Hardcasual

My recent posting hiatus can be blamed on a lot of things - my thesis being due, my job being insane, a few family crises - but really, what it all comes down to is this:

I don’t know what to say about The World Ends With You.

TWEWY (I hate to go the acronym route, but good god, I can’t write that title over and over) is, as anyone who has kept up with the trickle of non-GTA gaming news still on the internet knows, the new Nintendo DS action-RPG created by the Kingdom Hearts team and designed by Square character design mastermind Tetsuya Nomura.

In a rare and glorious departure, though, the game is set in a world that resembles our own. To the extent that Shibuya, Tokyo’s youth fashion epicenter, can be considered the real world. Instead of some steampunk future, some magical village, or Halloweenland, you’re travelling through packed intersections and ramen shops.

I’ve already talked a little bit about what makes the gameplay so special. The level of customization I talked about there - the on-the-fly difficulty adjustments that encourage playing the game at the exact level you like best, from super hardcore to blissfully easy - is just the beginning. The game allows you to restart failed battles at a lower difficulty level, completely avoids random battles, and allows you to play the two-character combat with as little attention to one character as you wish.

And that two-character combat model, the game’s odd combination of selling point and detraction, both pushes the possibilities of the DS to its furthest limit and shows just how insanely overcomplicated the system can be. You control one character with the stylus - the one you must control - and one with the d-pad (in Dance Dance Revolution-style combos), the one you don’t have to, necessarily. The game rewards you for playing as hard as you can, but you can take on most encounters with a decidedly casual difficulty level. 

How this pays off for the story and the direction, after the jump.

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If you haven’t had time to pop in your fresh copy of GTA IV and don’t want a single blood-spattered moment ruined for you, don’t read further. Though this article won’t go deep into the plot or contain any major spoilers, I will be talking almost exclusively about a character encountered a good two hours into the game. You’ve been warned.

At first, I had trouble connecting with GTA IV’s narrative. A few months ago, I saw Ken Levine speak about Bioshock, and he stated that designers must consider that the majority of buyers are meatheads who want to fire first and get story later. He may be right, because I couldn’t help it, but feel that the guns and guts weren’t coming soon enough. After a half-hour, I Googled “GTA IV cheats” to find the weapons, health, and spawn codes.

Then, for another half an hour or so, I went on a massacre across greater Liberty City—helicopter duels at the statue of liberty, grenade tosses on the highway, and, a new favorite, rocket-jumps off the Empire State Building.

With that out of my system, I returned to the campaign’s narrative, and have since been able to enjoy the game at a leisurely pace, even undertaking the wide variety of side-missions with my dealer, Little Jacob, my cousin, Roman, and my girlfriend, Michelle. Yeah, we’re so dating.

When I drunkenly drove Michelle to her house after drinks at Steinway Beer Garden, she announced we were an item. She then flew out the passenger window as the vehicle careened into the tale of an ice cream truck.

A similar event happened, again out of the blue, when I met a peculiar, wealthy man roaming the streets. I walked up to him, and the game entered a cinematic where he criticized my European heritage, then flattered himself by forking over a fresh one hundred dollar bill. Strapped on cash and in desperate need of health, I gladly took it. Then, as a symbol of true good fortune, I spotted a hotdog stand across the street—two steps forward and a garbage truck blindsided me.

What I’m getting at is GTA IV’s narratives, intentional or unintentional, are dark and brutal.

That’s why Brucie Kibbutz is both a breath of fresh air, and, for me, the cherry-on-top of a carefully crafted story sundae. Brucie’s a steroid-popping, car-thieving maniac. As a cliché, a stock version of the same character would play a lot like Biff. Instead, he’s highly likable and surprisingly wise, all because of one well chosen character trait: Brucie’s impenetrable confidence both in his existence and his role in Liberty City. He’s a dude. He’s a ‘roider. He’s a racer. And he’s definitely “alpha.”

But best of all, those labels are never a problem for Brucie, because he’s always the first to identify himself. He’s resolute and so is his image.

How Brucie Kibbutz pulls back the curtain of GTA IV’s mechanical world after the jump…

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You may remember a couple weeks ago I sat down with game journalist extraordinaire, Leigh Alexander, to get her take on the industry, the media, and the games she loves. Now, we’ve got the second part of her interview ready to go (part one’s right here). This time, she speaks about the industry—from the Fat Cats to the have and have-nots of DLC to open-source development. And if this interview’s not enough Leigh for you, check out her wonderful Kotaku article investigating the cathartic appeal of GTA IV’s Liberty City for the residents of New York’s rougher neighborhoods.

