Goldeneye for Wii

Fuck you Nintendo focus group.

The possibly-staged focus groups here are so believable only because of their incredibly predictable cattle-like reaction to the idea of a new Goldeneye game. Does no one remember that this has been done before? Does no one remember the rule to which Goldeneye is the exception, namely that movie tie-in video games are universally abhorrent? What about sequels and remakes in general? Remember things that never worked before? Let’s churn out another one!

The correct reaction to the announcement that Nintendo are YET AGAIN trying to replicate the success of Goldeneye would be to howl in anguish and punch the Nintendo representative in his soulless, history-defiling heart.

The trailer starts by asking: “How did one game become a classic?” But that question is never answered. I think Nintendo are hoping we will tell them. I think if they actually thought about the question for a while they might come up with a better idea than “let’s release another James Bond game and call it Goldeneye”.

Let me give you a fucking clue Nintendo. No one ever played it because of what it was called. NOT ONE PERSON. If I tied Shigeru Miyamoto to railway tracks and urinated directly into his eye socket, I could not make the experience enjoyable by calling it Goldeneye.

I guess paying license fees for the use of James Bond characters is easier than thinking up an original idea for a game.

Racism in The Last Airbender

Absolutely brilliant post about racism in casting and in particular in the casting of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Conversations in Mass Effect

Mass Effect (or as I’d like to call it: Sim Elevator) suffers from being not great at almost everything it tries to do. You’re exploring the galaxy but it feels really small, and this is roughly 25 years since Elite came out. There are about half a dozen little missions in the main story, the side missions are all similar and take place in the same cut-and-paste environments, but worst of all is the inventory system which made me want to stop playing rather than upgrade my team’s weapons.

Having said all that, I spent a lot of time playing.

Everything else is dressing for the conversations. The choices you make affect how the plot unfolds. Mass Effect is one of the better games that tries to do this but there are several problems that always seem to plague this genre.

• Choosing the “nasty” reply often stops the conversation dead.
• “Nasty” replies are often comically absurd, moustache-twirling, foul-mouthed threats. In real life, the worst people act like your best friend then take advantage of you.
• Choosing a path through the conversation tree results in an immediate reward of karma or credits or items. So it’s easy to play through all possible scenarios then just choose the one that gives you the most reward.

In short, conversations in these types of games are played not from some idea of character but strategically, like a resource management game. I think the first step in avoiding this is to dispense with the good – evil axis and think more carefully about how some kinds of actions produce certain kinds of results.

Studio Ghibli game

Studio Ghibli and Level 5′s upcoming Playstation 3 game which seems to be called “The Another World” (please fire your translator) looks stunning. I expect the story will be good if Miyazaki has anything to do with it. Let’s hope the game aspect lives up to the look.

A four-year-old plays Grand Theft Auto

The reason you can kill prostitutes in GTA is that you can kill anyone. Just like in real life. That doesn’t mean you have to.

This story shows that what you find entertaining in a sandbox game has a lot to do with what you bring to it.

(via kottke)

Juggle!

Denki have created the iPhone game Juggle! a 70s game (part Pong, part Breakout) that never was. I love the idea of creating a fake history for a long-running game series and then bringing it to life. Also the game looks pretty fun too.

Jenova Chen on emotion over story

I feel the video game is such a new medium, a lot of people are starting trying to approach a video game as if they are approaching cinema, which is a very established and mature medium so people know a lot about cinema so they can say all right let’s start from a story. But I think interactive media is so new that we couldn’t really nail a feeling yet, like it would be really hard to nail a sequence of feelings – which is a narrative story. So I tend to keep the game simple really just to nail one particular feeling at a time.

It’s interesting that instead of trying to copy cinema’s storytelling techniques, Chen is creating his own methodology. In this case, precisely communicating an emotion. He is suggesting that the language of computer games is still immature and should not hang on the coattails of cinema.

If this emotion can be summarised in a word, then we don’t need a game here.

He clearly understands that emotions can be very complex and the danger is that his game will convey something banal or uninteresting.

Ralph Macchio guitar battle

Crossroads is a film about a young classical guitarist who wants to learn the blues. It’s funny how this kind of guitar playing was revered at the time but has fallen out of fashion. It says a lot about the 80s that this is the climax of a film about Blues music.

Scorsese on Eyes Wide Shut

I was reading these excerpts of Martin Scorsese on Stanley Kubrick and he notes that most of Kubrick’s films are misunderstood at the time they are released, especially Eyes Wide Shut.

