Ludology 101

Zrbo's 5 Favorite Songs Of The Year

2011-12-20T13:52:00.000-08:00

Can you guess which one isn't from 2011?

Here we are again folks, the end of another year means it's time to start rolling out the 'best-of' lists. Let's take a walk down memory lane to see what songs I most enjoyed from the past year. These might not necessarily be the best songs of the year, just the ones I found myself listening to again and again. I guarantee at least one surprise.

Lady Gaga - "The Edge of Glory"

Ok, so I like Lady Gaga, can you really fault me? After all, I was somewhat obsessed with Madonna about a decade ago, and since Lady Gaga is basically the modern day equivalent (though don't tell that to Gaga apparently) you can see why I might like her. Though I didn't find her newest album to be as good as I had hoped, I've still managed to find myself liking at least a few of the new songs, The Edge of Glory being one. I first heard this song when Lady Gaga performed it on American Idol while wearing some sort of amazonian inspired headdress while perched on top of a giant wall making love to some dancer/model before committing mock suicide (sounds about right). The song starts innocently enough, but really gets good once she starts ratcheting up the intensity with "I'm on the edge with you.. with you... WITH YOU!!!". Throw in some deliciously 80s sax courtesy of the late Clarence Clemons right before he passed away, and you have a great little pop song. Surprisingly, this isn't really one of my favorite LG videos, I prefer to just listen to it, but here's the fairly tame video for your viewing pleasure.

Michael McCann - "Icarus"

It's well established here that I'm a big videogame fan, so here's the obligatory videogame bit. Taken from this year's Deus Ex: Human Revolution, sequel to one of the greatest games of all time, Icarus is just a fantastic bit of cyberpunk inspired music that still manages to send chills down my spine every time I hear it. The music just oozes style, perfectly fitting the technological dystopia of the near future found in the game. It might also help that I'm currently reading Snow Crash. Best part - I haven't even gotten around to playing the game yet.

Sergio Mendes - "Alibis"

I mean this completely un-ironically. Ever since fellow blogger Little Earl posted this song in his 80s mix tape series I've had this song inexplicably stuck in my noggin. Sure, it's definitely not from 2011, but it doesn't mean that a 25+ year old gem can't sneak it's way onto the list. It's just deliciously infectious without needing all that signal processing that's meant to get your attention, and Joe Pizzulo's voice is so, so smooth. To top it off, this video is such a great relic from a different time. I've constantly found myself singing this song out loud as I go about my daily business. Damn, I might have to go listen to it again right now.

VNV Nation - "Space & Time"

It's a year in which a new VNV Nation came out; ergo, a VNV track must appear in my list. The lead off track from VNV Nation's album Automatic, this song is so very quintessentially VNV while also managing to be something very different. There's the inclusion of electro-harpsichords, Ronan Harris' voice is more 'punchier' than ever (it sounds like he's eating that opening line), and there's even the vaguest hint of something approaching dubstep during the break (without delving into it so much as to sound like he's riding the fad). All in all, a great track from a great album.

And the winner is...(drumroll)...

Within Temptation - "Faster"

When I first heard this song earlier this year I literally (not figuratively) stopped in disbelief at what I was hearing. This was Within Temptation, the same symphonic metal band I had heard back in the early 2000s when I was living in Germany - the band that had that hokey looking Pagan-metal aesthetic? I wasn't even aware they were still around. The only song of theirs I still listened to was their cover of Kate Bush's Running up that Hill (also with the hokey Pagan-metal aesthetic). Now here they were with a video that actually looked professionally made and sounded good - really good.

A little Internet research later I learned that not only is Within Temptation still around, but they've become the biggest musical export out of the Netherlands (what does that say about a country's music when their most popular band does metal - imagine them nestled up there on the chart next to Beyonce and Kanye).

Apparently in the intervening years since I left Europe they've been working hard, pushing out a slew of albums. Their latest album, The Unforgiving, is actually pretty damn good. They took their sound in a more mainstream direction, something that I think works greatly to their benefit. It's also a dreaded concept album with characters and a plot, complete with an entire comic book (sorry, graphic novel) series penned by some actual known guys in the biz. I've watched the entire accompanying short film that goes along with the album and it isn't terribly good. But this song, Faster, just rocks my socks off.

Sounding like it should be featured during the credits of some Jerry Bruckheimer film accompanied by explosions, Faster not only rocks, but the video looks good too. Lead singer Sharon den Adel is just an amazing bombshell to look at (can you believe she just finished two back-to-back pregnancies?), with gorgeous eyes the likes which haven't been seen since Susanna Hoffs from the Bangles. Where on earlier albums her voice could occasionally sound shrill (waif metal? - did I just invent a new genre?), here she sounds much more confident and sultry. You can't even detect a hint of a Dutch accent, almost like she's been taking vocal lessons from a country music artist.

An energizing rocker all around, this one is great to listen to while driving, though a little dangerous. It's my top pick for 2011.

Runners-up:

Rebecca Black - Friday: It's like an anti-song parody of everything wrong with pop music nowadays, yet it's somehow stupidly infectious.

VNV Nation - Streamline: I initially thought this song was a bit of filler, but it's grown on me more than any other song on Automatic. Everything after the first chorus is sheer bliss.

Within Temptation - Sinead: Here's WT doing what's essentially a dance song, far removed from anything metal. I love the concept for this video - they're the band playing in the nightclub where a scene from the album's story is taking place.

The Beatles: Rock Band Review

2011-10-27T12:36:00.000-07:00

The Beatles were inarguably ahead of their time. As fellow blogger Little Earl used to remind me often, nearly all modern pop music has it's roots in what The Beatles did. Psychadelia? Check. Hard Rock? Check. Electronica? Check. Perhaps the only thing The Beatles didn't invent was dubstep. Indeed, they really forged new musical ground that continues to be explored to this day. It's too bad then that The Beatles: Rock Band comes well after it's time. That is meant as a great compliment - let me explain.

The videogame genre that's come to be known as the "music rhythm" genre began with the original Guitar Hero back in 2005. It soon developed a cult following, and with the release of Guitar Hero II a year later, seemed to explode in popularity. It became the party game, with friends lining up to take their turn on a plastic guitar. Through this plastic guitar with brightly colored buttons, players were expected to play along with a song by hitting the corresponding colored buttons as they were shown on screen. It was an elaborate karaoke of sorts, providing the thrill of being a guitar god without having to actually deal with the incredible difficulty of actually having to master true guitarmanship.

Soon a competitor came along in the form of Rock Band. Now people could play as a whole band, with plastic guitars, basses, drum kits, and microphones. Rock Band was definitely a step forward and took itself ever so slightly more serious than the Guitar Hero series. It was also around this time that the music rhythm genre began to become oversaturated. More and more versions kept being knocked out to bring in more cash: Guitar Hero 80s edition, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (complete with virtual G&R Slash as a playable character), Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Metallica, Guitar Hero: World Tour, Guitar Hero: Van Halen. These were all quick cash-ins, usually with little to no input by the featured artists, often featuring songs that supposedly 'inspired' the artist (seriously, a Foo Fighters song in Guitar Hero: Metallica, WTF!?).

Finally, in 2009, came word that The Beatles had given the Rock Band franchise permission to do a Rock Band version of The Beatles. Only this time things would be different, the surviving Beatles (and Yoko, don't forget Yoko) would have direct control on what was to be featured and how it all would be presented. They even went so far as to insist that their name be featured before the familiar Rock Band title, and thus we ended up with the magnificent The Beatles: Rock Band.

It's such a terrible shame then that The Beatles: Rock Band (TB:RB) was one of the last specific-band music games to come out. If only it had been the first, all the other titles would have benefited greatly, because the design of TB:RB is fantastic. Everything about the game screams quality.

The art style is superb, with cartoony looking versions of the fab four that have a somewhat whimsical look about them, apparently crafted under strict guidance from Apple Corps. (actually the whole game seems to have been strictly overseen by them, whoever 'they' are). The presentation is fantastic, taking you on a chronological journey, starting you off playing in the Cavern Club, to the Ed Sullivan show and all places inbetween, ending up on the roof of the Apple Corps. rooftop. For songs recorded at Abbey Road the game has added in "dreamscape" venues, with abstract whimsical nods to various songs (watch this to get what I mean).

This chronological progression really lets you see how the band progressed musically. The songs performed in the Cavern Club feel much more raw and live than the later tracks performed at Abbey Road studios which feel much more processed and musically dense. This is all helped by the various photos and short movies that you unlock as you progress. Some, if not most of these short movies are never before seen snippets and outtakes from various performances, movies, and interviews, though Little Earl would have to be the final judge on just how rare these really are.

TB:RB feels more than just a game, it's like an interactive history lesson that lets you play along. I feel like I actually learned stuff about The Beatles that I didn't previously know (like how the white album doesn't have more than two songs in a row sung by any given member). Ok, it's not going to wow a true afficianado, but for someone uneducated in Beatles lore, it offers a terrific overview of what The Beatles were about.

It's like an interactive history lesson that let's you play along

There's all sorts of little details that make this package work. Like when you pick a song to play, in the first few seconds before the song plays there's audio of the band warming up to play the song, with perhaps a few practice chords or John muttering to someone to turn an amp up. Or how between each musical venue a short montage plays showing you some famous scenes and audio snippets to show what the band was up to. Perhaps the most impressive is the opening to the game, with an amazingly done montage that takes you through the full gamut of The Beatles (seriously, I could watch this a hundred times and still enjoy it).

Overall The Beatles: Rock Band is superb package. I haven't even yet mentioned that the game supports not only the typical Rock Band staples such as guitar, bass, and drums, but the game allows for two microphones to be hooked up for vocal harmonies. My only disappointment with this game is that I wish it had been even more of a history lesson. As it is there's only something like eight short movies that you can unlock, I would have been fine with twice as much. But really, there's not much to complain about. It's just such as shame that this game came out in late 2009 after the music rhythm genre had already reached saturation, which resulted in poor sales. If this had come out earlier it could have laid the foundation for all sorts of music-games-as-history-lessons. Imagine a Pink Floyd: Rock Band, or Nirvana: Rock Band. Instead the only thing to come out since is... Green Day: Rock Band, ugh. Well, one can dream, but in the meantime I've gotta get back to my game and see if I can earn my 5 stars on Helter Skelter. 5/5 Zrbo points.

Better Late than Never: Zrbo's Favorite Game of 2009

2011-07-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

This post was originally going to update my list of favorite games of 2009 when I discovered that I had never actually made a post detailing those games. So think of this as a lost post that should have been posted a year and a half ago... if I had actually gotten around to playing my now favorite game of 2009 back then.

And the winner is... Demon's Souls! Ah, Demon's Souls, how did I not notice you back when you arrived to critical acclaim at the tail end of 2009? Even my go-to videogame review site, Gamespot, gave it the 2009 Game of the Year award and I still paid little-to-no attention to this wonderful, wonderful gem of a game.

Perhaps I didn't pay much attention to (or chose to ignore) Demon's Souls because of the reviews. The reviews were all extremely positive, but they all said the same thing: that the game is brutally difficult. And it is. Make no mistake, this is not some videogame-as-art kind of game, this is truly a gamer's game.

What makes the game so difficult? Well, to begin with, Demon's Souls eschews many facets of modern game design that have become the norm. Take the simple concept of the checkpoint. In most games the game is constantly saving your progress in the background, so that when you die you lose a few minutes of time and are usually placed near the beginning of the encounter that got you killed. Demon's Souls dumps this concept and makes it so that if you die you have to start the ENTIRE level over again, with all the enemies back in place. Not only that, but the game punishes you further by cutting your life bar in half when you die and by making you lose all of the souls (i.e., experience points) you've acquired unless you make it back to the place where you died and touch your bloodstain on the ground to retrieve your collected souls.

While that's usually the most cited reason for difficulty in Demon's Souls, there's certainly other ways the developer's have gone out of their way to make life difficult. Get this: the game does not include a pause option - as in you can't stop the game. Enemies will often be waiting in hiding and you can't see them until it's too late. If you do manage to survive to the end of the level and make it to the boss, you will find an absolutely cunning foe that requires all the skills you've learned to stay alive. And if you die during the boss fight, well it's back to the beginning of the level again.

So why would anyone go through with this torture? Well, for starters, the gameplay is just fantastic. Your character always responds to each press of the button, and the flow of combat, block, thrust, parry, block, stab, is so well honed and refined. What makes it so rewarding is that when you mess up and die from an attack it's always your error. Rarely will you have the problem of "WTF, I hit the button and my character didn't respond!". The combat mechanics work, and work well. It's just such a pleasure to engage in combat, learning all the subtle nuances of blocking, parrying, and swinging a sword around.

Another reason why the game is so fantastic is the multiplayer system. It's not however your typical multiplayer system. In Demon's Souls you play in your own world, but you can see the ghosts of other people playing in their world. This helps alleviate the lonely eerieness and sense of isolation as you wander around imposing castles, caves, and the like. Seeing someone's ghost running around gives you a sense of comfort knowing that someone else in a parallel world is going through the same tribulations.

The game makes a really wonderful use of these ghosts through the use of bloodstains. Occasionally you will stumble upon a bloodstain on the ground. When you touch it a red ghost pops up and reenacts the last few moments of another player's life so you can see how they died (watch this for an example). This is extremely useful in such an unforgivingly brutal world. You approach a blind corner, see a bloodstain on the ground and decide to touch it. A red ghost appears, runs around the blind corner, and then moments later comes running back only to keel over and die. That lets you know that there's something waiting around the corner. It's an absolutely brilliant mechanic, in that it can forewarn you about something without having the developer's resort to a sign or an NPC saying "hey you need to be careful ahead".

In addition to the bloodstain feature is a system in which other players can leave short messages scrawled on the ground that give you hints as to what to expect. It might say "Beware of the enemy ambush ahead" giving you yet another leg up. Coupled with this a recommendation system where you can recommend a message if you find it useful. The more people who recommend a message, the more likely it is to remain there, and every time someone recommends one of your messages you get a small health boost. It's an ingeniously wonderful system.

I haven't even begun to talk about the game world itself. It's a bleak, imposing world that marries elements of horror with traditional fantasy/Tolkien tropes. All the names have a decidedly Eastern European flavor to them (Boletaria, Vingard, etc.), plus there's a bit of Lovecraftian horror going on (such as the final boss known as 'the Great Old One' who looks suspiciously Cthulhu-esque). The various bosses have equally imposing names: The Adjudicator, Dirty Colossus, Maneater, Maiden Astraea, The Old Hero. The design of the various castles and settings really does evoke a sort of foggy-streets-of-Prague-at-night feeling. Overall, it's a wonderfully terrific atmosphere that further adds to the feeling of misery and gloom.

So, there you have it. Demon's Souls is a fantastic game that ignores traditional game mechanisms while bringing some wonderfully new mechanics along. When you finally manage to make your way through a forbidding castle, careful every step of the way, and manage to defeat the boss at the end, the game truly makes you feel a sense of accomplishment few other games can achieve. It's not hard for me to say that Demon's Souls is not only my favorite game of 2009, but one of my favorite games of all time.

Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010)

2011-05-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

I'm here to review Heavy Rain, a game for the Playstation 3 I just finished playing and one that I'm not sure exactly what to say about. To begin with, it's been marketed as a new type of videogame storytelling, one where your actions in the game influence the outcome of events in ways never thought possible before in videogaming. The makers call it, perhaps somewhat pretentiously, "interactive cinema". To add weight to this lofty ambition, the developers, Quantic Dream, have gone all out in the CGI department, using motion capture to create highly detailed characters that at times look almost real (check out the original E3 2006 demo). It's all quite a large feat, and Quantic Dream, well, they kind of pull it off, but not quite.

Remember in the past when people thought up the idea of interactive movies, where the audience would be watching a film, and when prompted, decide what a character should do next by pressing a button and inputting their choice? Except no one wanted to do this - you go to the movies to be immersed and entertained, not asked what you want the protagonist to do next. Well, this interactivity is at the crux of Heavy Rain, and it actually manages to work, perhaps because the player is the sole decision maker. In this sense it vaguely resembles an old Choose-your-own-adventure book.

Heavy Rain is a murder/mystery story revolving around a handful of characters, each with their own motivations and desires, on the hunt for the elusive 'Origami Killer'. The killer kidnaps children who are then found dead a few days later drowned in water holding an origami figure in their hands. It makes for a great setup, and the characters are fairly believable and fit the story well. The story opens with a prologue with you playing as the main protagonist Ethan, a father of two children. One day one of your boys gets killed due to some slight negligence on Ethan's part. The game then shifts forward a few years where we find Ethan has become a distraught wreck, divorced from his wife, living in regret over his first son's death. Soon, his second son gets kidnapped by the Origami Killer, setting in motion the events of the game.

It's an intriguing story, as Ethan's desire to find his boy is made all the more urgent considering he's already lost one of his children. Other playable characters include a comely journalist, an aging private investigator, and an FBI agent.

The other aspect that makes the game unique is the control scheme. Done away with are standard button mapping concepts such as "Hit A to jump", instead each action your character performs is determined by an onscreen prompt that guides you in how to perform a specific action. While difficult to explain in text, it works ingeniously well as the button presses become proportionally difficult to the task at hand. It also adds a sense of bonding with each character that doesn't usually occur in a game,

Heavy Rain has many terrific moments. Playing as Ethan, the Origami Killer begins sending you messages. These messages outline tasks Ethan must do if he wishes to save his son. Some are straight out of the Saw series of movies (though it should be noted that the game is primarily a whodunnit and not a horror flick), and since you are carrying out the action using approximate button presses, it makes the action that much more visceral and exciting. In one of my favorite sequences, Ethan is told by the killer that he must drive for five miles going the wrong way on the freeway. It's an intensely exciting experience, one that had me jumping out of my seat as I struggled to keep control of the car and not hit any oncoming traffic (watch it here).

This leads into the next interesting mechanic that Heavy Rain offers. Your characters can die. And you don't get to start the scene over. So if one of the characters doesn't make it, their plotline is finished, they won't have anything else to contribute to the rest of the game. This ties in neatly with the choose-your-own-adventure feel of the game, leading to branching stories and scenes that may or may not occur depending on your actions. Luckily I managed to keep everyone alive and got an appropriately rewarding ending, though it should be noted that none of the endings are considered 'the right' or 'best' ending.

However, the game has many, many faults. To begin with, it's a slow start. The first third of the game is a bore, as you learn the basics of the control scheme through such mundane tasks as brushing your teeth or making a sandwich.

Second, Quantic Dream is a French company and they used all French voice actors. Sure, many of them have terrific American accents, but frequently the French accent slips through, ruining the sense that I'm supposed to be a grizzled P.I. in Philadelphia. This is most notable with the character Lauren and Ethan's two sons, who just sound so, so, French.

The game suffers from some pretty large plotholes as well. A major recurring plot point that strongly suggests Ethan has something to do with his own child's kidnapping is glaringly never resolved. Near the end of the game, once the plot begins to come together, you'll find that suddenly characters who have never met suddenly know each other. This is a major distraction from an otherwise intriguing story.

My final grievance comes from the fact that the identity of the Origami Killer always remains the same. I was under the impression that depending on how you played, the identity of the Killer would be different, that way each playthrough would be truly unique. Alas, this is not so, and it somewhat undermines the fundemental idea that your actions determine the outcome. Additionally, the actual final identity of the Killer is a bit of a cop-out and a let down.

So what do I really think of the game? I loved the control scheme, and I enjoyed the branching narratives and different ways the action can be played out in each scene. I would love to see another game like this made with the same controls and choose-your-own-adventure style of storytelling, but one done with voice actors who actually sounded like they were supposed to, and one where the plot made more sense. There's a lot of potential here to create more engaging, meaningful stories, someone just needs to figure out how to make it all work.

Zrbo's Favorite Games of 2010, Part 3

2011-03-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

Mass Effect 2 (Bioware)
Here it is, my final favorite game of 2010. Mass Effect 2 is a sequel to 2007's Mass Effect. Developed by Bioware, the Mass Effect universe is perhaps one of the most original and exciting new sci-fi universes to emerge out of the videogame soup in the past few years, one entirely devoid of Space Marines. The universe of Mass Effect is a highly developed one where complex relationships between various characters and species helps to create a truly believable universe.

The Mass Effect series is interesting in that often your character is given choices which can dramatically effect events later in the game. The sequel takes this even further by taking your save file from the original Mass Effect (considering you completed it) and carrying over that file to the new game, along with all the choices you made.

I thought this was a fascinating feat, as so many little decisions (and big ones) you made in the first game have relevance in the sequel. For example, without giving too much away, you have the choice in the first game to sacrifice one of your overly aggressive teammates. In the sequel there's an entire plotline, quite an important one at that, that revolves around this character. In my first game I let the teammate live, but in a different game if I had let him die then this entire plotline would not have been there for me to explore in the sequel, or at least it would have been dramatically different. This is part of what makes the Mass Effect games so interesting, each game is entirely your own game, no one else's Mass Effect universe looks quite the same as your own due to a culmination of your decisions.

Another aspect of what makes the Mass Effect universe interesting is that, unlike in much sci-f where humans are the dominant species exploring the universe (think Star Trek), here humanity has arrived late to the party while other spacefaring races have had several hundred, if not thousands, of years to grow, develop, and conquer. This means that there are all sorts of technologies, fueds, and relationships that are available for exploration.

What puts this universe a step ahead of other sci-fi is how just how well these ideas have been thought out. The original Mass Effect (and also featured in the sequel) featured an in-game codex, essentially an encyclopedia, of everything relating to the universe. Not only is each codex entry expertly written, but the explanations are all plausibly scientific for nearly every conceivable facet of space-travel. To top it off they gave these entries narration, so that you can listen to them being read. The voice actor they choice delivers the information so well that it actually made it a joy to listen to all of the scientific rationale for how space ships have gravity or can travel faster-than-light (example here).

So what makes Mass Effect 2 fall short for my game of the year? To understand that we have to look at the changes that were made between the two games. The biggest difference is that the combat has been completely overhauled from the first game. It's much more exciting and visceral now. The designers also stripped away most of the inventory management, and the exploration of individual planets. Basically Bioware stripped the game almost entirely of it's role-playing game elements. I don't mean this in the literal sense, you are definitely still "playing a role", but all those other elements that make up RPGs, such as inventory and stat management have been almost completely removed.

While this does streamline the combat and the overall feel of the game, I felt that as a consequence the developers were left with no way of resolving conflict outside of combat. So now instead of being able to influence some outcome through wits, you are now left with just the option of shooting your way through various encounters. The game focuses now more on action than on cerebral choices.

Which leads to my second point. Many of the choices in the first game felt more complex, more meaningful. For example, near the end of the first game you have to choose the two teammates who will accompany you on the mission. Later you get separated and have to make the decision to stay with one to help fight off the approaching enemy or go rescue the other from certain death. Either way somebody dies, and it can be a tough, tough decision to make. In Mass Effect 2 the decisions just don't seem to have the same impact. They come across more like "Do you want to eat a burrito or a taco?" (ok, not really, but you get my point). There's just something lacking in the emotional investment you have when making these decisions. Now this could all be rectified depending on how these decisions play out in the conclusion when Mass Effect 3 ships (this year supposedly), but for the time being I was left feeling a wee bit disappointed.

There's a few other issues I have with the game that don't need a lot of detail but I'll rattle them off here quickly. Some of the new teammates are brilliantly conceived, such as your lizard-man doctor Mordin (who you can get to sing a little Gilbert & Sullivan if you know how). Others, such as Thane or the Justicar are not as well thought out and on my second playthrough I realized just how downright silly/cartoony some of these characters came across.

There was a part where I arrived at a spaceport and there were literally four minor characters from the first game all standing in the same area who all said virtually the same thing ("Hey remember me, you rescued me way back at the beginning of the first game, it's great to run into you again!"). This gave me a bit of that "small-universe" feeling, not only do I just happen to bump into this person out of the billions of people in the entire galaxy, but there just happens to be three other people who I know all standing around in the same area? I was definitely reminded here that I was merely playing a game at this moment.

My final grievance is with the story itself. The game was billed as the dark second chapter of the Mass Effect story (the developers pretty much called it the 'Empire Strikes Back' of the story), but almost the entirety of the game was devoted to waltzing around the galaxy recruiting new teammates, with a short 'final confrontation' at the end. I also found the beginning of the game puzzling, you basically get killed right at the beginning of the game and then are brought back to life by a shadowy pro-human group (led by 'The Illusive Man' pictured above and voiced terrifically by Martin Sheen). It seemed to me one big contrivance/excuse to 'reboot' your character. The whole thing felt a little off to me. It would be like if the infamous part where Vader tells Luke he's his father happened at the beginning of Return of the Jedi, rather than the end of Empire. If the writers wanted to do this, why didn't they have you die at the end of the first game?

So there you have it. No one game gets my vote for game of the year, but all three games together, Halo: Reach, Limbo, and Mass Effect 2, form a pretty good core of great games. Now, I promised honorable mentions, so here they are:

Red Dead Redemption - This was practically every other reviewer's game of the year. It's by the makers of Grand Theft Auto but instead of taking place in a modern day city, it takes place in the Wild West. With a huge world to explore it captured the mood of all your favorite westerns and let you play as the cowboy. It had a truly great atmosphere but I just cannot forgive the actual gameplay, which was just awful in my opinion. Sorry, but this is a game, and for it to be considered good you gotta give me good gameplay.

Alan Wake - A psychological thriller about a horror novel writer who, in the middle of a bout of writer's block, decides to vacation with his wife in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. Part Twin Peaks, part Stephen King novel, the game does not try to hide its inspirations (King is mentioned in the opening line of the game). It was a pretty good game, and the narration by Alan Wake is excellent, but I never felt spooked or particularly 'psychologically thrilled'.

Bioshock 2 - The original Bioshock is one of my favorite games of this console generation. The sequel takes the Ayn Rand objectivist dystopia of the first game and now has it run by a collectivism-worshipping psychiatrist. The gameplay was great and it was fun to visit the underwater ruins of Rapture again, but the game was completely unnecessary, the first game told a complete story, there was no need for a sequel.

That's it for this time, see you in a year!

Zrbo's Favorite Games of 2010, Part 2

2011-02-07T13:53:00.000-08:00

Limbo (Playdead Studios)
My second contender for my not-quite-game-of-the-year is Limbo, a downloadable game from the Danish studio 'Playdead Studios', a most fitting name for a game about a young boy trying to survive somewhere between life and death.

You play as a young boy who wakes up alone in a black-and-white forest. You are looking for your sister. There's something other-wordly about the place you are in... like you are in some sort of limbo. The game uses no text to explain anything to you, there's no dialogue, and the sound design is utterly superb in that there's virtually no music, with the game relying only on natural-sounding effects, such as the sound of rushing water or the wind rustling in the trees. Only later in the game does a little music pick up, and when it does, you hardly even notice the change.

This all contributes to the superb atmosphere of the game. The entire experience is done in black-and-white with a film grain effect to give it the impression you're watching some old Ingmar Bergman film (and yes, I can say that now that Little Earl has shown me the Seventh Seal). There's a certain creepiness as the young boy makes his way across a black-and-white landscape, never uttering a word. Just shades of black, white, and gray. For a look at the game check out this video here.

At it's heart Limbo is a puzzle platforming game, requiring you to figure out how to proceed as you move on. And the game punishes mistakes with a grizzly death. Didn't see that bear trap lying in the grass in front of you? BAM, the little boy dies. Luckily the game never sets you too far back, so dying becomes not only a learning experience, but also serves up a morbid pleasure in seeing just how the little boy will meet his fate.

In many ways the game is similar to 2008's Braid, which reviewers loved, and if you recall, I absolutely hated. But where Braid was told through obnoxious overwrought text, telling a story so vague that is was indecipherable (was it about loss? the trials of love? nuclear weapons?), Limbo gets its strength from its outright minimalism. There's no dialogue, no terribly written poetry to read, just a boy in a black-and-white world with a gigantic spider coming his way.

And it's amazing how much the game accomplishes without any of the usual storytelling means. The only discernible feature of the boy is his eyes. These little white dots add a certain character to the boy, and when confused by a puzzle the boy might shift his eyes towards something helpful or useful, such as rope hanging above that the player might not otherwise have noticed. They're very much like when cartoon characters turn off the lights and we can only see the whites of their eyes.

So why isn't this my game of the year? It's difficult to pinpoint exactly. It could be that the game is short and doesn't feel as big or meaty as the other two contenders on my list. Also, the ending is just a tad bit weak. As the Gamespot review notes in it's only criticism, it "ends abruptly". Just a slightly longer coda and this might have been my game of the year. Hell, I'll at least give it my "best downloadable game of the year". Limbo is available for the Xbox 360.

Next time I'll finish off my favorite games of 2010 with a look at my final pick as well as a few honorable mentions.

Zrbo's Favorite Games of 2010, Part 1

2011-01-28T13:52:00.000-08:00

Welcome and make yourself comfortable as I bring you my favorite games of 2010. You'll notice I didn't say "Game of the Year" as while I played many games this past year, some of them great and not so much, I couldn't whittle my choices down to one game I thought was the best or most represented what the year was about. Instead I've chosen my three favorite games of the year. I greatly enjoyed each of my three selections but I found each one had certain flaws that I just couldn't look past, which I'll discuss as I move through each selection. I'll start with one for now, with the other two in subsequent posts. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy!

Halo: Reach (Bungie Studios)
In case you didn't know, the Halo series of games are some of my favorite. The original Halo: Combat Evolved pretty much made me a convert to console gaming, something I completely avoided throughout the better part of the 90s, preferring to stick with PC games, most notably Diablo 2 and the venerable Starcraft. Halo changed all that for me as it showed that a shooter could be played with a controller instead of keyboard and mouse, plus it had great mechanics, and was a delightfully whimsical blend of sci-fi tropes from the past 30 years (Larry Niven's Ringworld combined with Giger's Aliens, Schwarzenegger's Predators, holographic AI buddy Cortana looks like she's from Tron, and my favorite character 343 Guilty Spark is like C-3PO is he went insane and became murderous).

The Halo trilogy, opening in medias res as our hero 'Master Chief' escapes from the surprise attack on the human stronghold 'Reach', tells the tale of Master Chief and humankind's struggle to overcome the alien religious conglomerate known as 'the Covenant', only to discover in the process the parasitic alien life form referred to only as 'the Flood', ultimately defeating both in Halo 3. I loved Halo 3 and thought it had an utterly appropriate ending to a series that came to define console shooters (and did I mention how I'm convinced the special ending (@7:00) you get by finishing the game on the highest difficulty is a nod towards the end of The Beatles' A Day in the Life?).

