The Bleeding Effect

In the popular press, it is all the rage right now to try to claim that violent games create violent people.  Sweet, innocent adolescents, they will claim, are suddenly, overnight and without warning, transformed into gun-toting, brass-knuckle-using thugs after five minutes of Halo: Reach.  An hour of WWE Smackdown will send little Johnny scampering to the store, where he will load up on weight gain products and subsequently beat the hell out of his classmates for no reason other than that he played that game.  And all of those trenchcoat-wearing social outcasts who brought Uzies to their schools and used them with extreme prejudice surely had Xboxes hidden away with the latest Grand Theft Auto in the disk drive, still warm from its latest use.  Every single teen in juvenile prison must have played State of Emergency since they could fart.

 

There are so many things wrong with these claims as to make them almost comical.  Why the media or the politicians or whomever are so obsessed with pinning teen violence on videogames is beyond me.  After all, who buys those games for their kids?  Did violent children not exist before the advent of the Nintendo?  And who lets a violent child grow up without ever teaching him more peaceful ways of resolving conflicts?  Playing Dynasty Warriors 6 no more makes me a violent person than it does make me a Three Kingdoms general.  I play violent games all the time, but I was taught the difference between fantasy and reality by my responsible parents, and I have an easy-going attitude to begin with.

 

That being said, I have encountered two unusual and rather specific instances in which playing a game really has impacted my poor little psyche.

 

The first comes from Stuntman: Ignition, a patently un-violent game (at least in the "stabby-stabby blow your brains out" way) in which you drive stunt vehicles around movie sets for faux action films.  Brilliant game, but it has one design flaw.  I hesitate to call it a flaw because it does make it a more challenging game, but I will call it a flaw nonetheless.  You score points by succeeding with stunts, like driving close to an explosion, pulling a 180 turn, driving between two trucks without touching either, etc.  Every stunt you do adds 1 to your score multiplier, and there is a way to string together the entire level so that you have an ungodly multiplier by the end and get a five-star rating: you do "little" stunts between the big ones, like popping wheelies on motorcycles or driving really closely by parked cars, so that your multiplier stays alive (it goes away after just a few seconds) and increases.  This means that you will actually drive out of your way in order to steer close to oncoming traffic, pedestrians, park tables, trees, whatever will count as a "close call" and increase your score.  I got pretty good at this, but unfortunately, it began to transfer into real life.  I remember driving into my apartment parking lot and actually steering to the side just so that I would be driving closer to the parked cars.  I realized what was going on immediately and had to stop playing for a few days.  I call this the Bleeding Effect.

Christmas sale at Wal-Mart!  Outta my way!

I've dubbed it such because of the second instance, which took place just last night.  Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood was just released, and as I am a big fan of the series, it naturally sits in my gaming library.  In the Assassin's Creed series, a man named Desmond is hooked into a Matrix-like dentist's chair and relives memories stored in his DNA of his ancestors, like those of a man named Altair from the crusades in 1191.  As he experiences those memories, Desmond slowly acquires his ancestors' assassin talents, something which Desmond's colleagues call The Bleeding Effect. 

 

This latest entry, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, is special because it has a multiplayer component, which I tried for the first time last night.  You and seven other humans are thrown into Renaissance Italy as various characters who look exactly like the rest of the people in the crowd - guard captains, smugglers, doctors, executioners, etc.  Each player is given another player to assassinate, meaning that while you are hunting down one player, someone else is hunting you.  This means that you have to find your target and watch your back at the same time, because at any moment, some random barber may come up behind you and suddenly fancy himself Sweeny Todd.  In my second match, I stalked my target into a square where we both saw one player kill another.  Then my target went up and killed the killer.  I took the opportunity to kill my target while he wiped the blood off his blade, and right after I stabbed him, some jerk came up and killed me!  We all had a good laugh about this (at least, I did), but after I turned off the game, I realized something slightly alarming.  I still felt the anxiety of knowing that a fellow assassin was trailing me and may strike at any moment.  I felt paranoia, even though the only two things behind me were my Christmas tree and a sleeping cat (who, to be fair, could very well attack me at any moment).

I'll show YOU Protestant Reformation!

If psychologists really want to study gamers, then they should look into this.  A violent kid is going to play violent games, but then, so will mild-mannered cornballs like me.  Rage issues are certainly nothing new, but for some reason the media keeps trying to pin the blame on the gaming industry without taking a second glance at the child's home life, whether he's being bullied at school, if he's insecure, whatever.  The media craves the easy explanation.  "If you do x, then y will happen."  But if you've ever been around a human before, you know that we are never so simple.  Why Stuntman: Ignition and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood have impacted my sensitive little brain while the hundreds of other games that I have played haven't made the slightest dent I have absolutely no idea, but at least these two haven't instilled in me a strange desire to kill people while driving away from a raging volcano.

Generic Game Title 64 (Quest 64 Review)

Every so often, games come along that stick with you for years after playing them.  I still remember stomping and smashing my way through Blast Corps on the Nintendo 64, getting carsick from playing RC Pro AM on the NES in my dad's Suburban, watching my older brother destroy the 49ers in Tecmo Super Bowl.  Those of us in our twenties are the first generation to have grown up with home entertainment consoles.  That's a strange thought that, I believe, is all too often taken for granted.  The gaming industry has grown up with us, from the infantile NES, to the adolescent Nintendo 64, to the gawky, awkward Gamecube, and now the college-aged, sleek, modern Nintendo Wii.  Yep, our generation can be summed up by the Nintendo company.  Each console became a stage in life, and each game a particular memory within that stage.  Some people remember falling off their bikes and breaking their arms in the third grade.  I remember the first time I played Star Fox.  It's about as lame as it sounds, but there you are.  For better or worse, we have a generation of Americans with shared memories.  There.  That makes it sound at least a little cooler.  Like a twisted sci-fi thriller starring Keanu Reeves or... something...  Aaaaaand it's lame again.  Crap.

