Archive for the ‘opinion’ Category

Sorry, Mr. Developer, but your game is too long

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Being a video game aficionado is a little bit different than being, say, a movie aficionado. Barring the occasional ridiculous exception most movies can be seen and enjoyed in one to three hours. You can throw in a movie at the end of a long day at the Widget factory and experience all it has to offer before you go to bed that night. Video games, on the other hand, take a little more work.

Take, for example, a game like Final Fantasy VI. My first time through it took me well past 30 hours to complete it. Which is roughly the equivalent of watching, say, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone about twelve times (or The Number 23 once). But what if you missed some side quest or accidentally killed off a major character? Or what if you just want to play it again? You might be a little more efficient, but you’re still looking spending at least ten more Sorcerer’s Stones worth of time playing this game. And here lies the problem.

If you want to fully re-experience the game, you have to invest virtually the same amount of time into it each and every time. Using our prior example, by the time you finished Final Fantasy VI twice, you’d have invested about 60 hours to it, or viewing the Sorcerer’s Stone 24 times (or Underworld once). Assuming you play the game two hours a day, you’d spend 30 consecutive days playing the game just to see it all twice.

I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have that kind of time.

This isn’t some rant about how I have a Job and Real Life Responsibilities(tm) now that I didn’t have when I was younger. I make time to engage my hobby (though, that’s another article). But games are getting longer and longer. In the month that I’ve been chipping away at whatever the Flavor of the Month is, several other games have come out that are of decent quality, similar length, and demand my attention. I know I haven’t fully experienced everything that my current game has to offer, but I did complete the main thread of the story.

So what do I do? Do I spend another month chipping away at the game again? Unlocking little bonuses, finding hidden story sequences and maybe finding some kind of in-joke that the developers put in? Or do I start a new game, learn about its mechanics, and where everything is fresh and new?

For me, the latter situation usually wins.

I have nothing against the old game or anything, it’s just that I’ve got other games to play, other stories to experience, and other puzzles to solve.

And as much as I’d like to plumb the depths of the game that obviously took years to craft… I just don’t have the time to dedicate to it. In fact, I’d go nearly as far to say that after spending three-dozen hours trying to work my way through a game, I’m borderline sick of it, even if I enjoyed it.

And besides, that that month I spent playing it, there’s a good chance that two or three other several-dozen-hours long titles have been released, and I can’t very well leave them sitting on the shelf unplayed, can I?

The Pokémon generation

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

You may or may not be aware, but last weekend a Pokémon tournament took place at several GameStop stores across the nation, mine included. I was seriously contemplating going and testing my mettle against the best my city had to offer, but unfortunately had to work (sudden schedule changes, the bane of my existence). Penny Arcade guy ‘Gabe’ was able to attend and his account is pretty telling. As the event approached, I was feeling a bit weird about going, and was pretty certain that if I did go, that I’d be the oldest one there by a pretty significant margin. I would have felt very strange knowing that I bought my first Pokémon game back in 1998, my sophomore year in college and the same year that some of these kids were born. So it’s somewhat comforting to know that someone else shared this concern.

“As it turns out I was the oldest person in the tournament by roughly twenty years and the only one not wearing a shirt with Pikachu on it.”

I’ve ended up purchasing a ridiculous amount of Pokémon things in the last decade. Since I’ve played games in the series for so long I sometimes forget that though the game is as deep as you want it to be, see EVs and IVs, it really is easy enough for the next generation of gamers to get in to. Gamers that don’t know or care what the different natures mean or what moves compliment others in a double-battle situation, just which ones look neat.

My mom, as it happens, works as a photographer for many of the schools in the region. One day she produces a copy of Pokémon Fire Red that she found in some parking lot of some school. This game was pretty beat up, it had been run over at least once and was missing a chunk of plastic from the corner, but still worked. I looked around the save file on it and noticed a few things, primarily that the person that played the game was not ‘Pro’. This might not mean much if you aren’t versed in the game, but his wallet was empty, all of his TMs were gone, all of his items were gone, he had no pokéballs, and all of his pokémon had been taught all of the HM moves they could learn, whether they were useful or not. He had linked up with and battled 9 times and lost all but one of those times. But the thing is, the timer on the game had clocked more than 145 hours in the game. The person who owned the game, someone called BLAKE, had spent a significant amount of time with it, and played the game the way he wanted to, not the way that it must be played, if the voice of the internet is to be believed. I sometimes forget that for every player on a message board obsessed with crafting the optimal team with perfect stats, there are dozens that just play the game. Not to necessarily be the best, but to take their ragtag team and show it off to their friends.

I don’t really know if I’d have made any significant progress in the tournament or even have made a respectable showing, but I do know that it was not for me. I am by no means ‘Pro’ at the game, and might well have lost, but contrary to what you may have been led to believe I would have felt pretty crummy if I managed to pound some little kids into oblivion.

Link! (Penny Arcade)

Fairness

Friday, July 20th, 2007

Activision game designer James Portnow has an article up on Next-Gen where he explores the concept of fairness in games. Games, he argues, must be unfair in some way to make them engaging, which seems counterintuitive. The problem with generating unfairness is to make the game challenging without making it frustrating. Dissatisfaction, he reasons, is brought about by the frustration at being unable to overcome the unfairness, rather than the unfairness itself.

