The Gameless Game

Trick bosses are annoying

2008-11-30T17:50:02Z

(A bit of a lull, and back to our ordinary scheduled blogging... more backlogged stuff coming soonish?)

Yesterday, I had was commenting on a rather ridiculous video and said a carefully weighed opinion. In case the video disappears, it's basically Chris-chan's ode to Playstation 3, a "life enchancement device" as he affectionately calls it. In case the video disappears, here's what I said:

I have had an occasional tendency to go in obsessive fanboy mode, but after this, I'll never ever feel bad afterwards - because I've never had even the slightest inclination to call my favourite things "life enhancement devices". My life's not ipso facto any better after pwning Mogenar today, dammit...

Well, actually, that Mogenar thing... that Mogenar thing... I think it's pretty much safe to say that games are just something that you buy to get more challenges and intellectual stimulation. They don't enhance your life; they make it harder and more interesting.

And Mogenar, if anything, is exactly the sort of thing that makes your life a hell.
]]> (Note: May have spoilers for Metroid Prime series)

In case you aren't following the links, Mogenar is the first "real" boss fight in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. There's always a point in Metroid Prime series, it seems, where you get seriously stumped by an annoying Trick Boss. In Metroid Prime, I got stumped by, er, Flaaghra at first, because I was a newbie - and then, Thardus. The rest of the game was relatively straightforward. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes ramped this up by making the subbosses much harder than the real bosses: Boost Guardian and Spider Guardian were just hell.

And now, Mogenar. Basically, the annoying thing about the fight is that the boss has one damn way to damage it, and it's not easy. In fact, the boss is specifically designed so that as soon as average person shoots at it, they immediately realise they should have been a little bit faster. There's no unofficial way to whittle down the enemy's strength, just the tricky one. And obviously, the moment you get any damage done, the boss will stop doing whatever the hell it was doing and hint that it is about to regenerate all of that hard-won damage right back, and you have to stop trying to pathetically damage it and deal with that problem.

Okay, in the end, the boss fight wasn't really all that super hard. But it just depressed me for a while - especially when I was stuck with another trick boss fight in Tomb Raider: Anniversary!

(Note: ...and potential spoilers for Tomb Raider: Anniversary)

I managed to get a little bit less stressed about the Mogenar boss fight because I managed to look at the guides. After MP2, I'm much more inclined to look at walkthroughs again.

TRA's centaur boss was similar - less stress thanks to guide perusal. The trick to winning that fight was to do an adrenaline-rush shot, grab the centaur's shield with grappling hook, and use that to one's advantage. I figured out the shield part without any assistance. Too bad I didn't figure out the adrenaline rush part - because it was weird.

Basically, the adrenaline rush thing can make the centaur freeze - in two different states. If you succeed, you can grab the shield. If not, it's possible to make the centaurs collide and make one of them freeze in a state where you can't grab the shield.

*sigh* Bug or glitch? Oh well, it's all over now - and both bosses have been dealt with. I'm having fun again! My life is better!

Wii for Real: Yes, it works

2008-10-25T16:10:47Z

So, for the last few months, I've enjoyed Wii as a... um, new platform for playing GameCube games. Then, I got Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which was ultimately just improved Melee and the Serious Players could just stick to GC controller.

And this week's new highlights for me: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Both will need more rambling in due time, but here's some rambling on the topic of Controlling The Games. Of course, I was a little bit sceptical about how these much-raved-about Wii controls really work in real life, but my fears have subsided.
]]> Wii Sports (albeit quite well-done and entertaining technology demos...) and whole another thing to do "real" games.

Here's what I figured: In today's multi-platform-driven world, is there room for funky controllers? Sure, the world wants innovative ways to control the games, and Nintendo does this pretty well, but would the game companies forget about that and just do bog-ordinary ports of the games for Wii? Also, will the new and so far unusual control schemes actually work in old kinds of games?

Metroid Prime 3 and Tomb Raider: Anniversary are both quite certainly rooted in "old kinds of games". I've beaten the first two Metroid Prime games and, gameplay-wise, they've always felt to me like fairly typical FPSes, when you really get down to it. I had beaten Tomb Raider 1 and Tomb Raider: Legend; what really new can I expect at this point?

Well, I can now definitely say - even after a relatively short bout with both games - that the games are definitely in the "new but old" category.

The newness of the controls comes primarily from the method itself. The gameplay of Metroid Prime 3 is pretty much the same as before - just that now you actually have a pointing device and an old Quake-hand can keep doing the same ol' thing, it just took a little bit time to get used to use a proverbial stick instead of a proverbial lump of soap to control the game. There's a few "gimmicky" things (wow, actually workable door locks - colour me surprised), but overall, the control scheme is rooted on the same old principles... finally used in the proper manner.

Likewise, after beating Tomb Raider: Legend (twice), I was a bit worried how the controls work in Anniversary, but there's little to no worries... just that I need to point at the stuff I want dead. Stick says where I go! Pointer says where I point and look! It can't get much easier than this.

...oh well, this is one of those "I got a good idea and ran out of steam" type posts for this blog. I'll just say that the stuff has worked acceptably and I'm not worried what the future will hold.

Wisdom in Weird Places

2008-10-11T15:42:48Z

I grew in a fairly ordinary Lutheran faith, but if you want a honest analytic opinion, I've always considered myself an "eclectic believer". Intricacies and slavish following of the Scriptures matter less to me - what really matters to me are the Good Ideas.

