Chris Glein's Blog

Music Made Me - Part 4

2012-01-31T18:15:00.000-08:00

Sweating Bullets - Megadeth

We just went through a rather cohesive set of grunge influences, where's this Megadeth thing coming from? It's certainly true that I never ended up a metal-head, but it's not as if I wasn't exposed to these things. We're entering a period here where there's a lot of divergent influences coming in from my brother and my brother's friends. I remember this song specifically. Something about the hardcore music combined with the funny voice just stuck with me. That and "Symphony of Destruction".

Nuthin' But A 'G' Thang - Dr. Dre

I'm guessing when most people hear this song they don’t think of stop motion LEGO movies. Yeah, didn't think so. Well my brother, his friend Justin, and I made a movie that had something to do with… time travel? I think. Damn I wish I could get a copy of that. It had an awesome driving sequence set to this song, with special effects that make seeing the strings seem professional. And then there were stop motion LEGO-men walking sequences. And then live action sequences of our awesomely awkward selves. Seriously, anyone have a copy of this? I need to see it again.

Take Five - Dave Brubeck

This is what adolescence looks like. From metal to rap to jazz; all of the sudden I'm absorbing all these extremely different things at the same time.

This one in particular is associated with making chili with my dad. It was a company picnic, and there was a chili cook-off. We made an entry and somehow won. I think it's mostly because people took some extremely creative interpretations on what chili is and I just stuck to tradition. I remember one of the chili competitors having fruit in it, for example. Anyway, winning made me feel kind of weird, because I was the bosses son. I mean, the voting was anonymous, but it still felt odd.

The chili was cooked entirely while listening to jazz on the public radio station, and as a result "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck still sticks out in my head as a song for cooking chili.

Fluffhead/Fluff's Travels - Phish

In 7th grade I made a new friend named Kevin who conveniently lived just down the road from me. He introduced me to this band named Phish.

As you can see from everything leading up to this moment, this came at a time when I was sorting through a lot of varied influences and trying to find my own tastes. Phish was obscure and weird enough to give me that much needed middle school individualism that we all seemed to crave. The song I remember clicking for me first was "Fluffhead".

I remember the moment I first heard it pretty clearly, actually. Well, I think I do - I might be collapsing two evenings into one in my head. Details. It was a sleepover at Kevin's with me, him, and this guy Zach who also rode our bus. Kevin said he wanted to try smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer. I thought he was joking; it turns out he wasn't. He was the only one to partake, and the evening ended with Kevin falling asleep and Zach vandalizing him with some aerosol cheese. It was not cool, and Kevin and I stopped hanging out with Zach after that.

The point, however, is that Kevin had a Phish tape on during the evening, and it was interesting and different. I followed up later and bought the album, Junta, which ended up being the first album I bought for myself. I proceeded to follow through their discography as money allowed and eventually catch up with current day, which at the time was Hoist.

I have fond memories, but I can't listen to Phish now like I could then. But they represent a couple things to me. One, as I said, was individuality. I was listening to something completely different from what everyone else was. Sometimes even at the cost of quality.

Phish's music was as much about the process as the end product, which appealed to me as someone who was diving into playing the guitar. But mostly it was about the moments. Their songs ramble and at times edge on dissonance, but sometimes the band just comes together in a magical way that wouldn't be as good without the parts that came before. They really rode out the whole musical journey, embracing contrast tones and free exploration. Mixed results, sure, but it sure provided an interesting range.

But I think the most important thing is that Phish will forever be associated with my first real friend, Kevin.

Music Made Me - Part 3

2012-01-29T17:46:00.001-08:00

I'm a child of the Seattle area, so even though I was too young and thoroughly uncool I was exposed to grunge music in real time. Of course at this age all music was essentially new to me so it's not as if I was aware that this particular sub-genre was of the local variety. But this next block of influential songs should show some not-so-subtle commonality. Welcome to the 90's.

Come As You Are - Nirvana

I didn't discuss it in my guitar story, but the first song I ever learned how to play was "Come As You Are" by Nirvana. Which was followed shortly by "Lithium". The odd thing is that I learned these songs on that nylon string classic acoustic guitar - not exactly ideal for playing a genre renowned for heavy distortion. I didn't really notice - I was still just struggling to actually get the thing in tune.

Alive - Pearl Jam

This song is tied in my head to one Michael Lee, and the experience of the two of us playing guitar together. I remember learning the first couple bars of the guitar solo and quickly getting horribly lost after that. But I pretended to keep up anyway.

Hearing that solo takes me back to the sleepover at that friend's house where we learned the song. That night (or at least a similar one) we were somehow allowed watched Silence of the Lambs, but I was thankfully still too young to be disturbed by it. It's funny that this was also the kid whose mom wouldn't let him play Dungeons & Dragons because of fear of devil worship or something. The timelines match up - 2nd edition of AD&D was where TSR pulled any sort of really controversial imagery from the game, which came out right around Pearl Jam's Ten. I'm sure most people don't have that sort of correlation in their head - that's just how it worked out for me.

These were good times. Later, I would suspect that this particular group of friends had become too cool for me. In retrospect now I think this was partially just in my head, but not completely. I probably made it worse on myself in some sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. However at this moment, for this song, I was happy. Middle school hadn't sunk its teeth in yet and I wasn't yet questioning my friendships.

Big Empty - Stone Temple Pilots

Someone gave me this album for my birthday, and I remember being disappointed because I had wanted some other album (not that I can remember which one now). Because of that I resisted and didn't appreciate the gems on the album at the time, and shortly thereafter I traded it for something else (which I also can't remember).

In that short superficially dissatisfied time it still managed to plant some seeds that matured later when I no longer had access to the album. As in all of the sudden I'm singing along to "Interstate Love Song" off the car radio and totally loving it. I think there's something about STP that doesn't work when your voice is still cracking.

My Wave - Soundgarden

We're on a family boat trip. For some reason my brother and I are able to split off in his Whaler to go… somewhere. I think we're somewhere near McNeil island, but I never paid the charts any attention so who knows. Anyway, we're in this little boat, racing along with a boom box in the back. And on comes "My Wave". I remember saying that I would never get sick of that sound. Of course the song turned out to be terribly repetitive. But whatever, in that moment, with the sound of the engine roaring and the water slapping the bottom of the boat, it was awesome.

I didn't go explore Soundgarden properly until a year or so later, when I found songs like "Fell On Black Days" that hold up much better for me. This seems to be a recurring pattern - parting from the raw initial loves and returning a the more constrained sound.

Elderly Woman Behind a Counter... - Pearl Jam

As hinted above, some combination of voice changing and lack of affinity for lyrics prevented me from really connecting to vocal-heavy songs. Some songs transcend that problem; this is one of them. Even in the throws of adolescence this song demanded I sing along. I know this not because I remember singing to it, but because I actually know the words.

My brain processes vocals as just another instrument, so I rarely know the words to songs. But we're entering a period where album ownership was a new thing to me. I became completely fascinated with liner notes. I remember pouring all over the quirky details, and I think that's how I actually walked away knowing the words to songs like this and "Daughter".

Music Made Me - Part 2

2012-01-26T15:22:00.001-08:00

Here we continue on my musical autobiography. At this point in the story I’ve now entered school and am starting to be exposed to movies and other pieces of pop culture that will influence my listening tastes. Which, let’s be clear, are still far from my own. Let’s continue…

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Thriller - Michael Jackson

I did the bulk of my growing up in one house, but that house was actually my third. I have no memories of the first, but I have some scattered flashes of the second. And one of those is of me and my brother upstairs dancing to “Thriller". Of course the music video is legendary (I'll go as far as to say "best ever"), but at the time I knew nothing of such things. Zombie dance not required for enjoyment.

It's funny, because one of the other memories I have of that house is a reoccurring nightmare of my 1st grade teacher turning into a lion and chasing me around the house. I think that dream only stopped once I developed the ability to fly (just in the dream, not in real life, sadly). Anyway, it seems like that nightmare could maybe be related to Michael turning into a wolfman, except I know that I didn't see the music video until years later.

Ghostbusters

So, Ghostbusters is an awesome movie. This is fact. But apparently the theme song developed magical powers over me.

Here's the story. I'm at a roller rink birthday party. It's my first time on skates, so naturally I'm terrified. After much effort I make it into the rink itself. I slowly circle via the edges with a death grip on whatever rail-substitute is available. This is not going well. And then the Ghostbusters theme starts to play. I instantly find the courage to let go of the rails. I ain't afraid of no ghost! In just a few moments I'm transformed from skating invalid to booty shaking pro. The song passes but the inspiration stays and I'm good to go for the rest of the party.

Apparently my source of mojo did not go by unnoticed. Fast forward many years and I'm in middle school. I have this friend who's also a girl (scandalous, I know). We hang out semi regularly, but of course at this age I'm at the mercy of adults for transportation. So the two of us are getting a ride from my mom when she starts relating the story of my Ghostbuster triumph. Naturally, I'm mortified; she's embarrassing me in front of a girl! Of course now it's all adorable, but at the time... well, you remember what it was like to be that age, but as a rule mothers are incapable of adolescent empathy. It's okay, I got over it.

Hangin' Tough – New Kids On The Block

I'm pretty sure Nickelodeon introduced me to this boy band. I tried to track down which show they would have been on, but I just couldn't bear to wade through that crap on YouTube. Let's just say that kids that age are defenseless against packaged pop music, and I was no different.

I had a breakthrough revelation related to this song. I had a copy of the track on cassette tape, right? At some point I realized that I could copy the song multiple times in a row so that I didn't have to hit rewind to hear it again. Oh yes, that happened. I had a tape that was all "Hangin' Tough."

A lot of the dates before this are hard to place, because fundamentally I wasn't processing contemporary music. Even if it was something close, I was still lagging behind. "Thriller" came out in 1982 I was one year old, so I'm pretty sure that memory comes well after its release. Likewise, Ghostbusters came out in 1984 when I was three, so I know I didn't see that in the theater. It's far more likely that I saw "Ghostbusters" some time a lead up to seeing "Ghostbusters II" in 1989, which I believe I did see in the theater. But New Kids on the Block is such a precise slice of time that I know this memory is from 1988 or at most 1989. Step very far on either side of that line and NKOTB is totally irrelevant (sorry, Tricia).

Along with placing these memories in time comes other weird details. Like I remember making that infinite "Hangin' Tough" tape in the room that had become my brother's bedroom but still had the bunk bed. So I guess around seven or eight years old is where I first got my own bedroom.

Nintendo

At some point around 1987 I got a Nintendo for my birthday. I don't think my parents knew what they were getting into. My brain previously hadn't really wrapped itself around this whole video game thing. But when I had Mario at home... holy crap it dug deep.

I didn't really start to think about video games as a musical influence until around 15 years later. I'll talk more about that reconnection when the time comes later in this series, but this time right here is when the seeds were planted.

There are many games with excellent chip tunes that stand the test of time, but Mega Man is one of the best. In 1988 Mega Man 2 hit the scene and the music was really good. Not at all familiar, but still truly excellent. I'm placing this in the timeline according to Mega Man 2, but of course this was an influence that took place over many years from many sources.

You'll notice I haven't linked to a track here. It's hard to get a public use copy of any old video game music, and I'm not going to ask you to run an emulator. The best I can do is list some stuff that approximates and some roundabout ways to get the originals.

The Megaman Network has the entire catalog of classic Megaman tracks, but only available as a bulk download. The track I wanted to choose for this entry is "Metalman" from Rockman 2, but "Bubbleman" and "Dr. Wily Stage 1" are also excellent. From Rockman 1 you can also try "Bombman" and "Cutman".
There are lots of modern bands that do covers of video game music. You can listen to the Minibosses do an entire medley of Megaman 2 here, although they take it to a metal place which might not connect with you unless you're overwhelmed with nostalgia for the originals. Here also is a reinterpretation of the Bubbleman theme by Entertainment System
Here is a straight up recreation of the original Metroid theme that I can link directly through Zune. Not Mega Man, but still good classic video game music.
I'm also feeling the need to put "Another Winter" by Anamanaguchi from the Scott Pilgrim game soundtrack here. It's crazy how a track from 2010 invokes 20 year old nostalgia.

Chip tunes have some severe limitations that in the right hands can be turned into something incredible. The inability to simulate real instruments is an obvious aspect of it, but there are many less obvious considerations. For example these old systems couldn't really do proper chords, so the musicians worked around this with arpeggios of those some chord patterns, often creating a completely different perspective on established genres of music. There are few things as wonderful as creativity working under constraint, and that's what chip tune music is all about. At the time these were just beeps and bloops to me, but the sophistication behind some of those compositions influenced me in ways that it would take years to understand.

No Woman, No Cry - Bob Marley & The Wailers

I have fond memories of listening to Bob Marley and reading Dragonlance. That probably sounds strange. It's not so much that they went well together; It's just that these were things I was experiencing at the same time, some sometimes they overlapped.

I liked "No Woman, No Cry" enough to put it on repeat in our fancy new CD player (yes, we're moving beyond cassettes now). I remember reading right up until the point where the family was leaving for a brunch thing. I flipped off the stereo, closed my book, and we headed out. Later that day when the family came back someone flipped on the stereo to have it still playing "No Woman, No Cry".

Special mention to “Jammin’”, which I definitely got down to. But it isn’t the poignant memory that “No Woman, No Cry” is; it’s just a good song that I enjoyed now and then.

I think this was the end of listening to the same song on repeat. Legend was a hard album to process in sequence; it's kind of all over the place, with pockets of stuff I flat out didn't like. This made it easier to skip around and burrow in to the songs that I did like. Soon I would have access to my own music and start appreciating the power of the album.

Music Made Me – Part 1

2012-01-24T20:47:00.000-08:00

A note about logistics: the only thing that has kept me from moving forward and posting this project is a complete inability to figure out how to best link the music for your consumption. There's no one universal solution that's going to work for everyone. I could go round up the links to iTunes, Amazon, Zune, Rhapsody, and whatever else, but that's a lot of work for me and there's still no guarantee it'd meet everyone's needs. So instead I'm going to trust that if you care to listen along you'll figure out how to get the music on your own (and if possible get more than a 30 second sample). I'll be providing Zune links because that's what I use, and if you’ve got the app and a Zune Pass this should be a smooth experience. If you do the leg work for another service and want to share in the comments, please feel free to.

Okay, with that out of the way we can get started.

Well, almost. I feel like these the first years demand a little more explanation. Towards the beginning of this timeline the entries will lean more towards memory than music. Like many, my young music tastes were undeveloped and mostly at the mercy of what people around me were listening to. But I'm going to focus on a lot of these early songs because young memories are somewhat of a novelty to me.

I have a terrible memory in general. But there are things that I remember better than others. I forget the details of movies, but I easily remember the intricacies of video games. Clearly there are some things that my brain stores better than others. As I go through this playlist exercise I'm realizing that music is one of the things that I remember well. As I walk back through my musical history I find myself remembering details I hadn't thought about in a long time. Maybe if I can put together my playlist it will help me remember my life better?

It should be made clear that this isn't a list of favorites. This is a list of impactful music, some of which I can't listen to now like I did back then. In a way those are the most interesting pieces - because clearly they represent an older version of me that isn't compatible with the me of today. That means I've changed, and that's probably good. I have a feeling that this exercise will get less interesting yet easier to listen to as we progress forward in time. We'll see.

But look, here I am layering on more disclaimers and we’re not even to the depths of adolescence. Enough stalling, let's talk about some music!

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Blueberry Hill - Fats Domino

We begin at the stretches of memory. This is a song that I recognize instantly, but couldn't place unaided. From what I've gathered it's highly likely that the photo you see here could be from a family jam session to this song. Air guitar be damned; real aspiring musicians use a broom. Never mind the fact that the song barely has any guitar in it at all...

Johnny B. Goode - Chuck Berry

Like many of my generation, it was Marty McFly that introduced me to this song. I have a memory of asking my dad to request it on the radio and eagerly waiting for it to come on. And when it did... dance party.

Much later in life, by which I mean last year, I had the opportunity to play "Power of Love" for Rock Band 3 with some friends and it produced a similar moment of pure glee. That’s some impressive lasting impact for a 25 year span. Oh nostalgia…

Make Me Smile - Chicago

My dad loved his "Chicago Silver" record, aka Chicago II. My mom didn't so much like it, so in general I think he had to enjoy it in private, but I still managed to get a whiff from time to time.

I like Chicago, but I don't think I realized how well they align with some of my future musical trajectories until I went back to pick a song for this list. This is an album that's meant to be listened as an album, where one song blends into the next, and I'm the sort of the person that wants to sit down and listen to a planned musical journey. I've long been mourning the atrophy of this standard as a la carte track purchasing has become the norm. It's also the case that Chicago is often less lyrical and more instrumental. They sing a bit, and then they jam. As someone with a terrible head for lyrics, this has always fit well with me. And then of course there are the horns. I'm such a sucker for a horn section. Take a good song, tactically add some horns, and it becomes a great song.

I picked "Make Me Smile" because it filled that nostalgic criteria. I've probably heard "25 or 6 to 4" more over the years, but "Smile" leaps out to me with that older, deeper connection. It's the more human song to me. I'm also particularly fond of "Saturday in the Park" but it's not on this album, so it doesn't fit the criteria.

Barbara Ann - The Beach Boys

I'd be remiss if I omitted the Beach Boys from the list of early influences. My dad played blues, jazz, and stuff like Chicago; my mom played the Beach Boys.

When I hear the Beach Boys I think of family road trips. I have this fuzzy memory of us getting a series of cassette tapes they were selling at a gas station chain. It was probably the equivalent of the modern day "Now That's What I Call Music 13". But it made stopping to fill up the tank fun because we could get a new tape with new music. I find it hard to imagine my mom not owning her own copy, but those tapes are what I think of.

I had a devil of a time picking a Beach Boys song for this list. I know at that age I enjoyed the fun poppy lyrics. But now, well, not so much. So I went with a song that I remember having that car singing vibe.

Still Around - Robert Cray

On weekends we'd occasionally have a family drive for breakfast or other activities. I'm not sure how long my dad had this album in the car's cassette player, but it left a lasting impression on me. He's always had a deep love for blues, which is something I happily adopted.

This song in particular seemed to stick out in my memory. In my head it had more of a storytelling angle, like it was some spooky mystery or something. It's not, it's a break up song of sorts, but that was way beyond me. Other songs like "Nothing But a Woman" are more up beat, but "Still Around" crawled its way deeper into some memory pocket as I wondered why the singer could be so upset that this other person was still around. These are the things that would haunt me on the way to swim lessons.

You Need To Stop

2011-09-01T18:44:00.000-07:00

God invented digitalphotography so that we could delete crappy photos before they saw the light ofday. It was a glorious gift. Stop fucking it up. If you wouldn't pay the pennies todevelop/print a photo then spare us all and don't put it on the interneteither. Edit. Your. Photos.

I'm not saying youneed to break out fancy photo editing software to adjust color balances andtouch up wrinkles. The only thing I'masking you to use is the delete button. Just look at your photo and decide whether another human would ever careto look at it. Does it fail to capture amoment or image that's even slightly interesting? Are you the only conceivable targetaudience? If so, don't upload it.

Do you not have thetime to look at each photo and make that kind of decision for each one? Stop. Bulk camera uploading kill kittens. If you don't have the time to review your photos then we don't have thetime to look at them.

Is this a photo of aperson? Look at it. Is it flattering? If it was a photo of you, would you want iton the internet for everyone to see? Would it be how you would want to be portrayed? To your mom? To your boss? To prospective loveinterests? If the answer to any of theseis no then stop. Do the person a favorand delete the photo. Or at the veryleast ask them first before you blast it onto the internet for all to see.

Seriously, I don'tknow what is wrong with you people. Notevery captured image is sacred. I'm noteven going to berate you for spending more time capturing your shitty photos thanenjoying what you're taking a photo of. I just want you to please exercise some fucking decency and stop thedigital diarrhea spewing out of your camera.

Fable Coin Golf

2011-09-01T14:02:00.001-07:00

I've had a couple people ask me if I could disseminate the results from my various Windows Phone gaming expeditions. I keep putting it off, but the fact that Fable Coin Golf is on sale this week reminded me to stop procrastinating.

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In Fable Coin Golf you flick a coin from one end to the other of an obstacle course while attempting to accumulate the highest score possible. Each flick subtracts from your score, but there are also pits, ponds, and monsters to avoid. You earn points for most everything else you bump into, especially coins and exploding barrels. Generally the challenge doesn't come from simply completing the level, but rather doing it with enough finesse to achieve a qualifying score.

As that this is Fable Coin Golf, the courses and obstacles are all themed after the big Fable games. It's got a stage-craft vibe that is pretty charming. The fidelity of the visuals may be why the levels take longer to load than I'd like, but at least the end result is quite pleasant.

The controls are accurate enough to get the job done. When going for the higher scores you may curse the imprecision of touch controls, but for the most part it's as accurate as you need it to be.

One of the hooks of the game is that your scores translate directly into currency for Fable III. I played Coin Golf before I was too far into Fable III, and I actually took the time to gold star every single level. So when I transferred the money into my Fable III game I was instantly rich. I was suddenly able to buy every single piece of property I had ever seen, and I never had to perform menial labor ever again. This had the side effect of somewhat ruining the economy-based win condition at the end of the game, but from what I hear that does a fine job of ruining itself even without being preemptively filthy rich. Seen as an alternative to playing Lute Hero or any of the other in-game jobs, Fable Coin Golf is much more entertaining.

I like Fable Coin Golf, and would quickly recommend it to pretty much anyone. It did exactly what I want a phone game to do - short burst entertainment. With it being on sale this week, I'd definitely recommend picking it up if you haven't already.

MustEatBrains - Update 1

2011-08-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

In the olden days, software was bought in a real physical store, came in a physical box, and was written onto some piece of physical media. If that software had problems with it, or lacked important features, then there was no real way to get an update out to the consumer. I think once or twice I had a game with such bad defects that they mailed out replacement floppy disks, but it was exceedingly rare. In general the mantra was "get it the right the first time, or don't bother."

Today's culture is incredibly different. Digital distribution has become the norm. Even if you bought a box in a store, you're invariably going to get updates pushed to you from the internet. Software has become a living, breathing thing. And it's changed both how people develop software and how they consume it. The mantra has shifted to "release early and often."

Given that my game lives on a internet connected device, I opted for a modern development strategy. I don't bring any of this up to say that I rushed something unfinished out the door. Not at all - I think my little game is awesome. But I don't see it as a product that is done - I see it as the beginning of things to come.

For the first release I knew that certain things needed to be established. I needed to solidify a visual style, and I needed to have the core gameplay be tight. As long as it was fun, and looked like something I wanted to play, some details could wait. If I tried to do every thing I wanted in one release then I'd never ever finish.

The point: I am happy to announce that the first update for MustEatBrains is now available!

The game as it exists today is essentially a little action game where you try for a new top score. But without being able to compete with other people there's not much meaning to that. So it was clear that the first thing I needed to add was online leaderboards. With the new update you'll be able to submit your scores and see how you compare to the top scores for the day or the top scores of all time.

Of course with this focus on score I wanted to give the player more info on how they got to the score they did. So I implemented a little post-game summary page that breaks down what carnage you inflicted and how you inflicted it. Nothing too fancy, just a little info to satisfy the data nerd in all of us.

I was really happy with the Living game mode at launch. And I thought it was cool that you could turn things around and play as the undead. But the Undead mode suffered from a lack of variety. The living player has multiple weapons at her disposal, and has to keep moving around tactically in order to stay alive. The undead player merely had to keep up an aggressive chase to maintain a steady supply of brains. Compared to the dynamic gameplay of the living player it just wasn't fun enough.

