OK, a few words on Game Design…

     So firstly, it’s not difficult to spot that through gaming’s evolution over the years, many things have not been lost, dating way back to board games. So we’re talking prehistory, here. The earliest known board game is Senet, invented in ancient Egypt, the rules of which are still unknown, but can be assumed to play similar to chess. So, let’s take a look at the boards of Senet, Chess/Draughts, and Battleships. Remind you of anything?

     So that’s strategy games basically covered; then there’s games that involve simply getting from place to place- usually based on luck, such as the rolling of the die, but more importantly, many games will have gimmicks on certain or all tiles. In other words, once the player reaches a tile/area, the player must take an action/overcome a trial based on where they are on the board/game-world. See where I’m going with this? In fact, one could consider Monopoly to be the first (game) World Map. Okay, so obviously the concept of the World Map is far more likely to be based off of actual maps- it’s more like games have borrowed elements from ye olde boarde. Such as ‘Warp Zones’, and in games where your route is automated (such as Starwing), being able to alter your course from the standard (or indeed logical) route by performing to a certain standard, taking a different route, or performing certain actions.

     Then we have card games. In Poker, we make decisions based on our prediction of what our opponent is thinking. Cheat is based on trickery and memory (that old trick of claiming to put down two cards of the same number/suite, and actually putting down three or four?), while Pontoon is based on a mixture of luck and decision-making and Snap, of course, is all about reflexes and reaction time. All of these pretty much sum up a vast majority of video games, right? The only major exception being the point-and-click genre, which is basically Cluedo. (Adventure games are an odd one, since they derive more from text-based adventure games, which came pretty much directly from literature, so one could think of the Adventure genre as adopted by games).

     It’s not just games with rules, though; isn’t The Sims just a huge digital custom-made dolls house? (Dolls with a hard-wired passionate instinctive NEED to commit mass-murdering kamikaze arson should they so much as glance at a barbeque. Or a microwave. Or a toaster…) Isn’t the Character Creation feature in countless fighting games and MMORPGs just guys playing Barbie without their sexual orientation feeling threatened?

     …But basically, when you boil it all down to the very basics, games are simply a series of decisions. Much like real life, only getting one wrong can’t ruin everything forever in the real world. Because you crazy we crazy humans like making decisions: it makes us feel important.

Aaaaah I guess that post I posted weeks ago didn't get posted at all.

Musing of the Day: “Life is like a box of chocolates- you never know what you’re going to get.” What a ridiculous saying. You know exactly what you’re going to get, until they bastardise the orange creams by replacing them with orange truffles. There’s a little leaflet telling you what all the fillings are, look. If life is like a box of chocolates, it’s not because you don’t know what you’re going to get; it’s 1, because it’s just like life to make twice as many hard caramels as every other flavour knowing full well that nobody in the world likes them and every single one will get thrown away with the packaging, untouched, and 2, because it’s also typical of life to sometimes put what all the fillings are on the underside of the box.

     So I uploaded this sometime mid-christmas and returned here only to find I'd actually uploaded it never. Which may be down to my internet being a huge jerk nobody likes or (most probably) I just didn't hit the 'publish' button or something equally blonde...

     So I’m FINALLY getting to play Skyward Sword over Christmas, and OH GOD does it live up to my expectations. It has all the lightheartedness that Wind Waker tried so hard to capture and just flattened by being A Crap Game (although I do miss the darkness in Ocarina of Time and, especially, Majora’s Mask). The artwork is stunning and the graphics live up to it, and the music is just BEAUTIFUL. I’ve also finally got around to getting some random character designs down on paper (as I type this out in Word, I begin to wonder if I actually know how to upload images in Blogger. …Um.)

     (Ah, so apparently yes I do, but for some reason they've scanned in as BMPs, despite my scanner being set to JPG, and crash when I try to upload them. So I suppose these mystery pics will remain mysterious until a later post. Exasperated siiiiigh.)

     …Uh, so basically, I’ve gone into Christmas Meltdown. Or maybe it’s just Biggleswade Meltdown (this place has that effect).  Either way, I know my mental state is deteriorating when I start to smell dinner and take out my headphones to smell it better. Either way, I know I’ll crawl out of this pit of contented lethargy soon enough. I just wish it wasn’t so comfy. In the meantime I shall worry about the big, scary presentation project coming up. I’ve actually changed my mind like a hundred times over which game to review, and now have half-finished powerpoint’s for Shadow of Memories, Majora’s Mask and Psychonauts. I really want to go for Majora's Mask, but a Zelda game might be too well-known so I guess I’ll end up going for one of the other two. EITHER WAY, IT’S NEVER GOING TO BE ANYTHING REMOTELY TOPICAL. I’m keeping up my trend of playing games years after I should have if it’s the last thing I do.

