What is this strange flippy thing... with letters?

I forgot to mention this anecdote back when I picked up InFAMOUS (I'm about halfway through, review coming soon people!) for the PS3. So I traded in my unused Xbox Qwerty Keypad (which I bought for TOJam because I thought I was going to need one to have people play the text adventure I created but I didn't need it... yeah, that's a story for another post) and in the return/exchange line at Best Buy something strange happened to me.

I put the unopened mini-keyboard in front of the BB employee, who was already bored on this Tuesday morning, and she went through the usual motions of returning an item. The manager was called to open the cage to get a copy of just released game and I fished through my wallet for my debit card and Best Buy Rewards card.

Alas, my worn down blue swipey rectangle was nowhere to be seen and I remembered taking it out and putting it in the back pocket of something when I had checked my account a few days prior. I looked up at the apathetic twenty-something with the bright yellow tag in front of me and asked if my points could be added on since this was an exchange from a previous order where I had used my card.

Fine, I'd have to do it by internets. No big deal. I swiped my warped debit card and put in my pin (but not backwards). At this point I looked at my shiny new game and noticed something sitting underneath it. Suddenly, I was mesmerized by the items before me.

I walked away from the counter in a trance, forgetting to ask the woman what this extra thing was. Black. Electricity. Bike-courier/biker wannabe. All the elements of the cover of my new PS3 game were on this big, solid rectangle. I wondered if it could be a new type of instruction manual that wastes even more paper. Maybe it was some part of a special edition that I was unaware of. What could it be?

A memory, forged centuries ago in the back of my mind started to reappear like fireflies at the sundown. Words... letters... periods... this was a book! But, no, more than a book. There were pictures inside and maps and enemies and 'tips'. This was a guide for something. It outlined the strategy of the game. Obviously this must be some relic that an action-anthropologist would go after. This was a grail.

As I turned the pages it all came back to me. These things before the era of the interweb. The Strategy book! No, that's not it... the Strategy... Guide. Strategy Guide. This is what I held in my hands and in my heart. I felt the importance in my hands and as I slipped the guide along with the game in my bag, I knew that it would sit somewhere in my apartment probably only to be opened a few times.

The nostalgia of the archaic book device made me smile a smile that I smiled as a kid.

It's raining games, Hallelujah!

So I've had an influx of games come in the mail from my good friend e-bay. He's a nice guy but he's always borrowing money and never paying me back. Future Shop also supported the cause and delivered my shiny new MGS4 Collector's edition. I'm not sure which collector's edition it is because there were a bunch released back in the day.

So what games have made it into my collection you ask? Well, the big ones were Fatal Frame for the Xbox and Folklore for the PS3. I now have the complete collection of the other survival horror series except for the Japanese only Wii title. The first of the series is definitely near the top of my to play list as I just had a testimonial from a fellow collector tell me that I will literally wet myself in fear.

I've been eyeing Folklore for awhile now and I finally found a decent deal. This will bump my total PS3 games to 5 (Resistance, LittleBigPlanet, MGS4 and InFAMOUS being the others) and this game stood out from the other console exclusive games. The art style of Folklore's world and the strong narrative elements it seemed to possess.



A few days before the arrival of the cursed original Fatal Frame (I say that because it took 3 attempts of securing it on e-bay to finally get the blasted thing, and wouldn't you know it, no instruction manual), Fatal Frame 2 came with a whole bunch of PS2 titles for my collection. It was just easier and cheaper to buy a bunch of meh games to find a diamond in the rough. The other standouts in this stack o' games are:

- Dark Cloud 2
- Twisted Metal: Black
- Ratchet & Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal
- Gran Turismo 4

Some of the random games were:

- Ace Combat 4 & 5 (never been into flight sims really)
- Onimusha 3
- Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend
- Sega Genesis Collection (which has about 6 games that aren't in my other collection)

So most of these will end up on the bottom of my to play list. Trust me when I say the list is huge. Maybe I'll post it up here someday, but it's always twisting and changing. But definitely keep an eye out for me to break out the 'scare-o-meter' for the Fatal Frame series.

Mega Man 10

I had my brother over tonight for a bit of an old school gaming session and we played some Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection (specifically Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master). His patience for old games isn't what it use to be and he seemed out of practice while trying to memorize boss patterns. We talked about the Mega Man 9 effect which obvious lead to us taking turns dying in the game of the same name.