After sitting on the problem for a while I decided the zombie player needed a better way to close the gap. Less time chasing, more time doing what zombies do best. So I gave the zombie a leap attack.

I wanted to keep the ravenous lust for brains a key part of the game, so I put the leap attack on a stamina system. Leaping takes a lot of stamina, which will slowly regenerate over time; however tasty human parts will refill that meter much faster. So as a zombie player you're always on the look out for edibles. It adds the slightest bit of resource management, but not too much.

As it stands the undead mode is pretty hard. I'll likely tweak that with future updates, but on the whole I'm happy with how it feels. As a zombie you're an underdog, both working with and competing against your undead compatriots for whatever human parts are available. It's hard, but it's thematically hard.

So, that's what's in the update. It also includes various balance tweaks (especially around the late game) and interface refinements. But the core features are what's listed above.

What's next? Well, the feedback is pretty clear. The next features people want to see are:

Sound
More varied environments

So those are definitely in the pipeline. As well as some more fun stuff that I'll share with you soon enough. Until then, sit back, relax, and eat some brains!

MustEatBrains

2011-07-26T21:53:00.000-07:00

I present to you, my game for Windows Phone: MustEatBrains!

The marketplace description:

Choose either to fight on the side of the living or the undead horde in this handcrafted action game. It's an all out brawl! How long will you last?

In the UNDEAD mode you play as a ravenous zombie. Chase after those meddlesome warm blooded fools and end their poor excuse for an existence. You score points for each heart stopped by your hand. Whatever fleshy parts you can salvage will bolster your undead endurance. But keep an eye out for tasty morsels of brain. The rush will make you invulnerable for a short time!

In the LIVING mode you stand alone against the undead horde. You score points for each undead soul laid to rest, and lose points for the unintentional death of innocents. You have a firearm at your command to hold back those zombies. But ammunition is limited, so keep an eye out for supplies to keep you blasting. If you run out you'll have to depend on your _other_ guns...

MustEatBrains features over three hundred frames of hand-drawn animation. Everything was crafted by one person - the art, the code, even the fonts. It is truly an old fashioned labor of love. I hope you enjoy it.

The trailer:

Download it for your Windows Phone here.

The Path to Brains

2011-07-25T21:16:00.000-07:00

In late 2006 (yes, this story starts five years ago) Microsoft released the first version of XNA, a development platform for writing games on the PC and Xbox. It put all the nitty-gritty details that generally plague game development behind a modern type-safe programming language (C#). It let developers focus on the more interesting aspects of game design. As someone who has dabbled in game development in the past, this simplified platform sounded like a great way for me to get back into it.

I wanted a project that fit me and my personal strengths, so I decided on a 2D game where I could provide the art with old fashioned pen and paper. This would accomplish two things: it would give me an excuse to reconnect with the visual arts, and it would produce a different visual style from most of the other stuff out there. I imagined a sketchy hand-drawn style, like doodles in a notebook come to life. Of course I wasn't the only one to have this idea, and in fact many games have come out in the years since with this style. Many have fallen short because they fail to embrace the look completely, while others have pulled it off brilliantly (like the enjoyable Parachute Panic). But from my perspective at the time, it wasn't a look that had been done.

In grade school I used to draw stick figures doing terrible awful violent things to each other. It's one of those things little boys do to vent their natural homicidal tendencies (medical term: testosterone), similar to throwing rocks and blowing stuff up with firecrackers. The thing that somehow makes this sort of thing vaguely less disturbing is that... well, they're stick figures. It's cartoon violence at its most cartoon state. I'm not going to get into a discussion about violence in media right now - I'm just presenting this a data point.

The trick with violence is that you need a morally justifiable sponge to soak it up so that the audience doesn't feel morally queasy. Very few realistic targets hold up to that job, so we've invented all sorts of other options to fill out the ranks. In particular, zombies are somewhat of a violence loophole. They're almost indistinguishable from their living counterparts, yet for some reason we heartily approve of them meeting their (second) end via a chainsaw. I think it's the outnumbered survivalist viewpoint that allows us to use a certain "vigor" in our zombie eradication methods. It's not as simple as the "its your or me!" factor; it's the "its you or… oh god where did you all come from… must… escape... aaaaarrrrrgh!" factor.

Where am I going with this? Well, when it comes to video games, violence is a common crutch because our brain easily understands "death == losing". And when it comes to violence, zombies are a generally agreeable adversary. So when I decided to make a game, I decided to make a zombie game. It's also possible that its just because I had recently rolled off of playing Dead Rising. In going back to unravel the timeline I remembered that I'd actually already posted about the topic of zombie gaming here in 2007. That post was actually a product of me thinking about what sort of game I wanted to make. And that exercise led me down the path of discovering modern designer board games. Which it turns out has turned into quite a hobby for me.

Well, despite the crazy cascade of events that this project kicked off, you'll notice I never released a game during all those years. In 2008 a version of XNA was released that supported the Zune device. At the time I worked on the Zune team at Microsoft, and developing for our little music player seemed like a fun goal. So I took what I had built before and adapted it for the small screen. I got it pretty far along, but in the end I lost steam because there frankly wasn't any market to release it to. It was fun as a toy for myself, but it would never be more than that.

A couple years later XNA added its fourth platform: Windows Phone. In the years that had passed, the iPhone had become a great market for indie game developers. And I had software that could run on a phone, more or less ready to go. So I got it up and running as soon as the developer tools were available. But I never quite pushed it out the door and on to the marketplace. Why? Well, full disclosure, I worked on Windows Phone. And I was too busy busting my butt on that product to have any free cycles to work on some programming side project. I code for a living; it's rare for me to get the capacity for additional coding.

It took me another year to find the time and finish the project. I decided to rework the art style, switch to a female protagonist, streamline the touch controls, build the features you expect of a phone game (e.g. save/resume), and of course polish it all as much as possible. The end product is something that I'm proud of, but it isn't anywhere near as grand as the ideas that initially got me started. It's a simple little action game. That's it. I think it's a good little action game, and I haven't played anything quite like it on Windows Phone, but it is a little bit of style over substance. I'm okay with that. This is my first ever release as an independent developer. Now that the hard part is out of the way I can hopefully tinker more and work one some of those deeper ideas.

MustEatBrains is now available for download for Windows Phone here.

Back to Creation

2011-07-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

Mostly on this blog I've posted about consumptive experiences. Video games, board games, movies, music… in short, "media." I experience media, in whatever form, and then sometimes I post thoughts about it here. However I do feel like part of life is adding to the conversation, not just being a consumer. Writing is one form of contributing (given the sort of writing I'm doing is derivative, not purely creative, but it's something). However there is a key way that I've been working on contributing over the past couple years that I haven't mentioned here at all.

I've always had some aptitude for committing visuals to the page. But art is one of those things where in our youth we're all equals and over time the skill level spreads out dramatically. Through school I drifted in that awkward middle space: expressive enough to be considered artistic by normal people, but not nearly good enough to actually be an artist. That's it there, isn't it? Artistic vs. artist. Or maybe more appropriately: "artist-ish."

As I continued taking classes in school it both became clear that I had some knack for this, but also that I lacked the skill and inspiration to really do anything meaningful with it. Skill is something you can work on, and the inability to understand the incremental improvements is something that most people see as a brick wall when it comes to art. Inspiration is something else entirely, in that it's difficult to manufacture. The short of this story is that I let art slip out of my life, much like I did for music. And while I know that for a variety of reasons that I'm not cut out to be an artist, there is a great need in my life for creation and art is a fantastic way to satisfy that need.

So it is that about two years ago I did something about it. With the help of a dear friend, I left my comfort zone of pencil and paper and picked up a paint brush.

I started with watercolors. And I think this piece here is the first I was happy with. Yes, it's Metroid fan art. Remember what I said about inspiration being a problem? Sometimes you need to borrow a spark.

Before too long I worked my way into acrylics. I started on canvas paper, not wasting real canvas on my initial fumbling. This piece here is one that I like. Bats are adorable.

The next step in confidence was canvas board. Still not real canvas, but a larger vote of confidence. This one of a kraken attack is one that I like.

Painting is meditative; working with physical colors is a wonderful (if unforgiving) experience. I also sit in front of a computer all day, so I wanted to keep my distance from digital painting. But it has a place, especially as a means of experimentation. This piece here is one of the digital paintings I've done.

I'm now at the point now where I feel like I can use real canvas and not be wasting it. This guy here is a return to the subject matter of that original watercolor. I like him for many reasons, but not least of them is how much growth the piece shows.

Waste a canvas? Ha! How about eight? This project is a series of paintings, which I've failed to adequately photograph together. I'm very happy with them. The next step is to figure out how I'm going to hang them, because I'm now willing to hang my own art in my own home. Progress.

With all this exploration in color and texture I felt like I earned the right to return to the cold hard world of pen and pencil. I just completed a rather ambitious project in that space which you'll be hearing about here very soon.

That's been my journey so far. I will try to comment on it more here as I feel is appropriate, but if you really want to track what I'm up to the best way is via my DeviantArt page. You can get a feed on that, and I've also added that as a gallery widget to this blog on the right.

Postcards from Middle-Earth - Part 2

2011-05-17T09:15:00.000-07:00

Continuing our pictorial journey through Middle-Earth…

We left off our journey arriving at the town of Bree. Here you can see it at nighttime.

More ruins from ages past.

Ah, the swamp with the neeker-breekers. Which of course in the game are not just an audio component, but big bugs that you have to squash.

More swamp. I took a ton of shots of the swamp because I found it so oddly beautiful. The low sun hitting the haze, with all the ruins poking out of the muck… not exactly inviting, but not exactly an eyesore either.

We've worked our way out of the swamp and into the Lone Lands. Here you can see Weathertop, also known as the ruined tower of Amon Sûl. In the game you can play out a nighttime defense against a ringwraith raid.

South of Weathertop there's this rundown inn along the main road (which of course Strider avoided as much as possible).

Some ruins in the Lone Lands. In the background is the fort of Ost Guruth, which isn't covered in the fiction at all but does serve as an important quest hub for players in the game.

We've worked our way out of the rather desolate Lone Lands and into the area known as the Trollshaws. On account of, well, the trolls. But when it's not pouring rain and you're not getting bagged by a wandering troll it can be quite lovely.

Speaking of trolls, here are a few famous ones. Bert, Tom, and William can be found as the stone statues that Bilbo and company left them in.

Here's a river going through part of the Trollshaws. Not the river, mind you (by which I mean the Bruinen, the river that Elrond used against the Nazgûl).

South of the main road and the great river's ford it all empties into a little lake.

We've crossed the river, climbed up and down, and have now descended into the valley of the elves: Rivendell.

Some of the nice architecture of Rivendell.

Here we've stepped inside the Last Homely House: Elrond's home. Apparently he doesn't live humbly.

At least Elrond knows how to entertain. In his decadent dining hall you can find old Bilbo, happy to play the riddle game with anyone who's willing to chat with him. Nothing like a creepy old hobbit walking around asking you what's in his pocket.

Music Made Me

2011-04-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

In the book High Fidelity (and the movie too, for that matter), the main character is obsessed with making "Top 5" lists and categorizing his music collection. There's a moment where he decides to organize his records autobiographically - the order in which he experienced them. I've always been intrigued by that idea: trying to express one's journey in life through the music that accompanied it. So I'm going to do just that, except instead of sorting stacks of records I'll be producing a playlist.

Unlike the character in the book I have no intention of organizing every single piece of music I own in such a matter. Really I just want to capture the inflection points. The problem is that as soon as you introduce choice into this exercise it becomes an entirely different activity. In defining the timeline of my life, what music was most important?

Do I choose songs that represent the evolution of my taste in music? Or do I choose songs that are steeped in personal memory? Sometimes hearing a song can take me to a time, or to a specific feeling. Some songs are tied so tightly to poignant memories that hearing them transports me to an exact moment. Clearly a musical timeline of my life has to include these songs. They may not represent me musically, but they do represent my human experience.

As I've tried to put this list together it's become clear that I can't just do one or the other. A progression through my music tastes alone is soulless; a trip through the highlights of emotional moments lacks context. There needs to be an intentional blend in order to achieve a sensible storyline. It's a tricky task, and one I've been working on for months now.

I've finished reconstructing my timeline, and now it's down to the logistics of writing, linking, and presenting this to the vast anonymity of the internet. Let this post serve as an introduction to the project. The next time you hear about it we'll jump right into the early years of my exposure to music. Everything from Bob Marley to Michael Jackson to even New Kids on the Block. You heard me, I'm baring it all.

Postcards from Middle-Earth - Part 1

2011-04-25T11:42:00.000-07:00

I'm generally not a fan of landscape photography. Maybe it's because the subject matter is infinitely patient. In general the photo will have everything in focus, and whatever is being captured has been there longer than you or I. There's no immediacy to it. Sure, mountains and trees and waterfalls are pretty, but I just don't know what a landscape photo is telling me other than "doesn't wherever you are now suck in comparison?"

While writing my series on Lord of the Rings Online I decided I wanted screenshots to go with it, and that for some reason it was important that they be personally taken screenshots instead of stock images from whatever the internet had to offer. As I went about I decided I really enjoyed the hunt. No longer was I just some hero in Middle Earth; now I was some hero with a camera.

Once I started I just couldn't stop, and I quickly gathered far more photos than I needed for my article. So I've decided to post them here as a visual journey through Turbine's rendering of Middle Earth. I feel like I was a little harsh on them, because truth be told there are many beautiful scenic areas in the game. Anyway, here you'll find no rants about game mechanics, just pretty pictures and some light captions. Enjoy.

It seemed natural for these photos to follow the hobbit journey from Hobbiton to Rivendell. Here we have Bag End in all its cozy glory. And excellent place to host a dozen dwarves.

A cute little hobbit hole cut out of the hillside. I'm thinking maybe this whole rectangular door things is overrated.

Frodo was found of hikes into the woods around the Shire. I imagine this forest path might have been one of his favorites.

Hobbits are none to comfortable around the water, but they have on big beautiful river running through the Shire. In classic hobbit fashion this river is named "The Water".

They've gotta get over that river somewhere, and here's one of the crossings at nighttime with a Bounder keeping watch. He probably doesn't see much action, and more than likely is drunk on the job.

It's daytime in this shot, but this is the Buckleberry Ferry where the hobbits escaped the black riders into Buckland.

I know they were trying to shake those scary black riders, but I don't think going through the Old Forest was the brightest idea. It is not a happy place.

Here we have Old Man Willow, luring all passersby into a blissful slumber.

We've emerge from the Old Forest into the Barrow Downs. Cairns and tombs, oh my! You can't take two steps without stumbling over reanimated bag of bones. This is where players will likely experience their first dungeon instance.

North of the forest are beautiful fields that would have provided a much more enjoyable path. But I guess the big open is just begging for a Ringwraith to swoop through and gobble you up.

All throughout the land of Middle Earth are ruins of ages past, such as this one.

And here we see the town of Bree, looking perfectly pleasant in the day light. For low level characters this is their main hub for banking and auctions. I guess it's a more friendly place if you're not trucking around the One Ring of Power.

The Guitar Story

2011-04-21T23:49:00.000-07:00

There are many reasons that people who met me over a decade ago would see me differently than those who've met me recently, but there's one reason in particular that secretly bothers me. Most people I know now would be surprised to hear that I used to play the guitar. A lot. The people I met before would be equally surprised to hear that I no longer do.

Everyone in high school seeks out their thing that sets them apart, and for me that became playing the guitar. Well, that and I basically always wore the same poncho. I was happy to later find out that the key feature I enjoyed (the marsupial pouch in front) could also be found much more fashionably in hoodies. But this isn't a story about my deep abiding love of a good zip-up hoody. This is the story of my rise and fall as a guitarist, my great shame, and how I plan to bring back something I once loved.

My parents purchased an old nylon string acoustic guitar at an auction sometime when I was very young. I'm pretty sure the intention was that one of them would learn to play it, but I first found it in a closet sometime around the 6th grade. This timing coincided with the beginning of what I'll overstate as my musical awakening. I was beginning to really listen to music, and the idea of playing along and maybe creating my own music appealed to me. So I picked up that guitar, turned on the radio, and tried to mimic the sounds I was hearing.

Keep in mind that this guitar was horrifically out of tune. I had no teacher and no internet. I hadn't the slightest clue what the relationships between the strings were supposed to be, so I just randomly tried different frets until it sounded like what was coming out of the radio. Eventually I got a hold of some old guitar books and was able to correctly tune the strings relative to each other, but I think there was still a good stretch there where I tuned off of the radio. (These kids today with their automatic electronic tuners, grumble grumble)

I remember playing for a talent show in middle school with a kid from my neighborhood, Mackenzie Pinch. We did a little self-written acoustic duet. The weird thing is I can't for the life of me remember what sort of audience we had, so I don't know if it a real talent show or just an audition. I don't think they turn down anyone in middle school talent shows, so it must have been the real deal. All I remember is being critiqued on my lack of showmanship.

I played with a couple of different friends over the years. And of course every time we had to form a band name and concept. I remember Kindred and Sterc in particular. At one point I had a brief arrangement at a local church. Mind you, at the time I was a stewing pot of venomous anti-Christian pseudo-intellectualism. I think they hoped that by just being around the whole process it would somehow convert me. It didn't work - I just enjoyed the opportunity to play with a band. The songs weren't exactly rockin', but it scratched an itch.

So I played around, had a good time, and slowly got better. But I don't think it really became part of my identity until after my Freshman year of high school. It was then that I started bringing my guitar to school to play during the lunch break. That thing went with me everywhere, and my playing really picked up a notch. I had started my journey in the grunge era, and then went back in time through classic rock. But the thoughtful acoustic licks of the Dave Matthews Band gave me some excellent material to work with in my senior year.

But there's a time for everything, and that time is college. That's when my playing was at its peak. Some random evening in my dorm I wandered onto the wrong floor which turned out to be the right floor. I met Dan and Billy and we started playing music. It became a regular thing, us playing in the common area in the evenings. Half the students on the floor loved it and half hated it - presumably because they were trying to study or some nonsense. But me for it was the best of times. It was casual but fun.

One of us blossomed. Dan stuck with it and has really grown into a lovely singer songwriter over the last decade. You can check him out online here, or in person this Saturday the 23rd at the Crocodile.

The other component of playing music in college was sunny days on the quad or red square. One of these days some dude came by and started playing with me. His style was interesting, his material original, and we hit it off musically. We agreed to meet again and it quickly became a regular thing. It actually got kind of serious. We started recording songs, performed in the university talent show (for real this time - I definitely remember this one), and most of my guitar activity started to revolve around this duo. It seemed great at the time, but it was actually the beginning of everything unraveling.

The songs were his, and he also provided the vocals, so I settled into an accompaniment role. It was nice to focus on that and grow my melodic skills. But over time I became dependent. It wasn't about what I brought to the table; it was about what I could add to what was already on the table. All of my song ideas started to dry up from lack of attention.

I realized I didn't have a real personal connection with this guy and so I was only half interested in the partnership. I eventually broke it off. Well, I stopped returning phone calls. Same difference?

I had left myself in a situation where when I picked up the guitar I didn't know what to play. I had the skill to do something with it, but no spark of inspiration. So I'd pick it up, fiddle around a bit, and then set it back down again feeling somewhat disappointed. Eventually I started accelerated the process by not picking it up at all. I got a job, moved, and it became all to easy to forget it all.

It's hard to explain the emotion. Sitting there feeling like you have this untapped potential. You have a voice, but you have nothing to say. I felt creatively barren, thoroughly uninspired and uninteresting. And then I was ashamed for leaving it behind. It had been such a huge part of me but then it was gone. It's like an old relationship where there are all these awkward maneuverings to avoid having to think about what it used to be and how it can no longer be that. You find yourself avoiding contact altogether just to prevent any opportunity to stir up old emotions.

Time has given me the perspective to understand what went wrong, but it's been harder to find a path to fix it. Essentially, I became overly focused on creation. If I couldn't bring something original to the table then I was a failure. By concentrating on the value of creation, I had lost the simple joy of just playing. Before it had never mattered if I was playing someone else's song. But as soon as it mattered more if it was my song, my sense of contentment became susceptible to the ebb and flow of creative juices. God forbid there be an extended period of ebb.

So the fix that had to be made was to restore that joy of playing. It sounds easier that it is. If every time you pick up an instrument you feel like a failure then it's hard to muster up the energy to idly strum a few tunes. And the longer you go without playing, the fewer songs you can remember to play. So even though I've known what the problem is for years, it's been hard to overcome the wounds and move forward.

Thankfully a potential solution has fallen from the heavens: Pro Guitar for Rock Band 3. Basically you can now play a real guitar with Rock Band. You choose the song, it'll tell you how to play it, and you can just focus on having a good time. But it's real. Real chords, real scales. Real. It's exactly the thing I've needed. So I dropped the (not insignificant) chunk of cash on the setup to get me back on the wagon.

I've been at it for only a week now. It's too early to say how this will play out. But I'm optimistic. It was good to feel the muscle memory kick into action and pick up right where I left it. The callouses haven't fared as well, but a daily regiment will have those back in no time. In the meantime I just have to pace myself a bit. But I think it's working, and it's got me walking around with a bit more bounce in my step.

RPS on Quest for Glory IV

2011-04-03T08:00:00.000-07:00

I follow this UK PC gaming blog called Rock Paper Shotgun. They're a bunch of well-spoken likeminded blokes, and I enjoy their words. Anyway, they have this series called Gaming Made Me in which they deep dive into the more influential games of their past. It's something that fits well with my selfish needs for this blog, so I've been thinking for awhile about tackling the same topic.

Well, then those rascally brits went ahead and covered one of my all time favorites: Quest for Glory IV. Perhaps later I'll have more to say on the topic, but for now I'll just refer you to their words. I will say I was both surprised and not surprised to learn that the voice actor for Commander Shepard and Katrina the vampire are one and the same. Apparently Jennifer Hale is the common element in games that rock my world.

LotRO Revisited - Part 6 - Free to Play

2011-03-30T23:59:00.000-07:00

At last we've come to the reason that I'm even talking about Lord of the Rings Online again in the first place: the fact that it's now to free to play. But what does that even mean?

It means you don't need to pay a monthly subscription to play LotRO. You don't even need a credit card. You can play this game for dozens of hours on end and not spend a dime. To do this you just set up an account on the website, click a button to download the game client, and start playing. Easy. Extremely high quality content for what you pay (nothing).

So, how is this possible? The game developer clearly still needs to make money to pay for operating costs and ongoing development. So they replace a fixed monthly subscription fee with a large set of optional "micro-transactions". In other words you don't pay a fixed $15 a month, but instead you spend a couple bucks here and there on smaller purchases. This will likely result in smaller per-account revenue, but by removing the steep up-front subscription cost it's possible to reach a broader audience and hopefully achieve similar overall revenue. That's the basic business model, and it's an increasingly popular one. But of course the devil is in the details.

The term "micro-transaction" conjures an image of being stopped every couple minutes to be solicited for money. It sounds disruptive and cheap. Certainly paying more up front sounds less obnoxious, right? Well I'm happy to say that LotRO handles micro-transactions with class and restraint.

You can happily level a character up to at least level 30 before you really feel like you have to spend any money. At that point you'll run out of free zones and maybe you'll put down $5 to unlock another zone for around 10 levels of quest content. You don't have to, though. The epic quest-line is always free, and there are always tasks, skirmishes, and level-scaling instances to keep you busy.

Smoothing everything over is the fact that you gain the real-money currency (Turbine Points) while playing the game. Every deed you complete gives you some points. So even if you absolutely refuse to spend real money on the game you'll still be able to pick up a couple things from the store.

