Obligatory "Year in Games" post 2010

Well, it has reached the time of year when we harvest the crop of retrospectives, the best-of and worst-of lists that one can accuse of gratuitous iconoclasm, corporate servitude, or trolling as suits your fancy. I continue my habit of not naming a "Game of the Year", nor even a "Game (that I played) of the Year" because it's a hollow designation, and (rightfully) nobody cares. That said, since it is customary to roll out some kind of year-end wrap-up, here is one.

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Are you experienced?

My review of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has gone up at GameCritics, but in case you don't want to bother, the summary is that Brotherhood is great and you should get it. It's not great like War and Peace is great. Brotherhood completely squanders all the awesome things you could do thematically with the horrible Papacy of Alexander VI and instead uses that as a backdrop for more of its tediously silly techno-conspiracy mumbo-jumbo. And, it's not great like Saint Peter's Basilica is great, because its poor design choices and occasionally slapdash construction deny it any real feel of majesty. Brotherhood is great like a really delicious dinner at a new restaurant with horrible decor. It's different, and fun, and you just can't understand some of the choices that were made in the setup.

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Dynamic origins of PBX1 homeodomain allostery

In the Monod-Wyman-Changeux model for cooperative binding, proteins exist in an equilibrium of low-affinity and high-affinity states in solution, absent any ligand. In this view, although it may appear that the binding of a ligand causes a conformational transition, it actually stabilizes one conformation from a pre-existing equilibrium. In the past several years, advanced NMR techniques have yielded increasing evidence that these structural equilibria exist for a number of proteins, suggesting that this model for linkage between conformational change and binding may be quite general. An upcoming paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology (1) is typical of such findings.

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Game notes - Falllout: New Vegas

As usual, I have more written down than I can put into a review or even a coherent essay. So here's a new occasional feature where I dump my game notes onto the blog. There's no structure to this, just a series of thoughts I had as I was playing.

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Flipside

A review will eventually go up at GameCritics.com, but because Fallout: New Vegas is such a large game I couldn't cover everything I wanted to in the detail it deserved. The shorthand for this game has been that it is "more Fallout 3", which is, in a limited sense, a fair assessment. Obsidian doesn't revolutionize anything about the way the game plays, except for the superior hardcore mode. What I would say instead is that New Vegas is more of a complement to Fallout 3 than a supplement. Bethesda's version of Fallout was one in which the environmental storytelling was very strong and the traditional storytelling was fairly weak. What I'd hoped was that Obsidian's talent would combine with Bethesda's in a productive way and produce a more cohesive whole. But instead it was more like two ships passing in the night. Fallout: New Vegas has a very strong story in the traditional sense, but the way exploration plays out makes it seem like Obsidian didn't really get what made Fallout 3 compelling.

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Cinematic Action Games: A Brief Critical Assessment

Many of the games I named in my previous post about the cinematic action genre have been criticized for their lack of value. Because these games are short and linear, and rarely have life-extending multiplayer modes, the validity of charging full price for them has been questioned. Simplistic gameplay and action-movie inspired plots have led some critics to call these games shallow. Yet, several games that belong in this genre — Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Sands of Time — are regularly trotted out as examples of the best that the medium can achieve. To categorize cinematic action games as intrinsically shallow or lacking in value would be the worst sort of genre-as-pejorative thinking. Their approach to game storytelling has produced many strengths, but one central characteristic of the genre is also a critical weakness. The great artistic limitations of cinematic action games come from their disinterest in the player as a creative force.

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Values and Characteristics of the Cinematic Action Genre

In his review of Enslaved, my colleague Brad Gallaway makes an argument for placing that game in a new genre, one that he feels has arisen fairly recently. Using the traditional naming conventions for narrow genres, the proper term would be "Uncharted clones", but I don't feel that description is quite adequate. While Uncharted is certainly the most identifiable game in the class, I believe the genre itself pre-dates that game. Uncharted represents not a new kind of game unto itself but an exemplary actualization of certain values in game design. Here I intend to put a name to those values and show how they relate to the characteristics of games in this group, which I think of as "Cinematic Action" games.

