Expensive Planetarium

Movin' On Down to the Dino-Farm

2011-09-04T21:37:00.003-05:00

In my efforts to combine... well, my efforts, I've decided to consolidate my video-game blogging. Please stay tuned to http://www.dinofarmgames.com for future updates from me. In the short run, anyway, I'll be writing my game design articles up there instead of here. See you there!

Games and Music

2011-09-02T00:43:00.003-05:00

People who were raised with digital games as their primary source of games (I'm definitely one of them) grow up to essentially assume that games have music. The mid 80s to early 90s boom of wonderful, memorable game music only solidified this impression. The melodies from Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda are probably just as famous as the games themselves.

But is it actually kind of a weird thing that we expect games to have music?

What if toys came with music? How would that make us feel? Or board games? What if you unboxed Chess to play a game with your girlfriend, and all of the sudden it starts playing some song you never heard before. Maybe you'd be excited, and say something like "whoa, cool! There's music!" But if all board games came with music, I suspect your reaction would be more of an annoyance. What if you already had music on? Or the TV?

These days, more and more digital gaming is taking place on portable devices such as smartphones and tablets. With these devices, it's all the more likely that users will probably not want music coming out of the device. They're on a crowded bus, they're watching TV, they're listening to music of their own.

With 100 Rogues, one of the very first complaints we got was that the game didn't allow users to play their own music while the game was running. As composers, our first reaction was "but... we worked hard on our music!" Of course, we understood and patched in the feature as soon as possible, but it did make us a little sad.

For Auro, we're discussing whether or not to include gameplay music. At the end of the day, a big factor in whether or not we'll include music in our games is the fact that we just want to compose and publish our music for people to hear.

As long as it's easy to turn off, adding music to your game definitely isn't a problem, and some people will even really like it. However, we should not assume that video games need music any more than any other type of game.

"Leveling Up" - Game-Balancing Made Near-Impossible

2011-08-27T14:21:00.010-05:00

"Leveling Up" - it's the first check-box on the modern checklist-game-designers lists' everywhere! Because every game's gotta let the player Level Up, right? What could be the harm in that? Numbers are increasing!

That seems to be the thought process for designers these days, anyway. What was the last game that came out that you can honestly say had no sort of "leveling up"? Depending on how you define it, a commercial game with absolutely no "numbers are increasing" feature just won't get made these days. Some popular games, like Pokemon and Farmville, are almost nothing but leveling up. Now, I have massive problems with those games - don't get me wrong - but they are not what I'm here to complain about today (I haven't written about Farmville yet... I suppose because I feel that anyone can see what's wrong with Farmville; I almost believe that the creators and everyone who plays it already knows how much it sucks but they simply don't care). Today, I'm going to talk about the problems with adding Leveling Up into a game.

The most common example is in an action RPG of some sort, especially one that has a real-time combat system. Obviously, the player starts off with low player-skill at the game, but as he plays, he improves. Therefore, as the game goes on, the difficulty of the game should ramp up so that it's always providing the player with a challenge. However, there's also some sort of leveling-up system, meaning that the character is actually getting stronger. This, of course, makes the game get easier over time. As you can see, we have two elements working against each other in this extremely common model.

Another clear example would be sports games. If you have a sports game, you generally want to be pitted against more and more difficult teams as you play, because you're getting better, so you need tougher challenges. However, many sports games these days add "leveling up" on top, meaning that your actual players are getting better from match to match. If your players are actually getting better, then that means the game is getting easier to some extent. So, now if we still want the game to be getting harder, we have to make it even harder than originally planned to make up for the player's leveling-up.

So, I hope that it's clear how in a skill-based game, having leveling-up is really out of place, and thus it makes your game much harder to balance. Assuming your leveling-up system is at all non-linear (which it really should be), it becomes impossible to track where your player will be in terms of his core-stats, and therefore impossible to balance the game appropriately. Combine with this the fact that most digital games are probably too inherently complex to begin with and we have a recipe for the current status of digital games: perpetual imbalance.

Our games should not be fighting against themselves like this. When designing a game, we must decide what it's about, and stick to it. Is it a game about timing, accuracy, and twitch skill? If so, how does a leveling up system compliment that? I am not saying, by the way, that an action game cannot introduce new mechanisms to the player as he goes, in the form of new enemies, new weapons, new environments. These are all great ways to increase the difficulty that force the player to increase his own skill.

So where would you want a "leveling up" system? Firstly, I think that we need to re-examine what "leveling up" means. The most common type of leveling up causes most or all of your stats to simply increase. As this does not at all change the options This is the most useless form of leveling up that has no place in any game, as far as I can figure. Good games are about making interesting decisions. If leveling up is not interesting, then it has no place in a good game, because it doesn't have anything to do with making interesting decisions. This is a big factor in why games like Pokemon and Farmville are mostly just grinds - they're just about increasing the numbers.

One possible way to have a leveling up system that would work in an Action RPG would be to offer the player some new verbs that come with distinct upsides and down-sides. Obtaining a new weapon, or tool, for instance. Perhaps each weapon you can equip has a strong upside and downside, and you can only equip one at a time. This means that it changes the decisions you have to make dramatically, but it still does offer some new mechanisms or strategies.

The main thing that's important is that our game designs are not fighting against themselves from the inside, but we also don't want needless complexity in games. If your character's health is scaling upward regularly, but enemy damage is also scaling up, then you can just cut that whole system entirely out. A big part of game design is finding those sorts of things which cancel each other out, and remove them.

Finally - I know that all of the game designers reading this are still going to want to put leveling up in all their games. I just want everyone to recognize that not all games need it, and that if you do use it, use it wisely in a way that increases strategic depth.

Is it a Puzzle or a Game?

2011-08-13T21:57:00.008-05:00

I've been thinking about puzzles vs. games a lot recently. First off, let's just discard the terminology "puzzle game", which is not helpful, as it uses the term "game" simply to mean "any software which is interactive".

Puzzles have a "correct answer" that must be found. Once you know that answer, there is absolutely no joy in the puzzle anymore; it's all about finding that one answer. Look at a jigsaw puzzle - each piece has a place that it must go - there's no "decision" to be made, it's simply about finding that place.

While games are also about reaching a goal, games get there by a series of decisions on the part of the player - and none of these decisions have a pre-determined right or wrong answer. Even if a puzzle has 3 or 4 pre-determined right answers, a game has thousands of possible answers, and nobody - not the developer or the game itself knows if you've made the right choice when you make it.

At least that's supposed to be the case; many games have false choices due to failures on the part of the game developer. Does this mean that a bad/broken game ends up being more like a puzzle? If so, does this say that games are inherently better than puzzles? I know that I personally prefer games, but most games these days tend to be leaning toward the puzzle-end, so who knows. Leave me some comments on this topic if you like!

For now, I'd like to go through a few games and discuss whether they're puzzles or games, and explain why.

Portal - PUZZLE - People call Portal a game because it's digital interactive software. There are no choices to be made in Portal; it's simply about finding the pre-determined solution. This is why the Portal 2 multiplayer is somewhat silly; you can only play it once, and both players have to have never played it before.

Tetris - GAME - People think Tetris is a puzzle for a really dumb reason - that the tetronimoes fit together somewhat like jigsaw puzzle pieces. But Tetris is a game, due to the emergent gameplay problems that are a product of random piece generation and player skill deficiencies. You can also lose in Tetris. It's worth noting that in Tetris, there is no formal "win" condition. This doesn't make it any closer to being a puzzle, of course, because puzzles definitely do have their own sort of "win" condition. I'd say that you "win" in Tetris by beating a target high score (yours, or someone else's).

Super Mario Brothers - GAME(barely!) This is a really interesting one, because - and correct me if I'm wrong - it's very close to being a puzzle, not a game. Super Mario Brothers has no random elements, but some elements play out in a random way due to the fact that the player moves through the level at an uneven and chaotic pace. This means that the jumping Paratroopa is in a different position when you have to jump over it, and that the Lakitu has dropped 3 instead of 2 Spinys by the time you have to navigate through. This means that there is indeed "play" to the game. Real choices emerge, specifically with the power-up mushroom. "Do I pursue that mushroom and risk greater danger, or do I just move along and try not to get hit?" This is a serious choice with no right answer. If you were to take powerups and monsters out of Super Mario Brothers, I think it would be a puzzle, not a game.

It seems that a single player game has to have random elements of some kind in order to be a game. If it does not, then it is a puzzle. Keep in mind that random instructions for the AI counts - meaning, some variance in what the computer does in a given situation.

I'd also like to point out that most games these days have a tendency to "puzzle-ify" themselves with a linear "campaign mode" - a list of pre-built stages that all have singular solutions. As someone who likes games and pretty much hates puzzles, this is very unfortunate. But perhaps if we are able to better define "puzzle" against "game", then less of this will happen in the future.

Some old photos of me

2011-06-25T13:01:00.005-05:00

Here's some old photos of me that illustrate why you should listen to everything I say about video games! Only kidding. Sort of. But seriously, I'm pretty hard-core.

So here I am playing some NES with my sister Ashlie. Probably "Ice Hockey", if I had to guess. That was always (and still is) a favorite. Although it could be a 2 player non-simultaneous game like Super Mario Brothers; that'd explain why Ashlie's not looking at the screen at the moment.

I was all about Nintendo Power, and these strategy guides were amazing. I still have the Final Fantasy guide as well, and only 5 years ago I used it to beat the game. They're really fun to read... I think I lost the SMB3 one though, haven't seen it in ages.

So the other pictures don't show much - sure, I liked Nintendo as a kid, who doesn't? But this shows how much more I like video games than the average person. Age 12 or 13, two computers hooked up via serial cable (used those COM1 ports on the soundcards, weird shit) SPECIFICALLY for the purpose of playing Doom/Doom2 Deathmatch. Me and my friend Pete Hushvahtov built dozens and dozens of maps using DCK and DoomCAD, and spend hours every single day playing them and testing them out.

Later, we went on to even try to play Quake on these machines, which was a terrible idea. The computer on the left was an AST 486/66 DX (my first ever computer) and the computer on the right was a Gateway 386 (but I believe I upgraded the motherboard to a 486 by this point... Doom sucked on a 386). That Gateway has quite a story behind it - it was handed down through several of my gaming friends, and stayed with me, in use, for almost ten years.

So yeah, for those of you who were confused, that's why I'm not impressed with Halo.

Why I don't like Oblivion

2011-06-06T22:10:00.009-05:00

I mention Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in passing often as an example of modern video games gone horribly wrong, but I realized recently that I've never explicitly laid out my reasons for why I think Oblivion is such a failure.

One thing you have to know getting into this is that I'm talking about Oblivion, not some modded house-rule thing. You can mod anything into a good game. If you change the rules of Monopoly drastically enough so that it's fun to play, that doesn't mean Monopoly is a good game.

Anyhow, most of the people who I send this link to are going to have little patience with reading a bunch of pre-amble, so I'll get right to the reasons that I think Oblivion is not a good game.

Persuasion system - Bethesda needs to hire a "people who have interacted with people" squad, to tell them what it's like to talk to a human being. Then after that, they need to hire a game designer to tell them not to cram broken, asinine mini-games into their game for any reason. Watch an experienced player play Oblivion and use the Persuasion system and you will see that not only does it completely destroy any suspension of disbelief, but it's also a broken game mechanic. Depending on the type of character you're playing, it could be pretty central.

