And then it hit me. The answer is, of course, a game show. The concept is simple: envision a game show, likely on Spike, where famous game designers are put on the stand. They are asked a series of difficult questions about their game design by a panel composed of industry experts and casual fans. For example “Epic, why did you make the chainsaw animation bizarrely long and also invulnerable in Gears of War?” or “Blizzard, why did you dumb down the challenge in your game until it could be played by a 3 year old with fetal alcohol syndrome?” Game designers will then be given a chance to rationalize their decision. And it has to be a lead designer – no sending the new guy or the intern to do your dirty work.

And why? Well, if you recall “You Can’t Do that on Television” on Nickelodeon (not to mention several other Nickelodeon slime based TV shows or activities), the threat of being slimed is great: not just the act of whatever the hell that stuff is, but the humiliation of of being publicly slimed made it all the worse. Any designer who does not explain his case to the panel of judges will find himself summarily slimed on national TV. Naturally, this can’t just be a TV show of vengeance. The incentive to appear on such a torture would be to promote a company, promote a game, and make rivals look bad. Arguably, one could set the show up to be a face off of designers and games, where the terrible are punished and the rational rewarded.

It is completely unrealistic, but I needed something to fantasize about as I experienced the latest atrocity of a patch from Eve Online.

This isn’t to say it’s a bad game. Sands of Destruction’s problem isn’t that it’s actually bad – it’s just that it’s never good. It manages to be almost entirely middle-of-the-road throughout, with no particularly exciting moments and only a few terribly boring ones. Its plot has an interesting premise, but gets dragged down by bland characters and predictable twists. Combat has the potential to be interesting, but is so easily broken that it ceases to be fun after the 8-hour point. Finally, despite compositions by Yasunori Mitsuda, none of the music is really memorable. It’s really sad when you see a game with this much wasted potential. I don’t think SoD could have been another Chrono Trigger or Xenogears, but it might have managed at least, say, Grandia or Lufia.

I couldn’t help but be disappointed when Sands of Destruction started to fall into the same old JRPG traps. It managed to avoid the one obstacle that stopped any of the games I named above from being really good – the flow of the game is really snappy, which is important when the encounter rate is fairly high.

The most fundamental disappointment, given my obsession with playing games that have good stories, is that SoD’s doesn’t have one. Giving the player the goal of destroying the world could have been interesting. Characters could have had complex (or at least moderately mature) motives for wanting to see the world end. Yet only one character in SoD, Morte, really wants to see the end of the world – and given she’s a teenager, it’s really hard to take her motivation that seriously. The rest of the group just follows her around – or, more accurately, follows the main character Kyrie around when he follows her. Kyrie himself starts out somewhat believable, but he falls too quickly into the stereotypical hero role. Plot twists that occur later in the game are telegraphed more and more – and, although a few parts were well-done, the rest of the game had become too mediocre at that point to really support it. Before long, SoD trips and falls into standard anime-inspired game hell, which has only gotten cheesier since its origin decades ago.

It seems that the easiest way to make a bad battle system is to make a simpler clone of a good one. SoD’s is a nod to Xenogears, in that you get action points and spend them on attacks and abilities. Without the Deathblow system to support it, and with all the special abilities both characters and monsters have, it ends up being simultaneously complex and mind-numbing. In many boss battles it’s better not to attack most of the time, because nearly every boss automatically takes a turn after receiving damage. Despite this ‘feature’ which serves only to frustrate the player, most bosses will go down in the course of a few turns if the skill upgrade system is (ab)used properly. It feels like the developers realized they made bosses cheat, and their solution was to allow players to cheat as well.

I’d be remiss to say Sands of Destruction was totally a disappointment. It runs fairly quickly both in and out of battles, and although many voice actors were sub-par, a few of them were decent. The plot takes an occasional unexpected twist, with one particular part – the fate of a minor villain – particularly well done and unexpectedly dark. Although SoD occasionally drags, the game is only about 16-17 hours total and never bogged down enough that I wanted to stop altogether.

Is Sands of Destruction great? Certainly not. But it is more fun to play than all the games I named at the beginning of this review, aside from Suikoden Tierkreis. It’s a little depressing that there aren’t better JRPG offerings on the DS, but there are at least a few more promising ones on the horizon.