I keep changing my mind about Eyes Wide Shut. First time I watched it, I really liked it. There are actually very few films I can think of where there is a portrayal of a marriage that is past the honeymoon period but is not heading towards divorce. Arguably the relationship in Eyes Wide Shut is heading towards divorce, but the film doesn’t show that, instead it is more interested in the difficulty in remaining fulfilled in a long-term relationship and the possibility that married people may be excited by the idea of infidelity but ultimately not act on it. That’s uncomfortable territory.

Is the film misunderstood? I’ve read synopses that describe it as a film about Bill Harford making his way around New York City and having sex. But if you watch it carefully, he never does. He has a series of encounters where sex is a possibility but each time he withdraws or is denied. Although the orgy scenes attracted some publicity, the film isn’t what I would call sexually explicit. And I think the idea that it is can be a distraction.

When I re-watched it, I didn’t enjoy it as much. Like all of Kubrick’s films, it looks great, but it lacks something visceral. Maybe it’s just the violence of his other films, or maybe like Scorsese suggests, it will take some time for me to really appreciate it.

Playing Portal with my dad

I hadn’t played Portal until very recently. In fact, not until it was being given away for free, and I’m a little ashamed to say that, but I think you’ll understand if I explain that the first time I played Portal was also the last time I hung out with my dad before he died. We played Bioshock as well and when I got around to playing through that on my own, the bits I recognised from the first time took on a strange significance. I wondered if my dad had got this far or if he had seen this bit or that bit. Not that it mattered, but computer games were one of the few things we could talk about together and now that line of communication was closed. So I knew playing through Portal would be bittersweet and like laying something in my past to rest and I didn’t want to do that.

The weird thing is, playing games with my dad was not a fun experience. He was a back seat player, telling you how to complete a level before you’d have a chance to look around. I yelled at him a lot for doing his but he never changed. I think he liked the feeling of having a secret. This got so bad that when Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out, my brother and I hid it from him so he wouldn’t drop spoilers during dinner.

Dad told me that there was a great song at the end of Portal. I knew this already because I listen to Jonathan Coulton but I had avoided listening to the song outside of the context of the game. The song is called Still Alive. I’d like to avoid reading too much into that. but when I got to the end of the game, it was a great touch. Adding that song adds character to the game, it adds humour as well. Valve are one of the only big game creators that I admire because they understand that adding touches like that is more important than advanced graphics, more important than “cool”. Not that they don’t have those in spades, but they don’t let them become the focus.

Playing Portal made me feel uneasy. I knew it was a short game, in fact it lets you know this by numbering the test rooms you pass through to get your reward. But very quickly I was two thirds through and I was still learning how things worked. I felt like I was just getting to the end of the tutorial. But the key to understanding Portal is understanding that the tutorial is the game.

A lot of games do this. Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 2 spring to mind. I didn’t enjoy either of these completely because they finish as soon as they teach you how to play the game. By contrast, a game like Splinter Cell often has a training level which guides you through what manoeuvres are available before you are dropped behind enemy lines. Splinter Cell’s illusion of free will is better because you are left to choose exactly how you approach a problem.

Portal shifts gear towards the end when you leave the testing environment. It feels more open, less linear, but like Half Life 2 (which takes place in the same universe) this openness is an illusion and there is usually only one sequence of steps that will allow you to reach the next section.

The shortness of Portal works in its favour in one sense because the game never gets boring or repetitive. The final confrontation comes at just the right time and is exciting and funny and satisfying despite this being a game where there is no combat in the traditional sense.

After a few days though, I realised that Portal is subtly different from other games. The idea that the game is the tutorial is more explicit. You’re not being told how to use the portals, you’re playing a character who is being told how to use the portals. The game is a metaphor for puzzle games. Without getting too recursive, it takes a step back and allows you to see how games teach you. (In a similar way, Bioshock was about a player being an empty vessel controlled by others.)

That’s not my favourite thing about Portal though. My favourite thing about Portal is that it’s a comedy. Or a horror-comedy. Or something. There are very few games that are genuinely funny – like sitcom funny – and they usually make the mistake of confusing funny with wacky, zany etc. (Psychonauts is funny-zany and pulls it off, but that’s a different story.) Portal is funny-creepy. Valve puts genuine, subtle humour into all its games but here it’s right out front. It’s a great game but it’s also very entertaining and you should definitely play it. Although I’m guessing that very few gamers haven’t already.