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.

The game puts you in the shoes of Neku, who by all rights shouldn’t be in Shibuya at all - he is far too cool, or at least considers himself to be - but suffers from all-too-convenient amnesia that allows the rules and story of the game to be revealed gradually, at a pace that can be best described as glacial.

And this is my problem. For a game that purports to break the classic Square trappings, this game falls into a lot of them. 

The story, even though it reaches well beyond the Shibuya hipness it could sink itself into (and which things like the fashion label power-up system hint at), isn’t anything groundbreaking. In fact, it’s easy to imagine Neku’s quest being the same as someone like that of FF7’s Cloud - a slow realization of his past, his own issues, and his need for his friends and comrades (who just happen to possess miraculous magical skills he needs to survive). 

The characters and design are uniformly interesting, despite this, and there’s a lot to do - some of it even deeply enjoyable. Things like powering up come in the form of eating different kinds of ramen, a natural pastime for Chris and I, and turning off the game for a while, which GTA makes easier and easier.

Despite the story’s issues, though, I find myself coming back to the game. It has its problems, certainly, but the level of gameplay innovation is the most exciting thing about it. While the Final Fantasy series slowly pushes into the next-gen realm, in alternately brilliant and recursive forms, this is truly next-gen gameplay. It’s difficult and new, but with painstaking efforts to allow players to learn at their own speed. When you finally do cross the hump to controlling both at once - or even both for part of the time - the rewards are quick to come and varied, and worthy of your effort.

Above all, the game is fun, and as linear and blank as the plotting turns out to be, it’s an impressive show of the design prowess of the Square team, and a worthy subway companion for those of us who are spending our HDTV hours with the (brilliant, compelling, and soon to be further discussed) Grand Theft Auto IV.

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…

GTA IV’s remaining core characters struggle to identify themselves. Immediately, you’re introduced exclusively to people fueled by their inability either internally or externally to meet labels they’ve assigned themselves. Rather than recognize their true identity, they aggressively set out to change it. It’s this pursuit that makes Niko both a hero and tragic (and possibly a tragic hero). Niko craves the American Dream, but Liberty City’s hard external reality interferes. But he will not be satisfied as a mob driver, and lusts for success. Even the supporting casts’ pursuits to re-label themselves makes them feel both pathetic and yet earnest. Mikhail Faustin believes he’s the city’s great gang boss, but his paranoia inhibits success time and time again. Still, he truly wants to do right—often less-worried about the mob’s business, than keeping hushed for his wife to watch TV.

But Brucie does not openly pursue a new image nor a new role in society. That’s not to say Brucie avoids advancement, rather Brucie recognizes the cause and effect his personality has to his success. He’s aware he’s a naturally successful person, and surrounds himself with similar people, like Niko. This is perfectly encapsulated in this small bit of dialogue.

Niko: Hey Brucie, what’s up?

Brucie: H-hey, Niko B! Come here. Show me the love man-hug style!

Niko: Woa, enough all right.

Brucie: Woa, woa, what are we about here, you and me?

Niko: I don’t know.

Brucie: What are we about, boy?

Niko: I’m an immigrant and a hired gun. And you’re a steroid junkey, but we get along.

Brucie: No, not that stuff. That’s superficial. I’m talking about the real shit.

Niko: What?

Brucie: We’re winners, man. Fucking winners. That’s how we roll.

Niko can only see the first-level of his reality, but Brucie pulls back the curtain and reveals the truth not only of the scene, but the truth of the entire game. Niko, the protagonist, is the hero of a videogame, and he will always win (just as heroes do in films, and just as, some of us may hope, heroes do in real life.) Brucie, too, is naturally a winner, but what make Brucie unique, truly special, is his ability to see the world’s mechanism. He sees how the clock works, and it’s so evident, so clear to him, that to everyone else he’s a moron. A fool.

At the end of the video, Niko completes a death-defying high-speed race and Brucie hollers with excitement. For Brucie, he saw the finish ling coming all along. While Niko, the player, will complete this race–you have to if you want to progress—both the player and Niko are under the illusion that success may never come. The game pressure’s you to succeed in this narrative, but the truth is there’s no real failure in GTA IV. Even if you never complete the narrative, you can always get the codes. You could spawn the helicopters, the weapons, the health and enjoy the city, but you’ve chosen to become the bigger character, the victor. It’s the path of Niko.