So when Bungie announced they were doing one more Halo game I was a bit shocked, though simultaneously delighted. I was intrigued as this time Bungie decided to make a prequel, with the game taking place during the fall of Reach. This is something fans had been clamoring for for a while, as the only account of the fall of Reach was in book form, sanctioned by Bungie as official canon. I especially loved the initial reveal trailer for Halo: Reach, with it's almost 9/11-meets-Hindenburg disaster sense of confusion and dread.

So how is the game? Well, Bungie have finally perfected their craft, with the overall gameplay feeling butter smooth. The weapons are a delight to use, and the artificial intelligence of the enemies is hands down some of the best in any game. The graphics have been improved, the options expanded, and Bungie have added in a progression system to make the addictive multiplayer even more so. From a pure gameplay standpoint, this is my favorite game of the year. From the story standpoint, not so much.

Bungie have never been very good storytellers. The story suffers from some poor writing, poor character development, and for the hardcore fans, they basically retconned the entire story of the book, causing the fan forums to explode in anger. The last part didn't matter as much to me as I never read the books, but still, I have no idea why Bungie changed the story so much when previously they've been so particular about making sure the story kept its logical integrity (there's even a mysterious 'Halo Bible' Bungie consults to make sure nothing contradicts anything previously established). I did however enjoy the ending, as we got to see a few characters we hadn't seen since the original Halo, and I loved how the final scene (@1:27) is the original opening from Halo.

Actually, my main gripe is with some of the presentation and options Bungie mysteriously left out. It's a little too much to go into here, but I do miss the old version of Firefight, and why they removed the Lowball gametype is a mystery to me. Mainly, Bungie promised the most comprehensive Halo possible, complete with all the bells and whistles from previous games but with MORE. Funny though how I feel that there's fewer options than in Halo 3.

In the end I suppose it doesn't matter, because as long as the gameplay is good (and it is very, very good) I will keep coming back to it (according to my Bungie.net profile I've already logged more than six and a half days of continuous play). At the same time I'm glad that Bungie have signed off on the Halo franchise, giving control to Microsoft's newly minted 343 Industries.

Stay tuned next time as I reveal my second favorite game of the year, a black and white game that features no words and almost no music.

Don't Copy that Floppy 2

2009-09-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

In case you don't remember the anti-piracy video "Don't Copy that Floppy" from 1992, now you can watch the hilarious new update above, complete with an ode to itself at the beginning. I can't figure this new one out. It seems to take itself somewhat seriously, despite some of the goofiness and cheesiness. But then there's the Klingons. And what's with the high-pitched "convicted felon" at the end - are they pulling my leg here or what?

Full Beatles: Rock Band Setlist Revealed

2009-08-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

While not wholly confirmed yet, here's the leaked setlist for all songs that will be included in the upcoming The Beatles: Rock Band game. It was already announced previously that several whole albums will be released later as pay-for DLC including Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper's and Abbey Road. I propose a Cosmic American get together when it drops September 9th.

Singles
I Want To Hold Your Hand
I Feel Fine
Day Tripper
Paperback Writer
Revolution
Don't Let Me Down

Please Please Me (1963)
I Saw Her Standing There
Boys
Do You Want To Know A Secret
Twist and Shout

With the Beatles (1963)
I Wanna Be Your Man

A Hard Day's Night (1964)
A Hard Day's Night
Can't Buy Me Love

Beatles For Sale (1964)
Eight Days a Week

Help! (1965)
Ticket To Ride

Rubber Soul (1965)
Drive My Car
I'm Looking Through You
If I Needed Someone

Revolver (1966)
Taxman
Yellow Submarine
And Your Bird Can Sing

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band/With a Little Help From My Friends
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
Getting Better
Good Morning Good Morning

Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
I Am The Walrus
Hello Goodbye

The Beatles (White Album) (1968)
Dear Prudence
Back In the U.S.S.R.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Birthday
Helter Skelter

Yellow Submarine (1969)
Hey Bulldog

Abbey Road (1969)
Come Together
Something
Octopus's Garden
I Want You (She's So Heavy)
Here Comes the Sun

Let It Be (1970)
Dig a Pony
I Me Mine
I Got a Feeling
Get Back

Love (2006)
Within You Without You/ Tomorrow Never Knows

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (Kojima, 2008)

2009-08-03T14:49:00.001-07:00

Last year in 2008 Hideo Kojima unleashed the final iteration of the Metal Gear Solid series onto the world. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was met with both critical and commercial success, with some reviewers naming it the best videogame of all time. The editors at Gamespot awarded the game a rare perfect 10 saying "It's difficult not to sound hyperbolic when discussing MGS4 because every part of its design seemingly fulfills its vision, without compromise. There is no halfway." This statement could not be more true. Over the course of the past year I decided to see what all the fuss was about with this game series. During that time I've written several pieces detailing my thoughts on each iteration, examining their messages, themes, and purpose. I've finally finished my goal of playing through all four games, and just like those Gamespot editors, it's difficult not to sound hyperbolic when discussing Solid Snake's final mission.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is a contradiction of sorts. At times it represents the height of what the medium has to offer. The story is larger than life, filled with grand themes and notions, bleeding edge game design, masterful production, memorable characters, and contains a sense of purpose like no other game. At the same time it is an overwrought, overblown mess, struggling to keep up with itself, and contains the most complex, complicated, most difficult to follow story in the history of videogames. There are moments where MGS4 is a colossal triumph, and moments where it reeks with overblown ambition.

I'd rather not go into the details of the story itself, as that would require it's own separate post (or several). Let's begin with the characters. In short, Kojima managed to include nearly every single character from every Metal Gear game into this game. And I mean everyone. Remember the poor soldier in the first game who was using the restroom? Yeah, he's in this game. It's like the War & Peace of videogames in terms of cast (the MGS database lists over 130 characters). But what's amazing about this is that Kojima actually manages to tie all these characters together into a (somewhat) cohesive story. The plot had been moving slowly until I reached the end of Act 3 (of five acts total) when suddenly Kojima managed to tie in the entire cast of characters, including those from the previous game which took place in the 1960s, in a move that showed just how deep his ambition was to tie all these threads together. It was like Kojima, instead of trying to corral this giant beast of a story into some pen, decided a better way to take control was to just grab the story by the balls and squeeze as hard as he could to force his will upon it.

As I said before, the game is full of contradictions. It speaks a message of peace and non-violence while simultaneously hyper-romanticizing the role of the warrior. At times the game strives to be ultra-realistic. Characters will go into painstaking detail about how a certain firearm works, or how a certain computer program functions. At other times the game gives way to guilty fantasy. This is most notable with the antagonists. The villians in the Metal Gear series have always been a bit over the top. This game is no exception. The main bosses in this game take place in the form of the Beauty and the Beast Corp., four lovely young women traumatized by war who've gone mad and are now instruments of war themselves. Each one has taken on a certain emotion, e.g. Raging Raven, Screaming Wolf. It's easy to laugh at the silliness of some of these characters. But if you look at it differently these characters are almost Jungian archetypes. Are they even meant to be real? Does Snake actually fight them, or could it be seen as Snake “fighting his demons”? There's a certain metaphoric quality to these characters. The way arch-villian Liquid Ocelot bristles with lightning, just as Volgin did in the previous game, could be seen not as an actual ability of his to wield lightning but as a metaphor for his power. It must be noted that the fantasy doesn't get in the way of the plot or is ever used as as Deus ex machinima. This quote from the Daniel Primed blog says it best: “While fantasy based elements are a rarely discussed staple of the series, these games use it only for metaphoric purposes and never to conclude storyline plot holes.” This leads me to my next point, these fantasy elements aren't really fantasy at all, but rather they should be seen as extended metaphors.

In essence that's what the whole game, the whole series even, is - metaphors embodied in characters. The whole series is just one big morality play, with each character taking on their part. This also means that nearly everything contains some sort of symbolism. Oh, is there ever so much symbolism in this game! One character could be seen as a stand-in for Christ, another the Virgin Mary (and simultaneously Mary Magdalene). A new character, Drebin, is the embodiment of the entire arms industry, even of capitalism itself, who also functions as a sort of Greek chorus/Cheshire cat, appearing to our hero in times of need to prod him along the path. There's even a bit of a Faust/Devil relationship between him and Snake. It's like an English major's dream manifested in game form.

The dichotomy of symbolism goes even farther. At times the drama is very Western (Shakespearian) at other times very Japanese. When I say Shakespearian I mean that in every sense of the word. Yes it contains those elements of great literature such as comedy, love, death, and tragedy, but it also appeals to the masses with it's occassionaly crude humor (lots of fart/poop jokes) and underdressed females. At the same time the game is very Japanese. The action sequences are straight out of a Hong Kong action flick (ok, not Japanese, but it has its roots in the martial arts). The females can occasionally act in a way Westerners might find old fashioned (like when one bride-to-be gets excited at the prospect of dutifully serving her husband). Occasionally there's that feeling that there's something you're not quite getting, like some cultural cue we're not familiar with. All together, it's this strange mix of Western drama and Japanese weirdness.

It's like the War & Peace of videogames in terms of cast.

To say the game can be melodramatic is an understatement. Since the whole game is essentially a vehicle for Kojima's message it can be nauseating at times when a character goes into an extended dialogue on the dangers of war or what have you. Like with the other games in the series, Kojima wants to make absolute certain that you get the message, so he'll have the characters speak these grand verbiose statements that go on and on and on. Kojima can be so blinded by his ambition that he doesn't know when to stop. Michael Abbott at the Brainy Gamer has an interesting piece on this aspect of Metal Gear and melodrama if you're interested in reading further.

I've spoken previously about Kojima's use of cinematic cutscenes in the series. It's an oft leveled criticism of Metal Gear that the cutscenes can be too lengthy, where it becomes less like you're playing a game and more like watching a film. This game is no exception. Before the game came out there were rumors about extraordinarily long cinematic sequences, so much that when publisher Konami let reviewers get an early version of the game for review purposes they were forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement saying they wouldn't comment on the length of those cutscenes.

Oh, folks, are they ever long. Usually they run from a few minutes to 15 minutes, with a few clocking in around 45 minutes. But then Kojima really outdoes himself when after the final confrontation the game goes into an epilogue that technically qualifies as a full-length feature according to the Screen Actors Guild. All in all there are over 10 hours of cinematics.

Which brings me to the next point: Kojima needs an editor. It's not that the game or the cinematics are too long, or even the story itself. It's his obsession over the nitty gritty details of the characters' motivations. We don't need an hour long explanation of how and exactly why the villian plans on using some computer program to accomplish his evil deeds, you can just tell us "The bad guy has item X, and that gives him power, so therefore we need to stop him!". Yes, it's cliched, but it's more effective than overly long explanations that barely hold up logically and which are ultimately inconsequential. Once again, our friend at the Brainy Gamer has an excellent piece on Kojima and his over-the-top ambitions. At the same time I have to confess that I somewhat enjoy these long, drawn-out explanations as it's what gives the series some of it's charm. Yes it's tiresome, but at the same time, have you ever played another videogame, or even seen a movie, that went into such detail over the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty? I'm sure you haven't. So it's at times frustrating to have to wade through all of this talk just to experience the game, but at the same time, it's all part of the adventure. It's like going to a Tarantino film, part of the thrill is just watching the characters and their discussions on Big Macs and Like a Virgin.

The game contains all the usual flair that I've discussed previously in my other analyses. Both the graphics and the score are AAA in quality. In fact, the game has arguably the best graphics and presentation out there, I am convinced that those shots of Sunny cooking eggs are real. The locales and situations Kojima puts Snake in are amazing, from putting Snake on a cloak-and-dagger like mission where he must tail an informant in a foggy Eastern European city that recalls something out of The Third Man, to some extraordinary split-screen sequences that have you controlling Snake on one half while a glorious cinematic plays in the other half, the game does it like no other.

Like the other games in the series, the one seems at times self-aware of it's own existence, toying with the player through fake reboot screens and characters specifically mentioning the gaming hardware. The game also has a certain self-importance about it. Kojima knew he was crafting a huge finale to a wildly popular series, and this is evidenced in his song selection. The opening song is a pathos-filled dirge sung entirely in Hebrew; the closing song a cover of Joan Baez's "Here's to you" from the film Sacco and Vanzetti. It's like Kojima wouldn't settle for anything less than these heavy, burdensome pieces to give his work some sort of gravitas.

I want to say more but I'm not sure what I want to say. There's so many different points of discussion, one could write a dissertation or hold an entire lecture series on this one game alone. Hideo Kojima is perhaps the most gifted auteur in the medium, and the amount of ambition in this game is staggering. I'm just not quite convinced the game lived up to that ambition, though it is still far and beyond anything else in videogaming. This one quote I found online says it best:

“That’s not to say that MGS4 is a failure because it simply isn’t, it is one of the best produced pieces of media of our time which so happens to be under the control of a mad man.”

After playing the entire series all the way through I've come to the conclusion that though this game may have it's flaws, I just might consider it the best narratively-focused videogame of all time (as opposed to something like Tetris, which might qualify for the best non-narrative game of all time), though it's difficult not to take the series as a whole into consideration when making that claim. But this comes with the heavy caveat: for now. No one else has ever come close to what Kojima tries to accomplish in this game; his ambition is extraordinary and the fact that he can pull it off with only a few gripes is equally extraordinary. But as I said, this is just possibly the best videogame series for now. Another game developer with similar ambitions and creativity could probably do better if they could manage to just rope in their ambitions a bit. Well, that's it. If you've made it this far, I thank you for reading this. Till next time.

Steampunk Willie

2009-07-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

Mickey's going steampunk. Well, it's not really confirmed, but the concept art for some unannounced game called "Epic Mickey" was found on an artist's webpage recently. Check it out, some of it looks amazing, especially this one of a tin-man like Goofy. The game is expected to arrive on Nintendo's Wii if it ever sees the light of day. Oh, and Yoggoth, if you weren't in the know already, Steampunk is so out, Dieselpunk is where all the cool kids are at.

Ludology Pathfinder

2009-07-08T09:41:00.000-07:00

(Doing some house cleaning here, this was posted back in May on sister site Cosmic American, but never made it's way here)

Allow me to gloat for a second here. I just finished up another semester of school yesterday, finally free to run around and enjoy the sun for a couple of months. The final project for one of my classes was to create a guide to a particular subject of our choosing. Known as a pathfinder in the library biz, these guides are designed to serve as an introduction to materials describing a subject, any subject, from Shakespeare to Dada. Naturally, I chose to make mine on videogames. It's got links to websites, the Ebert/Croal debate, and call numbers for those book-things in case you ever found yourself in a real library. Since no one else is ever going to see this thing besides my professor, I thought I'd share it with you here, have fun.

One Year Later...

2009-07-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

Apologies for not updating the blog, but I've been short on time this summer. Between helping my parents with their unexpected move, a trip to Portland, and a wedding trip to Las Vegas, I haven't had the chance to blog about my ludological pursuits. After delving back into The Orange Box and playing through Half Life 2: Episode 2 (and witnessing it's out-of-left-field tragic ending) I've finally busted open the one box on my shelf I haven't opened since I got it nearly one year ago.

