Sketchy Ports

Generally I'm the kind of guy who comes out in defense of ports. I think it's great that you can still buy classics Final Fantasy VI, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario 64, or R-Type for systems that are commonly available. I think the release of Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360 is going to make a lot of North American gamers happy, and likewise Innocent Life: A Futuristic Harvest Moon's move from the PSP to the PS2 moved it from a system not exactly known for a large or broad demographic to one that nearly everyone has. Other times, games like Disgaea or Riviera: The Promised Land that had limited distribution can get a second wind from a port to a new system, often with added features.

What is not cool, however, is what Square Enix pulled when releasing Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon. The day it released in North America - within hours of everyone happily picked up their preorders that are becoming oh-so-integral to actually getting a copy of a game - they announced a port from the Wii to the DS. This port, which adds a few minor features, is being released less than a year after the initial release in Japan. It's clearly been under planning since before the release of the Japanese version, but the timing is obviously designed to make sure as many people as possible bought the Wii version first.

I am similarly torn about my purchase of Knights in the Nightmare, the latest installment of Sting's Dept. Heaven series. Yggdra Union, the previous game, got a port from the GBA to the PSP two years after release. This is not too surprising, as the GBA was fading when it first came out, and the rerelease features significant improvements. Between this and the Riviera remakes, however, they've set a precedent - buy the game early, and you're getting the worse version. This time around it's for the DS to start with, but I can't stop feeling a "wait and see" attitude towards the game. Of course, if I don't show interest, the game's chances of localization get reduced; and if it is localized and I don't buy it, the chances of a potential remake's localization also get reduced. Living in North America, it's a situation I can't win. (I plan to try to win it by buying the Japanese first edition and, if it ever comes out, the North American remake - sorry Atlus!) They should confirm or deny plans for an enhanced port up front, both with regards to development and localization.

Ports of old games make sense, and crossplatform releases make sense. These feel more like crossplatform releases where they didn't announce half the platforms, then delayed one, then strategically announced it to screw fans as much as possible.

Gender Icons

While I am as excited for Pop CUTIE! Street Fashion Simulation as the next person (okay, a lot more than the next person), am I the only one that sees the inappropriateness of using a person in a dress as the iconic representation for "can wear this thing that is not a dress"?


But really, for a game with a Lu Bu Costume, I'll forgive a lot.

There is nothing funnier than unhappiness

I hate the "end game." Completely. Thematically and mechanically. In MMOs, strategy games, board games, adventure games, rogue-likes, platformers, pen and paper RPGs. All the damn time. It is not fun. If it were fun to run around invincible with every damn power in the world then I would just turn on some invincible cheats from the very beginning. Not to mention what it does to narrative. Ugh. How am I supposed to identify with or care about someone who is so ridiculously tricked out they're either a freaking god or some 11 year old's most banal power fantasy. Or both. Usually both.

So holy crap, do I love me some Oblivion.

And every day or so for the next few days I'm going to say why.

So I dislike heroes. I think every character in modern media with a "destiny" is a cop out (of course this isn't true, but it's easier to generalize.) I am disgusted at the idea of having special parents, or no parents, special blood, ancestral curses, blah blah, yawn, snore. And The Elder Scrolls, a series about prophecies, doesn't always feel the need to make the player the fated hero spoken of since days of yore ramble ramble. In Daggerfall if you even tried to be that hero you got your ass handed to you BECAUSE YOU WEREN'T GOOD ENOUGH. Why do all other writers have such a fear of making your character anything less than the most important person in the world?

The same in Oblivion. You haul ass all over the country doing the most ridiculous things, but the epic, world-saving moment doesn't belong to you. Sacrifice used to be the duty of heroes, somewhere along the line it has become their inalienable right. Heavenly Sword, Dead Rising, Final Fantasy X, God of War. If we expect it, if we become surprised and disappointed not to die or kill our loved ones or give up a life of good times, then it isn't exciting anymore.

But to be an ordinary prisoner, rising not to meet your birthright, but to exceed it? To witness the world being saved, knowing it wouldn't happen without you, and then knowing there's nothing but potential ahead of you?

Well, I think that hasn't lost all it's charm yet.

Thwomp Factory Fryday: Cooking Mama 2

Thwomp Factory Fryday is a weekly feature in which Amelia takes recipes out of a game with a cooking system and follows it as closely as possible. It will be posted every Friday until she runs out of money or gets salmonella.









Wow. I am finally back in Minneapolis with my computer, and camera, and free time, and everything. This is crazy. So, among the crazy vacations I've been taking lately was a trip to California to meet up with my brother (Joe, who also writes in this blog) and then go with him to his company party in Las Vegas. Before heading out to drink away his yearly bonus we attempted a Fryday of epic proportions, which I can finally post.