Not all of those memories were good, mind you, and the Nintendo 64 in particular seemed to excel at creating moments of my life which I'd rather forget.  The N64, mind you, was Nintendo's first major foray into the wide world of 3D.  Super Mario 64 led the charge, which boded well for the system, but things didn't go so smoothly after that.  I mentioned Blast Corps above for a reason.  It looked like fun - I mean, what young boy doesn't want a videogame in which your sole objective is to destroy buildings so that a runaway nuke-carrying truck doesn't run into something and blow up the world? - but it was so utterly pointless.  When you beat the game (on the moon, mind you), the nuke goes off anyway.  You put in all that work just to fail.  Sure, you could argue that at least it didn't blow up on the Earth, but you'd just be kidding yourself.  You failed.  The game-makers are laughing at you.

Similarly, the makers of Superman 64 must be laughing somewhere.  I'd swear there's a special place in Hell just for them.  If you've never played it, and I hope you haven't, then check out SeanBaby's review here.  Be warned: he has a potty mouth, though no amount of foul language can compare to the stink that was that game.

But possibly the most vivid memory I have of checking out a game that utterly sucked was the potentially-awesome Quest 64.  You play as a young mage named Brian with mastery over the four elements - earth, water, wind, fire.  The old master of the magical monestary begins the game by speaking to you about your father's disappearance; so, naturally, you must go out in search of him.  What begins, then, is one of the strangest and most potentially frustrating experiences of your life.

The glimmering metropolis.

To be fair, I can't say that I ever read the instruction booklet.  Only morons did that (side note: nowadays, I always read instruction booklets, at least for interesting things like games).  Regardless, the game offers approximately zero help on how to play, leaving you to devlop your own sense of the combat system... once you spend fifteen to twenty minutes just making your way out of the monestary.  You descend multiple staircases and scamper through countless hallways with equally countless doors - all leading to utterly pointless tiny rooms that 95% of the time don't even have a person inside, let alone a helpful treasure chest - before finally blinding yourself in the afternoon sun.  Then, you spend another fifteen to twenty minutes figuring out how to get down from the hill upon which sits your monestary before running through a town as utterly pointless as all those rooms from before, and then, finally, you are out in the open.  Check out this video of a Speed Demon beginning the game.  Even the fastest player out there still takes a solid four-and-a-half just to get out of town.

UFC totally stole this octagon idea.

Within two seconds, you enter combat with a pair of bunnies.  Combat takes place inside a magical octagon.  Each character - Brian, Bunny 1, Bunny 2 - acts individually within a small circle of available movement.  Each of the N64's yellow C buttons corresponds to one of the four elements of magic, and you can call upon any of them to aid you in battle.  The problem here is that they all start at level 0, and without any kind of guide on how to play the game, and the fact that I could never figure out how to use the stupid things, I took all of this to mean that you did not yet have any of those abilities, so I spent a good three turns just getting my guy close enough to said rabbits to smack them with my feeble cane while they pelted me from afar with wind magic.  By the time I won, I was already half-dead, and these bunnies were the most basic enemies in the game.  I took a few steps in retreat to heal myself at the inn, but before I could even go that far, a trio of wolves found me, and I was dead within a turn.

Welcome to Quest 64.

I recently reacquired this game at the local non-GameStop game store that specializes in games and consoles older than the cast of High School Musical.  I was determined to see if Quest 64 was still as legendarily bad as I recall, or if I was just being a retarded youngster who couldn't even figure out the basics of the game.  Well, I'm pleased to report that it's just about as mystifying as it was back then.  I did discover that you can use your elemental magic from the get-go, but the way you use the magic is anything but intuitive.  And, even when you use said magic, you can miss, or it doesn't do a lot of damage.  I was able to get further down the road this time, but the encounters are so damn frequent that I still had to turn back around and rest at the inn a number of times before I finially made my way to the next spot.

This is one suck game.

I understand that it wasn't poorly received back in the day.  I'll allow that the graphics weren't the worst to escape 1998, but they certainly haven't aged well.  The combat was interesting in theory, but then, so is Communism.  The story is nonexistent, and the setting is so generic that the world's actually called Celtland.  There are probably guys out there who loved this game as a child for whatever mysterious reason, and honestly that's okay.  I myself profess a love of Dynasty Warriors that I cannot sufficiently explain.  But for me, the memory of this game is about as painful as the memory I have of the time I sprained the arches of both of my feet at the same time while leaping into a swimming pool and quite suddenly finding a hidden underwater shelf.  Much like the thought of that ill-fated jump, the idea of this game just makes my muscles tense.  If you find yourself inside a use-game store, as you should if you fancy yourself a true connoisseur of games, avoid this one.  Save yourself the pain.

What the Heck Does Alignment Mean, Anyway? (Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber Review)

Welcome to the second edition of "Filling GoldenPigsy's Trough", wherein I review something upon his request.  This goes both ways, of course, as I make requests of him for his own blog (check it here, if you dare).  Dunno what he calls his segments; but doubtless he'll find my own title positively perfect.  My first post of this nature was here, for the Playstation 2's Disgaea: Hour of Darkness.  Today's post is, similarly, a review of an old strategy game, so if you don't like the Nintendo 64, then you can stop reading now.

Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (released in America on October 7, 2000 for the N64 and March 29, 2010 for the Wii's Virtual Console) has the distinction of being the only game I ever bought using money won from gambling.  My brother's father-in-law used to co-own a condo at the race tracks outside of town, so sometimes we'd all go out there to "watch" a NASCAR race (honestly how anyone can sit there and watch dozens of blurry cars turn left for an entire day is beyond me; I'd spend the day playing Army Men games on the N64 and then come out whenever I heard the shouts of rapture that indicated a crash).  At one of the races, we started a pot and picked cars, and out of the 20 or so people there, my car got 2nd place, which was good for $50.  I instantly went and picked this game up.

Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber is a real-time strategy RPG for the Nintendo 64 in which you create squads of 5 guys and send them marching around different maps, wresting town after town from the enemy's grasp until, eventually, you reach the map's enemy stronghold and take down its boss.  You beat him, you watch the story unfold, you fine-tune your squads on a world map, you enter another area, and repeat for about forty missions, each of which can take over an hour.  Your squad of 5 guys (and/or girls) is arranged on a 3x3 grid.  When they engage another squad, you don't control your men directly; rather, they attack based on their stats and location.  So, for instance, your knight standing on the front line of the 3x3 grid will attack twice per squad-battle, and your sorceress will attack twice when in the back row, but both will only attack once when their positions are flipped, and those attacks will be much weaker.  This forces you to plan ahead and mix and match to create the best squads who can withstand getting surprised from the sides or back as well as the front.

As I mentioned earlier, for each map, you essentially take over town after town until all that's left is the enemy stronghold.  Taking over all the other towns before the enemy base isn't necessary, of course - you could just make a bee-line straight for the boss if you really wanted - but, as you'll see, that's not a great idea.  To take over a town, all you have to do is knock the enemy squads out of it and then stop your own squad within its walls, but each town has a different "alignment" on a scale of 1-100, and you will "liberate" or "capture" the town depending on whether or not your squad's leader's own alignment is roughly the same as the town's.

Sound confusing?  It is, and in fact, Rockman24 didn't even know about alignment the first time he played through.  You are allowed up to ten squads out on the field per battle, but what Rockman24 did on his first play-through was use one squad to defend his home base and one super-powerful squad to go out and fight everybody until he sliced his way to the map's boss.  Upon beating the game, he and I learned something very important: Ogre Battle 64 contains multiple endings (six, to be exact) depending on your final "chaos level", which is determined by the choices you make during the story segments as well as "liberating" and "capturing" towns.  Make good decisions and liberate lots of towns, and you'll be fine.  Capture too many and make poor decisions, and your chaos level goes down, as Rockman24's most definitely did.  As an added punch to Rockman24's freefalling chaos level number, apparently it also goes down for each town that is still in enemy hands when you defeat the boss.  Suddenly, Rockman24's strategy of ripping a hole clean through the enemy lines until reaching the map's boss doesn't sound quite so brilliant, does it?

He got the worst ending possible.

By this point, I had secured my own copy of the game thanks to the only good to ever come from NASCAR racing, so when I played through, I made sure to do things right and liberate all the towns.  This is more complicated than you may think.  First of all, you have to have squads with alignments across the whole spectrum: a paladin trio with a pair of clerics ("good alignment"), a dark knight with a bunch of mages and a ninja ("bad alignment") and a small but lively host of sword masters and puppeteers ("neutral alignment", and yes I said puppeteers).  If you kill a paladin or cleric, your alignment usually goes down, and vice versa for dark knights or bezerkers.  If you take out an enemy several levels higher than yourself, alignment goes up, and vice versa for destroying puny weaklings.  Your squads' alignment is constantly in flux, so if, say, a holy paladin is blocking your path to a town with a really high alignment, you'll have to plan ahead and send some ninjas or mages

I got a much better ending than Rockman24.  Where his chaos level was a solid 2 (making for more than a few poo jokes), mine was closer to 85.  On a scale of 1-100, that's a bit of a difference, and all from something that the game never even explains to you.

The storyline itself is typical Japanese insanity.  Magnus Gallant is a blue-haired new captain in Southern Palatinus who quickly discovers that the rich are oppressing the poor, so after a few missions he and his buddies (one a hothead named after the Greek hero Diomedes) defect to the Revolutionary Army.  When the Revolutionary Army starts to win the war (thanks to you, of course), General Godeslas of the Southern Army, under direction of Sir Baldwin from the Holy Lodis Empire (whom I call Arec with a Kim-Jong Il accent whenever I see him), takes extreme measures and summons forth ogres from the nether realms.  Darkness consumes more and more of the land until the only human army left standing is that of Magnus.  Or something like that.  Mostly, it's just crazy demon stuff that gives the Japanese artists a chance to draw huge ape-like things with hammers.  Silly Japanese.

Beyond the main plot, Ogre Battle 64 is rife with countless subplots involving recruitable characters.  There are the foreign knights from other Ogre Battle games who will only join you if your chaos level is high enough.  There's the father who will only join you if you had found his daughter - a young cleric - during a particular mission.  There's a centurion, a rather dishy sorceress, and even a vampire.  And then there's the actually relevant subplot involving Prince Yumil, a real pansy of a guy who was childhood friends with Magnus.  In true Japanese fashion, this white-haired weeny strives as best as he can to be just like Magnus: strong, brave, charismatic, even though he is patently none of those things.  His insecurities drive much of the plot, and even though he is far too whiny for my tastes, his character development is certainly one of the more fascinating elements of the game, psychotic demon-ogres excluded, of course.

