When I was 8, my friends and I built a Ghostbusting headquarters in my basement. We had a containment unit made out of a desk. Sure, we were participating in the crass commercialism of children's entertainment that would mark that generation and all future ones, but being a Ghostbuster was even cooler than being a Ninja Turtle (and was less likely to get you hurt jumping off playground equipment now often banned).
The new Ghostbusters video game manages, as best it can, to capture that feeling. There are ghosts, and you bust them, and you cause a lot of mayhem in the process, and anything else that goes on is irrelevant. This is the contract you make with the game, and it holds up its end of the bargain. It doesn't matter that it's Gears of War-lite for shooting mechanics, or that the character models are unsettling, or that it's a blatant retread the plot of the first movie. It's just really fucking cool to carry a proton charger on your back and fire it at a giant marshmallow guy throwing cars at you, or stand around in a graveyard yelling at your friends not to cross the streams.
The only design element aside from that I want to call out is the clever use of poltergeisting to block off initially open areas, making the levels feel much larger than they are without using invisible walls.
If as a child you ever pretended to bust ghosts, this is the game for you.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Stabbing My Eardrums
Peripherally related to the last post: There's a lot of work that's been put into 2D sprite filtering algorithms over the years, so you can get extremely good results when scaling 8/16-bit style sprites up to modern resolutions. The ones in Genesis Collection are actually very poor, but other emulators have much better results.
I think we should take that theory and apply it to the audio capabilities of those machines, to at least smooth out some of the noisier and higher-pitched effects of the era. At least then I won't stand there trying to cut the dog in Beyond Oasis in half.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Fatal Labyrinth: A Review
As someone who played Nintendo consoles as a kid, my exposure to Sega is pretty much 1) Sonic, and 2) the trainwreck they are now. So Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection - the headlining title being the least interesting - is pretty much designed for me. One thing I was stunned to find on it was Fatal Labyrinth which as far as I can tell was the first console roguelike. In fact, released in 1990, it's contemporary with Angband (and so not too surprisingly, it's much more Hack-like than future Japanese roguelikes - persistent levels and only a cursory town).
Honestly? The game is crap, even if you can fly. But as is usual for roguelikes most reviews complain about the reviewer's dislike of fundamental aspects of the genre, rather than the particular implementation. That is if you handed them Shiren, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and ADOM, they'd review them all the same.
What Worked
The level generation, including secret doors, was fine. I think it was a little more interesting than the random generation present in later Chunsoft-developed roguelikes. Rogue is meticulously balanced in terms of food vs. exploration and Chunsoft games tended to ignore that by eschewing secret doors. While there's an abundance of food in Fatal Labyrinth you can't actually pick it up and need to eat it on the spot, so starvation is a real threat in the early levels if you explore inefficiently.
The "you've been on the level too long" notification, common in Japanese roguelikes, is found here. Probably for the first time. Between this and the food, the game does a good job of forcing you into progressively harder levels at the right pace.
There were breeders, enemies that spawn copies of themselves.
Statistically, the difficulty curve was good, but I'll get to some particulars of why it was bad at the end.
What Didn't Work
The controls. I don't think I was happy with a set of roguelike controls on a dedicated gaming device until Izuna Ni. Notably, you can't turn without moving.
The UI. There's some excuse here for the same reason as the controls (I won't blame it for attack numbers getting truncated to two digits) but in other cases it's horrible. You can't see what an item is until you pick it up, you can't see how satiating food is until you eat it, and if you cancel out of the second or third stage of the three-level menu you need to start over from the first.
Loot is shallow. There's a lot of things (and the full gamut of types - armor, scrolls, wands, rings, and a couple classes of weapons) including some cursed items, but they don't have +X/-X variants variants.
The key place the game falls over is risk management. The primary goal of the player in a roguelike is to minimize the effect of the random number generator, because unpredictability is always what makes you lose. This problem manifested in two ways. First, damage variance was enormous. Tracking damage per hit looked like 12, 5, 106, 45, 19, 2, 95. Especially when you first encountered enemies I had no idea how much damage they could do, even after they hit me half a dozen times. Even if I knew I was safe I had no idea how long it would take me to kill the enemy.
Second, I had no options to mitigate non-damage risks. It's common for there to be rings or scrolls that will prevent some class of status ailment or raise your resistance to it but this game had no such thing I could find. I probably spent 90% of levels 15 to 25 confused, and all the items to fix that are consumable. None of the rings or armor offered me resistance benefits I could see, and the enemy attacks could be done at range so using a bow or shuriken did not help.