Today's food comes to you from Cooking Mama 2: Dinner with friends. Now, in the interest of getting to the good parts we chose one recipe, and skipped most of the steps. We made chili dogs, and rather than bore you with all that slicing the bun and grinding the meat, we went right to catching the falling ingredients. Also it was just so much easier to buy a can of chili.

My impressions of food in the game: I sometimes wonder about Mama's baking (so much so that I intend to try that out step by step sometime) and a few of the mini games are ridiculous. Will blowing on a gallon of water really help cool it down? I don't think so, Mama. Otherwise it's a pretty solid cooking game (and it had better be.)

There's only one mysterious cooking mini-game, that may or may not work in real life, and needed to be tried out. After preparing all the chili dog ingredients, you need to catch them in a bun as they fall out of the sky. Why does Mama make her chili dogs like this? Does it improve the flavor, allowing the subtle spices of the chili to mature in the open air? Does it work up an appetite, with all that running around and panicking? Well read on, and find out!

They don't call the game "Cooking with Friends" for nothing! In the following videos I play the role of, well, the player, while Joe stands up on his balcony and drops the onions, condiments, hot dogs, and chili out of the sky. I like to think he's playing the role of Mama. Not seen but equally necessary is our brave camera man, James, who valiantly dodged flying onions and splattering ketchup to bring you this footage.



Damn, those onions are slippery! I'd say we caught maybe 40% of them. Hopefully the rest goes better.



Ahh, the hot dog itself. Terrific! That deserves a gold medal.



This is my favorite video for so many reasons. First of all, look at that gorey murder site of the ketchup landing. How come Mama hasn't released a companion game, Cleaning with Mama? She must need one. More importantly, LOOK AT THAT MUSTARD! 100% A++ EVEN BETTER THAN MAMA!!! TAKE THAT! erm...yeah.

Final Thoughts: Looks like you really can make a chili dog that way. Go Mama!


Give it your best effort!
-Amy

Next week (whatever that means): Kingdom of Loathing food and drinks

Maxim Gorky, on video games

"You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better."

Or maybe that was children's literature. Hmm...whatever. The two genres are similar enough.

I wish I could write less reactionary things, but it just isn't in me very often. And this here is mainly my reaction to things like this and this, mainly the second. I've swung back and forth on whether or not video games really ought to be treated as an "us vs. them" war. Upon reading the Richard Bartle article my gut said he was taking things a little too far and a little too serious, but in a world with women like the author of the second, I might have to agree with him.

Now, I'm not a parent and I'm not a psychologist. But I'm writing this as a person who has done a lot of volunteer work with children, and plans to have my own in 8-15 years from now. Also I'm the proud daughter of a damn good mother who has encouraged my love of games.

Brief summary of the second article: A woman bought a Nintendo DS and a fat stack of games for her four children. Her household then proceeded to descend into chaos and Nintendo-based obsession as her children ignored chores and other hobbies to play video games all day.

Well, if she thinks her anecdotal evidence is good enough to scare people off from gaming, I've got some of my own. The first games I remember my parents getting for me were educational. Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, I'm sure most people are familiar with that bunch. I never overplayed them, I still washed dishes, took out the garbage, practiced my cello, and did extra-curricular school activities. I liked them, and I probably even learned something from them. However, the games that really stuck out to me were the ones that didn't try to teach me lists of facts, they were the breathtakingly beautiful ones. Loom, Myst, King's Quest. The feelings I got from those games stick with me today and recur whenever I play a game I love. They make me want to draw, write, create, learn, and share all those feelings with my friends. The only difference now is sometimes they come from GTA, or Rock Band, or Mass Effect.

Surely this woman wouldn't claim an appreciation of art is useless for her children, would she? If she's taking her children to music lessons but only making them practice 10 minutes a day then clearly she's not trying to make virtuosos out of the little ones. So what, then? Probably she's trying to instill a love of music and an enriching hobby they can enjoy all their lives. But wait, you can get those from games, too!

There's another thing that's developmentally very important for children that games provide: fun! One of the biggest ruckuses in children's literature was in the 40s when the first four Pippi Longstocking books were published. Why was the now arguably best children's book ever written so controversial? Because it showed a child and especially *gasp* a girl, who thought playing was the most important thing for children. In a world mostly dominated by stories about children being proper and working and never questioning authority, Pippi was seen as "totally anti-social rubbish."

To quote the author of the article: What is constructive about playing football on a tiny screen, or washing a virtual dog, or watching a hideous pink pony trot around a pink palace decorated with shells?

Seriously. Go get a time machine and find yourself some pre-WWII literature critics. Because it's playing, and because in 2008 most people agree that it's okay for everyone (even children!) to play.

But, this woman didn't just bash video games with no rhyme or reason, she did actually state what they did to make her family life hell. Hmm...is there anything she could have done to avoid that?