Ogre Battle 64 scored high with critics upon its release, but for some reason gamers didn't feel the same way.  It didn't sell very well in America, and nowadays I'm quite shocked to see a copy sitting in the local game stores.  The Ogre Battle series has several other games available in Japan, but this and Tactics Ogre for the Game Boy Advance are the only two that I know of to hit American shelves.  A shame really.  They're brilliant games.  I would love to see more.

It should say something about Ogre Battle 64 that it is now the only Nintendo 64 game that I still play.  Its replay value is incredible.  This is due to its high customization: since there is no voice acting (thank goodness), you can name Magnus whatever you want, along with all of your recruits and even your army itself (its default name is the Blue Knights, but I prefer Ass-Kickers).  This makes for some highly entertaining "accidents", like when my friend's little brother named Magnus after himself but in all caps, so every time someone referred to Magnus they appeared to be yelling (Sir, may I introduce FRANK Gallant).  Coincidentally, Pokemon is much the same way.  You can name your little critters whatever the heck you want, so instead of seeing "Go, Pikachu!" at the start of a battle you may see "Go, dammit!" which I think is a much more accurate sentiment.  I'm a terrible sucker for being able to name your characters.  It anchors you emotionally to your recruits and gives you a reason to keep playing (I just need Jack O'Neill to level up one more time, and then I'll work on raising Darth Vader's alignment before giving T-Pain a few more rounds of training).  Making 5-man squads based on your friends or favorite TV shows is a great way to prove to yourself that you have too few of one and watch too much of the other.

So next time you want to name a meteor-throwing mage after Man v. Food's Adam Richmond and pair him up with Aragorn the sword master, Conan the bezerker, SBD the ninja, and Mr. Deathypants the scythe-wielding dark knight, go to a used game store and find Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber, or download it to your Virtual Console on the Nintendo Wii.  It's the N64's greatest RPG, and my personal favorite for the entire system.  As IGN put in in their recent review of its Virtual Console iteration, Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber "was (and still is) lordly indeed."

What in the Name of Outworld...

Recently, IGN.com pointed me in the direction of a strange video on YouTube concerning a Mortal Kombat movie.  This struck me as odd, since I figured the MK series all but finished after their latest videogame - Mortal Kombat: Armageddon - did everything it could to put an end to the increasingly insane storyline that is the Mortal Kombat universe.  The two movies that were made in 1995 and 1997 varied from mediocre adaptation (the first one) to holy-crap-why-are-my-eyes-disintegrating bad (the second one).  Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was so bad, in fact, that I had been sure that no one would ever attempt another.

Apparently I was wrong.

The video (watch it here) isn't so much a trailer as it is an opening sequence, where we see Jax - and who doesn't love Jax? - as a struggling cop in a nasty, beat-down city chatting with a mysterious hand-cuffed prisoner about some different serial killers running amuck.  Each killer - I'll let you find out who they are yourself - is a different character from the MK series reinvisioned in what most people are describing as a sort of Batman Begins take on the series.  You're treated to a brutal, if not terribly well-coordinated, fight scene, then a revelation of the identity of the prisoner with Jax before the video ends and you're left wondering "when can I see this in theaters?"

Come to find out, the video was made by director Kevin Tancharoen as a sort of bid for the opportunity to make the thing into a full-length film.  Judging from the seven minutes that I saw, I'm actually all for it.  Look no further than my 2010 movie preview to see that the theaters are being flooded with remakes and reboots right now, but for me at least, there's something different about the Mortal Kombat series.  I personally didn't grow up watching The Karate Kid or the A-Team TV series.  My generation played Mortal Kombat and watched Power Rangers (which I hear is coming back) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, also rumored to be rebooted in the next few years.

Reboots and remakes are complicated subjects for me.  On the one hand, they seem utterly unoriginal, since you're really just taking the same plot and putting a fresh coat of paint on it to make a few bucks (like what Avatar did with Disney's Pocahontas).  They feel as though inspired purely by greed and ease of accesibility.  "Hey, Remember [insert random 70s or 80s TV show, like Charlie's Angels and A-Team]?  People liked that.  I bet if we tweak it so that it's young and fresh and relatable to today's audience, they'll totally go for it!"  Sequels are just more of the same.  "Hey, Shrek did pretty good at the box office.  Let's make another one!"  You don't have to make up new characters, settings, or plots, and instantly you have thousands of fans familiar with the universe of your movie before it's even made, thereby making them more likely to go out and see it.  The skeptic in me really, really hates reboots, remakes, and sequels that aren't necessary to further the plot (good example of necessary sequels: the latter two Lord of the Rings films).

Weirdly, it's the writer in me who actually welcomes reboots and remakes.  I enjoy seeing what contemporary writers do with existing material: what audience do they target, how does that affect the feel of the film, how do the characters or settings change - and, if so, why?  How does modern technology change the special effects (see Clash of the Titans for your answer there)?  How abstract does the director get in his adaptation?  The list goes on.  I can't help it.  Reboots and remakes, though I find them morally unappealing, are simply irrisistable.  Guess I'm addicted.

We'll see what becomes of this Mortal Kombat video.  Warner Brothers apparently has the rights to another movie, and the director of this YouTube video is buddies with the screenwriter attached to WB's film, so maybe he'll get his wish.  I read some of Tancharoen's commentary on the YouTube short, and he sounds like he really has his act together on making a Mortal Kombat film that far surpasses the crap from the 1990s while maintaining the spirit of the games.  Were I Ed Boon, I'd pay this director much consideration.  Taking something as wildly violent and over-the-top as the Mortal Kombat universe and uppercutting it into the world of realism may actually boost the series into respectability, much as Christopher Nolan did with Batman.

