Capsule: Katamari Forever

Status: Normal mode and vast majority of drive mode complete

Put this on your box: Katamari is too unique to be derivative of anything else, so we made it derivative of itself!

Most intriguing idea: That a Katamari game would benefit from HD graphics. (It says "intriguing, folks, not "correct")

Best design decision: Katamari Drive compensates for some of the older games' deficiencies.

Worst design decision: The Prince's jump, which proves that the Move is an improvement on something.

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Why HisH doesn't fire until it sees the whites of PRFAR's eyes

The enzyme imidazole glycerophosphate synthase (IGPS) can be a bit of a lump. If you bind just one substrate it doesn't do anything, even though its two active sites are separated by more than 30 Å. Only if the second substrate also binds does catalysis actually go at anything like a respectable rate. In a recent paper in Structure researchers from Yale report evidence that this change of pace results from a change in dynamics.

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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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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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