So, what sorts of things can you buy?

Quest lines for levels 30-65
Additional skirmish instances to change up the scenery
Cosmetic outfits
Shared storage across all characters on your account
A wardrobe space for your characters to store and share cosmetic outfits
Shorter teleport home cooldowns and/or multiple home destinations
Short term acceleration for xp, crafting, or deeds

The larger priced items are content related (quests, skirmishes, etc.) or feature related (e.g. shared storage), and are usually a one-time purchase for the account. They're less "micro" and more a replacement for that monthly payment. The key difference being that unless you blaze through content too fast that it's going to be much cheaper.

The more controversial items are the true micro-transactions. But you'll note that none of the them will outright make your character more powerful, they just make progression faster. For example you can't buy levels, but you can spend a dollar to get a small percentage increase in your experience gain for 6 hours. That means you'll level faster than someone who didn't pay any money, but it doesn’t give you better stats, or items, or anything like that. You still have to play the game and overcome the same challenges. It's fair.

The micro-transactions are all poised as purely optional efficiency boosts. Sick of travel times? Pay a quarter to make your next couple trips instantaneous. Like crafting but don't have time for the grind? Pay fifty cents to double the rate of craft skill gains for awhile. This allows you to pick the parts of MMO grinding that annoy you and pay a little bit to have them go away. The cynical way to look at this would be that they're making you pay to keep the game from being awful. But the key thing to remember is that the free experience of today is the same thing people were previously paying a subscription for. They didn't make it worse for free accounts. You can pay for a more streamlined experience if you want to, but it's not necessary. That's what helps the micro-transactions feel optional and not gouging.

I was really wary of the false promises of "free to play", but I've been extremely impressed with how elegantly LotRO has pulled it off. I believe that you can play the game for free and have a perfectly good time. I'm also happy to occasionally give them money to make my experience better.

Being presented with all these optional purchases forced me to confront what I really value about my MMO play experience. It turns out that leveling faster isn't important to me, but looking cool is. So my first purchases were an awesome looking set of cosmetic armor, some wardrobe space to save fun hats and such, and some more outfit slots so I can choose my look to match my mood.

I also bought some crafting acceleration to get my weaponsmithing skill up high enough to create my own weapons as I level. I like feeling self sufficient. Plus crafting is way more fun if you cut the grinding in half. It's amazing how a numerical tweak can completely turn things around.

Beyond all that frivolous stuff I did pick up a couple quest packs after I cleared out the free zones. I've enjoyed the skirmishes so I bought some more of those too. I feel like now that I've spent some startup capital I can coast for quite awhile before my next purchase. It's hardly been a free experience, but I feel like the money I've spent is well worth what I've received in return.

---

So, the real question: Is this the right game for you?

Do you like the depth and scale of MMOs, but have very limited time to play and can't justify a monthly fee? Then the new free to play LotRO is perfect for you. It doesn't matter if you progress through the game slowly because you'll pay for new content equally slowly.

Are you the sort of player who enjoys MMOs for the first twenty levels when things are fresh, then gets bored somewhere in the middle and quits? Then LotRO would be a great fit for you because you'd probably quit right before you actually have to spend real money.

Do you get obsessed with your MMO and grind through content extremely quickly? Well then LotRO may still work for you because it still offers a compelling subscription option. It's only $10, not $15, and you get a substantial grant of points every month (~$6 worth). So it's kind of like Zune Pass where you get unlimited access but get to keep some stuff permanently if you ever cancel your subscription.

What I can't tell you is how well LotRO satisfies a player at the level cap. I've got a character there, but I don't play him because I personally don't care for grinding the same content over and over again. I do know that that there are raids, and there's a community of people running them. But I don't know how well LotRO stacks up here.

From a value perspective LotRO is hard to beat. High quality content, flexible pricing. The real reasons to not play the game are if you don't like RPGs or you aren't particularly interested in the Lord of the Rings fiction. If killing orcs in the English countryside bores you then this game is not for you.

If you do decide to try out the game, please set up your account using this link. That referral will give me some kickback (and no, that's not what motivated me to write this series). Be sure to create your character on the Gladden server, send me a note, and maybe we'll have a chance to adventure together. See you in Middle-Earth!

LotRO Revisited - Part 5 - User Interface

2011-03-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

We're now at part five of my ramblings on Lord of the Rings Online. Time to stop beating around the bush and start complaining about what I really want to complain about: User Interface

"LotRO's UI is approachable, largely due to its similarity with WoW, but it lacks the same polish… There are a ton of small issues with the interface - I could really go on and on."

During almost every topic I've covered on this game at one point or another I've mentioned problems with the user interface. I should put a disclaimer here: I'm a professional user interface developer. It's safe to say that I'm more sensitive to this class of issue than most people. But the reason I do this for a living is because I think it's extremely important. Good interface creates happy experiences; bad interface creates frustrating experiences.

Looking at the progress of this game over the years, it has gotten better. They have fixed some hiccups in the experience. But there are still warts, and the rate of improvement is too slow. Too many problems that have been there for years are still festering. The only conclusion I can come to is that refining the interface isn't a priority, and that they don't have the right kind of talent focused on these issues.

Iconography

"Icons are too small and lack strong enough silhouettes to be quickly identified."

Let's look at the action bar screenshot above that I talked about last time. There are a couple things you might notice, but the first is probably that the icons are incredibly tiny. 32x32 pixels, specifically. You can scale this bar up, but the source assets are 32x32, so the scaled up version looks terrible. By comparison WoW's source icons are 64x64, containing 4 times the amount of information.

So why are they so small? Well, I'm pretty sure that's because of design choices made in the skill system. If there are many skills to choose from then the icons need to be very small to fit on screen. The decision to regularly give the player new toys has lead to these icons being small.

But the size of the icons isn't the real problem. Depending on your settings your WoW UI might display at a similar size (from my informal sample I found many people had a 34x34 display size for their WoW icons). No the real problem is with the contents of those icons.

You'll notice that the attack skills all have a red background to their icon. Skills that buff or heal seem to have green backgrounds. There's an intentional pattern here. A terrible, terrible pattern. By definition these are actions you need to perform in the heat of the moment. Most of these are attack skills, so your bar is going to be a sea of red. By giving the icons all the same primary color they've lost the most glance-able pieces of information.

The other problem, other than small size and uniform color, is that the icons are trying to be little paintings. There's too much detail in those 32x32 dimensions. I think it's time for a comparison:

Here we have samples from 7 different MMOs. This is by no means a comprehensive list, it's just a set of MMOs that I personally have played (or have seen played, in the case of Rift). Not all of the above have excellent iconography, but you'll notice the ones from LotRO really blur together into one mass. The icons are too tightly grouped, they all have the same color, and it's hard to pick out strong silhouettes.

At this point you might think I'm nit picking. But your average MMO player spends almost as much time staring at these action bars as they do observing their virtual surroundings. I've known players to completely lose context of what was going on because they were overly focused on their bars. It's a mission critical piece of interface, and on this LotRO does a real sub-standard job.

Inventory

"The bag view is frustrating because you can't do key tasks from there like sell."

To the right in the screenshot you see my bag view. Pretty standard, although once again you'll note that the icons are frustratingly small. To the left is the window that you get when you talk to a vendor. You'll note that one is a grid view and one is a list view.

So what if I want to sell something? I've probably arranged my bags in some way meaningful to me so that I can find items later, so you'd think I'd sell from my bag view. This is the MMO standard, but it's not how it works in LotRO. I have to open up the Sell tab in the vendor window, browse a list view of my bag contents, and find the item there. I have to track down the item in an alphabetized list where up until this moment I may have not known its name (the grid view doesn't show titles until you hover for a tooltip). And I have to do this despite the fact that I might have organized my bags in some way where this would be a trivial task from the grid view.

This is frustrating to do even once, and if you've ever played an MMO you know that selling trash to vendors is something you do very frequently. It's clear that the developers knew that this was awkward, because there are a number of features of the list view designed to make the experience less terrible.

You can lock items from the vendor window so that they won't show up as options to sell. But of course you can't lock an item from the bag view, further reinforcing it's presence as a useless visualization.

You can filter the list view to different qualities of items, presumably to help find the items you want to sell. But the filters are opposite of what you want. You can filter only by increasing quality, not decreasing quality - so you can't filter down to trash.

None of this fixes the core problem: the original design was bad. Either embrace the list or embrace the grid - don't attempt some unholy hybrid.

The Solution?

"WoW provided an open platform that enabled the community to patch up the rough spots. Blizzard would watch popular trends and integrate those features into the core. The end result is that the default WoW UI has become better and better over the years at an impressive pace"

At last we have a sign that the developers are paying attention: recently (as in within the last six months) LotRO opened up it's platform to support LUA scripted plugins. This is huge. This empowers the community to start making things better. What's there now from an API perspective is very conservative, but it's still a huge step in the right direction.

There aren't a ton of high quality plugins available yet. This stuff takes time. But the basic tools are there, and the developer is listening to what the community needs. If I didn't have a day-job I'd probably take matters into my own hands and start modding again. Alas, I have no interest in burning out like that, so I'm just going to have to hope the plugin development community does what needs to be done. Let the healing begin.

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In the next and final segment I'll talk about the only thing all of you probably want to know: what does it actually mean to be "free to play"?

LotRO Revisited - Part 4 - Systems

2011-03-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Well, this fourth part of my return to Lord of the Rings Online is maybe a bit more on the nerdy side. It's not about what you can do, or where you do it; it's about how you do it. The mechanics of the game.

Combat

Overall the combat in LotRO feels... okay. I like to move around a lot as I play. I'm not sure if that's because I think I actually get some tactical advantage, or if I just like to keep things moving to spice up the visuals. Regardless, when I play this way in LotRO I can notice the differences between what the client sees and what the server is tracking. It feels a bit… floaty. I'll often run up to a monster and realize that for a moment it's still tracking some previous snapshot of what my location was. The whole experience looks good, but it's not quite at the fidelity that I prefer.

"The average fight lasts around 30 seconds, which doesn't sound like much, but is forever when you're just trying to kill a freaking boar. The result is you never feel very powerful."

This complaint seems to have largely been a result of the class I was playing. The minstrel is intended as a healer role, and at the time I wrote the quote above I don't think they'd even added the minstrel's battle form. But even with those enhanced offensive abilities a minstrel seems to be many times slower at killing stuff. Probably a poor choice for my play style.

Since coming back to the game I've been trying a new character class: champion. The time to eliminate a single opponent is more on the order of 10 seconds, if that. I find myself free to heroically run at many opponents simultaneously, which is far more satisfying. It's a better fit for my playstyle, even if the melee combat does illuminate more of the latency issues.

It's a bummer that for this type of game you don't know whether your character class is a good fit for you until you've invested a lot of time in them. By the point you have enough data to make an informed decision it's too late. You're probably unwilling to start over, even if it'd produce a better long-term experience.

One thing that LotRO has that I've never seen in another game is the idea of a "fellowship maneuver." Certain characters can initiate an attack where everyone in the party participates by clicking one of four icons: morale (health), power (mana), direct damage, or damage over time. If the group coordinates you can pull off specific combinations that trigger even more powerful attacks. Of course there's always that one guy who's not paying attention and clicks green at the wrong time, but when it works it's a neat mechanic.

Items

The modern MMO is mostly just a vehicle for loot addiction. It's all about the pursuit of making your character more badass. Leveling up is one obvious part of that, and the other part is stuff.

In general the gear you get in LotRO works exactly the same as it does in most other MMOs. But there are aspects that are themed to the fiction. Jewelry plays a stronger role (although you won't be stumbling upon any of the primary Rings of Power). There's also a pocket slot, which is a nice touch. But despite the fact that the stats on the items have different names and the rarity colors aren't what you're used to, it's all very familiar.

And then you get your first legendary weapon.

A legendary item is an item that levels up, just like your character. As it gains levels you can spend points on different stats, slot it with gems and runes, and even give it a name. These items stay with you for a long time. As a minstrel I tried to give all mine musically themed names. Above you see the sword "Sharp Crescendo". It's predecessor was a mace named "Percussive Force". These items become a deeper part of your character than just the normal gear your slap on. It's a fun system that makes loot that much more fun.

The Action Bar

"...they seem to have thrown too many options at you in an attempt to make it interesting. But instead most of the abilities end up blurring together and leaving you bogged down with your overcrowded quick bar."

I get a new ability about every other level. At first this was perfectly manageable. But after awhile I started to dread visiting the class trainer. Another ability? Where am I supposed to put this? This ability feels almost identical to another one I already have - when am I supposed to use it instead of the other one?

Yes, there is the possibility of loss of interest if what your character can do never changes, but this is taking it way too far in the other direction. Let's get more specific. Here's the action bar of your basic starting player, this one at level 6:

This particular character is a burglar. There's a stealth toggle, a couple basic attacks, a debuff, a GTFO emergency button, and some health and travel items. A perfectly acceptable set of actions, although probably not enough to keep someone satisfied in this style of game over hours and hours of play.

Here is my champion's action bar at level 28:

There's a lot going on there. The bottom row is all pure attacks. The next row up contains my personal buffs, some occasional use skills and health items. The rows above that have very infrequent use skills, plus my mount. The attack skills are roughly arranged in advancing order (this class builds up momentum as "fervor" points), with area of effect attacks bumped towards the right side.

As you can see I've already filled up my primary 12 key row. The next time I get an attack skill, it will have to go above that.. somewhere. It'll become harder and harder to organize, until eventually it'll be pure chaos. So I present to you the action bar from my level 65 minstrel:

Yeah, and that's not even everything. In addition to this here I have another vertical row of 12 skills on the right side of the screen. As for this core mega-grid, I can't even tell you what all those abilities are. The bottom row is my frequent use stuff, the tier one ballads (minstrels build up three levels of "ballads" that unlock "anthems", and then the cycle repeats), war-speech abilities (the minstrel's battle form that I've mentioned before), and some heals. Above that goes the rest of the ballads and the anthems, plus some more heals. Above that… um... the next two rows are mostly gibberish. I can pick out my craft skills and that's about it. Apparently I never use any of that crap.

Some of that probably doesn't need to be there. There's technically a skill window that I could use to access all of those abilities, but if it's anything that I might need in the heat of the moment then browsing the menu for a skill is a non-starter. So everything goes in a big clump at the bottom of my screen.

A few of those could be removed by making fixes to other game systems. For example you'll see three craft tools on that bar (Alt 1,2,3). Those are there because you can't use a craft skill unless you have the associated tool equipped. This includes gathering skills, so I'm constantly toggling between my prospecting pick axe and my woodcutting axe. It's dumb. To work around the dumbness I have to eat up three quick bar slots of permanent screen real estate.

Other icons on my bar could be removed with more integrated UI elsewhere. I have two icons pinned for tracking resources: ore and wood. That could easily be integrated into the map widget (as it is in WoW). It wouldn't even be that bad to set from the skill window if my tracking mode didn't reset every time my character died. So there are problems here that are partially due to game systems, and partially due to interface. As you can see we're once again encroaching upon my favorite topic…

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Next up I'll just cut to the chase and rant about user interface.

LotRO Revisited - Part 3 - Multiplayer

2011-03-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

My last article about Lord of the Rings Online focused on the solo activities one could undertake in Middle Earth. This article will focus on the "Multiplayer" part of the MMO acronym… probably what the rest of you play these games for.

Instances

I didn't talk about the dungeon instances at all in my previous posts. That's because I didn't really run many of them. I know, ironic given that my main character was a support class. I seem to assume a singleplayer stance until I feel confident enough to group up with others and know I'll be valuable to them. Maybe I'm just too proud to risk being that guy that doesn't know what he's doing and gets everyone killed.

This second time through I'm running far more dungeons. But it's not because I'm more confident, it's because they've implemented instance level scaling. You can now run the Great Barrows with any group from 20 to the level cap of 65. This makes it far easier to find a group, and far easier to balance the difficulty for a group's skill level (if it's too hard, just reduce the target level one or two). The instances have also been broken up into multiple shorter sections, making it less of a time commitment to do a run. Considering that LotRO has an older crowd these are very important concessions.

It's unfortunate that the game still lacks a quality matchmaking service (like WoW's new Dungeon Finder). There's an in-game tool (pictured above), but nobody uses it (similar to earlier incarnations of woW's Dungeon Finder). Instead you're stuck relying on either regional chat channels, or the unofficial global "looking for fellowship" channel. I'd assume that fixing this problem would be the natural next step for the development team, but I also felt the same way about WoW and it took them five years to deliver the feature. And unfortunately I have far less confidence in LotRO's interface designers. It'd greatly improve the experience, but I'm not holding my breath.

Skirmishes

Level scaling for instance is a actually a new feature for the game. It came about as a side effect of development for something else entirely: skirmishes. Where a dungeon instance is a handcrafted adventure, a skirmish is more of a random large scale battle. There's some overall scenario, but every time you play a skirmish it will be different. There are varied squads of enemies, random lieutenants, and boss battles.

One of the best parts about skirmishes is that you get a companion character to go into battle with you. You can customize the class and powers of this character, and level them up over time, but you don't get much tactical control once it's time to fight. This helps makes the battles larger (a 12 player raid actually results in 24 combatants on your side) as well as rounding out your weaknesses (you can spec your companion to heal you while you focus on dishing out pain). The whole skirmish system scales to different party levels and sizes (you can even do skirmishes solo, with just you and your companion). It's all very flexible.

I wouldn't recommend only spending your time playing skirmishes, but in moderation they're great. It's best with a big group of people for good chaotic fun, but it's also good times just by yourself.

PvP

"I only tried it once"

I still haven't tried it since that one time. And you know what, it looks like it'll stay that way. There are only a few things that are restricted to paying subscribers , and PvMP (Player vs. Monster Player) is one of them. So if I want to play a Warg and go for the throats of poor little Hobbits I'll have to shell out a monthly fee. Sad. Oh well, I don't think the Lord of the Rings setting is one that would really fire me up to pwn other players. It's probably for the best.

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Next time I'll be talking about the game's combat system as well as ranting more about the user interface.

LotRO Revisited - Part 2 - Keeping Busy

2011-03-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

The last post focused on the world of Lord of the Rings Online, because that's the first thing you'll see and care about. This post delves into the details of what to do within that world, once again comparing to my various quotes from three years ago.

Advancement - Deeds, Traits, and Levels

"It's impressive how enticing the deed system is considering how minor the effect is on gameplay."

I was a fan of the deed system right away. But the more time I've spent with it, the more impressed I've become. It's much better than an achievement system. It's a sophisticated layered incentive system that will keep you coming back for the silliest little things.

I've never found myself playing a game like this and doing so many things that give me no experience. That's a testament to how compelling completing these deeds can be. Sure, I could go do more quests and level-up... but it might be more fun to just poke around and find these ruins in order to get another rank on my Wisdom virtue. Oh and while I'm there maybe I can kill enough brigands to earn a title and maybe an upgrade in my Justice rank.

Having variety in this sort of game is a really good thing. I'm not exactly sure why it is that choose we spend our leisure time being overwhelmed with too many things to do. Maybe it's because these are things we can actually accomplish and check off our list? Regardless, it's a good thing to feel like there are lots of valid ways to spend your time. There are deeds for finding landmarks, killing specific types of baddies, completing quests in an area, using specific abilities a lot… you complete deeds constantly. Sometimes you get a title, sometimes you get a virtue rank (which can be slotted for a little stat boost), and always you get a couple Turbine Points (the real money currency of the game). It's just fundamentally more exciting than your average completionist-focused achievement.

"And as that the monsters in each region go up in level with me, it's not like I ever get the satisfaction of feeling more powerful. So what are the levels buying me?"

I kind of went off on a mini rant about whether levels are really helping anything (perhaps derived from this article from Raph Koster). It's not that I think levels are bad, it's more that I think perhaps they represent too strict of a divide. I joined a group of fellow adventurers to run some content five levels above me, and I was useless to them. At least half of my attacks missed. I should be less powerful than them, sure; but what seemed like a small numerical spread apparently represented total incompatibility. Is that fun?

This complaint isn't leveled at LotRO but the MMO genre as a whole. I think the only game I've played where this wasn't a problem was City of Heroes, where effective player level could be bumped up or down while in a group. This meant that the pool of people to play with was actually everyone online. Extremely liberating. I wish more games thought harder about how to unite players instead of separate them. Oh well.

Quests

"Pretty standard MMO fare"

Yep, the quest design in LotRO is status quo. Kill X Angry Baddies; gather X McGuffins; escort helpless Mr. X. The flow of quests has seen a definite improvement over the past couple years (less back-and-forth than I remember), but there isn't a terrible amount of variety in what it is you do. And this would be more of a problem if there weren't lots of other things to do that aren't strictly quests. There are deeds and tasks and skirmishes to fill up your time. It's easy to truck along and forget about your quest log for awhile, so it doesn't really bother me that the quests are vanilla.

"There's a primary story quest line that adheres to a higher quality bar, letting you follow the path of the ring without contradicting the fiction. "

The game has always had this quest line that connects you with the big names in the Lord of the Rings fiction. You meet Strider in Bree, you'll track down Black Riders, you'll rendezvous with the Fellowship in Rivendell and go hunting with Gimli and Legolas. It's great stuff. But the problem was that it required an extremely varied mix of solo, small fellowship, and instance quests in order to progress through the books. It was very hard to find the help you needed to work through the whole epic quest line. But since I last played the developers have gone through and tightened up the experience so that the whole storyline can be played solo. This makes it so that everyone can enjoy their best content, a smart move.

Tasks

I'm not positive, but I think Tasks exist because someone realized that there needed to be something for non-subscription players to do if they weren't willing to pay for quest packs. Tasks are repeatable quests that use the junk you'd normally sell to vendors. So instead of trashing that "Orcish Tea Cozy" you could instead turn it in for a small amount of experience and reputation. It's not glamorous, but I think the effect on the game is quite positive. It turns an uninteresting part of the game into a decision: do I prioritize experience growth or economic growth? The repeatable quests are gated to five per day, so if you're going to turn this crap into experience it'll take some storage space and patience. If you'd rather just have the cash now you can sell them all as before. It's a simple clever system that basically has no downsides for the player.

Crafting

I don't think anyone would consider the crafting system a critical feature for MMO. It's exclusion probably wouldn't cause anyone to pass on a game, but every MMO still seems to have one. LotRO has a perfectly passable crafting system that even has a fair share of innovative ideas. Like others it probably economically makes more sense to sell everything you find and buy crafted goods from others, but the system is there for those who enjoy this sort of thing. I think I'm one of them, but I'm always wondering if I really do or if I just feel compelled to participate.

"Unfortunately finding recipes on the auction house is laughably difficult due to poor UI."

The auction system categories are constantly getting refined, which does make the experience better. It's easier to drill into the right recipe section, for example. However it feels to me like they're going about it wrong. Maybe it's just the fact that they put Usable as a sort instead of a checkbox. This makes it fussy to do something perfectly reasonable like find cheap upgrades for your current gear. Ah, but this is a complaint with the interface. The mechanics of recipes are perfectly fine. I like the one-use recipes, I like how you can sometimes choose different output flavors, and I of course like the nice surprise of the crafting critical that gives you an awesomer version.

"the game lacks a friendly way to craft in bulk (I should never have to click a plus button 60 times just to smelt all my ore). "

Fixed! I'm not sure why it took so long to add a "Make All" button. Oh, again this was an interface complaint. It's almost like there's a trend here... More on that later.

"In my experience the stuff you can make is generally not of value by the time you can make it (given either the time to gather ingredients or the prohibitive cost of those ingredients on the auction house)."