Of course, the debate as to whether or not Mortal Kombat NEEDS a dose of realism is an entirely different beast, and right now, I just don't have the stomach for it.  I'm gonna go watch this video instead.

NOTE: Within minutes of writing this, I went on IGN and saw a trailer for a new Mortal Kombat game that looks like it's done in the 2D playing style of Marvel vs. Capcom with the 3D graphics of the past few MK games.  How's that for weird timing?  Oh wait, E3's going on.

Too Human, or Too Poorly Written?

I talk about plot quite often on this blog. In Hollywood, a film can still do well without a good plot if it is well-directed or acted, has great action scenes, or generally contains lots of eye-candy (see: Avatar). For novels, plot is considerably more important, though, again, not strictly a necessity. Instead of being able to fall back on a great actor, director, or visual effects artist, a novelist without a plot can create an interesting setting, or write so well that plot becomes secondary to his or her style.

So what about videogames?

Better yet, why should we even care about the plot of a videogame?

It's an understatement to say that games have come a long way in the past quarter-century.  Thirty years ago today, the world met Pac-Man.  Twenty-five years ago, North America saw the first Famicom, or Nintendo Entertainment System, along with everyone but John McCain's favorite plumber, Mario.  At that time, the pinnacle of electronic home entertainment was an 8-bit man in overalls hopping across platforms as he bounces on the heads of mushroom men and evil turtles.  Any background or story pretty much spawned from what you made of the game's pixelated world.

Today's game systems feature increasingly robust online capabilities, so that now anyone can experience the joy of playing Halo 3 (rated M, meaning that you're supposed to be over 18 before you play it) with a horde of prepubescent 11-year-olds who are more concerned with taking their new dirty words for a spin than they are actually playing.  The online mode has fundamentally altered the layout of today's gaming community.  Now, with every game made, the producers have an important choice to make: do we make a single-player game, or one with lots of multiplayer capabilities?  On older systems, when they went with the latter, the result was rarely anything special, and the single-player experience suffered accordingly.  If a game tried to be multiplayer-centric, it pretty much had to abandon a single-player mode entirely to be successful (see: Mario Party).  It seems like the games I remember playing the most were the rare gems that found that balance between being something that I could play when my friends weren't there and something that I could play when they were, like Star Fox 64, 007: Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and even Super Smash Brothers.

Somewhat ironically, now that the Xbox 360 is around, and its online modes are so good (it comes with a headset that you can talk into!) multiplayer games have undergone a sort of reversal, where now it's actually quite difficult to play one while in the same room as your friends.  Splitscreen is so 2003, gosh.  Seems like the only games that still do that are Rock Band/Guitar Hero and just about anything on the Nintendo Wii, which shuns online modes in general.  This worked out great for myself and my friends, who had the joy of growing up with local multiplayer and then gaining online multiplayer once we split apart for college.

It's hard to generalize about plots in games, since the genres are so varied.  Of course RPGs (Role-Playing Games) are going to have better plots than a racing game or a sports game.  In fact, when it comes to a sports game, I don't want a plot (ahem Blitz: The League)!  Therefore, for the sake of argument, I will be referring to the genres that are technically supposed to have stories to them: RPGs, Action-Adventures, FPSs (First-Person Shooters).  As a side-note, though, I recently played a demo of a new racer called Split/Second, and while it didn't exactly have a plot, its premise was simple and brilliant.  You're a contestant on a reality show, and during the race you have the opportunity to press a button that will blow things up as your competitors drive past them, thereby potentially destroying their cars and launching you ahead of them in the standings.  It was uncomplicated, effective, and intuitive, and I highly recommend it.

So, what would you do if you were told to write a storyline for a videogame?

Would you write a linear plot - like a book/movie - that happened to feature lots of opportunities for battles (some kind of war game, perhaps)?  Would you write a detective story with branching plotlines depending on what the gamer uncovers (like the excellent Heavy Rain on the PS3)?  Or would you write the flimsiest piece of crap that you could to allow for maximum gaming in the hopes that the game developers have more talent than you do?  Do you present your story through in-game cutscenes, rendered cutscenes, text, or dialog that goes on while the gamer plays?  Do you hire voice-actors, and if so, should you try to get a big name (like Haley Joel Osment for the Kingdom Hearts games or John Cleese for Fable III) or find the cheapest actors you can (Dynasty Warriors!  Just Cause 2!)?  If the setting is fictional, how much backstory do you provide?

The list seems endless, and just about every option has been tried, to varying effect.  I've seen games with no voice acting but the most wonderful storylines (Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy VI, Skies of Arcadia) and games with voice-acting better than many animated movies (Kingdom Hearts, Bioware games like Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic).  I've seen games where the world's history is presented to you only in the instruction booklet (this happens more often than you might think), and games where a character walks and talks to you while you still control your own guy (making for some hilarious moments of personal space invasion that, sadly, doesn't even faze the speaker), and games with slick, stylized cutscenes that look more like comic book frames than anything else (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2).  A great story can come in just about any form, when it comes to games.  It just depends on what the developers have at their disposal.

Believe it or not, I'm writing this post specifically because of one game, one that is somewhat related to the next post that I shall be writing.  It's called Too Human (for the Xbox 360, 2008), a hack-n-slash, loot-drop game whose setting is a sort of science-fiction retelling of Norse mythology.