Isaac cheated and looked up the robot master weaknesses and I stayed true to figuring out yourself (I don't think I did that as a kid but whatever). Looking at the challenges just made me remember how little of the game I had actually completed after I bought it; another game on the 'to beat' list.

A little surfing on the net during Splash Woman's stage brought me to a youtube clip of a project by a certain MegaPhilX. There are a lot of tribute games out there and they usually aren't that good but the attention to detail and imagination in Phil's Mega Man 10 really caught my eye.

You can only watch videos of two of the levels/robot masters and look at pictures of the entire roster of bosses but what's there does look promising. I especially enjoy the video of RainbowMan's level with its clever use of refraction of light and surprisingly unique move set by the titular boss. It's easy to scoff at the idea of a robot master being as colourful as the rainbow but after seeing him in action, I was wanting to steal his powers.

Grand Beginnings, flawed endings

I finished Beyond Good and Evil recently and I agree with the two general consensuses about the game: The first is that it's quite fun and the second that it's cut short too quickly. I have a theory that BGaE developed a cult following because of the excellent beginning that welcomes you with open arms as you boot up the disk and explore.

The reason Beyond Good and Evil 2 has been so eagerly awaited even before its announcement in May of 2008 was because the original drew the player in to the game so quickly. You start at this tranquil lighthouse which doubles as an orphanage and then disaster strikes; meteors rain down from the sky and out rise mummy-like aliens try to steal the kids. You fight them off, the army arrives late and claims victory, and then you're interviewed by the local news and their only question seems to be what it was like being rescued by the army.

From this point you are broke and must bring in some cashola by taking some pictures of the inhabitants of the planet (both flora and animals, half of which are anthropomorphic and talk in very familiar accents). After getting familiarized with the lighthouse, your off in your hovercraft to a) have it repaired by Jamaican Rhinos and b) explore a city teeming with things to do like shop, play a variant of air hockey, race your water-floating vehicle or just get an earful of local propaganda.

The city opens up into your main hub of the world like a zelda title and stays like that for the rest of the game. There in lies the problem of BGaE: If you're an explorer type of gamer like myself, then you'll seek out every nook and cranny before even heading to the first dungeon. You'll consume the hidden areas and side-quests and the game won't be able to keep up leaving a world map that's mostly covered before dinner time.

So the big complaint about Beyond is not that it's too short (Games do NOT always have to be epic or meet the standard 15 hours of gameplay motiff, they should be as long as they need to be. But they should at least be priced appropriately for what they deliver) but rather that it gives you this charming open world at the start with so much potential but then shrinks at an exponential rate. The wondrous places you're supposed to encounter aside from the main mission turn out to be 5 minute distractions where you destroy a bunch of enemies or leap through a series of conveyer belts in a platforming section.

The player is lied to at the get go about the scope of the game and only realize about halfway through. This is the smart thing though, because after that amount of time anyone who has been enjoying the wonderful characters or delicate blend of gameplay styles will have been immersed enough to see the story through to the end. Disappointment will settle in when everything wraps up so quickly and the chance of a sequel is teased but the initial excitement of unraveling the world of Beyond Good and Evil will linger as a good memory.

This is why it's much more important to have an excellent start than a satisfying ending. In a perfect world, games would have both but as any vg enthusiast can tell you, that is not the case. Stories hampered down by overzealous tutorial levels or sequences that throw you right into the action and take too long to get to the motivation to continue on have a serious threat of never being finished. Players will get bored and give up somewhere along the way so that great ending where everything is reveal or that amazing showdown with the final boss won't mean diddly. No one will see it and while those games become forgotten, the ones with grand beginnings become classics or cult favourites.

Compare:

Great Starts:
- Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
- Chrono Trigger
- Resident Evil 2

Weak Starts:
- Silent Hill 4: The Room
- Dead Rising
- Siren

Beers of Gwar

Beers of Gwar,

That'd be a sweet as game. They already have a miniature game that I own the rule book of (how could I resist an oddity like that) so it wouldn't be a huge surprise to see them jump into video game form like some of their other brethren. However, I'm not here to muse on Band-to-Game transitions (see what I did there?) but rather to rant about Gears of War 2.