Overall
Fatal Labyrinth is a game I'm unlikely to ever play again, but as first efforts go it's an admirable re-imagining of Rogue for a console system.
Honestly? The game is crap, even if you can fly. But as is usual for roguelikes most reviews complain about the reviewer's dislike of fundamental aspects of the genre, rather than the particular implementation. That is if you handed them Shiren, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and ADOM, they'd review them all the same.What Worked
The level generation, including secret doors, was fine. I think it was a little more interesting than the random generation present in later Chunsoft-developed roguelikes. Rogue is meticulously balanced in terms of food vs. exploration and Chunsoft games tended to ignore that by eschewing secret doors. While there's an abundance of food in Fatal Labyrinth you can't actually pick it up and need to eat it on the spot, so starvation is a real threat in the early levels if you explore inefficiently.
The "you've been on the level too long" notification, common in Japanese roguelikes, is found here. Probably for the first time. Between this and the food, the game does a good job of forcing you into progressively harder levels at the right pace.
There were breeders, enemies that spawn copies of themselves.
Statistically, the difficulty curve was good, but I'll get to some particulars of why it was bad at the end.
What Didn't Work
The controls. I don't think I was happy with a set of roguelike controls on a dedicated gaming device until Izuna Ni. Notably, you can't turn without moving.
The UI. There's some excuse here for the same reason as the controls (I won't blame it for attack numbers getting truncated to two digits) but in other cases it's horrible. You can't see what an item is until you pick it up, you can't see how satiating food is until you eat it, and if you cancel out of the second or third stage of the three-level menu you need to start over from the first.
Loot is shallow. There's a lot of things (and the full gamut of types - armor, scrolls, wands, rings, and a couple classes of weapons) including some cursed items, but they don't have +X/-X variants variants.
The key place the game falls over is risk management. The primary goal of the player in a roguelike is to minimize the effect of the random number generator, because unpredictability is always what makes you lose. This problem manifested in two ways. First, damage variance was enormous. Tracking damage per hit looked like 12, 5, 106, 45, 19, 2, 95. Especially when you first encountered enemies I had no idea how much damage they could do, even after they hit me half a dozen times. Even if I knew I was safe I had no idea how long it would take me to kill the enemy.
Second, I had no options to mitigate non-damage risks. It's common for there to be rings or scrolls that will prevent some class of status ailment or raise your resistance to it but this game had no such thing I could find. I probably spent 90% of levels 15 to 25 confused, and all the items to fix that are consumable. None of the rings or armor offered me resistance benefits I could see, and the enemy attacks could be done at range so using a bow or shuriken did not help.
Overall
Fatal Labyrinth is a game I'm unlikely to ever play again, but as first efforts go it's an admirable re-imagining of Rogue for a console system.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
A little more on Flower
The Flower developer diary is interesting. It could do without the Sony PR push, but then Flower probably couldn't have been made as it is without the Sony PR push, so you take the good with the bad.
I don't think I buy the "video game version of a poem" concept. Passage is a video game poem. Flower is a novella. The problem is that most video games are the equivalent of doorstop fantasy - next to George R. R. Martin, most modern literature will look like a poem. By this I'm not just referring to length, but content and structure - Flower progressively presents a theme and has a beginning, middle, and end, just with minimal filler. Actually so does Passage, so maybe I should consider something like Tori Emaki instead. This is a thing that eschews the literal for the aesthetic, which Flower and Passage do not.
It's interesting to see Penny Arcade claim "there isn't enough "product" here to be satisfied" when their own game came under fire for much the same thing at twice the cost and 2-3 times the play length, but far more filler and recycled game mechanics. That may be the video game equivalent of pulp fiction (it's even serialized).
I don't think I buy the "video game version of a poem" concept. Passage is a video game poem. Flower is a novella. The problem is that most video games are the equivalent of doorstop fantasy - next to George R. R. Martin, most modern literature will look like a poem. By this I'm not just referring to length, but content and structure - Flower progressively presents a theme and has a beginning, middle, and end, just with minimal filler. Actually so does Passage, so maybe I should consider something like Tori Emaki instead. This is a thing that eschews the literal for the aesthetic, which Flower and Passage do not.
It's interesting to see Penny Arcade claim "there isn't enough "product" here to be satisfied" when their own game came under fire for much the same thing at twice the cost and 2-3 times the play length, but far more filler and recycled game mechanics. That may be the video game equivalent of pulp fiction (it's even serialized).
