Thought for the day – Guns

“I don’t need to be careful anymore! I have a gun!”
– Homer Simpson

I’m going to try and post more, just short things about ideas and criticisms. I owe it to mankind to publish the output of my Mighty Brain.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is the first game in a long while that has made me treat guns with caution. One-on-one against a normal, unarmed opponent Batman will pummel them with impunity, but even a run-of-the-mill goon with a rifle can cause problem if he is allowed to get a good shot. Bats can’t just charge through the hail of bullets and deliver four knuckles-worth of justice, as a salvo will not only take about 1/3 of your health but leave you staggering, making escape more difficult as you hurriedly try to grapple to one of the Asylum’s ubiquitous gargoyles. If you get hit once, it’s going to get harder to avoid being hit again, it really underlines how guns are things that make killing much, much easier, very appropriate for a game where the protagonist has a near pathological hatred of them.

Champions Online: Divided they Stand- PVP vs RP

There seems to be a great deal of hoo-hah around Champions online regarding the lack of segregation between Roleplayers and PVPers.

For those who don’t know, in the past when you start playing an MMO, you select a single server and make a character on it, who, under most circumstances, remains there and only there. This means devs have been able to set aside servers both for roleplayers, where non-RP dialog can even be punishable in some cases, or for hardcore PVP, often lifting some of the restrictions places on it in the normal servers, where enemies can be engaged on site without a dueling system to keep it consentual, so weak characters are not steamrolled by players of much higher levels.

Champions online works differently. Rather than picking a server, every time a player enters an area he can pick an “instance” of that area. This is good for eliminating the possibility people will find them unable to play with friends because they are on another server. It also fixes that recurring MMO issue of how many heroic adventurers/superheroes you find in a single place, diminishing how “special” being one seems.

But the resulting issue seems to be that RPers want to claim areas of the game as their own for roleplaying purposes, citing supposed cases of griefing by players engaging in PVP fights in locations such as the nightclub. PVPers, meanwhile, argue that this is a RPer landgrab, and that they have a right to dual as they wish and want to use these locals for their interesting layouts and such.

It seems to me the solution should be simple, have players flag themselves as being a PVPer or RPer and have the game sort them into instances together, so you have a PVP instance of heroes brawling around the bars and clubs of Millenium City, whilst in another instance you have anthropomorphic woodland creatures flirting with each other.

Further, an ignore list could go beyond hiding offenders text and let you ensure you never find yourself in the same servers as them. Only problem I see is the possibility that the list gets so long that you can’t get into any instance at all. But surely by that point you should be considering that maybe it’s you that has the problem?

Dead Rising part 2

There is a survivor with a broken leg that requires you to lend a shoulder to move him to the security room. Interestingly you seem to move quicker with him holding on (though you can’t use weapons) and I find that if you both go into the dry fountain on the way, there will be no way to get him out, since you can’t jump whilst holding him up and he can’t be made to get out on his own. This resulted in him being eaten before I got killed and lost half an hour’s play. Again.

Dead Rising

I have been drawn to Dead Rising for a while now, it seems to me that the freeform, “sandbox” style of game is the way to make the truest “Survival Horror”.  In movies, survivors tend not to take up an impressive array of firearms, but desperatly seek shelter and the means to make it through another day.  I think it might actually be possible to ride out the whole game in the safe room at the start, perhaps never even finding yourself in danger.  Unfortunately, on booting for the first time I was reminded of something that means me and my SD TV might have to wait a little longer.  Nowadays making a game unsuited for an SD TV would just be silly, but two or so years ago it must have been crazy to assume everyone with a 360 played in HD already.  Most of the text is just about legible I suppose, but it’s a very big black mark against one of the early selling points of the system. Hopefully a move and a new job will allow me to get the spectacular (budget) HDTV I so deserve.

