It has been ages since I have completed an 8-bit Mega Man title, so the release of Capcom’s Mega Man 9 has been nothing short of a blessing to me personally. Now the first thing people will tell you about the game is that it is hard. Not just hard, but rather the stuff of legends: “So hard you can’t possibly like it, you’re not hardcore!”

True, Mega Man 9 is hard. Yet at the same time, it was refreshingly ‘easy’. I have died more times than a year’s worth of death in other games, but the game always made it crystal clear where, when and how I died. I could anticipate it the next time, learn from mistakes and actually gain skill in navigating the level.

After doing that often enough, something magical happened: I stepped over the threshold into the magical zone of flow. Completing the task became ‘easy’ and I started to mix it up, finding ways of playing the game that defined ‘my style’ rather than the task at hand. I had a temporary drop in ability to play the game, as I took more risks knowing the game’s rules, but the results where very good and improved my skill.

To be honest though, that is what happens with all good games. Grasping the basics of the game and expanding upon its rule set while bending it to your own whims, is what it is all about. It has been at the basis of each and every game I have played. The importance of Mega Man 9 in this respect, is that it manages to communicate very clearly (and dare I say, abruptly) what can and cannot be done in the game.

When I think of some of the more recent games I have played, I find them to be fuzzy in comparison. In a first-person shooter chances are that a failure can rest upon a handful of external factors which may or may not equate directly to skill.

Mega Man 9 is trial-and-error with direct feedback; the earlier mentioned first-person shooter might incorporate trial-and-error with delayed feedback. A flawed decision might only show up a few minutes later or the complex artificial intelligence might actually randomize combat to such a degree that the course of action to take can only be guessed at. Sometimes even relying upon sheer luck. Or at least, that is what it feels like.

But this is all silly, of course. I cannot possibly be claiming that advanced artificial intelligence is worse than enemies that respawn as soon as they are a few inches off the screen, now can I? Yes and no. The fuzziness has its own zen nebula; its own zone of experience where you become one with the environment, but it is a zone that remains filled with static no matter what you do. There is an element that cannot be grasped or touched for that matter.

Mega Man 9 presented something I have been missing in more recent games for a long time: that the player is directly responsible for its actions. Physics, artificial intelligence, randomly or procedurally generated content… It all adds to the fuzziness and its constantly changing environments make for a less predictable game. That in its turn may generate a constantly challenging and evolving game-experience, but at the same time that makes you lose influence on how to play the game.

How to gain control over it. How to bend its world to our whims through the game’s own rules. How to beat the game at its own game. Its cheap deaths and unfair challenges actually drill the solution into your mind without teaching you it by proxy. That is gaming. Not only to let the player complete the assignment, but also to make it realize what is wrong and what is right on its own terms. In my opinion, that needs to return to games. We need that more in modern games.

And though Mega Man 9 is still very hard, I am almost sure that more players will also feel in control with this game than with most other games.

Whether they actually like that or not is another matter entirely.

Seems Kotaku has an article detailing Mike Fahey’s experience with our ‘muhmorpuhger’ The Chronicles of Spellborn at the Leipzig Games Convention.

Very nice (and welcome) words to read. Hearing ‘the egg’ worked will most definitely put a broad smile on the face of a certain colleague.

You can hear Matthew Florianz (audio) talking while Pierre-Yves Deslandes (PR) handles the controls.

How you control a game defines the entire experience. Control is the only thing you can rely upon with the game world, so it would be rather efficient if the controls matched your expectations exactly. PixelJunk Eden (PS3) for PlayStation Network presents itself as a simple platform-title. But it doesn’t exactly have the controls to match that ‘simple’ approach…

Genesis
Eden‘s controls aren’t difficult, it’s just unorthodox. De object of the game is to traverse 2D-gardens looking for spectra. To reach these spectra you need to collect pollen to burst the nearby seeds open and climb alongside the plants growing from them. Doesn’t sound too complex, not?

But once you start jumping you bump into Eden‘s problem. Jumping from the ground is just as you’d expect. But jump from a plant and you suddenly have a silk thread trailing you. You can use the thread to swing around like some kind of wannabe Spider-Man, but press the jump-button again and the thread breaks.