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You won't be scared if you're angry

As I have mentioned before, I think Fatal Frame II is the scariest anything ever made by anyone. I'm unashamed to admit that the game terrified me, and literally gave me nightmares, as a full-grown adult. So, it was with some degree of trepidation that I picked up the disc for Fatal Frame III and placed it in my wheezing old PS2. True to form, I found a lot of the game to be genuinely frightening, but a funny thing happened on the way to the dark, decrepit mansion haunted by the tormented souls of the damned. I found that I was more annoyed by Fatal Frame III than scared by it.

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Starting on the wrong foot

If you're going to make an episodic game, you need to put your best foot forward in part one. That's tough to do with a game, because the workaday business of teaching the player how to play often gets in the way of the really cool stuff you want to include. But, it's critical to show off your best design early on. The memory of a really awesome opening segment can propel a player through some mid-game doldrums, but a lame beginning means you'll never sell part two. Decay, an XBox Live Indie Game in the adventure-horror mode, begins strongly, with a suicide that immediately cultivates an atmosphere of despair. Unfortunately, this first episode just wasn't very good, which is a shame because the second episode shows real promise.

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How soon you forget

If you played the demo for Enslaved, you have already been through the sequence. On a flying prison ship of some kind, a young woman, Trip, breaks out of her cell. She sets off an explosion that accidentally frees the player's avatar, a man named Monkey. She flees through the ship, cutting off Monkey at every turn, until he finally encounters her again just as the vehicle is about to crash. He clings to an escape pod as she ejects it, falling unconscious when they crash. While he is knocked out, Trip fits him with a headband that will kill him if he disobeys her. The sequence is exciting, visually memorable, and pretty fun to play. It is also at war with the story Enslaved seems to be trying to tell.

I haven't used a reminder like this in some time, but the game has only been out for a few days. So, look up at the title of the blog and carefully read the two words underneath it before you proceed.

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Costridium virulence: What's essential?

Clostridium difficile is an intestinal pathogen that causes diarrhea in hospitals and other healthcare settings (including nursing homes). Present as a commensal bacterium in a significant fraction of the population, C. difficile is usually rather harmless, its numbers suppressed by competition with the intestinal flora. When its competitors are decimated by antibiotics, however, C. difficile flourishes, releasing toxins that cause inflammation and diarrhea, which can be dangerous because the individuals suffering these effects are often already ill. There has been conflicting information, however, as to which of C. difficile's toxins are necessary to cause disease. A paper in the recent Nature (1) aims to resolve the question.

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From Masyaf to Firenze

If you believe Metacritic, Assassin's Creed II is a major improvement over its predecessor. The Metascore jumped 10 points between games, which would seem to suggest it solves a major problem, or at least a good number of smaller ones. I played the games out of order, going through Ezio Auditore's adventures in the sequel before I experienced Altaïr's adventure in the original Assassin's Creed. I can clearly see some areas where the latter game improved on the former, but I wouldn't say that the quality was dramatically greater. In some ways, it felt like the series lost as much as it gained going from one game to the other.

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Capsule: BioHack

Status: Complete, most challenges met.

Put this on your (nonexistent) box: Play Biochemistry 101!

Most intriguing idea: Modeling a puzzle game after natural regulatory systems.

Best design decision: Keeping things simple in these complex systems.

Worst design decision: The visually confusing quantitative and rainbow modes.


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Capsule: Professor Layton and the Unwound Future

Status: Complete

Put this on your box: Walk with the Professor! Feel the burn!

Most intriguing idea: Sorry, fresh out.

Best design decision: The super hint for times when you just can't figure out what the puzzle wants you to do.

Worst design decision: The world is much too large and the subway doesn't have nearly enough stops.

