The Aftermath of This Week’s Christine Love Binge

July 27, 2012 By 1 Comment

I first heard the name “Christine Love” when Analogue: A Hate Story went up on Steam. I was intrigued enough to seek out information on the title, which led me to Wikipedia and the aforementioned name, as well as one of her previous works: the antithetically titled Digital: A Love Story.

Weeks (months?) passed and I wound up at E3 with an appointment to see IndieCade’s booth. They’d carved out a space alongside the walk between the South and West lobbies of the Los Angeles Convention center and lined it with computers, consoles, and tablets running a slew of independent games of varying degrees of notoriety. Sound Shapes was there, as were many other titles of which I have forgotten the names (one, in particular, involved performing heists a la the “Ocean” movies).

One of the most recognizable, though, was Analogue. I was curious, so I sat down with it for a few minutes. Just long enough to determine how it worked — I activated an AI, read a few logs, and then was on my way.

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Bats, Brawls, and Riots: A Rocksteady Story

July 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Be honest: when you hear the name of development studio Rocksteady, it’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that immediately comes to mind, right? Maybe that’s just me, but that rhino and his similarly musically themed compatriot were cornerstones of my childhood. And, given how little anyone had seen from Rocksteady Studios back in the mid-2000s on up to 2009, perhaps it isn’t so surprising that I think “rhino” before I think “game development studio.”

And sometimes he thinks less ‘badass’ and more ‘bassinet.’

Rocksteady is best known, today, for their stunning take on the Batman mythology in videogame form, kicking Batman: Arkham Asylum out the door in 2009 and following it up in 2011 with Batman: Arkham City, a free-roaminger sequel to the first game that managed to be bigger and better in the ways that counted, and even a few that were wholly unexpected.

Prior to that, though, Rocksteady’s only released title had come out in 2006, two years after the studio was founded in 2004 by Sefton Hill (whose earlier credits include point-and-click adventure game Discworld II) and Jamie Walker, who touts his involvement in the Harry Potter games on the Rocksteady website. I don’t know that the last is really something that inspires confidence, but it was apparently enough for Eidos, which tasked the fledgling studio with developing a new first-person shooter.

Gun? Check. Badge? Check. Boobs? Um…

Eventually, this was attached to a nearly decade-old game called Urban Chaos, a sort-of sandbox third-person action game whose lead, despite being billed as a strong female character and badass police officer, wore body armor that still managed to reveal her cleavage. Y’know, the part of the body right over your most vital organ. Maybe they were going for name recognition of some kind? I dunno, Urban Chaos: Riot Response was the game’s third title, but I can’t imagine someone at Eidos thought, “Hey, remember that really obscure third-person action game we released in 1999? Well, it’s 2006; let’s say this game’s a spin-off!”

So Rocksteady’s first game had a crappy title, but the core of it was a fairly unique experience. Players were fighting on the streets of a modern American city trying to take down members of the Burners gang, which had assumed control. The action was tight and responsive, the concept was interesting, and the game was competently forged. Today, in particular, it would be a breath of fresh air in the face of the multitudes of war-time first-person shooters that seem to define the genre.

And then Rocksteady disappeared for three years. I can’t really envision how they snagged the contract for the newest Batman game. The last had been released in 2005, a tie-in to Batman Begins, and had, as one might expect, been completely in line with what one expected of licensed games at the time: junk. I’d love to see Rocksteady’s original pitch, what they told Warner Bros. that had the studio granting them the Batman license, that brought Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy on board as the Joker and Batman respectively. Rocksteady, in 2009, released Batman: Arkham Asylum and redefined licensed gaming. Rather, they showed gamers how well a preexisting world could be utilized by a company with the passion, intuition, and drive to do so.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a seminal super-hero game because it succeeds at the basic task at which every pretender to its throne has failed: It does everything in its power to make the player feel like the superhero they are controlling. Batman, in particular, is a modern-day ninja, loaded with gadgets, capable of cloaking himself in darkness and striking his foes down from the shadows, but equally comfortable in a one-sided melee against a seemingly endless slew of foes. With a smooth-as-silk combat system that balanced accessibility with depth, fights become a martial ballet with a palpable sense of rhythm.