Two quick, unimportant definitions first:

Hack-n-slash: the type of game where you control one guy (Baldur, in this case) who slices his way through hundreds of enemies as he progresses from room to room.  You have a health bar that depletes every time you get hit.  These games are primarily about the action.

Loot-drop: when the enemies die, they routinely drop new weapons and armor for you to try on or sell.

Yay!  Anyway, I knew very little about Norse mythology going into this game.  I knew that Thor was the god of thunder (and a great character to play as in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance because everytime you kill something he says "The son of Odin is triumphant!" or some other nonsense), and Loki was the trickster god responsible for Jim Carrey's The Mask, and Odin was important somewhere in there, but that was about it.

The story of this game is presented as if you have been dropped right into the middle of the game.  You are given no backstory except through things that character mention off-hand, and with everyone who speaks to you you must figure out who the hell they are on your own.  You learn that Baldur's wife or something died at some point, and after a mission or two you learn that some guy named Hod was responsible.  For the entire time, the game plays as if you are somehow supposed to know the full backstory already, and believe me, it's frustrating.  I realize that game developers probably aren't all that concerned with getting the gamer emotionally invested in their game, but it couldn't hurt to try.  Some games do well with less story (like the "sandbox" style Just Cause 2, where I spend more time hijacking helicopters, flying them as high as they'll go, then blowing them up and freefalling for a good five minutes before pulling my chute as close to the ground as I can without giving the landscape a fresh pockmark), but your missions in Too Human are not just to go out and kill mindless monsters; they are directly involved with the game's overall plot, like the mission where your character decides to hunt Hod down and kill him for revenge.

After thoroughly not caring, I went and did a bit of research on Norse mythology, thereby learning much of the backstory on which this game apparently based itself, but even then the game made changes that still elude me.  Granted, I've yet to finish the game, so perhaps all will be revealed in time, but there's a subtle difference between evoking mystery and confusion, as I believe I mentioned in a recent post (the one on The Warrior Heir, I think), and the writers for this game don't know the difference.

That, and the gameplay's not very fun, either.

I'm not saying every game has to have a well-told story. That'd be ridiculous, and more often than not all I want to do is plop down in my chair and beat up a few thugs or blow up some expensive-looking machinery or kill 2000 unfortunate Chinese men from the Han dynasty.  I'm not even saying that all games in the style of Too Human have to have engaging plots (just look at Blizzard's masterpiece, Diablo II: 95% action, 5% plot, and it's one of the best games I own).  I'm just saying that if you're going to make a game as obviously plot-centric as Too Human was, then spend the extra money on hiring writers who give a crap.  Hell, I'd have done it for free if they'd have just called me up.  I could have written something better.  Or, ideally, they'd have remade Too Human as a game version of Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight series, which I shall be reviewing next.  Stay tuned if you want to hear what a REAL story based on Norse mythology is like...

His Power Level is.... OVER 9000!!!!!!!! (Disgaea Review)

If you know me, you should be shocked that I've yet to review a videogame on this blog.  Well, your troubles are over, mister, because that's what I'm here to do.

I am a big fan of videogames.  Have been ever since I sat in my big brother's room and watched him play Tecmo Bowl.  My parents had a suburban with a TV mounted in the back of the center console, and my dad was clever enough to rig up a VCR under one of the back seats and a Nintendo Entertainment System under the other, so for long car rides we played a lot of Baseball All Stars and RC Pro AM and the occasional Legend of Zelda, though I was worthless at that one.  I've gotten better and would wager that, in my prime, there was no finer Biggoron swordsman in all the world when it came to Ocarina of Time.  When my childhood best friend moved in next door and we got to know each other, I discovered that he and his older brother had a whole closetful of games at their disposal, and I was hardly seen in my own home again until my parents, who missed me dearly, were distraught enough to buy a Super Nintendo for my "first grade graduation".  They'd gotten it from a friend, so it came with about fifteen games, among them F-Zero and Star Fox, which quickly became two of my favorites.  It's sad to see that neither franchise has transitioned onto the newest consoles, but oh well.  Not everyone's so lucky as Mario.

In many ways, games have come a long way since then.  Near-photorealism is upon us (just look at the racing games out there nowadays).  Gone are the days of text-based dialog.  Everyone's voice-acted nowadays, for better or worse (better = Kingdom Hearts; worse = Just Cause 2, or any of the Dynasty Warriors games).  Soundtracks have become so well-composed that you can buy them in stores (though just last night I encountered a band dedicated to making electric-guitar versions of 8-bit game themes from the late 80's and early 90's, so the classics live on!).

In many other ways, though, games have perhaps NOT come very far.  As mentioned before, sometimes the voice acting is so bad that you wish you just turn it off completely (but you can't.  Ever.)  Storylines have become much more complex thanks to dramatic increases in memory to allow for longer games (see: any Bioware game, like Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, or Jade Empire), yet oftentimes the storylines, simply put, are utterly worthless.  Depending on the game, you may end up "playing a movie", where you find that overly-long cinematic cut scenes take up more of your time than gameplay (see: Xenosaga), or you may find yourself playing through a game whose story is so convoluted that you don't have the slightest idea why you're doing things in the first place (see: Too Human, which I shall be discussing further in a later post).  Many games nowadays have become so shallow in their stories that it's embarrassing to me as a writer.

And don't even get me started on game-movie tie-ins.  Just don't.