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Crime isn't just shooting people

Mafia II borrows so much from GoodFellas that 2K Czech probably ought to give Scorcese and Pileggi co-writing credits. Direct references to the film appear in a couple of specific scenes, but the real influence is more fundamental. GoodFellas depicts the mafia as a group of buddies, and Mafia II is built around the same idea. Although family matters motivate the game's protagonist, Vito, when it's convenient for the plot, the real impetus for his journey through the Empire Bay underworld comes from his friends. Unfortunately, the game's vision of mafia life falls apart because of its ill-considered adherence to gaming convention. Mafia II devolves into a series of increasingly ludicrous and bloody shootouts, even though a realist mob drama in the vein of GoodFellas would be an amazing game.

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Capsule: Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Status: Completed X360 version.

Put this on your box: In Persia, no pot is safe.

Most intriguing idea: Allowing the player to change, rather than just use, the environment in the course of a platform run.

Best design decision: Requiring precision timing with the environmental powers.

Worst design decision: Putting the rewind and combat powers on the same magic gauge.


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Zombie cyclophilins catalyze HIV capsid isomerization

If you're going to study the role an enzyme plays in a biological pathway, it's often useful to "kill" it with a mutation. For example, the proline cis-trans isomerase cyclophilin A (CypA) needs a particular arginine residue for its chemistry, so mutations that remove or alter that functional group, like R55K and R55A, should destroy the protein's function and have effects on the related pathways that help illustrate its role. The hydrophobic pocket it uses to bind substrates is made by residues like H126, F113, and W121. Growing or shrinking those residues should alter the shape of the pocket and change binding or activity, leaving the enzyme "dead".

Using model reactions and various binding assays, researchers have previously examined a number of these mutants (4,7) and found that they diminish isomerase activity and alter inhibition. However, a detailed study of the effects of the mutations on CypA's catalytic cycle has not been performed. Former Kern lab members Daryl Bosco (now a professor at UMass Medical) and Elan Eisenmesser (now at UCHSC) examined these mutants in greater detail to see how they really behaved. I also contributed some data at the last minute, when the third reviewer requested we study an additional mutant, prompting a scene that I promise was not too much like that Downfall parody. In every case we found that these enzymes, although significantly impaired, weren't as dead as they had seemed.

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The curious case of Kainé

The strength of Nier is the friendship between its decidedly odd cast of characters. The western release features a burly and frankly ugly man, a rare choice of protagonist for a JRPG. His principal companion is a pompous talking book that grants him magic powers. Also magical is their young comrade Emil, the sunniest character in the game and the one most constantly dumped on by its world. Then there is the possessed warrior Kainé, whose picture I have tucked beneath the fold because her appearance is arguably NSFW. That design is one of my main reservations about the game.

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New game minus

I recently wrapped up my time (for now) with Nier, a game I hadn't been planning to play. On the strength of Trent Fingland's extremely positive review, I decided to give it a spin, and now it has a place on my Game of the Year shortlist with BioShock 2, Red Dead Redemption, and Trauma Team. As Trent pointed out in his review, Nier doesn't really do anything new. Instead it picks and chooses from existing influences ranging from text adventures to twin-stick shooters. One strength of the game is that each of these play motifs surfaces at just the right moment and feels completely appropriate. The other main strength of the game is impeccable characterization, which can be attributed to solid writing and excellent voice acting. Nier's unique "new game +" mode expands on the characterization of a major character in an interesting way, but in my opinion this worked ultimately to the game's detriment.

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Capsule: Trauma Team

Status: Complete

Put This on Your Box: House meets ER meets CSI meets Ghost Whisperer!

Most Intriguing Idea: Fusing multiple styles of medical drama into a single coherent story.

Best Design Decision: The diagnostics segments.

Worst Design Decision: The mechanics for endoscopy.

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Capsule: Singularity

Final Status: Complete.

Put this on your box: One of the first games to combine ideas from Half Life and BioShock!

Most intriguing idea: Aging and regressing the environment to progress.

Best design decision: The seeker.

Worst design decision: Monsters.

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The M2 channel controversy rides again

Most people never learn about an actual scientific controversy. Almost every "controversy" that bubbles into the public eye is manufactured, often reflecting social or ethical differences rather than genuine disagreements between experts about how different models fit to reality. Actual scientific controversies tend to be highly technical, and often concern points that lay people find to be esoteric. That doesn't mean that the issues involved aren't important, or that they're even difficult to understand. One controversy that has unfolded over the past few years and now may be over relates to a seemingly simple question. Where do adamantane drugs bind to the influenza A M2 channel?