"Hello sir!"

*INSULT*
*FLIRT*
*THREATEN*
*JOKE*
*BRAG*
*COERCE*
*THREATEN*
<3 *BEST FRIENDS* <3

Quest/Radar - The quest/radar system renders the entire game so dumb that you can program a bot to beat it by giving it the following instructions: 1. mash interact button 2. follow green arrow. 3. repeat. Nothing kills the feeling of "adventure" like a green arrow telling you EXACTLY where to go.

Massive world / Fast Travel / Copy paste dungeons - What's the point of a huge world if they have to copy paste material and allow the player to teleport around at will? Why not just make it a smaller (like 1/8th the size, still big) world that's completely unique material and never needs "fast travel"?

Bad writing - I know, it's a video game so it's supposed to have bad writing, but for an RPG it counts heavily against you. The writing in this game was horrible - absolutely saturday morning cartoon level. Most people just don't notice it because they have this switch that gets turned off in their brain when they play video games, the switch labeled "be at all critical about writing".

Sloppy solutions - The difference between game designers and Bethesda is that Bethesda absolutely hates coming up with creative solutions for design problems. Instead, they like to slap on a total shoe-horned solution. Want examples? How about the weapon/armor system? How do we balance that so that you don't get a weapon that's too good too early. Oh, okay, a weapon with a level 5 prerequisite doesn't exist in the whole world until *you're* level 5, (and then everyone has one). Note that even in Morrowind, you could get high level weapons whenever you could get them. The globalized leveling is of course the worst offender, but there are tons (shopkeepers money limit comes to mind). I'll now go into detail in two more of these:

Globalized leveling - When you level up in Oblivion, so does just about every other creature on the planet. This is so that it's "balanced". This of course means, however, that leveling up is a totally meaningless affair. It also means fighting brown bears late game who have 9000 health and bandits in full glass armor - yup, you heard right. Why are they living in tents in the wilderness, they're sitting on a gold mine! Oh right, because of the...

...Globalized crimes - Steal an apple, then fast travel to the opposite end of the continent, and immediately get arrested on site. Real nice. Also, even if you get away with the theft, nobody will buy your stolen goods, because they know. Somehow.

"Radiant AI" - People who lived through "Blast Processessing" should have had a good chuckle over Radiant AI. So Radiant AI means that NPCs walk around with horrible animations, heads glued in your direction as you walk by (oh man, so REALISTIC) to and from a few predetermined places. Also, they will stop and have an insultingly un-believable conversation that directly involves the player with another NPC sometimes. Wow, so immersive.

Every Google Image search result for "Oblivion" looks fucking retarded.

I'm not going to mention all of the smaller fuckups (like horseback riding... and animation and character models and AHH stop me) which, in and of themselves, aren't important, but they do speak to the general priorities and care Bethesda takes with making games (another one: hiring like 8 people to voice 1000 NPCs. Awful).

The short of it is, Oblivion is a very bad game. It isn't just "not a great game", it's bad, and I have outlined the reasons why. Furthermore, it looks even worse when you compare it to almost every CRPG that came before it. Games like Fallout (1 and 2 only, obviously), Planescape: Torment, Ultima, Wizardry, Arcanum, and even the previous ES games are all more well crafted than Oblivion.

Epilogue: I also think that while Morrowind was a far more playable, and less obviously broken game, I don't think they've ever made a solid, GOOD game. They have been of course mercilessly applauded for Oblivion and Fallout 3, and so I see no reason to believe that they would change their ways, and so this is why I have zero expectations for #5, Skyrim.

Finally, thanks to Blake Reynolds for being my research assistant!

"What upcoming video games are you excited for?" (With UPDATES!)

2011-05-19T18:13:00.005-05:00

I made a new friend recently, and we talked about video games. He asked me how psyched I was for the new Bethesda game, the new id Software game, the new Rockstar Games game. When people ask me about these things, I really feel bad, because I know how I must come off. I try as best as I can to be as diplomatic as possible, but I usually fail miserably. What I want to be able to say is something like "Bethesda doesn't make the kind of games that would interest me", however this statement isn't true - I am very interested in CRPGs. I'm forced to say "I think Bethesda are a bunch of jokers, I don't think they know what they're doing, I have absolutely no faith in their ability to make games".

After hearing a good bit of my negativity, the new guy asked "Well, what upcoming video games are you excited for?" 18 months ago, I could answer this question with ease: Elemental: War of Magic, Civilization V, and Starcraft 2. Yet all three let me down, each in their own unique way. Now, I really couldn't tell you what upcoming video game I'm excited for. Maybe the new Advance Wars game, although sadly, no new Advance Wars game has been announced. A few indie games, like the commercial version of Desktop Dungeons (which I may be doing the soundtrack to! Fingers crossed!), and maybe that Iron Tower RPG.

But it is not as though I'm not excited about gaming in general. Board games are in a sort of Renaissance right now. For just about the same amount of time as video games have been sucking, board games have been kicking ass. And although I've been studying my ass off in the last 6-8 months or so, I still know next to nothing about the medium. Every time I try out a new game and I figure out how it works, there' s an amazing "wow! That's so cool!" feeling associated with understanding the brilliant mechanisms. I almost never get that from video games.

I'm not excited for almost any new digital game, but there are at least 30 board games that I could name right now that I am desperate to try out, old and new. Caylus, Race for the Galaxy, Age of Steam, Age of Empires III, Sid Meier's Civilization(The Board Game), DUST Tactics, Battle Line, Talisman... the list goes on and on and on.

I love games as much as anybody. Video games are just in an extremely dark place right now.

While I'm here, I may as well update anyone who cares on what I've been doing.

- Currently contracted to do a web-game for a rather large company you've probably heard of. Might post details on this project once it's out (depending on how it goes).

- Working very part-time on 100 Rogues, providing new pixel art for the Monster Classes which are available as DLC.

- Will be finding out about a possible deal with the makers of Mount & Blade pretty soon... more details to follow.

- Will be finding out about another possible deal with the makers of Desktop Dungeons, about doing music for their upcoming commercial version - more details to follow.

- Will be helping the roguelike guru & good friend John Harris with music for his next game, In Profundis, which just got funded via Kickstarter (congrats, John!)

- Finally, AURO has been delayed until we find out what is happening with all of these things. Certainly there will be more updates on that.

Take care all!

Dragon Age II

2011-03-20T20:21:00.008-05:00

Caption:

Man... and I thought Dragon Age: Origins was bad. I don't even know where to start... I suppose I'll start with the gameplay, since this is the absolute most important feature of a game.

GAMEPLAY: Since Bioware is completely out of touch with the nature of games and have very little understanding nor desire to understand what it is that makes a game fun, the gameplay is a dull, lifeless, canned experience. Their priorities were clearly, "make sure combat looks like a fight scene from a very bad action movie" (even though that's an awful priority, it's worth noting that they failed even at that, too). A turn-based mechanism would allow the game to be about difficult tactical decisions; instead, because it's in real time, it mostly boils down to a very bad action game. Yes, you can pause and issue commands, but no one could try to say that this is a tactics game with a straight face. The camera is super zoomed in, the play is loose and automatic, the difficulty is non-existent. The gameplay boils down to right clicking an enemy and hitting your ability (which are all good to use all the time, not something you have to really be careful with or think much about) buttons once the cooldowns are up. It's dumb, it isn't dynamic or kinetic or interesting.

VISUALS: Of course, as is the case with all AAA modern games, there is another priority that goes before "good gameplay": technology. It's getting more and more ridiculous that concessions to gameplay are being made for the sake of tech, but it still happens. Why can't I zoom out more? Why can't I just do a Fallout/Arcanum view and just lock it there? Oh, because there would be too many polys on the screen. I see. Can we reduce the number of polygons on these "characters" faces? Sorry, not for some stupid reason like "improving gameplay"... did you forget that half the time the player won't even be playing? They'll be watching our really, really stupid cutscenes. The animations are weird and jerky, a mess of motion capture and "fixed" motion capture, the faces look like potatoes and the environments look like they were rushed or possibly generated by an automatic terrain generator. Character designs are boring and bland of course, because interesting character designs are gay.

CUTSCENES: Oh my! What "edgy" cutscenes! The overall tone and spirit can be described as something like "He-Man with lots of blood". The "cinematography" is entirely blood-squirt-based; almost every scene has to either begin or end with a bunch of blood shooting across the frame, impressing only the dumbest of 13-year-old boys with each spurt. It's very manly, and not gay at all, even a little bit. To further prove the point, the women all have breasts the size of human heads or larger. This game is edgy, artistics, and above all else, heterosexual. I'm just kidding, it's none of those things. The writing is pretty offensive to anyone over the age of 15, so I really would recommend taking the following steps first: Firstly, turn off voice acting, which they were kind enough to provide as an option. Then, go into the configuration and turn off cutscenes as well. Then, hit exit game, and uninstall the game - that should significantly improve your experience with Dragon Age 2.

Dragon Age 2 Wants You To Know that it's Not a Gay Game

MUSIC: Of course, the score sucks as well. Standard-issue, melody-less, forgettable nothingness; a machine's "impression" of what music sounds like. Adds nothing to the game except to make me feel more insulted by the idea that this crap was supposed to move me.

BIOWARE: The game is totally canned, safe, easy; there's no room for exploration, discovery, creative expression. The game just isn't dynamic. It feels like you're playing World of WarCraft single player, except honestly, it's even worse than that. All of the treasures on your straight little safe path are highlighted for you so that you don't miss any of them. This is a great example of what I talk about with my expression: "If it's not fun to play more than once, then it's not fun to play once". Well, DA2 definitely wouldn't be fun to play more than once, and what do you know, it's not fun to play once, either.

CHARACTER CREATION: At first I was going to give them some credit for adding what seemed like a bit more flexibility to the character creation system, but then I realized my mistake. The thing is... here's the problems: People talk about DA as though it were the modern day Baldur's Gate. Well, BG was based on Dungeons and Dragons, which had a really flexible character creation system. A huge element to that that's entirely missing from Dragon Age games is the fact that as one class, you can take abilities from other classes - cross class skills, feats, etc. Furthermore, DA's skill trees are broken, because it's just always better to focus on one tree than it is to take a little from each. Oh yeah, I'm gonna take dual wielding AND archery, over dual wielding and something inside the same tree as dual wielding that can be used WITH dual wielding. It's like, would you rather have two free Hyundai cars, or one free Mercedes? You can only drive one at a time, so what the fuck's the point in having more than one? This is why a good game designer would create interesting skills that are useful regardless of the weapon you're holding. Oh, and the rogue can't steal, as usual. Stealing would be far too dynamic, and require actual game design choices to be made.

OVERALL: This game is an abomination; I don't have a single good thing to say about it, except that it's probably better than Oblivion.

The one good thing about this game is, in 20 years, no one will even have heard of "Dragon Age", it will disappear into obscurity and irrelevance where it belongs.

"Less is More" talk at Diplocon

2011-03-09T11:02:00.002-05:00

Here's my first public talk on game design, done at Diplocon 2011 on March 5th (skip the first 30 seconds which are blank - and apologies for the quality).

It's called "Less is More", which is something that I think game developers need to hear.

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG...

2011-02-17T04:41:00.004-05:00

I like Gamasutra, in general. I've written for them and have been interviewed on there more than once, and I'd love to be a regular writer for them. But seriously, where do they find some of these people?