Yet, for a long time, I have had this weird mental condition that prevents me from being open-minded. It's one of those weird things that have to be demolished if I'm really going to accept Good Ideas from around me.

The mental block is simple: Are computer games a valid source for religion, philosophy and ethics? Can the same thing be said about fiction in general?

]]>

Perhaps it would be best to start from a long, long, long time ago - when the computer games could first expose me to things that are different from the Plain Old Boring Christian Ideals. That was way back in the Commodore 64 era.

Believe it or not, the first game to expose me to non-Christianity was... Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Okay, perhaps it was not just the game that did that. But the fact is, the Great Ninja Craze of Late 1980s/Early 1990s was the one got me interested of the Eastern philosophies - for real. I remember reading some of the eastern tales and thinking how profound that stuff was.

(Oh, and Shadow Warriors and The Way of the Exploding Fist and International Karate and someone even warez'd me PC Budokan and...)

Yet, here was this tiny little thing that conflicted with everything. Being a kid, it never occurred to me that it was actually okay to think for myself. I was learning about eastern philosophies kind of in secret. Yet, I'm pretty sure no one around me at the time would have minded if I had suddenly gone Zen Buddhist, it's just that it's not exactly conventional in where I lived.

Yet - no, conformity or peer pressure did not kill that budding clue that I had. What killed it was the plain ol' John 14:6.

Yeah. Here I was, learning all sorts of interesting and profound and completely harmless things about some very wise things other people had been saying about the Way of Things. And someone reminded me that the Wise Guy had said that no, his way is the right one and that way is the wrong one. Stated as plainly as possible. It didn't make any freaking sense, but there it was, written in the pages.

That kind of hurt, but I got over it with a shrug. Oh well. Time to strive for boring life, then.

But the episode left me one important lesson: It's okay that there are other cultures, there are other ways of thinking, and they can be pretty darn wise too. I feel I learned a lot of interesting things from that episode, and I am happy I did.

And most importantly, wisdom can be found from everywhere.

Now, flash forward to the 2000s. I'm playing very good old games, like the Ultima series and Thief: The Dark Project - and the odd thing is, I've noted that I really like game worlds with depth. The game worlds that I've enjoyed the most are the ones that put also thought in the religious and philosophical side of the world, because I like games that make us think.

I absolutely love Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle's Ophidian dissection of virtues, for example. Summarised, in each of us, we have tendencies toward order and chaos, and these are best left balanced. Order likes ethicality, discipline and logic; chaos likes tolerance, enthusiasm and emotion. From balancing these pairs, we find harmony, dedication and rationality. Favouring order over chaos leads to prejudice, apathy and ruthlessness; favouring chaos over order leads to anarchy, wantonness and insanity.

This was well put! The designers spent a good while thinking of a really nice system of virtue for U7SI. Wouldn't that make sense as a belief system for real people? The game also delightfully explores what misunderstanding of these virtues means: the Ophidian civilisation is gone, and one of the reasons for that was a great war between followers of Order and followers of Chaos. The Avatar, who has had to deal with misunderstood virtues before, takes the quest to figure out what really should have been done in the first place - understand the Balance.

What does this all have to say about us? We all know people who seem to favour one direction over another, even dangerously close to reaching the bad end of their scale. I'm a Chaos person, pretty clearly; looking at the game, I know that without self-restraint and common sense it'd be terribly easy to slide to anarchy, wantonness and insanity. Time to tiptoe back and look at the Order side for inspiration, it seems.

But this is not why I'm rambling here. The real reason is this: People can dismiss this as fiction.

It's a work of fiction.

It's a brilliant piece of thinking, but it's fiction.

That's the awful part. And my realisation, and New Good Guideline that I'm probably going to damn follow well, is pretty simple: Human culture - bless its vivid hues, its complex textures, its expanse and just plain brilliant complexity - can come up with profound wisdom every-damn-where.

I'm sorry, syncretism can creep up on you. But it doesn't change the plain facts.

I've been following Fundies Say the Dardest Things for a while now, and I've found out one thing: some Fundamentalist Christians tend to be annoyed if someone suggests the Bible is written by people. Yet, they wouldn't spend a second thought calling someone else's holy book a work of fiction. They certainly wouldn't spend a second thought calling a fictional book of faith a work of fiction (except when it's Necronomicon, which is obviously not, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary).

It's a problematic situation, all around. The Bible is written by people, that has been proven, and despite of not exactly being up to standards compared to what passes for brilliant prose these days, it has a few good bits in it. As, I'm saying, is the case with many other holy books out there.

Even fictional ones.

For example, I've kept reading the Principia Discordia for a while now - yet again, heavens know how many times it has already been - and, you know, it's hard to dismiss the whole thing entirely as a joke. It just proves what I've said above: You can find wisdom - touching wisdom - in weird places.

If a piece of fiction makes you think, for God's sake, don't stop thinking.

If it makes you laugh and think, for God's sake, pass it on and don't crush it as heresy.

We need to celebrate human culture. Not just our culture, but everyone else's, too.

At the cost of being a heretic, I have to say I made a small mistake of being restrained too much by a single freaking verse. I want to be a part of the world. I want to know its wisdom.