Aha! A real comment on crafting. Well, it's worth saying that I'm having a little better luck with my second character's crafting experience. Knowing the basics of the system helps you plan ahead. I've definitely been able to create good upgrades for myself without having to spend too much time rounding up the ingredients. Part of this was knowing to stop screwing around on the auction house and just vendor trash certain professions' components. I'm sorry scholars and cooks, but you're not willing to pay enough to make it worth the trouble.

Another thing that's contributed to a smoother experience is the introduction of Bounty quests. These are three times repeatable quests that reward you with a big pile of crafting ingredients and patterns. This helps take a bit of the pressure off of rounding up some of the more obscure components.

Overall I think I like LotRO's crafting system. It gives me something else to do besides obsessively leveling, and that's probably for the best.

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Next up, stuff to do with other people. Yes, the 'M' of MMO. Um, more specifically the second 'M'.

LotRO Revisited - Part 1 - The World

2011-03-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Now that I've put up my complete words from 2008, it's time to re-evaluate the Lord of the Rings Online of today.

"... there's no doubt in my mind that WoW is a superior game. But when you've exhausted all of WoW's content, and you haven't written off the genre as a whole, you can do worse than to slum it out to LotRO."

Well, that's an unflattering quote to start off with. It's also not untrue. Basically the only times I've played LotRO have been when I've been bored with WoW. There's never been a time when WoW was satisfying me that I thought about maybe playing some LotRO instead.

But this free to play thing changes the comparison. It's no longer just about which game is a "better" game; it's about which game gives you the most enjoyment for your time and money. I'm cheap enough to think about what $15 a month means to me. Okay, $15 doesn't sound like much, but over a year that's $180, and I don’t know if WoW is that much better than LotRO. Probably the hardest part for me is the knowledge that if I'm not playing the game then I'm wasting $15 a month. The flexibility LotRO now offers of being able to play as frequently or infrequently as I want is extremely compelling. And for my infrequent play style, LotRO may just be the better choice.

I'll get more into the free to play details later, but for now I need to close the gap between 2008 and 2011.

World and Travel

"Comparing to the fiction, [the game] basically only allows access to locations where events started to get interesting. There's no Lonely Mountain, no Moria, no Isengard, and certainly no Mordor. Spending hours of your time grinding through a field that the Fellowship breezed through doesn't exactly leave a heroic taste in your mouth."

Well, since I wrote these words there have been two large area expansions: Moria, and Mirkwood.

Moria is a huge labyrinth of underground halls and caverns. When you see the Bridge of Khazad-dûm you will find it cracked in half, as that you arrive after Gandalf's passing. It's an epic space that hits a wide spread of underground themes. It's nice for awhile, but it wasn't long before I felt the need for some fresh air and open sky. Thankfully when you've leveled your way through the content you emerge in the elven city of Lórien, providing a much appreciated change in scenery.

If you look on a map Mirkwood is huge, but the Mirkwood expansion only lets you poke around a small section of it. It's an appropriately spooky forest, if a bit monotone. Sadly I can't think of a single landmark that burned itself into my memory. So I rode around for awhile until I found a cool scary tree for a photo.

From a palette perspective you could just consider Moria to be the "mine" expansion and Mirkwood to be the "forest" expansion - with not a lot of variety within either. This is an ongoing struggle for LotRO. The fiction isn't host to fantastical scenery. Pretty, absolutely; imaginative, no. What it lacks in inspiration it makes up for in quantity of historical locales, but here the slow drip of releases prevents me from achieving satisfaction.

For what it's worth the next large expansion is scheduled to release this fall and will add Rohan. This should add key landmarks like Isengard, Helm's Deep, Edoras, and Fangorn Forest - definitely many things to look forward to.

"And this is where I think the license is working against the game: In trying to own up to the epic size of the world the developers have created an epic amount of work for themselves. If it's taken this long to get us to the Misty Mountains, how long will it be until we're at the steps of Mount Doom?"

Apparently a long time. What's released right now basically brings us to the end of Fellowship. It's been four years (2007 to 2011), and that doesn't count the development time prior to launch. The next expansion will officially start progress into the Two Towers. Insert some fuzzy math and at that rate it'll be around 2019 before the core landmass from the trilogy is completed and we can /dance in Barad-dûr. By that point I expect to be able to play the game on retinal implants as I jetpack to work in the coastal Cascades.

What I can say is that what's available is lovingly crafted, and I expect that trend to continue. But the rate of expansion remains maddeningly slow.

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Next time I'll talk about all the sorts of quests and various activities to do in this finely crafted Middle Earth.

Lord of the Rings Online... circa 2008

2011-03-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

Recently Lord of the Rings Online went free to play, which is to say you can play the game without a subscription or even a credit card. Of course there are all sorts of potential microtransactions available so that Turbine can actually make money on their game, but these are all completely optional. Since there's no cost to me I decided to log in and check out the game (the last time I played was alongside the Mirkwood expansion about a year ago). And as I evaluated the game in its current state against adjusted criteria I thought it'd be interesting to revistwhat I'd written about the game in the past here. It was at that point that I realized that there was a lot of content that I wrote about the game that somehow never got posted. So, I present to you what was intended to be an immediate follow-up to this post, further thoughts about Lord of the Rings Online, three years ago (circa early 2008).

Huge disclaimer: there are things I talk about below that have changed over the past three years. I'll be following this post with my thoughts on how far the game has come. But I'm intentionally posting this as is, even though some of the statements are now inaccurate.

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World and Travel

This is the only part of what I wrote that made it to the blog already. You can read about it here.

Advancement - Deeds, Traits, and Levels

One of the great innovations the developers have brought to LotRO is the deed system. Deeds can be given for traditional stuff like killing 200 orcs, or they can come from something more interesting like scouting out every ruin in the region. Completing deeds can reward you with titles, which don't have any effect on gameplay but are fun to get nonetheless. Unfortunately, titles are usually the result of easier deeds, so the coolness factor of being called "Spider-Foe" is lessened when you know everyone else has that title as well. I wish they had more challenging titles to earn for those of us who want to set ourselves apart.

Deeds can also produce traits, which equip into slots to specialize your character. Some of these grant you new abilities (like the capacity to wear heavier armor), while others just grant you an attribute buff. Many of these are stackable, so if you unlock the Zeal trait multiple times the effect of the Zeal buff will be stronger. Number-wise, the carrot on the end of the stick is small, but it's enough to encourage you to do something a little off the beaten path.

It's impressive how enticing the deed system is considering how minor the effect is on gameplay. I've often found myself re-treading some old content just to get some interesting deed. It makes me wonder if all the extreme level banding is really necessary. I seem to be willing to go out of my way for very small gameplay rewards. The worry of all MMO developers is that without gating the content I will blaze through it too fast and cancel my subscription when I'm done. But in my modern MMO experience I usually level past the quest content before I'm able to get through all of it. And as that the monsters in each region go up in level with me, it's not like I ever get the satisfaction of feeling more powerful. So what are the levels buying me? All they're really doing is designating which regions I'm supposed to be playing at what times.

Wouldn't the experience be just as rich if I everyone was the same level? Maybe getting rid of levels is too extreme, but at the very least can we make the gaps less extreme? There are 50 levels in LotRO, and taking on something more than 4 or 5 levels higher than you is a death wish. What if you could reasonably engage something within 10 levels? Would that break the game?

Combat

The combat in LotRO has always left me feeling a little unsatisfied. It's standard WoW fare: various timed abilities mapped to a numbered quick bar. You stand there, whacking at your opponent, firing off some pattern of special attacks, waiting for them to keel over so you can loot their stuff. It's the sort of thing that doesn't demand your full attention. The main difference in this game is that they seem to have thrown too many options at you in an attempt to make it interesting. But instead most of the abilities end up blurring together and leaving you bogged down with your overcrowded quick bar.

The average fight lasts around 30 seconds, which doesn't sound like much, but is forever when you're just trying to kill a freaking boar. The result is you never feel very powerful. It doesn't help that you will be fighting an unending swarm of sameness. The respawn times seem shorter and the variety in foes fewer. Expect to fight a lot of boars, bears, wolves, spiders, brigands, and orcs. It's all true to the fiction, but once the initial warm fuzzies wear off you'll be wishing there was some more diversity.

User Interface

LotRO's UI is approachable, largely due to its similarity with WoW, but it lacks the same polish. Icons are too small and lack strong enough silhouettes to be quickly identified. There are odd inconsistencies in the click-ability of items, requiring that you overfill your quick bar. And the bag view is frustrating because you can't do key tasks from there like sell. There are a ton of small issues with the interface - I could really go on and on.

WoW provided an open platform that enabled the community to patch up the rough spots. Blizzard would watch popular trends and integrate those features into the core. The end result is that the default WoW UI has become better and better over the years at an impressive pace. Here in LotRO there's no ability to make up for the UI's shortcomings, and the momentum from the development team is too slow. I know user interface is my field so I'm a bit biased, but I strongly believe that WoW's choice of UI platform is one of the largest contributers to its continued success.

Quests

The introduction to the game is quite strong with solo instances and nice epic feeling quests. But outside of that there's an excessive amount of fetch quests and back-and-forth travel. There's a primary story quest line that adheres to a higher quality bar, letting you follow the path of the ring without contradicting the fiction. But in general the creative uses of instances in the early regions seems to thin out and be replaced by less inspired content as you move forward. Pretty standard MMO fare.

PvP

Given the Lord of the Rings fiction, LotRO doesn't let you turn on your fellows for standard PvP. That would let ~~the terrorists~~ Sauron win. Instead the game offers a special mode where some players play monsters and others play their heroes. I only tried it once, and was unfortunately bogged down by the excessive travelling involved. There was far too much downtime moving around to then die so quickly. But playing as the bad guys did spice up the sometimes bland morality of the primary quest lines. And it was certainly enjoyable to play varied looking characters (spiders and orcs and such). But the time to reward ratio was too high so I only gave it that one try.

Crafting

The crafting system seems pretty standard at first glance, but it has a lot more complexity to it than what you see in WoW. For example there's a chance of crafting criticals that can add some surprises to a usually boring task (in the form of either a better version of the item or more components). There are patterns for more powerful items that are balanced by being one-use only, avoiding flooding the market and making the common stuff irrelevant. Unfortunately finding recipes on the auction house is laughably difficult due to poor UI. And for the other stuff the game lacks a friendly way to craft in bulk (I should never have to click a plus button 60 times just to smelt all my ore). In my experience the stuff you can make is generally not of value by the time you can make it (given either the time to gather ingredients or the prohibitive cost of those ingredients on the auction house). Overall crafting seems to be more interesting that what you can do in WoW but lacks polish, especially around the UI.

It is worth calling out that the ability to dye your armor is awesome. It prevents your character from looking stupid, which is good because you're going to be staring at them for hours on end. I know support for this involves investment in some core tech, but really every MMO should have this feature.

---

There you have it - my unposted words from three years ago. Next up I'll talk about how far the game has come since then.

Microdungeon

2011-02-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

I stopped in at Gamma Ray Games this weekend to pick up a game and stumbled upon something awesome. There was some art up on the walls: framed pieces of cardstock with little dungeon maps inked on to them. As someone who once doodled maps onto notebook paper I was immediately won over.

Apparently this is the work of one Tony Dowler. A year ago Tony acquired a large stack of this cardstock and set out to make 3 microdungeons a week for a year. I think at first there was some connection to actual dungeon design, but after doing it for awhile the bizarre starts to creep out, like cupcake dungeons. The dungeon starts to become like a little haiku, with the obscure room labels giving us a piece of the author's mind. I pretty much love everything about it.

There are compilations available for parts of the microdungeon journey. Here are two good examples:

And showing that not all things need be micro: this.

I love cartography. But there's something about this style of map making that really resonates with me. I love the willfully inconsistent perspective amongst the buildings. I love the different line widths and the textural hatch marks. I love the starkness of it all where the life has to come purely from line work (although to be fair I love it colored too). It's simple and playful yet organized. Delightful.

This all comes at a time where I've been mulling over The Hobbit and thinking I totally need a replica of Thror's Map for my wall 'o maps. Perhaps it's time I finally put pen to paper myself to see if I've still got the skills.

Scott Pilgrim vs the World

2010-09-16T12:57:00.000-07:00

It's common to have a video game release alongside a film release as some sort of companion marketing synergy something-something. It's rare that I actually experience those products in tandem as intended. But that has been the case with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. So I have two pieces of media to process here, both of which have increased my curiosity about the original source material.

I actually technically started with the game, but I'll begin with the movie. If you are not in an extremely specific demographic, then this movie isn't for you. If you're old enough to have predated the video game generation, then the whole thing is going to feel like a whirlwind of predictable, repetitive, superficial bubblegum. If instead you're too young and had your video game cherry popped by Halo or Grand Theft Auto, then you won't connect with the references or the 8-bit stylings. In short, your ability to enjoy this movie may be limited by whether you know what a bob-omb is.

I guess I should have known I would have liked the film, as that the director's filmography includes Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. Both of those movies understood their genre well, and Scott Pilgrim is no different here. The film feels like some delicious blend of video game and comic book. That's either going to come off as cheesy or awesome, depending on your perspective. I did hear a groan from the audience when the movie took a left turn about twenty minutes in with its first boss battle. It reminded me of the time I saw Crouching Tiger in the theater and there was a similar confused "what?" that came from the crowd when a character in the film started to fly. Please, get over yourself, suspend your disbelief, and enjoy this alternate slice of reality. Physics be damned.

In short the plot is that Scott Pilgrim falls in love with Ramona Flowers (and with her vibrant hair, goggles, mystery, and deep brown eyes who can blame him?), and must progress through a series of seven boss battles to win her. The progression of the film is entirely predictable. You will know after a scene without looking at your watch about how much movie is left. But it's really no different than knowing that the solution that House comes up with 20 minutes in is wrong and the one he comes up with 5 minutes from the end is right. It's just narrative structure. But, you know, with boss battles.

The movie was paired with a coordinating game release for XBLA and PSN. The game is a classic beat-em-up, in the style of River City Ransom or Double Dragon. Unlike Castle Crashers, this modern beat-em-up makes no effort to modernize the visual style. The Scott Pilgrim game is blissfully low tech, with pixelated sprites and chiptune music. Oh my god, the music. So catchy, so good. Or at least it is to my nostalgic ear. There was one tune that started to grate on me, but that's because the loop was too short and the level was too hard. But overall the audio experience is delightfully old school.

Generally the point of tying two media releases is to motivate you to get into one if you're initially only into the other. The expectation I'm guessing is that if you're excited about the movie you'll get the game, not as much the other way around given that movie license games are usually terrible. In this case I guess I did it backwards - as that I picked up the game because I heard it was good. I didn't form plans to see the movie until I heard that it was also good, although I guess the game did get me a bit more excited for it. Not that I helped - the movie had already been declared a box office failure in the short weeks before I got out to see it. It's sad how immediately things are judged. It's the same logic that gets an amazing show like Firefly canceled. Oh well, I still heartily recommend both Scott Pilgrim the game and Scott Pilgrim the movie to anyone who fits in that demographic (and if you're in it, you probably already know).

Darksiders (Xbox 360)

2010-08-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

Before playing Darksiders, I had already heard a lot of press about how the game is just one big Zelda rip off. It is accused of unabashedly stealing mechanics from that franchise and others. And you know what, that's no lie. But I fail to see how it's a problem. The Zelda games are almost uniformly excellent. And there really aren't many other games that attempt that gameplay style. So really, there's low supply and high demand for Zelda-style games, and something like Darksiders should be perfectly welcome. I mean, were people really upset when Shadow Complex blatantly cribbed from Metroid? I'm glad the gaming industry isn't as crazy about patents as the rest of the software world - it prevents the culture from stagnating.

When the cell shaded art style for Wind Waker got unveiled apparently a ton of fans were mortified. They wanted some more realistically rendered adult Link. Personally I loved the light hearted cartoon style of Wind Waker. But if some people were still holding out for a grittier, more "adult" Link, then they have it in Darksiders... and then some. Darksiders takes place in a world where angels and demons are battling it out over a post-apocalyptic Earth. You play as War, one of the four horsemen, standing in the middle trying to keep both sides in line through extreme violence. It's like if Link started rampaging around making demonic pacts and cutting people's head's off. Instead of, you know, occasionally harassing chickens.

That theme may not align to your typical Zelda game, but the mechanics are all familiar. You get a boomerang and a hookshot; you'll romp through dungeons with chests, puzzles, and keys; and at the end there will be an epic boss battle with some pattern you need to learn that involves the fancy tool you just found. It's undeniably the same design. But it's all executed very well.

Truth be told, I think I preferred it to Twilight Princess. The visuals are obviously of a higher fidelity, but there are also a lot of surprisingly inspired environments. The controls are tight and responsive (at least compared to my regrettable experience of playing Twilight Princess on the Wii instead of the Gamecube). And overall the game is just that much more streamlined, with a manageable length (which for me is a positive characteristic these days). Overall Darksiders was a nice little game that took a beloved pattern and repeated it. It totally scratched the right itch, so if you've been feeling the need for a classic Zelda romp, then give Darksiders a spin.

Read My Face

2010-02-04T08:52:00.000-08:00

It amazes me how much we communicate to each other with just our faces. With all the fine muscles behind them faces can be extremely expressive, so it's not the capability that amazes me. It's the accuracy with which its interpreted. Fundamentally, we rarely see our own faces. We even more rarely see them while they're delivering all these subtle emotional cues. It blows my mind that we operate at this level where I can nonverbally make some facial contortion to represent a rather nuanced emotion and that someone else can understand that.

We never took facial communication classes where we all sat in front of mirrors practicing our vocabulary. No, we learned this all in the wild. And we started pretty young. It's never been intuitive to me that babies learn the complexities of speech long before they learn to not poo themselves. But they're picking up and delivering facial cues well before they start babbling. So really the language of the face is the first mode of communication we learn. This stuff is deeply ingrained in us.

Since we can't see ourselves, all of this has to be learned by making a face and judging reactions. Maybe we will just invent some combination of muscle contractions that seem to represent our inner state, but it's more likely that we're copying a face that we've someone else make. Which, since we can't see ourselves and judge the success rate, could have hilariously bad execution.

There are some smiles that are cold, forced, and unbelievable; there are others that are delightfully contagious. Some of this may have to with aptitude, but a lot of it has to do with the honesty of the emotions behind what's being presented. I'm sure that the good actors spend an absurd amount of time in front of a mirror learning how to lie with their face (so either they had raw talent, or they're just narcissistic?).

I wonder sometimes how well I filter what I'm feeling inside to what my face is projecting outside. I don't know of course because you can see it and I can't. If I'm feeling something powerful, can I repress it? If there's something I dislike, my instincts tell me to make a foul face. If it's something small, my cultural filters kick in and I can prevent the emotion from making it my face and being inappropriate. But if the emotion is stronger it becomes more and more difficult to not wear that on my face. And if it's strong enough, there's no stopping it. If I feel love, how can that not be read in the details big and small written all over my face? Even my eyes alone are going to carry a message that clear. But with the whole face in concert? For something that big you're going to get communication on all open channels.

Love is obviously an emotion that we rarely have a reason to repress, but there are plenty of things that we do need to keep from making it to the surface. There are all sorts of things flying through our heads, and every one of them shouldn't vent out through the face. Well, unless you want to look like the crazy person that you are on the inside. So it is that we've all developed a controlled path from emotion to facial communication; we all have filters, conscious or unconscious. We have some knowledge of our facial vocabulary and are making decisions about which faces to put forth based on proven effectiveness and relevance to the situation.

Although our potential vocabulary is large, it's always being refined by the reaction we see in other people. When we make a face, we're looking for the reaction face in other people. If we perceive that reaction to be positive, we're more likely to use that face in the future. Or maybe their positive reaction causes us to return a positive reaction, and it all cycles until we're just standing their grinning like idiots.

I don't know where I'm going with this. The topic just completely fascinates me. How much of myself is projected with completely subconscious imprecise facial communication? How accurate is what I put out there? Can everything I'm thinking be plainly read on my face? I really have no clue how well I communicate what I'm feeling, or how well I conceal the thoughts and emotions I don't want other people to see. I can know what I'm saying, because I also have ears. But I have no idea what my face is telling you.

:/

Thirst

2010-01-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

Sourcing off the same list that I got Let the Right One In, I added Thirst to my Netflix queue. This time the origin is Korean instead of Scandinavian, so it's another subtitled vampire movie. Turns out not all of the best vampire movies out there come from America, go figure.

Outside of the fact that I've had to read, there were no real other similarities between the movies. Let the Right One In was very down to earth, but Thirst is a bit more crazy. It's a textbook recommendation to do some more background work before you decide to turn your loved one into a vampire. The end result is one character who's overwhelmed with the guilt of their affliction, and another who's drunk with power. A recipe for disaster (with disaster having proven correlation to entertainment value).

And it's a love story, of course. Why is that all vampire stories are love stories? I'm not complaining, it's just odd that there's such a strong association. Maybe it's an exploration of our love-inspired promises to be together forever. When you have to deal with real forever then it gets more complicated. Or maybe its that we just find all this blood lust somehow erotic. I'm sure there's a long discussion to be had just on that, but I'm off-topic now.

So Thirst is the love story between a priest accidentally turned vampire and an oppressed but not-so-innocent girl. It's one of those stories that is at its core familiar to you, but at the same time unlike anything you've ever seen before. Just enough off axis to keep me guessing. The movie also has a nice escalation to it. There's a steady ramping up from the mundane to the supernatural that fits nicely with the progression of the characters. The end moments are particularly charming.

If I had to rank my recent forays into foreign vampire films I'd put Let the Right One In slightly higher. Maybe its just this Norwegian blood of mine, but I really connected to that movie's pacing. It's a simple story with a truly drab setting, but that all made it so much more real for me. But that's just a slight preference, because Thirst is also definitely worth a spin. Unfortunately I think I've run out of vampire movies on my list. Maybe it's time I bumped True Blood up in the queue?

Ratings

2010-01-03T16:16:00.000-08:00

The internet is moving to a very democratic place where for all sorts of content there is the possibility for comments and ratings. This is generally a good thing, but transparency in the whole system is pretty critical because frankly most people don't have a clue how to participate in a rating system.

I was poking around on Netflix and came across a user review that started with this:

I gave it a 5 star review because I love it. I may have given it an 8 on a 10 star scale, but since I only get 5 stars thats what its getting.

And then later in the same comment:

I can see where people would rate this lower but I rate things based on if I loved it and could watch it again. So all in all, okay 3D effects, obvious plot, and some of the acting is sub-par but I still loved it.

Um, yeah. I'm glad that Netflix tells me that this person is only 21% similar to me. But I'm still kind of bitter that their rating gets averaged in with everyone else's and in the end result is something that I really can't trust.

It's extremely important to establish a consistent description of what different ratings mean. Netflix does indeed include a description in the tooltip:

1 - Hated It
2 - Didn't Like It
3 - Liked It
4 - Really Liked It
5 - Loved It

Unfortunately these definitions leave a bit too much to the imagination. I mean, I love my wife and I love ice cream, yet these are not the same kinds of love. But the problem is that both are totally valid uses of the word. There's the love that's about deep meaning, and there's the infatuation that is just wanting to experience something over and over again. When I rate my Netflix movies it's based on some combination of these two aspects: meaning and repetition.

1 - I feel like less of a person for experiencing this
2 - That was kind of a waste of my time
3 - Not life altering, but entertaining
4 - That made me feel something
5 - I am a better person for having experienced this

1 - Actively upset that I spent any time watching that
2 - Wish I would have watched something else
3 - A fine use of my time to view it once
4 - Want to see it again
5 - Could watch it over and over; will watch it anytime it's on

This is how movies like Back to the Future and Phoebe in Wonderland can both end up being five stars. It's unfortunate that the different meaning behind those two ratings get lost, but it's the best I can do with a one dimensional scale.