I like how inventory management is an important part of the game, Frank being able to carry a very limited number of items at a time, which can be increased with levels.  This representing the amount of extra strenth you can develop over a three day period and quickly stitching another pocket into your jacket I suppose.  That aside, it makes a lot more sense than Resident Evil’s invisible attaché case or the four-dimensional hammerspace that most games have, and presents the player with the dilemma of what they will carry around with them.  Starting with four slots, you may want to keep a healing item, a good baseball bat or other club to clear a path through the horde, and a gun in case you find yourself needing one when they are difficult to find.  That leaves one slot, and remember that the melee weapons tend to break when you are in the middle of a crowd, and guns don’t come with much ammo.  The situation means you are constantly on the lookout for things you can use.

The execution of the freeform aspect, having free reign over the mall, able to choose to complete the side quests you find and try to take a good picture, whilst at the same time providing the boundaries, both in where you can go physically and when you need to be in certain places to continue with the plot, provide a narrative structure that keeps you playing with goals in mind rather than the aimless screwing around that sessions of GTA4 often turn into. The mystery element to the story, making it more than simply a matter of if the characters can survive, helps pull the player in and value Frank’s life, which is good since the game is made to punish you severely if you are even a little careless about saving or what you do with him;

The game uses fixed save points that you need to visit if you want to put the game down and keep your progress. They tend not to be very close together, so you have to plan things with some care to ensure an accident doesn’t result in the loss of hours of gameplay. It’s not something I’m used to in this age of quicksaves and checkpoints, and I have lost progress to it, but I can understand why it’s like that. You shouldn’t be able to look at a cluster of zombies, quicksave and charge through repeatedly until you make it through. The immersion of this survival situation would take a hit if I had the option to play it safe.

I have been playing for about 5 in-game hours now, and whilst I like the premise and basic gameplay, I find myself having trouble progressing. It is now night-time, making it hard to see in most locations, and I won’t be able to continue the main story until 6am. In the meantime, besides randomly cutting up zombies, my options are to rescue people hiding in the mall, most of whom will ignore my instructions whilst following me and will need repeated saving from the zombies they wander needlessly close to, and fighting a boss that is much too difficult for me at my current level 6 with the weapons available. What’s worse, the survivors need to be lead across a field not only filled with zombies but patroled by some guys in a jeep that shoot me up, again with me not having a good enough weapon to deal with it. This all means I’m repeatedly loosing big chunks of play time to idiot AI and a situation that goes far beyond “enjoyably taxing” and into “infuriatingly unfair”. Maybe I will find a solution, and hopefully it will make up for all the lost time. The save system is all well and good if I know that when I lose my time it’s my fault, but that simply isn’t the case, I loose time because the game, for various reasons, stacks too much against me, I need followers that can look after themselves instead of trying to take on the horde alone.

So it seems thus far that the concept is sound but the execution is a bit lacking. I’ve not stopped playing yet though, maybe I will find something to get me back into it if I can just make it to the next morning.

9 out of 10 serial killers agree

It’s been a good day, getting myself back into some better habits, one of them being keeping a blog.  Guitar practice, drawig and writing all got done today, some progress on my Fallout 3 mod prototype as well, made some money on some quite painless overtime and had a little quality time with the 360 and Force Unleashed.

Force Unleashed is pretty good so far, except that the camera sometimes makes it difficult for me to see what I need to, especially in boss fights, and it really could have done with more intelligent auto-aim so I don’t keep firing force powers into empty space.  I like the combat and physics though, it’s still fun throwing people around and see them react realistically, it’s a really impressive engine.  I quite like the story myself, as a Star Wars fan.  It helps make some sense of the ending of Sith and helps understand how things came to be as they were at the beginning of the original trilogy.  And whilst elements are predictable, there are some surprises to be had, and some quite strong characters.

Made Pulled Pork for the first time today, which was abit of a gamble since I followed no single recipe and improvised a lot, having neither a Slow Cooker or a Barbeque as most instructions perscribe.  Not complicated though, just a shoudler of pork in a glass dish with beer and chicken stock (not broth as some recipies call for) with some salt, sugar and curry power on, since that’s what I have and a lot of the ingrediants recepies needed were in the curry powder.  After 3 hours on 150 degrees (C) it was pretty tender, though not quite so much as I have seen in YouTube videos, it maybe could have used more time.  The meat on it’s own is pretty great, but the surprisingly palatable liquid, to someone who really doesn’t care for beer, added a fantastic flavour to it.  Should have sandwiches from it for a while now, until I have another go.  More liquid might be the way to go, as the good meat was the submerged part, and obviously a lot of it goes over the time, I might need to add to it after cooking, though I don’t know if interupting it could have ill effects.