So, without further ado, part two of our interview.

Hardcasual: Over the past two gaming generations, big-business game studio’s like EA have developed a negative image over tentative buy-outs, employer relations, and license exclusivity (in EA’s case, their ownership of the NFL license). What are your feelings on the mega-studios’ role in the industry?

Leigh Alexander: One of the things I’ve never bought, whether in the videogame industry or anywhere else, is this idea that big business, “big corporate” always has to be evil. People always dump on EA, but if you were to walk in there, you’re not going to see Darth Vader sitting in the Death Star. I think you’d see a building full of game developers who care about the work they’re doing, individual people who want to do a good job, and who want to make enough money so that they don’t lose their jobs. They’re working 80-hour weeks—yeah, of course they want to make money. They’re people like we are. People write to me who work on these games, and they’re good people like us who like their games and like their work. It’s true there are decisions being made with investors in mind before the audience is in mind, but that’s how the world works. It sucks, but they’re not your friends - they’re there to do a job.

The thing that gets me is whenever there’s not a scandal going on, the topic of discussion on the Internet is “how can we make games deeper?” We say, “It needs to be richer, it needs to be better, we want it more immersive, it needs to be more realistic, we want more explosions, we want more, more, more, more.” More multiplayer, there are not enough maps, et et cetera.

Guess what? It costs money to do that. It costs the developers a lot of money. In fact, it costs them more than we realize. I know nothing about the actual pound for pound cost of making games, but, at the least, I know it costs millions of dollars. Well, these companies can’t lose money on the games they make, because their stock will devalue, they don’t turn profits, their investors sell and then they have no development budget. Any given game company, even if it looks like a fat cat billionaire, could just as easily be a hair away from in the hole. It’s enormously volatile even over short periods of times. Look at Atari. [Mimes a downward spiral]. Look at Activision [Reverses it]. Some people think [Activision's] bigger than EA now. This can turn on a dime.

[These companies] start at the books before they even go into development. They say, “this is how much we need to make to be risk averse.” If the game does not do as well as they planned, developers lose jobs, budgets for the next game get cut, things get delayed. Things we don’t like happen when games don’t make the money the companies set out to make. It’s not like John Riccitello [EA's CEO] is going to roll your money into a cigar and smoke it. Lots of times vilify companies like EA, but they’re very carefully planning “is this a good investment or not.” The thing about the industry being that volatile is they have to naturally be risk-averse. They have to make games they know will sell. Things that are very different don’t often make it through in this market. It’s not worth the risk to the game company. It’s not just enough to make a good game; they have to make good decisions too. That’s their responsibility to their employees and their investors, and just because that comes before the audience sometimes doesn’t mean the people behind these companies are evil warlords.

Downloadable content, open-source development, and the need to make a buck after the jump…

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Apologies for the slow-stream of posts. Without diving deep into the shallow pool that is our personal lives, a mish-mash of family, work, and finishing our college theses (WE’RE DONE!) kept us off the blog. But in good news, we’re back! But are you? I imagine GTAIV has most of the community plastered firmly to their ass from now until July (a huge concern for movie blockbusters, apparently). And rightfully so, I’ve enjoyed my three or four hours with it.

But if it’s blogs you want, a new “Why We Play” is up at GameSetWatch.com. I look at why different people attend launch parties, and relate that with my experience picking up GTA IV at midnight. People yell, people throw up the “shocker,” someone recommends I start a riot - the usual. In case you missed last week’s “Why We Play,” I’ve posted it after the jump.

So we’re back. That means more posts. More opinions. And the final two parts of my (somewhat) recent interview with Leigh Alexander

-Chris

“Why We Play” examines the closure of Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom after the jump…

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Until this week, I had never played the Hot Shots Golf series. In fact, I never would have played it, if my girlfriend hadn’t taken control of my PS3. At first, I didn’t even notice. She asked me to download the small car game (PixelJunk Racers) then that cute game (LocoRoco). She may forget their names, but I think she’s just amused by my need to translate her handful of words into a particular title

Her: It’s a Nintendo game. And the bad guys are mean.
Me: Mario Galaxy.
Her: No, meaner.
Me: Are you sure it’s Nintendo?
Her: Yeah, you really bash people.
Me: Have I been playing it a lot lately?
Her: Uh-huh.
Me: River City Ransom.
Her: No, it’s a war.
Me: Advanced Wars?
Her: What’s that?
Me: Is it Call of Duty 4
Her: Is that the loud one?
Me: Yes.
Her: Jump-Jump-Shoot?
(She calls it Jump-Jump-Shoot, because when she plays multiplayer I jump around while she tries to shoot me. A match can last upwards an hour.)
Me: Yes.
Her: That’s it.
Me: That’s not a Nintendo game.
Her: I was testing you.