The curtain can be pulled back; success can be had at any time. And when I met Brucie, it was suddenly evident: the city’s already mine.

-Chris
Image: Source

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…

HC: Another topic of contention amongst gamers is the rise of downloadable content (DLC). Do you think studios use DLC to shake the pennies out of our pockets or is it just a necessary financial avenue for the studios’ survival?

LA: People always complain they’re trying to get more money out of us. Yes, they want to make more money, because they’re running out of choices. The high cost of development really limits the mobility of the industry as a whole. Pretty soon they’ll be unable to do anything, but sequels. So, they’re trying to think of ways games can be more than highly priced one-shot experiences. The word they use is ‘long tail,’ and they say, “How can we create a game that has staying power in the market?” There are several ways to do this, but the game needs to continue to have value beyond its launch week for it to be worth the cost of development. Companies are aware now there’s a point at which we’ll stop going to the cash register. You’d see a huge drop off. Like, an $80 game theoretically costs a lot more to make than a $60 game, and, hopefully, at $80 they’ll make more money, but people aren’t going to go to the store for that. There’s a peak. [Companies] are looking for alternative ways that they can make money from their game so they don’t have to charge us as much. “Yes, we’ll sell you a $60 game, but over time, if it’s worth that much to you, you can make it an $80 game. If you love this game, you’ll pay us more. If you pick it up and hate it, you don’t buy it anymore.” So I definitely disagree with the point of view that looks at the industry as if they’re going to do anything to make more money off of you. Yes, that’s what it’s about, but not because they’re getting fat off profits at our expense. It’s because the industry is so volatile, and they’re moving so much money around in a high-risk environment.

HC: DLC will always be tied to the issue of those who have it and those who don’t. DO you think this “have and have not dilemma” affects game play, specifically in multiplayer games?

LA: It’s difficult in multiplayer games, and MMOs are already fighting with this because nobody is going to retail for PC anymore and nobody is paying subscription fees. They want to try before they buy. I think we’re on the right track with something like Hellgate [London], where if you don’t think it’s very good, which a lot of people didn’t, you can play it for free. If you love it, which probably some people do, you pay a tiered subscription. If you’re hardcore into a game and you’re going to spend 60 hours a week in it, that’s maybe 30 bucks a month to you, though I don’t know the exact costs. And you’d be happy to pay that if you’re that into the game. If you’re going to be one of those people who’s going to [play] a few times a month, and you don’t want it to be eating into your wallet every month when you’re not using it, then play for free.

I think, though, the people that are “have nots” won’t mind, because if they cared they would buy it, just like they do at retail. I think it’s going to take a long time for [companies] to develop a cost structure that people find doable and fair, though. For example, a lot of people are young. They don’t have credit cards. Their mom’s not going to give them her credit card so they can buy more guns on the computer. Parents aren’t going to do that. And the game companies know this. So companies like Nexon in Asia sell pre-paid cards. They do it here now for Maple story. They sell cards in Target, and you buy your kid a $10 card, and they can plug in the card and buy themselves $10 worth of in-game shit. To some extent people will have and some people won’t, but hopefully the developers have made a game where enough can be got by playing that the other stuff is bonus. Should they offer things as DLC that give a distinctive advantage? No, of course not. It would have to be done with a firm hand on game balance, and with a firm hand on the pricing model.

HC: Recently, Insomniac games made an effort to help developers by opening Nocturnal Initiatives, which offers various parts of Insomniac source code. This pseudo-open-source method between studios could be a great solution for trimming development costs. Do you think we’ll see more studios take this leap?

LA: They will never do that. A lot of people are advocating that, but it will never happen. I think I will be dead before that ever happens. If it hasn’t happened on computers, it hasn’t happened in operating systems, it definitely won’t happen in games. I think they have the ability to move certain pieces of content from Wii to Playstation to 360 if they wanted, but they wouldn’t do it. They will not all sit down and shake hands. They’re too competitive. They’re too proprietary. And to some extent there are hardware differences. Both developers and hardware makers are establishing their own place in the market, and they want to own it. They don’t want a level playing field.