It’s a train wreck waiting to happen. To ‘normally’ jump off a plant, you need to ‘double jump’: press jump once and the thread will keep you from moving further, press jump twice and you’ll jump like in any other platform game. It’s a subtle difference, but especially during the start of the game, a seasoned gamer can become hugely frustrated because of it.

Luckily, PixelJunk Eden is a brilliant platform game. Eventually you’ll succumb to its strange whims and the game will turn from frustrating title to must-have. But it did remind me of other games with unorthodox controls; games with strange controller layouts colliding head-on with common sense.

Old School
As a child I came in contact with Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja in the arcades. A nice platform/action title not entirely dissimilar to Metal Slug in terms of feel. After spending too much money on it, I couldn’t wait until the game would hit my trusty NES. And a year later it finally did, but… The game turned out to be completely unplayable. Why? Because the functions of the A and B buttons were ‘reversed’.

Ever since Super Mario Bros., every platform game on the NES used A to jump and B to shoot (or run) by default. Except Joe & Mac evidently; in this game B was used to jump and A was used to shoot. My little children’s brain couldn’t cope with the switch and I rather quickly traded the game back for another game

But if you only suspect the lesser-known developers from fumbling by makings such choices, you’re wrong. Nintendo itself is no stranger to fly in the face of common sense and they did so with full conviction with the Nintendo DS. Where the SNES games ‘emulated’ the B-A pattern from the NES on the Y-B buttons, the Nintendo DS did this with (again) the B-A buttons, on the SNES controller’s layout.

SNES veterans playing Mario Kart DS were unpleasantly surprised by this: the ‘new old’ layout proved to induce cramps in hands trying to hopelessly adapt to the far less intuitive layout, while the Y-B layout would’ve been so much more comfortable.

It’s even worse if you play GBA games on a Nintendo DS. The B-A buttons from the GBA layout are instantly transplanted unto the Nintendo DS’s B-A buttons, leading to the same kinds of cramp. Ironically, New Super Mario Bros. (in itself a Nintendo DS game) allowed for players to choose between the comfortable SNES-alike Y-B control scheme or the cramp-worthy B-A one, instead of forcing the latter.

Default
Though these days I’m not nearly as horrified by strange controller layouts as during Joe & Mac, I do find myself annoyed by the need to ‘learn’ the controller layout when a developer decides to ‘reinvent the wheel’. Imported games only worsen the problem. For their Dual Shock controllers Sony uses the Circle and Cross buttons for OK and Cancel respectively. But in the West this is exactly the other way around, with Cross used for acknowledging and Circle used to Cancel.

Then there’s the difference between console controllers and their default controller configurations. For instance, while playing most first person shooters on the Xbox, the games uses the triggers extensively for shooting. But switch to the PlayStation 2 and suddenly the top shoulder buttons (L1 and R1) were used for the same functions. This difference remained in use even as the Xbox 360 finally gained the final pair of shoulder buttons, the result being a mental and physical switch of controlling first person shooters as one switches consoles.

Microsoft seems to the be the first (and so far only) manufacturer to understand the importance of certain default settings and control layouts. The Xbox 360 features a collection of system wide settings that keeps preferences like an inverted Y-axis consistent over various games. Next to that, the functions of the A and B buttons on the Xbox 360 are set in stone and even colour coded (green and red).

Nintendo is definitely the worst manufacturer in this respect. If you encounter the rare instance of being able to reassign functions or to customize your controller-layout in a Nintendo game, you can be almost certain that there was some kind of sacrificial ceremony involved to get it in there.

Though it might not be fair to blame Nintendo in this instance. The stubbornness of gamers to cling to a ‘perceived’ perfect controller-layout is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for it allows you to quickly capture the essence of a game’s controls when you stick to the commonly used functions. A curse for it forces your game to be immediately the same as all those other games. Never before was this topic so under discussion as during the introduction of Metroid Prime‘s control scheme and how it should have been that of a ‘normal’ FPS.

But despite the fact that gamers should be more open to new controller-layouts, it’s a rather indecent thing to disallow players to modify the layout outright. Or even worse: only go half the way. If you have ever tried to modify the controller-layout of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, you might have ran into some severe limitations of what function was allowed to move to which button. Quite strange.