One of my favorite genres is strategy, specifically grid-based Strategy-RPGs first made famous (as far as I know) by Final Fantasy: Tactics.  This basically involves having about 8 characters spread out over a map separated into a grid a bit like chess.  The characters move one at a time, depending on their speed stat, and you go around taking out the enemy until there's none left on the board.  You win, you move on to the next map after some story, and you repeat, with character customization going on in-between battles.  If it sounds simple, it isn't.  Final Fantasy: Tactics featured 20 different classes for your non-storyline characters, and each one offers a completely different way of playing: warriors, archers, black mages, white mages, or the oddball calculator, just to name a few.  These games in this genre are deep, time-consuming, and have a reputation (to me, anyway) as having some of the best storylines around.

Enter Disgaea: Hour of Darkness.

From what I understand, Disgaea first arrived in Japan for the PlayStation 2 in 2001, then in the US two years later, while I was in high school.  I don't know how exactly I became aware of it, but somehow or another I picked it up.  What followed was possibly the closest experience to taking drugs that I've ever experienced.  My grades slipped because I had to keep playing.  I didn't see my friends.  I definitely didn't see my parents.  My cat started spending more time in the gameroom with me, leaving me to suspect that my parents hired him to make sure I didn't die of exhaustion from playing too much, like that Korean guy did with World of Warcraft a few years ago.

My total playtime for Disgaea?  142 hours, 35 minutes and 35 seconds.  That's not including the combined 148 hours, 55 minutes and 7 seconds I've spent on the two sequels, or the 111 hours, 44 minutes and 43 seconds on Makai Kingdom, the spiritual spin-off made by the same company.

Total time spent on Nippon Ichi's Strategy-RPG drugs?  403 hours, 15 minutes and 25 seconds.

That's almost 17 straight days.  I kept waiting for my friends to stage an intervention.  Had they done so, I may have reclaimed two weeks of my life.

And I would have been worse off for it.

Disgaea: Hour of Darkness stars Laharl, the son of the Overlord of the Netherworld.  He awakens to find that his father has died (from choking on a pretzel, as you later find out), and that Laharl has been asleep in his coffin for two years.  His vassal, Etna, has woken him because other overlords have begun to fight for his father's throne, and it's up to him to claim it for himself.  What follows is a multi-chapter story about your typical anti-hero as he tries, in vain, to act like a big tough demon.  He meets an "angel assassin" in the form of Flonne, your typical Japanese young girl who is all innocence, to the point where she doesn't even know what an assassin really is.  Their relationship provides the majority of the character development, as Flonne strives to teach Larharl what love and goodness are and he tries to ignore her and continue his masculine, hilarious path towards domination.

Aside from the surprisingly poignant moments concerning love and its ability to turn demons and angels into friends, it's the humor that really pushes the story along.  This is one of those games that knows it's a game, kind of like how Deadpool of the X-men universe knows that he's in a comic and often comments on it.  One of the "overlords" you fight is this super-effeminate man who's so overconfident yet so impotent that Laharl renames him "Mid-boss", since there's no way that he could be the boss of the whole chapter and must therefore be a mid-chapter miniboss.  Also, Etna has a horde of slaves at her disposal: an army of demonic penguins called Prinnies.

I love these guys.  They speak in high-pitched voices and call everyone "Dood!" as they pull bombs and knives from their goofy little fannypacks.  They are human souls sent to the Netherworld for their sins.  They are lazy, overworked, and utterly expendable.

Other sources of humor come from a cameo by overacting Power Rangers (one of whom speaks as though reading deadpan from cue cards) and a zombie who wields the ultimate power-up: a horse wiener.  Seriously.  When Laharl finds out that this zombie wields a horse wiener, he almost runs for it because he's so scared.  Disgaea's sense of humor is kooky and wacky in the way that only a Japanese game can be.  Just check out the item list I provided at the end of this post if you still aren't convinced.

That's all well and good, but what's the gameplay like?  This is a videogame, after all.

Simply put, it plays similarly to what I described up top about Final Fantasy: Tactics.  You use about 6 or 8 characters on a grid-style map, only this time you choose all of your characters' actions at once, let them fly, then let the computer take a turn.  This allows you to set up combos between your characters, and chains where several of your guys attack the same enemy in a row.  This makes your attacks do more and more damage as the chain increases, forcing you to strategize which of your characters will attack in what order so as to unload the most damage.

To make this even more complex, strewn about the maps are geo panels, which are colored squares with different effects like "experience + 50%", or "attack - 50%", or "invulnerability".  This throws a huge monkey wrench into the mix, for you may come across a map where multiple enemies are lounging behind a solid line of geo panels that say "no crossing" or something like that, meaning that you have to find some way to circumnavigate the panels in order to get to them, even if it means throwing your team to the right side of the map where a bunch of badguys lie in wait, perched on "attack +100%" panels for the sole purpose of making your life a living hell.  The game becomes one huge puzzle where you not only have to pit your spatial skills against the computer but also your mathematical skills.  Despite the sometimes juvenile humor, this is a thinking man's game, and I'm not even going to go into what it takes to set off a "color chain".  Just believe me when I say that I've spent thirty minutes at a time without moving a single character or taking a single action.  This is chess on the most bizarre of steroids.

I saw a poster recently.  It was one of those "inspirational" posters that have become so immensely popular on lolcats-style websites like Failblog or, of course, VeryDemotivational.com.  It said "Disgaea: Like getting your degree in statistics, but with anime characters and demon penguins", and I think that pretty much sums things up.  This game, and its sequels and spin-offs, is all about numbers.  Where most Strategy-RPGs have a level-cap of, say, 100, Disgaea allows you to level up all the way to 9999.

That's right.  Level 9999.

None of this sissy level 100 crap.  By the time your character has attained level 9999, he's probably doing so much damage that the game can't even show the numbers in the bottom-left-hand corner like it usually does, but must resort to something like "2113923k" or more, depending on how insane you are.