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…

[“Why We Play” is a new weekly column by freelance writer and HardCasual blogger Chris Plante that discusses how video games benefit us when we are away from them, in the real world, and what brings us back. This time - a look at some harsh criticism of a gamer upset when her favorite site went away]

I’m a fan of gaming blog RockPaperShotgun. I think they write intelligent, rich, expansive criticism and analysis. Naturally, I assumed RPS readers were equally intelligent and thoughtful - guilty by association. So then what caused a small group of RPS commenters to attack the gaming habits of an eleven year old girl with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, forcing RPS to shut down the post’s comment section?

A Little Background

I was born with a full cleft-palate and cleft-lip. Like all children with birth defects, I never considered it a blessing, just a cross I willingly bear. For better or worse, I usually forgot about the scars on my mouth unless I spotted another child staring or heard an adult make an irresponsible hare lip joke.

Now, I’m twenty-two, and I live the average life of a post-collegiate freelancer in New York City. I have a cabinet full of ramen, a loving girlfriend, and parents that still pay my cell phone bill. And my rent.

For better and worse, I like to think my birth defect shaped me into this person. Truthfully, I’ve never been happier.

A week ago, a friend and fellow gamer, Paul Arzt, responded on our communal blog to my GameSetWatch column, “In the Name of God.” He noted the power of games as safe environments, places where we can make mistakes, learn new skills, and create. He then mentioned a now popular news story, the closing of Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom.

This story has attracted a vocal response; many commenters have been quick to write it off as the closing of yet another Disney marketing MMO, but Paul showed me the unique response of a young girl named Madison who took the news in a personal way. She wrote this on her online journal:

“My favorite web site, Virtual Magic Kingdom (VMK) is closing May 21st. I’m sad and MAD! I can’t live without my friends on VMK. PLEASE sign my guestbook like a petition to SAVE VMK for me and my friends. Pass my site on to everyone you know so they can help too. I love VMK cause I can WALK, TALK, EAT, DANCE, SHOP and play checkers all by myself.

PLEASE HELP ME!

Love,
Madison
p.s. VMK is GERM FREE too!
p.s.s. and no one stares at me there.

As Paul clarified for me, Madison has Spinal Muscular Atrophy (that likely explains her post-scripts). For her, this game, DVMK, is not just a virtual place she can practice life skills free of consequence, as I mentioned earlier; this is a place where she can live life without fear or shame. It’s a place where she doesn’t need someone’s help to live an ordinary life.

Why Gaming Matters To Madison

This shook me. I have never considered my birth defect in relation to my gaming habits. Obviously, a cleft-palate stands no comparison to the seriousness of SMA. Yet, and I hope Madison doesn’t mind, I empathize with her plight.

Since I cannot speak on her behalf, I’ll explain my own upbringing as a gamer with a birth defect as modestly as possible. In elementary school, I spent a lot of my time at home. I had a group of four friends, which our parents, mothers and fathers of the 90’s, called ‘the Hood.’ We were inseparable, and each of us, outsiders in our own ways, had the others’ backs.

But like all kids, there were certain things we never understood about each other. Better, we never understood what made people stare at us. People looked at me because I was physically different; people looked at them because they were mentally different. In times when I felt my friends and family couldn’t understand my differences I resorted to a creative outlet, and, in retrospect, nine times out of ten, that outlet was a video game.

At first, my parents didn’t buy me many NES carts. I had Super Mario Bros. and, being from Kansas City, Bo Jackson Baseball. I played these two passionately, completing them dozens of times. I remember the first time I beat Super Mario Bros. Like a good book, I rebooted, and played through it again.

Is this sad and pathetic? I don’t think so. I think it is part of being a kid. For most (read: all) people, there were hard parts in youth, and as much as we want to believe we were “the cool kid,” hindsight reveals no kid was the cool kid - we all smelt funny, had our distinct insecurities, and lacked refined motor skills. And since you’re reading GSW, I’ll assume we all spent our fair share of nights with nothing but ourselves, our console of choice, and a sixer of Cherry Coke.

Therefore, I assumed we, as gamers, must all empathize with these kids’ traumas. And that’s why I was shocked, and a bit disgusted, by the general gamer reaction to the closure of DVMK. Before Madison even wrote her passionate response, commenters across various gaming blogospheres were quick to criticize eleven year-olds for mourning the death of their favorite game and, for many, their only mode of digital communication.

Perspectives: Ponder On This?

In case you still find this closure a bit silly, here are two thought-experiments to help you better understand the dilemma.

1.) Imagine your favorite game as a child. Got it? Now imagine your parent throwing it away. Now imagine them destroying every copy of that game. That’s the experience of an MMO closure for an eleven year old.