As well as being damn tasty, it’s quite a feeling of achievement for someone who so rarely cooks properly beyond putting frozen food in the oven, and it’s a dish I have long wanted to try since seeing it on Dexter and from hearing of it from my deranged Welsh friend Dan.  Neither of these people should really be role-models…

And about time, too:

Times have been rough, Sonic could only afford the one gauntlet

What?

Okay, after the initial shock, the sword does look cool, but Sonic?  Should probably reserve judgement until more details are known, but I can’t see how any kind of established Sonic gameplay will marry with swordplay.  Involving Sonic with a Black Knight could make this a kind of successor to Secret Rings‘ Arabian Nights theme, and that did okay.  But for all the goodwill Sega seem to have won with Sonic Unleashed and it’s side-on platfoming, it seems to loose it all again with werewolfs and swords.  But after E3 I am more accepting of the werewolf, so they could win me over in the meantime.

Why are they making another Wii game when Sonic Unleashed is already coming for the console?  I guess if it wasn’t at E3 it won’t be here until next year.

I think we should give this one a chance.  It may be as close to a new Rocket Knight Adventure as we will ever get.

Skedoosh! (Blinded by the awesomeness of Kung Fu Panda)

Just got home from seeing Kung Fu Panda, happily it was worth the mostly abysmal trailers that proceeded it, especially the formulaic teen-”comedy” of the summer with the privileged American girl being sent to school in *gasp* England.  Oh but wait, in her effort to get out she falls for a guy who gives her a reason to stay, that would sure be an unforeseen and ironic twist if it wasn’t in the trailer.  And what always happens.  You Don’t Mess with the Zohan might be amusing to me, as someone who finds Adam Sandler sometimes tolerable, though.  I could have done without Wall-E telling me not to pirate DVDs though.

I went in mostly for the fight scenes, that I heard were ace, Jack Black, because he’s just so damn likeable to me even if he plays mostly the same role, and David Cross, because he’s awesome but I wasn’t going to see Alvin and the Chipmunks for him.  I sometimes wish he was more picky about what he picks up.

So anyway, of course the film looks as amazing as you would expect of Dreamworks, the backgrounds and animation both, with the intricate and fluid fights standing out in particular.  I think all the participants seemed very ’solid’, like they really had a presence in their surroundings.  I also really want to sing the praise of the 2D animation at the very beginning, also looked great and set up how Po fantasised about martial arts and the Furious Five.  I loved Tai Lung’s escape sequence in particular, that wall of red arrows looked great and again, acted to set up just how powerful he was very well.

So the performances: I can’t pick out anyone who was bad, Black and Hoffman had great chemistry, I get the feeling Black wrote some of his own lines, especially the opening which reminded me of his Tenacious D persona a great deal, and all the time he really gushed over his idols.  McShane showed the haughty malevolence and emotion that was so sadly wasted on the Golden Compass.  My only complaint about the rest of the main cast is they spoke too little, Jackie Chan’s Master Monkey in particular had maybe 2 lines in the whole thing (though was made more characterful through expression and mime) though David Cross’s Master Crane did at least have his delightfully awkward talk with Po.  I should also say I really enjoyed Michael Clark Duncan’s Rhinoceros Commander, partly because I didn’t know he was in it but recognised him, and also for his bluster and confidence that you know from the start is going to be rather painfully taken from him later.  Angelina Jolie was great as Tigress, definitely the deepest character outside of Po, Shifu and Tai Lung, really cool to see the parallels with Tai Lung and how Shifu raised her differently, but with maybe a somewhat similar outcome, as shown by her slowness to accept Po and decision to act on her own against Tai Lung, longing to win the approval Shifu witheld from her.