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The Dunning-Kruger reticule

In my review panning Alpha Protocol, one of the many issues I singled out for complaint was the disconnect between the reticule and the actual position hit by my bullets. I've received a few comments through various channels that reflect a belief that I simply didn't understand how an RPG works. I think it's pretty obvious that I do; most of these comments display a fundamental misunderstanding of my complaint. The point here is not that when my character shoots there is a complicated set of calculations that decides whether or not I actually hit where I was aiming. Rather, my complaints about this are complaints about the interface, because the meaningless reticule adds a needless layer of opacity to the RPG system.

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In which I review Sparky Clarkson's reviews

Today The Escapist published an issue that's all about games journalism, and there are a number of fascinating articles. I particularly liked "1984 out of 10", a piece by Peter Parrish that examined the current game-reviewing scene through the lens of George Orwell's 1936 essay "In Defence of the Novel". It's a sharp take, and shows how the inflation of praise (not just scores) results in the apotheosis of mediocrity, and thousands of crummy games walking around with Metascores in the high 70s.

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Can oil and water mix?

We all know that linear polymers of amino acids (proteins) adopt complex three-dimensional structures when they are dissolved in water. The process of forming these structures is called folding, and it is understood to occur because proteins are amphiphilic. Some parts of a protein chain like to interact with water (hydrophilic), while others are oily and want to get out of water (hydrophobic). Folding of the chain sticks all the oily parts together on the inside of the structure while the parts of the chain that have favorable interactions with water remain on the outside. An upcoming paper from the Journal of Physical Chemistry B suggests that sufficiently long alkanes might undergo a similar transition, even though they don't have any chemical groups that like to interact with water.

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The ladies of New Austin

To put it mildly, Rockstar's games have a history of problematic depictions of female characters. Following on long-running problems with the series, Grand Theft Auto IV famously caused an eruption of outrage thanks to the IGN-produced "Ladies of Liberty City" promo. While the experiences shown in the video were not mandatory for players, they were supported by a game that regularly treated women as disposable objects there for the pleasure of the player. The few female characters that inched above that level were universally bereft of agency and dependent on the player. Given that the Wild West occupies a part of history where women really were looked on as property, I did not have high hopes for Rockstar's western-themed Red Dead Redemption. Yet, I found myself pleasantly surprised to find three competent, independent women at the core of the story.

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APB's blue wall of silence

Well, we've just come to the end of what will probably be the world's least productive week this year. Sports fans had enormous distractions: the NBA finals, the beginning of the US Open, and of course the World Cup, which is something I can't avoid hearing about since I work with a Korean, two Germans, and an Italian. And that's just the soccer-mad people whose teams are actually in the tournament! Fortunately, most of the lab computers do not have speakers, so I am spared the god-forsaken noise of the vuvuzelas while at work. If you've no taste for athletics, however, this week offered an alluring diversion in the form of E3. Between the various webcast events and the constant impact of game and hardware impressions, there was plenty to divert people's attention from work. Apparently, Realtime Worlds took note of the deluge and tried to slip something in under it — a review embargo on their upcoming MMO shooter, APB. Now, there's nothing unusual about a review embargo, but this one is notable because it ends on July 2, a full week after the game is released.

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Games within the game

Rockstar has made a name for itself based on games set in vast, detailed open worlds that, like many large and varied settings, have a substantial decoration of minigames. Although these diversions can play a very important role in world-building and changing up the pace of play, they typically get almost no mention in reviews, unless they form a significant part of the gameplay (GTA: Chinatown Wars' drug-dealing minigame) or have a unique aesthetic (No More Heroes 2's jobs). Red Dead Redemption, in an effort to add texture to its Wild West, includes a number of these side games scattered across its countryside. Unfortunately the result is something of a mixed bag.