2.) Imagine your life without chat clients. That means no AIM, Gchat, or MSNMessenger - nothing. For many parents DVMK is a safe place for their children to communicate, explore, and make friends online.

It utilizes a “safe chat system” which allows players to only uses words in the game’s dictionary - so no foul language, and no kids giving away their phone number or address. There are not a lot of back-ups to this system, and those that exist require the impossible: an eleven year-old manually transferring an entire online social network. I’m twenty-two and I couldn’t fully switch from Facebook to MySpace with a gun to my head.

The RPS Perspective

Enter RockPaperShotgun. They covered the story in brief. They mentioned the closure, and linked to a few personal stories, including Madison’s. It was a well-measured and heartfelt post. And then the users commented.

At first, the comments were varied. Some shared memories of DVMK. Some went tangential with a “damn the man” attitude, attacking Disney. Then a series of comments suggested that no child, healthy or unhealthy, should have such a reliance on a videogame. The argument was cruel, thoughtless, and, above all, erroneous.

Again, Madison replied:

Hi!

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1537

These comments HURT! They don’t understand!
I can’t do ANYTHING by myself. In VMK I can.
I lOVE life and I LOVE my friends. My friends and I play in VMK as if we were out on a playground. Which is IMPOSSIBLE in the real world. I can be just like everyone else in VMK. I don’t LIVE in a virtual world. My mom does lots of stuff with me and I go lots of places when i can. But I can’t go out much in the winter time because of the chance i could pick up germs and get sick…

Immediately, RPS closed their comment section. In its place, they left this message:

“Update - Thread’s now closed to deter further bad eggs. As a general rule - if you can’t say something nice about an eleven year old who’s upset, you probably shouldn’t say anything.”

What made these readers speak out against the gaming habits of Madison and other DVMK players? After all, these are readers who dedicate their fair share of time to a gaming hobby, commenting on a site like RockPaperShotgun, which I associate with both hardcore and intelligent PC game enthusiasts.

Before I go further, I’d like to point give a disclaimer about this group from RockPaperShotgun’s Kieron Gillen:

“[It’s] Worth stressing that RPS commenters are a bunch of adorable pussycats compared to the vast majority of gaming sites, and I think characterizing the thread solely as a hate-mob would be deeply unfair. There’s some intelligent comments there, mixed with some off-colour gags and some people really not quite getting the girl’s situation.”

I wholeheartedly agree.

Internet Wild West Frustrations

There’s no exact way for me to reason a group’s action, and in reality, I have no place to say whether they’re right or wrong. The Internet’s still like the Wild West, and unless a comments section is closed, people are free to express themselves. But why did these commenters choose to express their displeasure with an eleven year-old’s gaming habits? What disgusted them, scared them, or frustrated them? Why did they feel emboldened to speak up?

I think they felt a subconscious fear, a stigma from those Cherry Coke nights. As gamers, we work as a group to protect ourselves tooth and nail from certain stereotypes: loners, losers, dorks, perverts, social miscreants, and recluses.

When someone insinuates these stereotypes might apply to a game, like in the case of the recent Resident Evil 5 racism mess at Kotaku, or a group of gamers, as with DVMK players, we try to distance ourselves from the problem. Rather than discuss the problem at hand, we tend to say, “Well, that isn’t me!” Gamers aren’t racist. Gamers don’t squander their life in a virtual world. But it’s never so black and white.

Yes, there is racism in games, there’s racism in all mediums. The problem with our discussions isn’t whether or not the game is racist or we are racist. The problem is how we react to it. What’s our responsibility to and for the games?

Yes, there are reclusive gamers. So what? People do not relate one gamer to all gamers. The problem is how do we protect these games for either social or medical reasons need these virtual society lead day-to-day lives. The questions should be, “What can we do for them?” Not, “How can we further distance them?”

Or maybe I’m making too many assumptions. Maybe we all didn’t spend parts of our childhood feeling different. And perhaps most of us always felt welcome by our family and friends. It’s possible most of us looked at gaming merely as a pastime and can’t associate with it as a sanctuary, a place away from it all.

Then I guess it’s just Madison and me. But if all that’s true, that most gamers and commenters never felt that type of loneliness, and that they attacked a young girl simply because they felt privileged to judge her inadequacies and insecurities in an anonymous setting, then I feel I’m in the right group. I’d rather stay inside where it’s safe than go out with people like that.