That flashback made me care a lot more for her and Shifu, made Tai Lung a more interesting, tragic figure, and Oogway awesome, setting up how powerful he was in dispaching Lung with ease, before he parted the mortal coil and left the ‘weaker’ characters behind for the final battle.  Very good use of the perhaps overused device.

As for the plot, yes it is a case of “slacker is the chosen one just because, and that makes him better than people who worked hard all their life” to a degree, but it is at least done better than I recall seeing elsewhere. I don’t see it as a celebration of sloth (which is something I am very tired of, perhaps exemplified by Homer as he is now in The Smipsons), as we see that Po always had the drive, but felt his dream was unattainable due to his body and clumsiness. The greater triumph was over what he thought was impossible that he didn’t dare try, not quitting when even his master was trying to wash him out, and that though something can seem mystical and unreachable, there’s no “secret ingredient”, you are what you make yourself.

Beyond that, I liked the way things like the finger-hold, Tai Lung’s power and “the secret ingredient of secret ingredient soup” were set up, the only thing more I think I could ask for would be more time for the other characters to shine, especially since the film isn’t especially long.  Apparently this is going to spin into an ongoing franchise, hopefully they will do right by it and possibly expand on those characters if the actors return.

There are a lot of promising films out this summer, with this completing with Iron-Man, Hulk, Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder and more for my money, but I’m certainly glad I spent some of my hard-earned on it.  Not the worst plot on earth, but more importantly a visual delight with endearing characters and superb fantasy martial art sequences.

If you love it, fix it- No More Heroes

Cross posted from my Destructoid Blog as part of their “If you love it, fix it” theme for the month. Definitely need to condense a bit.

Let’s be clear here, No More Heroes was pretty much my number one reason to buy a Wii, based largely on the preview piece in EDGE magazine. This after playing Suda 51’s previous effort, Killer7, and returning it within days for being weird to the point of discomfort (though now I want to give it another chance). I agonised over it’s fortnight delay in the UK, but I think it’s fair to say my excitement was vindicated in the end.

The game is stylish whilst so much of the industry aims for the uniformity of realism, and has a good control scheme that takes advantage of the remote and nunchuk without having the player jerking the remote furiously to defeat their every foe, or putting their damn elbow out the way Red Steel did. The basic controls are all handled largely with the buttons and stick, saving those big, satisfying swings of the remote for the big, satisfying kills, making you feel more involved with the stuff you actually play for. The main character designs are fantastic, combined with the rich cell-shading that shades shadow in almost complete blackness, giving a very distinct look, whilst arcade-retro style icons in bright primary colours appear around the game world, which besides looking cool probably makes some point about gamer mentality many of us missed.

But it is not a game without flaws, indeed, I don’t think it’s possible for most people to play the game in it’s entirety to at least pick up on some of the more obvious, niggling problems.

Welcome to Santa Destroy

It’s hard for me to pinpoint what the problem is with NMH’s open world, Travis’s home town of Santa Destroy, as compared to dedicated open world games like GTA, or others that use one as a setting and hub for a linear story mode like Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. I found, and I think others agreed, that the place is a bit sparse and bland, that moving through it is not terribly enjoyable and that one would rather just be at their destination right away. Aesthetically there isn’t really much wrong, though it’s not exactly a vibrant place, though I don’t think it’s meant to be. There just doesn’t seem to be much to do in it, unless you have a specific task to do there you will likely just be out to find one. If you are not looking for the collectable items or the trivial amounts of cash that can be found out there, you are probably doing temp jobs to earn ranked battles or moving between said battles, or making the one trip you will likely make between each battle to each of the three or so shops you can visit. Their isn’t much fun to be had just driving around as this is pretty well a world without consequence, hitting pedestrians doesn’t even slow you down, much less call down the wrath of the Fuzz, and Travis won’t be knocked from his ride even if he hits a car. The only time Travis is likely to fall off the bike is on hitting a wall, which probably only happens with any regularity when a botched hand-break turn puts you there.