[Image from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, by Retro Studios / Nintendo. Someone else is being political. Are you thinking about that possibility?]

Emperor Ing fell at last

2008-10-03T10:05:12Z

Finally.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes has been a bit problematic game for me. It's much harder game than Metroid Prime, and when I started playing the game, I made a conscious effort not to look at any walkthroughs - after all, I had beaten Metroid Prime with some help so the sequel should not prove to be problematic, right?

Well, I'm happy to say that while I did indeed look at walkthroughs while playing the game, I can honestly say that I did figure out the strategies myself. In the end, I did look at the walkthrough at times to see if there's any "optimal" way of beating the bosses - but I did manage to figure out how to damage them and what I really should do to beat them. That's one of the annoying features of Metroid series: You somehow manage to figure out how to beat the things, but figuring out how to do things without dying 10 times is the hard part. I'm taking my enjoyment from the fact that I figure things out this way, rather than slavishly following the "Real Men don't look at the walkthroughs" purism that I thought was a good idea. I enjoy the games more this way.

Anyway, the end battle was amazing - much more fun than the Metroid Prime last boss. Took some massive amount of cursing to get through, though... The crazy thing is, of course, that the final forms of the bosses aren't so difficult at all; Emperor Ing's first form is the hardest because it sucks up all ammo and there's such a limited time to damage the thing.

One annoying thing about the game was the fact that I got 99% of the scans. I missed one damn one-time-only scan (the space pirate cannon). Damn. Well, maybe I'll be inspired to beat the game again or something. Eventually.

But now, this game is finally over. Finally. Damn it. No more beating the goddamn Spider Guardian. Considering adding Metroid Prime 3: Corruption to the to-get list.

I need a bit of rest. But at least now I can get back to playing Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age, without any big diversions like this any more.

Metroiding goes on

2008-09-06T16:34:24Z

I'm getting back to Metroid series!

A few days ago, I actually made some progress in Metroid Prime: Hunters. Unbelievable, all in all - I was out of clues and was getting desperate.

But best of all, I actually beat the bloody Boost Guardian in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. When I first played the game, it was the first boss that managed to kill me. I was so happy when I had beaten Quadraxis back in the day that there would never ever be need for me to defeat the Very Damn Annoying Bosses again... but then my memory card died. And the motivation to defeat the Boost Guardian again can be pretty low. Hope I can stay steamrolling until I hit the bloody Spider Guardian again...

"'Alpha Blogg was harder than I remembered', he blogged." Yep - I think I even got killed once when I played it first time. I guess the reason is simple: the title loop lies. I'm looked at the opening credits many times, thought "oh, this is easy", and got flattened. Alpha Blogg isn't trivial - just Relatively Straightforward. Fortunately I beat the thing without retries this time, because I messed up and couldn't get to the save point and would have needed to redo a lot of stuff again. Grr.

Oh, and the game looks a bit funny on Wii due to crisper graphics, I guess...

And finally, a little bit of Somewhat Tasteless And In Any Case Quite Inappropriate Humour® (but publishable, I hope, since I'm not making light of the incident itself, no way). From Iltasanomat (a local tabloid) website: "11-year-old American boy died in Thursday after re-enacting Halo, the famous video game, in his home in Farrington. The boy shot himself accidentally with his own gun." *sigh* it is, of course, extremely regrettable that this sorts of incidents happen, but one could bring forth, once again, the Console War angle here. At least Metroid Prime developers, in their infinite wisdom, remembered to include the Space Pirate research data in the game, stating very emphatically that all attempts to recreate Samus Aran's Morph Ball have ended in severe injuries or death. Kids, do not use real guns, they are not toys!

Pokéfailures

2008-09-01T19:39:30Z

A while back, there was some Æncyclopædiæ drama over Chris-chan (aka Christian Weston Chandler). I'm not really commenting much on the issue, having had similar (but deinitely not as spectacular and not as severe) issues as this guy, but I'm just saying that I found the Sonichu audio books pretty... unique. And at parts hilarious. I sure hope this guy gets over the, ahem, issues, one way or other.

Anyway, I'm not posting about that - I just mentioned that because looking at the case reminded me that I still haven't completed Pokémon Sapphire. So, in the weekend, I played good few hours of the thing. Yay. So here is some aimless rambling about a Grown Man Playing Pokémon, a bit Analytically.

I'm not necessarily completely coherent today, so apologies if this article is too weird to handle.
]]> So why was I playing Pokémon in first place?

Wasn't there a line in Pokémon Red/Blue that said something like "a RPG! There's no time for that!"

Years ago, the regrettable fact was that there weren't any good portable game systems besides Game Boy line, and, uh, the only RPG that was worth playing for on the only portable game system ever was Pokémon. And, hey, I like Vulpixes! Flame-throwing foxes are pretty cute! ...okay, the GBA game has some pretty cute ones too. But Vulpixes are so aww cute.

Now, years later, the only portable console line worth a damn is still the Game Boy line and the Nintendo DS, but at least the situation is changed for the better: There's plenty of great RPGs available for GBA - I've bashed through Breath of Fire and almost through a couple of Final Fantasy titles. And, more importabtly, the aanoying thing about Game Boy was that the games were rarely very complex in the first place, and in the GBA era, this changed for the better. i wanted complexity, and no longer had to demand specifically a RPG. There's thrillingly beautiful action games like Metroid: Zero Mission, amazing strategy games like Fire Emblem, even puzzlingly cool concepts like the isometric Max Payne remake - and hey, these are just the GBA things, I haven't even gotten started about the DS offerings... but I digress. Back to teh Pokeyman.