Beers of Gwar 2. Yes. Inside a giant worm. Christ, it even sounds like a Gwar song.

*Minor Spoilettes below*

Did I enjoy it: Yes.
Did it awe me a certain points: Yes
Was I shocked when Dom found his wife: Yes
Was it challenging: Not as much as GOW1
Did it have a Halo 2 like ending: Yes
Did it crumble apart after the 4th chapter: Yes
Did it have a final boss: No
Did it have a final encounter that you beat by pressing a button over and over: Yes

I admit maybe I was tainted by Yahtzee's review but I felt unsatisfied with the experience. The locals were schizophrenic yet completely without break. You're on on big mission that doesn't seem to slow down; the only reason I wanted a bit of a stop maybe to touch in with HQ or whatnot was so the story could be fleshed out a little bit more.

The backbone of GOW2's story is hints. Everything alludes to something else that will happen but not in this game. It will all be wrapped up nicely in the third one. Mankind has an obsession with threes and I have a theory on that one. Most of these hints come from the collectibles in the game which just means that there's even less interesting tidbits if you're just running through the entire thing. It's time to get the locusts and their seemingly human queen because they're jerks!

The coworker that lent me the game asked me, after listening to some of the negative comments seen above, 'Did you at least enjoy the game?' My answer was yes because I did, especially since the last game I picked up was Dark Sector: yes, the game with one gimmick and a story that completely disjointed almost to the point of being nonsensical. However, I preferred the narrative in 'Dumb Sector' more because it was so terribly strung together.

I guess the point is that maybe I've become too critical of video games. I did have fun playing through GOW2 but I wanted more fun darnit. I wanted more immersion and harder, grub infested battles like in the first one. I wanted scenes that I would remember fondly like first encountering lambent wretches outside the factory in the rain or the mine cart rides or defending a gas station from a TON of locusts or fearing for my avatar's life when a boomer would show up. Maybe I'm just coming down with sequelitis disappointicus.

Control

Welcome to another Non-gamers' Corner. Last week I took a look at modern game controllers (excluding the weird, slightly erotic looking 'Wiimote' which was coupled with the Nintendo Wii, one of the current video game consoles) so if you're not familiar at all with anything game related, especially controllers, search for either 'non-gamers' corner' or take a look at my September 30th post.

Anyway, the whole reason I wrote that article was to write this one. Now that we know what a controller is, lets talk about why it can be so frustrating to first learn how to play a game or games in general, especially in front of somebody(ies) who have had years of experience.

On a side note, I was going to address non-gamers as female gamers, because most of the experiences I've had with people that find video games stupid or weird or just too alien to understand have been women... whether it's girlfriends or mothers or whatever. However, a non-gamer can be anyone but that doesn't change my main example that I'm going to use for the issue of learning how to control a character in a video game.

Boyfriends/male friends trying to teach their girlfriends/female friends how to play games. There, now I've got your attention. I've seen so many cases of this (and have been guilty of it myself) in which the 'teacher' tries to patiently explain how the game works while the 'student' jerks and waggles the controller in hopes that it will help them learn faster, and possibly appease the one in the teacher role. Ultimately the teacher gets incredibly frustrated usually giving up and leaving the whole experience a sour one for both people. I've seen too many people turned off of video games because of this and many pissed off girl friends that end up resenting the boyfriend and his hobby.

It all comes down to control, in a literal and figurative sense. Playing a video game is all based on muscle memory. The problem is that gamers don't realize just how innate the action of manipulating a gamepad has become. Think back, all you game enthusiasts, and remember how difficult it was controlling Mario for the first time, or speeding along with Sonic or jumping over a crocodile in Pitfall.

I can remember vague memories of twitching in direction of my character jumps in hope that this would make the leap more successful. I'm not sure how long it took me to get out of this this stage and into a more comfortable feel to the controller but I know it wasn't overnight and really no non-gamer should be expected to just 'get it' right away.

'Getting it' takes time and, most importantly, one on one interaction with the game. Having someone trying to show you the ropes and always telling you what do means you're more distanced from the experience. If you do not own a video game console just ask to either borrow your friends or have a bit of quality time with whatever game that someone is getting you to learn.