The other core tenet of the Batman mythos, however, is that he’s human and, therefore, extremely vulnerable to lethal attacks. Specifically, guns. Batman cannot stand up to bullets for more than a few seconds. As one would expect, his body armor can protect him from a few rounds, but not sustained fire. This is fine, because he can instead stalk these enemies while they’re still unaware of his presence, until the last couple know he’s there, but are so frightened and jumpy that they have no hope of taking him down. That the game simulates even Batman’s intimidation factor is the icing on the cake that makes it truly exceptional.

That Rocksteady improved on this formula with Batman: Arkham City by making it open, adding additional layers of complexity to combat (while smoothing out some of the very limited kinks therein), and opening up the story to include a larger ensemble of the Caped Crusader’s rogues gallery makes them exceptional.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Rocksteady should feel particularly exalted. Their combat system has been picked through for inspiration by Beenox and Square Enix London on The Amazing Spider-Man and Sleeping Dogs, respectively, though neither has managed to make it function as smoothly as Rocksteady. Even the Assassin’s Creed series, which actually preceded Batman: Arkham Asylum and featured a similarly intuitive group combat system, never achieved the greatness of Rocksteady’s. Part of that is that is that Assassin’s Creed’s combat has always stressed defense over offense, while Arkham Asylum and its sequel have rewarded an unbroken flow of techniques, both offensive and defensive.

To not only do justice to a franchise, but elevate it beyond anything anyone had previously expected of it or any other licensed property in the videogame sector is not a small feat. It takes inspired and creative individuals and a relentless passion for the craft and the fictional world around which they’re building their project. Further, Rocksteady has demonstrated the ability to put all of those inspired components together in a way that makes them truly sing, creating a final piece that is far more than the sum of its parts. They have done so not once, but twice. If that’s not special, I don’t know what is.

Katsuhiro Harada: A Champion for Common Sense

July 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Immediately after meeting Harada, Josh stole the hearts of the women of Tekken. Yeah, Josh parties.

Katsuhiro Harada is a mensch. He’s also a good sport, going along with the antics of Capcom’s face of fighting games, Yoshinori Ono, in their public “competition,” mirroring the competitive spirit of their newly crossed-over characters. Mind, GeekParty editor-in-chief and slave-driver Josh Wirtanen already knew about his absurdly cool personality first-hand, having regaled me with tales of his antics at a Namco Bandai event in Las Vegas, as well as snagging a seat next to him at the Microsoft press conference prior to this year’s E3. Lately, though, Harada has been making headlines for reasons that have nothing to do with his Capcom counterpart and everything to do with his bluntly honest and vocal nature.

Blame Twitter, I guess. It gives him a direct line to the people. It’s not just that, though. In interviews, Harada comes across as one who doesn’t stick to the company line, more concerned with staying true to his ideals.

Professionally, Harada is the man in charge of the Tekken franchise, dictating its direction in both general and specific terms. He’s not a PR machine, nor should he be seen as such, and, while counterpart Ono is almost preternaturally pleasant and endearing, Harada comes across as far more prickly and notably severe. Sometimes that comes into conflict with the fans, as when his Twitter account was assaulted by members of the fandom who felt “betrayed” by changes (both perceived and real) to the sound effects and voices of their beloved Tekken franchise. Harada responded with a lengthy Twitter rant that went in depth, detailing just how complex the process of retaining and recreating sounds from older games in the series was in newer games, how it wasn’t a lack of will, but an occasional lack of the requisite “way” to make things happen.

And, through it all, he asserts that the vast majority of his fans (99%, he claims) are absolutely wonderful, supportive and grateful. Even for those who aren’t, though, he demonstrates a distinct level of trust in their intelligence with his explanation of why sounds aren’t entirely consistent from game to game. He doesn’t insult them with platitudes or lash out blindly, but explains respectfully why things are as they are and, even though his valediction is a little on the abrasive side, it’s really the most he allows himself by way of a counterattack.

He also, though, takes this opportunity to publicly laud his team, proffering gamers a glimpse of the intensity of the work that Tekken’s creators put into their game simply so that the consumers who buy it will enjoy their experience. These normally unsung heroes are the audiovisual wizards who allow a company like Namco Bandai to seemingly pull a product, fully formed, from the ether and use it to line store shelves, eventually bringing it to your hands. Harada reminds his consumers that these people exist and that they work hard, often with challenges that include mixing archaic data with modern hardware.