What really drew me to Pokémon back in the day? I realised that when I looked at the Sapphire game. One could try to fit in a preposterous statement by asserting that I was looking at a game from my early adulthood, back in the day when I used a game system from my childhood, through the eyes of an adult when I was playing a game on a system that definitely belonged to my adulthood. In other words, no damn green-LCD nostalgia from school days. So - a few years back, I was playing Pokémon Sapphire... eyes open and seeling the utter corniness of it all. I grinned, and went forward. What the heck else I could do?

One of the things that makes me think Pokémon series is fun is because it's so over-the-top in its childish stuff. It's meant to be funny for the children, and in its pure simplicity it's just charmingly funny to me too. Nintendo's recent offerings have been meticulously translated, and at least up to the GBA generation, they gave a good day off for the good translators and brought in the tolerable-but-cheesy translators. There's nothing wrong as such with the dialogue - maybe it was weird to begin with - but there's this distinct impression that they brought in the cheese company to do funny dialogue for children, different crews for different products.

There's a lot more to like about the games than just the charming dialogue. Colourful world, colourful creatures that vary from horrible to cute-overload, and when you get right down to it, the basic mechanic of collecting Pokémon is pretty clever and interesting even as such. And some of these things are so cute. Awww that cute Vulpix up there. Aww.

However, there's sides I've never quite liked in these games, especially when you compare them with other RPGs. Most of the things have to do with game mechanics.

Level balance is off the whack. Level difference of over 10 is lethal if you want to somehow catch wild Pokémon, especially if your all-slaughtering dream team happens to have proper moves learned - you probably don't want to waste move slots on completely puny attacks.
Moves are a weird thing. While the move system itself is pretty good, there's not really enough information available on different moves; the only good way to find out what the moves really do is through good old-fashioned "let's go try it out" thing. Pretty big leap from here to, say, Fire Emblem's damage calculations. Okay, I get it, it's a children's game, and it's not responsible parenting to unleash the Inner Munchkins of the poor and innocent children. (It's their responsibility, after all, to unleash it themselves, if they want to learn, through fun and harmless way, what "learning by mistakes" really means.. =)
HMs are too weird. I don't know about the GBA games, but in the GB games the HM moves couldn't be forgotten without some extra help, and oh boy, did that ever stink.
I'm not very convinced that buffs work too well in the game. The game seems to use buffs in retarded situations, and only buffs that are of any good use are ones that raise evasion. Even so, using buffs is severely subject to Murphy's Law. The best strategy seems to be to just go out there and kick butt.
Finally - dude, were's my secret hideout? Okay, it's supposed to be secret, but geez, a helpful map note might be useful.. I'm getting caffeine dementia and I can't remember every mystery from a game I played about year and a half ago. Never you worry, I'm going to learn that fly move and go scouting... speaking of which, some sort of planner would be pretty good, aside of just having a list of all badges you have and map showing what towns you haven't visited yet...

Regrettably, I haven't yet checked out the DS games and how they stack up, but if old signs are true, nothing big has been going on. We'll see, eventually...

(Image: Oh dear, Vulpix flies! Captured by yours truly some good while ago from Pokémon: The First Movie, the Pikachu's Vacation segment. Apparently, frequently copied around the net by now. And yes, two frames make it worth to let the DVD sit on the shelf... =)
(Update: Sorry, was speaking of Crystal when I obviously meant to say Sapphire. Darn. Sorry.)

A random video: Samus v. Metroid Prime

2008-09-01T16:03:30Z

Finally managed to sign up to Veoh. So, here, I finally uploaded a video from late 2004 or so: Me defeating Metroid Prime, in, uh, Metroid Prime, GameCube's finest game, for the first time. I should have uploaded this somewhere earlier, but I didn't want to burden archive.org and YouTube only wants 10-minute vids. Anyway, my play style here displays some unprecedented clumsiness, never before seen but sometimes repeated. (I think I was just getting tired that day - this was my third or fourth try that day...)

The Great Finnish Nintendo Slogan Failure of 1992

2008-08-27T12:09:29Z

I’ve been meaning to post this for a long time, but never quite got around to it. Nintendo-lehti, the official Finnish Nintendo magazine in 1990s, had a contest where people could submit new ideas for marketing slogans for Nintendo. The results were published in issue 3/1992, but I’m not sure if Nintendo’s importer (Funente Oy, I think?) ever used the slogans.

]]> The winning slogans were actually pretty innocuous:

“Game Boy is small, but contains big adventures!”
“Great entertainment with a push of a button!”
“Keep the console hot, and your head cool!”

…but the “other slogans that the judges also liked”, that took the rest of the page, led me to believe that this was some sort of a weird badly-covered-up attempt at publishing some Humour in the magazine. This was the 1990s. You never knew if this was a sincere attempt at humour or an attempt to be deliberately cheesy.