Let us again lay out the standard argument against making an unfair game, “making a game unfair makes it frustrating and a frustrating game is unfun!” In this sentence lies the key to our problem. If we examine this sentence closely we find that it is not the unfairness that makes a game unfun but rather the resultant frustration. Thus our great question becomes: can we make a game that’s unfair and yet not frustrating?

Then, he does almost a 180° turn and decries indiscriminate use of unfairness.

“Of course we’re talking about a dangerous subject here, playing with fairness is playing with fire. There is no easier way to sink your game than to make it unfair. In my studies on the topic I have found dozens of games ruined by unfairness and only a handful elevated by it…but the potential is undeniably there.”

More inside.

It seems to me that there are two different issues here: can a game be unfair and still fun, and can a game be fair and still be fun? It should be painfully obvious that the answer to both of these questions is an emphatic ‘yes’. Games like checkers, chess, and even tic-tac-toe with their impressive longevity clearly illustrate that games that are fair can be quite engaging and stand the test of time quite well. This directly parallels strategy games where a sufficiently balanced (i.e. fair) game will be considered to be quite the achievement. Starcraft, for example, is still seeing significant amounts of play after ten years on the market. Fairness extends beyond strategy games, any game supporting multiple players must be fair. It’s important that as many aspects of the game be as fair as possible, so that the deciding factor of the match is the player’s wits.

Does that leave room for unfair games? Of course! In any single-player game, or in a game played against computer-controlled opponents, unfairness is de rigeur. The computer has faster reflexes, more resources, and generally more everything than you do. But we love the underdog. We love to see a scrappy, no-nonsense hero overcome overwhelming odds to become victorious. The difficulty, of course, is to strike a balance. If a game must be unfair, it must be possible to overcome that unfairness, and there must be some reward for doing so. Although folks will claim to climb a mountain simply because it was there, very few will attempt to overcome some monstrously unfair challenge if there is no benefit to doing so. I am aware of a subset of folks doing obscene challenges in certain games just for fun, but they’re a puzzling minority.

Games so bad they’re good

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

A while back I explored the phenomenon that some games are like some movies, and are so bad that they become good. Clive Thompson, perhaps reading my article, has recently explored this idea in his column, though he wasn’t able to find any games that traversed the SaT.

The pleasure of B entertainment is pure, narcotic-level irony — the peculiar joy that comes from seeing something that is trying to be good but failing on every level.

Bad games never produce this pleasure. Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children’s show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it’s just … bad.

I’ll concede that he may not have gone far enough back into gaming history. All of the games he played were relatively modern. Many games in the 8-bit heyday fit squarely into this pigeonhole. Games like Bad Dudes (“President Ronnie has been kidnapped by ninjas, are you a bad enough dude to rescue President Ronnie?”). They do exist, you just need to expend a bit more effort to find them.

EDIT: Whoops, almost forgot about the original Resident Evil.

Link! (Wired via Slashdot)

Shoddy review from equally shoddy website is factually incorrect

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

I don’t really understand how Game Daily has managed to stay afloat as long as it has. Its staff is exceptionally incompetent. That they’ve managed to become and continue to be a source of news and information for anyone is beyond me.

Case in point, their recent review of Pokémon Battle Revolution. While not a great game by anyone’s standard, the review manages to get some key issues completely wrong which makes me wonder if Robert Workman even played the game he was reviewing.

More inside.

“Trainers choose three (out of six) Pokemon for battle and issue commands using a menu system. From there, they have absolutely no control over their Pokemon or its direction, watching it lash out and receive damage from its opponent without lifting a finger during each turn.”

It is true that you can only select 3 out of six of your creatures for the battles, it’s been that way since the first Pokémon Stadium games on the Nintendo 64. What isn’t true is that they have no direction once you start playing. You actually choose what moves you want your team to do, either via pointing and clicking on the screen, using the Wii contoller in ‘NES Controller Mode’, or by using your DS as a controller. Building up your team and choosing the ‘perfect’ moveset to battle with has been the crux of the console extensions since their inception. In the very next paragraph, he does mention the control schemes, though how he missed that you actually have control is slightly perplexing.

“Without the DS game, Revolution lets players customize trainers, but they can’t select their own Pokemon. It seems like a bogus alterative, blatantly created to force players (or their exhausted parents) to spend another 150 bucks to get the full experience. Rip. Off.”

It’s not too big a secret that this game is meant to be an extension to the portable titles, just like the games that came before it, and all of them have been overpriced for what you get. I’m not entirely sure where the ‘another 150 bucks’ figure comes in, though. Perhaps the author is saying that to get the full enjoyment out of this game, you’ll have to buy the DS title and a DS to play it on (which, as of this writing is still $35 + $130, or $165). Though by that logic, you could just as well say that you need to spend another $300 to get the full enjoyment of the DS game ($250 for a Wii and $50 for the game), which is lunacy. Just like you don’t include the price of the DVD player with the cost of buying the latest Star Wars box set, you don’t include the price of the games with the system.

The rest of the review is, acceptably, the reviewers opinion. Fortunately, opinions can be neither right or wrong.

Link! to the review in question (GameDaily)