Well, a single DS for 4 children is a stupid choice. Maybe she wanted to teach sharing, I don't know, but if she really wanted a "family Nintendo", passed around lovingly by everyone as we all played Brain Trainer together she should have gotten something that her whole family could have enjoyed at the same time. The first console I ever owned was a regular old NES. After washing the dishes and taking out the trash my mom and I often would sit down and play a few games of Dr. Mario together (she usually won.) Now, my mom loves to play cards and sometimes the occasional falling block game, but she isn't a "gamer." She bought me games, let me find time to play them, and listened to me talk on and on about them because they made me happy and thoughtful, not because it was any real interest to her. Another thing I loved to do, as a younger sibling, was to sit and watch my older brother play games, and annoyingly shout out things he should do. A tiny little DS doesn't even allow for this kind of sibling interaction, just excludes everyone who isn't holding it. Get a Wii, get a 360, get a freaking NES off ebay, get 2 DSes (using the money you can save by not buying crappy games, covered next), just don't get one "family" DS.

And now, I have come full circle to my beloved Gorky quote. The other thing you should do is get your children good games with child appropriate content but quality that transcends all age groups. I don't know any kids that love Brain Trainer...geez. What a boregasbord. I guess that's just my personal opinion, and seriously, if someone loves Brain Trainer or My Little Pony, fine, they're perfectly good frivolous toys, if you like that sort of thing. Get them some works of art too, though. Try Animal Crossing. Nothing in that game is inappropriate to children, but I'm 22 and of all my DS games I've gotten the most hours of real satisfaction out of that one. (ESRB notice: Experience May Change With Online Play. Especially if you come to my town with its The Boobs constellation.) Or what about Electroplankton? Also maybe just a frivolous toy, but a visually and aurally stunning one that can encourage a love of music and maybe even more practice time on instruments. Rock Band is in fact what motivated me after a long hiatus to play my cello simply for my own enjoyment. Instead of Brain Trainer, try out the puzzles of Professor Layton, and its accompanying mystery. It's a twofer! You get to learn logic and math as well as good narrative!

In a few days I'll be roadtripping to my parents' house for Mother's Day. I'm going to give my mom a big hug and thank her for not being like Ms. I Hate Fun. Then we'll probably play some Dr. Mario, and she'll still probably beat me.

Thwomp Factory Fryday: Contact

Thwomp Factory Fryday is a weekly feature in which Amelia takes recipes out of a game with a cooking system and follows it as closely as possible. It will be posted every Friday until she runs out of money or gets salmonella.

Oh my. Thwomp Factory Fryday is experiencing some technical difficulties of the fun and not fun varieties. The fun kind was when I spent last weekend in Las Vegas with my brother, Joe. The not fun part is that I believe I left my camera's USB cable in his apartment. So this week's Fryday will not have pictures, and next week's will be so chockablock with awesome that it will be a sort of apology.

Today's food comes to you from Contact. Contact is an RPG for the DS that does more than its part to bring back the dying art of whimsy. The player is a separate entity from the main character, Terry, and with the aid of a mysterious yet clumsy Professor (and sometimes his space dog who wants to be a space cat) the two of them set out to help the Professor and return Terry to his home. Anyway, I think it is a top-notch game.

My Impressions of food in the game: I would feel erroneous to call cooking in Contact a mini-game. Actual preparation of food is more like a checklist (and I love me some grindy checklists) but the Cooking skill is integrated very nicely into the rest of the game. Even though a fancy prepared food item does little more than a potion, it levels up your Cooking skill which gives you special attacks with chef knives, bonus damage to some monsters, and other abilities. The other thing that I love about cooking in Contact? That you need to be wearing your Cooking Outfit in order to cook.

The Contact Menu:
Fruit Juice
Chicken Bites
Cheeseburger
Croquettes

Fruit Juice is made of Tropical Fruit and Water. After looking at all the fruit in the grocery store I finally decided on Kiwi, Starfruit, and Papaya. They seemed the most tropical and easy to carry home in my backpack while on my bike (but some day I'm going to make something out of a whole coconut.) As I proved in my Magical Melody cuisine, I don't have a blender so this time I tried mixing them all up in my coffee grinder, with just a spoonful of water. It was slow going but effective. The finished fruit juice was green, a little bit sour, but pretty good.

Chicken Bites are made of Chicken and Flour. So I just cubed some a chicken thigh, covered it in flour, and fried. Delicious!

Cheeseburger is made out of Hamburger Steak and Bread. Hamburger Steak is made out of Wild Game and Meat. This recipe confused but intrigued me. What's Wild Game? Why isn't it Meat? It sure sounds like Meat. The only item in the store that said "game" on it was a Cornish game hen. I bought one. After cooking that and a piece of steak I had in my freezer, I put pieces of both between two slices of bread. Cheese did not magically appear. Dammit. I had hoped it would. It was a pretty good meaty sandwich, though.