Tangent: It's interesting browsing someone's movie collection. Movie purchases operate primarily under the repetition scale, not the meaning scale. You can totally love a movie, yet not need feel the need to own it. You can also have total fluff that makes you feel good that you want to have around so you can watch whenever. As tempting as it can be to judge someone's tastes by their displayed collection, it's only part of the picture.

There's less of a distinction with games (either of the video or board form) where repetition is more integral to the experience. Compare to Board Game Geek's rating definitions:

10 - Outstanding. Always want to play and expect this will never change
9 - Excellent game. Always want to play it.
8 - Very good game. I like to play. Probably I'll suggest it and will never turn down a game.
7 - Good game, usually willing to play.
6 - Ok game, some fun or challenge at least, will play sporadically if in the right mood.
5 - Average game, slightly boring, take it or leave it.
4 - Not so good, it doesn't get me but could be talked into it on occasion.
3 - Likely won't play this again although could be convinced. Bad.
2 - Extremely annoying game, won't play this ever again.
1 - Defies description of a game. You won't catch me dead playing this. Clearly broken.

People wouldn't know what to do with a board game that changed their life but wasn't worth playing a second time. Although that concept doesn't exist in the board game world, it is something we regularly see in film. But I'd love to see the board game that delivered that experience.

I often see reviews that knock video games for being too short. Because video games are quite a bit more expensive than seeing a movie there's an expectation that the consumer should get their money's worth. My time is not as plentiful as it used to be, so a game that delivers a quality experience with no multiplayer or other replay value is just fine. I love the short and sweet game, and so their assumed negative criticism is actually a positive to me.

It's kind of because of this information loss that I don’t try to give numeric ratings on my blog. But I do put a good deal of thought into it whenever I give one elsewhere. But it's a problem that not everyone puts the same level of care into their ratings. I think my first exposure to this was a decade ago back in the days of Am I Hot or Not, which is probably the first real large scale use of internet driven ratings. One person might be sitting there agonizing over the fine difference between a seven and an eight; another person might be treating it as binary with "hot" being ten and "not" being one. And even if you have people putting real thought into it, they many not use the scale uniformly (for example I know that I underuse the one and two star ratings for Netflix).

It's weird, because I think this whole rating thing is hugely important to helping people sift through ever growing heap of content available to us. But I also think that we as humans pretty much suck at it. I think that identity is key to making the experience more accurate, like when Netflix tells me that the rating I'm looking at is from someone who is a bad match for me, or when you choose a particular editorial source whose opinions align with our own. But how much will we really grow and be challenged if we're only exposed to stuff that is like what we already like?

It's a hard problem space, and I hope there are smart people out there thinking really hard about it. In the meantime, I rate this post a "Q".

The Beatles: Rock Band (Xbox 360)

2010-01-03T12:25:00.000-08:00

My love affair with rhythm video games has cooled a bit. I don't lust after the experience like I once did. I'll never turn down an opportunity to play, but it's not something I'm generally seeking out anymore.

But every once in awhile an event comes along that reminds me just how awesome this whole music gaming thing can be. This time that was Beatles Rock Band with the family on Christmas Eve. Take a selection of music that pretty much everyone knows, have a large enough group of people such that you can cycle players in and out, and then add in some snacks and booze. It's a Good Time.

Harmonix did a good job with the Beatles, giving a charming presentation of the timeline and a fitting visual style. But honestly it doesn't matter that much. It's about having the right songs with the right people. And that combination is all it really takes to make the band gaming experience awesome.

I think what's really changed is that I used to be willing to play these games alone. The drive to master the instruments and nail the songs was incentive enough. But that passed, and I really only became interested in the cooperative experience. I'd still like to get better at the drums (as that it gives me the illusion that I could play drums for realz), but I recognize that that would require some solo practicing that I just wasn't willing to be bothered with. Anyway, I had only been seeking the game out in group scenarios, and those opportunities had become less frequent, so I had started to forget that I cared. But it was nice to remember this holiday that it can be just as fun even after all this time.

False Ending

2009-12-31T10:42:00.000-08:00

So I've been continuing my exploration of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. And you know what, I took down the boss and saw the credits roll. So that means I beat the game, right? Apparently not so much. I just experienced the premature "bad" ending. In reality I'm only halfway through the game.

Truth be told, if I were playing this game back in 1997 when it came out, I don't know if I'd have realized that I'd encountered a false ending. Yeah, it was kind of a crappy one, but there's a long history of unsatisfying endings in video games. This ending didn't resolve much of the story, but the story didn't make that much sense anyway and it's told with such horrific voice acting that there's a chance someone would have skipped it. Even so, nothing about what's said in the "bad" ending indicates that you did something wrong. You ascend the final staircase and beat down who you consider to be the mastermind of everything that's gone down. After that you're treated to some exposition and then some unskippable credits. How are you supposed to know that that wasn't the real deal?

You may be thinking that perhaps I rushed through the game and missed otherwise obvious details. But I'm pretty obsessive about exploring every last inch of these types of games, fighting every monster and getting all the loot. When I came across the final staircase I knew it for what it was and backed off to go scour the rest of the map for secrets. I've played enough games to know that once you've beaten a game the incentive to go after the little side objectives drops off dramatically. If I don't do it before the ending, chances are I'll never do it. I wanted to make sure I got everything possible out of this game, so I held off the final boss fight as long as possible. When I was satisfied that I had got as many secrets as I could figure out I went off and got my (apparently bad) ending.

What was I missing? As thorough as I was, I apparently missed not one, but two critical items. If you get these two rings, equip them, and go to the clock tower then a door opens up. You go down there, get a cutscene and another item. If you wear that during the "final" boss battle and attack this mysterious green orb instead of the boss you break the curse and continue on to the second half of the game and eventually the real final boss. Totally obvious.

Okay, one of the rings I missed just because I forgot to go back somewhere after I got the bat form. But nothing about that ring obviously indicates what you should do with it. The other ring was in a secret area I didn't figure out. It looked like a place you were supposed to bat and mist through, but you were actually supposed to equip this armor that lets you walk through spikes (which I hadn't realized you could do). That ring more obviously indicated that you should wear it in the clock tower, but it's also extraordinarily easy to miss. To get that spike armor you first have to figure out a whole sequence of other secrets.

If this were Metroid, it'd be the equivalent of having the game end after you fight Kraid just because you skipped picking up some hidden missile pack (no Mother Brain for you). Or like if Zelda if you never got to fight Ganon because you missed one of the heart containers. Why would someone intentionally obfuscate such a large chunk of the game? It's a terrible idea.

The only reason I knew to continue was that I had heard the term "inverted castle" thrown around in reference to this game and when I hit the ending I hadn't seen any inverted castles. I also had an inkling that there was more because I'd played the GBA and DS games, where they've for whatever reason continued this tradition of premature bad endings. Thankfully those ones were more obvious with their badness.

And that's the problem, isn't it? In order to have a false ending it needs to be sufficiently bad. Like you screw up and a nuclear bomb goes off in Manhattan. You know, obvious failure. You should be thinking "whoops, that probably wasn't supposed to happen." Not "good job me, now let's watch the credits." You essentially want something that dumps you at a clear "Game Over" screen (although not Symphony's, which has to be the cheesiest Game Over screen ever). It's okay to have a "what if" scenario, but not if the "if" is convincing enough that you're willing to accept it and unknowingly miss out on half the experience.

Torchlight (PC)

2009-12-20T20:43:00.000-08:00

Okay, enough talking about games that used to be better. It's time for some positive evolution.

Torchlight is Diablo III for those of us who can't wait for Diablo III. It's that same delightfully simple visceral click-fest that kept us all loot-crazed in the late 90s. Well, it's not the same; it's way better. Not only does it feature great graphics and fantastic art direction, it's also streamlined to remove any of the frustrations with the old formula. Oh, and did I mention that it's cheap? Yep, $20. Actually, this weekend it's only $10 on Steam.

If you've never played Diablo, know that Torchlight may still be the game for you. All you need to enjoy this game is a mouse and a pulse. Left button for one spell, right button for another, and go. The MMO genre stole a lot of it's core ideas from Diablo, but slowed everything way way down. I think we'd all forgotten that it doesn't have to be that hard. You don't need rows and rows of action bars with obscure abilities to have tactical depth. Left button, right button, win.

So you click like mad and unleash your fury on hordes of baddies. Then you run around and scoop up their shiny loot. Maybe you got some fancy new thing for yourself (yay!), but if not you can sell it for cash money. And this time around you have a pet to help you with this time honored task. That's right, you don't even need to stop the action in order to sell your goodies - just strap the loot to your pet and tell it to come back with the proceeds. But your pet isn't just a vendor mule - they fight alongside you and can even be given gear and spells. It's brilliant.

Torchlight stands on its own, but it really excites me that this game is the foundation for an MMO the developer is working on. They're going to take this simple wonderful gameplay and bring in that connectivity and persistence that makes MMOs so compelling. I'm officially excited.

I could go on and on about this game. But it'd be mean of me to post about it after the weekend deal. So instead I'll just leave you with some words from Alec over at Rock Paper Shotgun:

The odd thing with trying to write about Torchlight is that I can barely remember playing it. I can remember installing it, then darkness, and then about a week later. I didn’t feel sad or afraid come said week later – time had just blinked past, pleasurably if not terribly memorably. This might sound like a backhanded compliment, but really it’s a straight compliment – sometimes, it’s exactly this phenomenon that we play games for. We want something to take away time that we have no other purpose for. Not everything needs to fill our heads with tales of grand adventure, awe of digital entertainment’s great diversity or triumph over statistical adversity. Torchlight takes away time, quickly and painlessly, replacing it with a vague sense of achievement and a dim hunger for things that can be obtained with ease. If your life is overcomplicated, I can confidently prescribe Torchlight.

It isn’t this precise and effective medicine simply because it’s a decent Diablo clone. It’s because it ruthlessly removes the extraneous ingredients of what was already an incredibly simple formula. Anything that could waste your time or cause annoyance has been cleanly excised, leaving the perhaps cynical but absolute truth of why we play such games: we want constant reward from minimal effort. Click, kill, click, upgrade, click, kill, kill, kill, UPGRADE. It’s not even risk/reward – it’s just reward/reward

Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (DS)

2009-12-20T20:19:00.000-08:00

The new release of Spirit Tracks reminds me that I never commented on it's predecessor, Phantom Hourglass. It's not that I didn't play it - I did. But I sent it back after only a couple sittings. I know, I know - I sent back a freaking Zelda games.

I love the Zelda series. The original game totally blew my elementary school mind. A Link to the Past is definitely one of my all time favorites (I'm sure boosted a bit due to my overall SNES nostalgia). I missed Ocarina of Time on the N64, but thankfully got to play it on the GameCube. I loved what Wind Waker did with the art style and with the story. The Minish Cap was a good enough handheld throwback. Twilight Princess was appropriately epic, but I really regret playing it on the Wii instead of the GameCube (the Wii controls were terribly gimmicky). There have been some missteps in the series for sure, but in general it has continued to satisfy me throughout.

Phantom Hourglass, however, frustrated me to no end. It wasn't the stylus controls. I was able to deal with those and appreciate that they made some things better and some things worse (I would argue a lot of those functions would work better if simply mapped to buttons). No, the thing that killed the game for me was the goddamn boat.

Instead of having an overworld to navigate through you're given a big sea and a boat. You trace out a path and the boat will follow that to get from island to island. That doesn't seem so bad, but then you're supposed to pay attention to fire the ship's cannons to avoid monsters and obstacles. The controls aren't terribly precise, but the real problem is the pacing. Most of the time there'll be nothing to worry about, and since you don't have to interact much you'll start to mentally check out. But you can't, because if some little monster pops up and wails on you might have to start your journey over from the beginning. So you're forced to be attentive in the face of overwhelming boredom.

The boat trips drove me absolutely nuts. I was mostly enjoying the game and then as soon as I had to use the boat I pretty much hit a brick wall. So I sent the game back to GameFly, heartbroken. It's too bad, because there were some good ideas in there, but just too many hang-ups for me to continue. And now the sequel is out in Spirit Tracks, and I don't know what to do. It's a reportedly high quality Zelda game, so I should play it? It's been described as just like Phantom Hourglass but with a train instead of a boat... should I give the formula another fair shake?

Venting on a completely different issue: please, developers, never ever use the DS microphone. A large percentage of people play handheld games in public places, and most of them are not interested in looking like an idiot in public. Phantom Hourglass had this part where I was supposed to blow out a torch using the microphone input, and rather than freak out the person next to me on the bus I closed up my DS to save that experience for later. But when I got around to it later that day it was way more annoying than I even anticipated. I blew soft, I blew hard, I blew from all different angles*, until eventually the flame went out with some random combination. It was frustrating, and I wasn't looking forward to any more "puzzles" based on that crap.

It seems unfair of me to be so unsatisfied when a game fails to evolve, but then also be upset here when a game fails during experimentation. I recognize that it's unfair, but that's how I feel.

I worry about the new trend in game controls (be it the DS stylus, touch on the iPhone, the Wii remote, or even Natal). These things have huge potential to open up accessibility of gaming to more people, but used incorrectly they create an imprecise frustrating mess. It takes some restraint to temper the new shinny thing with reason and arrive at a control scheme that makes sense. Okay, I'll say it: Japanese culture is obsessed with kitsch and gimmick. In the broad sense I think that's fine and healthy, but I don't know how much I can look to them to lead the charge on quality gaming. I'm worried that eastern development studios like Nintendo are losing touch with what they did to connect to me in the first place. Of course down the road something awesome will come out and temporarily restore my faith in them, but right now my optimism is low. Here's hoping my friends working on Natal nail it.

* Yes, that is what she said

Phoebe in Wonderland

2009-12-14T10:02:00.000-08:00

It's kind of ridiculous, but the premise of Idiocracy basically convinced me to have children. Yes, it's a comedy, and one with extravagant extremes, but the core idea isn't wrong. And I can't really sit back and complain about that while also being part of the problem. But I'm not here to talk about Idiocracy, which has uneven quality at best. I'm here to talk about Phoebe in Wonderland, which is amazing (and is available via Netflix insta-watch, if that's your thing). It is in fact nothing like Idiocracy (I'm already beginning to regret using that as a segue), except that both of them made me think about parenting.

Phoebe in Wonderland is a story that represents everything I fear and everything that excites me about the possibility of being a parent. You have this brilliant vibrant child who is everything you could want: imaginative, creative, and smart as can be. But then you also have the sort of thing that every parent fears: that their child is broken. And that situation threatens to tear the parents apart (both from each other and from themselves). It's a story of the best and the worst. It's a story that forces me to confront the question "even if it's hard, is it still worth it?"

I feel compelled to write about this movie, but I'm having a hard time deciding what to say. It's not quite true that if I told you more it would spoil the experience, but I do feel like it would lessen it. This is a story in which uncertainty made the journey stronger for me. So here's what you need to know: It's a beautiful film, it's well crafted, and for me it was extremely impactful. I often judge a movie by the conversation it spawns afterwards, but in the silence after this one there was absolutely no discussion as I grabbed for the remote and immediately rated it five stars. If you at all consider yourself to be in a similar place in life as me then I highly recommend you watch Phoebe in Wonderland.

Rise of the Argonauts (Xbox 360)

2009-12-11T12:03:00.000-08:00

I'm not as much of a slave to my Gamefly queue as I am to my Netflix queue. Given the various platforms and their different economic models it's hard for rentals to be a large percentage. At any point I'll generally have a disc out from Gamefly, an MMO I'm poking around in, a handheld game for the bus, some slow burner on the console that would take too long to rent, and some downloadable game. But I'm always trying to push as much of my gaming to rental as possible, which is the smartest option for my rate of play. It has the side effect of encouraging me to try games I would never risk real permanent money on. Which means I throw stuff into my queue that is sometimes pretty borderline.

Oh, hello Rise of the Argonauts, I'm talking about you now. Not long into the first sitting I found myself wondering why the hell I threw this game into my queue. Ancient Greek mythology is up my alley, so that had to been a factor. But this game has a huge identity complex. The core gameplay mechanic is a third person action game. You know, a God of War knockoff. But Argonauts isn't nearly as good, even compared to other knockoffs. You aren't actually provided enough opportunities to swing your aggression around to succeed at being that type of game. Early on I was given an upgrade to a weapon before I had been given an opportunity to use the one before it. Instead of fighting there's lots and lots of dialogue.

For a game with so much talking the dialogue animations are awkward. Wait, they're not awkward - they're absent. Jason stands there in the same pose for every single conversation. And there's some serious recycling of the voice talent for bit parts. I think I had only talked to my fourth NPC before I hit a repeat.

I finished my first sitting and seriously considered putting the game back in the envelope right then and there. But something compelled me to stick with it. I definitely wanted to solve the mystery of why I chose to play the game in the first place. I knew where the answer was - in the GameTrailers video review. Most stuff in my queue first goes through a video review check (games are such a long time commitment that I like to see them first). But I knew that if I went back to the review at this point it'd bias my experience, so I held back and instead just flat out avoided the game for a week.

Eventually I came back, with revised expectations. This is clearly not an action game. It's something… else. I started looking for the positives. Jason may just stand there stiffly as he talks to people, but statically he looks pretty good. And his voice acting is quality. The interpretation of Greek mythology is a bit off canon, but at least they commit to their variations. I found myself honestly invested in what was going to happen next.

And then I remembered why I rented the game in the first place. It was precisely for that mix of compelling story but crappy gameplay. It's the flip of the video game cliché. I had left a little test for myself in my queue: I wanted to know if a game that failed at being a game but still had a decent story behind it could satisfy me. I've played a ton of games that strike the opposite balance and walked away content. Could I do the reverse?

The verdict? Well, I played the game to completion, but all that really means is that I'm willing to ride out a train wreck. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. I did continue to care about what was going to happen all the way until the end, but I was also pretty desperate to put that game controller to good use the whole time. Any time I play a game I could have easily reached for the remote instead of the controller, but there's something about my mood that decided on the interactive option.

Yes, Rise of the Argonauts has a story, but it's far from cinema quality. Nor does it muster enough quality interactivity to elevate the story to be more than it is. I'm left dreaming about how much better it would be if it had excelled more at either end. But it didn't, so I guess it's a failure. Oh well, back it goes in the envelope. We'll see what present I left for myself next.

Scarface

2009-12-10T21:52:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty much a slave to my Netflix queue these days, as that it is by far my primary source of video entertainment. Whenever someone recommends a movie to me, or if there's some repeating pop culture reference to which I am clueless, the movie goes in my queue. The rate I feed the queue is definitely faster than the rate at which I consume it, so over the years the queue has grown obscenely long. Generally I try to manage the top of the queue to keep titles up there that suits my current mood or are at least recently contextual. But every now and then I lapse, and, well... get Scarface.

I don't know what specifically convinced me to add Scarface to the queue. It's probably just the fact that it's one of those movies that people are generally aware of. You know, Al Pacino, "say hello to my little friend!" Having never seen the movie I could describe the cover and vaguely repeat the tidbits I've picked up from conversations over the years. This is the sort of situation that stuffs a movie into my queue. Which is too bad, because the review scores are lies. The ratings my friends gave it based on memory are lies. Scarface is not worth your three hours.

One of the problems I having here is the same I've been having with this Castlevania thing: I experienced this movie in the wrong order. I've seen films like Blow and American Gangster. This is not my first cinematic encounter with drugs and crime lords. It's unfair of me to make any comparisons here, because Scarface is a movie that really paved the way for those more modern titles. In its day it was a ballsy epic that blew people's minds. But for me, in my timeline, it's a story I've seen before and seen better.

What I will say is that Al Pacino is the redeeming aspect of this movie. Having seen him in so many other movies it's clear he is playing a specific role here and not just some stock Al Pacino character. It's not a likeable character, but he nails it. He also totally looks the part, ranging from sleazy to decadent throughout his rise to power.

But that's pretty much it. It's long, there's heaps of cocaine, people swear a lot, and there's violence. Where does this get compelling? I gave it two stars, with Pacino's performance pulling it up out of complete oblivion.

Nostalgic Bias

2009-12-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

As promised, I've started playing Symphony of the Night. And I'm having a hard time developing an unbiased opinion. I'm comparing my current experience with the experience other people had in the natural evolution of gaming. I'm coming to this game after having already experienced a half dozen of its indirect sequels. It's extraordinarily difficult to pretend that I'm not bringing a ton of baggage with me on this experience.

But that's always the case, isn't it? All of our experiences are shaped by the path we were on that lead us to them. Expectations, one way or the other, can completely tint our perceptions. Trying to be completely objective is futile, so I guess I shouldn't bother to try? In as much as this blog is a record of my memories, lack of bias is irrelevant. But as this blog serves as a form of communication with other people and a platform for discussion, it's more important for me to try to relate my point of view to a more broad point of view.

So I guess you should question my judgment about this Super Castlevania game. My opinions are not be trusted, as that they are steeped in a nostalgic bias. But should I question my own feelings? Given the warm fuzzies that nostalgia gives me, I don't really have any incentive to upend my positive experiences. But hopefully those don't get in the way of forming new experiences, because when that happens I'm officially Old.

Maybe the true solution is for me as a writer to share my history with you as a reader, so that you can judge how well your path aligns with my path. If you and I have been on similar journeys then it stands to reason that the way I experience something new will be very similar to the way you will experience it. Although you can read what I've posted here and piece some of that together, you'll always have incomplete information because you don't have my whole history. For some time now I've been meaning to put together the autobiographical sort of my gaming experiences (a la High Fidelity) which would definitely serve this purpose. But to take advantage of that I'm assuming a much larger investment from a reader than is probably sane. As I stated from the outset of this blog, I assume I am my only audience. So I should probably only engage such a task if it's appropriately self indulgent, for which I think this qualifies.

In the meantime, I encourage you to challenge what I have to say. I am only one data point. If you're in the same boat, give Symphony a spin and we'll compare notes. Or perhaps you've played Symphony but not Super Castlevania, and can give the reverse analysis. If we come to opposite conclusions than we've really learned nothing more than nostalgia is king. But if there's agreement then I think we're on to something.

Castlevania

2009-11-30T23:06:00.000-08:00

I just polished off Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, while at the same time the Angry Video Game Nerd completed his four part series on the Castlevania franchise (told in parts I, II, III, and IV, and of course supplemented by his classic coverage of Castlevania II). Given the type of game the Nerd generally covers I usually only go to him for entertainment value, not critical analysis. But watching these videos on the Castlevania franchise I found he and I seem to be in exact agreement.

There's an inflection point on the Castlevania franchise, which is Symphony of the Night. Truth be told, I haven't actually played it - the hilariously bad voice acting turned me away immediately. But I have a good idea what Symphony is like because every Castlevania game after it carries its influence. This is when games stopped being called Metroid-clones and started being placed in the "metroidvania" genre.

I've played most of the handheld games (Aria of Sorrow, Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, and most recent Order of Ecclesia), and they all follow the same formula. You're fighting Dracula (although generally with some other secondary villain). You explore his castle, progressing through tough boss fights and unlocking abilities that open up new areas of the castle. Gone is the classic whip, replaced with a set of swords, axes, pole arms, and sometimes magic. There's some attempt at a story, and it's always terrible. There is series gothic atmosphere, but the annoying characters completely destroy the mood (Portrait of Ruin's childlike heroes were particularly guilty of this, but to be fair Order of Ecclesia wasn't so bad). Then there's a layer of RPG elements where you have stats, level up, and manage all sorts of equipment. And throughout this is a ton of recycled art assets (going from Dawn of Sorrow to Portrait of Ruin I felt like I was playing the same game). Overall the formula takes in classic Castlevania and adds in elements from Metroid and Final Fantasy.