It's also important for you non-gamers to understand that most games have similar control scheme within their genres (for e.g. most games like Super Mario Bros have the same button for jump and the same button for run, etc.) so this makes it even easier for regular gamers to pick up and play. Basically, once you get the hang of a type of game, you've basically got your fingers trained for next one you try.

Instruction manuals always have a layout of the control scheme and most games have a tutorial mode which contain really dumbed down segments that take you through the absolute basics of a game. Some people find this tedious and patronizing and some tutorials have been known to take a very long time to finish. Some have been known to be absolutely horrendous and give you very little idea on how to play the game. If you feel even more confused while going through a tutorial or reading an instruction manual, it's better to walk away from it or just jump into the game and see how you do.

So, looking back, learning the controls of a game comes down to patience, a little bit of help from friends, a little bit of time alone with the game and the understanding that you're not going to get everything right away and that it takes time to get to be really good at certain games. And, all the teachers out there, just try and remember how long you've been playing and the learning curve you had to go through when getting there. And even if you think you're great, there's always someone out there who handles a controller better than you.

Whacking off

So I've been preoccupied by Whacked! over the last few days and it's been taking up too much of my time. The minute I saw the cover art for the game was drawn into the stylistic world that it portrays. It's a bit of a relic and touted poor reviews but it's got some great characters and environments. Maybe this has something to do with one of their animators.

The game is shaped around the concept of a fucked up game show and in between levels there are 5 to 30 second commercials. Imagine my shock when I saw this:

Look familiar at all? Dan Paladin, the man behind the art of Castle Crashers and Alien Hominid, worked on this baby right as he was putting the finishing touches on the flash version of AH. His unique style alone was enough to keep me going for the game.

However, it seems that lead designer Phil Saunders was the man to shake hands with for coming up with great ideas like a psychotic rabbit name 'Lucky' who has stumps for hands because he's been harvested for good luck charms or a pirate ship floating in the middle of a bath tub that has a dead and twitching giant foot protruding from the water.

The game is definitely not without it's faults however. It plays like the hyper-active cousin of Twisted Metal (that was the only game I could think of right now) and the action gets pretty hectic. You go around killing your opponents for stars and you try and reach 100 or 150 or whatever the quota is. Problem is that the game is so unbalanced, especially in solo mode, that once you're close to reaching the amount of stars you need to pass, suddenly the computer comes at you will billions of different weapons and special stage modifiers that suddenly you're now in last place with you star total.

However, any game that has a character like Lucy, immediately has my attention because I'm apparently an adolescent boy.

I love how she makes a social commentary on the age range for the game show... ie the video game... ie many video games. The fact that they play with the fact that she has bars over her goodies just takes the whole character design to another level.

Ideas are intertwined in Whacked! which gives a great feel of the world the game inhabits (for instance, the Asson ad that you saw before is connected to a level that has a broken oil pipe in a subarctic climate and is also connected to the creation of one of the characters, Toof, who is a orange eating-machine that Asson apparently developed to eat oil particles). I give a nod to the writing 'team' on this one.

But going back to the sex which means going back to Lucy, which also goes back to the title of this post, I've been reading a book (what... that thing full of word thingies? what does that have to do with video games you ask?) called Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and other sexy games changed our culture (ISBN 978-1-932595-36-9) and I've found it to be a fascinating look at how sex permeates into all aspect of culture and pop-culture, including video games.

Damon Brown is the author and has written for non sex related publications like Playboy. While Brown's objective writing and history of sex and pop culture is a very interesting read, I was immediately drawn to the forward written by Jon M. Gibson who apparently was the co-founder of the Nerdcore label of calendars and stuffs.

His musings on the immaturity of the video game industry regarding sex really hit a note with me as I have a inherent interest on sex, video games and sex in video games. I'm not going to go into too much detail as this post is already long enough, but I will share a quote from the forward to Porn & Pong:

It's the foreplay videogames lack. They just skip right ahead to the fucking, on an express to orgasm. Evidenced by horny-boy fluff like Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, Playboy: The Mansion and The Guy Game, boobs and booty - the McDonald's drive-thru version of sexy - are the only things that seem to matter.

This is very true but man did it work like a charm when I was younger. More on that later...