To kick this train wreck going, I have to say that I made absolutely no attempt to properly translate the rhyming here, because I may run into danger of subtly adding a meaning to this poem, and I definitely want to keep the meanings exactly as they are:

“When you push a button in Nintendo
you might see the title screen in the screen
no matter what you play, for example, SMB 2
it definitely is from Nintendo
the famous video game.
In the game the difficulty level is average,
sound good, graphics excellent.
Of games good of combat,
of thinking and of adventure,
Zelda 2, that it is — a game good and excellent.
I hope you have a Nintendo in your home
so that you may let out a joyful screamulation.”

Okay, I had to coin that last word. How the hell else could I translate “riemuhuudanto”, which probably can’t be found in the dictionary anyway?

The biggest crime of this poem — apart of the completely incomprehensible “Of games…” part that I’m not sure makes any sense in Finnish, even — is that it describes Zelda II as having an average difficulty. Remember that game? Of course you remember Zelda II: The Kick-in-the-Teeth of Link! Okay, maybe NES games as a whole just had damn high difficulty level, so it would have been pretty average…

Besides, while game reviews in poetry form are sometimes amusing, taking poetry-format game reviews and cramming them in game advertising is a quite questionable policy. And, of course, I have to wonder why anyone would advertise anything as having “average” qualities.

“Let go of the mundane life and vanities with Nintendo. Awe-inspiring moments, challenging fights and thrilling adventures among demons. Nintendo — for people of all ages!”

For some reason, this is exactly how I picture hard-line conservative Christians advertising Nintendo games. See? It definitely can be done! What makes conservative Christians have such a strong anti-video game sentiment these days is really anyone’s guess.

“Explosively sweet video game console.”

Here we go back to the “weird 1990s mood”, and get a pretty good example of what not to do when you get the good idea of putting some contemporary colloquialisms in a phrase. Make sure it makes some damn sense if someone who doesn’t get the slang reads it.

“Nintendo games are:
Faint-inducingly Fun
Comfortably Complex
Icily Interesting
Incorrigibly Interesting
Notoriously Nice!”

This poem was a bit easier to translate accurately, and I’m happy that I could somehow translate the alliteration here. However, I have piles of scepticism reserved for poetic advertising slogans, especially alliterative ones, and definitely so for ones that stumble and wobble to make some sense.

Please don’t make advertising slogans that look like they have been Made Up. If you’re selling things, pretend you’d have to be right next to the customer to throw a sales pitch, to sell it to them in person. Advertising slogans should sound like something that you can say, and come up with, without any big conscious effort. Don’t go “Nintendo games are… um… eh… icily interesting??? Yeah, that’s pretty clever.”

“Nintendo games are the highest quality games in the world!”

As a whole, this phrase isn’t that bad, but then I started to think… who on Earth would use “high quality” as a term that describes a game or a game system? “Buy The Elder Scrolls IV: Game of the Year Edition, ensured by its publisher 2K Games to be a fully patched release that is shipped on two high-quality factory-pressed DVD-ROM discs. Not crappy DVD-Rs or anything.” This, my friends, does not sell. Consumers have to take high quality as granted, especially on consoles when patching isn’t possible.

“The joy of a rainy day is / to buy a Nintendo.”

Another one of those poetic rhyming slogans, and in this case, it just doesn’t pay to try to translate it that way. I have to object on this on the grounds that while I really like rainy days, I don’t particularly like going out to buy game systems on rainy days. The last two Nintendo systems that I bought (DS and Wii) were both bought in a rather clear and nice day. Rainy days are pretty nice to play games.

Interactivity as art, once more...

2008-08-26T13:17:04Z

The weird thing about "games as art" debate is that everyone agrees that games are an art form, but when you really think about it, it's hard to say what really makes games a form of art of their own.

Games have the distinct feature that they are interactive. They have some sort of definable gameplay, and that is just about one of the distinct features of games, now that we really think of it. Games are an art form that stand on top of other art forms - motion picture, visual arts, music and literature, to mention just a few things.

But is there an excuse to call games a form of art that is truly separate from others?
]]>
In my opinion, the fact that games are a separate form of art is easily evident in the way they transform other media, the same way that "recycling old ideas" produces end results that look nothing like the "original" ideas.

One could argue that, for example, film is a completely useless art form too: all it does is take theatre, music, and visual arts, and produce something that could be done on the separate mediums individually. Oops! In fact, film transforms other forms of medium and breaks away from those shackles. Not being confined on stage will make it possible to set scenes in places that are difficult to replicate on stage in front of the audience. There are distinct visual and musical styles that are employed in film. Writing screenplays for stage is different from writing for film and for television.

One of the good common-sense definitions I can come up with for defining what constitutes a form of art is actually pretty simple:

Do people actually create things for this segment?
If so, do they have to do something differently than when they're creating things for other media?

Games are a very good example of a medium that is quite creative in nature (easily satisfying point 1) and the creators have to have special considerations in mind when creating things (point 2).

One of the big stumbling blocks when trying to convince people that games are different from other forms of art is in forms of narration. People will probably take a simplistic view and say that games are either games or just another form of cinema; you're playing a game and, in the middle, watching gigantic non-interactive cutscenes.

My favourite contrary example, it seems now, are the Metroid series and Thief series. Both of these use narration in a distinct way.

Save a few exceptions like Metroid Fusion, in Metroid series, cutscenes are rather rare, and often unnarrated. One of the big points in this is that the player has to make sense of what they are seeing, because the game isn't trying to force-feed you one easy official explanation. Most often, you have to observe what things are happening in the game itself. In the game, you may see a new interesting place where you should probably go, but you can't get to yet. The place might even have some clues on things that are yet to happen, like a new weapon. You may see things that are played out by the enemies; you have to react appropriately.