Last summer I began my journey through the Metal Gear saga. Borrowing a friend's PS2 I played through the original Metal Gear Solid. I had missed out on the entire series when it first debuted, having never owned a Playstation product before. So excited was I to further explore this series, and with some new games on the horizon that I was keen on (I'm looking at you LittleBigPlantet) I did the completely rash and unexpected act of buying a Playstation 3. The Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle to be exact - the last of the PS3s to include some form of backwards-compatability with PS2 games.

Throughout the past year I've blogged on more than one occassion about the series, from it's grand statements on war, to the uniquely Kojima touches, such as funny little conversations you have to go through just to save the game. Now the time has come to finish what I started. The other night I peeled off the plastic of that case I've had staring at me for nearly a year now and popped the Metal Gear Solid 4 disc in and began the final journey of Solid Snake. I'll be sure to include my thoughts on it when I'm done.

E3 Hype

2009-05-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

To get you in the mood for next week's E3 event, may I present to you Sony's 2006 meme-generating press conference, enjoy!

Ludology 101

2009-05-14T15:19:00.000-07:00

Allow me to gloat for a second here. I just finished up another semester of school yesterday, finally free to run around and enjoy the sun for a couple of months. The final project for one of my classes was to create a guide to a particular subject of our choosing. Known as a pathfinder in the library biz, these guides are designed to serve as an introduction to materials describing a subject, any subject, from Shakespeare to Dada. Naturally, I chose to make mine on videogames. It's got links to websites, the Ebert/Croal debate, and call numbers for those book-things in case you ever found yourself in a real library. Since no one else is ever going to see this thing besides my professor, I thought I'd share it with you here, have fun.

On Ludology

2009-04-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

Recently I've been working on my final project for one of my grad school classes this semester. I'm putting together a 'pathfinder', essentially a listing of all materials available (from the San Jose King library) on a given subject. I chose videogames (of course) as my subject. More specifically I chose ludology, those materials pertaining to the academic study of videogames. In my search for relevant sources I've come across many interesting materials. What's fascinating to me about these materials is not just that games are being examined in a critical light, but that the discussion is so new that reading about it makes me feel that I'm taking part in its creation. It's not like most stuff you read in school where the theories being presented are based on well established ideas, and as you're reading it you get the feeling that you're just an observer, barely skimming the surface of what hundreds of academics have thoroughly plowed. This stuff is new, raw, fresh. Just being able to find something on the topic feels like a success.

It's like the boundaries haven't even been set yet. As I read this stuff I get the feeling like this is a new frontier, it's just starting to get mapped out, and that if I'm clever enough I can claim a piece of this land and contribute to the greater whole.

Take for example the name of this new territory. So far there isn't even a real word for it. There seems to be some mass developing behind the word 'ludology', which I've taken and ran with as the name of this blog. Ludology is based on the Latin word 'ludus', meaning either 'sport', 'school', or 'game'. But what does this 'study of games' even mean? It's not the study of the actual coding and creation of these games, though parts of that creation are definitely open to discussion within ludology. Is it about the story or narrative of games? Well, it's not really that either, though narrative lends itself more easily to discussion. Maybe it's about the culture of gaming, i.e. game console wars and fanboys. Hmm, not sure. Thinking about it, while ludology isn't necessarily any one of those things, I think it might be all of those things, but with something more. It's like the old 'sum of the parts are greater than the whole'. Ludology is an attempt to discuss all of these aspects simultaneously while attempting to derive some greater meaning from the whole. It wants to answer the question, 'so what's the meaning behind all of this?' What insights into the human condition do these games give us?

Just like with cinema a century ago, when its moving pictures allowed us to take a look at ourselves away from the context of the action happening immediately before us as it had for centuries upon the stage, asking ourselves how we would react if confronted with the situations those characters face up on the screen, and creating tension, drama, and intrigue though camera angles, dramatic cuts, lighting, and music, videogames not only allow us to examine how we would react when we are faced with those same situations and cinematic devices, but asks us to go a step further and actually physically interact and carry out the actions of those characters.

How does a player react in the game Bioshock when he is given the decision to save or kill the genetically altered, deformed girls known as 'little sisters'? How does the player feel in Metal Gear Solid 3, when near the end of the game, after a lengthy cinematic cutscene in which the main character's mother/mentor figure asks for you to mercy kill her, the game gives control back to the player and demands that they physically press the controller button to carry out the action? These are just some of the questions that ludology asks.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (Kojima, 2004)

2009-04-03T12:29:00.000-07:00

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a commentary on the ever-shifting state of the world's superpowers and on how the wars and grudges these countries hold against one another are ultimately meaningless when history is viewed as a whole. Widely regarded by fans as a return to form for the series, Hideo Kojima not only continues to expand on the mythos of the world he's created, but continues to explore his distinct storytelling style and unique take on the American action-military genre.

Snake Eater is the third game in the Metal Gear Solid series, though it takes place first in the series chronology as it serves as a prequel. Kojima takes us back to the height of the Cold War in 1964. The tale Kojima spins deals with everything from the Cuban Missle Crisis, power struggles between Kruschev and Brezhnev within the U.S.S.R., to discussions about then-current films and ramen noodles.

We meet Snake about to be sent off to the swampy jungles of the fictional Russian province of Tselinoyarsk to retrieve a defecting Russian scientist. Upon his retrieval this scientist explains how a certain faction of the Russian army was forcing him to work on a terrible weapon called 'The Shagohod'. It's obvious to us, the player, that this Shagohod is a precursor to the future 'Metal Gears' which we've so lovingly encountered in the previous two games of the series.

As is usual a twist happens in Snake's plans, as just as he's about to escape with the scientist, Snake's mentor shows up - only ever referred by her codename 'The Boss' - and takes the scientist with her, and says she's defecting to the Russian side and joining an elite group of fighters known as 'the Cobras'. She then proceeds to throw Snake off a bridge to what should be his death, with Snake only managing to grab a hold of the bandana the Boss was wearing - the bandana that becomes Snake's familiar signature headpiece.

For the player this sets up the mystery that drives the game - why is the Boss - Snake's mentor and hinted-at possible lover (and even mother) and number one soldier in the U.S. - defecting to the Russian side?

Snake manages to survive falling off the bridge and is rescued, taken home to heal up, and given his new mission - eliminate the Cobras, rescue the scientist, and kill the Boss. This third time through a Metal Gear game this is all somewhat familiar. Kojima enjoys this style of splitting the narrative. Just like in MGS2, first there's an initial sequence of gameplay that lasts no more than an hour, a first act if you will, which functions as a sort of extended prologue. This is then followed by a second act, where the real 'meat and potatoes' of the story occurs.

By this third outing it might be useful to talk more specifically about Kojima's style and his use of certain motifs which carry the story. One such element Kojima likes to employ is what I'll call the "ritual game save". In all three games whenever the player wants to save their progress in the game they have to go through a certain in-game routine. The player must essentially 'phone-in' to headquarters, speak to someone (always a female) to tell them he wants to save. This is always followed by some sort of conversation with the female, usually with a lot of flirting.

In the first game it was Mei Ling, a cute Chinese-American girl who always told Snake these useful proverbs that at first seem somewhat serious but by the end of the game got a little wacky (an example of Kojima toying with the player). These proverbs usually fit with the context of what was happening at the moment. So, for example, if there were a lot of enemy patrols in the vicinity she might give a proverb saying to the effect of "it's better to avoid confrontation and be sneaky rather than fight".

In Metal Gear Solid 2 in the opening 'Tanker' chapter the save is carried out by Snake's scientist buddy Otacon who attempts to emulate Mei Lings proverbs but doesn't quite get them right, functioning as a kind of subversion of Mei Ling's advice (watch here). In the second act these game saves are carried out through conversations between Raiden and communications officer/girlfriend Rose, where they discuss their relationship and what it means to be in a relationship (watch here).

In Snake Eater saving happens with the communications officer codenamed 'Para-medic'. This time instead of proverbs or relationships, Para-medic likes to talk about films and usually tries to relate those films to what Snake is encountering in the game. Here's one discussing Godzilla. Watching this clip clues you in to Kojima's fondness for self-referential jokes, like how Para-medic bets they'll still be making Godzilla movies in 2004. In another conversation Para-medic tells Snake about a new movie she's just seen called From Russia with Love. The Major in charge of the mission is apparently wild about the movie and, with the writers playing completely to the audience, the Major says "007 is the biggest thing to come out of England since the Mayflower. I wouldn't be surprised if they made 20 more of those movies!" The James Bond references are further explored during the opening title sequence, a brilliant send-up to all 007 movie openings.

It cannot be stressed enough that Kojima enjoys borrowing heavily from film. Just watch the opening scene, complete with an initial quote which sets up the theme of the game, the opening shot of the airplane flying through the clouds, and the starring credits fading in and out. It looks like something straight out of the Hunt for Red October. Also in this scene you'll notice Kojima subverting players expectations again. When we first see Snake here he's wearing a mask that makes him look like Raiden from the previous game. He even dons the same breathing apparatus that Raiden wore as he made his initial swim into the Big Shell.

I mentioned in the beginning that most fans of the series considered Snake Eater to be a return to form. What I meant by that is that fans were disappointed with MGS2 because they wanted to play as the hero, Snake, but instead had to play whiny voiced hero-in-training Raiden. I, for one, enjoyed playing as Raiden. I believe those fans who found themselves disappointed with the previous game missed the point that Kojima didn't want us to play as the hero, but instead wanted us to experience the narrative from the perspective of an outsider observing the hero.

When the player initially sees Snake in this opening scene looking like Raiden the initial thought is "Oh no, am I playing as Raiden again?" The answer is of course, no, Kojima is just having his way with you.

This method of making the player aware that the game is playing with them is endemic of Kojima and the Metal Gear Solid series. From the British Film Institute's 100 Videogames Screen Guide:

What is most interesting about Metal Gear Solid, however, is that for all its filmic intentions, it is a game that is supremely confident with its game-ness. At various points, characters draw attention to their presence in a videogame, or even to the paraphernalia of videogame hardware and interface. Where intuition might tell us that rendering the interface transparent or even invisible might be the most effective means of creating immersion or presence in the narrative and world of the game, Kojima and his team brazenly remind the player of the constructedness of this experience. This is postmodern media in playable form.

Whereas the theme of the original Metal Gear Solid was genetics, or 'gene', and the that of its sequel being a discussion on the nature of information, or 'meme', Snake Eater's theme is 'scene' - the climate in which events occur and the impact it has upon them. From the Metal Gear Wiki: "Scene deals heavily with Relativism, the idea that concepts such as right and wrong or allies and enemies are not absolute or eternal; but instead are personal and transitive, shaped by our cultures and the times we live in." Unlike past games I was aware of what the theme was going into this game. Funny enough I didn't really catch any major strands of the theme until near the end of the game when the Boss gives her big speech. This speech is typical of Kojima's style in that he wants the player to understand his intention so he tends to lay it down rather heavily when he does.

In this speech the Boss describes a realization she had while on one of the first manned missions into space. Having witnessed the Earth from so high she realized that national boundaries are just a figment of our beliefs, and over the course of time those nation states that define those boundaries slowly change their relationships with those other powers. Examining history as a whole those relationships that define the current political 'scene' are rendered meaningless, as today's enemy is tomorrow's ally, as she makes the point when speaking about Russia (and 'prophesizing' that one day the Cold War will be over when we're fighting a new enemy). From the Wiki: "The Boss is a victim of circumstance. Her "scene" - Cold War Era America - forces her to, ultimately, give her life. Snake is forced to kill his former mentor due to a "scene" he not only has no control over, but has no knowledge of." By realizing she's only playing a part in this Cold War 'scene' she realizes the meaninglessness of defining things in absolutes, in terms of right vs. wrong. She realizes that her actions as a solider are rendered pointless, leading her to accept that the wars she fights are ultimately futile.

The Metal Gear series has always been about the futility of war, each game examining that futility through a different lens. The original game was about how we pass on our culture through our genes. The second game examining how we define our culture through its accumulated knowledge. Now this third game deals with how we define our culture through our relationships with one another and the meaninglessness of defining those relationships as right or wrong.

A few final notes. I should point out how well the game pulls off being a prequel. Whereas other more well known prequels deliver a sense of inevitability - we already know Anakin will turn into Darth Vader for example - Snake Eater managed to completely surprise me. It wasn't until about two-thirds of the way through that I began to realize that I was witnessing the birth of a major character, arguably the most important character in the entire series, and I hadn't seen it coming at all, yet when it finally came together it happened so naturally that I was pleasantly surprised with how well it was pulled off.

I also have to give a nod to Harry Gregson-Williams' score. The Metal Gear series has always had amazing music, but Gregson-Williams manages to outdo himself in this game. From the bluesy take on the Metal Gear theme titled 'Old Metal Gear', to the previously mentioned over-the-top opening song performed by Cynthia Harrell, Gregson-Williams delivers a dramatic and exciting score. Adding an infusion of some Spanish guitar into the stirring Metal Gear Solid theme gives us one of the most memorable music pieces to ever come out of videogaming.

That's it for my look at Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Now that I've completed these three games I can finally play the game that got me interested in starting this series in the first place, the fourth and final part of the series, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Until then, happy gaming.

Why I Hated the 2008 Game of the Year

2009-03-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

Last year a small title made it's way onto the Xbox Live marketplace. This small indie game named 'Braid' was developed by Jonathan Blow, a new pioneer in the games-as-art movement. The story behind the making of Braid is a tale all it's own. Blow worked on the game for three years by himself and funded the entire project with his own money. Jonathan Blow is of the new school of game design. From Wikipedia:

In a speech at the Free Play conference in Australia in September 2007, Blow suggested games were approaching the level of societal influence of other forms of art, such as films and novels. One example that Blow cites is World of Warcraft, which he labels "unethical", stating that such games exploit players by using a simple reward-for-suffering scheme to keep them in front of their computer. In his view, developers need to think about what reinforcement the games are providing players when they reward them for performing certain actions. He emphasized that there was a need for developers to design inspiring new games using "innovative, ethical and personal art.

When Braid was released last year it instantly won over nearly every game critic out there. It also found great success with gamers, becoming one of the most downloaded titles through the Xbox marketplace. It eventually won the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences "Casual Game of the Year". Everyone loved it.

Not me. I pretty much fucking hated it. As you're probably aware if you read this blog I'm a bit of a proponent of games-as-art. Braid was the game that was supposed to cross that magical barrier into art land and make Mr. Blow and all the other gamers feel that their medium had finally reached that magical realm of 'art' next to sculpture and cinema. But I would beg to differ. I thought the story was poorly written, difficult to decipher, and the game itself was just too difficult to derive any meaning from it. There were many oppotunities for Blow to be more open with his narrative by giving the player an understandable and meaningful story, but it seems that at each opportunity to do so he purposefully hides the narrative through an obnoxious and pretentious writing style that only further obfuscates its intention. Why did Blow make this game and write this story if he didn't want anyone to see it? I think he might as well have just written the story in his diary if that's the case.

An annoying aspect about Braid is what's occured outside of the game itself. Because it's received such critical praise, because of the "Indie developer makes it big" story of its creation, and because of Blow's stature as an "Indie darling" most people seem hesitant to critique it. Critics think it's great because it has some sort of "mature" story and gamers think it's neat because it references older games such as Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, but for all I care Jonathan Blow can just go... blow himself (ok, that one was too easy).