These sources are good games, so the combination should be awesome, right? Well, not really. The end result is… diluted. Instead of overcoming enemies with skill you can now just out-level them. But the developers have taken that into account so unless you know all the tricks you should expect to do some level grinding. And by tricks I don't just mean patterns, I also mean particular equipment combinations that exploit their vulnerabilities. A lot of that equipment comes from random drops, so you won't just be grinding for XP. Some of this grinding comes naturally, because the branching exploration means that you're going to retreat the same areas more than you'd like instead of experiencing a clear climactic progression. Despite all the flaws I obviously find something of value in these games because I keep playing them. But I'm always left a little disappointed because they fall short of that classic action game I remember so fondly.

What is that classic game? Super Castlevania IV for the SNES. On this the Nerd and I agree; Super Castlevania is the pinnacle of the series. The music... the tight control… this game is awesome. It's definitely on my short list for best 2D action games. Each level has it's own feel, with perfectly paired music and some challenging boss. The game is hard, but not cruel. You can infinitely continue from the beginning of the stage, and the password system let's you save your progress easily enough (for the standard of the day). So although there will be parts that test your patience and precision, it's manageable.

Your primary weapon in Super Castlevania is the whip, and here it is at its most deadly. You can attack in all eight directions, as well as control the whip's motion after the initial strike. This creates a weapon with a lot of subtlety, with plenty of tricks to master. The "evolution" from this to the wide array of single-button single-direction weapons in later games is a complete disappointment. Instead of being compelled to get better with the whip you're only strategy is to find weapons with better stats or larger hit boxes. Maybe this broadens the audience for the game by requiring less skill, but it's not like the whip is impenetrable.

I've always had this ambient dissatisfaction with the post-Symphony Castlevania games. I'm excited to start them, but by the end I'm left feeling that something was missing. Like they could have been better if they were less RPG and more like the classic Castlevania games. I figured it's possible that nostalgia had clouded my judgment, so I decided to dust off the Wii and download Super Castlevania IV for the Virtual Console. It did not disappoint. I played the game to its completion and enjoyed every minute of it. It's really amazing how little the series has evolved over the past 15 years, and how so many of the changes don't really add anything to the experience. The new titles have more gameplay breadth, but not really depth. In my opinion the franchise has lost its way and become something far lesser than what it once was.

The more I ponder this topic the more I realize I'm missing a piece of the puzzle. I'm going to go grab Symphony of the Night off XBLA and report back with my findings.

Let the Right One In

2009-11-18T10:28:00.000-08:00

When Halloween rolled around this year I decided that I was very much in the mood for a vampire movie. So I flipped through this article on Rotten Tomatoes of the top rated vampire movies of all time. I cross reference that against the list available for instant watch on Netflix and landed on Let the Right One In.

This movie tells the story of a boy in some Scandinavian city who falls in love with a vampire. No, this is nothing like Twilight (although I will say the people that seem to loathe that movie need to get over themselves - it was neither spectacularly good nor spectacularly bad - it was adequately entertaining). The life of the vampire in this world is not sparkly and moral, but rather messy and vulnerable. She is both predator to humans and also completely reliant on them. Her motivations are not completely selfless, but there is something sweet about her connection with this boy. Which is not an emotion you'd typically associate with a horror movie.

I'm a fan of a careful blend of mundane and supernatural. If everything is fantastical then a story becomes hard to relate to. But if there isn't enough magic and mystery then it can be a little bit boring. There are real life stories that definitely entertain me, but I have a preference for something a little bit more than real. Given my video game habit it shouldn't come as a surprise that I'm a bit of an escapist, but the trick is blending in just the right amount of fiction that it's still believable. Unbreakable is an excellent example of this. Let the Right One In also hits this sweet spot really well. Yes, this is a world that hosts vampires, but the story around this is such a sleepy human tale that the vampire element doesn't feel so outlandish. The movie doesn't gloss over vampire mythology, nor is it the focus of the narrative.

The movie totally scratched my itch. I was looking for an innovative new tale of those delightfully enigmatic bloodsuckers and that's exactly what I got here. If you're also looking for a more relaxed, less in-your-face (but still dark) vampire movie then you should check this one out.

Ghostbusters (Xbox 360)

2009-11-12T18:27:00.000-08:00

Like many, the first time I went roller skating I was timid and hugged the wall the whole time. But there was a turning point where I finally gained enough confidence to let go, power skate as fast as I could, and really enjoy myself. That point was when the Ghostbusters theme song came on. I remember later in my life, going to some skating birthday party where my mom told this little factoid to a girl I was crushing on. I was mortified, of course. But apparently it doesn't embarrass me now, as I sit freely blogging it to The Internet.

The first time I saw the Ghostbusters movie I obviously enjoyed it enough to inspire death defying confidence. I mean, bustin' makes you feel good, right? But of course I didn't really have a clue about most of what was going on (keymaster… why are the adults laughing?). As time passed and I returned to the movie it just became more and more awesome. But I'm not here today to talk about the movie. I'm here to talk about the video game. No, not that one. The new one. Yes, there's a new Ghostbusters game that features all the original voice talents.

And really, that's what makes the game: the voice acting. You go around to familiar locales, fighting familiar ghosts, all the time listening to the chatter of Venkman, Stantz, Egon, and Winston. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis do an awesome job; Ernie Hudson does good but has a more limited role; Bill Murray pretty much phones it in. Murray's obviously the more successful actor, but he just doesn't feel like the same Venkman from his Ghostbusting days. But in general the whole cast transports you right back to the 80's, living out your childhood dream of busting ghosts with the Ghostbusters.

The core gameplay can be generally described as a first person shooter, but it doesn't really feel in any way like Halo or anything. Because instead of packing a rifle you've got a freaking proton pack. The developers did a great job of making the proton pack feel just right. It's got the sound, the look, and leaves just the right amount of carnage. You use the stream to wear down a ghost until it's weak enough for you to wrangle it, then you toss out a trap and suck that apparition in. It feels exactly how it should, and each capture is very satisfying.

To mix things up you also have alternate modes for you weapon. The slime feels very appropriate for a Ghostbusters game, but the shotgun and machine gun modes are a little more of a stretch. It's not so far out of place to yank you out of the groove, they're there for the less traditional ghosts that you don't actually have to trap. It doesn't feel as satisfying as the classic ghost wrangling, but the game is probably better for having the variety.

Basically the rest of the game rides on those two main strengths: the voice acting and the feeling of your proton pack. The rest is pretty standard for the genre. The environments aren't bad, but rarely are they particularly inspiring. The story is an appropriate vehicle for giving you an opportunity to return to classics like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, but it isn't particularly memorable beyond that.

I'd say the biggest problem of the game is the uneven difficulty curve, which is exacerbated by the extremely long loading times. Every time you die you're dumped to the loading screen and treated to that ever so classic Ghostbusters theme. Every time. No, no, I mean every time. And it always starts at the beginning of the song, with the game finishing loading right about when you're going to find about "something strange, in the neighborhood." It's really amazing that no one realized how extremely annoying this would be. You get to some freakishly hard part in the game where some gargoyles are cheezing you, and you're going to listen to the first part of that theme a couple dozen times.

The game does make it a little harder to die as that as long as one of your fellow Ghostbusters is still standing they can revive you. Well, they can… but they might die before they get to you. Of course you have the return the favor, reviving them when they get knocked down. Which you will be doing constantly. There are many fights where you will spend as much time fussing over your comrades as actually unloading with your proton pack. It's hardly heroic. I don't mean to say that the game is too hard, because it's not. It's just that it's uneven. You will coast by most of the time, but occasionally you'll hit an annoying snag, and then you'll have the Ghostbusters theme song stuck in your head for a couple days.

Aggravating load times aside, I did truly enjoy this one. It's all about the source material. If you find the Ghostbusters movies hilarious, and you're okay with a light FPS, then this game is a nice short distraction.

Champions Online: Impressions

2009-11-10T16:16:00.000-08:00

This past Halloween weekend Cryptic decided to offer Champions Online for free for a couple days. Promotional weekends are increasingly common in MMOs, but generally they're structured as a "welcome back" for old subscribers, and they're offered for older games. But Champions Online is a brand new title, so having the opportunity to try out a fresh new game for free was quite a treat.

In my lapse of blogging I completely skipped over the time period where I transferred off of Tabula Rasa and on to City of Heroes. I'll need to recap my feelings about that game at some point, but fundamentally all you need to know is that Champions Online is the successor to City of Heroes. Same dev team, save concept, better tech. As a developer this is an odd move, since common wisdom says that you should be looking to acquire subscribers and hold on to them. Starting over with a new title means you're going to be competing with your own product. This is why Ultima Online's sequel got preemptively canned back in the day. It's the same reason there's still people playing both Counter Strike and Counter Strike: Source. But I guess the MMO publishers are finding that players maybe aren't as faithful to one title as early behavior indicated.

As a player I like this quite a bit. The MMO genre has to evolve, and it's really hard to do that with an existing product with an already invested player base. Any major change will piss them off. The easiest way to innovate is with a fresh new title. Of course these games represent a huge development investment, so it's not sustainable for this to be the only source of progress. But I think a clean slate is necessary from time to time.

In the case of Champions Online, I definitely got the impression that this was a clear upgrade from City of Heroes. It's unmistakably the same feel, but care has been taken to smooth out a lot of the rough edges. That's not to say there aren't some issues with it, but in general I like what they've done. So to recap my impressions I'm going to list off my likes, dislikes, and "meh"s from the weekend. Keep in mind that I only had a day or two to fool around with the game, so these are truly initial impressions and may contain blatant inaccuracies.

Like: Character customization
Given the lineage this is no surprise, but it's even better here thanks to more abnormal combinations. Plus this time around you can make minor modifications to how your powers look. Want a half-robot half-wolfman wreathed in green flames? You got it. The buildings blocks are there to make a spectacular variety of heroes, and due to that I enjoy checking out other players at least as much as actually playing the game. It's fascinating to see what people come up with the tools they're given. You can see my creations here.

Like: Name uniqueness
With every MMO I run into a brick wall at the end of character creation when I have to come up with a unique name. With Champions they've skirted the whole issue by saying it's not the end of the world if there are two characters with the same name. Instead you have a handle to resolve name collisions, but that handle doesn't display over your character and spoil your design.

Like: One versus many
Most MMOs balance you as being more powerful than one opponent, but generally stressed to your limits with too many more than that. In Champions you are a superhero, and as a result you are able to take down multiple foes at the same time. In no way will you be bested by a cluster of boars, unless those boars happen to be super villains (I haven't personally seen any boars in the game, but knowing MMO tradition I can only assume they'll pop up somewhere). Having combat that isn't just one on one all the time really keeps things more interesting, with more potential focus on area of effect attacks and crowd control.

Like: Difficulty scales to party size
Both Tabula Rasa and City of Heroes also had this feature. There is a downside in that instances can never be as finely tuned as your general WoW 5-man affairs. But there's a distinct upside in that you don't have to actually get together an exact number of people in order to play in a group.

Like: Integrated mission tracking
LotRO recently added this feature as well, and there's rumblings of WoW doing it in the future (yielding to the extreme popularity of QuestHelper). Thankfully it looks like the entire MMO genre will evolve beyond reading obscure quest text and trying to figure out how that relates to your map. I certainly don't miss the days of either cheating with thottbot or wasting time aimlessly wandering.

Like: Light death penalty
If you die, you immediately revive at the closest spawn point. You get penalized one Hero Point, which will temporarily reduce your effectiveness. But your Hero Point comes back through combat, so you're not stuck with a fixed period debuff. In no time you're back in the action, with the only real damage being done to your pride.

Like: Travel powers
Getting around in Champions is fast, fun, and thematic. You can fly, you can jump, you can tunnel - whatever fits your character theme. And best of all, you get your travel power immediately after completing the (skippable) tutorial.

Like: Charge/sustain attack powers
Some of the powers in Champions can do more damage depending on how long you hold the button. The mechanics are simple, but they give a little more depth to what is otherwise mundane MMO combat.

Like: Not as heavily instanced as City of Heroes
This isn't really something to like the game for; it's more something to not dislike it for. In City of Heroes every mission involved going into an instanced area. Every. Single. One. Champions ditches this for a more standard split of partially open world and partially private instanced content.

Like: Achievements
I didn't get to dig into it, but I did notice that the game offers achievement-like rewards. As I've already mentioned, I'm a fan.

Like: Separate world resolution from UI resolution
Want really crisp UI but your video card can't quite handle that resolution for the whole game world? Normally you're screwed. But in Champions they let you have your UI at a higher resolution than the game world, giving you readable text but with reasonable performance.

Meh: Open missions
This is my first time trying out the feature that Warhammer Online made famous, and I wasn't very impressed. The idea of informally sharing a quest with other people seems cool, but I never encountered one that had clear goals and rewards. Maybe there are better ones deeper into the game.

Meh: Itemization
Mission rewards give you a large selection of reward choices that have dizzyingly similar starts on them. I realize that part of the problem is that I don't yet understand the meaning of all those stats, but I think it really stems from having too many attributes. It's good that these items don't actually change the look of your costume (which you carefully crafted), but that does mean that the only thing to get excited about with an item drop is a miniscule increase in effectiveness. I think I prefer City of Heroes' system of power modifications, where you choose what individual attributes to improve for each power like damage or casting time.

Meh: Theme
Don't get me wrong, I like superheroes and supervillains. But the whole defending Metropolis thing doesn't really do it for me. Helping out the local police force, freeing civilians from fallen rubble… yawn. These don't carry enough escapism for my video game criteria. Champions doesn't seem to have it as bad as City of Heroes, where you're fighting petty crooks the whole time. Once I was out of the tutorial area they at least started to mix it up with irradiated mutants and ice demons, but I still didn't really feel connected to the modern semi-realistic theme. I don't know why I can endlessly smash orc skulls in some fantasy based MMO, yet I have to talk to one policeman in Champions and it's a total turn off. For games with this level of time commitment, you really want the world to draw you in.

Dislike: Funky use/talk targeting
There's a "use" button in the game, which is overloaded to cover both talking to people and picking stuff up with super strength. The end result is that when you're trying to talk to some NPC you instead might end up ripping up a light post. You can instead click to talk to a NPC, but it requires more fiddling than you'd expect.

Dislike: Weak feeling melee
I tried out a couple different power sets, and universally I liked my ranged characters more than my melee ones. The animations looked flashy enough, but it just didn't match up with the damage I was seeing. It's pretty standard for MMO combat to feel disconnected, so you think I'd be used to it. But it's really disappointing to carefully craft an awesome blade swirling character to then try them out in game and have it feel totally weak.

Dislike: Where's the Xbox version?
When I first tried Champions it was the PAX after last, and I played it with an Xbox controller. It's clear playing the game now that some things were done a certain way to be more console friendly (like the funky talk targeting). But where's the news of the Xbox port? So many games have claimed they were going to bring the MMO to the living room, but no one's delivered yet. What gives? When will I be able to waste away my life from the comfort of my couch?

Overall
I enjoyed my weekend of Champions. Am I going to pick up a subscription? Probably, but not yet. I've got too many things in my queue right now. But I do definitely want to come back and spend more time with this one a bit down the road. Feeling ownership over a character is key to enjoying this class of game, and Champions really excels at that.

Hello Again

2009-11-10T15:41:00.000-08:00

I've been off the wagon for quite awhile now. I have pretty decent excuses, given that since I last posted I got married, bought a house, and built a lot of software. I've been very busy, but not so busy that I should have put blogging on hold. This writing thing has been a good challenge for me, and I'm fundamentally just being lazy by letting it slip. But I'm going to try and not dwell on that and instead just start posting as if I never stopped.

A Touch of Evil: First Impressions

2008-09-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

I picked up a copy of A Touch Of Evil at PAX last weekend, and what follows are my impressions from the first couple sessions. This is by no means a proper review, since I haven't played enough to really make any firm judgment (hell, I haven't even moved beyond the basic rules set yet). Nor is it really a good session report. But I figure there are people out there who'd be interested in what I have to say given that the game isn't set to officially hit stores for a couple weeks.

A Touch of Evil is a board game that can be best be described as a playable version of Sleepy Hollow. It takes place in the town of Shadowbrook, which has recently be hit by a series of murders. Each player adopts the role of an investigator who is trying to uncover the villain and defeat them in an epic showdown. The elders of the town might be able to help the heroes or they might actually be in league with the villain; it's up to the players to investigate the town before making their move so that they don't hit any nasty surprises. The players are trying to stop the villain before the whole town gets murdered off, but of course they're also racing each other to see who can beat the villain first and take all the credit.

For my first game I played solitaire to get acquainted with the game flow (using two hero characters with the cooperative rules set). My primary goal here was to make sure that someone knew the rules well enough so that the big game night later in the week would go smoothly. Playing solo with two characters allowed the game to move rather quickly, with the game ending in about an hour including time spent re-reading rules for clarification. The expanded Mystery Phase events added to the cooperative game helped accelerate progress by moving the shadow track often and creating investigation (the game's currency) on the board to jump start the economy. I was able to outfit my characters pretty well and win a showdown with the vampire villain no problem. All told it was an enjoyable singleplayer experience, although next time I would incorporate all the advanced rules to increase the difficulty.

With my trial run out of the way it was time for game night. Seven people showed up to play, with me being the only one familiar with the rules. Thankfully the game is pretty intuitive so everyone picked it up quickly. Unfortunately seven players make for a long turn sequence, and the game ended up taking around three hours. At some point we informally switched from a competitive game to a cooperative game for the final showdown in order to just end the damned thing. Despite the length, most people enjoyed the game and are eager to play again (although likely with fewer people and/or faster moving rules).

The villain we matched up against was the Spectral Horseman, and his rampage ride ability was a big hit. Every now and again someone would linger too long at a location and all of the sudden the entire board exploded with fights against the horseman. Unfortunately we had bad luck with Mystery cards and the rider got significantly buffed early on. It's odd to be wishing for murder to strike the town, but the trick is that murder cards both move the game closer to darkness as well as create opportunities. Some cards just straight up buff the villain, and we got a lot of those in the beginning. Because of this the shadow track didn't move very far until late in, so nobody was rushing to get a Lair card and attempt a showdown. But halfway into the game the town elders started dropping like flies, there were autopsies left and right, and all of the sudden the economy was in full swing.

One thing that definitely contributed to the slow down (in addition to the sheer amount of people) was the Fog card that subtracts from player movement. On paper it didn't seem like a big hindrance but it often pushed location runs just out of reach, subtly slowing down everyone's ability to explore. Given the choice between getting halfway to a destination and staying in town to draw another event card most people chose getting a card. All I know is that next time we play I'm buying a horse on my first turn and not looking back.

In spite of the length pretty much everyone still had a good time. But I think I owe them apology. I quote from page 3 the rulebook:

A Touch of Evil, The Supernatural Game can be played by 2-8 players, either Competitively or Cooperatively. For game length reasons you may find it best to limit 7 or 8 player games to Cooperative play or the 'Team Game' covered in the Advanced Game section. The game will work with virtually any number of players (limited only by Hero Characters available), but will become cumbersome with 7 or more individually Competitive players.

Whoops. Oh well. It was still a fun game and it's easy to see how different each session can be. I'm certainly looking forward to the next one.

Big Love

2008-08-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

So there's this HBO series called Big Love, which I am currently working my way through on Netflix. I'm two discs in, and I am totally hooked.

Big Love is about polygamy, and it's absolutely fascinating. Mind you, the series isn't supportive of the concept. In fact the whole mechanics play out into one big train wreck. But it provides you a portal into a world that is both familiar and also completely different, which in my opinion is what good storytelling is all about.

The show centers around this polygamist family with one husband and three wives. They are all one big family, but each wife's time with the husband is rigorously scheduled in equal increments so that no one feels slighted. Each wife even has her own house. There's this odd balance between keeping everything together and yet carefully segregated. The dynamic between the three wives is really interesting, with huge heaps of jealousy but also some sisterhood.

Outside of the home the family leads a very different life, as that they have to keep their polygamist lifestyle secret, for fear that it tarnish the husband's reputation and thus his business. The family is thus very aware of the critical eye the rest of society places upon them. The only people who do approve are their extended family in the polygamist cult they grew up with, and they're all bat-shit crazy. The whole result is a very isolated family that has to lean on each other pretty heavily. Or at least they would if they didn't have so many issues.

In general the characters come off as genuine. Even though this is a very odd, obviously unhealthy situation, you can relate to them as people. The one exception is the second wife, Nicki. Her self destructive tendencies and malicious manipulation pretty much makes her the biggest villain of the show. But at least it's fun to hate her, and eagerly anticipate her inevitable spectacular breakdown. It's coming, I know it. Until then I eagerly check the mailbox waiting for the next disc to arrive.

Braid (Xbox 360)

2008-08-13T11:17:00.001-07:00

I'd heard good things about Braid, so I snatched the demo up as soon as it became available last Wednesday. I was immediately surprised by the visual presentation. In static screenshots you don't really see the constant motion going on in the background that gives the game a surrealistic painted quality. It's subtle but really beautiful. But the first level included in the trial didn't knock my socks off from a gameplay perspective. So far the game had only shown me relatively straightforward platforming, and if I hadn't hear so much praise for Braid I probably would have left it at that. Thankfully I trusted in the good things I'd heard about the game and slapped down $15 for the full version so I could see more.

I'm glad I did, because Braid is the most mind bending experience I've had since Portal. And if you've played Portal you know how strong of a statement that is.

In each world of Braid time behaves differently. There's this one world where your character's position in physical space maps to everyone else's passage through time. If you move to the right, time move forwards for them; if you move to the left, time rewinds. This in itself is enough to make your head explode, but then on top of that different objects exist in different timelines, some which you can rewind and some you can't. Later in the game you split out your shadow out to walk in a parallel timeline, where you work together with it to gather keys and hit switches. And then later you gain the ability to manually place a time distortion bubble. It's nuts.

The puzzles in this game require you to think about time and space in ways that you never have before. The solutions are generally never very difficult to execute and are made easier by the fact that you can rewind your timeline. It's kind of like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, except you can rewind as much as you want, as long as you want, and at whatever speed you want. So the difficulty isn't in the execution, it's in getting your mind to wrap around concepts it has never confronted before. Which is the best kind of puzzle game.

But Braid doesn't try to be just a puzzle game. It actually has a story. It's true that after having gathered all the puzzle pieces and completed the story I can't quite admit to having the closure that my Closure achievement tells me I have, but I do appreciate that someone really tried to turn this puzzle game into something more. The music, the visuals, and the story all work together to create a truly unique experience. Yes, it's $5 more than Geometry Wars, and I probably will play Geometry Wars for longer. But Braid is one of those singular experiences where video games cross into the territory of art and leaves you with something truly memorable.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 (Xbox 360)

2008-08-12T18:30:00.000-07:00

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved was the title that really kicked off the whole Xbox Live Arcade thing. It combined classic simple gameplay with high production values at a low price, making it hard not to like. It's been quite some time since then, and this whole notion of small scale downloadable games on consoles has really taken off. And after all this time we now have a sequel, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2.