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The "real" John Marston

Trying to discuss the real nature of the Wild West is a bit like trying to discuss the real nature of Arthurian Britain. We believe, perhaps we even know, that the relevant historical period exists, but its true character has been almost completely obscured by myth. The early view of the West was fairly simplistic; the dime novels and Hollywood Westerns were characterized by the easy heroism of the gunslinger taking on bandits or the settler fighting savage Indians. Since the 1970s a revisionist attitude has produced a grittier and dirtier take on the West that frequently inverts the stereotypes. It would be a mistake to view these recent films as a more "realistic" vision, however. The changes in the Western reflect an increasing sophistication in cinema's moral attitude, not an increasing dedication to fact. Red Dead Redemption is fully aware that our view of the Old West is more social construction than historical knowledge. I happen to think its main character is also intended to be a construct, a man who is a fiction in the world of the game. That is, the John Marston we play is the man as imagined by his son, Jack.

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The Gringos Who Saved Mexico

I want to begin by saying that I really like Red Dead Redemption, and a positive review will be forthcoming as soon as I stop being so bad at writing it. Rockstar's new Western is an improvement over their work in GTA IV in a lot of ways, not the least of which is that I didn't feel like I needed to take a shower after every play session. But the developer's bad habits have a way of shining through, and to a large extent I liked Red Dead Redemption in spite of itself. No part of the game took more effort to look past than John Marston's adventure in Mexico. The scenery down there is beautiful, but the narrative is a train wreck.

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Those punks felt lucky

I can't imagine how anyone can vote for Rand Paul. I'm not even talking about his moronic take on the Civil Rights Act. I mean, that's pitiably foolish, and his whole "I"m not a racist, but..." act doesn't excuse his adopting the position that government must never interfere with private business even in the face of egregious social injustice. But at least if the people of Kentucky are fools enough to elect the man, the CRA is in no danger of being undone by Paul's idiocy. We might not be so lucky when it comes to his potential choices for dealing with the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which he recently had the goddamn gall to characterize as an "accident". Paul even criticized the anger towards BP as un-American. To which I say: Fuck you, sir, and the political philosophy you rode in on.

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What's wrong with Leanne

In my last post I mentioned the difficulty I sometimes have in connecting with characters that express values opposed to my own. Because a game is an interactive entertainment that requires the player to exert considerable effort in order to progress, it's important to make sure that the player identifies or sympathizes with the characters he's controlling. This is especially true of 40+ hour games like RPGs. You're spending a lot of time with these people, so they'd better be worthwhile company. Unfortunately, Resonance of Fate had a small cast I didn't enjoy spending time with at all. I found the personalities of the male characters, Vashyron and Zephyr, to be completely repulsive and tiresome. But the female character, Leanne, was problematic in a different way. It wasn't just her personality, although she's not the sort of person I'd generally care to hang around with. Leanne just made me sad, because she was so obviously a patriarchal caricature.

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Who wants to be Lloyd Irving?

Having explained what I thought was wrong with Infinite Space, I feel obliged to talk about what it did right. In this context I'm going to discuss something lots of other games get wrong, from my point of view. Let me start with the proposition that games express values. That may seem trivial to anyone who has played through twenty or so JRPGs with the same neo-luddite earth-friendly themes, but I'm actually not talking about that kind of expression. Games also have intrinsic values that are communicated by the kinds of characters that are chosen as protagonists, the way that the plot evolves around them, and the systems with which the player affects that plot. In marked contrast to many notable JRPGs of the last decade, Infinite Space values intelligence and pragmatism. Because I share those values, I appreciated the game more, perhaps, than its gameplay and plot strictly deserved.

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Lost in Infinite Space

The last three games I've played have something in common, in that they are noble efforts with imperfect outcomes. Infinite Space, Metro 2033, and Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon all have significant positives offset by serious negatives. In particular, I thought Infinite Space and Metro 2033 were pretty compelling despite their problems. The easiest of these to talk about is what's wrong with Infinite Space, so I'll start there.

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Do metamorphic proteins mediate evolutionary structural transitions?

