Scenario and story in Bastion

Bastion is a game with marvelous art, a wonderful soundtrack, and solid mechanics, but it was not sold to the public on the strength of these aspects. Rather, it was sold on its storytelling system, in which a narrator responds to what the main character (called only the Kid) is doing. In the game, however, the narrator actually does relatively little of this, and Bastion's plot is thinly realized, offering little insight into its characters and their motivations. Rather, the game's storytelling system primarily delivers background information on the city of Caelondia and the Calamity that has caused the destruction of the city and its environs. Bastion's narrative puts scenario first and story second, in a way that both supports and weakens its central themes.

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Final Fantasy XIII: A series of tubes

The worst reason to hate Final Fantasy XIII is because of its linearity. Non-linearity doesn't necessarily improve a game, and following a constrained path doesn't necessarily make it worse. All Final Fantasy games, including the most highly praised ones, have been essentially linear in both story and world design, and FFXIII is not even unique in degree, given FFX. A player's desire to break out of a constrained experience is usually not a result of linearity per se, but instead reflects a failure of the game's story to engage that player. "Failure" is a reasonably good description of FFXIII's story, which is surprising because Square-Enix had done so much of this stuff before.

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Final Fantasy XIII: The best part

Despite respectable review scores and reasonably good sales, Final Fantasy XIII is widely derided, for many good reasons and a few bad ones. Defenders of the game often point to the battle system as the game's saving grace. I found myself sharing the sentiment when I played through the game recently. That might be seen as damning by faint praise, given that so much of the game was attacked, but the combat system really is quite strong, and manages to incorporate principles that are familiar from hard-core RPGs in a dynamic and accessible way. While it probably won't satisfy players who cut their teeth on those older systems, FFXIII represents an interesting fusion of principles.

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The Road Course

This past weekend marked an interesting turn in the NASCAR racing season, by which I mean a right turn. Both the Sprint Cup and Nationwide Tour visited road courses, a rare departure for a racing brand built on ovals. The weight, center of gravity, and wheelbase of a stock car can make even the ovals difficult to drive at racing speeds, so even though the road courses make use of the same basic skills, they pose a unique and difficult challenge, so much so that it was once typical to see "ringers" with road racing expertise make an appearance at the two annual road races. The change-up can result in some uniquely exciting racing, or, as happened this weekend in both races, bruising wrecks. Video games that try to change up their gameplay midstream face similar risks. To understand this, we need look no further than the shmups appearing in Goichi Suda's third-person action games No More Heroes and Shadows of the Damned.

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Where Armageddon failed

I initially had a hard time writing my review of Red Faction: Armageddon. I almost fell into the same trap that caught me in my review of No More Heroes 2, another game that essentially abandoned an existing open-world concept, of reviewing the predecessor rather than the sequel. This was an enticing prospect, because I liked Red Faction: Guerilla a great deal, and I did not like Armageddon one little bit. I ultimately did the review the right way (it should be going up on GameCritics.com soon), but I still want to talk some more about Red Faction: Armageddon and why it's such a disappointment in juxtaposition to Guerilla

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The Hollow Man

Who is Cole Phelps?

Oh, I can recount the dry facts easily enough: lousy Marine officer who got a Silver Star anyway, good case man for the LAPD, affair with a German junkie, etc. What I'm curious about is the emotional life of the fellow. I spent upwards of twenty hours plodding around a sterile version of L.A. with the guy and I still don't have a clue. He's a lump, as unreadable and impenetrable as a copy of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft written in cuneiform on a lead brick. And we can't even blame it on lousy animation. L.A. Noire's problem is, instead, structural. It exists at the unhappiest place along the spectrum from movie to game, where the developers don't do enough to create characters, and fail to give the players any tools to do it themselves.

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Identity Crysis

Let me start by stating something important, which is that Crysis 2 is an excellent game and worth playing if you have ever enjoyed first-person shooters at all. The core design is very strong, especially the extent to which the nanosuit was tuned to make the player feel like a badass without feeling invulnerable. On many levels, however, I thought the game couldn't really decide what it wanted to be about. Is it a game about making sound tactical choices in an operation against a superior force, or is it a (bad) story about squid attacking New York City with a bioweapon?

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The trouble with Tripitaka

During the "Females on Female Characters" panel at PAX, Susan Arendt argued briefly in support of Tripitaka (Trip), a character from Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. This appreciation seemed bizarre to me, so the moment stuck in my mind. Enslaved was a gorgeous game with phenomenal voice acting, decently expressive gameplay, and very bad writing, of which I thought Trip was a prime example. The game apparently wants us to like and sympathize with Trip, but she struck me as a perfectly reprehensible person in general, and seemed to represent patriarchal stereotypes more than she undermined them.

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The Text Blues: But I Digress...

It seems like most of the people who wrote reviews of 999 thought very highly of it. I'm not sure why that was; I found the game to be a fairly tedious exercise in the repetition of insufficiently interesting puzzles. 999 creates this problem for itself because of its structure. The enforced replays that are central to 999's design and fiction ask for more from the puzzles and dialogue than they are able to contribute as art or entertainment. In addition to that, I felt that 999 had a tendency to undermine its plot and atmosphere during its moments of exposition, because it did not make proper use of the communicative elements on hand.

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The Text Blues: Silence is Leaden

A few days after the Christmas snowfall in Alabama, while we waited for the lasagna to finish cooking, we popped a copy of Epic Mickey into the Wii and I played a bit of it. I got past the first, easy battle and entered the hallway, where a cutscene began. My mother, who mostly plays Snood, wanted to know why Mickey wasn't speaking. "He's always talked," she noted, and for almost anyone alive that's true. Mickey started talking in 1929, just a year after his famous appearance in the sound-synched Steamboat Willie. Sound has been a famous part of Mickey's history, so it's alienating, especially to non-gamers, to run into an essentially silent version of the Mouse in Epic Mickey. I think the decision to eschew spoken dialogue is defensible, and even clever. However, I also feel that the way dialogue was handled didn't serve the game's aesthetic, because it replaced speech with text.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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