I usually feel like my hand is in a blender when reading game design articles on the internet (with a few exceptions, The Lost Garden and Auntie Pixelantie come to mind). But this is one of the wrongest articles I've ever read. It's just riddled with incorrect and offensive assertions by game designer Michael Samyn.

The first couple paragraphs are just riddled with misguided nonsense! Let's get started!

Frank Lantz once argued that games are not media -- because they "do not carry an idea from one place to another." I tend to agree with him.

What? What the hell kind of arbitrary nonsense is that? Games do carry many ideas from one place to another; even traditional games have been constructed to make a point.

"But I like to add that "video games are not games."

Do I need to even respond? RED APPLES ARENT APPLES!

"When it comes to traditional games -- board games and card games, as well as children's games and even sports and dancing..."

Whoa whoa whoa - wait - DANCING? Ok dancing is a game, but video games - they're not games. Everyone following along?

"Games establish a set of conditions within which humans play."

One of the only things he says in the entire article which isn't wrong. Nice work getting through a single sentence.

"Any meaning or message that comes out of the game is generated by the players, and was not enclosed in the game's design."

Oops! Wrong again! Ever heard of Monopoly? Darn it, articles is hard!

"Video games have been similar to some of those traditional games for a long time. But there have always been remarkable differences. From the very beginning, many video games could be played by a person on their own. "

Wait, don't close Wikipedia yet. While you're there, look up a huge category of games known as Solitaire games. Also, what's with these sentences - was this a 5th graders book report?

"...the presentation of video games on computers is often immeasurably more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we've seen in any of the other games, many of which can be presented through arbitrary tokens."

Okay, this isn't very clear - I think he may be attempting to say that computer games are more complex. But there are some non-digital games that are really damned complex - how many video games have you played that are more complicated than Contract Bridge? Dungeons and Dragons? Even Go really is far more complicated than most video games I've played. I suppose this part is subjective - actually, since this guy is so unclear, it's subjective as to what he even means to say. Thumbs down!

There's a tendency among developers to dismiss the visual presentation of a video game as "eye candy" or "skinning" or the evil necessary to appeal to a larger market. But what if we would take this presentation seriously instead?

Oh yeah - developers aren't focusing on the visual enough! That's totally the case! *slams head against a locker* Most AAA studios take the visual element of games more seriously than anything else about a game, due to the marketing power of screenshots and preview videos. Where has this guy been?

"What if we look at video games as simulations"

What if we look at a cow as a dog! Or a leaf blower... as a car!!! Weee, I'm riding my leaf blower! I write for gamasutraaaaaa!!!

"What if we look at video games...as aesthetic spectacles of images and sound and text and motion? Don't they start looking very similar to a medium then?"

They already are a medium. You must have been sick that day. Also, even if they weren't some definition of "medium", who cares? Why is it important that they fall into that category? Is it because... GAME SHAME?

"To be sure, video games are a medium unlike any before."

Wait... but you said they weren't a medium. Maybe someone tapped you on the shoulder while you were writing this and filled you in?

"The central role of the player and their ability to interact and change the presentation, makes video games rather unsuitable for the kind of expressive or informative art that we are used to associating with media."

This statement makes even less sense than the randomly placed comma inside it. I think there are too many asinine assumptions that I have to be under to agree with this statement - who knows. I'll give it two stars out of five.

"But what if we look at this capacity for change as an opportunity rather than a restriction?"

Yes. Thank you. Gameplay is what makes games special! Hopefully that's where you're going. Please let that be where you're going...

"Why would we want to tell a straightforward story like other media do? Have you seen a Hollywood film lately? All stories are the same, apparently."

First off, his question about "why would we want to tell a straightforward story" - he's assuming we want to tell a story with games, that that should be our goal. The worst part about this, though, is how he attacks Hollywood. Yes, Hollywood makes a lot of bad films with bad stories. But if we're talking about storytelling, even a mediocre film does a better job of telling a story than almost any game. Why? Because games & gameplay are inherently nonlinear, while films and stories are inherently linear.

"And what about the desperate attempts of the more artistic directors and writers to cut their stories apart and make absurd associations for the sake of escaping the terror of plot? Pathetic!"

Care to list an example? All I know from this crappy-ass statement is that "more artistic directors and writers are pathetic". So wait, this article is waging an all-out attack on the film medium now? Basically he's now said that Hollywood sucks, and "more artistic" (whatever the fuck that means) filmmakers also suck. Worst. Article. Ever.

"But at least they understand that there is a problem. They just don't know that we have the solution.

And neither do we, apparently.

Yet."

Oooh, edgy. Single-sentence paragraphs - count my mind as blown! So wait, what's the problem? Film has a problem? And video games are going to fix film's problems? There better be some really smart answers coming up when I hit next page...

~ ~ PAGE 2 ~ ~

"Not only do I doubt very much if artists really have some kind of clear message they're trying to convey in their music or their painting or their film. But media as experienced by a member of the audience have very little to do with information."

You have to wonder if this man has heard of a "thesis statement". Okay so now artists, musicians, and painters all basically suck, too. I now realize why this guy's game, "The Path", was an incoherent mess. The man clearly is extrapolating his own inability - or unwillingness - to get a clear message down before creating something to ALL artists everywhere. Well guess what, I'm about to prove you wrong. I have a clear message that I'm trying to convey with this article... it's that MICHAEL SAMYN IS NOT QUALIFIED TO BE WRITING ABOUT GAMES.

"Who cares about the message of a high definition action movie projected on a gigantic screen?"

Doesn't that depend on, like, whether the movie is good? Are you implying that any of the following traits "HD", "Action Movie", or "Gigantic Screen" means that no one cares about it?

"Experiencing media is about what happens inside of me, and has very little to do with the source or the message or the medium."

An over-statement, but given how wrong this guy usually is, I'll give it to him.

"But even if media are as rigid and straightforward as Lantz suggests, why would they need to remain that way? It's not hard to imagine a medium radically changing under impact of computer technology."

Maybe. Hey! Weren't we talking about games? Let's talk about games.

"And it's equally quite likely that an entirely new medium emerges from this new technology, a medium that is as different from all the others as cinema was from painting and printed text from marble sculptures."

You know, I'm not sure I see the evolution between those things. Am I the only one?

"In fact, it is difficult to imagine a new medium not evolving out of such a versatile technology!"

Yeah, at least one already did - video games. Remember? They count.

"I agree with Mr Lantz that games are not media."

Oh so now they're not media again. Trying my best to follow along.

"Video games that are not media are better games."

He wrote that. Also, remember before how he said that video games aren't games, too. So what we can take away from this is "video games that are not media are better games but also they aren't games". Nice. Can you win a Peabody award for stupid?

"Video games that are not games are better media."

YOU DID NOT JUST SAY THAT! ARHGHHH. Are video games media or aren't they? I mean personally I think the question of whether or not they are is an entirely pointless and fruitless one, but can you at least decide what your point of view is on it? There's only one page left... please don't flip-flop on this issue again... please...

~ ~ Page 3 ~ ~

"I believe the key to expanding the audience for video games lies in..."

Whoa whoa whoa - you want to EXPAND the audience for video games? Who the hell doesn't play video games at this point? I mean, this is subjective of course, but it doesn't seem to me like video games have the problem of being too small an industry.

"...lies in the acceptance and embrace by developers that video games -- unlike traditional games -- are media."

"The promise of participating in a virtual world holds irresistible appeal. But the discovery of rigid systems of game rules underneath the seductive spectacle turns all but the most persistent away."

Nope, actually a lot of people really like games. You'd be surprised. Where do you want the WRONG stamp - on your face? Better put it on your face.

"It's not that people don't like playing games. But when they turn to their next generation console or their souped-up PC for playing, it's not out of a desire to interact with abstract systems. It's because they want to be immersed in an emotional spectacle, they want to take a ride through a fantastic landscape of sights and sounds."

There's that lovable buzzword!

"Make the experience about the characters and their adventures! Don't craft some kind of story to justify cool game mechanics, but invent new forms of interaction that support and enhance the experience of the fiction."

Translation: "Don't make games, make interactive fiction! Games are bad."

"When we open up to the potential of video games as a medium, we will automatically discover a much wider range of subjects and styles. As a result our audience will expand over the entire population, much like has happened with film and print, when they grew out of their geeky period."

Uh... sir. Welcome to about 10 years ago. You do know that video games are larger than film and print and music and probably anything else you can think of, and have been for some time?

"There will be video games for everyone. Because video games will be a medium."

Will be??? But... I see. Had to slip ONE LAST flip flop on this issue in. Well, at least the little girl won't be crying anymore, because she DIED from YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

"We're attracted to the immersive..."

*wink*

"...and expressive potential of video game technology but we try not to start from the assumption that our work needs to be formatted like a game."

I have no problems with things that aren't games. I do have a problem with bad writers telling game designers not to design games, though.

"Thanks to the Notgames initiative..."

What the fuck is this? Notgames? Okay, if that doesn't tell you "KEITH WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG ABOUT GAME SHAME" then I don't know what will. I DONT KNOW WHAT WE TALK ABOUT ON NOTGAMES BUT ONE THING FOR SURE, IT ISN'T THOSE DAMN DIRTY GAMES!!

"What we are advocating here is the birth of something entirely new: a new medium for a new century, a medium capable of addressing the complexity of contemporary life in a form that is enriching as well as enjoyable. And we believe that video games have the potential to become this medium."

Video games already ARE enriching and enjoyable, you fuck-ass. How about if I believe that your face has the potential to become reasonably presentable in the future, how would you like that?

"So give them that! Don't order them around to perform a certain task, do this or that mission, attain some goal, etc. Allow them to live the fantasy."

Why should I, as a game designer, stop designing games? Oh, right, because of your GAME SHAME again - fantasy, narrative, "media", virtual worlds, simulators - these things are all BETTER THAN GAMES. That's the bullshit thesis to this cacophony of nonsense. You're basically the guy that says "No offense, but, you're a worthless scumbag". All your qualifiers can't hide the fact that YOU sir have drank the "A Game Is Not Enough" Kool-Aid.

Epilogue: On further inspection, Notgames appears to be a decently intelligent video game theory blog/community. But they named their site "not games" - my point still stands. In fact, it's made even stronger, because even "game-intellectuals" seem to think the only way to advance games is to abandon them completely.

Immersion

2011-02-12T03:32:00.009-05:00

I will often dig through a game trying to understand why it works... or, in many more cases, why it doesn't. I'll reach the core of the problem - the fundamental design choices that led to all of the higher level stuff. I'll be excited about this, and want to share it with people and see what they think - get some "peer review", you could say. Once in a blue moon, they'll agree. Sometimes, they'll make some solid counter-arguments and cause me to re-think my analysis. But mostly, they'll attempt to justify the bad decision by blurting out the same buzzword:

"Immersion".

I'll give an example. I'll often attack 3D gameplay, since, in my view, it's at a huge disadvantage from 2D gameplay right out of the gate(I can get into this at another time, but the short of it is a huge reduction in gameplay clarity - representing a 3D space on a 2D image and forcing the player to translate several different angles at once without the aid of depth perception, as well as loss of visual clarity and - ah, this needs to be its own article). You may disagree with this assertion, but I hope that you disagree with it for a better reason than one of the following two:

1. "3D graphics are state-of the art technology and higher levels of technology = better games"

2. "Immersion"

The mainstream wisdom goes something like this: the more pixels on the screen, the more polygons, the more visual effects, the more technology used and the more cinematic the presentation, the more immersive the game is.