Your character classes have better versions of themselves to unlock, and your characters can "reincarnate", which means that they start over at level 1, but their base stats will be higher depending on how many levels they have stored up from reincarnating multiple times.  This means that your goal is not to just get your guys up to level 9999.  Your goal is to level him up as much as you can, reincarnate him, and repeat until you've built up thousands of levels so that your base stats rock (for instance, if your base attack stat is 40, say, instead of 20, this means that as your guy levels up, his attack power will be twice as high).

Then, to top it all off, there's the Item World.  Items are every bit as complex as your own characters.  Weapons, armor, and accessories like the above-mentioned horse wiener often contain "specialists", which are little inhabitants who increase the capabilities of your items in various ways (raising its attack, defense, poison resistance, etc.).  If you wish for a more powerful version of your sword, say, you can go inside it, where you can find its specialists and "subdue" them, which makes them twice as powerful AND allows you to move them from one item to another.  Every item is its own dungeon.

Now you see where those 17 days went.

The further down into your items you go, the stronger they get.  Regular items have a level cap of 40 or 60 (I can't remember), while rare items have a higher cap, and "legendary" items have a cap of 100.  If you can make it all the way to the 100th floor inside that item, you will face a boss who wields the item of the next-highest rank over your own (so if you are inside the 2nd-best sword, for instance, the boss on the 100th floor will be using the 1st-best sword, which is in fact the only way to obtain the very, very best weapons).  With each level that you descend, the enemies get tougher, and leaving prematurely requires that you use a Mr. Gency Exit, of which you don't get a terribly large amount.  Thankfully, you can leave after every 10th floor without a penalty, and you can always go back inside after having left.  You just have to be able to survive ten floors in a row, ending with a boss battle.  Good luck with that when you're down in the furthest reaches and the enemies are perhaps dozens of levels higher than your allies.

This game is a strategy-RPG-lover's dream.  There is so much to do that you're never left with an empty checklist.  You're always leveling up, or finding better items, so you are always telling yourself "just one more" until you find that it's 1:30 in the morning and you have a paper due tomorrow that you haven't even started.  The story and characters are irreverent, but they have soul and I promise you will care for them by journey's end.  The 2D sprites don't look so good on today's TVs, but you don't play Strategy-RPGs for their graphics.  Maybe that's why, in today's world of so much flash and so little substance (here's lookin' at you, Avatar), Strategy-RPGs seem to have so little market.

I will leave you with a brief list of some of my favorite weapons and their hilarious one-line descriptions.  Please note that these are actually from Disgaea 2, as I have misplaced my Disgaea 1 strategy guide and don't want to bother scouring the internet for the information.

GLOVE WEAPONS

Double Slap - Sorry baby!  Why you make me do that?
Playful Punch - Ow ow ow OUCH!  It's not funny anymore!
Father's Fist - I'm not angry.  I'm just upset.  Now come here.
Slap Back - Cook your own dinner from now on!
7 Year Kill - Not bad, but I wish it worked faster.
Star Shatter - Finally, a way to punch the sun.

SWORDS

Lazy Sword - Buy a better sword later.
Broadsword - It's broad!  It's a sword!  It's a Broadsword!
Bastard Sword - A real jerk at times, but gets the job done.
Katzbalger - Cool, but don't use this on your cat.

SPEARS

Ashigaru - Your standard, stabby spear.
Beckdoraban - Whatever it means, the name sounds strong.
Trident - Basically an oversized fork.
Bone Spear - Good, but it could gain a few pounds.
Benkei's Glaive - Useful when guarding bridges.
Halberd - Cuts, jabs, spins, and makes julienne fries!
Elder Spear - Complains to younger spears.
Singularity - You'll never find another quite like it.
Gungnir - Like a small dog, returns when thrown.
Holy Longinus - The Godkiller.  How is that holy?

BOWS

Toy Bow - You've gotta be kidding.
Elven Bow - A famous elf used it to return a lost ring.
Assassin Bow - Best if shot from a grassy knoll.
Demon Bow - Made in Hell by underpaid, overworked imps.
Angel Bow - Made in Heaven by underworked wimps.
Forest Bow - Ironic, because it's made of dead trees.
Platinum Bow - Has sold over 1,000,000 copies.
Soul Eater - Beware its strange foot fetish.
Evil Hunter - When evil's afoot, shoot it in the leg.
Lovely Cupid - Girly love energize!  Maximum limit reached!
[NOTE: That's the best bow in the game...]

GUNS

Trumpet - Make sure to put your lips on the right end.
Godfather - It'll make you an offer you can't refuse.
Spray Gun - Works best on oversized insects.
Intoccabile - It means Untouchable, so hands off!

AXES

Gang Axe - Come here and let me axe you a question!
Primitive Axe - Inspired by a giant monolith.
Dwarven Axe - They're fun to toss, but you'll get in trouble.
Kill All - No, really.  It kills all.
Serial Axe - Snap, crackle, pop!  You're dead.
Master Axe - This is for you, the master of axing.
Emperor's Axe - Used by Czars to keep the proletariat in line.
Diabolic Axe - Overlords and axes - like chicken and waffles!

STAVES

Magician Wand - Will not help pull rabbits out of hats.
Cardinal Staff - Hit 70 home runs with this.
Druid Staff - *Stonehenge not included.
Force Staff - You won't need a target computer anymore.
Chief's Staff - Great for slap shots.
Crimson Wand - Can it... BE any more red?
Omniscient Rod - Sees you when you're sleeping.  How creepy.