Supple Think: October 2008

A Man Once Dreamt that He Was a Rock

by Zen

Posted on Sunday, October 19, 2008
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I'll confess I've never been as up on the Mega Man phenomenon as I should have been. Growing up I got to play the original, but not enough to get good at it. At home the only gaming device I was allowed was my Game Boy, so I made do with a couple of the Game Boy titles until I could use an emulator.

Technically I've played through and beaten the first seven games in the series, but since I did it with an emulator I cheated like mad and never got very good at them. The first Mega Man on Game Boy, however, remains my bitch to this day; I can maul through it with my eyes closed from start to finish.

Despite my metered exposure, having played almost the entire franchise I can say with some certainly that Mega Man 9 is the best entry by far. I would not have said anything of the sort during my first few hours of gameplay, what with the constant falling and exploding and losing, but after skating through the game once on energy tanks and picking it up again something crazy happened: I declared my lordship over it.

Every obstacle in the entire game is an obstacle only until you make sense of it. There's a rhythm to every area in Mega Man 9, and once you get into it you'll find yourself stopping very rarely. Areas that seemed arduous at first become second-nature, and weapons that seemed useless become favorite tools.

That's something about Mega Man 9 that we haven't seen in a long time: useful weapons. This is the single biggest factor in Mega Man 2's greatness, where the Metal Blade achieved legendary status for its versatility, power, and forgiving use of ammunition. The unfortunate side effect in Mega Man 2 was that it was practically compulsory for you to take on Metal Man first in a game that should be all about leaving it up to the player. Mega Man 9 sidesteps this by having every weapon possess genuine utility. Even the tired rotating shield weapon doubles as Enker's Mirror Shield, and the fire weapon is more useful for its angle of attack than for any extra damage it does or the fact that you can charge it.

A fundamental fact of a good Mega Man game is that the weapons you receive don't affect how much damage you do so much as they affect how you play the game. Another one is that playing the levels in a different order should be a very different experience. Mega Man games are even more nonlinear than the old Metroid games, it's just that that nonlinearity is completely on the table from the beginning. You acquire the tools in the order you want, and rather than deciding whether you can pass through an area, acquring a new tool merely decides how you can pass through that area.

The result, in Mega Man 9, is a playground. You are given obstacles, and you are given a bunch of tools. Anything will work, so it's just up to you to figure out what you want to use. It gets written up in my book along with Final Fantasy Tactics, Super Metroid, and Mario Sunshine as a shining example of nonlinear game and level design. If I could, I would make out with it every day.
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Who might I pay for a video game?

by Schleich

Posted on Saturday, October 11, 2008
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Half year ago I was bugged to write something about folks out there that I would like to give money to. You know for making games or something.

I figure there are plenty of game makers out there that are creative, and I am pretty sure my contemporaries here at supple think have named plenty of them.

I will take a different tack. Here are three “fine” artists that I think make some pretty neat stuff. I would really just like to see what these folk would do with a medium such as electronic entertainment. With a video game how do you integrate meaning without subjecting your audience to a movie? Will their creativity and training cross over? Google any of these names to find their websites and look at more of their work.

Michael A. Salter


Banksy
If you don’t know google him, he is incredibly popular. He has his faults, but if you can get by the clichés in his beliefs then you can enjoy his work for what it is. I really wonder if he could maintain his sensibilities about the world if he was challenged with making a game with market appeal.


Kris Kuksi
Kuksi’s latest work is incredible, called “the grotesque.” Imagine navigating an environment styled in such a way, with game play and story driven by such a mind.


That is about it for now. I have listed three artists; there are however hundreds if not thousands of established “fine” artists that would make excellent additions to development teams.

I have qualified “fine” in this article because art and artist are perhaps two of the most meaningless terms in the English language.

I just hope writing on this blog I can expose at least a few of my friends to some art they will enjoy. Article Permalink

Trapped in a Video Game Factory Please Send Help

by Tupperwarez

Posted on Wednesday, October 8, 2008
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I have a problem, and it is a mental one. No, a different one. This is the one where I suddenly decide, "Hey, I like computer games and talking about them, why don't I make one?" I just had another attack recently.

I have chosen to take on this latest relapse of mental colic in a different way. Instead of outlining an exhaustive design document this time around, I've chosen to start implementing what strikes my fancy at the time. This of course, has lead to a Montana Free Militia-worthy arsenal of guns, grenades, laser drones, and little bobbing things that spray bullets everywhere. I have yet to decide what this says about my state of mind.