Firstly - and I hate that I have to say this so often - but more is not better. Less is more. One who is experienced in any kind of design or art form understands this - expressing your idea in as few strokes as possible is the holy grail of creation. Elegance is better. Having more pixels on the screen means only one thing: there are more pixels on the screen. It means absolutely nothing else about the quality of the game. I think you should meditate on that idea for a moment and really try to internalize it. A game with 320x200 resolution is not worse than a game with ten times that resolution. It's also not better, but a lot less people make that mistake.

Secondly, cinema does not improve a game any more than gameplay improves a film. Cutscenes in a game do not make a game more movie-like, any more than taking a few electric guitar breaks between chapters of "Catcher in the Rye" makes the the book more musical. Games are great at being games, and movies are great at being movies. I'm not saying you can't make something good by blending the two in some way or taking inspiration from each other, but I am saying that they don't need to. The future of games isn't "more and more like movies", the future of games is "better games".

Considered "immersive" just a few years ago

But here's the largest point I want to make, about this word "immersion" itself. Like I stated before, and like you already know, when people say it they are talking about visual/aural stuff. Which really means they're talking about technology. "HD makes the game more immersive", "voices make the game more immersive", "bump mapping makes the game more immersive", etc. The truth is that none of these things make a game more immersive.

Ironically, it's actually when we look past the graphics, sound, controls, and everything else that people normally consider the elements of immersion, that we become immersed. When the Pong-paddle becomes an extension of our arm, or our thoughts, and we subtly, unconsciously, shift our weight in our chairs. When we frantically spin the falling Tetris piece, shouting a bizarre litany of curses. This is when we are fully immersed in a game, and it has absolutely nothing to do with visuals or technology. So what does it have to do with, then?

My friend (and Dinofarm Games lead artist) Blake Reynolds says that the most important thing about an illustration is "transparency". What he means by this is that the quality of the drawing is such that we don't even think about the drawing itself; we can look past it and are able to appreciate the meaning or purpose behind the work. This rule applies to game design as well. The way to create an "immersive" game is by achieving a transparent game design.

Now, where it gets tricky is that "transparent design" is a synonym for "good design". What's nice is that the laws of design are very fundamental to the human experience, and what's even nicer is that they are not new. Video games are new, but they are simply a new type of canvas for the same laws of design. If we find a new island, or even a new planet, the laws of physics stay the same.

If you want your game to be immersive, express it in as "few strokes" as you can. How simple could your game possibly be while still expressing your gameplay idea? If you achieve a simple elegance (like that of Tetris, Portal, or Go), then you are on the right track. Each new level of complexity you add is another chance that the player will be shaken from his trance and disassociate himself with your game.

Considered "Immersive", less than a decade ago.

So finally, back to my initial example. 3D graphics aren't "more immersive" than 2D graphics. 2D graphics aren't more immersive than 3D either, and games with no graphics at all are also not less or more immersive than games with graphics. If visuals made things more immersive, then movies would be inherently more immersive than books, but we know that this is not the case. People can be just as wrapped up and immersed in a book as they can in a movie. In a game, immersion comes from gameplay.

Game designers, we should be taking full advantage of the awesome power of human imagination - a power that allows us to literally place a human consciousness inside of a "@" symbol in Rogue, or inside of the 2x2 pixel protagonist of Atari's Adventure. This power is far greater than that of any video card's will ever be.

Updates (and a great Let's Play)

2011-02-11T02:00:00.003-05:00

100 Rogues took me two years to make and it was kind of a harrowing process. At the end there were a lot of things that were learned a bit too late, and as is the case with all creative endeavors, there were things that I feel just could have been done better. However, fellow Blogger member Sonnez has written an amazing Let's Play of 100 Rogues that has not only enchanted me with its engaging, fun prose, but reminded me why I made the game in the first place. Hats off, Sonnez!

I've been working on a very big, and I think important piece for Expensive Planetarium. It's in the pipe and should be out in the next week or so. However, it's been slow because of several other projects that are also going on.

I wrote my first piece for Gamasutra! Hooray!
My team, Dinofarm Games, started on a new project about a month or two ago. We're still in very early phases, but what we can say is that it is not Little Wars, the war-game that we were previously planning on doing. Little Wars is still something I want to do, but we've put it aside for the time being. I can't wait to share more with everybody about our new project. Formal announcements will probably happen sometime next month.
I'm doing a talk on game design on March 4th at a game development convention called Diplocon. It's a smaller-level thing, but I haven't done a talk like this before so it's a really nice place to start. It's for college and highschool students, so hopefully I can inspire a small chunk of the next generation with some Expensive Planetarium style thinkings.
I've also been totally enraptured by the world of games that isn't video games. I wrote my well-received piece, "Holy Crap, Board Games!" a few weeks ago, but that really was only the beginning. I got a few books that cover the topics of board & card games from all throughout history and from every part of the globe. It's just amazing how much deeper the world of games is than many of us - the generation of video gamers - realize. It's kind of like I was raised on screenplays and I just found out about books.
Finally, I've been looking for new writers! Do you have an idea you'd like to pitch for us? We can't pay you, of course, but it's a good exercise, and I may actually have a few readers!

Like I said, I have another piece coming soon, and it's a good one! If you want to write for EP, shoot me an email at keith.burgun-at-yahoo.com.

Zero Punctuation does my work for me

2011-01-19T15:49:00.003-05:00

I was going to review World of WarCraft today, but then I saw Yahtzee's new review, and frankly, he nails it. He's fair, but absolutely right.

Holy crap! Board games!

2011-01-18T03:20:00.006-05:00

I wanted to write an article today about World of WarCraft and really talk about how horrible it is in detail, but I've chosen to go with a more positive topic today: how excellent board games are.

I grew up on video games - they are a part of me in such a way that nothing can ever replace them. I'll always play video games; I've known this since I was four years old and got my hands on an Atari 2600 joystick for the first time. There has never been a phase of my life that I didn't want to play video games. I can actually mark off sections of my life by what games I was playing the most for those years. Video games are like my family or something - totally indispensable, cherished above all else. Board games are like the new family that moved into my house that is straight up cooler in just about every way than my family.

Now, when I say "board games", a lot of you may be thinking stuff like Monopoly, Checkers, Chutes and Ladders. That's what I thought board games were like one year ago, but holy crap was I wrong. Thinking that board games are Monopoly is like thinking that rock music is Avril Lavigne. About a year ago a very credible friend of mine told me about the board game Puerto Rico. He linked me to its page on Boardgamegeek.com - "what the hell is this? This site is huge... I've never heard of any of these games!" I exclaimed. I feel like a biologist scouring an unknown planet and observing the alien flora and fauna for the first time (Professor Burgun's log - the strangest thing... all of the animals and plants here on this planet... they're remarkably, unmistakably better than the animals on our planet!).

As I was browsing Board Game Geek - looking up the rules, reading forum posts, looking at photos and watching gameplay videos - something started to materialize in my brain. Board games don't have cinematic cutscenes. Board games don't have load-times. Board games don't have grinding. They don't have unskippable tutorial sections. I often reminisce about 80s video games, and how in that time period, game designers had to get creative because of the limitations posed by the medium. For that reason, gameplay was what was advertised, and gameplay was what the game was all about. Well, board games still live in that world.

Looking at the world of board games is to me, like looking into the future of videogames. Or, alternatively, it's looking into an alternate present of video games; one in which we weren't paralyzed by technology and a bloated industry for 15 or so years of our short history. It's magical. Of course, I'm just looking at the highest rated games, but wow - that actually means something for board gamers. Without massive corporate interests behind reviews, you can actually get some real information about how a game plays.

The reasons for why board games are so much more healthy, and really so much more awesome than video games are many, but here are a few:

1. INDUSTRY SIZE - The board game industry is small - awesomely small. Whenever I shout about how the video game industry needs to shrink dramatically, I get shouted back down. Essentially the argument is, the industry needs to be this big in order for us to get "quality games". This is, of course, total bullshit. Indies are making the best video games that are being made right now, usually at the cost of three ramen noodle packets per day. Game design doesn't cost millions of dollars, it just costs a good game designer with some passion.

2. CULTURE - Board games have been around since... well, they're probably the reason the board was invented, let's put it that way. Because they as a medium are so old, they don't have the young, hip, rock-star status that video games do. This means that the people who play them actually searched them out because they sincerely like games. They're willing to do some research, hunt a game down, and then sit down with a bunch of friends and read through a manual to play a game. People who play board games really love games. Want more proof? Go to BGG's sister site, Video Game Geek, and look at their list of top rated games. That's right, X-Com is #1. All is right in the world at Video Game Geek.

3. TECHNOLOGY - Got some paper and pencils available? You can make a board game right now - a totally playable, fun board game. I talk about how limitations in technology spur innovation and nowhere is this more true than with board games. The only thing that makes your board game stand out is its game design. No one will like it if it has crappy, broken gameplay. Board games are not driven by today's latest technology; they're driven by today's latest design.

4. PLAY vs COMPLETION - With few exceptions, board games are about play and video games are about completion. I've been throwing around the slogan "a game that isn't fun to play through twice isn't fun to play through once". My point is basically that if a game isn't interactive and dynamic enough to have multiple interesting play-throughs, it isn't really even worth playing through once. Board games are all built to be played many, many times.

Before you comment on this article, please read the next paragraph, as it outlines what I am NOT saying:

What I'm not saying is that all board games are good - there are some awful, stupid board games out there. I'm not saying they're all innovative, either - there's a lot of cloning going on, for sure. What I am saying is that the state of the market/culture/medium is overall a lot healthier, and for that reason good design is more frequently rewarded.

I'm also not saying that video games have any inherent problems at all - there's absolutely nothing wrong with the medium - in fact, I would say that because it's a newer medium than board games, it is in a way more exciting. So much is possible that we haven't even considered with video games, and I really like being a video game designer for that reason.

So what do we video game people have to learn from board games? The answer is: a shit-ton. There are so many mechanics that get played with in board games that have absolutely never, ever been even attempted in a video game. If you're looking to steal ideas, designers, start looking to board games. However, there's something even bigger that we need to learn from them.

For the past few months - since I realized what I realized about board games - I've been in an insane spree of learning about board games (seriously, it's crazy). I don't have a lot of money, so one way that I can acquaint myself with games is by playing computer versions, usually online, usually written by just some guy not affiliated with the actual game. As I'm playing them more and more, it's gotten me to realize that the line between board games and video games will begin to blur in the future. Many indie games tread this line.

At the end of the day, a good game is a good game, and board games have an astounding amount to offer. If you're not already acquainted, I have some pointers as to where to start.

1. Board Game Geek - This is where you'll want to go again, and again, and again. Pretty much everything you'll ever need to know about board games is here.

2. The Dice Tower (@ Youtube) - The Dice Tower is a really great video series hosted by Tom Vasel. I don't agree with all of his opinions on games, but generally he's pretty fair, and the guy runs an entertaining and informative show.