Which brings us to the bike itself. In short, it just isn’t much fun to ride, not especially fast and even slower if you have to slow down for every turn of more than a handful of degrees because attempting to get the twist motion on the remote for the afore-mentioned hand-breaks throws you into the afore mentioned walls. For some reason the game seems to have difficulty picking up which way you twisted the remote, so most of the time it just defaults to sending you right, forcing you to make sharp lefts by doughnutting 270 degrees.(Fact for the day: apparently “doughnutting” is a dictionary-recognised word) The fact that you will be called on once to use the bike to jump over barriers and once in a high-speed chase makes the rest of the time spent on it feel a bit more disappointing. It would also help if it didn’t seem to get stuck in the terrain so frequently.

Get Sabre, Ignite Sabre, Kill.

The basic gameplay style of NMH, fighting hordes of near-useless grunts, punctuated by longer fights with more powerful and individual opponents, is one that is tried and true, and whilst in many areas NMH excels at it, through the compelling boss characters and the control method, it will become clear to most a few levels into the game that the regular enemies, though they may dress in suits, military uniform or street thugs, are essentially exactly the same, even with apparently differing weapons. You will find no real difference fighting people with fire axes compared to knuckledusters, no change in speed, their reach or, apparently, the damage they deal. Their AI is nothing spectacular either, for the most part you get close enough to them that they run at them, you swing at them until you take all their health or land a motion-driven quick-kill. There is a tutorial at the beginning of the game indicating that enemies can block low or high, which is what makes the ability to set your attacks to land high or low by tilting the remote useful, but the reality is they rarely block at all. Given the numbers of enemies you tend to encounter, I think a little more sense of self-preservation is warranted, having grunts flee from you on getting weakened or seeming many of their fellows taken down, or simply cowering behind that underused block function.

In fairness perhaps I am going a bit harsh on the variety of enemies since there are some which have guns, who fight quite differently, and actually do run from you to keep their distance, and this makes them bloody annoying since you can only catch up when they stop to shoot you again. There are also occasional grunts armed with beam-katanas like Travis’s who are rather more dangerous, having the odd unblockable (but easily dodgeable) attack and I think they actually do block now and then. These guys do, however, look identical to all their mates. For some visual variety if nothing else, I would have liked the lumbering lunks that are slow and powerful, and the nippy blighters that are fragile but hard to hit., though the more I think about it the less I am bothered, I half expect that Suda 51 wanted the large majority of the games enemies to be essentially identical to make a point how gamers do not mind repetition too much, so long as something unique (mostly the bosses) break it up.

One of the best things about NMH is what is for the most part an excellent and well-thought-out use of the remote and nunchuk as an input device, and good controls in general that make the player feel involved in the action, from having them manually trigger the katana ignition at the opening of each stage to the motions for the big final strokes that will kill the handful of enemies ahead of Travis, and the series of motions required to perform the the wrestling moves. This does, however, make all the more apparent the few times when the controls are lacking. I have already mentioned the games only use of the twist motion on the bike seemingly not being able to detect turns to the left properly, but there is also, more frustratingly to me, a similar problem when playing the ‘baseball’ minigame. Travis is called upon, I believe two or three times in the main game and for at least two assassination side missions, call for the player to swing the remote like a baseball bat to strike a ball back at a line of enemies. Since most players of NMH will likely have played the Wii Sports packaged with their Wii, they will probably not find this too threatening. They will also probably share my irritation when them make their first swing and Travis doesn’t move. If they are lucky, they will get Travis to swing once out of their three attempts, which will be grossly mistimed since the viewpoint we are given seems to make it difficult to judge this. The times this happens in the lead-up to a ranked battle this is merely a nuisance, you just get to kill them the usual way and probably loose a bonus. For the side-missions, however, after 3 tries the mission ends, and if you want another go you have to cross town to the agency, select the mission again and return to the stadium. This highlights the lack of “restart mission” option for these sorts of mission.