Honestly, I wasn't super excited for this release. As good as Geometry Wars for its time, a lot has happened since then. The core formula was really simple, and since then two-stick shooters have become as ubiquitous on XBLA as first-person-shooters on the PC. I just couldn't see how this little game about shooting shapes in a rectangle could really evolve into something more interesting.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

You see, the original Geometry Wars was pretty hardcore. The whole scoring mechanic celebrated The Perfect Game. Dying reset your multiplier, but the difficulty of the game constantly increased, so a mistake early on prevented you from getting a decent score. The beginning of the game was really easy, so it took awhile to see if you were going to cut the mustard and walk away with an awesome score. But difficulty skyrocketed from trivial to ridiculous in a short time period, and pretty soon you were dead and stuck with too many enemies and no multiplier. The end result was largely decided by one little split-second mistake. Although I appreciated the skill involved in it, I just wasn't interested in getting that hardcore over a split-second.

The sequel innovates in a couple of key ways that dramatically improve the experience. First, your multiplier is not reset when you die, so there's no need to get overly frustrated when your perfect run is flawed. Second, your multiplier is not defined by how many kills you get, but instead by these little green geoms that drop from defeated enemies. This forces you to balance your play between adding to your score and increasing your long-term score potential by gathering multiplier. It also forces you to play aggressively, flying head-on into enemies instead of endless circling. Finally, the game features a couple of truly innovative modes that feel unlike anything else out there and emphasize the best parts of the new Geometry Wars gameplay.

Probably my favorite of these modes is King. In King there are bubbles where you are protected for a short time, but you cannot shoot while outside a bubble. This creates a brilliant pacing between aggressive and defensive gameplay. One moment you're unleashing carnage, the next you're racing for your life. It's one of the most brilliant gameplay innovations I've ever experienced. It effortlessly blends strategy into an action-packed twitch-fest.

GW2 also introduces multiplayer to the franchise, and King with four players is one of the best multiplayer experiences I've ever had. It's not head-to-head in that you don't shoot at other players, but that's not to say that it isn't brutally competitive. Do you put yourself at risk to farm multiplier or do you stay safe and shoot? Where do you shoot so that the geoms are most likely to benefit you and not your opponents? How do you plan your movement between bubbles so that you have a safe escape route at all times? How many bubbles can you pop to limit your opponent's options without impeding your own strategy? The amount of stuff going on is gleefully overwhelming. And at the core of this is a fast paced action game, so pretty much every part of your gaming brain is being tickled at once. It's incredibly fun, and thoroughly addictive.

King is great, but Pacifism is pretty awesome too. In this mode you can't shoot at all. The only way to kill enemies is to fly through gates that explode as you cross through them. Instead of dealing with sparse nimble enemies you deal with lumbering swarms. By having your offensive capabilities crippled you're forced to focus completely on movement, frantically bobbing and weaving through overwhelming odds. As far as I'm concerned the mode could have been called Balls, because without them you will fail. Just as in the other modes you have to balance multiplier and score, but in Pacifism getting that multiplier often means launching yourself directly towards the oncoming swarm. Seriously, balls.

Singleplayer turns out to be just as addictive as multiplayer in GW2, primarily due to the tight integration of friend leaderboards. You are constantly aware of your friend's high scores and encouraged to better them. It feeds that competitive drive, but in an oddly social way. My only complaint is that there is no persistence to multiplayer scores whatsoever.

Achievements are often misused in games. They should add something to your game experience, not entice you with ridiculous goals that exploit your inner obsessive completist. Geometry Wars 2 strikes a perfect achievement balance. Each mode in the game has an achievement that encourages you to play it in a different way. Instead of merely awarding excellence, the achievement gives you new stuff to do. It enhances the core game.

All told, I'm happy to have been proven wrong. I wasn't really looking forward to this game, and it's completely surprised me. Geometry Wars 2 has brought some serious innovation to the two-stick shooter genre. And it's only $10. So, um yeah. Hot.

John Woo Presents Stranglehold (Xbox 360)

2008-08-06T11:33:00.000-07:00

Given the reviews I knew that Stranglehold (sorry, "John Woo Presents Stranglehold") probably wouldn't rock my world, so I guess I wasn't too disappointed when it didn't. It's not bad, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it over all the other games out there. The premise is solid: a shooter with crazy destructible environments and a combo system that awards you for taking dudes out with style. But the execution of that premise left something to be desired.

The first style system I remember was from Project Gotham Racing. It had these challenge modes where the goal was to string together longs stretches of flashy moves while keeping up a fast pace and not bumping into anything. If you were really good you could keep one combo going for the entire circuit and get a crapload of points. Stranglehold tries to integrate a similar thing into its shooter mechanics, with you being rewarded for stuff like making a headshot while leaping through the air dramatically. Instead of getting points you fill up a meter that lets you heal yourself or unleash devastating barrages. Unfortunately the game has overly simple rules for detecting how suave you are, resulting in your best performances going by unnoticed while some sloppy mishap gets you tons of points. The adrenaline is there keeping you gunning for a longer streak, but the inability of the system to correctly gauge flair makes the whole experience feel slightly disconnected. It becomes clear pretty early on that the best way to get style points is to game the system, not to actually have any style.

It doesn't help that the weapons are uninspired. There's a long stream of guns that mostly feel identical. I know I'm spoiled by games that have the luxury of inventing death rays and plasma rifles, but realistic weaponry doesn't have to be so spectacularly generic. My advice: concentrate on fewer weapons but make them feel like they pack a punch. Anyway, from a game about gunplay I expect more.

The plot of the game is generic action movie fluff. You're a cop who doesn't exactly play by the book, and at some point I think the chief asks you to turn in your badge, although I could be confusing it with a dozen other action cop flicks. For a video game a generic plot is the norm, so he plot is perfectly satisfactory. The audio leveling, however, is not. This isn't the first time I've complained about being unable to hear story sequences in a game. It felt like I was watching FOX, where the commercials are many levels louder than the program you care about. Each time a story sequence came up I had to crank the volume, and then I had to remember to turn it down again as soon as the action started again. If they were looking for an efficient way to break my immersion, then mission accomplished.

Thankfully the destructible environments mostly distracted me from the lackluster gunplay and varying sound quality. While the bullets are whizzing by whatever area you're in gets torn to shreds. At the end of large fights I often found myself stopping to admiring the carnage I had wrought. Graphically the game looks pretty decent (if a bit too shiny), and it looks its best after everything's been blown to hell. If there's one complaint I have in this department it'd be that each level is a bit too long, extending well after you're sick of seeing the same scenery.

Stranglehold isn't bad. I mean, I played it through to the end. But it's definitely one of those rentals where I contemplated sending it back halfway through.

Conan (Xbox 360)

2008-08-04T11:05:00.001-07:00

I've been doing the GameFly thing for quite some time now, and I've noticed that my play style has changed somewhat. Gone are the days of playing only a handful of games, but playing them so deeply that I know every last inch. I don't think it's correct to say my taste has changed, but I do think it has expanded. I now seek out games where the reviews criticize it for being "too short." I often would rather have short but memorable experiences with multiple games than a long deep relationship with one epic game. I've shifted to be a gaming polygamist. That's not to say that I don't enjoy deep, long-term gameplay (just look at how much MMO blogging I do), but I've now got a soft spot for the short but sweet weekend rental.

Conan is just that sort of game. Not to be confused with Age of Conan, the MMO, the Conan for the Xbox 360 is a simple third-person action slash-fest. You are Conan, and you kill stuff. And being the barbarian badass that you are, you vanquish your foes with gratuitous force. It's quite satisfying.

There's nothing terribly complicated about the core gameplay. There are three primary attack buttons and different combos for various sequences of these attacks. For the most part you can mash buttons and watch the carnage unfold. Later in the game you'll encounter foes that require you pull off specific combos to get passed their defenses, but it never gets too intricate. All told the combat feels pretty solid.

The boss battles in Conan are appropriately grand. You fight everything from a sand dragon to a kraken to an undead elephant. Seriously, the game gets major points for memorable boss creatures. Defeating the bosses involves a mix of standard combat and Quick Time Events. Thankfully the QTEs are lenient and never immediately fatal, so defeating a boss is never a matter of repetition until you achieve perfection.

You may be reading all of this and thing to yourself, "But I've played this game before." Yes, Conan is the posterchild for derivative game design. There is absolutely nothing here that hasn't already been done in dozens of other action games. But it's done well. Combat feels good, the animation is great, the bosses are memorable, and the whole experience only takes up about five hours of your time. This is the video game equivalent of the popcorn action flick. It won't give you any deep and meaningful revelations, but it sure is fun.

That's not to say that the game is lacking character. Conan may be a man of few words, but those few words are delivered well and are absolutely hilarious. The game has a charm to it. It's a chauvinistic and violent charm, but for some reason in the world of Conan the Barbarian that's totally endearing. For example, instead of collecting hidden packages, flags, or agility orbs, Conan seeks out topless women chained to poles. They strip off their shackles and thank Conan suggestively… achievement unlocked. It all sounds really offensive, but it fits thematically, and for some reason that makes it okay. Don't get me wrong, this game is not for the feint of heart. But for a five hour romp of decapitations and one liners, it's excellent.

Painting Zombies

2008-07-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

I've been having a good time with Last Night on Earth, but poking around on BoardGameGeek I've always been a little jealous of those swank miniatures that some people have painted. I've also noticed that it's very possible to confuse the heroes while playing, so the painted figured do serve some functional value. So I decided to take up an arts and crafts project to paint the pieces from my game.

I've never painted anything like these soft plastic miniatures before, so I posted a query to the BGG crowd for tips. And I'm so glad I did, because those people were ridiculously helpful. Armed with pages of discussion on optimal painting techniques I headed to Michael's to get my materials.

Supply list:

Apple Barrel 24 color acrylic paint set - $4.99
Apple Barrel white, 2oz - $0.79
Apple Barrel black, 20z - $0.79
Delta Ceramcoat matte interior varnish - $2.29
Loew-Cornell set of four sable brushes - $6.99
Elmer's adhesive putty - $1.99
Solo bathroom cups (package of 80) - $2.39

Total: $21.88 (including tax)

The first step was to wash the minis. Apparently they have some residual stuff on them from the mold, and if you don't wash them the paint will have problems sticking. So I washed all the minis and left them to dry for a couple hours.

The next step was to prime them. I started with the zombies, because you've gotta screw up pretty fierce to make zombies look bad. Two coats of black paint later, my zombies were looking like freaky little tar monsters.

Someone from the boards had the excellent suggestion of using sticky tack to affix the figures to something so I didn't have to actually touch the figure while painting. Thus the plastic cups. There are two colors of zombies, green and brown, and since I needed to preserve that in my final output I marked the cups with either a "G" or "B".

With all the prep complete it was time to break out the color. I wanted to preserve the original skin tone difference between the two sets of zombies, so I mixed two not-quite-human skin colors. After the skin was painted on zombies I was able to go nuts applying various clothing colors to them, making full use of the 24 colors in my palette. Lastly I finished off the bases, starting with a dark-green base (to match the game board) and then accenting them with either a light green or brown to bring back the two zombie team colors.

The final step was to apply a coat of matte varnish to make sure that the paint won't wear down as the figures get handled during gameplay.

You can see more photos of the final result here. Personally, I'm extremely happy with how they turned out. Now that I've cut my teeth on the zombies, the next step is to tackle the heroes. There's more detail to worry about with the heroes, but the core steps should be the same. I'll post photos when I'm done.

Always a Critic

2008-07-28T23:55:00.000-07:00

I worry sometimes that I'm too negative. If I scan back through what I've written on this blog, I see more negative statements than positive statements. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with criticism, but when that's all you've got to say it's pretty darn depressing. Saying the glass is half empty is fine, but focusing on the fact that it's one eighth empty is taking it a bit far. I don't want to be that person.

Sometimes the most succinct way to describe something is in the ways that it differs from something similar. If you had to illustrate everything from scratch every time, building up from the base to the small details, it would take forever. It's far easier to talk about things in relation to other things. This is a fundamental optimization of communication. But hidden in these comparisons are value statements. You say what something is, and you say what it is not. And it saying what it is not, you are often describing what it should be. And in pondering too often what things are not, it is too easy to lose sight of what they are.

This is a common problem. No one really talks about the ways in which the world's religions and denominations are similar; we focus on (and wage wars over) the miniscule ways that they are different. We don't talk about similarity because similarity is understood. There's nothing more to say. Everybody likes ice cream; everybody likes bacon. It's far more interesting to talk about ways in which we are different. But there's a difference between knowing how you are different from something and defining yourself by how you are different.

I don't think of myself as a negative person, and I don't think that I'm overly negative in my interactions with other people. I enjoy a good argument, but that's not the basis for how I relate to others. So is this disproportionate negativity just an anomaly of my writing?

I definitely know that I struggle with it constantly in blogging. Far more topics flit through my head than I have the time to put to words. So there's an ongoing selection process for deciding what topics to write about. The topics I write about are the ones that I have the most to say about. I've talked before about how this leads to me writing about games. But it turns out it's also a factor in contributing to an overall negative tone.

Concrete example: You'll notice I never wrote about Iron Man. Why? Iron Man was freaking awesome. Thoroughly enjoyable. I'd recommend it to almost anyone. But everyone knows that Iron Man was awesome. I didn't feel the need to tell anyone. It was just understood.

I also haven't written anything about The Orange Box, which was one of my favorite games from last year. Portal is gaming perfection, Team Fortress is refinement of a classic, and Episode Two ends with one of the most epic gaming sequences I've experienced in a long time. It's not like I decided to not write about it. It's still totally on my list. But I've subconsciously preferred so many topics over it. What's wrong with me?

I think it's a natural tendency, and one I'll probably always struggle with. Constant Vigilance, I guess. But at least I'm aware of it. I began this blog as an effort to help my memory, and in respect of that I think it's important to keep my personal time capsule from becoming a depressing log of spiraling negativity.

Paprika

2008-07-28T11:05:00.000-07:00

I have no recollection of how Paprika ended up in my queue. Maybe someone else recommended it to me, maybe it popped up on a Netflix related list. Regardless, going into the movie I really had no idea what exactly to expect. I knew from the sleeve that it was an anime, and that's about it.

Paprika is a story about dream therapy. Not any sort of traditional dream therapy, but rather an invention that allows a therapist to enter your dreams and help you work through reoccurring dreams and nightmares. Unfortunately the device falls into the wrong hands, and a sort of dream terrorist emerges. Victims of his nightmares go insane and start throwing themselves out of windows and such. It starts strong, but the plot gets fuzzy real quick. There's some detective work going on to track down the culprit, but it's not told particularly well and I quickly became lost. I mean, I got the gist of it, but it wasn't exactly crisp.

Thankfully the visuals are amazing. The dreams are appropriately vibrant and surreal. The parade of insanity is creepy, but I especially liked the first patient's reoccurring dream sequence with everything from film noir to a circus to shrinking hallways. The waking scenes also are really well done, with a realistic style that sharply contrasts the insanity going on in people's heads.

But overall I was left disappointed. It was definitely pretty, but I felt like the premise was squandered. Basically the plot was two stars, and the visuals were four. So it really would depend on your mood how much you'd enjoy it. When I sat down to watch it I guess I was in the mood for plot, because in the end the movie didn't quite do it for me.

I Am Legend

2008-07-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

I think zombie movies are most successful when they focus on what it means to be a survivor. Take our world, fuck it up, and then tell the story of the people living in that world. The world is some modification on ours, so we can relate to it; but the world is also changed, so it's a little more interesting.

Zombie survival stories are distinct from other post-apocalyptic stories in that the world is largely intact. All the stuff that mankind has built for itself is still there. The difference is that all the people are gone. The stories generally revolve around being lonely and coming to understand how much we depend on each other (both for infrastructure and for emotional support). But of course we live in a world that celebrates the resilience of the individual, so at the same time the stories are about how one resourceful person can survive untold odds and carve out a life. And that of course is one of the other themes: transcending just surviving to rebuilding civilization. These are the nuts and bolts that hold a zombie film together. The monsters, the action, the gore… these things are all secondary.

I Am Legend is a zombie movie (although you might not know it from the preview). Well, they're technically supposed to be vampires, but the vampires exist in great numbers and resulted from a worldwide infection. Whatever, they're nocturnal zombies. Anyway, the story is most successful when it concentrates on Robert Neville's (Will Smith's character) survival story. It's fascinating to watch the desolate city, his daily routine, and his bond with his dog. That stuff is all goodness. That's what a good zombie movie is made of: a great survival scenario.

I thought everything about the movie was quite successful until somewhere around the point where he makes contact with another survivor. It's not that adding someone else to the mix was inherently bad, it just happened so late in the film that it couldn't be fully developed. And the ending was just plain terrible. Why do we need so many stories of needless martyrdom? There's a place for sacrifice, but it has to have meaning. More often than not it feels like a cheap Hollywood cash-in for emotional filler. I personally like it when a storyteller has the balls to kill off a primary character when it fits the storyline. When characters survive everything unscathed it takes the bite out of their dangerous environment. But its another thing entirely to have a character take their own life in the face of danger when there were hundreds of valid alternatives. That's just cheap. It's not like the story of I Am Legend was lacking loss. Robert Neville loses everyone he knows, his whole family, and most poignantly his last companion, Sam. But Neville's death is pointless.

But I digress. The ending left some large questions about the evolution of the infected unanswered. Supposedly Robert Neville is some sort of brilliant scientist, yet he is completely oblivious to the obviously evolving intelligent behavior in the infected. In the theatrical ending, none of that was addressed. I didn't realize it at the time, but apparently that wasn't the original ending. In the original ending Robert Neville begins to see himself through the eyes of the infected. To them he is a murderous invader; he is the villain. The meaning of the title is different: he is a legend to them, as opposed to him being a legend to the remaining human survivors for creating a cure or some crap. The role reversal is a far more interesting premise, but apparently it was deemed unpalatable by the general movie-going public.

You know, I had the same problem with Wanted last week; an interesting story adapted to film and being changed for the worse. Sure, you have to change some things to a story when it crosses mediums. But don't change the freaking premise. In doing a little research on the original book I found out that it's been called out as a key inspiration behind such films as Night of the Living Dead and 28 Days Later. This is a story that was instrumental in shaping a whole genre, and had already inspired two direct film adaptations. What about this makes a filmmaker think they can make a last minute change to the ending and have the same impact?

Okay, I'm done ranting. Seriously, I really enjoyed the first two acts. It's just frustrating that the ending was a total cop out.

WALL-E

2008-07-14T10:45:00.000-07:00

Pixar has a pretty strong track record. They don't make many films, but every single one of them has been thoroughly entertaining. They might not all completely rock your world, but with those animators painstakingly scrubbing frame by frame it's pretty hard for complete crap to make it to the final cut. WALL-E completely lives up to its strong pedigree.

After the movie I polled our group to see where WALL-E ranked relative to the other Pixar films. We made it a little technical and did a quick and dirty ladder elimination. Here are the results:

The Incredibles
WALL-E
Ratatouille
A Bug's Life
Monster's Inc.
Finding Nemo
Toy Story
Toy Story 2
Cars

It wasn't the most scientific process, so the list is imperfect. I don't think we ever did all the proper matches in the secondary bracket. But it gives you the gist. WALL-E is one of the best of a very strong list of animated films.

The Incredibles won out in that list, but it's hard to really crown a champion. Fundamentally it's too early to properly place WALL-E (time and another viewing could shift the mix), but there's no doubting that it's really good. Thoroughly enjoyable. Easily recommended to anyone with a pulse.

The premise is kind of similar to that of Idiocracy, except this time there's actually a worthwhile plot. Oh, and robots. Robots make everything better. These aren't your standard mutinizing deathbots, but they're so adorable that I'll forgive their lack of hatred for meatbags.

Most Pixar stories have a strong moral, with varying levels of subtlety. I'm okay with there being a message, but I don’t like being beat over the head with it. It's one of the few things I dislike about Monster's Inc, actually - it gets a little too warm and fuzzy. WALL-E has a message, but I never felt like I was being preached too.

Anyway, WALL-E is a totally charming. Unless you have a heart of coal I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy it.

Wanted

2008-07-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

In watching Wanted I kept thinking of Assassin's Creed. Not just because they are both stories about leagues of assassins, but because they are both stories with a lot of style but not a lot of heart. That sounds cheesy, and in no way do I mean to imply that the film was lacking some awful stock romantic comedy love story. I mean that the story callously blew by some serious events that most humans would stop at. I felt guilty every time Altair needlessly knifed some guard who was just doing his job; similarly I couldn't help but notice the extreme collateral damage left behind by Wanted's Wesley Gibson. Seriously, train wrecks that kill hundreds of innocent bystanders are hard to let slide. I'm a reminded a bit of Die Hard 2 (which by the way is terrible), where McLane saves the day but somewhere along the way an entire passenger plane of people is incinerated and nobody seems sad.

Keep in mind that I don't have a weak heart for violence. I play video games, I watch action movies, and I enjoy a good zombie flick (especially when the good guys lose and everybody dies). I'm properly desensitized, right? Well, there are different types violence. The right setting can make violence contextually appropriate (sometimes entertaining, sometimes funny). Catch the wrong balance and you'll have me actually thinking about what's going on onscreen (which has a place, but only if you have the story and maturity of emotion to back it up). Wanted doesn't completely miss the mark - there are scenes that pull off the action with style or humor. But there were quite a few moments where I found myself thinking "was that really necessary?"

It's a delicate line. For example, stabbing someone in the eye with a carrot = awesome. Shooting someone through someone else's eye socket = gratuitous. It's a shame too, because the triumphant march of bad assery leading up to that moment is nothing short of beautiful.

All the chaos surrounding Wesley Gibson's rise to power left me undecided about his character. He's no lawful good hero, that's for sure. That's fine, I can handle the dark and vengeful hero (hey, it works for Batman). But that doesn’t really fit Wesley either, as he feels far more self indulgent than righteous. I'm not saying that everything has to be black and white good vs. evil, but instead of being complicated everything about Wanted's morality is just plain muddled. They try to fix this by providing a lame back story of The Greater Good, reinforced only by a quick fire-side tale from Angelina, but it doesn't stick.

Apparently this movie came from a comic book. And in doing a little research on the comic to film adaptation I began to understand more where the alignment got all out of whack. In the comic The Fraternity is not an order of righteous assassins, but rather a band of super villains. These quotes from the writer about the adaptation help put things into perspective:

"The only thing that they really changed substantially was where the assassins came from, and that does obviously mean a radical change running through it, because suddenly Wesley isn’t a force for evil – in some ways, he’s a force for good"

They changed the justification but let the actions and personality untouched. Maybe it's more palatable by the general moviegoing public, but it doesn't make any sense. Fundamentally, the righteousness is not what Wesley's journey is about. It's about him finding out he's special, standing up for himself, transferring from being shat upon to shitting upon others. It's not like the motivating factor in his transformation is that he found some higher calling to help people. Actually, the turning point is when he checks his bank balance and finds out he's rich (no really, that's the pivotal part for his character - go capitalism). So why bother adding justification to his actions if his journey is inherently self-centered? What was wrong with this being a story about villains?

"if everyone was outright villains, it made it hard to root for the guys, which I could appreciate, but not agree with. The Godfather is all about villains, and you end up rooting for them. You just have to put them against guys who are more evil."

This was another shortcoming for me. Even with the changes they made I didn't really feel like the villain was any more evil than the protagonist. I wasn't rooting for anyone in particular. Which is sad, because that's almost the same as not caring. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I liked the original concept so much more. Most of the things that bothered me during the movie are the same things that were changed in the comic to film adaptation. Guess I'm going to have to give the graphic novel a flip through.