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Games You Missed: Blue Lacuna, Spelunky
I want to advertise two independent games I've been playing recently.
Spelunky (which really needs a better homepage at this point) is a roguelike platformer. By this I don't just mean the levels are randomly generated (although they are) but that it's difficult but rewarding, its interactions are multifaceted, it's short, and it's score-focused. It is also best played on a gamepad. It's by Derek Yu, who is one of the co-authors of Aquaria.
> cryBlue Lacuna, by Aaron A. Reed, is the deepest and broadest piece of interactive fiction I've played. Granted, it's not a community I keep up on (regrettably), but I enjoy it more than Jigsaw and Galatea which were my two favorites. There is a prequel, Blueful, which is a bit too pretentious for me.
You feel only the mounting dread of impending loss. The loss itself is not yet real.
Spelunky (which really needs a better homepage at this point) is a roguelike platformer. By this I don't just mean the levels are randomly generated (although they are) but that it's difficult but rewarding, its interactions are multifaceted, it's short, and it's score-focused. It is also best played on a gamepad. It's by Derek Yu, who is one of the co-authors of Aquaria.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Flower: A Review
I have nightmares about the first third-person cameras in 3D games, especially in console games. Especially Crash Bandicoot, but even Mario 64 was inaccessible to me at that time. I retreated to a world of arcade and simulation games and eventually stopped playing enough games to be considered a "gamer" until 2003 or so.
Flower recalls the worst of that experience. Loose controls and a poor sense of depth. Entirely new movement aspects to consider like my turning radius. Homogeneous level designs with invisible walls and few landmarks. Undifferentiated paths and points of interest. Am I Mario or Lakitu? Am I the petals or the wind? Why can I turn around here but not there? Why can't I just slow down or turn the camera to get the angle I want to find this item or make that jump?
Despite that association Flower is not painful to play, and I want to identify why. Rewarding the players for exploration instead of punishing them for stagnation. The abstracted subject matter of the game. The pacing and integration of the themes - indeed, having a theme at all. Environments that are peaceful rather than frustrating to get lost in.
When someone asked me to briefly explain Flower's gameplay (ugh) I said "it's a game about making things better." I was referring to the game's environments at the time but after saying it I realized it went further than that. Traditional wisdom says polishing a game involves steps like "tighten up the controls, add more normal maps, and draw something really huge and evil-looking." Certainly that's one (expensive and difficult) development path. Flower shows us at least one way to step back, relax, reevaluate, and try to make it better.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Reward Schedules
One of the fundamental things I expect from a game is that it rewards me in proportion to the amount of time I spend playing it. This is why I can't stand games that are too long, because the rewards tend to come too far apart. But there are other ways that game designers miss the point and fail to reward in proportion with play time.
Wipeout Pulse is a pretty standard racing game. You do events, collect medals (ideally gold); collect enough medals and unlock more events. One of these events is a Tournament, which is a set of several races back to back. The problem is, you only get one medal for the tournament. There isn't any more or less or different skill than a single race, but I'm only rewarded 1/3 or 1/4 as much per unit of time played. This is really annoying, and I've now cleared the first nine (out of 12 and 4 bonus) race grids having played exactly one tournament. I understand the need for tournaments in an online game, to test player performance on a variety of tracks - but in the single player game, you've already done that by making me play all of them against the same AI controlled cars I'll play against in the tournament. [I wrote this paragraph before Wipeout HD came out. It has the same problem.]
There's a fine line between rewarding players for time invested and for skilled play, and I also get no satisfaction from rewards simply for time invested. David Sirlin has already written everything I want to say on this subject:
My desire, which I don't think I've seen a designer formulate explicitly before, is that I want to be rewarded a number of times proportional to how long I play, but with a quality of reward proportional to how well I play; additionally I want my reward magnitude to diminish as I play things far below my demonstrated skill level. This is an oversimplification in some ways - varying the reward frequency randomly is much more effective than a reward every hour, for example - but is what I basically want. If I play a level for an hour and get 100 points, playing for two hours should get me about 200 points. If I play a level further in the game, I should get at least as many points, and also a special hat; if I play that level twice, I should get two hats.
To bring this back to Wipeout: Tournaments should reward me proportional to the number of races in them. A gold medal in a tournament should be worth 12 points instead of 3. The game already does a good job of doling out rewards with magnitude proportional to my skill level, by unlocking new harder, faster tracks when I beat the old ones. To balance that, playing levels from grids before my current one cannot unlock future ones, only raise my raw score.