3. Ticket to Ride Online - Ticket to Ride is a light-ish board game, but from what I've read, it's one of the most loved board games out there right now. And now that I've played it, I totally see why. The theme and the mechanics are both really great and work very well together. You can play four times for free on this page, which is definitely enough to help you decide if it interests you. There's a nice video tutorial voiced by a lady with a very strange, subtle accent.

In case anyone's interested, here are the games I'm currently playing (and loving). YOMI, a (NON COLLECTIBLE) card battle game designed by David Sirlin (who comes from the world of video games - a pro SF2 player that balanced SF2 HD Remix and even worked with Blizzard on their matchmaking system for SC2!). Puerto Rico is an absolutely fantastic game - don't let the dry theme turn you off - it gets better and better the more you play. Pandemic is a really fun co-operative game themed around saving the world from a plague of viruses. Consider this a formal EXPENSIVE PLANETARIUM recommendation for all three of these games.

Keith Attacks! Episode 1 - StarCraft 2

2011-01-08T18:36:00.004-05:00

Hi! I'd like to introduce "Keith Attacks!", a review segment on Expensive Planetarium where I viciously and unfairly attack your favorite games. Why do I do it? Because I'm a mean, unfair jerk who doesn't give games a chance! If only I would, then I'd see how great these games really are! I am far too judgmental, probably because it makes me feel better about myself. One wonders if I even like video games at all!

I played StarCraft 2 with high intensity for the first few months that it was out, as well as during the beta. When I stopped playing about a month or so ago, I was a Diamond-league player, which is the highest-skill level league that exists in the game. I'm not even close to as good as a professional, but I've been playing RTSes for a very long time. Played WarCraft 3 intensely on the ladder for 6 years; before that, played StarCraft for another 5 years with near-equal intensity. Before that, I played WarCraft 2 pretty intensely as well (anyone else here play War2 on Kali?). I know my way around RTS games and I especially know Blizzard RTSes - I'd say as well as anybody.

StarCraft 2 is the original StarCraft with the user-interface fixes that Blizzard should have added to the original game the moment they conceived them - which was probably years ago. It wouldn't have been hard to patch-in fixes like "no limit to the amount of units you can select" and "can hotkey several buildings together" and subgroups etc. Blizzard could have done this, but they didn't, because if they did, then it'd be clear to even MORE people that SC2 doesn't have a legitimate reason for existing beyond making Blizzard money. Money which, by the way, Blizzard does not need, with its 14 million times fifteen income each month from the poor unfortunate souls who play World of WarCraft.

Sure, there are new units. I wouldn't have complained if StarCraft 2 was a new "expansion" that added / changed the units as was done in StarCraft 2. But we're talking a $59.99 game here (why is it $59.99 and not $49.99? Because it can be - what are you going to do about it, customer? Not buy it?) Yes, there is a new ladder system, and while it's worlds better than the original StarCraft, that isn't saying much because Blizzard entirely abandoned the original Battle.net only a couple years after launching it (this behavior towards games is pitifully sad and I hope that in the future, people are better at calling it out than we have been). However, it's arguably not as good as WarCraft III's "battle.net" service in a lot of ways. War3 had chatrooms, clan support, and you could actually play the game offline or on a local area network! Imagine that! Now you always have to connect to Blizzard if you want to use their game at all, for any reason. There are some significant advantages to the new ladder, certainly (like allowing only one account per purchase, which stops "new account" manipulation of the ladder), but all in all it ends up being about as good as the WarCraft III one.

The gameplay of Blizzard RTSes has gone unchanged (mostly) since their very first attempt, WarCraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994. The biggest changes occurred during the development of WarCraft 3. This game changed the game in a few fundamental ways, but the most fundamental was the change to economy. Instead of having 30 workers on your minerals (or in the case of WarCraft 2, infinite workers on your goldmine), you could have a maximum of five workers per gold mine, which was quickly achieved and then almost never a concern. Economy in general had a very subdued role with WarCraft 3 due to this. Furthermore, they reduced the food cap from the outrageous 200 food (which means you can have armies of 100 - 250 individual units, depending on your race etc) to 100 food, and added harsh income penalties (called Upkeep) for going over 70 food. It was clear: Blizzard was trying to make the games be more about battles and tactics, and less about maxing out economies. Unfortunately, they also added some mechanics to the game, like heroes and items, which ended up creating entirely new problems. However, if you followed from StarCraft to WarCraft 3, you can see a game design process in action.

That process is not visible from WarCraft 3 to StarCraft 2. I said it before, but it's really true. StarCraft 2 is the same game as StarCraft in a prettier package. It's almost as if they said "Ah well, that didn't work so good. Let's just do the first thing we did again, people seemed to like that." And sure, that makes sense, but for people like me - people who care about game design, mechanics, and simply having actually new experiences - it's a real let-down. From a business standpoint, I'm sure it was Activision's dream - there is absolutely zero risk in making the game that StarCraft 2 was. The same reason that publishers would all murder their mothers to get their hands on a StarCraft sequel is the same reason that smart gamers should not give a crap about it - it's safe.

Finally, some points on the real-time strategy genre as a whole. The genre is generally flawed by a conflict of interest. It has two distinct interests: being a good strategy game, and having an epic "war-movie" presentation during gameplay. These two interests have been there, really, since the beginning, and it's been a root of major problems. Controlling multiple units in real time in a combat situation is tough - even controlling just two units at the same time is a real challenge. Developers realize this, and that's why we have "control groups", which basically group up X amount of units into one group that can be commanded together. It's not a perfectly clean system however, as you always have to be adding units to groups and you have to remember what hotkey you've assigned what group to. Even more, you also sometimes have sub-groups within a group that you have to tab through. On top of that, you have to be constantly producing units and increasing your economy - if you don't click the "produce SCV" button every 30 seconds, you will be at a disadvantage to a guy who does press "produce SCV" every 30 seconds. This is in a strategy game.

Nice and visually clear, right?

This already would cause a game designer to ask the following question: if you have a control group with 50 marines in it, why not divide that by 5, or 10 even, to reduce the number of units you have to worry about producing and adding to the group, etc. It also would increase the visual clarity of the game overall, as it's a bit hard sometimes to gauge the difference between a 50 and a 60 -count army, but it's much easier to visually see the difference between a 5 and 6 count army.

Also let's find a singular element that the game is about and focus on that. Is the game about the battles? Then let's minimize or cut entirely the economy stuff. Is it about economy and base-building? Then let's minimize or cut out the focus on micro and unit positioning. Right now the real time strategy genre is a erratic mishmash of different gameplay concepts without a very direct focus. The economy and base building mechanic is really weak, but both it and the combat mechanic suffer greatly because of the conflict of interest.

Basically, the lower the numbers, the clearer the game will be - any designer knows that more is not better; if anything, the opposite is true - less is more. Good design is expressing your idea with as little inherent complexity as possible. This process simply did not occur with StarCraft 2, and as a result, the game is simply not a very well designed one.

A friend who has friends at Blizzard tells me that pretty much the entire original Blizzard team left sometime around 2002-2003 (right after WarCraft 3 was released). This, coupled with their merger with Activision and unbelievable success with World of Warcraft, all would point to, at least, impending doom. Not necessarily immediate doom, but I can already see that Blizzard is no longer the company they once were - a company who had a sense of humor, took risks, and above all else were fair to their customers. Whoever it was that made Blizzard special has moved on, and between World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2, gamers who care about what they play should move on, too.

There's no such thing as a "casual game"

2010-12-04T23:03:00.002-05:00

Wrote a new article for the Destructoid Blog, detailing why the term "casual game" has no real use and we should get rid of it.

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/keithburgun/there-s-no-such-thing-as-a-casual-game--188980.phtml

Wrote for Destructoid

2010-12-02T04:16:00.003-05:00

Wrote a piece on a Destructoid blog. It contains seven major themes that anyone who reads EP will be very familiar with, but it's nice to have them laid out:

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/keithburgun/introducing-myself-at-destructoid-188812.phtml

Returning to Donkey Kong Country

2010-11-30T12:35:00.007-05:00

This isn't really a review. I haven't beaten the game, I've only gotten about 20% through or so. However, I feel that I already have enough to say about the game to notice a much larger general point.

Donkey Kong Country Returns, by Retros Studios, is a solid game. Because it's a Wii game, this means that it's easily the best platformer on the system, and probably one of the best games on the platform as well. I do have some issues with it, but nothing game-breaking like the problems I've encountered in other Wii platformers.

The game is a 2D sidescroller with 3D graphics - I suppose some people call that 2.5D - a trend which I'm glad hasn't caught on too successfully, since it does nothing but encourage confusion between graphics and gameplay. Donkey Kong Country Returns indeed - if you're familiar with the original Donkey Kong Country, there's really not much more to say. If, however, you're familiar with more recent platformers, the most significant addition to the game you'll notice is the addition of difficulty. Not "mind-bending, cruel" difficulty, but a solid, balanced difficulty. The New Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Galaxy 2 (and don't even get me started on Kirby's Epic Yarn) have challenge ratings that hover between "for babies" and "literally impossible to lose"(Okay, I'll start - Kirby's Epic Yawn doesn't even allow the player to lose. There is no losing. You can't even get hurt!) Donkey Kong Country Returns actually challenges the player, and as I've discussed before here several times, a balanced level of difficulty is a requirement for fun gameplay.

Remember this? Of course you do

Here's what really irks me, though. If DKCR is really one of the best games for the Wii, and it's essentially the spitting image of the 1994 Super Nintendo game... what does that say about today's games, or the last 15 years of games for that matter? Is copying a game from 15 years ago really the best we can do? Apparently, that's the case right now. Another example to support this theory is the Wii version of "Punch-Out", another re-makey-sequel game which is almost exactly the same game as the NES original. A friend asked what I thought about it and I said "I love it, it's Punch-Out!" I've loved Punch-Out since I was a little kid - re-skinning it with 3D graphics isn't going to change that.

My theory is that we've really lost our way in the last decade, and so we haven't grown up much, if at all, in terms of game design. We spent all our time, energy, and resources focusing on technology - which of course, has come a long way since 1995. A few companies are making great games - "Portal" is original and about as good as a game gets. This is encouraging, and as depressing as it is that the best games on the Wii were designed in the early 90s, maybe it's a good sign that developers are wise enough at least to copy what works. I sure would have appreciated it if Bethesda had had the same wisdom in making Fallout 3.

It's been a dark decade for video game design, but I see signs that there will be a return, and hopefully even a renaissance in the years to come.

My Philosophy and the Tale of 100 Rogues

2010-11-29T09:31:00.001-05:00

In December of 2008, a friend of mine was asked by his boss to create an iPhone game for their company. He and I were already engaged in some independent game development, so he said "I know just the guy to help us!" That guy's name is... me!

Pictured: My Face (got stuck like that long ago)

I'm a writer, artist, musician, and even a little bit programmer, but I usually introduce myself to people as a game designer. Most indie developers (or pros, for that matter) don't refer to themselves in this way - if a person designed and programmed a game they'll usually say they're the programmer or software engineer. Game design is too often an afterthought - something that someone just does - despite the fact that it is the most important element (and the only necessary element) to creating games. After all, you can create a game with nothing but words (like the game "Ghost") or nothing but rocks (like the game "Let's Throw Rocks At Each Other"). Game design is so ubiquitous to the human experience that we do it all the time without necessarily even realizing it. As children, we practiced the art of game design when we would tell our friends "Ok! You can't touch the rugs!" And then if that was too hard, we'd practice our game balancing skills by "patching" our game - perhaps by saying something like "alright, well, you can touch the rug as long as you have your hands on the table." Children understand the craft of game design without anyone explaining it to them, and yet so many in video game development in particular seem to lose sight of this as adults. I have many theories for why this happens; it's often the technological arms-race that we get sucked into, or a feeling like our games have to be more than just games to be worth anyone's time, or perhaps we just get lost in the theming of a game. With my first commercial game, I was determined to not let any of those things happen.