When I started tooling around with it, I loved Game Maker. Between the drag-and-drop and scripting aspects of the programming, it was basically instant gratification. I could get a game up and running without having to fiddle with bedrock stuff like sprite management, collision detection, update cycles, instance tracking, etc. All that was taken care of by Game Maker. I could just get down to the business of designing.

But then the cracks started appearing. I began to realize that while I didn't have to worry about the basic machinery, it also meant that I didn't have a say in how things were done. It was like the death of a thousand cuts. Oh, the color of the bottom-left pixel always determines the transparency color for sprites? I need to make an entirely new object to create multiple hit-boxes? I have to do WHAT to get a 2D traceline working?

I was getting antsy to say the least. So I started messing around with the XNA framework. I found the additional muscle and flexibility liberating, but starting with Game Maker did have some benefits. Mainly that the additional flexibility that I found with XNA would have paralyzed me with indecision. Without the basic understanding of game program flow that I gained from using Game Maker, I would not have known where to start. So ultimately, starting with Game Maker isn't a bad idea at all. Just don't be upset when you start hitting Game Maker's limitations. All that means is that you're ready to move on, so why not do so?

Seeing things like the XNA framework, Popcap's Sexy framework, the improvements in PyGame and more recenly WiiWare, are very heartening to me. Making games is a process that has become ludicrously more laborious and costly as time goes on. That there are measures being taken to mitigate this for the little guy can only be a good thing. I say this with the full knowledge that we'll have to endure a tsunami of garbage before getting the good stuff. But we're all jaded enough here that I think this goes without saying.

Basically this has just been a rambling post on my shallow forays into game making and you probably shouldn't take too much stock in it (if anyone is even reading this fucking thing in the first place, that is). For all my talk about XNA, I'm probably going to stick with Game Maker for a little while longer, mainly because I'm so lazy. That, and I have yet to be even in the same ZIP code occupied by people who are serious about making games. My vain hope is that one day I'll get out of my "Me too!" amateur rut and produce something serviceable.

A guy can dream, right? Article Permalink

This Game has a Japanese Title

by Zen

Posted on
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Hey, is it cool if I shit all over this thing you love? Okay, thanks.

Ever since I played them back in college, I've wondered how anybody could possibly hold Suikoden I and/or II in such high regard. Like Final Fantasy V before them, the games are clearly beloved only because they feel so secret and valuable to US gamers. Saying Suikoden is your favorite game will make everyone stroke their beards and grunt appreciatively in your Philosophy East/West class. Suikoden II is an especially safe bet, since anybody who played the first game is unlikely to have stuck around for the sequel, so if they're not quite sure what you're on about they'll probably keep it to themselves.


It's pretty hard to objectively demonstrate that a game is garbage, but it's easy enough to argue against what people love about it. I think Suikoden is a lot like Xenogears in how much its ambition is completely wasted by sloppy, hamfisted execution, and the fans of both series are always so impressed by the former that they completely ignore the latter. Sooner or later, though, the fans start to wake up a little bit. For Xenogears fans it was Xenosaga that started them thinking, and Suikoden fans have Suikoden III and IV.

Suikoden III and IV are exactly like Suikoden I and II. I haven't played them, so I'm basing this purely on what I've read about them on the Internet: that their characters' interactions are contrived and nonsensical, that the story is shallow and undeveloped, that the villains are set up as pure world-destroying evil in a series that's supposed to be all about moral grey areas, that the gameplay and pacing are clunky and time-consuming, that the 108-character feature doesn't mesh with the combat system, and that the strategy game-like tactical battles are a completely worthless afterthought.


It's unfair for me to prejudge Suikoden III and IV based on Internet forums, but the point I'm trying to make is that the problems Suikoden fans have with the third and fourth games in the series are the exact same problems I had with the first two. Maybe they really are inferior games, but it looks to me like all they did was force series fans to confront the flaws in a deeply flawed series of games.

Suikoden hasn't just aged badly--there is actually no reason whatsoever to play the games today. A lot of games that aren't much fun anymore are at least historically interesting, doing something to advance the medium or offering a take on a genre not seen before or since. Suikoden's legacy is the mechanic that ruined Chrono Cross and a bunch of SaGa mechanics that never worked. For every character making a decision in a world there were five stupid anime characters doing everything for no reason. For every time the game reminded you that there was no right side or wrong side in the story there were five scenes demonizing the villain. For every attempt at moral inquiry the game decided to remind you five times that racism is bad.

Suikoden is not profound, influential, or even very much fun to play. Its importance in the medium is only to shine a light on those who value games first and foremost by their rarity. Leave it be and move along.