     Also, every post from now on will probably be beefed out with contain a ‘Random Musing of the Day’. These will usually be completely irrelevant, and sometimes…they’ll be completely irrelevant. They will never be relevant.

     Peace off, internet.

This could go on a while, you might want to pull up some snacks or something.

Musing of the day: I don’t know about you, but if I was an evil villain hellbent on world domination, my first point of call would be to steal the crystals/stars/jigsaw pieces/bananas/etc of an anthropomorphic woodland creature, which  I would then scatter across 7-10 diversely lush and zany worlds full of conveniently placed difficult, yet completely solvable, puzzles, eventually leading them to my lair where they could beat the living crap out of me.

     I feel cliché going for a Zelda game (my defense is that it’s the black sheep of the series in so many ways) but I just have to open a fresh can of unrelenting passionate worship for The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. I believe I’ve already had a small rant about this in a previous post, so consider this an expansion on Why This Game Is Awesome.

     Majora’s Mask plays more or less identical to Ocarina of Time, being it’s direct sequel, but contrasts it’s predecessor in just about every other way. MM is full of heavy, dark undertones (and overtones, really)- rather than the classic Zelda plot of ‘good vs. evil’, this instalment places a lot of emphasis on the blur between good and evil. The plot is that the Skull Kid has become possessed by the titular Majora’s Mask and using it’s power, causes the moon to fall (the same moon that scares the living hell out of me scared me as a kid. LOOK. AT. IT), crashing into Termina and destroying the world. Link is sent on his Epic Quest Of Heroicness by the Happy Mask Salesman- but only has three days in which to save the world, and help as many people as possible along the way, in a three-day Groundhog Day Loop. The underlying twist is that the Skull Kid is just out to create a little mischief in the hope of causing his friends, four giants who show up and the end of the game to hold up the moon, to return- he doesn’t seem to grasp the damage he’s causing (world destruction) at all. Not to mention that the Happy Mask Salesman’s motives are questionable- it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to assume he only gained the mask in the first place to cause havoc and destruction himself. And yet you’re returning it to him. Then there’s the fact that the creepy children near the end of the game all look suspiciously a lot like him.

     The game is packed full of sidequests, all of which are entirely worthwhile either for comedic value, some truly heart-gut-pulling moments, or simply to understand a little more about the random side-characters in Termina. And almost every single character, no matter how brief their appearance or how insignificant their role, has at least a little depth written in. For example, the swordsman who sits in his Dojo for most of the three days boasting that he’s unafraid of the moon crashing into Termina, as he will cut it in half with his sheer unrivalled strength…can be found in the last few hours of the third day hiding in the back room crying and pleading for his life. Visiting the ranch in the last few hours scores you a cute but sad scene where the eldest of two sisters tells the younger that she can try alcohol for the first time, as she finally recognises her as an adult. They then both leave, telling you, of all things, “See you tomorrow”. Bear in mind that all of this is accompanied by the saddest, most hopeless music you will ever hear.

     And then there’s the sidequest about Kafei and Anju, an engaged couple, the former of whom disappeared because the Skull Kid turned him into a child and a theif stole his half of a ceremonial wedding mask, which Kafei cannot return to Anju without. It takes all three days to help Kafei recover the mask and tell Anju that he’ll return- on the night of the final day, when most of the town has evacuated, including the rest of Anju’s family, Anju stays behind to wait for Kafei. Those few minutes you spend standing there waiting with her, with that music playing, are probably the single saddest, most atmospheric few minutes in  gaming history. Especially since he doesn’t appear until literally the last minute.

     Anyway, more on the music. The Zelda series has always used music rather uniquely in that it’s almost used as a narrative tool, to draw links between environments or even characters (such as reusing the Serenade of Water from Ocarina of Time as the theme of the Zora queen in Twilight Princess). Nintendo have picked up a habit of creating such links by reversing classic tracks. In this case, part of the theme of Saria from OoT was reversed to create the Song of Healing in MM, probably to illustrate how juxtaposed the two worlds are; Saria’s Song being an upbeat, innocent song, while the Song of Healing is calming but melancholy. Then there’s the music in Clock Town (the peaceful ‘hub’ of the game), which changes with each day. Day One’s music  is a typical laidback-but-lively ‘Town Theme’. When the clock reaches Day Two, the music is sped up, and suddenly has a certain frantic feeling to it. But when Day Three arrives, nothing inspires more dread than when the lighthearted music is pierced by a chilling, ominous series of nightmare chords.