So I started the long journey that was 100 Rogues in December of 2008. It wouldn't be released until May of this year (2010), so it took about 18 months to complete - a damn long time in the world of iPhone apps. We had been playing this interesting indie game "POWDER" (created by Jeff Lait and ported to every platform ever) and we decided "hey! let's make a POWDER clone!" I thought that the game had a lot of potential, but I knew I could do it better. Like all creative crafts, game design can only pull from things the game designer himself is aware of. I knew a lot about games, but at the time, I had no idea that POWDER was just the tip of a massive, 30 year old iceberg - the Roguelike genre (here's the wikipedia page on Roguelikes, if you aren't familiar).

In my research, I soon ended up contacting Roguelike guru John Harris - he runs a GameSetWatch column called "@Play" which discusses all things Roguelike. He and I soon became friends, and he opened my eyes to a whole new world of games that I hadn't known before. "Nethack", "ADOM", "DoomRL" - there was just so much to learn - that is, once you get over some terrifying bumps in the road. The first one that really hooked me was Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer for Super Famicom (also recently ported to the Nintendo DS). I found a ROM of the fan-translated game and I was HOOKED! Compared to most roguelikes, Shiren sported a more disciplined design, with beautiful, animated 2D pixel art and music by the legendary Koichi Sugiyama (of Dragon Quest fame). I knew that these were all qualities 100 Rogues would need to have, as an iPhone game. Along the way, I also got very into "Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup", which while it is a fantastic game, the original author, Linley, was not very disciplined about throwing things into his game. Despite its being a wonderful game, my experience with DC:SS may have actually been a negative influence on the design of 100 Rogues (later, the lead designer himself David Ploog told me that he himself thought DC:SS's design to be a bit out of control, and that they were in the process of trimming it. A week after he told me that, they cut out an entire school of magic, so I guess he meant it!).

I also figured I needed to know more about my platform. Now, I've never been an Apple guy, but I got myself an iTouch and started perusing various games on the App Store. Let's just say that "unimpressed" is a severe understatement - most of the games, even some of the more popular games on the App Store looked like a teenager's Myspace page, and played like a pop-up advertisement ("hit the monkey and win 5 free iPod Nanos!"). If this was what the iPhone people were used to, then there was no way I would be getting away with the complexity of your average Roguelike game. Actually, that was entirely fine by me - I believe that the best games have a super-simple, elegant design, such as the original Super Mario Brothers or Tetris. The limitation of having no buttons was a good exercise in game design (but dear god, I can't wait to go back to buttons!).

Two of our classes, the Crusader and the Wizard

So here was my great idea for my Roguelike game: unlike most of them, where you generally fight one monster at a time and rely on a slew of items and your basic attack and throw abilities, my game would pit you against packs (mobs) of monsters at all times, and you would have a bunch of "skills" you'd have to use to defeat them all. I didn't intend on doing this, but what I ended up with was a design that looked a good bit like "Diablo II - Roguelike Edition". Our lead artist Blake Reynolds and I drew up designs for four character classes who would be defined not as much by stats (for we wanted to keep the numbers as minimal as possible), but by their skills. For instance, a Crusader has the ability to wear heavy armor and deal close-range magical attacks, but the Fairy Wizard can't wear heavy armor but instead can deal massive damage at a range and teleport around. We went with a simple three stat setup - Health (obvious), Energy (used for casting spells), and Strength (determines damage dealt with all weapons). A system of "speed" and dexterity were not added to the game, as we determined that we could express quickness through character abilities. For instance, a to-be-released class, the Skellyman Scoundrel (here's a very early video design tour on her), her speed is expressed through abilities that allow her to jump over enemy's heads, or throw down smokebombs to confuse and blind everyone. We took a pretty decently disciplined look at items, inspired by both Valve's Team Fortress 2 and the aformentioned Shiren the Wanderer. In TF2, none of the weapons are better or worse than any of the others; instead, they're all like tools in a toolbox. I was inspired by this because I feel like in most dungeon crawls, 99% of the stuff you find is completely useless garbage that has no use (other than to be sold, which I'll also address in a minute). And in Shiren, there are specific "classes of item" for each "class of use". So, anything that's a one-shot consumable (like a health potion or a strength-up potion) is a "weed", anything that has multiple charges of spells is a "staff", and you have just three equip slots: "weapon", "shield"(acts as armor in most games), and armlets (which give special benefits such as immunities). This has huge benefits to clarity, and so we tried to emulate that with our item system (although I might've gotten a little item-lusty after so much damned Dungeon Crawl!)

Oh, one of the most controversial design aspects of 100 Rogues is that you cannot sell items to our item shop - only buying is possible. This is for a very specific reason, and actually I copied it, and its rationale from Dungeon Crawl. What's really cool about DC:SS is that in their in-game Help, they have a section on "Philosophy". In this section, the designer talks about his anti-grind and anti-no brainer philosophy.

"A very important point in Crawl is steering away from no-brainers. Speaking about games in general, wherever there's a no-brainer, that means the development team put a lot of effort into providing a "choice" that's really not an interesting choice at all. And that's a horrible lost opportunity for fun."

To me, the act we're so used to in games like Diablo of selling items qualifies as a no brainer. I have a +3 Godlike Sword of the Skull, so hmm, should I sell off these five regular "Shortswords" I have? In most of these games, selling items isn't a real choice, and therefore it isn't a strong gameplay mechanic in most of these games; you simply sell off the stuff that's clearly worse than what you've currently got. A lot of people complained, saying "but selling items is FUN!" But "Fun" can, of course mean many different things. A well-designed game is one that delivers "fun" upon overcoming a challenge, realizing that you have learned a new skill as a player. Selling an item teaches you nothing and is not a challenge or a risk. I think the reason people think that selling items is fun is because it benefits them as a player, and because it exploits an evolutionarily-rooted biological need to "collect". This is the territory of slot-machines, not good games.

The Crusader shootin' some Magic at a bunch of rats

The story of 100 Rogues is not yet over, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I believe that software should be supported and taken care of for as long as is possible - years or even decades - as opposed to the more common belief in sequels. For as much as I dislike paying 50 dollars for incremental fixes/improvements which could have been in a free patch, I cannot stand the cannibalistic disrespect we offer our software once it has been sequeled. "Abandonware" is something that we should be ashamed of.

I'm new here at Armchair Arcade, but I'm a big fan of the editors here and have been a reader for some time. I hope that this story serves as a decent introduction to myself and my philosophy on games.P

GOG's Death (Not?) and the Shame of Abandonware

2010-11-29T09:30:00.000-05:00

Today, Good Old Games (gog.com) shut down. It was one of the very few ways available to customers who want to purchase a game that's more than five years old. This is sad news, but not nearly as sad as the cannibalistic reality that we've been living with for a very long time.

"Abandonware" is a term that should fill the heart of anyone who cares about computer gaming with shame. Imagine if you couldn't buy or borrow a book written more than five years ago - or if older films like Casa Blanca or Citizen Kane were simply impossible to get your hands on. The grim situation - if you're not already familiar is this. After a game is about 5 to 10 years old, two things happen. Firstly, it is "succeeded" by a sequel. Instead of adding bug fixes, new content and other improvements to the original game, those are usually released in a new box and sold as a separate piece of software. Then, the old software is simply forgotten, and it is assumed that no one cares about them and they are not sold. The other problem that leads to the existence of Abandonware is the insane, frothing-at-the mouth technology arms race that we've found ourselves embroiled in since day one. Technology has, of course, always been linked to computer games; but for the past twenty years, the situation has been ridiculous. If your software is more than six or seven years old, chances are most people won't even have a suitable platform to play your game on.

"So what?" You may be saying. "New, better games come and replace the old games." I've heard this argument many times, and indeed, this is the narrative pushed by not only retailers but even our media, our "journalists". The problem is, new games aren't better than old games. Some new games are better, and some new games are worse. Sometimes a sequel comes out and it's improved in some ways and less good in other ways. How many games released for the Wii last year were truly better games than Spacewar, often credited as being one of the first electronic games? Furthermore, just as there is value in understanding political history, art history, or the history of any field of study at all, there is great value in understanding video game history. If everyone understood the history of CRPGs, would they be all that impressed by Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion? If The New Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo DS was the first platformer I ever played, I would probably think it was an outstandingly good game (and if Tetris DS was the first Tetris I had played, I would grow up thinking Tetris sucked - which is what's happening to a generation right now, hope you're all comfortable with that). The point is, history gives us the context we need to judge a game's quality.

Another problem with this practice is that we lose respect for software, in general. I remember working at FuncoLand (before it was bought by Gamestop Evil Enterprises Corporation), and lifting a few-years-old copy of Madden for Gamecube out of a great bin of 1.99 discounted sports games (sports games, by the way, are the worst offender here, since most of them have a new release EVERY YEAR). I thought to myself "man, only a couple of years ago, people were lining up to buy this for FIFTY DOLLARS, and now, not more than a couple of years later, it's basically cultural garbage." The game wasn't any less of a game than it was the day it came out. I used to have a saying to customers, "games don't get any worse over time, they only get cheaper." Few listened to my advice, because we are so wrapped up in this mindset that any game more than a few years old is basically garbage.

So what is the solution to all of this? Sites like Good Old Games have popped up here and there, offering consumers a way to play some older games, but clearly it isn't working out too well. Steam and Impulse both sell a lot of old games on their services, as well. Someone may still be able to make a viable commercial site dealing in old games, but my idea is to create a digital, public video games library. Right now, these do exist, but they're unofficial, and technically illegal. I donated to The Underground Gamer, a torrents site which is one of the only places on the internet documenting nearly all of video game history. Despite this service to history and our culture, what they are doing is illegal. This is why I think it should possibly be the role of the state to step in and say, "hey, this stuff needs to be preserved and made available for the public at large", just as we have done for literature with the public library system. This would require both a technical know-how and a respect for video-gaming that I do not see the government having for another ten or twenty years, however, so I wouldn't get too excited.

The digital library idea may seem crazy, but if you're like me, you think that we've been in a pretty dark place for gaming for the past ten or fifteen years. This situation will not improve until we change the way we look at, and deal with our heritage. I'm to understand that GOG.COM isn't actually dead (could be a rather tasteless PR stunt) and there are some new technologies, such as OnLive which could serve to function as our digital library. However, they will only function this way, if these companies think that there are enough of us who care. We have a long way to go.

How "Turn-Based" Became a Bad Word

2010-11-29T09:28:00.001-05:00

Most of us who are heavily involved in games and game design realize the massive benefits to simple, classic turn-based mechanics. I'm not going to say that turn-based is "better" than real-time any more than a screwdriver is better than a hammer; they're just tools which we can use to get the job done. These days, however, many game designers are indeed using a hammer to nail in a screw, and building some pretty shoddy birdhouses. So many games coming out today would greatly benefit from a turn-based gameplay mechanic - often you can see that the designers knew this, but that something held them back from using one. Today I'm writing about what this something is - a deep-seated cultural mistake that we make about games in general.