With each click the characters moan, scream, and produce other sounds juicy with stimulation. Of course it’s not the meaning of the sound they make, it’s the fact that each of these noises is calculated to be so brief and repetitious, fading in and out instantly and producing a peak at just the right tone. It elicits pleasure in the player’s brain, and without thinking he or she understands that another such buzz is only a click away. When the clicking is finished, the number action begins. The screen fills itself with numbers. They sprawl across each other, mixing together, interacting to produce more numbers. They grow bigger and bigger, until they climax and the game returns to the clicking.

Okay, it may be more than a stretch to say that a game like Torchlight is sexual, but its mechanics play into a similar psychology. A simple enjoyment of watching a computer operate. Clicking mice and watching numbers change. It plays into the most basic instinctive motivation for using computers. You move your cursor around, unite numbers, watch them procreate into more numbers. A primitive instinct, but one that still hasn’t been overwritten even after decades of computer evolution, and probably never will.

John Carmack understood this dimension of games when he was quoted saying that stories in games are the same as stories in porn. Doom is violence porn just as Torchlight is number porn. This is a key reason why developers and players alike struggle for cultural validation, the non-game playing asexual public sees the violence and the statistics, and wonders why this should be taken seriously instead of kept private in dimly lit rooms.

This is an idiotic conclusion to make, despite how reasonable the logic leading up to it may be. A game that taps directly into primal instincts isn’t a bad game because of it, nor is it bad at all. Any sport will do the same, music does the same, praying does the same. A thing only becomes porn once it perverts its source into a drug. The most beautiful things in life are the most fundamental and simple, anything that glorifies those multiplies their value.

There is a fine line on the edge of pornography where art exists, and Torchlight walks that slackline without blinking. It’s a game that heightens the player’s understanding of number systems, where balances between complicated and subtle forces can produce various and unpredictable outcomes. The ability for the player to realize this resides in his or her own ability to walk that line. If the player wavers and falls, then the game can serve to stimulate that instinctive desire and nothing more.

Whether or not Torchlight or Doom or any videogame is lowbrow smut is your decision. But no matter what you decide, it’s important to understand the connection. Similarities undoubtedly exist and need to be recognized. If videogames want to achieve a higher status, then the similarities need to be reconciled.

That being said, we can still admire their most recent bout of antics.  Earlier this week, the company released a series of parody images that inserted Valve characters into classic Apple advertisements.  That might not sound entirely clever, but this is Valve we’re talking about.  They always have tricks up their sleeve.  Each of the fake ads was sent to just one news site, and the one that has actual text in it is an incredible homage to the rambling copy Apple used in the 80’s (90’s too?).   While we don’t know the details, there is little doubt that the company is preparing to announce Mac compatibility with Steam, or at the very least the Steam client with just Source Engine games.  The fact that the new Steam Beta UI is apparently made with Webkit helps further solidify the speculation.

But the Mac teasers are nothing compared to the method they chose to announce Portal 2.  A random and unexpected update to Portal added a slew of new radios, which play a blast of screechy noise when brought to a certain point in each level.  Fans decided to put the noises together and do some awesomely geeky analysis, leading to the discovery that the sounds decode into a series of teaser images when run through Slow Scan Television (others contained Morse Code messages). Better yet, when some of the decoded sequences were run through an MD5 hash translator, they revealed  the address and login info for an old modem-accessible BBS, which contains even more teaser pics.  Here’s a good article if you want some better explanations.

But as gamers continued to puzzle over each new secret, Valve had one more surprise.  Portal was updated once again, and if certain sites are correct, it was triggered by enough people logging into the BBS.  The patch sheet for the update  lists “Added valuable asset retrieval” as its sole feature, and gamers quickly discovered what that meant; the game’s ending was retconned, and Portal 2 has officially been announced.

While this is hardly the first time that a game developer has set up a clever Alternate Reality Game, Valve’s may be the most clever and cryptic.  Still, even if you award that title to Bungie’s ilovebees campaign for Halo 2, Valve still wins with the surprise factor.  ilovebees popped in preparation for the release of Halo 2, a game we knew was coming.  The Portal 2 announcement, however, is entirely out of left field.

And this is where my excitement turns into depression again.  I don’t expect every developer to do these kinds of treasure hunts: in fact, I don’t think I’d want them all to.  But while Valve’s ARG might seem unnecessarily obtuse, I feel like it is far more respectful to its  audience than more common forms of game advertising.  One popular trend among developers is to create a teaser site with either false (or unhelpful) information and a countdown timer that may lead to an announcement, or in some cases may lead to yet another vague teaser. This feels less like a gift as it does an insult.  Apparently we aren’t worthy of knowing their big secret, and have to wait in agony until they decide it is time for us to know.