This isn’t to say that Harada is a corporate shill. Not at all. The man, in an interview with Eurogamer, was quick to respond in the negative to a question about his perspective on and plans for DLC. Infamous in Street Fighter X Tekken for hiding a dozen characters, already completed, on the disc behind a sizable paywall and for an extended period of time, fighting games are in an interesting place when it comes to DLC. Since matches are wholly discrete, the most significant way to influence gameplay is to introduce a new character, the temptation for which is to make said character paid DLC. When you have such an obvious, standalone element that can be provided after launch, selling it piecemeal seems almost intuitive (just ask NetherRealm Studios about their Mortal Kombat DLC).

Harada disagrees, and feels that something at integral to the fighting game experience as a character shouldn’t be released after the game’s launch in such a manner that only those willing to pay extra can enjoy that element of the experience. He outright says so, going so far as to put his job up as collateral against it, ”If I was given the choice to include paid DLC or quit Namco, I would maybe quit… Or maybe I would just say ‘get someone else to deal with this’.”

So where, then, do Harada’s loyalties lie, if not expressly to the gaming public or to his employer? In the end, Harada’s loyalty is to the game he’s producing. Mr. Tekken is most concerned with bringing to market a fine-tuned and complete product that he can not only say is done, but feel proud about selling to the masses who wish to play it. In an industry largely focused on serving fans only up to the point at which it stops serving the bottom line, and in which fans have grown accustomed to carrying on until they’ve gotten their way, Harada’s voice is a firm reminder that the people who make these games work hard and are, ostensibly, artists and engineers of various stripes, that people who make “demands” for seemingly “simple” additions or fixes to games often have little or no conception of the amount of labor that would actually entail. He is also a reminder, however, that the consumer doesn’t exist merely to be screwed by the corporation, but needs to be respected as one of the elements of commerce, to maintain a mutually beneficial economy in which they feel that what they are paying for justifies its price, has that perceived value requisite to satisfy them, and that unscrupulous DLC practices are a quick way to undermine that.

For that, Katsuhiro Harada, I salute you.

The “Call of Duty” Blockbuster: Opiate for the Masses, Killer of Innovation?

July 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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Best Buy vs. Shelby – When Game Trades Go Wrong

July 5, 2012 By 3 Comments

In late May, I was granted the review of Resistance: Burning Skies for another site. As sometimes happens in those situations, I ended up having to pick the game up myself on release day and, despite a review held back due to multiplayer connection issues post-launch, managed to play through what was, among Vita games, second only to Supremacy MMA: Unrestricted in its degree of awful.

As such, when I was surfing the Best Buy website a couple of weeks later and saw that they were running a 100 percent trade-in bonus sale, I jumped on the chance to pawn off the game (and pick up the Vita version of Mortal Kombat at ten bucks off, so GeekParty’s Team Josh could school me from afar over the Internet).

My first sign that something was amiss should have been the lack of a listing for Burning Skies on the Best Buy trade-in page, but I went into the nearest store anyway in hopes that it was just a glitch or imperfection in the system, the sort of thing that sometimes happens when dealing with a large and unwieldy database. Inside, I made my way to the dedicated trading kiosk (unoccupied) and managed to secure an employee to man it. As I made banter about the less-than-effective bench, pressed up against the kiosk such that one would have to sit facing away from it, or pull it out into the middle of foot traffic, she searched the system for the game. This was soon revealed to be a futile effort.

“Let me talk to my manager, see what we can do.”

She left and I milled around, whistling quietly, snatching up what I’d come for, and waiting some more. Five minutes became ten and I began to wonder if I’d been forgotten. But she returned soon thereafter. The game, it seemed, was not in their used system for some reason or another. Too new? Perhaps due to the online pass? She couldn’t say. She said that they could offer me a generic trade-in value of a single dollar for my two-week old game. I scoffed, but still bought Mortal Kombat before I left.

Back home, I hopped on the trade-in page once more and tried to figure out why Resistance: Burning Skies wasn’t there. Too recent? No, because Lollipop Chainsaw was in there, and that had just come out. How ‘bout the online pass? Also nullified by the presence of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.

Perplexed, I mulled over the predicament for a few minutes, then picked up the phone. I got in touch with Best Buy’s call center and tried to make sense of what had happened. Walking my first representative through the sequence of events failed to accomplish much of anything, though, and I grew frustrated. My questions became more pointed.