The reason we hesitate to use turn-based mechanics in our games is because we do not embrace the qualities that make games unique. Instead, we spend most of our time chasing after what makes other mediums great - great visual art, great storyline, great cinematics. If you understand what a game is, you understand that none of these have anything to do with what makes a great game. The properties that define a game are things like rules, goals, feedback, actions, and resources. Chess, Galaga, and Dungeon Crawl are no worse games for lacking pre-rendered cutscenes, elaborate stories, or realistic graphics. There is - and has been for many, many years - a striving to make games look more like a cartoon, or more like a movie, or more like a book - or more like so many things, and this is at the heart of why "Turn Based Is A Bad Thing".

Firstly, I hope we can all agree that there are a lot of games that come out that should be turn-based, but aren't. I would cite examples like the Total War series, Fallout 3, and most Bioware games. Even if you can't agree with this, you can surely agree that there's a general feeling that turn-based is unpopular. These games are real time, but not because that was the best mechanic available. People, developers, and most of all publishers believe that turn-based is bad because it's "unrealistic" and it's "slow". Ironically, the reason it's slow is because the developers tried to make it realistic!

They think it's slow because... well, in most modern games, it tends to be rather slow. This is, however, not because it's turn based, but rather because it's turn based and it has to have somewhat "realistic" animations. First let's look at turn based board games - are they slow? No, they are not... a player is always playing, or considering his next move. They achieve this by having no animations or cutscenes or anything at all in the way of pure gameplay. If you play Advance Wars on the default game settings (combat animations on, normal map movement speed), a mission takes about three to four times as long as it does when I play with as much of that stuff "off" as possible. Final Fantasy Tactics is a great game, but if you play it a lot it does tend to drag way more than it needs to. I get to play so much more Fantasy General with all animations turned off. I think it's a very good thing for a game developer to ask this question:

"What percentage of the time your game is running is your player playing, and what percentage are they watching something un-dynamic happen?"

I personally believe that players should be "playing" upwards of 80% of the time that a game is running in front of them with a controller in their hand. I do understand that there are some physical limitations to this, like disk-read time, load times, etc. And it's also good to have brief moments of breathing room, especially after reaching goals. But these days, most games are hovering between 20 and 40%. In Super Mario Brothers, I'm making decisions about 99% of the time - decisions like when to jump, how long to hold the A button, whether to try to jump for those coins, how to maneuver around that Paratroopa. In Tetris I'm making meaningful gameplay decisions practically 100% of the time. A game like Fallout (1 or 2)does it pretty well, and the aforementioned Advance Wars and Fantasy General are good about this if you tweak the right game options. I'm not against animations in games, but I do think it is a bad thing if players have to wait for your animations to be over to continue playing. Everyone remembers how silly this got for some of the summons in Final Fantasy VII and VIII, but in a course of days or weeks played, even a one-second delay adds up to a ton of time you spent not playing, but watching.

Pictured: The player waiting idly while his GBA plays an animation.

To game designers, and especially turn-based game designers: Let go of realism! Stop making the mistake of thinking that good games come from their realism; "reality" is just one set of rules that sometimes can be a good model for game design, but it always has its limits. If you had to "keep your balance" and "go to the bathroom" in Half-Life 2, that would have been more realistic, but less good. So for you turn based game developers - don't worry about realism. Players sat down to play your game - let them.

I'm writing for Armchair Arcade

2010-11-07T16:06:00.003-05:00

Just wanted to let any hapless adventurer who wanders into the depths of the Expensive Planetarium that I've been writing for Armchair Arcade recently. Definitely go check them out, they're a cool site - most notable for their Matt Chat series.

Please check out:

How Turn-Based became a Bad Word

My Philosophy and the Tale of 100 Rogues

GOG's Death (Not?) and the Shame of Abandonware

I haven't written much for EP recently because of that, but also because I'm finishing up the 2.0 version of 100 Rogues. After that, we're onto the Skellyman Scoundrel, which will also be intense. On top of that, I may have another new project starting up in the next week or so. If so I'll be doing posts about it. I will, however, come back to EP as soon as I have time.

-Keith

Mario's Turning Point

2010-08-18T05:35:00.033-05:00

Disclaimer: This article (and this blog in general) discusses game design. Please keep in mind that the quality of a game's design has nothing to do with how much fun you personally had with the game. I've talked to a lot of gamers and many aren't able to discern between these two things. I personally think I had the most fun with "Super Mario World" - that was the game that came out when I was at the prime age for video game enjoyment. Someone who was born 4 or 5 years later might have had the most fun with "Mario 64", and someone who was born 4 or 5 years earlier might have had the most fun with "Super Mario Brothers". Either way, we all have to be able to discern between "what we had the most fun with" and "what is designed the best".

Have you ever asked yourself why you expect game sequels to get better and better, incrementally, while you don't do the same for any other medium? Do you expect Romeo & Juliet 2 to be better than the original? Citizen Kane 2? Frankenstein 2? With every medium I can think of other than games, hearing of a "sequel" is met with in the correct reaction - disgust. But with games, it's not only accepted, but ferociously anticipated. The likely defense is, "games are different!" Well, books, film, poetry, plays - aren't they all "different" from each other, too? In all of these types of media, a sequel (generally) involves a retelling of the same or a similar story/characters/setting, but just with more "stuff". Games are the same, and yet we expect this to yield good results? A good game is like a well designed machine - Nay! - it is a well-designed machine - so throwing new mechanics in there without really thinking it through can have disastrous consequences.

In this piece, we'll explore the Mario series, and take an in-depth look at what Nintendo did with its sequels, and ponder about where the series is headed.

Super Mario Brothers - this game quite obviously blew the lid off the whole goddamn thing, and for very good reason. Super Mario Brothers isn't good "for its time", Super Mario Brothers is just plain good. A brilliant blogger Auntie Pixelante discusses in detail SMB's brilliant invisible tutorial, which indicates the level of care taken to level design in the game. I would argue that - as is the case when a series is not yet a series and is still trying to establish itself - the level design of Super Mario Brothers and its Japanese sequel are arguably the best in the entire series. The visual art is the most stark, which at the end of the day might be for the best; for while 2D Mario games never have had a problem with visual clarity, more visual clarity is always a good thing. Super Mario Brothers has a distinct visual language to it - anything rectangular or flat is level geometry, and anything curvy isn't (clouds, bushes, enemies, etc).

Flaws: I guess that one might try to make the case that "it doesn't have a ton of variety" i.e. items and bosses and all, but I wouldn't consider that a flaw any more than I would consider it a flaw that Tetris or Chess don't have those things. Furthermore, many of the later attempts to add these things ended up adding flaws, as I'll explain. I'm racking my brain here, and I can't really think of a direct flaw that this game has. Maybe it could use one or two more songs in the soundtrack.

Super Mario Brothers 2 (aka The Lost Levels): Most Americans don't even know about this one, unless they had "Super Mario All-Stars" for SNES, which included a version of the game under the title"The Lost Levels". What anyone will tell you about this game is that it's hard - very hard. The only differences between this game and the original are the addition of a new poison power-mushroom that actually hurts you, and new levels. Cruel, numerous, near-unfair new levels.

Flaws: It could be argued that the fact that it's so similar to Super Mario Brothers is a flaw, and it could be argued that the crushing difficulty is a flaw. Personally, I don't really think either is a flaw of game design - I think difficulty CAN be a flaw, but for Super Mario Brothers 2 I think it works. It's essentially a continuation of the first game - a Book Two if you will. It's for those who have beaten the original and want more. We've already trained our Super Mario Brothers skills, so really how does it make sense to release more of the same without cranking the difficulty? So I'd argue that this game pretty much matches the original in flawlessness.

Super Mario Brothers 2 (USA): This is the game most of us here in the states refer to as Super Mario Brothers 2. It's the weird one, where you can pull up vegetables out of the ground, and jumping on an enemy's head doesn't kill him. What a fundamental change that is to the series, and one that would never be repeated again (but not because it's bad). Of course, this game started out as a bizarre middle-eastern themed game with a totally non-mario IP attached - it was originally called Doki Doki Panic and then just re-skinned as a Mario game. Why did they do this? Well, the Japanese have a very insulting legacy of thinking very little of us Americans, our patience and our skills. They thought that their Super Mario Brothers 2 was essentially too hard for us (I'd argue that we may have a different world here in the states if the Japanese didn't begin this campaign of dumbing everything down for us, but that's an argument for another time). Whether or not this is true, we were left with the very interesting, and honestly amazing game that is Super Mario Brothers 2 USA / Doki Doki Panic. The game is really quite brilliant; the pick-up-and-throw mechanic works super well, and it's something that I haven't really seen matched in a game since. It has its own distinct, colorful visual style, fever dream-like enemies and level design, and really fun bosses. Most of the monsters you'll encounter in Super Mario 2 never return, but bob-ombs, shyguys and a few musical cues become standard issue for the series. Not only that, but it has four different player classes you can play as with their own strengths and weaknesses!

FLAWS: It's significantly easier to control yourself while in mid-air in Mario 2 than it is in Mario 1, and this is a pattern that will continue for the rest of the series. It isn't quite a flaw, per se, but it is a change that I think makes a bad tradeoff (I'll go into this more later). You could also argue that it changed so much that the original concept of Mario isn't even recognizable. I personally do not consider this a flaw at all, so I am going to say that this game is, like the previous two games, without any major flaws.

Super Mario Brothers 3: This is one of the most talked-about (and best-selling) Mario games. For Americans, it was a return to the original model, but with a ton of stuff added in. It's far more expansive than any Mario game that had come yet - a colorful animated overmap for each world, an inventory - hell, you can even play Mario Brothers in a little versus-mode game! This is the Mario game that introduced the flight mechanic, as well as a series of brilliant specialty suits, such as a Frog suit (pictured left - who wouldn't be charmed by this?), a Tanooki suit, and a Hammer Bros suit. One of the most brilliant things about these specialty suits is just how rare they are - in a given play-through, you're likely to see just one or two of each, if you're lucky! This, accompanied by their fun and powerful functionalities, gives them very very high value. This is also probably the most difficult Mario game to ever get released in the USA, although Nintendo tried to dull that effect by also making it the only Mario game to have a messed-with power-down system (in most Mario games, if you have a tier 3 ability, such as a Fire Flower or the Leaf, and you're hit, you'll be made small again, but in the US version of Mario 3, you become Super).

FLAWS: Mario 3, with all its charm, was Mario's Turning Point, where the seeds were planted for the downfall of the series. To explain, I need to define a couple terms.

Most players subconsciously realize that there's a difference between what the player wants in a game, and what the player wants from the game. What I mean is somewhat explained with the following example: Let's say there's a button on the controller that instantaneously beats the current level. Now obviously, the player's immediate goal (what he wants) is to beat the game. That's the stated goal of the game, and we'll say that has "endogenous value". However, as a player, he probably realizes that he doesn't really want to use this feature, because that would make the game no fun, and what he wants from the game to have a good challenge, because it's fun. We'll say that this has "exogenous value". This dichotomy of two different kinds of value in a game is what game designers are talking about when they say that "players don't always know what they want". Giving the player more control over his jumps, as has happened with every Mario after the first, is giving the player something of endogenous value (control) and taking away something of exogenous value (more tension). (Of course, you do want to find the "just right" amount of control, so it's arguable that Nintendo was just trying to find that sweet spot - however, if you look at the future of the series, it backs up the case that they were pandering.)