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…

Her: Buy that cute game.
Me: We already have LocoRoco.
Her: No, the other one. With that awkward man on the cover.
Me: I think I’m going to just put some money down for Haze.
Her: What’s that?
Me: You shoot people and use drugs.
Her: You have enough of those. Buy this.

She makes a valid point. I do have “enough of those.” So I picked up Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds, and prepared to enjoy it for awhile, and once she grew bored of it, say, two weeks, return it.

But the more I want to returns HSG:OB for a Metal Gear reservation, the more I like it. I’ve never been a fan of its sugar-sweet style, yet, even that has grown on me. At its best, it’s just a golf game. I thought I hated golf. So why-oh why-can’t I free myself from Hot Shots?

The Advanced Shot System.

Every so often, I try a new game mechanic and it seems so simple and so obvious I can’t believe it wasn’t in every game of its ilk before it. The gravity gun in Half-Life, the option in NCAA 07 - sometimes they’re new because next-gen consoles finally make them possible, but in the case of Hot Shots golf the innovation feels less reliant on the system’s power than on the designers’ creativity.

In HSG:OB, you’re given two play options:

1.) The Traditional: You use a power bar to precisely gauge your shots. It’s effective, but boring. You’ve seen it in nearly every golf game since God created golf on the eight day - His grumpiest day.

2.) The Advanced Shot: No power bars. As your character swings you see a transparent club at his maximum range. Half-way up the arc, your club glints a yellow light. To hit the ball you must guess the amount of power you want to apply. Say your 100 yards from the hole, and your club hits 125 yards. You’ll want to hit “X” somewhere between the yellow glint and your club reaching the transparent club that represents your maximum power, the full 125 yards.

But that just sets the power of your swing. To hit the ball, a large circle quickly shrinks around the ball, until it wraps the ball perfectly. You want to hit “X” the moment it wraps the ball. If you’re having trouble, think Elite Beat Agents or just check out this video.

If you’re still confused, I’ll let the paid professional explain.

The mechanic feels too simple at first. Often, your shots go way off target, sputter off the tee, or shoot straight up into the air, but once you focus on the swing of the club shots get easier and feel more rewarding. The reward comes from the lack of precision a power bar provides. When you chip in, you feel like it was your skill, not your ability to work out the math on the power bar. Before, the player consciously or sub-consciously divided the distance by the power of the club. 100 yard shot, 125 yard club, hit the power bar at 80%. You still work out this math in some form, but now you have no specific mark that represents an 80% power shot. You think, “Symmetrical with my chest is 50%, so when the clubs at my shoulder, I’ll probably get 75%-85% power”. As you play, you eventually lose the numbers and go off instinct.

I can’t say which technique’s more effective for competitive players, but the advanced shot’s ideal for the player that wants to put in a relaxed and enjoyable 9-holes. I’ll admit it, if I hit par, I’m a bit impressed with myself. Somehow, a simple mechanic makes the game feel less like a set of digitized rules, and more like a real game of golf.

And it’s not just Hot Shots Golf that’s making big steps like this. We’ll see more of these mechanics as advanced graphics allow designers to abandon complicated HUDs. A perfect example of this is Call of Duty’s health system. Even the “loud game” has its plus sides.

Any Hot Shots Golf fans out there? How did they tackle swinging in the past? While we’re on the topic of our girlfriends playing video games, Sam must convince his girlfriend to write a post about how much she hates the harpoon gun in Crackdown. Please!

-Chris

Image Source: PlayStation Blog

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.

BioShock isn’t entirely unique, though. Other games do things like this, with their own unique takes on it.

Chris’s baby, Ninja Gaiden: DS, begins with only the normal difficulty available, with the harder (impossible?) difficulties only open after defeating the game one time around and mastering the basics of the game’s mechanics. The God of War series has its much-joked-about “maybe you’re a sissy” screens after you die enough times, allowing and suggesting that you kick it down a notch and play at your level.

New Nintendo DS RPG The World Ends With You takes this even further, with a system that actually rewards you for stepping away from the game, and a difficulty system that allows you to choose as the game goes on to play harder and harder, but keeps the fundamental difficulty basically the same. Not only does your level and the basic difficulty of enemies when you’re aware of the way to play stay basically the same, but by saving your game and turning the DS off, your attacks level up. If you get stuck on a boss, the old adage of “turn the game off, wait a day, and try again” is more than just a mental exercise - you’re actually stronger when you get back.