On several previous occasions on this blog I've discussed proteins that undergo significant changes in structure without drastic changes in their primary sequence or solution conditions. In some cases, a few mutations can take a protein to a novel fold, as with Philip Bryan's protein G work. In others, closely related sequences within a whole family populate different kinds of folds, as Matt Cordes illustrated for the case of Cro proteins. In addition, there are some cases such as lymphotactin, where interconversion between two very different structures takes place at equilibrium, as illustrated by Brian Volkman's research. Each time stories like this come up I have mentioned that this kind of behavior (termed "metamorphism" in a 2008 commentary by Alexey Murzin) suggests a means by which proteins could evolve from one structure to another without losing foldedness or function. Recently, a group from the Weizmann Institute published results in PNAS that speak to this possibility.

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Take cisplatin in the morning and call me

Although we are most familiar with the circadian rhythm from its effects on our physiological state, the roots of the phenomenon lie in the molecular biology of individual cells. The circadian rhythm is the result of a transcriptional control system that regulates the levels of many different proteins in the cell with the passing of time. Not all of the proteins subject to this control have yet been catalogued, and as a result some surprising effects are still being discovered. A recent article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from the Sancar lab at UNC suggests that circadian control of a DNA repair factor may be a way to enhance the effectiveness of a chemotherapeutic agent. The article is open access, so I encourage you to open it up and read along.

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Larry the bilker

Matt Taibbi has an article about the destruction of Jefferson County up at Rolling Stone. I strongly recommend you read it, but take your blood pressure medicine first. I would like to be able to say that this story, in which crooked banks and corrupt politicians conspire to inflate the price of a public works project more than 1000 percent, saddling a county with billions of dollars of debt it will take a generation to pay off, is an elaborate April Fool's joke. Unfortunately, as the residents of Birmingham know, it's all too real. Like countless city councilmen, county commissioners, and mayors before him, Larry Langford played the city like a long con, adding the ruinous sewer project to his other notable failures, such as VisionLand. One wonders how much of his talent for failing upward was due to the assistance of men who knew he could be bought.

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Evony gives up

The lawyers for Evony have dropped their Australian libel-tourism suit against Bruce Everiss. In accordance with Australian law, they will have to pay his legal fees. In light of Evony's advertising strategy, it seems only natural to celebrate this news with a picture of some boobies:

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Obligatory PAX post

Like several thousand gamers, I spent the past weekend at PAX East. It was great to finally meet a bunch of the people I regularly communicate with on Twitter, Wave, and other places. There really are too many to be named, so I won't even try, but if I introduced myself to you at any point during the weekend it was because I felt it was a genuine pleasure to meet you, and I hope to see you again soon. Unfortunately, with the press of people and the absurdly long lines for some panels, I wasn't able to hook up with everyone I knew who was there. Hopefully the next iteration of the Expo will handle the lines a bit better.

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How native-like is a cold-denatured structure?

A protein has several different levels of structure. The primary structure is the arrangements of atoms and bonds, and it is formed in the ribosome by the assembly of amino acids as directed by an RNA template. The secondary structure is the local topology, the helices and strands, and this forms mostly because of the release of energy through the formation of hydrogen bonds. The tertiary structure is the actual fold of the protein, the way helices, strands, and loops are arranged in space. The fold forms primarily because of the favorable entropy of burying the protein's hydrophobic groups where water cannot access them, analogous to the formation of an oil droplet in water. This suggests that, in addition to the well-known phenomenon of proteins denaturing, or losing their higher-order structure, under conditions of high heat, proteins might also denature when they get too cold.

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Dynamics conservation in the Ras superfamily

The proposition that general fold architecture is preserved within a family of evolutionarily-related proteins is not controversial. The amino acid sequence of a protein determines its structure, and countless studies have substantiated the idea that proteins with similar sequences will adopt similar folded conformations. Because structure and dynamics are intrinsically linked, one could reasonably assume that many features of a protein's dynamics get conserved along with the fold. A growing number of experiments show that this is indeed the case, including a recent paper in Structure (1).

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Even more lab courtesy haiku

Alert your labmates
if your prep will require all
the lab's baffled flasks.