One of my favourite parts of NMH, that made me exclaim out loud to no-one in particular to be “sweet”, is getting a result on the slot machine after a kill giving me a temporary power up that essentially renders me invincible and lets me kill enemies in particularly brutal fashion through context actions. Travis only moves at a walk, makes sinister taunts when an incorrect button input is entered and there is a cool shader effect and ambient sound effect as Travis kills. Less good is when you get a power-up that is neither useful or fun, and worse still when you get one just after you cleared the room already and it stops you even opening the prize boxes that are left. More curious still is that a “Triple 7” outcome gives you a sort of smart-bomb attack, one that can be stored for later use, indeed a lucky player can store up to three of them. And I mean really lucky since this is the rarest outcome in my experience, having got it exactly once in one-and-a-half play-throughs. Seems to me that a better solution would be for players to be able to win a shot at the fruit-machine which they can use when they wish, giving a chance at one of these “Dark Side Modes” and letting players determine when it will be useful. That said, the projectile one is fiddly to aim and not very effective, I would tweek it so that it damages enemies in an arc or cone area ahead of Travis, so the player doesn’t need to fine-position the cursor and can take out closely positioned grunts in one go. This also might not feel like quite such a wasted mechanic if it were available outside of the levels leading to ranked battles.

The bosses, or “Ranked Assassins” are the high-points of the game, after all, Travis’s objective to to kill them and become “Number One”, everything else Travis does is to let him do that. And they are indeed pretty damn great, having cool designs brimming with character and distinct style of fighting and gimmicks. One of the few things they have in common with each other is also one of the most annoying things about them, that you can’t interrupt their attacks, as you might expect you are supposed to, by belting them with your beam katana, which only results in a rather odd metallic sound. I can’t help that think, especially since Travis calls the assassins his “own kind” that they should behave a bit more like him, guarding and dodging attacks in order to preserve their already plentiful health bars. Strikes me as a bit of “Fake difficulty”, that instead we should have opponents that fight smarter, looking for and creating openings for their big moves. I think this would make beating them even more satisfying, rather than just a matter of surviving long enough to do enough damage, with the player likewise forced to find or make an opening by teasing an attack to dodge and capitalise on.

Continuing of the theme of satisfaction from the defeat of the bosses, it seems a bit anticlimactic that the player’s last action against a boss will almost always be a regular attack, causing them to collapse and be killed in the pre-made cutscene with no input from the player. Even grunts are, for the most part, taken down with Kill-mode swings or wrestling move commands. What I propose is that the player drives the final exchange of blows through motion actions. Yes, I am essentially advocating a Quick Time Event, sorry, but they would be quick time events where you carve up some psychopath in a garish costume. Wouldn’t even need to be that different from the non-interactive cutscenes that were in the game, just add a slice to bisect Destroyman or decapitate Death Metal, a jab to run Bad Girl through, maybe even carry over the existing grapple command to execute a Northern Lights Suplex on Shinobu., with failure resulting in either death or damage (for example from Destroyman’s nipple guns) One of the cool things about the controls of the game is the feeling of satisfaction as you cut the redshirts in half, shouldn’t that be carried over, even expanded upon for the bosses?

Presentation (or Alex realises he can’t think of an even slightly amusing heading for this bit)

The presentation of the game is superb, but good as the quirky, heavily pixilated graphics are, you will likely find they can actually get in the way, especially if you are willing to take the time in the open world to find all the hidden items. The Lovikov ball items, exchanged for advanced attacks and abilities, are represented as orange dots, with spots where you can dig for near-pointless quantities of cash (and I have just learned, collectable cards) being marked with slightly different orange dots. Worse, the mini-map, in keeping with the simplistic style of the HUD, doesn’t rotate smoothly with the player’s perspective, which can cause confusion when seeking such items.

Through it’s unique and quirky style, the game makes good use of what power the Wii has, though at the same time we can see the failings of either the console or the game in the graphical department, mostly in the open world again. There are pop-up issues with things like trees and lampposts, which have to be very close to the player to appear, and the draw distance is not especially good. I can not say if it is even possible to fix this. However, some objects, including pedestrians, will disappear sometimes in the first-person look mode.

The music and sound is pretty great throughout, my only problem is the one J-pop song that seems to play in all the shops. Again, a bit of variety might have been nice.

No more heroes anymore?