Hardware Limitations
But even if the software cooperates, you might find the hardware being the way. Just try to play a 2D-fighter through any Xbox or Xbox 360 controller and it becomes clear why people have been clamouring for a better d-pad right from the start. The only option for them seems to be to buy an extra arcade stick.

Or consider the ridiculous approach by Nintendo to outfit their Nintendo 64 controller with an analog stick at such a ridiculous position that the d-pad became the red-headed stepchild of the controller. Even menu’s needed to be navigated through use of the stick. An even more ridiculous decision as the d-pad was often turned off for proper menu-navigation. Nintendo keeps this little FUBAR alive until this very day. Even the Wii Remote’s pointing functionality is often infuriatingly ditched for in comparison cumbersome d-pad control, or even worse, Nunchuk control.

To add even another layer of complexity, your taste for a good control layout may change over time. Personally, I’ve played Super Metroid many more times on an emulator than my Super Nintendo. The reason? A PlayStation-to-PC converter that allowed me to use a Dual Shock controller for the game instead of the holy SNES controller.

Using the Dual Shock in Super Metroid allowed me to have the run-button mapped to R2 and the item-select to R1, while the diagonal aims could be moved to L1 and L2. The game works so much better due to this configuration, it’s becoming default for playing the game on a SNES or Classic Controller as well. At least, the R button is then getting the run-button mapped, while the diagonals are reduced to just one mapped to L.

(That said, Super Metroid is one of the rare Nintendo games that allow you to completely remap the controls. Not entirely without reason. Its default controls are slightly bizarre: X is used to shoot, A for jumping and B for running. Insane…)

Control Solution
Control layouts can sometimes completely miss the point yet be absolutely logical. Guitar Hero predecessor Frequency uses three action buttons on the controller instead of the five on a plastic guitar. Those three buttons were Square, X and Circle on the Dual Shock 2 controller. That sounds quite logical, but every Frequency-player worth its salt knows that using those buttons won’t gget you anywhere.

Instead, to properly play the game you will need to use the Dual Shock 2’s shoulder buttons, leaving one of them unused and the button configuration strangely unbalanced. The imbalance does allow you to use two hands and three fingers in harmony and the result is so much more direct control that after a few minutes you can’t imagine switching back to just the action buttons.

So what can solve these control troubles? The Wii? I don’t think so. Its movements and direct actions should make controls more transparent, but currently those extra possibilities seem to be straightjacketed into shaking the controller to use a function usually assigned to a button anyway.

Games that do demand actual movements are nine out of ten times too frustrating as the leeway for performing such movements can be criminally tight misinterpreting your wishes. The Wii experience is far too analog, while its strengths can be found in controls that seem to emulate the old ‘press button, something happens’ mechanic that works for normal controllers.

Maybe that’s why the far more digital ‘ddouble jump’ out of PixelJunk Eden manages to fascinate me. It’s the developer’s choice to include it, you’ll get used to it pretty quickly, it’s entirely logical to include from the game’s point of view and yet… I do miss the accepted control scheme for a platformers.

Couldn’t jump and leaving a silk thread been mapped to two separate buttons? Would’ve saved me a lot typing.

In what seemingly is the newest craze on the not-for-the-sane-at-heart rllmukforum.com, t-shirts adorned with Penrose-tilings are suddenly a hot commodity.

Phi (or 1.618, whatever gains your preference) introduced the idea as Penrose Cyan and I liked it enough to place an order. Apparently I was the second person to do so. It turns out to be a great high-quality shirt and the little tag on the left sleeve is a rather smart finishing touch.

So yeah, basically I’m playing billboard here, but if you like the idea of a visualisation of the golden ratio on your chest, you might want to scour the site at your own leisure. Just a friendly warning: next to the Penrose/Aperiodic design, the Tribar is also inbound.

For some reason PixelJunk Eden (PS3) is causing a whole set of different reactions than I expected. Personally I love the game, though I did reminisce a bit about its controls on Bashers (NL).

The weird thing seems to be that a lot of players in my gaming sphere not only think the controls are weird (they are), but also inconsistent. Which in my opinion is way off the mark.