Refill or reorder
reagents before you empty
the goddamn bottle.

Touching toxins, gloves
go on. Touching telephones,
take those nasty things off.


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Capsule: Star Fox Adventures

Final Status: Complete.

Put this on your box: It's Star Fox without anything that you liked about Star Fox!

Most intriguing idea: Translating a sci-fi dogfighting character to a magical adventure setting. (It says intriguing there, folks, not good.)

Best design decision: The surprisingly smooth inventory/command system.

Worst design decision: The first-person targeting reticle's aggressive recentering behavior.

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Camp

The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful. ...Of course, one can't always say that.

—Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'"

This game is so bad, it's not just become good. It's pretty close to perfect.

—Jim Sterling, review of Deadly Premonition

Jim Sterling gave Deadly Premonition a score of 10 points out of a possible 10, easily the highest score the game received among major gaming review sites. In his review, he makes it plain that this game does not deserve that score in any "objective" sense. The graphics are dated, the gameplay is limited, and its systems pay too much attention to irrelevant details. This is to say nothing of its absurd plot and characters. In comparison to almost any other game, Deadly Premonition is awful, but within the bounds of a certain kind of sensibility, that does not preclude it from also being good. Sontag identifies that sensibility as Camp, and it's an idea worth thinking about in connection to games.

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One-button war

In comparison to systems like Pong or Pac-Man, modern games tend to be extremely complicated. An XBox 360 controller has 16 unique inputs, and many of the games for the system shift the meaning of those inputs contextually to multiply the possible ways a player can communicate intention to the game. But the complexity of controllers is a response to increasingly byzantine game systems, of which there are few better examples than the typical real-time strategy game, with its array of resources, buildings, and units. So it's refreshing to play a game that provides some RTS flavor without the need for a poster-sized command summary. Pax Britannica, from my friend Matthew Gallant and the other guys at No Fun Games, offers four-player deathmatch RTS using just one button.

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Prion diseases: protein is enough

Spongiform encephalopathies are transmissible diseases that can have a major economic impact on agricultural exports, and pose a significant challenge for surveillance of the food supply. Scientists generally believe that these diseases are transmitted via a self-propagating, aberrant conformation of the prion protein (PrP). This prion hypothesis suggests that PrP alone should be sufficient to cause symptoms or death. If this hypothesis is true, then it should be possible to reproduce the disease using recombinant proteins expressed in yeast or bacteria. In tomorrow's Science, researchers from Columbus and Shanghai report that they have managed to do this, establishing that PrP alone can account for prion disease transmission.

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The sea of broken dreams

During the initial hype cycle for BioShock 2, the game had the subtitle "Sea of Dreams". The player can find a recording in Siren Alley that ties this name into Dr. Sofia Lamb's view of Rapture itself. The world's brightest and most creative minds were drawn to Ryan's underwater would-be utopia, each trying to remodel its world to fit their own desires. BioShock drew much of its power from depicting the ways those dreams could grow out of control and become malignant obsessions. The sequel, in contrast, builds its world from the dreams that died. In many ways, the subject of BioShock 2 is failure.

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Why I used to love Santa Destroy

In Suda 51's No More Heroes, I loved the city of Santa Destroy. That's a controversial position, because Santa Destroy bored almost everyone else to tears — the excision of the city from the sequel, Desperate Struggle, was met with almost unanimous praise. Judged strictly by its impact on the gameplay, the town had few redeeming features, and there's not much point in disputing that. But Santa Destroy had value to No More Heroes in other ways. In excising it, the sequel lost something.

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What price eternity?

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks died of an incredibly fast-growing and invasive uterine cancer. She is still alive today, making vital contributions to our understanding of cancer and cellular biology. How a dead, uneducated black woman continues to live and provide valuable scientific insights, and why her children and grandchildren have not benefited from her legacy, is the subject of Rebecca Skloot's new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (which you can buy from Amazon here).