I actually feel a little guilty complaining about things like lack of variety and a sometimes bland game world, since given the points made in Cowzilla3’s excellent post on the matter maybe this is the exact way Suda wanted it to be. Certainly it didn’t stop me playing, and I didn’t get so bored that I put it down for any great length of time before completing it, and maybe that proves his point. Maybe if I had my way the game would become overcomplicated and loose some of it’s charm. In spite of the games flaws, Suda should be applauded for making a game that has a simple, undemanding joy to it, and which utilises the hardware as well as I have seen so far. He made a gamble by putting a game aimed at an older audience on the kid and casual gamer-centric Wii in order to implement the style of gameplay he wanted, where it may just have been “That one by the chap who did Killer7” on another console. Hopefully it will pay off, since his is an attitude that should be encouraged, if not by Japan, then at least by the western markets.

The only way I can think to sign off here is to thank Suda, Grasshopper and anyone who made this game possible, it shows that whilst games are not obliged to be art, they certainly can be, and for all the flaws I have tried to highlight here, I love the game dearly, it has validated my decision to buy a Wii. Hopefully the game will lead the way for things like Platinum’s MadWorld, and show the right people that the market wants a No More Heroes 2, and maybe even Suda and Kojima’s collaboration on the new Snatcher project will bear fruit for the Wii.

AJM

PS: I actually made a few more sketches that were simply unfit for human consumption. Have not been drawing for a while, so hopefully I will either improve or just drop the idea entirely. Hopefully I will also be able to work out how to make Gimp less of a pain to use and output half-decent quality jpegs.

[insert overused meme here] (Portal thoughts)

The infuriating thing about writing about Portal like this is that telling you why it is such a masterpiece and how it exceeded my expectations many times over might very well deprive you some small part of the experience I have just enjoyed. I should note that I often avoid exposing myself to too much information regarding a game I am interested in prior to playing, and as such I only knew Portal had become a hugely and nearly unanimously well received puzzle game with an innovative new mechanic. And for a little while, it appeared that was all it was, and I had to wonder how a short (I think it took me four hours) puzzle game had gotten quite so much praise, even if it was well executed.

So before you read any more, go play Portal, all of it.  You’ll thank me.

Good, wasn’t it?

The portal mechanic is beautify simple, and the game does a great job of letting the player learn the applications of the portal gun.  The player, in the course of the training section of the game, will be made to experiment with all possible applications of the portal gun, such as setting both portals on the floor or one on a ceiling and another on a wall, to make them understand the physics of passing through.  By passing through the portal, you will carry on whatever momentum you had whilst immediately having gravity shift relative direction.  I’m not sure that really covers it but I think it’s partially because it’s hard to explain that the game makes you use the gun in all these ways to  come to understand it for yourself.  It also has a very cool graphical effect, you can look through a portal to the destination side, and line them up to look at yourself or look into infinity.  It amazes me that you can so seamlessly move through the portals, looking at the area on the other side as you go in, there is not so much has a flicker I could detect from it being rendered through the portal to you actually being on the other side.

To return to the subject of player training, it is something the game excels at.  The first portion of the game, in the Enrichment Centre proper, gradually forces the player not only to use each necessary skill, but often to accociate them with objects.  You quickly learn that a big red floor button usally needs a box placed on it if you can’t remain on it yourself, and protruding sections of wall come to be associated with the fling manuveur.  Also whilt training, each room opens with a sign indicating the kinds of skills that will be required, with other signs showing as needed.  For example, a trickly later puzzle has a massive hall with a physical barrier ahead, with a field over it so you can’t just make a portal to the other side.  But a two-step diagram on the floor here illustrates the fling move, making you look up at the panel often used for them.  Even after escaping from the training centre, the user gets some breathing space to learn what new surfaces the gun can be used on, and learn things like how it can be shot through chain link fences.

I can think of only two places where I felt stuck.  One called for me to press a small button through a portal without passing all the way through (which would cause me to fall to death) which is not something I had ever seen any kind of clue or prior training for.  Further, on doing so I found I had to do so with excellent timing and very quickly replace the portals to redirect a bouncing energy ball into the door that the button opens very briefly.   I suppose it was as good a place as any to learn to use the button, it wasn’t truely time critical, but it took me a while to even notice the button, placed as it was facing the wall you had to cast a portal onto to press it.  Could have used something to draw the eye.