At it's core Braid is a platformer, like Super Mario Bros. You play the character 'Tim'. The one difference is that you have the ability to manipulate time, by pressing a button you can rewind everything in the game world, like hitting the rewind button on a VCR where you get to see everything happen in reverse. This is also where the game derives its story. Tim is looking for 'The Princess', and there's a story told through books at the beginning of each world describing Tim's journey. Each level is basically a puzzle where you're trying to obtain a hard to reach jigsaw puzzle piece to complete a puzzle which reveals some aspect about the story and allows you to move on to the next world. These puzzles become increasingly difficult as you progress. By halfway through the game they're Grade-A Mensa level difficult. I'll admit, the puzzles can be fun and there's a nice rewarding feeling when you get when all of a sudden a puzzle 'clicks' in your head and you're able to solve it. It's akin to figuring out that really tough crossword clue.

This would be fine, but there's many problems. First off, the puzzles can be excrutiatingly hard. I stared at some for hours trying to figure them out. I think Blow went a little overboard with some of them. He's also quite adamant that the player figure out the puzzle with no help. On the official walkthrough there's basically no walkthrough. Blow only says "Figure it out for yourself". Like I said though, the later puzzles are really, really tough. I'll admit watching a few Youtube videos for some of the answers.

What's worse though is that some of the puzzles are just finicky as hell. For example, one puzzle piece is tucked away up high. If you jump off of a ledge there's a cloud that looks like you should be able to land on it and make your way over to the puzzle piece. I tried jumping from this ledge multiple times but was always just a little too far away from the cloud to land on it. I thought, "Well it would be too easy if all I had to do was jump on the cloud to get the piece", I mean, that's not really much of a puzzle. So I tried for hours to find some other method to get that puzzle piece. Finally I gave up and went to Youtube... only to discover that I was right all along, it's just that the game demanded you be standing on the very last pixel of the ledge in order to land on the cloud. Oh come on! That's not a puzzle, that's just overly demanding game design.

Hey it looks like Donkey Kong, it must be brilliant!

But that's not the worst aspect of the game. The worst part is the story. Critics said it was a mature story that really made you think. The story, told through the books, is written in this completely obnoxious prose that sounds like it came out of a high school writing class. Yes, it's trying to be deep, but it comes off as pretentous. Here's a typical passage:

“But to be fully couched within the comfort of a friend is a mode of existence with severe implications. To please you perfectly, she must understand you perfectly. Thus you cannot defy her expectations or escape her reach. Her benevolence has circumscribed you, and your life’s achievements will not reach beyond the map she has drawn.”

And it doesn't get any better. After completing the game I still have no idea what the game was about. Was the Princess even a real person, or did she just represent some sort of ideal? The problem is that Blow leaves the story so open to interpretation that it ceases to have any real inherent meaning. There's really no concrete aspect of the story that you can point to and say "This is what I think the story is about." Is it about the loss of a relationship? Is it about the perils of nuclear weapons? Is it about the loss of innocence? Is it a commentary on the state of the medium? Only Jonathan Blow knows.

There's an interesting disussion over at The Brainy Gamer between the writer of that blog and another about the meaning of Braid. I have to say, I was delighted when I read Mr. Brainy Gamer's response where he too wasn't the biggest fan, and he's a much better writer than I. Check out what he says. Braid comes to the PC on March 31st.

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Well blogging friends, I'm off to Reno to celebrate my 30th birthday with a bunch of friends (LE was too cool for school to come). When I get back on Sunday I'll be 30, so you'll no longer be able to trust me, as I'll now be part of 'The Man' trying to keep those young rapscallions 'down'. If you want to join the party we'll be at the El Dorado in the Player's Spa Suite (sounds awesome, eh?).

One Billion Games Played (not by me!)

2009-03-06T10:21:00.000-08:00

According to Bungie studios' website, as of last Saturday over one billion games of Halo 3 have been logged. Here's a brief blurb from Bungie:

"Saturday night, while many of us were stuffing food into our faces, plenty of folks were still playing Halo 3. At precisely 6:36pm PST, in a three minute and nineteen second game of Infection on Foundry, four players participated in Halo 3's one billionth match.

One Billion. It's a giant number, one that's difficult to understand without the proper context. Our first thought was to put it into perspective by comparing Halo 3's total games played with its predecessor, Halo 2, a title that we are still super proud of, and one that's topped the original Xbox LIVE Leaderboards since its launch through to present day - over four years of online gaming.

But there's a problem with that comparison. Halo 2 has yet to achieve one billion games played. As of right now, it's sitting pretty at 798 million total matches played. Surprised? We were."

For the record, as of this writing I've contributed 1,661 games of those billion (see here). That's 1,661 x 5-10 minutes of my life playing this damn game. Funny enough, I still haven't passed the mark on how many Halo 2 games I've participated in - 1,780. Congrats Halo 3, here's to another billion!

Escape from City 17

2009-02-13T11:15:00.001-08:00

Here's a short film based on Half Life 2, made by two brothers for 500 bucks. If this were done by a Hollywood studio it would be loaded with unnecessary CG effects plus they'd probably throw Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep in there for name recognition. Give me a full length feature made by these guys and I'd be set (and from the promo at the end it looks like they might just be making a few more).

Another Contender

2009-02-03T15:04:00.000-08:00

In my quest to play through the Metal Gear Solid series I've begun the third chapter of the saga: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (yes, that's the title!). Ladies and gentleman, I think we have another contender for the Best First Levels in Videogames. I am continually impressed with what this series has to offer. Hideo Kojima must be some sort of mad genius, as he is able to expertly take traditional western-fare and infuse it with a distinctly Japanese flavor, and by that I mean, a distinctly strange flavor. It's almost as if Kojima sat around watching western action films his entire youth and then attempted to go make his own in videogame form, but with everything not quite how we've come to expect from such films, and all done in a quirky, somethings-a-little-bit-off kind of way. You could even say he's like the Japanese equivalent of Quentin Tarantino (is that going too far?).

Take for example, the opening to Metal Gear Solid 3. This time Kojima is aiming for the prequel treatment. We find Solid Snake traipsing around the jungles of southeast Asia sometime during the late 60s/early 70s. The first hour of the game opens with Snake dropping into the jungle via parachute, encoutering old foes from the previous two games (or are they new foes since this is in the past?). The gameplay is all done quite expertly. But what really seals the deal here is the opening song which plays once you've finished the cold opening, like, say, a James Bond film! Oh, did I say that? Because the opening song that plays is nearly a shot-by-shot parody/send-up of every James Bond opening music video ever made. And just like Kojima is want to do, there's just something not quite right about it.

Oh sure, it's got the soulful female vocals (man they really need to get Tina Turner to sing this song), they've got the big band sound, they've got the trippy silhouette images (they forgot the naked ladies though), but the lyrics... At first they sound typical, but when they start to get going they're just... Well, here's an example: "Someday you go through the rain/And someday, you feed on a treefrog" Huuuhh?? Please, just watch and enjoy for yourself:

I love it. I can't get the song out of my head. It's just so spot-on. What's even better though? Watching other people sing the song on youtube! Hot Girl, check. Girl in her bedroom, got it. These two guys take the cake though, tell me which one you think is better, the one labeled The Definitive Cover, or the "WTF were they thinking?" Karaoke guy? I could seriously watch these all day.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Now In Bitingly Satirical Webcomic Form!

2009-01-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

Did reading my piece on Metal Gear Solid 2 get you interested in experiencing the game but you don't want to go through the motions of playing it? Don't fear! Someone has gone ahead and translated the entire experience into hilarious satirical webcomic form. Live Journal member Hiimdaisy has put up four pieces that go through the entire plot of MGS2, but done in a way that just makes the whole thing funny while staying true to the actual game. I laughed my ass off through all four pieces, though if you haven't played it you might not find it so brilliant. Check out "Let's Destroy Metal Gear Again!" Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Kojima, 2001): The Mega Analysis

2008-12-23T11:34:00.000-08:00

Upon the release of Hideo Kojima's 'Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots' earlier this year, critics heaped praise onto this final chapter of the Metal Gear saga. The review at Gamespot, my preferred site for reviews, begins with this:

"Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is the most technically stunning video game ever made. It's also a fine example of storytelling prowess within its medium, combining gameplay and narrative so slickly and beautifully that it's impossible to extricate one from the other. It's likely you will emerge awestruck from your first play-through, wishing the experience would continue yet nonetheless satisfied with its conclusion. It's difficult not to sound hyperbolic when discussing MGS4 because every part of its design seemingly fulfills its vision, without compromise. There is no halfway."

I am not here to talk about this game. I'm here to talk about 'Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty'. I haven't played the fourth title yet, but what that review says about the fourth title I would apply to the second. I'm going to go ahead and say that for me, this was the best videogame narrative I've ever experienced. By the time the final credits rolled I was so blown away that I had trouble sleeping that night, trying to make sense of what I had just experienced.

Speaking to a good friend a few days later, I said that it's almost a shame that MGS2 is a videogame, in that it requires you to play it to experience it, that you can't just sit back and be a passive observer. But that's also the beauty of it, because the game begins to toy with you right off the bat, leading you down further and further rabbit holes, which eventually start to break the fourth wall, leading up to a point where you, the player, are the one being played.

It's difficult to talk specifically about MGS2 without giving too much away. It's told in two chapters. The first chapter begins with you, back as Solid Snake, investigating a tanker leaving New York harbor in the middle of the night. It's been two years since the Shadow Moses incident, the name given to what happened in the first game. Snake now works with Otacon, the scientist and inventor of the original Metal Gear, for a group named 'Philanthropy', with the goal to rid the world of all Metal Gears, which have now become widely available since Ocelot, one of the main baddies from the first game, made off with the test data after the Shadow Moses incident and sold it on the black market. Otacon has learned (under mysterious circumstances) that a new version of Metal Gear is being transported on this vessel and Snake is being sent to investigate. Snake makes his way onboard, and let's just say things don't go as planned, resulting in the tanker sinking just off the coast of Manhattan.

Then the real story begins. In chapter 2 you start off as Snake, or at least you think you're Snake, being given a briefing in a scene eerily reminiscent of the original Metal Gear Solid. You're reminded about an oil tanker that sunk off the coast of Manhattan two years ago, and how the government came in and created 'The Big Shell' - an offshore platform built to clean up the mess. Just like with the original MGS, you're told that the President was touring the facility when terrorists took over the platform and are demanding a ransom, otherwise they'll kill the President and blow the Big Shell, resulting in an even greater environmental disaster. Then, in a bizarre twist, you're told that the leader of the terrorists is Solid Snake himself! And then it's revealed that you, the player, are not Snake, but Raiden, an effeminate whiny-voiced soldier who's had extensive training in virtual reality scenarios but who's now on his first real world mission.

This completely throws you off as the player, for you know what happened two years ago with the tanker, you just played that part, and now you're not only told an alternate history of those events, but you're told that Snake was responsible (which he wasn't)! And on top of that you're not playing as Snake, the hero, but as some other guy! What's going on here??

Things get weirder. Colonel Hoffman, who, just like in the original MGS commands the operation, informs you that he had to get a replacement communications officer due to some unforeseen circumstances. For the replacement he's picked... Rose, your girlfriend? Raiden is baffled by this, as are we. Over the course of the game Raiden will have many conversations with Rose via Codec, a sort of video-chat player Kojima uses as his primary narrative device. These talks with Rose are often lengthy discussions on the meaning of relationships, the importance of communication, and the importance of trust. I've never witnessed such conversations in a videogame, and even most television and movies don't go into such painstaking detail of how conversations in relationships can play out. Plus she refers to Raiden by his real name, Jack. So we've got Jack and Rose, a la a movie about a sinking ship, I don't think this is just coincidence. Watch an example of these conversation here (skip the first 20 seconds).

More bizarre things happen. As the story progresses you run into a man who looks and talks exactly like Solid Snake (voiced by the same actor), but who goes by the ridiculous name Iriquois Pliskin. You meet another Cyborg-Ninja, just like in the original game, who gives you a gift from some group called the 'La Li Lu Le Lo'. As the game goes on the rug is continually pulled out from under the player. Twists within twists. Eventually the game itself (or is it Kojima?) starts to toy with you, implementing fake game over screens ('Fission Mailed' instead of 'Mission Failed') and other bizarre happenings that break the fourth wall.

And then comes the finale, where the game becomes so bizarre and ridiculous I didn't know what to think. I was reminded of the infamous boat ride scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where you begin to think the director is either crazy or he's just having his way with you. I thought, "Has Kojima just lost it at this point? Is he just messing with me knowing that I'm too far involved not to continue?" Things got so strange near the end that I called out to my girlfriend in the other room to come witness what I was seeing to make sure I wasn't crazy. I thought that perhaps Kojima was some alien genius whose brain functioned at a higher level because I have no idea how he thought this stuff up, wrote it, and executed it so brilliantly. It's like some bizarre combination of the intricate and meticulous plots of Umberto Eco, mixed with the surrealness of David Lynch, and topped off with a dash of eccentric Japanese anime flair.

I can't describe the ending without ruining the story, but it ends with a whole treatise on the nature of self and truth, the importance of faith and free-will, and how our past is linked to our future as a species. In attempting to understand everything I stumbled across this site (it's one huge spoiler, you've been warned) which is devoted entirely to a discussion of the finale. I found this part was a good summation of the first two MGS games:

"The first Metal Gear Solid deals with the question, 'How much of a human being is defined by the genes?'. Naturally, the theme for the second is its complimentary part, 'How much of a human being is defined by information?'"

Update: This last Christmas day my dad gave me a catalog from MIT press to look at to see if there were any books I might be interested in. I ran into this book, which appears to deal with what I think Kojima was trying to say. Also, I've read that Goedel, Escher, Bach is another good place to start.

That's it for my look at Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. I'll leave you with the closing credits to the game, set against shots of New York City and Federal Hall (where the game ends) with a great accompanying jazzy piece of music that fits perfectly. Stick around for the end to hear Snake's final monologue (and click on Part 41 if you dare to listen to the final Codec call, a Metal Gear tradition, major spoilers!).

P.S - Did I forget to mention there's a part where Raiden runs around naked? You can watch a short X-Play retrospective of this memorable incident.

Update: Shoe Attack Already Turned Into Videogame

2008-12-15T15:58:00.000-08:00

Not 24 hours since the incident occured a game company has already gone ahead and made a flash game based off of this soon-to-be-infamous event. Play it here. No respect I tell ya', no respect!

Update: Check out these animated .gifs, I really like the Matrix and Three Stooges ones.

Mega Man: The Movie!

2008-11-24T15:14:00.000-08:00

Ok, so the above trailer isn't for a real film. It's just a fan made trailer for a fictional Mega Man movie. There's a lot of fan service going on, so if haven't played a Mega Man game in a while you might not get it all, but for a couple of fans working with zero budget it's pretty damn fun to watch and imagine "what if...". Now, it's nowhere near as good as the fake Legend of Zelda trailer IGN.com put out earlier this year, which looks so real that upon viewing it my girlfriend said "why don't they just make the real thing, millions of people would go see it anyways." Besides the ridiculous looking Ganon, it looks like a real trailer for a real film. Watch it below:

The Best Halo Clip You'll See This Week

2008-11-12T14:30:00.000-08:00

Skimbleshanks the... Dance Dance Revolution Cat??