Sure, there’s this thing with hitting X once or twice, but once that is learned no other control problems present itself. And yet, players seem to think the game is buggy with their Grimp not holding onto plants or even having his own mind about your control-input.

And here I was thinking that together with Braid (X360), this game would reinvigorate the platform genre. Seems Braid is the only one allowed to.

Social networks have quickly become a web staple. To such an extent that with each new one you start asking yourself whether it has any use at all. While Google, Facebook et al are vying to gain control of the data (or in some cases define who actually owns social data), games seem blissfully ignorant of the new hype.

Well, that was until Microsoft dipped its toe into the water. Xbox Live at one point gained the friend of friends ability, making it possible for you to view a friend’s friendlist, potentially allowing you to play with other safe persons even if your friend is away. A rather novel exploit of this feature still surprised me a bit.

Xbox Live’s friendlist is notoriously limited to a certain amount of persons you can register as a friend. Which is kind of annoying if you have different communities per game and playing them all actively. You are going to run out of available slots pretty quickly. As a means to circumvent that community-wise, specific game-accounts were created. Basically an Xbox Live Silver host account is set-up and everybody within the community registers that account instead of individual friends. Because of the friend of a friend feature that means that by adding one friend you gain access to the entire community of that one game. Sure the same limit still applies to the host account, but now to the community as a whole rather than individual friendlists. It’s also an easy way to keep track of a clan without sacrificing your ‘normal’ friends.

Though it is more or less an exploit at the moment, it is easy to see how this idea could be extended, allowing you to compress your social network even within a hard limit. At the same time it highlights how social networks can add to the online game experience.

Just about everyone who has played games online knows of the annoying players that can wreck games (and if you do not, there is a good chance you are one of them). Sure, there are ways of getting rid of them by banning, reporting them, etc. But the most ideal situation is that you wouldn’t encounter them at all. Penny Arcade’s humoristic theory sets an excellent point that social networks can potentially circumvent. Anonymity can bring out the worst in people and by playing with friends of friends the anonymity is broken down.

This is the same aspect LinkedIn works with. By scanning the contacts of who you know, you can easily reach business contacts that you thought were completely anonymous to you. For games it would work the other way around. The closer you are to someone the greater the social pressure on the player would be to keep its cool. After all, you and the connected player both share a friend and damaging the relationship with one, could damage that with the other as well.

Of course, that is the negative view of it, the positive view is that because you are a friend of a friend, the chances you behave similar to the shared friend is far greater than connecting with a random player. Simply put, players receive an individual social status that is only relevant within its intended range. Taking Xbox Live as an example again; someone with a feedback of 1 star can be an excellent player to you personally, but a small disaster to anyone else. The 1 star feedback is not relevant because it applies to the whole and is based upon a rather shaky median. (Who actually provides feedback, and if so only positive or negative? It’s a niche providing a niche-rating.)

A social network in contrast will be more likely to connect you to players with the same preferences. If a person within your social network would be getting negative feedback, it would potentially be far more relevant to you as a player.

Of course, it runs completely wild when you apply this idea to an MMO.

Imagine an MMO in which the only people you see and can play with online are all part of your social network to an n degree. Assuming there would be no fault with the earlier provided Xbox Live example, you would be playing in a world with a greater chance of people adhering to your own play style. And by adding new friends directly you would decrease your degree of separation with even more people.

Of course when put to the extremes the idea is nuts: you would be working towards the normal amount of players an open MMO would provide. But at the same time, it hints at an optimization. I could imagine it being used to reduce server loads (though the practical application might be hopelessly complex negating the effect). I could also imagine this being a way to prevent spam from gold-farmers and bots, which would need a ‘friend’ to get into an internal social MMO bubble.

At the same time that also hints at its greatest weakness: the lone wolf. A person without any friends would be in a completely empty world and would need to find an external source to gain access. That idea is quite chilling even though it is already applied in everyday life. On the other hand it would be a boon for already existing communities, say a forum, which could basically play with its own group not having to fear disruptions from outside.

It would severely compromise the massive aspect of an MMO. But at the same time it feels like a way forward for online games in general. After all, less is more, n’est-ce pas?