The other time called for me to redirect a rocket from another room into a glass tube to make a box fall out.  I could find no prompts to do this, had no prior indication it was even possible to break the tubes, or that I could get a box by doing so.  To my shame, I went to GameFAQs on that one.  I think part of the problem is that on leaving many sections of the game you pass through a field that disintegrates items you should not have and resets the portals, so I got used to forgetting what had gone on more than a room or two ago (In this case the rocket launching robot).

What makes the game great beside the portal mechanic is the atmosphere and black humour.  Without seeing a single other person, you find clues to the existence of other test subjects like yourself, like their hiding places and the scrawled hints and directions (often made to mimick the centre’s own directional signs, speaking of the escapee’s state of mind)  but at the same time, you feel very alone, it looks like these other subjects are long gone, and this is compounded by the observation areas that can be seen through distorted windows, clearly devoid of life.  This sense of isolation, coupled with having only the GladDOS AI and her security cameras for company gives a sense of paranoia about why this test is being conducted by a computer apparently of her own will.  Looking at Chell, her slightly messy hair and orange jumpsuit makes her look as much like a prisoner as a test subject.

This brings us to GlaDOS, the real star of the game, hilarious, but a bit frightening.  It becomes apparent very quickly that she isn’t “quite right”, with her warning of overexposure to a button and telling the player outragious and obvious lies.  Initially things can be passed off as ‘eccentricity’ or a weird sense of humour, but as the game goes on she seems to start trying to torture the player to no apparent end, trying to personify the famous Companion Cube before making you destroy it.  Even then, it could all be part of the test, until she attempts to feed you to a furnace, when there can be no doubt she, in as far as it is possible for a computer to be, is insane.  After the escape her, she starts to sound desperate, still making increasing insane cake-based promises and making childish threats and pleas.  She is one of the best written characters I have come across in a video game, and a great example of how well a character can be realised without learning any of their background prior to the events of the game.  Special mention must go to the little sentry turrets.  Their sweet, polite dialogue and almost cute appearance makes you feel a little sorry for them, especially when GlaDOS admonishes you for sending them to “android hell”.

Music is used sparingly, usually to add tension to already time-sensitive events.  One favourite use of mine is when the music starts as it becomes apparent that GlaDOS means to kill you.  As well as adding tension, it made me feel a sense of finality, like this was the end of the game and ll I could do was wait for whatever happened.  This made it more satisfying when I saw the way to escape, gave it a certain extra feeling of triumph.

Praise should also be given for the attention to detail, both in ensuring a player can’t get trapped or stuck without a key item, and can not make life to easy for themselves.  The game detects the loss of a storage cube and drops a new one, there are the fields that block and reset the portal gun to restrict where portals are made and from where.  It impressed me that they created a specific death sound bite for the turret robots when you disintegrate on by taking it through the field.  There also plenty of visual details, like the cut phone chord in GlaDOS’s chamber, and the automated slide show about Black Mesa, which gave me a really cool feeling of realisation that Portal takes place in the Half Life continuity.

Graphically the game carries a great sense of aesthetic, starting in the clean, sterile Enrichment Centre and progressing into the dark, dingy maintenance areas that are brilliantly made to look like places you just aren’t meant to see.  The contrast is hammered home shortly after to escape the training section, when the first set of stairs you try to go up immediately falls apart from disrepair.

So that’s Portal.  It’s only a few hours long, but that’s more a case of it not overstaying it’s welcome, I don’t think you would want to feel at the mercy of GlaDOS for too long, and being a puzzle game for the most part means the appeal might wear off if it went too long and started to repeat similar puzzles.  If you didn’t play it when I told you too I hope you will go do so, everyone should if you ask me, if only to enjoy the superbly silly ending.

Oh and I got Team Fortress 2 and the HL2 Episodes in there too.  That’s nice.  I have played a little TF2 so far, I’m sure I will have more to say on it later.  But after Portal alone the Orange Box has proven excellent value so far.