2008-11-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

Broadway will turn anything into a musical nowadays. ANYTHING. Legally Blonde? Check. ABBA tribute? Check. Dance Dance Revolution the musical? Check! Word on the street this morning is that everyone's favorite "let's watch the fat kid excel at the one thing he's good at" party game will be making it's debut on Broadway. It's about damn time I'm sure some of you are saying.
This adaptation of the popular dancing video game franchise will star Van Hansis of As The World Turns. And if that doesn't clinch it for you, perhaps the description of the musical will:

"Set in an Orwellian society where a dance prophet named Moonbeam Funk helps dancing youth gangs rebel against a fascist government. The company working on the show describes it as "like Footloose set in the future — but kind of scarier, and with 40 really attractive, barely-clothed young actors and buckets of free beer."

Footloose, in the future! Sign me up!

Time to Line Up (for a Wii)

2008-10-10T10:12:00.001-07:00

NPR posted an article recently comparing the rise of recent videogame sales to the rise of movies during the Great Depression. In the pun-tacularly titled article "In Tough Economic Times, Video Games Console", writer Laura Sydell examines how during the Depression people started going to the movies more in order to find some cheap entertainment and forget their worries, and sees similarities to our modern times. While movie revenues continue to remain even, sales of videogames are up 43% from this time last year. She sees this in part as "getting more bang for your buck." Looks like more and more people would rather pay $50 for something that will keep them entertained for months rather than something that lasts just a few hours.

With Nintendo Wii's still flying off the shelves (I've yet to actually see one on a store shelf and they've been out for nearly two years now), combined with Nintendo's heavy marketing focus on families and the casual gamer, plus the rise of HDTVs, it looks like more Americans are deciding to stay in instead of going out. And with the Dow dropping another 679 points today, it may be that way for awhile.

Bungie Announces New Halo Game, Internet Asplodes

2008-10-09T15:37:00.000-07:00

Late last night, or early in the morning if you were there at the Tokyo Game Show, Bungie announced that the new game they are working on is Halo 3: Recon. With an amazingly cool trailer and equally cool box art, the internet promptly asploded into a million bits. This time there's no Master Chief, it looks to have a darker tone (doesn't that Covenant ship look a lot like the ships from Terminator?), and it looks to take place on Earth between the events of Halo 2 and Halo 3. Well actually it takes place during Halo 2 since in the trailer you can see the slipspace rupture caused by the Prophet of Regret's ship entering slipspace which promptly destroyed New Mombasa which happened right after the first few levels of Halo 2... oh just watch the trailer here.

Number 1: Super Mario Bros. - "World 1-1" (Nintendo, 1985)

2008-10-02T09:56:00.000-07:00

Number 1 on my list of best first levels in videogaming is the first level of Super Mario Bros. This level is probably familiar to anyone who has had even the remotest contact with videogaming. It's also probably THE most played level in any videogame ever if you think about it. Who doesn't know those opening few steps, running up to the '?' block, the little Goomba which makes its way towards you, only to be squashed by Mario's jump, with a mushroom power-up as a reward? And then there's the memorable tune, the Super Marios Bros. theme if you will (not sure on the actual title or if it even has a title). It's so simple, yet so catchy, and ultimately very memorable. Nearly anyone who played the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the 80's can hum along with it, it practically defined the sound of videogaming during that time.

Then there's the story of a plumber named Mario and his brother Luigi, off to rescue the princess of someplace called 'the Mushroom Kingdom' from a giant turtle/dragon thing named King Koopa (the name Bowser would come later). Moving his way from left to right, Mario conquers his foes by 'stomping', or jumping, on top of them, encountering bizarre enemies such as large turtles, some of which have wings and fly, fireball spewing piranha plants that pop out of giant oversized pipes, flying men in clouds that drop spikey turtle things, hammer tossing turtle brothers, and all sorts of strange and bizarre creatures. Oh, and in order to 'power-up' the character Mario, he acquires giant mushrooms that pop out of bricks, which glide away unless Mario runs after them. Who the hell came up with this stuff??

The man behind this madness is Shigeru Miyamoto, whose name belongs in the above credits more than Nintendo does. A student of art and industrial design, Miyamoto was hired by Nintendo of Japan in 1977 as a staff artist. A few years later, when the newfound Nintendo of America was struggling to come up with a hit, Miyamoto was recruited to design a new game. This was rather unprecedented as nearly all videogame designers at the time hailed from the computer programming field, no one hired 'artists' to make games. He ended up creating two of the most enduring videogame charactes to date, a giant barrel-tossing gorilla, and a little mustachioed protagonist originally named 'Jumpman'. This of course was the game Donkey Kong. The name Jumpman was changed for the American release. The story goes that Miyamoto and the other designers were sitting around trying to come up with a name for this character when their landlord Mario Segale came knocking, asking for the overdue rent. And thus Jumpman became Mario.

World 1-1 is a great level because it does nearly everything right. Right off the bat it teaches you that you can stomp on your enemies to get rid of them. The '?' blocks invite you to 'hit' them from below, and the very second block contains a power-up, which is nearly impossible to avoid since it slides around and bounces off the pipe in front of you, coming back in your direction. The aforementioned pipe teaches you to jump over obstacles. What makes it all work is that the gameplay just feels right. Mario's controls are very tight and precise. There's a lot of nuance in his jump, so that with a good run Mario can leap over a long chasm, or with just a short press of a button he'll jump correspondingly shorter. Mario's stomping move is also well implemented. Enemies such as goombas are defeated with just one hit. Koopas require two hits to get their shells moving, but even then there's the danger that their shell will bounce off of an object and come flying back, sometimes resulting in a shell infininetely moving back and forth. The addition of the fire flower power-up allows Mario to shoot fireballs, with koopas now dying in one hit, thus adding another level of depth to the simple gameplay. All in all, everything from how Mario controls, to how the enemies behave, to the availability of power-ups, it all just works.

Gaming journalists often talk about a lack of a 'Citizen Kane' of videogames. Newsweek's N'gai Croal doesn't like this debate, in this article from Slate.com, he says this:

"Would you ask whether literature had produced a Guernica, or whether photography had produced an Oedipus Rex, or whether film had produced a Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde? What's with this urge that many people have to compare games to other media—particularly movies—and find them wanting on those other media's terms? (Are we all Roger Ebert now?)"

I can see what Croal is trying to get at here, that every media should be taken on its own terms. Perhaps in comparing videogames to film we are missing the point, we should be looking at the genre of videogames as their own unique medium, it's just not fair asking for a Citizen Kane to come along and legitimize the form.

While Croal and others are arguing over this I think they're missing the Citizen Kane of videogames lurking right here in their midst. We've had it since 1985, and it's the game this article is about. I would say that Super Mario Bros. is the game these guys are looking for. Super Mario Bros. was responsible for arcade games transitioning into modern videogames. Until that point gaming was something you did at arcades, bowling alleys, and bars - something to pass the time away while you threw back some beers. The purpose of games like Pong, Asteroids and Donkey Kong was to provide the consumer with some fun while getting them to throw another quarter in the slot. There was no real concept of 'progress' within a game, there hadn't been born the idea that a game could be 'finished'. Have you seen The King of Kong? (highly recommended by the way) Only a handful of people have ever gotten to the end of Donkey Kong, and there's no real end, the game just sort of bugs out. With Super Mario Bros. gamers were invited to play a new kind of game, one where they could progress through a series of levels and ultimately defeat a big bad guy and win the game.

Super Mario had elements of arcade games that came before it, and through a combination of an amazing art style, memorable music, a bizarre world, and expertly crafted gameplay, it helped elevate gaming to something that hadn't been seen or done before. Gaming was no longer just about playing a game to see your high score, it was now about enjoying the whole experience, from the music to the visuals, familiarizing yourself with the layout of each level, and learning how to master the controls until you too could get to that final castle and save that damn princess!

Oh, and to take the analogy of films and videogames one step further, it would probably be better to compare Super Mario Bros. to The Godfather, with Super Mario Bros. 3 as The Godfather Part II.

For all these reasons, Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 is my pick for best first level of all time. Watch it here.

Number 2: Half Life 2 - "Point Insertion" (Valve, 2004)

2008-09-19T11:57:00.000-07:00

Returning back now with my list for best first levels in videogames, the number 2 spot belongs to the opening of Valve's sequel to its astounding masterpiece "Half Life". The opening level of Half Life 2 is called "Point Insertion". It begins with you, as our hero Gordon Freeman, being awoken by the mysterious "G-Man", who we'll come back to later. The original Half Life opened with the level "Anamalous Materials", with Gordon going to work on his first day of his new job at Black Mesa, a sort of secret government testing facility.

What makes the Half Life games unique is that the entire story is seen from your point of view. There are no cinematic sequences, no cuts, nothing at all to remind you that you are playing a game. The games play in a sort-of real time, with everything being directly experienced by you as the player. This was best witnessed during the opening of the original Half Life, with Gordon entering the Black Mesa facility as if he were just going to work, with the characters around you greeting you, giving you your nametag and ID and showing you your office. There was a never a game as immersive, and the game laid the groundwork for many games to come, such as Bioshock, which was also featured on this countdown.

So why did I choose Point Insertion over Anamalous Materials? Well, Anamalous Materials was absolutely amazing for its time and Point Insertion definitely couldn't have happened without it. But I'm of the opinion that the opening of Half Life 2 provides for a greater gameplay experience, subtly teaching you the mechanics of the game while effectively showing the world and conveying the atmosphere better than its predecessor. Anamalous Materials could be faulted for its lack of gameplay. While the opening tram-ride scene has been lauded, it doesn't provide for much gameplay besides looking around and taking in the environment. Because of this, I find Point Insertion a better opening level, if only by a hair.

What is the story of Half Life you may ask? Well, Gordon Freeman, fresh out of M.I.T., arrives for his first day of work. He's invited to take part in some sort of experiment which utilizes his knowledge of nuclear physics when something goes wrong during said experiment, opening a dimensional rift, allowing trans-dimensional aliens to invade and overrun the facility. After a lengthy battle working his way through the facility battling not only the aliens, but also the military who've been sent in to "contain the outbreak", Gordon succeeds in stopping the invasion and is subsequently placed in some sort of stasis by the mysterous "G-Man", an unknown figure who pops up throughout both games who appears to be observing Gordon and his progress (think of the cigarrette smoking man from The X-Files).

As I stated in the beginning, Half Life 2 opens with you, as Gordon Freeman being awoken from your stasis by the G-Man who ends his opening monologue with the lines "The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. So wake up Mr. Freeman, wake up and smell the ashes."

You awake to find yourself on a train. There's just a small handful of people with you there. They're all wearing the same jumpsuits, with numbers sewn onto the chest, like something you'd see in a prison or concentration camp. One of them remarks that he didn't see you get on. The train pulls into the station and as you walk out the door you are presented with the grim nightmare world of Half Life 2. Apparently not everything went well after your success at Black Mesa. As you learn over the course of the game, an alien force known as "The Combine" has taken over the world. Having been attracted to Earth after you accidentally opened the dimensional rift in the first game, the Combine quickly took over in what became known as "The Seven Hour War", after which Earth surrendered. Apparently the Combine have decimated most of Earth's population, leaving only a handful of humans left to live in highly controlled city centers known only by their number.

You are greeted on the overhead TV screens by a welcoming voice. "Welcome, welcome to City 17. You have chosen, or been chosen to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers. I thought so much of City 17 that I elected to establish my administration here in the citadel, so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors. I am proud to call City 17 my home. And so, whether you are here to stay, or passing through to parts unknown, welcome, to City 17. It's safer here. " This is the voice of Dr. Breen, who will become the antagonist of the game, and you can detect just a slight hint of uneasiness, or maybe it's weariness, in his voice. This is definitely not the Earth you left behind.

As you make your way through the train station you are treated to an amazingly life-like world. From the dilapidated buildings, to the way the "Civil Protection", in their gasmasks and creepy vocoder voices push you around, to the little scenes that take place (like where you can see the poor guy being interrogated through the slit in the door), the game effectively builds the atmosphere of a nightmarishly dystopian world, that perhaps recalls the horror of WWII ghettos.

You run into an old friend disguised as a member of Civil Protection (CP) who briefly catches you up on what's been going on. He's part of an underground resistance movement against the Combine and directs you to make it to a nearby safehouse. Soon you make your way outside to the main plaza, where you first catch a glimpse of the enormous Citadel, a towering alien structure many miles tall. You make your way through a few alleyways where you stumble across the CP in action, terrorizing and beating a few citizens inside an apartment building, apparently for no reason. This scene reminds me vaguely of the part in THX-1138 with the robot officer beating the person being broadcast on TV (also used as a sound sample on the opening track of Nine Inch Nails' 'The Downward Spiral'). This is definitely a grim world.

Eventually the Combine picks up that you aren't supposed to be in the city. Over a loudspeaker you hear a calm British female voice saying there's been a miscount of people in the sector. Soon the CP are onto you. They chase you across the rooftops, with alien-like helicopters on your tail. You make your way to another building only to find yourself surrounded by CPs. That's when you are saved by Alyx Vance, the comely daughter of one of your old work buddies, who becomes your companion for the remainder of the game.

This level does a lot of things right. It sets up the atmosphere for the rest of the game and it teaches you the basic mechanics of the game with nice subtle touches, like how it teaches you to pick up objects by having a CP officer order you to pick up a piece of trash and throw it away. It's also interesting how there's no HUD during this first level. With no life bars or ammo gauges to clutter up the screen it allows for a more immersive experience. For all these reasons this is why I've chosen Point Insertion as my number two pick.

Watch the level here, and if you're interested watch Anamalous Materials here.

(As a side note, I really enjoyed the ending of this game too. Though it could be said that it's exteremely abrupt, I thought it fit perfectly. Also, I haven't played through Episodes 1 and 2, so please no spoilers!)

Rock Band 2 Is Broken

2008-09-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

This just in from my favorite gaming blog Joystiq: The talking parts in Rock Band 2 are broken. Need proof? They recited the Declaration of Independence to the Beastie Boys' "So Whatcha Want" (a song that doesn't have any singing parts) on Expert difficulty and got 100%. Not only that, but it's in the most drab, monotone voice possible, and hilarious! Watch it here and giggle away!

Number 3: Resident Evil 4 - Pre-title sequence (Capcom, 2005)

2008-09-08T15:56:00.001-07:00

The opening of 2005's Resident Evil 4 starts off as quite the innocuous "first level" but just as the player begins to grasp the gameplay's basic concepts, turns into one of the most thrilling, exciting, nail-biting sequences in modern gaming, and hot damn is it fun!

In Resident Evil 4 you find yourselves back in the shoes of Leon Kennedy, star of Resident Evil 2. In the opening cinematic we listen as Leon summarizes the events of RE2 (townsfolk turn into zombies created by evil corporation, Leon saving the day - the usual zombie plot). We learn that Leon has gone from lowly police officer to government agent superstar. When word breaks that the President's daughter Ashley has been kidnapped while travelling abroad, Leon is sent to an unnamed foreign country (ahem... Spain) to her last known whereabouts to track her down and bring her back.