But these games are the exception, not the rule. They’re rarities, games that accept that sometimes you only want a bite-sized experience, but you still want to spend that time with what they created.

For me, gaming is something I do to blow off steam after a long day or to occupy me on a subway or long break. I want to be challenged, but I also hate it when a developer decides that I need to be run through the ringer over and over, that at even the calmest moments of the game I should be in fear that something will leap out and send me back to the place I was an hour ago. If an hour is all I have, where the hell is the fun in that?

This is one of the things that came up the first time the “hardcasual” nomenclature ever arrived - that BioShock was aware of a fact of life that seemed to be alien to game designers, if not game players. We’re here to enjoy ourselves, and to enjoy the worlds and the stories that you guys are creating. But if you’re creating a world where a half-hour’s play can gleefully be stricken from the record if we’re not save-junkies or ammo-hoarders, you’re cheating a group of people who would enjoy your work a lot more.

- Sam Ryan

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…

[ “Why We Play” is a new weekly column by freelance writer and HardCasual blogger Chris Plante that discusses how video games benefit us when we are away from them, in the real world, and what brings us back.]

Every Friday I go to a class to discuss games. I enjoy our conversations, because they give me a different perspective on stories I’ve played dozens of times. Their rants are like Rashomon, Akira Kursowa’s classic film about the dangers of perspective. For us, everyone’s killed Bowser, it’s how we killed Bowser that’s unique.

As we spent more time together, we noticed our differences. By label some of us are the stereotypical gamers, but then there are a handful of jocks, a few bubblegum girls (who beat my ass in just about anything), professional students, artists, and young professionals. How do we get along so well, when we’re so different? Is this the power of a shared hobby?

To figure out this puzzle, we considered only the essential aspects of gaming. The player. The game. The controller.

For me, a controller works like a pair of shoes. When I sport my kicks, I no longer literally feel the ground beneath my feet. I feel rubber and crusty socks (see: mysterious foot condition). But when I step on grass, I still know it is grass. I don’t have to see it, or even smell it. I feel it, somehow, through the shoes. They’re a tacit part of me.

To bring this back to controllers, in Call of Duty 4, I don’t feel the rubber or broken glass or even the gun in my hand, but I recognize the environment and how I interact with it via my controls. They’re my game shoes, and after twenty years of play they’re perfectly worn-in. The controller is an understood extension of myself.

Our tacit relationship with games through our controllers offers many advantages in real life. They teach us motor skills and linguistics, organization and management, and even bring us closer to the divine. That’s right, God is in the game, or, better, in our interaction with the game, but, out of modesty and complete fear you’ll never read “Why We Play” again, I won’t unpack such a lofty claim in my 5th paragraph on GameSetWatch.

Image: Source

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…

There’s no Pauline Kael or Lester Bangs. We don’t have models to praise or admonish. Sometimes, I feel we need a couple lone wolfs to step away from the pack, to give contrary opinions. Or maybe they already do. These might be the Brian Crecentes or N’Gai Croals, the Stephen Totilos or Maggie Smiths, the Leigh Alexanders or Michael Erards. It’s too early to tell.

And as Sam said, we have no Citizen Kanes. Nor should we, according to the film industry time line. Right about now we’re at an historical equivalent to the work of Oskar Fischinger. We definitely have the space marines to draw that comparison.

I think, and many commenters made this point, bloggers and journalists alike must be careful not to discourage the creation process. We shouldn’t criticize, but lead by an example of what we believe’s the right way, the right method. If we can’t have a consistent method, we must make a method of our best efforts.

We’re at an exciting time for gamers and game critics. In an effort to do our part, Sam, and myself in many ways, were quick to vocalize our thoughts on other writers, but we forgot the unspoken rule: Never joke about the other guy’s set.

From now on, we hope to promote our own voices and thoughts. For example, Sam’s thoughts are usually little smarter than mine, but ladies usually think I’m more handsome. So that’s OK.

Enough with that horse. Bring on the next one! (Man, did this get way off the topic (YHTBTR) of the original post.)

-Chris

NOTE: Hardcasual does not support any brutality to animals. They are not automatons, but beautiful creatures and members of our global community. For more information on horses and other domesticated mammals, click here.