What Metroid and Thief have in common is the reliance in collectable information. Most of the details of what's going on isn't actually happening in the game. Metroid Prime employs logbook scans: You find information about enemies and information gathered from the computers and other information sources in the environment. You find information on what, say, the Space Pirates were doing in a certain area, and how it turned out - and that tells you something you will find handy or need to know to proceed.

In Thief series, most of the information comes from people who have conversations, and from books and papers that are lying around the levels. Not just clues on how to proceed, but also bits that tell you something about the world.

The big point is that the stereotypical view of gaming is that there's Gameplay and then there's Narration, and the two never meet. It's a regrettable part of some games these days; I greatly enjoy, say, Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy series, but those series are not good poster boys for "games as storytelling devices" - which is regrettable, because they are such high-profile examples.

Thief and Metroid series, and even games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Arena and Deus Ex and - well, a lot of games, really - are good examples of games where deep, though-provoking narration is intermingled in the gameplay. You have the choice of following the story - you can play the games as straight-up action experiences and only pay attention to the plot when it suits you, but you can also spend time looking for every last bit of trivia and information that could help you or make you understand the situation better. Following the story doesn't interrupt your gameplay experience, yet at the same time, it doesn't prevent the story for being deep, fascinating, thought-provoking, even beautiful.

Last days of GameCubing, the coming of Wii

2008-08-26T09:53:11Z

For me, the last week marked the end of GameCube gaming... well, GameCube gaming on a GameCube, at least.

Here's the complex, remarkable and weird tale on the last few days of SSBM on the Almighty Cube, and how I moved from the Cube to that fantastic new white box thing. Warning: Horrenduous flash photography also included. Another warning: Nothing works.
]]> Super Smash Bros. Melee. My memory card had blown up some years ago and I still hadn't unlocked all characters, mostly because Mewtwo takes such a horrenduously long time to get on vs. mode. So, my solution was to just play some 60-minute vs. matches.

Fox was my chosen combatant here. I can't just come up with good captions for some of these pictures. Hmm...

Honest, overblown caption: "No! We must not give up now! We've fought this hard for hours to end! Come on, team, you can do it!"

The caption containing a Needless Internet Culture Reference: "Man, that was awesome. Tittyfucking awesome, man."

60-minute vs. matches are very darn hard, mostly because they can also get a bit boring. But I've never, ever in my life gotten over 160 K.O.s in a single match. Well, the lower skill level of the enemies probably had something to do with it.

20 hours of play time is just ridiculous. And at one point, you start seeing things. Horrible things. Horrible things that are also kind of funny. Fox butts and stuff. But in the end...
...you are rewarded.

That's that for the obligatory SSBM part - and playing SSBM will continue, no doubt, because there's still stuff to be unlocked.

Last Thursday, I got the Wii. This was a bit of a weird and problematic experience. First of all, there was a random funny remark from the game store clerk: "Well, it's a bag from a bit different company, but I hope it will do..."
An evil kapitalist ploy to suppress the distribution of higher arts! The epicly branded plastic bag could barely hold the weight of the Wii box. How on Earth could it have possibly held the weight of an X-Box? The world is full of mysteries.

But what was in the bag obviously mattered much much more.

"Oh my God, Nintendo Wii!"

Now, I'll say this one thing about my gaming habits: I don't do demos. I usually try to keep myself in suspense before actually getting the game and playing it for the first time. The same goes for the consoles: my vague idea about Wii was something along the lines of "uses SD cards and has internal Flash drive so you don't need to get a memory card at first; uses WLAN;" (though it came to me as a surprise that LAN needs an USB adapter) "GameCube games need GC controllers and memory cards. Oh, and it comes with Wii Sports, which is apparently a pretty neat game."

So, it was a complete surprise to me that it had a News Channel, which is quickly becoming my favourite way of following news. It took only a few days - Sunday, I think - that the News Channel showed me the first news from Finland, which also happened to be the first local Oulu news I've seen (on the results of the 2008 Air Guitar World Championships).

But nothing could have prepared me for what was the very first news I saw on the News Channel. Being a geek, I immediately headed out to read the technology news, that reported on...
...WTF?

Anyway, despite these minor weirdnesses (and Wii's panic-inducing inability to read the Wii Sports disc at first - turned out to be just a case of dirty discs after all), the Wii has been, so far, an interesting experience.

Ultima Forever?

2008-08-18T12:13:36Z

This post might need a little bit of explanation to go with it, first. I've sometimes had to post jaded observations on how some things are awful. This post is not intended as a flame; the point is that this is an observation.

And the observation is that I've grown tired defending the Ultima series. Now, don't get me wrong... I'm just admitting excess zealotism, and is a part of healing process.
]]>
And here's my request: if I ever, anywhere, say that the bad old days were better, doubt me.

I've often been defending Ultima VII as one of the greatest computer RPGs ever made. It is one of my favourite games, that's definitely true, and that fact will never go away. But I have had the big mental block in admitting that the game could be anything but the greatest computer RPG ever, and all newer games are just pale imitations - and that makes me a hopeless elitist zealot. I have to apologise for that.