I wanted to know whether they were taking their trade-in program seriously or just throwing it out there to see what stuck, how they could expect people to wait to trade in recent games they’d finished with when GameStop had their trade-in values for games mapped out before the title had even been shipped. I wanted to speak to someone at the corporate office; he told me they were closed, having left at 5. It was now almost 8 my time, 7 for him. Finally, he agreed to try to set up a phone appointment for me with someone higher in the chain, and attempt, in the meantime, to uncover why my game wasn’t up for trade.

An hour later, I received a call back. He hadn’t been able to uncover anything about the game, but he had received authorization to offer me a $30 gift card. I refused; my goal wasn’t to extort money from the company, but to be able to perform a simple transaction that they had advertised. Soon, I was on the phone with his supervisor. She was quick to pick up on the situation and what was wrong, and asked me for a couple of days to do more research and talk to some of those involved in the trade-in program, find out if there was some alternative reason the game wasn’t available to trade. I gave my consent and then waited.

True to her word, she called back two days later. The situation was still unclear, and beyond anyone’s ability to alter with any degree of alacrity (checking the website, it’s up there now for twelve bucks), but she was planning to send me a $50 gift card. Well, all right then.

Two weeks later, after I’d fairly conclusively forgotten about the whole incident, I received a mostly unmarked letter, only a return address to adorn it, beyond its destination. Within, I found the promised gift card, the company’s logo emblazoned on the accompanying letter in the upper left corner, where it had been surreptitiously hidden behind the envelope in which it arrived.

Sorry, no address for you.

I’m not really sure what I should take from this situation. I mean, it’s an example of customer service seemingly gone right, but it’s a strange society we live in where it’s simply more acceptable, and easier, for a corporation to offer reparations for what amounts to a perceived slight. I didn’t feel as though I’d been wronged, merely inconvenienced, and my priority was to cut through that obstacle and perform my part as a cog in our grand, capitalist machine. Instead, I was given multiple times the value of the original item I wished to trade in (which I eventually relieved myself of at a local GameStop, using the funds to pre-order Code of Princess; check it out, if you have any fondness for Guardian Heroes), but I ended up feeling like I’d somehow let the system down, or helped the system screw itself over.

That said, I spent the gift card today and, with a little extra out of pocket, managed to satisfy my consumerist drive.

Also, my craving for Sour Patch Kid Fruits. The grape ones are fucking addictive.

It’s a sickness, I tell you.

Those Games? They’re Made By People Too

July 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It takes a lot to make things happen in the gaming industry. We’re talking about a multi-billion dollar interactive medium with tremendous conglomerates monopolizing the landscape. Gaming, as such, has gone through awkward cycles, beginning as a small diversion on early computers, games often the product of a single individual or a small team thereof, then something grander and more mainstream, surpassing even cinema as the highest grossing entertainment industry in the world. Now, with digital distribution an increasingly prevalent means of selling and purchasing games, and development tools that demand less intricate knowledge of the inner workings of a computer than in days past, the independent gaming scene has become an integral part of the landscape, well represented on Steam and Desura.

But of the games that make it to sale, the highest profile are still those formulated by the big, full-fledged studios, with multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns backing them. It becomes all too easy to forget that even in such a large-scale development effort, those who are creating the games are still individuals, many of whom have sought out a career in the gaming industry because it’s something about which they are passionate, be it the art, the engine, the story or the sound that draws them in and drives them to work insane hours for appreciation in only the most general of senses. We homogenize the process, think in terms of studios instead of artists and programmers, writers, and musicians.

At the beginning of last month, a video went out from Sony Online Entertainment, relating some of the upcoming changes in EverQuest II with its latest patch. Rather than prattle on about balance changes or retooled zones, the video regales its viewers with two “quality-of-life” features: built-in voice modulation and, perhaps more impressive, a webcam-based facial recognition technology that maps a player’s character’s face to the player, allowing him (or her) to speak or emote and have the character they control mimic their facial motion.

There’s a secondary question in here about how much the EverQuest II player-base will actually care about a feature such as this. Voice modulation, as demonstrated on the original Xbox, often comes across as more annoying than entertaining in practice, while the face morphing tech on display requires a webcam; of those who still play EQII, how many communicate with those around them by voice and, of those, what percentage actually have enough of an investment in role-playing that they desire their character to mimic them and possess a webcam? Each factor sees the fraction of the player-base for whom these efforts are being made plummet in size to the point where one might ask, “Is it even substantive enough to warrant the manpower going into it?”