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Regrettable steps

So, the spam has finally gotten to be a bit too irritating. I am leaving anonymous commenting available, but the CAPTCHA is on for at least the time being to see if that suppresses the spam. I have also posted a formal Comment Policy, as well as a Page of Shame describing my most irritating comment spam. Sorry for anyone who is inconvenienced by the CAPTCHA: consider this post to be the place for leaving complaints about that or the comment policy.
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Choosing what to complain about

My review of The Saboteur has gone live at GameCritics.com (spoiler alert: I really liked it!) after a modestly torturous rewrite. It's a vastly larger game than any I've reviewed before at that site, which led to an enormous imbalance between my notes and the size of the review. I spent almost 48 hours in the world of The Saboteur, which means I have many pages of notes that had to be boiled down significantly before I could get anywhere near a readable size. Games like this are so large that reviews could easily become a ponderous, ten-page affair, and there are a number of sites that don't put any reins on that kind of approach. Those bloated, feature-counting reviews are, in my opinion, part of the reason that game criticism has been slow to grow beyond software criticism. Yet, games are software, and they often have bugs or shortcomings that become increasingly obvious as more time is spent with them. A game like The Saboteur has tons of little things wrong with it, and some of the other games I've reviewed had a few little things wrong with them. When I write the review, I discard most of those criticisms, but I can imagine somebody reading those reviews and wondering why I didn't talk about problem X.

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Capsule: The Sky Crawlers - Innocent Aces

Final Status: Completed all main story missions on various difficulties

Put This on Your Box: It's Top Gun meets World War II!

Most Intriguing Idea: Making an arcade flight sim that controls somewhat like an actual airplane.

Best Design Decision: The tactical maneuver commands — done right, there's nothing wrong with "Press A for Awesome".

Worst Design Decision: Brevity.

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Storytelling in Silent Hill

My review of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories went up last week at gamecritics.com, and I really regret that I had to pan it. The game had some good ideas buried in it, but the overall experience was just miserable, oscillating wildly between deadly boredom and screaming frustration. I covered most of the gameplay issues I had in the review, but I only lightly touched on the positives and negatives of the game's storytelling. My reason for this is that it's difficult to talk about what's really going on in the story without revealing the game's central twist. I think it's unfair to even slightly spoil a game in a review (I felt I had to change the review's subtitle for just this reason), and like many Silent Hill games the twist at the end is profoundly important to the player's experience. Here on the blog I don't feel so much restraint, however, and I think it's worth discussing what the game gets right and wrong in terms of the characters, locales, and echo messages. That means the following discussion has massive spoilers, so be forewarned.

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Glitches in the Animus

I think it's fair to say that one of the things Assassin's Creed II is about is immersion. The fiction of the game concerns a completely immersive virtual world reconstructed from one character's DNA, which allows him to inhabit the bodies of his ancestors. The game world itself is constructed to resemble, with startling fidelity, famous locations in Italy. The game also adopts a 3rd-person open-world approach that produces at least a competent illusion of player agency in the game world. Genuine player immersion is, at least with present technology, an unreachable goal, and so of course Assassin's Creed II never manages to achieve it. What struck me during the course of play, however, was how many times the game simply gave up on the pursuit, falling back on old game tropes that betray the illusion, despite how easily this could have been avoided.

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Haiti

I can barely imagine a worse place for a devastating earthquake to hit than Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. Even worse, the main shock originated very close to its largest city, Port-au-Prince, and nearby aftershocks are continuing. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, died in the earthquake itself, and given the lack of infrastructure even more may perish in the near future from disease and starvation. Many of the nation's most significant structures (including the National Palace) have been destroyed, its slums have been flattened, and many of the buildings still standing have suffered irreparable damage and will have to be demolished.

You can help the survivors by donating to the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Partners in Health. Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti is also taking donations for earthquake relief. I know as well as anyone how hard things are right now. I know a lot of my readers are unemployed, or living on a limited budget. Small donations add up, though, and much of what will be desperately needed in Haiti in the coming weeks and months comes very cheap. If you can spare $50, that's great, but if you can only spare $5, give that. No matter how bad your lot is right now, I can guarantee you it's better than living in a shattered country without power, food, medicine, or clean water.

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