When you arrive on the outskirts of a small country village everything appears normal. You enter a house asking a local resident about Ashley. While Leon talks, the resident sits there with his back towards Leon stoking his fireplace. Suddenly he turns around wielding an axe. You respond swiftly, taking him out. You take out a few more folk along the road as they attempt to attack you. They don't look like zombies, they just look angry... strange.

Ok, so you've gotten about 10 minutes to try out the controls, get a basic idea of how to aim and shoot, taking out a couple 'non-zombies' when without warning the game amps up the difficulty of the situation to a nearly absurd degree. You enter the village proper and see the residents going about their business. You creep around the side of a house to get a better look. One of the townsfolk spots you and then suddenly the townsfolk go f-ing batshit crazy!

A huge mob makes its way towards you, armed with axes, pitchforks, and other blunt instruments. At this point you have several options open but the most common one is to barricade yourself inside a nearby house. You run inside, you can move dressers and tables in front of the doors and windows to slow the oncoming mob. You think you're safe for a minute when suddenly there's a guy with a freakin' burlap sack over his head wielding a chainsaw coming through the door straight at you!!

You run upstairs, find a shotgun mounted on the wall and take it. The townsfolk are putting ladders up to climb through the second story windows, they've made it past your barricade and are moving inside the house towards the staircase. The chainsaw wielding maniac is gunning right for you, with the intent to stick that chainsaw right in your head. You do the only thing you can, you just start shooting in every direction. You take out one guy only to have three more directly behind him, you shoot the chainsaw guy right in the face with the shotgun yet he still gets back up! Some crazed woman is running at you with an axe! You don't know what to do, you're shooting at this crazed mob but they just keep coming at you, you're running out of ammo, you're thinking "Oh shit, am I really supposed be taking on ALL these people this damn early in the game??!?"

And then as suddenly as it began - it stops. Church bells ring in the distance, the townsfolk turn around and leave, making their way towards the church, muttering something about "Lord Saddler". Leon walks outside. As Leon whirls around asking himself where everybody went the camera pulls away, moving to an aerial view of the town, and THEN, finally, the title of the game comes up, with the words "Resident Evil" and you realize that you've only just seen the intro to the game. Then you realize that you've just pissed your pants.

Watch a video here (sorry for the poor quality but it's the only decent one I could find).

Number 4: Bioshock - "Welcome to Rapture" (2k Games, 2007)

2008-08-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

The number 4 spot on my list belongs to the opening of last year's critically acclaimed Bioshock. The game takes place in the city of Rapture, an art deco underwater city built as an objectivist utopia by a megalomaniac of a man named Andrew Ryan (a sort of play-on-words/anagram for Ayn Rand). You play as a man simply named 'Jack', who is the sole survivor of a plane crash in the 1940's mid-Atlantic ocean.

Bioshock is a fascinating game because the game tasks you with hunting down and killing 'Big Daddies' - giant 'men' (we never get to glimpse who or what is inside) encased in oversized old-fashioned diving suits. You need to get rid of these Big Daddies because they protect the Little Sisters, small girls who walk around and harvest a material named 'Adam' from the dead bodies strewn around Rapture. You see, upon Jack's arrival you learn that something has gone horrible amiss in Rapture, leaving most of its citizens dead or so drugged-up that they've become ravenous killers. What you learn is that in this "anything goes" objectivist society, a new sort of drug/genetic modification was developed, called 'Plasmids', which gave its users phenomenal powers over the elements, allowing for such things as shooting electricity from one's hands, or the ability to turn water into ice. But something went wrong. It's a bit of a conceit, but is well implemented in the story. Plus it allows for some great old-fashioned advertising, like the old cigarette commercials from the '50's that look so silly and antiquated nowadays.

When you finally get to one of these Little Sisters you are presented with a choice, you can either choose to 'harvest' them, taking all the Adam they've accumulated but killing the Little Sister in the process, or you can choose to save them, removing the leech thing from their backs and returning them to normal, but sacrificing the precious Adam in the process. The first time you are confronted with this option it can be almost terrifying as you see a little girl looking at you in fear with the two options laid out in front of you. It seems that most people are unable to kill the little sister the first time, opting to save her instead.

The game also has one of the greatest twists in modern gaming, and in perhaps all of gaming. I don't want to divulge what it is here, but it's a great example of the reader-response school of literary criticism and really leaves the player to question what their role is in playing a videogame. I honestly felt that my trust hadn't been so much betrayed by the characters in the game, but that it was the actual game makers themselves who had betrayed me. I wish I could say more.

In the "Welcome to Rapture" segment we, as Jack, wake up from the plane crash to find ourselves floating in the water with the ruins of the plane crash around us. Water has never looked so damn good in a game. The fact that you don't have any sort of display at this point leaves a lot of people sitting there for a few minutes not realizing that the game has started. You swim a short way and see some sort of lighthouse protruding from the water nearby. You swim over to it and upon opening the front door are greeted with the statue of a scowling man holding a giant banner that reads: "No Gods or King, only Man". A short trip down the stairs brings you to the bathysphere (a giant diving bell). Upon pulling the lever the bathysphere closes and you are plunged underwater to begin your journey. Giant art-deco statues, straight from the cover of an Ayn Rand novel, appear outside holding signs which say how many fathoms deep you are. A movie screen pops up and a small "Welcome" movie begins to play. You are greeted by the voice of Andrew Ryan, who sounds something like Orson Welles, and he delivers his manifesto for why he built Rapture in one of gaming's great speeches:

"I'm Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question:
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his own brow?
No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone.
I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...
Rapture.
A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well."

After this little movie you are greeted with the city of Rapture before you. An art-deco masterpiece entirely underwater, like something out of Jules-Verne. My favorite part is the giant humpback whale slowly swimming between the massive skyscrapers. Soon you enter Rapture and find that something terrible has occured.

There's no specific endpoint to the beginning of the game, but for this piece I'll say it's when you get knocked out and see a Big Daddy/Little Sister slowly trudging past you, with the Big Daddy sounding like some sort of whale. This level is not only a great introduction to the game, but it effectively introduces you to combat, plasmids, and how to use your environment around you. I could go on about this game, but I'll stop for now. I highly recommend watching the intro to the game, you can find it here.

Can love bloom on a battlefield? - Metal Gear Solid Conclusion

2008-08-28T14:44:00.000-07:00

It's taken me a while but I finally finished the original Metal Gear Solid. In terms of plot, so much has happened since our last outing that it's hard to wrap it all up. Hideo Kojima, the creator of the series, really enjoys large, complex plots. Essentially, Snake learns that he has to stop the Metal Gear from firing. He also learns that he's been injected with a genetic virus called "FoxDie" which is a virus programmed only to kill certain people. Snake learns that he was injected with FoxDie which would kill all of the terrorists trying to take control of Metal Gear, but he learns that it is designed to kill him also. Basically his whole mission was a setup by the government from the beginning - in order to cover up the secret of the Metal Gear project, which if exposed could cause huge tensions between the superpowers of the world, Snake was injected with FoxDie. When he came into contact with the various terrorists they would be exposed to it and die (thus why the DARPA chief died of a mysterious heart-attack, because he wasn't the DARPA chief at all, he was one of the terrorists in disguise! Still following?). Snake also learns that the leader of the terrorists, Liquid Snake, is actually his twin brother. You see, they were all part of a genetic experiment during the '70's called 'Les infantes terribles' which was designed to create the ultimate super-soldiers from the cloned DNA of 'Big Boss', the bad guy from the original Metal Gear games on the old NES. They share the same genetic code and that's why Snake will also die from FoxDie. In fact, we learn that Gulf War syndrome is a byproduct of the genetic engineering, because all those soldiers over there were injected with stuff that essentially caused their genetic makeup to change to that of Big Boss's. Oh yeah, that Ninja that Snake encountered earlier turns out to be the brother of one of the operatives on your team, but he's not really her brother, he's actually her parents' killer!!! If you're wearing your tinfoil hat at this point don't be ashamed.

So as we can see, Kojima likes his plots complexo-to-the-maxo. But ultimately (and thankfully) not much of the plot is relevant to our discussion. Metal Gear Solid deals with a lot of themes not usually found in videogames. At the end of the story Snake knows that he's going to die from the FoxDie, but he doesn't know when. In fact, Naomi (who's brother was the Ninja) tells him that he'll die when his time is up, but until then he should "live life!" Kojima explores destiny and fate here. If Snake could die at any moment, then what's the difference if he didn't know he was infected at all? Should he let that control his life?

Kojima also deals here with finding purpose in one's life. Throughout the game Snake is constantly asked "what are you fighting for?" If he's just a mercenary, does he have actual beliefs, or is he purely just a gun-for-hire? During one of his conversations with Master Miller (who ultimately turns out to be Liquid in disguise), Miller says to him "The only difference between a murderer and a soldier is that the soldier has a purpose." Do we need to give ourselves over to something greater to find purpose in life? At the end, Snake escapes from the compound with Meryl (the Colonel's niece) and decides he'd like to finally give his life purpose by giving himself to Meryl. Watch the final cinematic here (skip to 4:15 to get to the actual speech by Naomi addressing this topic).

Speaking of love, the scientist who Snake helped rescue earlier, Otacon, delivers one of the more awkward lines in the history of videogames. During his time being held hostage by the terrorists Otacon falls in love with one of them. Later in the game, after he's been freed by Snake, Otacon approaches Snake and asks him "Do you think love can bloom, even on a battlefield?" Though its hard not to chuckle when you hear this line, it's Kojima once again driving home the point that we need to live life for a purpose, that we can't just live for ourselves, but that we need to live for something greater. Watch the scene here.

So, is Metal Gear Solid art? It's hard to say. The game certainly has a strong message. While most other games in the same league (I'm looking at you Halo) have larger than life heroes and a sense of epicness, their messages are ultimately pretty thin. But with Metal Gear Solid Kojima is actually trying to tell us something. Unfortunately most of this message is conveyed during lengthy cinematic cutscenes which technically aren't part of the gameplay, but more like watching a movie. Perhaps as a compromise we could say that the game isn't art, but the story and message contained within is.

Until next time, I'll leave you with the closing song from Metal Gear Solid 4 - a cover of Joan Baez's "Here's to you" from the film 'Sacco e Vanzetti'. Oh yes - Kojima goes there.

Number 5: Doom - "Hangar" (id Software, 1993)

2008-08-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

For the number 5 spot on my list of best first levels I've chosen the first level of Doom. A lot has been said about Doom. Though Wolfenstein was the first real first-person-shooter (also created by id Software) it was Doom that really grabbed people's attention and introduced them to the genre. Seeing everything from the eyes of the protagonist was a first for many people. But what really made Doom famous was its use of gore and violence. For its time it was an incredibly good looking game, and the blood, well, we thought it looked so damn real!!

I remember the first time I saw Doom I was blow away. Was this real? Could I really just walk around shooting zombies and other creatures, watching them keel over in disgusting death animations uttering a dying moan as I pumped another round into my shotgun?? Would I get in trouble for playing this game??? For it's time it was an extremely violent game. This was back in the era when Bart Simpson uttering "Eat my shorts" was pushing the limits and offending Barbara Bush. No one had seen a game quite like this before.

In terms of the actual level "Hangar" it's a great little introduction to the game. You start out with the wimpy pistol but in no time you get the shotgun, a highly effective weapon which also produced some of the more grisly death animations. Fighting through a small group of gun wielding zombies the player is soon introduced to the fireball-spitting Imps. An experienced Doom player can get through this level in under thirty seconds, but there's a surprising amount of depth if you take your time. There's a couple of secrets to be found, including access to the outside courtyard. This also makes this level the perfect level for the introduction of the "Deathmatch" mode.

Doom popularized Deathmatch mode for thousands of kids across the country. It seemed so revolutionary at the time - instead of shooting the monsters, you connected up two or more computers and shot your friends! The introduction of Deathmatch helped lay the groundwork for the online deathmatches that you can play today in hundreds of games, from Counterstrike to Call of Duty to Halo. In fact in most games today some sort of "multiplayer" mode is practically mandatory. But there was nothing like it at the time. In fact, once you got a taste for fragging your friends it could be hard to go back to the normal game. For all these reasons, this is why "Hangar" from Doom takes number 5. To take a look at actual gameplay footage click here.

Zrbo Presents: Top 5 "First Levels" of Videogames

2008-08-26T11:22:00.000-07:00

As you probably know I'm a connoisseur of videogames. There's a certain enjoyment that comes with playing a game that can't be found through film or music. Especially when a game is new, there's nothing like getting home, ripping off the plastic and popping the disc/cartridge/floppy disc in and firing up that game for the first time, taking in the graphics, the music, and, most importantly, the gameplay.

The following posts will highlight those opening moments of videogames. More specifically I'll be looking at those great first levels of videogames. The top 5 "first levels" I've chosen are ones I believe effectively teach the player the basics of gameplay, give the players a taste of what the game is about and what's to come, and in cases where the game has a story to tell, introduce players to the story and leave them wanting more.

This list is not meant as a nostalgia trip, though you may find a whiff of it here and there. Also, my knowledge of videogames is not nearly complete and there would practically be no way for anyone to have played every single game out there, so please excuse me if "your favorite game" didn't make the list. The following list is composed of games that I have played, though that was not necessarily a criteria of mine. I hope you enjoy what's to come, and I'll try to make it as easy to read as I can for the non-gamers out there. Lad-, er, gentlemen, the top 5 first levels of videogames...

More Parodies

2008-08-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

Back now with another round of gaming-related parody videos. Last year in the run-up to the launch of the Halo 3 videogame, a series of award winning ads aired for the Halo 3 "Believe" campaign. This series of ads was played out like a PBS World War II documentary, with "interviews" from "veterans" of the futuristic war between the humans and the alien Covenant depicted in the Halo series. This series of four videos can be seen here, here, here, and my personal favorite here below (the old guy in this last one really brings it home in my opinion):

In addition to these four ads, a huge diorama display was built and used in one additional ad (and was so popular that is subsequently toured the country). This diorama displayed a huge battle between the Covenant and the humans, with the commercial playing a piece from Chopin and containing a little twist at the end. Honestly I think it's an amazing piece. Watch it below:

There's a new Viva Pinata game coming out soon (Viva Pinata being both a game series and kids show on TV). The Viva Pinata ad campaign delighfully parodies the faux-gravitas the "Believe" ads try to achieve, with the cleverly titled "Believa Pinata" diorama parody taking the cake in my opinion. Watch both ads below:

Top 10 Forge Art Halo 3 Screenshots

2008-08-07T16:00:00.000-07:00

From Hawty McBloggy comes these great screenshots of stuff people have made using Halo 3's Forge (a sort of level editor). All of these were made out of objects in the game such as barrels, guns, power-up items, etc. Check out some of my favorites or click the link above to see them all.

Guitar Hero

E.T.