Flight, a new innovation for Super Mario Brothers 3 and added to just about every Mario since, does the opposite of improving the game. We all love flight because powerful - high endogenous value - and because of a sort of wow-factor associated with the idea. But my question is, in terms of delivering exogenous value, isn't being able to skip half the level counter-productive? (Do not give me the "well, if you don't like the power up, just don't get it" argument - that's essentially the player having to do the game designer's job. It breaks immersion and the player's drive. When I play a game, I want to do the very best I can and be able to just make it, I don't want to have to shoot myself in the foot so that it's a challenge.)

Furthermore, flight is a hindrance to the game's exogenous value because it allows you to slowly float down from every jump.

Most game-design-conscious people realize that the fun of Mario is contained within the jump mechanic. It's the classic tension and release setup, with the tension being while you're in mid-air (will I land safely, or die?) and when you land (either where you intended to land, or in a bottomless pit, or face to face with a paratroopa). All of the levels are built entirely around this mechanic - Mario is all about the jump. So what happens to this mechanic when you can float down slowly after every jump? Well, there's a lot less tension and a lot less difficulty. You don't have to plan jumps as much, they're not nearly as much of a commitment, and therefore, they're not as much fun. The game gets less fun when you can float after every jump.

So flight is a flaw in Super Mario Brothers 3. Beyond that, there isn't much bad I can say about the game. Like I said, it's the hardest Mario ever released in the States, so if you were going to put flight into one Mario game, I guess this would be the one to put it in.

Super Mario World: I've gone through most of my adult life saying that Super Mario World was my favorite Mario game - like Mario 3 before it, there's a lot to like about the game. This game is even more expansive, with a huge flowing continuous overmap world, each world having its own great-looking tileset, and of course the introduction of the beloved "Yoshi" character (although some would say they ripped the Yoshi mechanic off from the far-less-great series, Adventure Island, which had Dino-Riding going back to the second game in the series) A side note is that while all Mario games have absolutely fantastic soundtracks, Super Mario World may take the cake.

FLAWS: Super Mario World may be my personal favorite, but it isn't the best. Actually, it's probably the worst of all the Mario games released at the time - it's plenty flawed. Firstly, flight is back, and while it has a fun-to-use mechanic, it's also a mechanic that allows you to skip some levels entirely. And you don't even have to tap "A" to float now, you can just hold it down. A really neat mechanic was created for flying with the cape, but is it more fun than playing a level? Also Yoshi, while very neat and cool, makes the game practically un-lose-able. When you're hit by an enemy while riding Yoshi, you don't lose any powerups, you just get knocked off Yoshi and just have to hop back on. This makes it pretty rare that Mario actually takes any damage if he has a Yoshi. Also, Yoshi makes it difficult to even fall into a pit ever, because of the fact that you can jump off of his back. If all that isn't enough, you keep an extra powerup item in stock that floats down if you lose your current powerup. So these additions all make the game significantly easier, and the level design of Super Mario World is probably the most tame to begin with.

Post Mario World Marios: Overall, after Super Mario Brothers Mario 3, it seems there was a campaign of making the Mario games more and more forgiving. Yoshi's Island, the sequel to Mario World, had the same effect World had when riding Yoshi, (you can never take damage from touching a monster or hazard) only this time it wasn't a powerup, it was just how the game worked all the time. Mario 64 lost the "Super" in its title but added a "health meter", making it so that Mario has to get hit eight times before dying. That is, eight times, without getting any coins, because coins re-fill your health. So yeah, I'd guess it's a ironic title, because Mario is more "Super" than ever!

Next comes Super Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube, which was where they decided that while it's good that Mario has tons of health, there's still the pesky problem of jumping and landing somewhere bad, like a bottomless pit. Introducing the FLUDD Water Pack. This device completely killed off, execution-style, any semblance of fun that could come from the jumping mechanic. If you talk to people who did (somehow) play this game through, they'll tell you that the best parts are the bonus missions where you don't have the stupid thing, because you actually have to time and plan jumps. Nintendo by this point has completely given up on game design. Someone told them that the more forgiving they are, the more Mario games they'll sell, and that is what they're focused on. Further evidence for this can be found in Galaxy & Galaxy 2 which essentially gives you a small, controllable second-jump, should you not plan your jump correctly the first time. The New Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo DS may be the easiest Mario game of all time (two new power ups, both of which just require you holding RIGHT on the d-pad and Winning!)

Now that I've gotten to these modern Mario games, I need to make sure I'm still coming through clear. If you enjoyed these games immensely, that doesn't mean that we even necessarily disagree. Enjoyment, or fun, can come from many, many sources. Maybe you enjoyed the art, music, or presentation. Maybe you enjoyed the characters, the story, the world. Maybe you enjoyed it because you had good friends playing it with you. I don't know, but what I do know is that the game design of Mario games has been on a strong downward decline since the beginning.

So here's what I think happened with the Mario series. They created the brilliant Super Mario Brothers, and then continued with that on Super Mario Brothers 2(Japan - The American SMB2 is essentially a side note, but a very innovative interesting game in its own right). Then, for Mario 3, they (more or less) went back to the normal-ish difficulty of the original Mario but added a bunch of features. This is the really the first "Sequel" in the sense that I talked about at the beginning of the article. Mario 3 isn't a bad game at all - it's a great game - but it has the first seeds of the downfall of the series. I believe that they didn't make Mario 3 because they had a great new idea for a game (like Doki Doki Panic/SMB2US/almost every original IP Nintendo made up until that point was), it was because they wanted to "make another Mario game" which everyone knew would make them a TON of money. This was a turning point for the company, but since they were so, so good, it just took them a long time to reach "suck".

Just as you aren't doing a child any favors by not allowing them to see or feel the consequences of their actions, you aren't doing a player any favors by being massively forgiving. It's the game designer's job to decide where that sweet spot is - obviously being 100% unforgiving is a bad thing - but like all things, it's about balance. Mario games cannot continue on the track they're on; people are going to eventually wise up and they are going to hit a wall like a ton of bricks.

Nintendo is sick, and all the coins in the world won't replenish their health. They want to keep making Mario games because Mario games will make money, but they already made Mario. This is the sequel problem that they are running into. Someone on Reddit said "a new Mario game is no fun without new cool additions!" to which I replied, "Then don't make a new Mario game, come up with something new instead!" Crazy, right?

Finally, on a larger note... this article started out as being about "ranking the Mario games and discussing their flaws", but it almost became about sequels and how we gamers don't treat a sequel with the skepticism that it deserves. If sequels can do such terrible damage to a game concept as strong as Mario's, then it should be recognized for what it is: a process of design-decay.

******

-Thanks to John Harris for some factual corrections & editing!

Our Mission Statement

2010-03-13T15:35:00.004-05:00

If someone really cares about games, they have no media they can rely on. There is no reliable, smart, mature game media that I know of. I think that this is because there is a core misunderstanding, a confusion about what video games are. They're of course games like any other, but we as a culture have this conception that video games are *about* technology, that they're *about* the Proper Nouns, that they're about all sorts of things that they aren't about. It was true three years ago, and it's true today - "Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing" received 8.0 ratings from Gamespot and IGN, just recently. The gameplay of these games is abysmal, but it was hardly even touched upon in any of these reviews. This shows that there is still a need for a voice like ours.

Expensive Planetarium is here to be a place for people to put their thoughts about games, game design, as well as reviews of specific games. And we will actually discuss that which makes games what they are - gameplay. If you'd like to write for Expensive Planetarium, let me know!

-Keith

Sports Games

2010-01-09T14:54:00.008-05:00

Sports games are to videogames what Rap and Country are to music - both are extremely successful, and both generated extremely polarized opinions. It's difficult to find someone who sees a sports game, such as Madden, as just another game - in quite a similar way to that in which most people don't hear a rap song and just think of it as just another song. They're both these very special side-genres, and while they're both considered music or games, they're almost totally their own things. I'm here to contend that this should not be the case. Sports games (and rap, for that matter) would be better off if they forgot about their genre and just made the best videogame (or song) that they could.

In theory, the sport-themed video game is a great idea. They're a set of rules that have been tweaked and patched for many, many years, and rules that are already proven to be fun. But it's quite rare that a sports game comes out that I'll actually enjoy. A big reason for this is that sports games aren't usually doing their best to bring the essence of a sport into a videogame context. No, sadly, most modern sports games have another much dumber goal in mind.

The goal of new sports games is to look the way sports look on TV. As if football is "football on TV". This is yet again, more evidence of Game Shame. It seemingly wouldn't be "good enough" for it to be a great video game that is based on the rules of football. This is what really needs to change. Actually, for once I'm not even speculating here. I actually watched an interview with the developers of Madden '10, and the entire thing was talking about how we can make it look more like TV - getting more TV-like camera angles, more people on the sidelines, and things of that nature - and absolutely nothing having to do with gameplay.

What Else is Possible?

If we look back to the 80s and 90s, there were a lot more great sports games. Nintendo's "Ice Hockey" was a brilliant hockey game, where you would choose team, but also would choose your lineup of only four (down from five) and a goalie, using three different archetypes - slow/strong type, quick/weak type, and all-around type. The gameplay was simple, but got across the core mechanics of Ice Hockey and is damn fun. I highly recommend it. It's a great example of how sports games can be very fast and free with the rules and regulations, and having nothing at all resembling "an updated roster".

Seen here: Ice Hockey's average, fast, and bruiser classes.

Another example of sports-based gaming brilliance is the Mutant League series, which sadly only had two games - Football and Hockey - but were both brilliant. These games take a much more creative approach to their respective games, adding in many new rules, simplifying in other areas, and generally having a really fun and silly spirit. Technos was great at these also.

These days, with respect to creative, "this is a videogame first" sports games, we're limited to, essentially the Mario-based games. This was actually fine for a long time, as throughout most of gaming's history, Nintendo (and those they licensed their characters out to) were brilliant. Mario Golf for Gameboy Color is an outstanding "golf-RPG", and Mario Tennis for N64 was a very rigorous, balanced and solid tennis game. Unfortunately, in the last 10 years, this sub-genre of sports games has degenerated into

We'll Still Need Maddens

I stumbled recently upon the trailer for a new football game called "Backbreaker". I was excited to hear of a new football franchise, with Madden being the only pro football game "allowed". This is because EA bought out the exclusive rights to the NFL stuff, and everyone thinks people won't buy a football game that doesn't have updated rosters. I obviously disagree with this - but I still think we'll always need the "simulation" style of football game, there are simply those who would value "updated roster" and "looking like TV" more than good, solid mechanics. But I also wonder if there couldn't be something in between.

Anyway, "Backbreaker" seems to unfortunately be more of the same. Sure, there are some technological advancements, but nothing that Madden won't have in a matter of years (check out the trailer if you like). So that's sad for me. But in order for sports games to stop being so stale, regular, average gamers who like games of all sorts have to open their mind to them. To those who are closed-minded about sports games, I implore you to play Super Dodge Ball for NES, or any of the Mutant League games for Genesis. These are great games first, that just happen to be based on sports, and that's what I think all sports games should be.