My revised, well-considered position is this: Ultima VII was a great milestone in computer RPG history, unparalleled in its time, and an innovator in many respects. It may not be a game that will be played and revered constantly, but it will be a game that will be remembered, a game whose legacy we will revere, and a game that still sometimes surpasses the games of our era.

There. I'm very sure that "the old me" would have approved of that assessment, too - it's just that I need to get on with the times. I have to face the reality.

The reality is that there are better games than Ultima VII now.

I feel so stupid that I have to write that thing down in this actual very blog. Of course that's true. I've been saying that for a while no... wait, no, no I haven't. I've always said Ultima VII is the Best Game Ever.

I could go into a screaming rage right now, saying how I hate Ultima I-V engine's boring, dry presentation, Ultima VI's clumsy half-way UI, and Ultima VII's lack of engaging plot and lack of interesting side quests (and U7Pt2:SI's very jarring unfinished rough edges). I coild go into a screaming rage over the fact that despite what many say, I really really loved Ultima VIII and thought Ultima IX was starting to look like a very, very respectable game - and I'm glad it later re-incarnated into a better body as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

I could, because these are facts. But I respect these games. I also have to say they are damn good games at what they did, and were very advanced at the time. But I have to say that there are better games now. I have to keep telling that to me to keep me sane, goddamn it.

You see, that's what drives me mad. Part of my psyche works in weird ways. It tells me that Nethack is the best freaking game ever and that in order for me to be considered a serious gamer, I should complete the game. Ascend. Beat the hell out of the game. But that's where my psyche is wrong: I also hate Nethack for its relentless difficulty, lack of the properties I consider vital in RPG (engaging character development or NPCs, good story, amount of choices), and it's dry-boring ASCIIbetical presentation that, while neat, isn't really my cup of tea. I want at least character portraits. Hey, Ultima I-V don't have those either, and that's what makes them boring in my book.

So here's another revised view: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the best damn CRPG right now. I hate cramped little worlds - Ultima VII's world was tiny compared to predecessors - but while Oblivion's world is tiny too, at least there's point in exploring it. Woods look like woods. You can actually lost in the game if you don't look at the maps. But what sets apart U7 and TES4 is that the latter not only has an engaging main plot but a bunch of sidequests. You can't say that U7 is exactly swamped with a lot of interesting diversions. Sure, you can bake bread and stuff, but are there really that many scripted sideplots? Hell no.

Likewise, I've always counted Neverwinter Nights as one of the best damn CRPGs. It's usually in my lists as the second best CRPG ever - and after this, it will damn stay there. Replayability. Moddability. New module every day if you want it, damn it. Something Ultima VII won't do, damn it.

So what does this rant really amount to? Well, I don't know how many times I will personally play through Ultima VII once I'm finished with the Finnish translation of the game. I've already bashed through it several times. It's starting to get routine-ish, and there's just not enough stuff to do. One of the reasons is that there's not enough mods, probably. But I will state emphatically that if the modders come up with amazing mods, I'll sure as hell play them. I've just gnawed through the main plot so many times and you can't really live your life in Ultima VII as you can in Oblivion.

I guess I'll just end my small pointless rant here. I just did this to clear my head and quit being a hypocrite toward my own feelings. I love games. I just shouldn't have false attachments to the past and see things as they really are - the progress dannot be stopped.

Not much to report, except...

2008-08-15T14:28:22Z

... the blog has peen upgraded to Movable Type 4.2, and...

... apparently, "6 days ago" (~~I hate web2.0 sites that don't provide me bloody exact dates I post my garbage~~ damn it, identi.ca does have exact date, just not in the place I actually could find it easily...2008-08-09 19:07:32 UTC =), I beat Thief II: The Metal Age. Too bad I'm pretty much too coffeed to tell more, but I really enjoyed the whole game. Great levels and stuff. Too bad Thief 3 won't run in WINE too well yet, but I can satisfy my newfound craving for taffering through T2X.

Max Payne teaser

2008-07-12T11:36:50Z

Max Payne film appears to be coming after all. The teaser is here.

My first impression of this something along the lines of "it doesn't seem to have a shred of the famous Finnish melancholy". One of the reasons I liked MP1 and MP2 was that they were depressing in a positive way - this place is f'ing dark, life sucks, but if you look at the stuff around you you'll also see funny things (starting, of course, from the very concept that the whole games are so angsty in the over-the-top way).

And, uh, the music is wrong.

Oh well, I guess I'll end up watching it anyway. And I hope Payne and Redemption, if it eventually comes, will do a Maxpaynesque film a bit better. =)

Glest: Yet another random discovery

2008-07-06T09:54:16Z

Glest, which I found some time ago, seems like an interesting game. The open source world could certainly use a few good real-time strategy games, especially ones with cute dragons.

A few things seem to speak against Glest right now: While the game seems decent, it's not exactly polished what comes to the user interface. For some reason, from general playability point of view, there seems to be some sort of... well, one could call it apathy. I guess the game core is important, but the rest of the game user interface seems just boring. When you start the game up, you get logo and web site URL. Yawn. Boring fonts. Loading screen is one of those "technical" kinds where boring-font text shows that boring files are being slowly heaved into the computer memory from the disk. Compare this to, say, Wesnoth: Thrilling title screens! Nice buttons all around! Progress bars, while a bit boring, aren't aesthetically dubious, and you don't need to suffer from filenameitis.