     Finally, the immensely genius twist MM takes is in the final dungeon, when you go inside the moon itself. Ever wondered what the inside of the moon looked like?

     Chances are you don’t expect an endless grassy, sunny field with a single tree. The first time you see it, you sit there mind-blown for a good few minutes before finally approaching. As you get nearer to the tree, you see four children (the same ones I mentioned earlier), each wearing a mask of one of the major bosses in the game, and one sitting alone wearing Majora’s Mask, asking you to play with him, the answer ‘yes’ being the trigger for the final boss fight.

     …I believe that concludes my epic rant, leaving me with nothing but another abrupt ending (seriously, how do people end these things conclusively? My posts always just leave off like there should be more because I honestly don’t know.)

     Peace off!

A brief rant on games journalism

Let me take a moment to babble some more; the topic is game journalism (it would seem). GO!

     A few things have always bothered me about game reviews, most of which boil down to the fact that they’re notoriously objective. I’m fairly mathematical in the way I think- I assign accurate percentages to about 78% of my thoughts (oh god, I didn’t even do that on purpose), so I do fully approve of objective rating systems. A review’s purpose is, after all, to deliver information to the reader in order to allow the reader to decide whether to buy Game A or Game B, and if Game B scored 1/10^th or 14% or whatever higher than Game A, that decision is made that bit easier. No, what I mean when I refer to objectivity, is all the outright redundant information reviewers feel they need to deliver. “MGS4 has a much wider range of weapons than it’s predecessors”. “Resi 4 has slightly sharper graphics on the Gamecube than the PS2 version”. And my personal favourite, said about many, many great games: “It loses points due to simply not being long enough”. Journalists: logic suggests that if you are marking a game down due it lacking in longevity, this means that you are disappointed because you wanted more of it, right? And if you wanted more of this game, that means you enjoyed it, right? Or am I missing something? Because lack of longevity is the worst reason I can think of to knock off points, and yet it’s one of the most frequent complaints that seems to completely destroy the reputation of some genuinely brilliant games.

     …Anyway, where was I. Ah yes. I was whining about people whining.

     Writers can complain about or sing praise for all these things a game can be lacking in or overcompensating with, but really: does it matter? How much does it affect the gameplay, and how much is it going to change your experience of the game? Graphics are important- they can turn an amazing game into a truly beautiful game. But can dated graphics actually ruin a decent game? And does it REALLY matter whether it’s in HD? (Actually, I suppose it does in some cases, where you’re expected to have either a HD TV or a microscope just to read the migraine-inducing bloody text…)

     Take Oblivion, of the Elder Scrolls series, for example. I played it a little once and yes, it’s a well-made game. It has a huge world with endless possibilities and some mighty fine graphics and animation (not so much on the people, but I could put up with that. I’ve seen worse). But I just…didn’t enjoy it. I’m not saying it’s a bad game, and it’s not not my thing, I should love it. But I couldn’t get into it. Contrast with the very little-known game Shadow of Memories, a game about a man who keeps getting murdered, and has to travel back in time to save his own life. Now there is some dodgy character modelling and awful animation, complete with truly cringeworthy voice acting. It’s just a horribly made game. But you know what? However poorly executed, it has a great story, and every chapter leads you from “what the hell am I supposed to do here…?” to the next part of the main story, and back to “aaaaah, I seeeee!” with elegance. It’s an amazing game that I finished with every ending, even the extra “New Game +” endings and the “Super-Awful-You-Just-Failed-At-This-Game-You-Complete-Berk” ending.

     What I’m trying to say is, yes, magazines can give us the solid information so we, The General Gaming Public, can decide our own opinion on a game, but that really doesn’t tell us anything about the game itself. What’s it like to step into the overworld for the first time? Will The Big Plot Twist make us go “WHOA.” or “I totally saw that coming” (without spoiling The Big Plot Twist, preferably)?

How it all began...

…And now I suppose all that’s left is my own history of how I got into games. Yeah, it’s one of those ‘origins’ episodes, I suppose.

     The first time I played a video game was when I was 4- this was 1996, smack bang in the peak of the 90’s, back when TV was (j)awesome and we all wore jelly shoes (which got lost in the sea. You didn’t even need to be near the sea, they would get lost in the sea. One day science will grant us the technology to brave tonnes of water pressure in order to find out more about our ocean, and what will we find? Jelly shoes. Gugles of them.). My neighbours handed down Ye Olde Commodore 64 along with a bigass crate of games, about 5 of which worked (and even those were dodgy, I remember the crash screen well…). And so the first game I played was Space Invaders, probably starting my trend of playing games years after they were popular (I started playing Disgaea recently), closely followed by Paper Boy, Battleships and some Scooby Doo game (TV spin-off games sucked then, too, I recall). And that was my only gaming experience for a few years, until IT came along.