Batman

Alien

The Saga Continues (part 2)

2008-07-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

Here am I back with part two of my analysis of the Metal Gear Saga. Since our last outing with our hero Solid Snake, Snake has infiltrated a warehouse full of nukes. He was told by the now-dead weapons company exec that he needs to find Dr. Hal Emmerich, creator of the Metal Gear project. After facing off against a ninja-cyborg (who seems to know Snake from somewhere else), our hero finds Dr. Emmerich. The Doctor, who prefers to be called Otacon, explains just what the Metal Gear project is. The project is to create a giant bipedal walking battle tank fully armed with nuclear warheads, able to fire its nukes from anywhere on the planet. Unfortunately Otacon thought the Metal Gear would be used only for defensive purposes, only now realizing that his project will probably be used for more something more nefarious. There are many parallels here with the guilt behind those who took part in the Manhattan Project. Not fully realizing the implications of nuclear technology, some of those scientists felt regret the rest of their lives. It's actually layed on pretty thick here, with Otacon revealing that his grandfather had been involved in the Manhattan Project and that his dad also just happened to be born the same day as the bombing of Hiroshima. Kojima seems to enjoy laying things on thick. As we saw with the eight minute long speech against nuclear weapons in our previous outing, Kojima really likes to drive the point home, perhaps even overshooting it a bit. It's like he wants us, the player, to know that he is specifically addressing us. This goes against the writer's adage of "show, don't tell". Sometimes it seems that Kojima would just rather tell us. It can definitely pull you out of the game.

And it would seem that Kojima likes to pull the player out of the game. Continuing on, Snake meets up with Meryl (pictured above), the Colonel's daughter (it's a long story but the Colonel who's giving Snake the orders has a niece who joined Fox-Hound before they went renegade). What's interesting here is Kojima's use of "self-reflexive awareness of the game as a game" (I stole this from somewhere else, excuse me). After meeting up with Meryl you exit out into a hallway. Meryl calls attention to the fact that guards are no longer patrolling the hallways, which she finds odd. Then Snake replies, "What happened to the music?" It's then that you realize as the player that the game is talking to you, because in fact, the music in the game really has stopped. The tense spy-action background music, something the player probably never paid much attention to before, has ceased playing. I had trouble finding a good clip of this, for now go all the way to the very end of this one to watch.

Imagine in a film if during a particularly quiet scene one of the characters mentioned that there was no music. How odd would that be? Then, just a few moments later, when you enter a new part of the building the music starts back up again. When you get a call on your radio, one of the characters working with the Colonel specifically asks you if you've heard any strange music lately, and Snake responds with something along the lines of "Yeah, when I entered this part of the building I started hearing a little tune". Kojima seems to enjoy playing with the person playing the game, and not just the characters involved in it.

There are a lot of humorous moments in the game too. I'll get into that more next time, along with a discussion of the lengthy cutscenes as I promised last time.

Me and Louis Wu? Yeah, Weez Tight

2008-07-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

Me and Louis Wu? Yeah, I know him. If you don't, he's the webmaster of halo.bungie.org, the main fansite for all things Halo related. His real name is actually Claude Errera, but no one ever calls him that (his name comes from a character from Ringworld. Halo - Ringworld, get it?). His website is basically the main hub of the Halo community, with daily news postings, discussions, and anything related to the world of Halo. Louis is in fact so well known that his name appears in the credits of all three Halo titles, even the first, and also had a character in one of the games named for him. There's even a whole segment on the special edition of Halo 3 where they visit his house and interview him.

Sometimes if I see an interesting bit of Halo-related news that hasn't appeared on HBO (as the fans call his site) I'll send in an e-mail with the news. So far I've managed to make the front page twice, here, and here (look for Herr Zrbo).

So this morning I saw an interesting bit of news, checked out HBO and thought that I hadn't seen it posted there, so I sent off a little e-mail to Louis informing him of it. After I sent the tidbit I checked out the site again and noticed that the news I thought I had heard first was actually the first news item of the day, having been posted a few hours before. Whoops.

BUT, I did receive an e-mail from Louis! It read:

"Was the first news post of the day - still on the front page. : )"

Yeah, that's right. I got a personal e-mail from Louis. Like I said - me and Louis? Yeah, we go way back.

Bungie-gate

2008-07-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

This week, in the middle of the videogame industry's largest showcase, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), a tragedy befell the videogame community. For the past few months Bungie Studios, creator of the Halo series of games, had been teasing that something new was in the works. Many speculated that it would be another entry in the Halo series. Last Friday Bungie put up a countdown clock, ticking down to Wednesday morning. Fans were ecstatic, on Wednesday they would get to see something new, something marvelous. That day never came.

With just 12 hours to go, the countdown stopped. A message appeared on Bungie's website from Bungie president Harold Ryan, it read:

"For the last several months, we've been building toward a reveal of something exciting that Bungie is working on. We were looking forward to sharing that with our fan community during the week of E3. However, those plans were changed by our publisher.

We realize that many of our fans are disappointed by this turn of events. Members of the Bungie team share that disappointment."

So Microsoft, the 'partner' mentioned above, decided at the last moment to pull the plug on the reveal. Fans went nuts. Websites went nuts. Even the LA Times went nuts, interviewing Don Mattrick (the strangest portmanteau of a name ever), head of Microsoft's Xbox division, who claimed that the reveal was pulled "...to help trim its E3 presentation to under 90 minutes, from 2 1/2 hours, to accommodate attention-challenged reporters. 'We had an embarrassment of riches', said Mattrick." Thanks Don.

So it looks like we'll have to wait to see what gaming goodness Bungie was going to reveal. In the meantime, please enjoy this video above - it's the funniest thing I've seen all week.

Herr Zrbo Calls It

2008-07-11T14:44:00.000-07:00

Alright folks, here it is, I'm calling it. I'm gonna say the Mythic map pack for Halo 3 will be released September 23rd.

How do I know this when the map pack hasn't even been given the name 'Mythic', nor when any possible release window has even been discussed by Bungie studios? Well, with the release of 'Cold Storage' this past week for free (an excellent remake of the original Halo's 'Chill Out') Bungie has bought itself some time until it needs to release the next map pack. The last set of maps, the Legendary map pack, was released last April. We've got about two and a half months now until late September, the 25th being the one year anniversary of Halo 3's launch. Since new content is usually released on Tuesday, the 23rd looks like a fine day to release a map pack celebrating that anniversary. Considering that the map packs so far have been named after the difficulty levels in Halo, even though Mythic isn't an actual difficulty level, it's long been associated with Bungie studios.

You heard it here first folks, and if I'm wrong, I owe you a Coke.

The Saga Begins

2008-07-09T10:48:00.000-07:00

I've recently taken it upon myself to try out the Metal Gear series. Just a few weeks ago the final chapter of the series, Metal Gear Solid 4, was released. As I've posted before, it's been receiving rave reviews, with some reviewers calling it one of the best videogame narratives ever. After procuring (on-site?) a Playstation 2 and a copy of the original Metal Gear Solid (1998) I've begun my journey.

The man behind the MGS series is Hideo Kojima. He is both the creator and director of the series. One of the problems with videogames not being taken seriously as an art form could probably be attributed to the fact that games are made my many, many people, so there's usually no one identifiable person who leaves their distinctive mark or stamp on a game like there is with movie directors. This is not the case with the MGS series. Hideo Kojima, who is seen as a sort of auteur, is the driving force behind MGS. Some people think of Kojima as a visionary- a complete master of his craft, able to tell amazing, complex (actually, really complex) narratives. Others see his games mimicking cinema so much that they say he's in the wrong business, that he should be making films instead of videogames. For an interesting look at Kojima check out this article at the Brainy Gamer which compares and contrasts him with D.W. Griffith.

Metal Gear Solid starts out with the main character, Solid Snake, being given a mission to infiltrate a nuclear waste disposal facility in the Bering Strait which has been taken over by a rogue private military contract group called Fox-Hound, of which Solid Snake used to be a member. The game relies on you, as Snake, to sneak around and figure out what's going on.

What makes the game interesting, at least for me, is that the story is basically an analysis of the American military-industrial complex told from a distinctly non-American perspective. First off, the whole gameplay revolves around stealth. Fighting is usually a last resort, with sneaking around making the game much easier than if you try to fight everyone you see. I find this in contrast to most American made games, which usually have you shooting anything and everything, with violence being the easiest, if not the only answer. Whole books could and have been written on America's fascination with violence, but I think it shows here when your character doesn't fight all that much, even though you're told you're a top tier secret agent with deadly skills.

The other observation I've made so far is just how anti-violence prone this whole game is. There have been increasing anti-war/anti-violence themes and messages cropping up as I go along. Currently I'd say I'm a quarter of the way through the game. After rescuing a kidnapped weapons company executive (think Halliburton) the player is treated to an 8 minute long cutscene which goes into a whole history lesson about post-Cold War nuclear weapons disposal, how much nuclear waste is created each year, out-of-work Russian scientists looking for a job, and a whole diatribe on the evils on nuclear weapons. Watch it here (skip to 5:15 to get the real history lesson).

As the length of just this cutscene shows (and there are many more lengthy cutscenes), Kojima is fond of fashioning his games like they were movies, and that's what I'll explore next time.

Im in ur internetz

2008-07-02T14:13:00.000-07:00

From Gizmodo comes this great idea: Why have your wi-fi router named something mundane like '2Wire5420' when you could name it something more clever. Some of the examples they include are here for your enjoyment.

YourDaughterIsaWhore
Keepthatnoisedown
Thosepeoplein1583lookliketerrorists
YourWifeCheats
IHaveYourMail
GetYourOwnDSLCheapskate
MyNetworkIsLockedJackass
ISawYouNaked

So many options to choose from! Anyone else have any good ones?

The Greatest Game of All Time

2008-07-01T09:48:00.001-07:00

And now ladies and gentlemen, the intro to the game that sparked a thousand bases belonging to us - Zero Wing:

Microsoft finally fixes Xbox 360 DRM Issues

2008-06-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has finally got around to fixing their crappy DRM on the Xbox 360. Well, they haven't fixed the DRM so much as given Xbox users a way to consolidate all of their licenses onto one Xbox. The reason this has been such a royal pain is that the content you download is tied to the specific console that you downloaded it to. So, if for example you're like me and your 360 broke and you had to go get a new one (with the warranty you're glad you purchased), you could access your paid-for content only while signed into Xbox Live (XBL). This is fine most of the time as my console is usually plugged into the internet 24/7, but occassionally when XBL is down, or my internet was down, I was unable to play games I had paid for! Well, now you can fix this dastardly issue, just go to xbox.com. Now my girlfriend can finally play Zuma again on her own account, thank the gods!

The Smuggler = Chill Out = Cold Storage

2008-06-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

If you understand the subject line, you're excited, if you don't understand it, you probably don't give a damn.

Parodies of Parodies

2008-06-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

In late 2006 the game Gears of War premiered on the Xbox 360. Set in a war-torn futuristic world, Gears of War told the story of Marcus Fenix as he and his buddies fought back against the Locust horde. The game was pure machismo - the characters all looked and talked like football players, with huge, huge guns complete with chainsaw bayonets. It was a pretty violent game to say the least.

An interesting counterpoint to this violent image was the preview trailer for the game. It presented the game as this somber, moody piece, with the trailer set to the music of Gary Jules' cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" (originally featured in Donny Darko). You can watch this trailer here.

The videogame community reacted positively to this trailer. Soon, a few other games took this trailer and twisted it into a parody of their own. One parody of this trailer, comes from Battlefield: Bad Company with the appropriately titled "Bad World".

But the real cream of the crop comes from the Leisure Suit Larry series. In this video, Larry runs around to the same tune as the original Gears of War trailer, but finds something very different in the end. Watch the others first, then watch this.

Beastie Boys' Sabotage video recreated using Halo 3

2008-06-19T11:18:00.000-07:00

Some clever folks in the Halo community remade the video for the Beastie Boys' Sabotage video. Find it here, and find a side-by-side comparison here. I recommend the side-by-side comparison, I can't imagine how many hours they put into making this!

PS3 or not to PS3?

2008-06-17T11:46:00.000-07:00

Metal Gear Solid 4 came out last Thursday and so far the critics have been raving. A brief view of metacritic yields such praise as:

"Is it possible to give a game an 11? If so, this would be the game that would merit that score."

"Hideo Kojima set out to move and excite people, to truly make a work of art, and not just a fun videogame. Metal Gear Solid 4 is an accomplishment like no other."

"A true masterpiece that will be revered for years to come like its predecessors, but one that will stand through the tests of time and will still be referred to as perhaps the pinnacle of storytelling in videogames."

All this praise has got me interested. What could be so amazing about this game to get such glowing reviews as this? I mean, "the pinnacle of storytelling in videogames"? Wow. I've never been interested in a Playstation before, but now, jeez, I think I'm ready to plunk down by $400 a give it a chance, just to play this freaking game.

One way to look at the current generation of gaming consoles is in how much potential each console has left. By potential I'm referring to how much uncertainty each console still has in its offerings. The Xbox 360, as far as I can tell, has a fairly certain future. At this point it's put most of it's big offerings onto the table, it doesn't have much of a hand left. Halo 3, Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto. After this past holiday season there's really not many surprises in store. Sure we'll have some milking of the Halo franchise, another Gears game, but I don't foresee anything as mega-selling as Halo 3 coming along.

Next up is the Wii. When the Wii was first announced it definitely had the greatest potential. The idea of motion-based controls just blew everyone's minds away. Unfortunately I don't think the Wii ever truly utilized those motion controls to the extent it could have. Instead it seems to have become a haven for mini-games and 'shovelware'. An interesting read on this lack of squandered potential is from MTV's Stephen Totilo with an article a while back called The Case of the Missing DS Drawing Games. Now that the Wii has got it's obligatory Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kart, and Brawl games out of the way, I just don't see what big name items are left. Maybe another Zelda game before the current cycle is up, but even that's a bit of a guess. As far as I see it, though the Wii might continue to sell like hotcakes, there's really no more interesting games coming out for it.

And now we come to the Playstation 3. Usually I don't side with the PS3, but when it comes to remaining potential, this is where I think it's at. With pretty much nothing worth owning until now, the PS3 is still hiding its hand pretty well. Another Final Fantasy game, which is almost a certainty, hasn't even been announced as far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong). Blu-Ray being the winning format certainly works in Sony's favor, as does the price drop, which is right on the heels of the 360's current price. In terms of games, I think the 360 has the best selection right now, but in terms of potential, I think the PS3 has the most left.

So, is one game worth buying a Playstation 3 for? I'm not sure, that's probably why I'm writing this. The biggest thing that I have against the PS3 at the moment is that they dropped the backwards compatibilty, though the already-sold-out Metal Gear Solid bundle was backwards compatible, and just yesterday Sony said they were shipping more. If they do, I just might be tempted enough to buy me one.

In a more perfect world

2008-06-15T19:39:00.001-07:00

Check out this piece on Cracked.com (remember Cracked magazine, they're all digital now). It's a collage of videogame objects in the real world. I really enjoy the Donkey Kong one. Some are a bit obscure, even for me. Read it here.

Bungie announces new Halo 3 map

2008-06-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

At the MLG tournament in San Diego this weekend, Bungie showed off a new map, 'Cold Storage'. It's supposed to be a remake of Chill Out from the original Halo, and it looks a lot like the area from the final cinematic of the game, the one where Master Chief is taking a snooze (probably where the name Cold Storage comes from, hint hint). I don't have much experience playing Chill Out but apparently it's a fan-favorite, especially among the competitive MLG types. It's also not certain whether Cold Storage is one of previously known new maps, codenamed Purple Reign, Moonbase Alpha, and the recently revealed 'the Smuggler' (complete with it's own mini-ARG ). I, for one, welcome our new Chill Out overlords.