Although the application for Wipeout and other arcade-style games is obvious, the general principle works when analyzing other games. In Sim/Tycoon games for example, it's easy to get a stable supply of money and rake in profits slowly forever. But you can keep building more and more complex parks, taking on more risk to prove your skill at the game and get a bigger reward - manifesting as more money faster, and a chance at an even more complex environment. Design elements like tech trees also make sure that to get the coolest things in the game, you need to task those risks and not just amass money.
In RPGs, I can grind for XP and level up my characters. But superlinear level progression means this stops being effective unless I push myself, and I'll never see new content - plot, environments, items, and so on - unless I move past the area I'm in.
Poor reward handling has hurt a lot of games for me recently - Assassin's Creed was enjoyable except the game's main reward mechanism is making you better in combat, when a key element of the game is avoiding combat. Fallout 3 stopped handing out primary character advancement 20 hours into an 80 hour game (by contrast, my Oblivion character has a dozen stats I could increase after 120 hours, but it stopped giving me exciting equipment, which Fallout managed up to hour 50).
Wipeout Pulse is a pretty standard racing game. You do events, collect medals (ideally gold); collect enough medals and unlock more events. One of these events is a Tournament, which is a set of several races back to back. The problem is, you only get one medal for the tournament. There isn't any more or less or different skill than a single race, but I'm only rewarded 1/3 or 1/4 as much per unit of time played. This is really annoying, and I've now cleared the first nine (out of 12 and 4 bonus) race grids having played exactly one tournament. I understand the need for tournaments in an online game, to test player performance on a variety of tracks - but in the single player game, you've already done that by making me play all of them against the same AI controlled cars I'll play against in the tournament. [I wrote this paragraph before Wipeout HD came out. It has the same problem.]
There's a fine line between rewarding players for time invested and for skilled play, and I also get no satisfaction from rewards simply for time invested. David Sirlin has already written everything I want to say on this subject:
Here is what World of Warcraft teaches:The problem isn't specific to WoW, though. Too many games, MMO and not, reward time investment over skill improvement. Skill improvement is often the result of time investment, so it's hard to distinguish sometimes. Still, there are clear cases of games that have unmotivating rewards, not because the rewards aren't interesting, but because they're handed out in the wrong ways.1. Investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill.
If you invest more time than someone else, you "deserve" rewards. People who invest less time "do not deserve" rewards. This is an absurd lesson that has no connection to anything I do in the real world.
My desire, which I don't think I've seen a designer formulate explicitly before, is that I want to be rewarded a number of times proportional to how long I play, but with a quality of reward proportional to how well I play; additionally I want my reward magnitude to diminish as I play things far below my demonstrated skill level. This is an oversimplification in some ways - varying the reward frequency randomly is much more effective than a reward every hour, for example - but is what I basically want. If I play a level for an hour and get 100 points, playing for two hours should get me about 200 points. If I play a level further in the game, I should get at least as many points, and also a special hat; if I play that level twice, I should get two hats.
To bring this back to Wipeout: Tournaments should reward me proportional to the number of races in them. A gold medal in a tournament should be worth 12 points instead of 3. The game already does a good job of doling out rewards with magnitude proportional to my skill level, by unlocking new harder, faster tracks when I beat the old ones. To balance that, playing levels from grids before my current one cannot unlock future ones, only raise my raw score.
Although the application for Wipeout and other arcade-style games is obvious, the general principle works when analyzing other games. In Sim/Tycoon games for example, it's easy to get a stable supply of money and rake in profits slowly forever. But you can keep building more and more complex parks, taking on more risk to prove your skill at the game and get a bigger reward - manifesting as more money faster, and a chance at an even more complex environment. Design elements like tech trees also make sure that to get the coolest things in the game, you need to task those risks and not just amass money.
In RPGs, I can grind for XP and level up my characters. But superlinear level progression means this stops being effective unless I push myself, and I'll never see new content - plot, environments, items, and so on - unless I move past the area I'm in.
Poor reward handling has hurt a lot of games for me recently - Assassin's Creed was enjoyable except the game's main reward mechanism is making you better in combat, when a key element of the game is avoiding combat. Fallout 3 stopped handing out primary character advancement 20 hours into an 80 hour game (by contrast, my Oblivion character has a dozen stats I could increase after 120 hours, but it stopped giving me exciting equipment, which Fallout managed up to hour 50).
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