Another is that it doesn't really run on the old comp with GeForce 2 MX. And Mac install is... well, really difficult - it's not an .app you can drag to the Applications and remove by dragging it to trash, like Wesnoth - I hate games that have to be scrubbed.

But aside of technical problems, I really hope all of the best for the developers - it certainly looks like a promising game.

Oblivion Mods: The Obligatory Random Look at Favourites

2008-06-29T15:34:43Z

A lot of people have published a “my favourite mods for game X” list. I’m being innovative by, uh, not really doing anything particularly interesting in addition. This is, simply put, just a bunch of really mods for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. For some of the initial footwork, I have to thank Pelit magazine, but I basically picked my favourite ones and looked at some latter mods. Besides, they specifically excluded mods that just improve the graphics — games that strive to be experiences, graphics are important. This post is primarily a “list of Cool Stuff I’ve downloaded, in case I need to remember all that again” - so it could be later supplemented…

]]> What platform was this game on, again?

BTmod

The PC version of Oblivion has been made with XBox360 in mind, so the screen display is “big” and “legible”. Perhaps a bit too big and legible for people whose ancient machines have problems getting decent framerate at 800x600. BTmod fixes this by making menu texts much smaller; inventory and container lists can have tons more items in them. Maps become more usable when you can see more. And so on, and so forth. The game looks like a good, proper PC game after this mod!

Thieving mods

Oblivion is not Thief II, but clearly, thieving stuff is pretty important for rogue characters. I still need to find a “populate the land with bazillion houses with about five gillion worth of loot” mod (I’ve heard there are such things), but these mods make guards and other vile creatures work a bit more logically. Attack and Hide makes sneaking around a large bit more fun: Instead of magically coming to get you, the creatures can’t necessarily figure out where the heck you are, so if they lose track of you, you can keep yourself hidden and still trust your epic Sneak Attacks. Guard Overhaul makes guards a bit more interesting - they work a bit more on their own initiative, pay attention to people who are sneaking around, etc etc… and best of all, you get cool disguises. A thief’s got to have disguises, right?

Let there be light

Exterior Actors Have Torches

A mod to make some of the people hold torches in the outside. Nightly citylife gets a bit of a new character thanks to this little addition…

Beauty…

…in oneself…

The default character models in Oblivion don’t really look very appealing - males aren’t very male (except maybe for Chuck Norris the Nord, whose maleness is not in question, ever, as the video shows) and females aren’t very female. The pack by Exnem and others corrects this for female characters: Lots of different body types that look about bazillion times better than the stock body model. If I want my lithe rogue of mine to look like a lithe rogue, it’s right here. If you want a busty warrior goddess of doom, it’s right here too. …yeah, and it also works for OMG Nudie Woman Characterz, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Ren’s beauty pack would have also made the cut, at least based on screenshots, but with 60 hours of play time, I think I first desperately need to figure out how to mess with character’s looks without starting over…

Clothing/Armor Replacer adds quite a few female armor models. The rogue outfit is… well, certainly not practical, but definitely, er, rogue-y.

…in knowledge…

Sometimes, the simplest of mod ideas can also be the most interesting.

Oblivion has a ton of books. Most houses you can buy have bookshelves of some sort. Stock book covers are boring. So, the simple route to make the game more interesting is to give each book an individual, brand new cover… and add some spells to make dealing with Oblivion’s sometimes clumsy grab system simpler, by locking the books in various positions while they’re moved.

…in harmony.

Oblivion was an innovative game in that Forests Actually Look Like Forests, Damn It, but Natural Environments has made all the wonders of nature even more beautiful. Wonderful skies! Wondeful forestlands as far as eye can see! Amazing sunsets! And best of all, you can actually see underwater! (And if you couldn’t, it would probably be rendered in all of its muddy glory instead of the bleak water we have in this game! =) Natural Wildlife makes forestland animals behave a bit more rationally - for example, the deer flee from you.

We’re Goofy, We’re Buggy

One notable lack in Oblivion is that you can, basically, only do the stuff that you need to do. But Oblivion is so much more: Half of the fun is doing stuff that does nothing to further your goals. (I wouldn’t be writing this blog post unless I knew this profound truth!) You can spend umpteen hours trying to place the item on the shelf in your home just right, and it’s not just the crappy grab UI that has that effect.

So here’s one mod to further that goal, to make up for an obvious omission: You can’t just wave at people, or whatever, because that accomplishes nothing in the game. So here’s gestures! Here’s sleeping animations! Here’s general goofing! You can mock-kick too! And there’s a bunch of dance moves!

Regrettably, these moves may not work at all given some obscure conditions, and they only have a chance working in third-person mode. And they’re not looped or anything. Annoying engine limitations, I wager…

And where I stash my magic hat is where my home is

Secret Storage

If you place your stuff in a random chest, it can get stolen. The solution is to buy a home, or spend about 10 minutes in TESCS to create an Unlootable Uberchest of Doom, which is the boring solution. Or, you can take the stylish and, for certain characters, quite appropriate route by hiding your stuff in a safe place behind a loose brick in the Imperial City.

Of other city and house mods, I’ve seen commendations of the Hoarfrost Castle and Kvatch Rebuilt; I’ve only seen Hoarfrost briefly and I’ve not yet seen the rebuilt Kvatch at all, so these have to be commented upon later.