If that's not pretentious enough for you, try this out: if Suikoden were a philosopher, it would be John Locke. Both are trite codifications of the shallow biases and habits of their ages with nothing novel or penetrating to contribute. Congratulations, Suikoden! You are the ass pit 'twixt the cheeks of Descartes and Berkeley!
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time sink gaming

by Schleich

Posted on Monday, October 6, 2008
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Unfortunately I haven't been able to participate in this practice much anymore. I used to all the time though. Here are some of my previous favorite time sinks, with a brief summary.

Sim City -- floods suck
Sim City 2000 -- space arcologies -> people suffocated to death
Final Fantasy VII -- standard crap everyone did
Final Fantasy Tactics -- chess, but your knight can jump up cliffs and it grants you two moves at once
Total Annihilation -- Just how many Big Berthas can you build? What happens when you decide the walls to your base should be nothing but missile turrets? These questions and more tonight at nine.
Diablo II -- also known as advanced solitaire
Pokemon Red/Blue -- dragonite ruled that shit, but the game boy color's IR port did not
Counter-Strike -- oh dear, headed up a clan, played thousands of hours, literally, also fag/gay
Morrowind -- I never beat the game, but I damn near stole everything or at least almost everything
Disgaea -- beating ______ is annoying and time consuming
Oblivion -- all but 4 quests completed, and those 4 glitched so I couldn't finish them, guild master of all guilds, dragonknight of the fancy parlor tradesmith quest was the best

Trust me, I am not proud.

My current behavior involves buying a game, beating it in a day. Then never speaking of it again. Which is sad, but it is the only way I can keep reasonably up to date with new games. CoD 4, Braid, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Rock Band, and others all fell to this impersonal method. I suppose I should be happy that I still get the opportunity to finish the games.

The game that will take me to the brink will be Fallout 3. I simply can not wait to pack rat live explosives on other people. Article Permalink

My Tanks Are Fight

by Tupperwarez

Posted on Wednesday, October 1, 2008
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alzabo asked me if there were any time-sink games of note that have held me in a productivity-sapping grip. Now, I could write pages about the months that X-COM: UFO Defense has stolen from me, or my utterly demented completionist approach to RPGs, or my weakness for strategy games.

But I'm not going to do that. Instead, let me tell you about these tanks. These. Fucking. Tanks.

Metal Max Returns is Super Nintendo remake of Metal Max for the NES, both of which were Japan-only releases. So I have game translation group Aeon Genesis to thank for all my lost time, not that I'm complaining or anything.

Metal Max Returns is a fascinating game to me because it is a Super Nintendo game that is both refreshingly advanced and frustratingly primitive. For starters, the game plays like a free-roaming RPG. There are precious few plot-related bottlenecks to block your exploration of the huge world map. If you wanted to you can, with a little care, explore and uncover nearly three fourths of the world without bothering with what constitutes the main plot. You can collect bounties on boss monsters whenever you want. Actually, you can pretty must just do whatever the hell you want within the bounds of the game, which is light-years ahead of the usual console RPG of that time.

And that's not mentioning the other useful features. Your personal computer, the BSCon, is essentially an online help file, a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Wasteland. It contains information about every town you've been to, including what shops/facilities are available and their inventories, and also whether or not a sale is going on. You can set a chime to let you know when you've accumulated a certain amount of money.

I'm not saying the game is all roses, though. The encounter rate is a relic from the NES days, in the sense that it is utterly infuriating. You cannot go five steps without some biomechanical horror trying to kill you. To compound the frustration, the interface is very clunky and makes inventory organization a chore that you will dread.

That about sums up the pros and cons I see in the game. This is all really great material for discussing game design and perhaps the history of the Super Famicom, but let's cut the bullshit for a second here.

The real reason Metal Max Returns fascinates me is these goddamn tanks. The ability to customize your tank to an almost psychotic degree is hypnotic. Not only can you modify the tank chassis, but you can also tune the individual parts up or down. This in turn changes the overall weight of your tank, which you must carefully balance with your engine's load capacity. When I'm adjusting these tanks into unstoppable engines of destruction, I'm entranced like a goddamn stoner staring into a kaleidoscope.

My best tank is a refurbished ambulance. It is equipped with twin 22mm Vulcan machineguns, a 195mm main cannon, autonomous guidance system, air-conditioning, and leather upholstery (no, seriously).

Pictured here is the female soldier popping up from her armored dune buggy and using her hand-held minigun to shoot a cybernetic hippopotamus, which has a cannon in its mouth.

Why are you not playing this goddamn game along with me? Article Permalink

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