On the other hand, Valve created this elaborate series of codes because it knew the fans would break them in a timely fashion.  They gave us the pieces to the puzzle, and let us figure them out.  When they’re all put together, the secrets within are not concrete, but are obvious enough that we can be certain of what they’re going to do at the minimum.  That’s a level of trust that few game companies have in its customers, though one that can only be created with years of interaction and loyalty.

All of this makes me wonder – is Valve so good at pleasing their fans because they are successful enough to have the ability to do so?  Or do they have that ability because they’ve always pleased the fans?  Maybe their model actually can be used for the good of the industry.

- Dear Sony – fuck you.  I understand that you wanted to put a demo out right before the game is released.  Everyone does it (or at least they should do it).  But you’ve got a lot of balls to then go ahead and tell the world that yes, this is the same thing you showed at E3 2009.    I might be reading too much into this one, but I think this is quite a daring bit of marketing psychology.  Sony knows that “core” gamers would kill to be able to attend E3 and feel like they’re actually a part of the industry.  Putting this label on the demo is a great way to convince this audience that, through their benevolence, Sony is giving them an opportunity to be part of the Secret Fraternity of Real Games Journalists, if only for a few minutes.

But I think a lot of gamers are smarter than that.  We have read about how E3 demos rarely reflect the final product.  We also know that God of War 3 has had another whole year to simmer.  I might be seeing “E3 2009 demo”, but what I’m reading is “We could have given you this demo any time in the last ten months, but we decided it would be better to sit on it, so that we didn’t have to cook up another one, based on the actual retail release, before March rolled around.  We probably would have served you better by letting you have this shortly after the Expo ended, but that would mean we actually cared about you. With this approach, we can trick you into thinking this, while in reality we continue to treat you, our loyal consumer, like the Unwashed.”

- This is one of those demos wherein they throw you into a level that may actually be in the final game, but with powers and abilities that will be impossible to obtain by that point.  It is an effective way to tease gamers with a taste of what the game can do, but being the (technically) fourth game in the franchise, I have something to compare it to, and it doesn’t stack up.  Kratos has been given even more special moves, including a new ranged attack that lets him pull in enemies Mortal Kombat style and set them up for a throw.  GOW2 was smart to remove the ability to infinitely chain air throws together, and this move may bring the problem right back.  Kratos also has a new throw  that lets him use his foe like a battering ram, giving him both several seconds of invincibility frames and a form of crowd control.  The demo also lets you use one of the alternate weapons, a set of giant melee gauntlets with surprisingly good long range capabilities.  In my experimentation, I found these  gauntlets to be disturbingly effective at interrupting boss attacks.   Not to mention the absurdity of giving a slow, close range weapon a  ranged attack.  It’s as if the game is afraid of making players compromise.  That probably isn’t far from the truth.

- I’ve always felt uneasy with the nature of the violence in this series, and this demo didn’t help matters at all.  The  camera tries harder than ever before to zoom in on the HD carnage of the game’s Quick Time Events, which continue to push the envelope in regards to blood and dismemberment.  Call me a sissy, but I’m not sure how much more I can take.  And curiously enough, I think the game feels the same way that I do.  The command icons that pop up during the QTE’s have been moved the left and right edges of the screen, so that the action can go on unobscured in the center.   So the cues you need to see are in one place, while the events the game wants you to see are in another, and rarely is there time for you to switch between them.

Fortunately for its sales potential, God of War is gamer comfort food.  But from a critical perspective, it has always been treading on thin ice.  GOW2 kept treading because it fixed critical combat flaws, and the PSP game was such a good graphical showcase for the PSP that it just barely slid along.  But this demo falls right through and drowns.  I understand that there isn’t much incentive to drastically change the formula with a popular franchise such as this, but others have at least been able to use current gen hardware to significantly increase the spectacle.  There is no evidence of this in the GOW3 demo, and what enhancements it does boast comes at the expense of the more sensible elements of game design.  It makes the game look as if it is desperate to justify its existence, so it flails its swords around in a fit until it accidentally cuts its own limb off.  It breaks things that never needed fixing.  Etc, etc.

And if the retail product does turn out better than this, then Sony only has themselves to blame for not coming out with a fresher demo.  I’m willing to be persuaded, but I’m not very receptive to trickery.