Croquettes are Potato plus Ham. So first I boiled a potato, then mashed it up, then added some ham. Then I deepfried them. I thought it wouldn't work very well, given the lack of anything sticky, like eggs, but they kept their shape and were actually very tasty.


My impressions of the real food: This was all pretty tasty, everything other than the Fruit Juice was pretty much just ordinary cooked meat. However, this was a LOT of food. I'll be eating what's left of this Contact menu for the next week. Also, why isn't everyone in the world of Contact not obese? Sure, there are one or two salad items in the game, but almost every dish is either potatoes, rice, or meat. Or a different kind of meat. Or "Wild Game". Upon thinking about it further, why don't they all have scurvy? Yarr!

Final thoughts: It must be all that running around they do, that keeps them from getting fat. And I guess they just drink a lot of Fruit Juice.

-Amelia

P.S. Next week will be awesome! Joe and I team up and make chili dogs Cooking Mama style! Mainly the "drop stuff down and catch it in a bun" minigame! And there will be videos!

[Review] Wuthering Heights

If I were to say that I was surprised upon receiving the latest offering from Bronte Games, it would be a criminally lax understatement. After such flops as Villette II and Jane Eyre X-Treme Go-Kart Challenge, my doubt in the once great publisher of mid-90’s licensed games was understandably shaken. I’d read the preliminary reports from Japan, and they were guarded, but positive. Daily Dengenki Famitsu went even further, calling it, "a revolutionary new take on the visual novel, not simply a character game." While I may not agree with my kabuki quantum counterparts on all of the finer points, there is some truth to their words.

When a noble, yet politically unstable aristocrat flees the unfriendly streets of London for the rustic moors, he finds himself embroiled in a web of dark passions, mysteries dredged from the past, and wild, fruit-chomping action. A top-down, shooter-RPG that would not be out of place at a wedding joining the Xenosaga series with Zombies Ate My Neighbors in blessed matrimony, Wuthering Heights represents a bold step in blending survival horror elements with traditional CRPG gameplay. Eliminating the inventory management that is often the focus of such games, the player is instead confronted with a parade of delicate social situations that quickly ramp up in misery and violence until there is no recourse but to stare at the wallpaper in resignation at the leaden pressure suffusing the atmosphere.

The wallpaper won’t help; it is peeling and rotten, much like the second half of the game.

To say that the graphics are dreary would be insulting to the richness of the English language. You won’t see much color while traversing the game’s ever-present moors, but the textures on the crumbling garden walls and moldering leather more than make up for the limited palette. Unfortunately, the player is rarely privy to these visual flourishes on account of their hefty memory requirements. Unless the camera’s focus is directly on an object, the majority of the screen is obscured by low-resolution fog reminiscent of a second-generation PSX title. While the story team has taken great pains to work this murkiness into the game’s plot, it can become smothering at times.

Speaking of the story, it’s nothing that we haven’t seen before. Although presented in a novel fashion, the player rarely gets to take part. Instead, the core protagonist is strung along from cutscene to convoluted cutscene. This would have been bearable, if stretching the definition of a game within our post-postmodern society, if the characters were able to support the weight of the topics addressed. Instead we are faced with refugees from every modern RPG that has failed to be published in the last ten years.

Ever since Squaresoft made the switch from identifiable, heroic protagonists of its 16-bit days to the more mature, angst-ridden emopunks of its later hits, the market has been flooded in copycats with embarrassing social flaws and bad haircuts. The primary villain of Wuthering Heights offers nothing new to the discriminating gamer, although no doubt much will be made of his uncanny resemblance to superstar, Ralph Fiennes. I will be frank; he’s no Sephiroth, ladies. On the other hand, if you still haven’t had enough of the near-silent protagonist, the meek love interest, or the racially stereotyped groundskeeper, Wuthering Heights will make you feel right at home. The late Working Designs could have executed this translation to great effect, or current-era Atlus. As it is, however, characterization is warped and wholly obscured by despair.

Despite its flaws, I can’t help but respect Bronte Games for their decision to port Wuthering Heights to this side of the pond. While it won’t win any awards for furthering the video-games-as-literature argument, it’s a fine way to spend the occasional night where the moon is obscured by reaching, claw-like branches and the loneliness of your interior terrain is matched by the outside world. Moreover, it is clear that the localization team spared no expense in making sure that audiences stateside would be able to understand the complex Relationship Grid system. In addition to a faux leather relationship flowchart, the game comes with a dense manual that weighs in at over 300 pages. It’s attention to detail like this that makes Wuthering Heights worth your time if you’re able to push today’s flashy games out of your mind for long enough to appreciate the lengthy reward scheme that was the nourishing milk of yesteryear’s gaming elite.