The primary question, though (as is pertinent to this article and, going forward, this weekly column), is “who put this guy up to this?” Watch the video below and see for yourself:

Follow his eyes, listen to the cadence of his voice, the pacing thereof. It smacks of overt rehearsal, to the point where his enthusiasm comes across as wholly fabricated, a product of the features he’s hawking. A narrative built in my head, growing from an insidious little seed to a pervasive sense of certainty that this guy, with his pony-tail and over-the-top enthusiasm, was being put up to making these absurd changes by Sony Online Entertainment, his job essentially being held hostage and his unbelievable excitement at the prospect of voice modulation and facial motion capture in yesterday’s MMO stemming from an SOE mandate.

About a week later, I was at E3, walking by the SOE booth on the last day. I’d had an appointment there the day prior, but had only had time to see a trio of the titles they had on display and wanted to take some of my free time to wander around and see a few more (SOE had over half a dozen games on display, all of them free-to-play). It was while doing this that I spotted the same individual from the video, walking another journalist through the aforementioned features on the booth’s EverQuest II machine. His hair was down, but the smile on his face was easy to recognize. I considered approaching him and asking a pointed question about just who this update was planned for (who in the remaining EQII player-base would have both the means and desire to speak through a filter and have their character’s face warp in an odd pantomime of theirs as they traversed the land? Jokes about slack-jawed über-nerds traipsing about Norrath, mouths dangling listlessly as they grind through mob after mob.

I almost immediately thought better of it and took only a few steps closer, looked over my fellow journalist’s shoulder as my quarry explained how the motion capture worked (virtual points generated on one’s face and then tracked through the webcam, all in real-time). I watched his eyes, which lit up as she asked questions that allowed him to delve deeper into the system, explain more about what his team had sought to accomplish and how they’d gone about it, what they felt it would contribute to the player-base. I watched his smile, far more genuine than in the trailer, and listened to his voice, which was missing that artificial affect I’d expected, instead brimming with natural and infectious excitement.

And it hit me: This is a dude who seriously cares about what he is doing in the gaming industry, and to EverQuest II in particular. It doesn’t matter to him if the vast majority of the players don’t use it, if it doesn’t bring in new players or what have you, but if it enriches the experience for even a small fraction of those in the game, he will be satisfied that he has done right by the players and invested his time well. And, even if not, it will still stand as something that he was personally passionate about, into which he invested his time until it became a real, substantial thing that he could demonstrate to the public.

In many ways, David Georgeson (because that’s his name) is the everyman in the gaming industry. He is the director of development for EverQuest II, yes, but he is still just a part of the team. He stands out in my mind specifically because I witnessed his humanization, the moment in which he went from a shill on the screen to a real individual who I had seen and now knew to be as genuine as anyone else.

Stretch back for a moment to the days of Atari, when games were often developed entirely by a single individual or a very small team of programmers. Their names were generally not released to the public, the cartridges fabricated by the ambiguous, voluminous mass that was Atari. Adventure, though, was built with an easter egg (one of, if not the absolute, first in gaming history) that revealed the name “Warren Robinett,” who created not just the room that contained his credit but also the rest of the game with no official credit from Atari.

Even in modern games, which have credit sequences like movies, and for which there are some notable, star developers, the credits are often just another element that, as with movies, players skip over or never even attempt to view. They’re certainly rarely, if ever, internalized. I speak primarily from personal and anecdotal experience, of course, but I can’t imagine the majority of those who drool at the sight of the newest Call of Duty title, mainly so they can hop online and spew racial and sexist obscenities at their fellow men and women, really give a shit who worked absurd, crunch-time shifts to get their latest fix out the door.

David Georgeson brought this back down to Earth for me. It chipped through the jade-encrusted exterior I’d built over decades of gaming, growing increasingly distant from that original, blind joy of play that allowed me to lose myself for hours in a simple, side-scrolling platformer. It showed me, again, that almost every title, regardless of whether it’s the most popular shooter or niche RPG in the world has not only its fans, but also its dedicated and passionate developers.

That is something special. Maybe you should try playing his game.