     THE POKECRAZE. POKEMOOOOON.

     I think me and my friends talked about nothing but Pokemon for at least 2 years. Most people didn’t even play it, just watched the godawfully awesome anime (but we who did play the games were the total bosses). Ironically, as I type this out in Microsoft Word and see that little red line under the word ‘Pokemon’, I think pretty much the exact same thing I thought when I saw that red line 12 years ago; “Why the fork is Pokemon STILL not in the bloody dictionary!?” So this was 1999, when the Pokemans were just getting popular over here; the late 90’s, the age of Nickelodeon, Sunny D (with all the E numbers), SMTV Live and the word ‘wicked’. It was around this time that I spent a lot of time at my friend’s house playing copious amounts of Crash Bandicoot. So copious that my parents offered to get me a home console of my own; it was a choice between a PS1 (“the one that Beth has”) or a Nintendo 64 (“the one with Pokemon”). My answer was something like “POKEMOOOOOOONNNNNNN”.

     And oy vey, did I make the right choice. Pokemon games aside, nothing on the PS1 could ever even HOPE to match up to some of possibly The Best Games Of All Time. The Banjo-Kazooie games, for example. Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie were just MADE of pure British humour, and the fact that most of it went right over your head when you were 7 or 8 only makes it more genius when you play it years later. Only Rare would think of the name “W. Anchor”. And then there’s the menu (“Seaman's surprise"...?) in the bar owned by the Token Obviously Gay Character and his transvestite barmaid. Oh, and this was back when games were hard, too; not false difficulty, but honestly, genuinely difficult.

     And then there was Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. I don’t care if Ocarina of Time came with gold bars and chocolate, Majora’s Mask is the best Zelda, hands down. There is really nothing like those last few minutes of the three-day cycle, when the saddest, most epic music begins to play, and the clock in the bottom of the screen turns to a countdown. Majora’s Mask was so different to the rest of the Zelda series, and so much darker.

     Anyway, the mid-naughties were when I discovered other JRPGs than Pokemon, with Final Fantasy X (the last decent Final Fantasy game to be made), later followed by the Shin Megami Tensei series (the best of which being Digital Devil Saga, which has some really amazing character design and the most epic of soundtracks) and Phantom Brave (and eventually it’s predecessors, Disgaea and La Pucelle. See what I mean about playing games years after they’re popular?). And so that makes up the bulk of my gaming taste; RPGs and old-school platformers (…and the odd point-and-click).

Gaming History: The Next Generation (see what I did there)

The 2000’s saw the reign of Nintendo , Sony and Sega’s next instalments in the console wars; the Nintendo Gamecube (released in 2001), the Playstation 2 (2000), and the Sega Dreamcast (actually released in 1998, but close enough). This was also the debut of Microsoft in the gaming scene, with the Xbox (2001).

     By this point, the gaming industry had changed radically from what it was 10 years ago; the average game was once programmed by one person, and cost about $100,000 to develop. These days, games are made by a team of over a hundred at least, and cost millions to develop. This means that there is a lot more pressure to create games that are guaranteed to make money to cover the costs. Arguably, this has led to a decrease in the standard of quality in modern games. Companies churn out sequel after sequel, each more mainstream and less innovative than the last, and if it’s not sequels, it’s ‘My Fashion Pony Adventure 3: Housewife Edition’, in an attempt to expand “gaming” to “a wider audience” (if I could paint sarcastic rainbows and stars around those words, I would). Real classics are becoming rare- even the Final Fantasy series has descended from its pedestal to simply recreating the same settings over and over, with less and less original/likeable characters (notice how in 12 and 13, Square seems to have decided that everyone has to be ‘doable’). In other words, developers seem to think that there’s little room for creativity anymore; it’s just too risky. An excellent example of a victim of this would be Psychonauts for PS2; Tim Schaffer’s idea for Psychonauts was rejected by Lucas Arts in favour of making more (and more and more and more) Star Wars games. Granted that unfortunately, when he took his ideas to Double Fine Productions instead, the game didn’t sell well on release, but became the very definition of ‘cult classic’. However, had it been published by Lucas Arts, known for the Monkey Island series, perhaps it would have gotten a little more recognition from the start as one of the best games of all time.