Plenty of girls have a deep catalog of video game knowledge. My girlfriend is not one of them. If you want to discuss cinema before 1950, she can go on for days. She’s also developed a passing interest in children’s television and even comic books. But video games? Her interest starts and ends on their cute-factor. In the case of Hot Shots Golf, our discussion went something like this.

Our deep, thought provoking convo and the Advanced Shot Technique after the jump… Keep reading →

Due to a few technical issues—computer has a cough—I am unable to post part two and part three of my interview with Leigh Alexander until this weekend.

I hate to leave you all empty handed, so here are a few links to help soothe the long wait.

———————————–

Leigh Alexander’s “Microsoft: “Perception,” Not Us, is PC Gaming’s Big Problem” at Kotaku:
Microsoft’s duty (or lack there of) to the PC gamer.

N’Gai Croal announces Page 6, er… “Page 110” at LevelUp
Finally, gamers get a respectable celebrity column. Will it be a tabloid? Will there be juicy gossip? Or will it wind up like another Page 6?

David Jaffe on “Heartland” at The Escapist
“The player chases after the teenage son, beating him and dragging him down the stairs, and throwing him into the living room. The commanding officer orders the player to douse the family and the house with gasoline, and set it on fire. “It was meant to be, ‘Oh, my God, this is the worst thing in the world,’” says Jaffe.”

The Vita-Chamber. For the hardcore community, this was BioShock’s great failing - the ability to be immediately resurrected at any point in the game, mere steps away from where you last were, with the effects of what you did in your final blaze of glory constant. The feature was so loathed among the hardcore that the game offered ways to turn it off, and the patch that the creators eventually released even incentivized avoiding them with a massive 100 point Xbox Live achievement.

For me, though, the Vita-Chambers were one of the best things about the game. They opened me up to trying new things - to attacking enemies in new ways, to exploring when I just didn’t have the ammo or the health, but didn’t feel like grinding all the way back to the nearest recharge stations either - and gave me the freedom to explore the world and the story without micro-managing my play style to death.

BioShock, though, seems to be a rarity among games, a game that expects that you might want to have it match your play style as you go along. It lets you play as you see fit, and then self-adjusts to allow you to continue playing without having to go back and grind for ammo, experience, and upgrades. If you learn from your mistakes, you can play straight through the game relying more on trial and error than painstaking failure after failure.

Continued after the jump.

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Hi loyal readers,

Just a friendly reminder that every Tuesday you can catch my new column, Why We Play, at GameSetWatch. This week I discuss the closure of Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom and the trouble with gamer stereotypes and the insecurities they have produced. In case you missed last weeks Why We Play, “In the Name of God,” I’ve cross-posted it below.

Hope you enjoy, and as always I love your feedback

Cheers,

Chris

Why We Play - “In the Name of God” after the jump…

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A lesson on commenting from the trenches of Hardcasual.

Notice how a perk of being respectful is good grammar.

-Chris

Original image property of Highlights Magazine.

In stand up, there’s an unspoken rule: don’t joke about another stand-up’s set. Sam’s post, Ropeburned by Games Journalism, brought a lot of attention to Hardcasual, but it was only recently that I had put these two thoughts together. Originally, I planned to let Sam’s opinions and his apology stand on their own, but since both articles have attracted a good portion of our new readership, I’ve decided to offer my brief opinion—after all, we share the damn blog. There’s no sense beating a dead horse, but I’m going to ignore that rule, beat it, then say there’s no sense in beating a dead horse… anymore.

Game journalism has a big white elephant: there’s no definitive way for any of us to discuss games - not for the Kotakus the 1Ups the Newsweeks the forums the IRC rooms or the personal blogs.

There’s no Strunk & White’s Elements of Style for the designers or the journalists. In fact, the IGDA’s currently having an entire conversation about this dilemna over a round-robin e-mail. Is videogame one word or two? Do I use AP or MLA? Are online games all games online or just PC games online? With such an unclear style how do we maintain consistency?

Watch me further beat the horse and dissect the elephant after the jump…

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