Anyway, when it comes down to it I do always try to judge movies on very basic criteria. Was I entertained? Absolutely. Yes, I realize I just spent many paragraphs talking about stuff that bothered me. But there was totally good stuff in there. I really enjoyed how pathetic Wesley is in the beginning of the movie, hitting a little on that vibe that worked so well for Fight Club and The Matrix. Stylistically the movie had some strong images that are memorable. I had a good time watching it. It just didn't bring anything new or particularly impactful to the table, but that's not always necessary if you're just looking for an enjoyable way to pass a couple of hours.

Top FPS games of all time

2008-06-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

ScrewAttack.com put together a video countdown of the top 10 FPS games of all time. I suggest you go and watch the video, but for discussion here's their list:

1. GoldenEye 007
2. Halo
3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
4. Wolfenstein 3D
5. Quake
6. Counter-Strike
7. Duke Nukem
8. Half-Life 2
9. Doom 3
10. BioShock

It's a pretty solid list, although there are definitely some items I'd shift around. I don't think they're so consistent about whether this is a list of most influential games or most polished. The choice of Doom 3 over the original Doom throws it all out of whack.

I was curious how their list compared to review scores, so I put together a Metacritic query to get the top rated FPS games of all time. Collapsing to one entry per franchise, this is what you get for the top 10:

1. Perfect Dark (97)
2. Halo (97)
3. Half-Life 2 (96)
4. GoldenEye 007 (96)
5. BioShock (96)
6. Quake (94)
7. Gears of War (94)
8. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (94)
9. Unreal Tournament 2004 (93)
10. Thief: The Dark Project (92)

In case you're curious, here are the rest (this is from the top 50, which only includes games with a rating of 89 or greater, collapsed by franchise):
11. Team Fortress 2 (92)
12. No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way (91)
13. Rez (Import) (91)
14. Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (91)
15. Battlefield 2 (91)
16. Crysis (91)
17. Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay - Developer's Cut, The (90)
18. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (90)
19. Einhander (90)
20. TimeSplitters 2 (90)
21. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (90)
22. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (90)
23. F.E.A.R. Combat (90)
24. Portal (90)
25. Bangai-O Spirits (90)
26. Far Cry (89)
27. Max Payne (89)
28. Descent 3 (89)
29. Duke Nukem 3D (89)

Wolfenstein 3D is too old to show up on Metacritic, which explains its absence. As is the original Doom. I didn't hit Doom 3 at all in my walk through the top 50. Turns out it was a couple pages further down, with a rating of 88.

You'll also notice that Counter-Strike isn't on the list. That's largely because the version that people are still playing is a free mod, which puts it outside the scope of Metacritic. It's successor, Counter-Strike Source, does show up, with a rating of 88. It's hard to figure out a proper rating for these mini titles. You'll notice TF2 and Portal in the list above, although technically they could be roped under The Orange Box, which is how most people played them (a title which rates at a very high 96).

Duke Nukem is further down the Metacritic list than it is on ScrewAttack's, but I'm going to have to agree with Handsome Rob on this one. Duke Nukem was pure awesomeness back in 1996. It's elusive sequel is the butt of many jokes, but when that epic trailer hit in 2001 you know were excited. Hell, it still looks like it'd be fun.

But there's one place where I think the placement of ScrewAttack's list is way off, and that's for Half-Life. The PC is the prime platform for the FPS genre, and Half-Life is the best selling FPS on that platform (although yes, Halo 3 has sold more, but just barely). But ratings and sales aside, Half-Life for me personally is definitely #1. I know I'm a little biased, but I can honestly say that I wouldn't be where I am today in life without this game.

One thing I think is a little odd about the Metacritic list is that Metroid Prime 3 shows up as a shooter but Metroid Prime (one of the highest rated games of all time with an 87) does not. Having played all three of the Prime games, I'd have to say that they all are pretty equivalent in their shooter content. The Wiimote makes it easier to look around, but the core shooting mechanic still isn't the highlight of the gameplay. But it's more of a shooter than say Portal, which does show up. Bleh, all that genre stuff gets more and more muddled every day.

So what about my list? Ugh, that's hard. I think I can tell you this much:
1. Half-Life
2. Halo

I missed the whole Perfect Dark and GoldenEye thing. I was off in PC land playing too much Starcraft to care about early console shooters. Funny thing, Starcraft only averages a Metacritic score of 88, which shows you about how much weight to put in subtle score differences.

One of these days I'm going to crack down and list all the games I've ever played, autobiographically (High Fidelity style). Maybe then I'll feel like I've done the proper amount of introspection to present you with a solid top 10 list.

Tabula Rasa On Hold

2008-06-22T19:20:00.000-07:00

I quit WoW once I had seen all the sights I wanted to see and I knew that the rest wasn't worth the effort. I quit Lord of the Rings Online when I realized that the gameplay just didn't do it for me anymore. So why am I deciding that now is the time to quit Tabula Rasa? I've been totally digging this MMO. It's managed to turn traditionally slow MMORPG gameplay into something much more exciting. So if the game plays great, then what's the freaking problem?

As time passed playing Tabula Rasa, I began to realize that it was a really lonely game. I grouped up whenever there was an opportunity, and that was always fun, but over time it happened less and less. I started making it more of a priority, but the vast majority of my time was still spent solo. I think there are a couple factors at work here. One obvious problem is that the game hasn't been a smash success, and the population is on the decline. Spread the few players over segregated servers and level ranges and the result is that there are few people that you can actually play with. This is made worse by the fact that the traditional instanced group activities have zero replay incentive - loot is completely exchangeable in Tabula Rasa, so the only reason to run an instance is for the quest, and once you've done the quest there's no reason to return. So your only potential partners are people that are in your level range and haven't run the quest yet, and there just aren't enough of them. The fact that Tabula Rasa is lenient about group composition and travel is great, but it can't make up for a lack of players. It makes me feel guilty, because I know that me leaving doesn't make it any easier for the people I'm leaving behind, but the whole thing was starting to feel like a diluted single player game.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem whatsoever with a single player game in a large persistent world. That's how I find myself playing most MMOs. But if you're going to survive completely on that, you need something driving you forward that's as powerful as a traditional singleplayer epic. Tabula Rasa is overall weak on story and environment (although it does has its moments). Towards the high 30s I ran into a long stream of lackluster content that just killed my mojo. If there was some social gameplay to distract me I'd probably keep on truckin', but without that there just wasn't enough to pull me through.

I can blame that weak content for my waning interest, but there's also a bit of a flaw in the character development track. Through the lower levels you are very involved in shaping your character to your play style, with your final class decision happening at level 30. That's a great moment, and after that you've got quite a few levels to break in your awesome new abilities. But after you've pumped some points into them and found your balance you realize that there's nothing more coming. You'll get more points to allocate, making your abilities slightly more powerful, but there's nothing significant that will change all the way from 30 to the level cap at 50. By the late 30s I felt like I'd already mastered my arsenal and had nothing to focus on next.

So it was that I found myself with no one to play with, no interesting story to pursue, increasingly repetitive environments, and no long-term developments to look forward to. Basically, the long-term appeal was gone.

So I've put my Tabula Rasa account into hibernation. I could go back and start with another class, and that does intrigue me. In fact, even after everything I've said above, just thinking about the game makes me want to play it some more. But I think I'd rather put this one on the backburner and see if the development team can flesh more things out in the following months. I hope they do, because the moment to moment action of this game is still my favorite for any MMO.

Saints Row vs. GTA IV

2008-06-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

I was a little curious what kind of angle Saints Row 2 would take with regards to the elephant in the room that is GTA IV. I thought they would just put distance between releases and act as if their competitor doesn’t exist. Nope. Instead they’re releasing videos that make direct comparisons in a virtual gauntlet throw-down. Now as I recall the activities in Saints Row were actually really fun, but going head to head with the obscenely well rated GTA IV is pretty ballsy.

Broken Flowers

2008-05-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

I don't bust out the 1 star rating on Netflix very often, but Broken Flowers has received that honor. You'd think a movie with an 86% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes would guarantee at least some level of enjoyment. Nope. The critics seem to love it, but if you look around at forums or user ratings you'll see I'm not alone in my disappointment.

It doesn't take much for me to enjoy a movie. I have to be entertained or walk away thinking. Either is acceptable, both are great. Broken Flowers managed to come up with neither. For a movie billed as a comedy it was decidedly not funny. No laughter, no smile, no dry statement aloud of "That's funny," not even a pleasant retrospective afterwards of some ridiculous moment.

Okay, so it's not humor I'm going to get out of this… maybe there are interesting characters? Nope. I'm cool with many forms of Bill Murray (everything from Ghostbusters to Lost in Translation to Life Aquatic), but his character in Broken Flowers has crossed the line from being understated to stating nothing. The women of the film provide the only personality, but they are constrained to short vignettes. So really you're stranded with no emotional anchor for the entire film.

How about plot? Certainly this slow, unfunny movie with bland characters must tell an interesting tale? Not the case. The setup is forced and the plot goes nowhere. No really, nowhere - the ending was extremely unsatisfying. You know, the sort where the credits start scrolling and you say aloud "Really? That's it?" You can squint and say that the movie made a statement about a man going on a journey to find out he wanted something he didn't know he wanted. But really at that point you're just trying to find a way to justify the wasted hour and a half of your life.

28 Weeks Later

2008-05-04T19:05:00.001-07:00

I quite enjoyed 28 Days Later. It's a zombie movie that's not a zombie movie. In this world it's not about the dead rising, it' s about a virus that turns people into rage-filled assailants. This curates a different theme from the normal shambling hordes (even compared to those movies that do have fast zombies). The story is unveiled in an interesting way too, with the events of the movie happening well after the initial outbreak. You usually don't expect mystery from a zombie flick, but 28 Days Later delivers. Thoroughly enjoyed it, and highly recommend it to anyone with the stomach for the thrills and gore.

So I decided to check out its sequel: 28 Weeks Later. And I'm decided more conflicted about this one. With one hand it makes bold statements and presents interesting scenarios, while with the other hand it frustrates me to no end with people making stupid decisions.

This movie takes place after the Infected have died of starvation and Great Britain is being reclaimed. The United States military is securing an area of London, incinerating any possible remnants of the virus, and slowly reintroducing the citizens that had escaped the outbreak. It's an interesting setting with lots of possibilities. Well, as far as moviemaking goes there's only one possibility (another outbreak), but you know what I mean.

I don't take any offense to the core events that unfold after this, but the details of how they came to pass drive me nuts. I don't like movies where the world is saved by the actions of one child's, nor do I like movies where one child's actions damn the entire world (although the latter is far more likely). There are too many key moments in 28 Weeks Later where everything goes to crap because of something stupid. There's no guard looking over the potentially infected mother; the civilians are frantically relocated to an unsecure location; nobody tells the kids nor their eventual caretakers that they might be different. These events unfold for stupid reasons, when perfectly good reasons could have been given with just a few more minutes of footage. There are guards posted over the mother, but they get distracted or just plain overtaken; There's a proper heavily-drilled procedure for locking down the civilians but something else goes wrong and the protection is compromised. Blah, blah, blah - it's not hard to switch the blame here from stupid people to something more reasonable. Yes, I realize that there are people out there making dumb decision that just might destroy us all, but I don't think that makes a good movie. That just gets you cursing that the screen, rolling your eyes, and saying "well I wouldn't have done that."

Despite these faults, the movie does manage to make some bold statements. It's not easy to get a viewer to sympathize with the military opening up on innocents, but in this movie you totally do. There's a theme throughout the movie of various people making sacrifices for the greater good. The ballsy thing about the movie is that these actions cause the end of all civilization as we know it. In other words, compassion and heroism not only leads to failure, but repercussions on an epic scale. It is by no means your standard zombie movie message, and it'll keep your brain churning well after the movie is over.

I'm finding that the movies in this genre I like best are the ones with smart people making smart decisions in a difficult situation. That doesn't guarantee success for them. That's a good message: the right choices don't always lead to success. Saying that dumb choices lead to failure is a worthless message. I liked the original Dawn of the Dead because it was a story about people trying to carve out a life for themselves in a horrible situation. You watched what they did and though "hmmm, that's an interesting idea - I wonder how it'll work out." You cared for the characters because on some level you could relate to them.

Now I'm not saying that 28 Weeks Later is a bad movie. It's not. It's has an interested setting and premise, it's well executed, and it'll keep you thinking afterwards. But there were some serious lapses in storytelling that almost ruined the experience for me. Almost. I would still take another ride through this world again 28 Months Later or whatever, but this time no freaking kids, okay?

Assassin's Creed (Xbox 360)

2008-05-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

There was a fair share of controversy around Assassin's Creed when it was released last Fall. There seemed to be a split between people who thought it was flawless and others who got caught up on something and ended up bashing it. And now that I've played the game I totally understand why it played out that way. Assassin's Creed is a game that is so close to greatness that it's few flaws stick out in sharp contrast. Whether you love it or are disappointed by it depends on whether those flaws are enough to pull you out of the experience. I personally was able to largely ignore the blemishes and really enjoy myself, but I was left with a feeling that this game could have been so much more.

Let's get one thing out of the way first - Assassin's Creed looks great. The presentation of games these days is often judged on sheer graphic photorealism. And Creed has that, but what it really excels at is motion. Altair runs, stalks, climbs, and fights in a completely fluid manner. You leap across rooftops, drop down into the streets, and disappear amongst the bustling merchants… and it all looks totally natural and effortless. The way that Altair climbs walls, shuffling around and reaching for handholds, is truly impressive.

The cities in the game are amazingly lifelike. There's detail everywhere, and when you climb up to a vantage point to get a full panorama it all looks extraordinary. At the street level there are people everywhere going through their daily tasks, looking quite natural. But it's here that the façade first started to crack for me. I hadn't even finished my first assassination before I'd heard many of the voice clips repeat two or three times. It's hard to feel that it's a living city with realistically behaving citizens when they all say the exact same thing. This is standard fare in video games, of course. But Assassin's Creed hides its videogame-ness so well in so many other places that little things like this stand out.

For a game about assassination it's really critical for the world to behave believably. The game really succeeds when you're stalking your target waiting for the right moment, or frantically trying to elude the guards after you've raised the alarm. But it falls apart when you realize that the guards chase just as doggedly when you accidentally bump into one of them as after you've murdered their king. Or when you sometimes can take down a guard in plain sight and no one seems to care. Or when you decimate an entire section of guards because they always let you fight them one at a time. All of these things work to change the atmosphere from being a sandbox game to becoming an arcade game.

You follow an interesting structure leading up to each assassination. You scout out the area from the rooftops, perform some investigations so you know when to strike, and then you get approval from the local assassin's bureau to go after your mark. The problem is that there doesn't seem to be much point to carefully planning out your attack. The investigations you do simply unlock the final assassination - they don't actually have any specific bearing on how it carries out. It would be great if additional planning gave you the locations of the guards, or arranged a distraction that provided a better opening. But instead you simple waltz up to the target, see a cut scene, and do the deed. There are some satisfying assassinations, but in general there's a ton of untapped potential here.

One of the things that really bothered me was the inconsistency in Altair's moral code. He's supposed to be an honorable assassin, who claims poison is a cowards tool and refuses to slay the innocent. But somehow the town guards are not considered amongst the innocent. Never mind that these guards are just working people with families at home. Altair always sides with the accused in disputes with the guards, assuming them all to be corrupt. I know it's a lot to ask from a video game, but I feel that the game's story and characters would hold more weight if you actually had to do out your job in the least disruptive way. When I first played the game I naturally tried to bypass guards and perform the sneakiest assassinations possible (this coming from a guy who hates stealth games). But over time I realized it was far easier to just murder every single guard who got in my way. Subltety be damned.

All of these things I complain about are what prevents Assassin's Creed from being a true masterpiece. But I wouldn't even be talking about them if it weren't so close. When it works, it works really well. The premise behind the entire story is really clever. It provides an excellent framework and leads really well to more games in the same franchise. Which I hope to see. The developer has really taken some of the ideas from their work on Prince of Persia to the next level, and with some focus they could have something truly amazing on their hands. As is Assassin's Creed is still a must play, just forgive me for wanting it to be more than it is.

We Own The Night

2008-04-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

From the previews I thought that We Own The Night was going to be the story of two brothers who end up as enemies in the war on drugs. But that's not really what it is. It's more the story of two divided brothers reluctantly coming together in the face of tragedy; basically a tale of the bond of family winning over everything else. And watching the preview again now I probably should have picked up on that, but it's hard to process all that information in a short time period.

It's a good thing, because the plot is far more interesting this way. Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg play brothers who are headed in opposite directions. Wahlberg's character is following the footsteps of their father (played by Robert Duvall) as a police officer, while Phoenix's character is partying hard as a club manager and is slowly getting involved in the drug culture. In a lesser movie, Phoenix's character would be on path to become some villain who slowly loses his humanity and the ability to understand the harm he's causing. But this ain't that movie. Instead he goes through the painful process of abandoning the life he had built for himself when he sees harm come to his brother and father.

It’s all about family and duty. The two brothers don't get along at all. But even if in adult life you don't connect with your sibling that doesn't mean you can undo the childhood you shared. That bond, even if unintended or undesired, is strong. Phoenix's character throws away everything to protect his family, but he doesn't do it through some noble sense of martyrdom. He doesn't go through some heartfelt transformation and emerge sunshine and rainbows. He's conflicted the whole time. He loses the life he wanted, and he's pretty miserable afterwards.

It's complicated. I came in expecting something less subtle than what I got, so I was pleasantly surprised.

More Tabula Rasa

2008-04-16T08:29:00.000-07:00

You can currently get Tabula Rasa dirt cheap on Amazon. If you were on the fence but didn’t want to plop down the money for the initial purchase it should be a no brainer now.

I'm definitely still enjoying it. I'm currently at level 35, which means I've made my final class selection (Grenadier) and have had a few levels to play around with it. I don't have a flamethrower, but I do have a cryogenic disperser (or as I call it, "The Popsicle Maker"), which is equally awesome. That combined with rockets, chainguns, and some area of effect based Logos abilities makes me obscenely good at taking down large squads of enemies. I'm currently working on tracking down the Logos to unlock my class' signature Concussion Wave ability.

The development team is doing a great job of regularly making improvements to the game. The latest update made holding a crazy combo even more compelling and added some great rewards for attacking/defending control points. I hope they're able to keep up this agile development pace, because they have some really cool ideas in the pipeline. Tabula Rasa has a lot to teach the MMO genre at large, so I thought I'd compile a list of its strengths and weaknesses.

Things Tabula Rasa could teach other MMOs:

Quick Travel: Less time wasted due to instant and free travel between waypoints. Better connectivity due to multiple waypoints per zone
Play-Style Flexibility: Less rigid about grouping because instances scale to squad size
Feels Heroic: Multiple enemies instead of single targets that take a long time to kill. You are stronger than most individual targets, so you feel like a bad ass.
Risk: Incentive to play aggressively due to combo XP modifiers
Dynamic Environments: Control points provide a constantly moving PVE target. A mix of allied and enemy NPCs dropping in randomly creates a real warzone feeling.
Achievements: Per zone rewards for various accomplishments (Targets of Opportunity). Logos provide exploration oriented goals.
Informed Decisions: The most important decision for your character (class) is made after you've already had time to play and figure out what you like and don't.
Don't Make Me Start Over: Cloning lets you branch your character to try something different without having to start over from scratch
Levels Are Less Important: Less rigidness in the level strata means you can take on enemies well above your level. There's still a point beyond which you're screwed, but it's not as tight of a level band as WoW or LotRO.
Informal Cooperation: Kill credit is shared even if you're not in a squad, provoking more impromptu grouping
Share: Built-in support for sharing resources between your characters
Unlockables: The hybrid races are only available after completing quests, making them somewhat of a prestige item.
Community: Regular and frank Feedback Fridays let you know what the development team is up to
Development: Small updates with a short development cycle

Things Tabula Rasa could learn from other MMOs:

Casual Play: Rest XP bonus rewards you for having self control
Items Have Value: Interesting rewards for running instances (especially since instances are available for all play styles now). The lack of soulbound items in Tabula Rasa makes getting gear a little too easy (and thus less rewarding)
Epic Boss Battles: Interesting scripted encounters that make you poo your pants
Customization: Any shortcomings in WoW's user interface can be overcome with UI mods. Empowering the community to do work for you is a good thing.
More Locales: There are currently two planets in Tabula Rasa, with each planet having multiple zones. Unfortunately this only really amounts to two different palettes. It's sad when a game with interstellar possibilities has less variety than Middle Earth.

Carnivàle

2008-04-13T19:01:00.000-07:00

I recently finished the second season of Carnivàle, which since the show didn't get renewed means I've watched the entirety of the series. Really puts a damper on that planned six season story arc. The show took an aggravatingly snail-like pace to unravel the primary storyline, to the point where I just stopped caring. There's a personified agent of evil, his counter agent of good, and lots of tension… but they don't end up in the same place until the very end of that second season. There are shows out there that string mystery along successfully, but this isn't one of them.

I didn't stick with watching the show for two seasons because of the story; I did it for the setting. Carnivàle follows a traveling circus in the depression era dustbowl, and completely nails that dirty, desolate, freaky atmosphere. It's got one of the best title sequences ever. The costume design is also especially noteworthy; it takes talent to make me lust after a haggard three-piece suit that's been worn every day and drug all over middle America. Everything fits together to create a unique atmosphere that lets you completely forget the meandering plot.

The primary protagonist, Ben Hawkins, isn't really likeable. But he's not explicitly unlikable either... he's just kinda… there. He squints, he whines, but mainly he just putts about while having a hard time understanding the world he's caught up in. His antagonist, Brother Justin the preacher, is clearly the stronger character, but your feelings about him get all confused in trying to figure out where his sister fits in. Is she the root of his evil or is she a victim? From episode to episode her tact varies wildly. The writers set up Ben and Justin on a Good vs. Evil storyline but then muddle the characters in an effort to make them feel more complicated. The end result is that you just don't care what happens to them.

To be fair, it's only the main plotline that's unsatisfying. The stories of the secondary characters are far more interesting. It helps that their arcs are introduced and resolved in a timely fashion. They also get less wrapped up in the series' uneven mysticism. I'm all for the supernatural, but I was never really able to figure out how this world worked. There's obviously some stuff afoot, but too many ideas are introduced and not enough are explored.

Carnivàle is a good series to sit back and watch if you don't want to think too hard. Unforgettable scenery, great costumes, interesting characters, unsatisfying plot. I wouldn't recommend the whole pie but it is worth tasting a slice.

Jet Li's Fearless

2008-04-13T17:46:00.000-07:00

When it comes to martial arts, Jet Li's Fearless delivers, but everything else is just blah, blah, blah. I realize that these movies aren't really about the plot… but is it that hard to make it engaging? Fearless is the story of a prodigy's reckless youth, the (self-inflicted) tragedy that causes him to go into exile and think hard about his life, and then his return with transcending maturity and eventual martyrdom. In no way does the younger character feel connected to the older one. It might be me applying Western expectations to an Eastern story, but I like to see a character grow instead of be replaced. We're an individualist culture, and like to see the soul of a character persist through a transformation. Jet Li's character's change isn't properly explained. It's like you take trauma followed by a breath of fresh air and out pops perfection. Formula for success. Maybe I just demand a few more flaws from my hero characters.

Anyway, Jet Li kicks butt 'n stuff, and it's all very pretty. No nearly as pretty as Hero or Crouching Tiger, but still pretty. The film was marketed as being Jet Li's last epic martial arts film, which made me very confused when I recently saw ads on a bus for The Forbidden Kingdom with Jet Li and Jackie Chan. Not that I'm complaining: that sounds like a great idea. It could be spectacularly awful (the fate of the world rests on the shoulders of a teenage boy… again?), but the match-up will no doubt be incredible.

Anyway, you won't be wasting your time with Fearless; it's entertaining. But it left me feeling a little empty.