     …Anyway, I seem to have veered off on a tangent. Trigonometry aside, the next generation (the current generation) arose, beginning with the handhelds. Nintendo began it’s Era of Alternative Gaming with the Nintendo DS in 2004, featuring the innovative touch screen technology. It wasn’t long after this that Sony finally made its debut on the handheld scene with the PSP in 2005 (2004 in Japan). Following this came the current generation of home consoles, with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 (released in 2005), Sony’s Playstation 3 (2006), and Nintendo’s Wii (2006). This is the point where Nintendo casually slid into publishing mostly casual games and party games; less Mario, less Zelda, less Starfox (what I would give for a Starfox game on the Wii…), more Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Wii Dancey-Dancey Excersize Party Games For Housewives. Let us take a moment to shake our heads at Nintendo (at no point did I state that this blog would be impartial, welcome to the Bias Zone).

Some more history: gather round, children...

Some more history! Make yourself comfortable.

     The 80’s saw the birth of some truly unmemorable home consoles. So many that they actually crashed the entire gaming market with samey home consoles with the same few games. Nintendo and Sega stood as the last remaining competitors after every other company backed off from the gaming market, causing a power shift in the gaming industry from America to Japan. More on those two later, anyway.

     One of the few consoles from this era of any real note was the Commodore 64, released in 1982; the cartridges were cassette tapes, and instead of any kind of handheld controller, the games were controlled using a Qwerty PC keyboard. ’83 saw the birth of the Famicom, known to the rest of the world as the NES; the Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES ‘deluxe set’ came bundled with R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy; literally, a robot, which was compatible with only 2 games. Nintendo has also released the handheld Game & Watch series by this point, in ’81; each G&W consisted of one game (with two modes; Game B was either a harder version of Game A, or the same game with a gimmick), many of which have practically become templates for minigames-within-games used even today (if you find yourself moving left and right to catch things falling from the sky, it’s a descendant of Parachute. If you’re moving left and right to dodge things, it’s Helmet. The list goes on). Sega also made their debut with the Sega Master System in ’85, rising to rival Nintendo (who won that war in 2001, when Sega became a third-party software publisher) in the ‘console wars’.

     The 80’s also introduced some titles that pretty much shaped gaming as it is today. There were many text-based adventure games, such as the classic series, Zork (can’t be bothered to download? Here is an accurate representation). Text Adventures are literally entirely made up of text; time is frozen while the player does nothing, and with no actual visuals, the situation is simply described to the player (“You stand facing a house. The door is locked, and there is a postbox. To the East is a forest”). Actions are performed by inputting the command; the basic commands were usually “Look”, “Examine”, “Take”, “Drop”, and the likes. The player moves by inputting “East”, “North”, “West”, “South”, “Up”, or “Down”; advancing through the game relies on solving puzzles using whatever items were at hand. Should the player encounter a monster of any kind, it would either be an indestructible obstacle meant only to be avoided (such as ‘Grue’s), or result in a battle. Any fights would rely on either more puzzle-solving (such as the ogre in Zork, defeated by shouting ‘Ulysses’, which frightens it off), or whether you picked up a certain item earlier (if you picked up an axe instead of a sword and end up fighting a fast enemy, you’ll be too slow to hit it, and die. If you picked up the sword and end up fighting a heavily armoured enemy, you won’t be strong enough to cause any damage, and you’ll die, guide dang it.)

     Then there was 3D Monster Maze, released in ’81 for the Sinclair ZX81 (not a gaming console, but a home computer). 3D Monster Maze was not only essentially the first true survival horror but had the first 3D engine. The actual graphics were 2D (the opening sequence featured a man not even made up of pixels, but of ASCII characters), but the game took place in a maze navigated in first person with complete 3D movement. The game itself was simple; there is one exit from the maze, and one T-Rex loitering around. The game would alert the player to the T-Rex’s current position in relation to the player’s with a line of text along the bottom of the screen. When the player drew closer to ‘Rex, the text would change from “REX LIES IN WAIT” (the default status, and the closest thing to being safe) to “HE IS HUNTING FOR YOU”. When Rex is directly adjacent to the player, the message “RUN HE IS BEHIND YOU” or “RUN HE IS BESIDE YOU” appears (unless he’s directly in front of you, in which case you’ve probably already flailed desperately in panic for a moment before running like HELL).

     The first 3D, fully-textured graphics appeared in the PC game Ultima Underworld, in 1992. But 3D graphics didn’t really kick off until ’93, with the release of Starfox (Starwing outside of Japan) for the SNES. Of course, this started the huge transition to 3D; famous series’ such as Nintendo’s Super Mario and Legend of Zelda series made the transition on the Nintendo 64 flawlessly with Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time respectively, along with Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy series with the 7^th instalment (the game that brought Final Fantasy into the mainstream) on the Playstation.