Mandible Games

I’m afraid I’ve lied to you all.

In a previous entry I explained in depth why game worlds need to make sense – not just in terms of Game, but in terms of World. I claimed that your world needed to be consistent, to feel like a living, breathing, realistic location, not like it was summoned out of the ether to provide a backdrop for a half-naked Greek dude to violently slaughter things.

This is actually a load of horse hockey.

But it’s important to realize when it’s a load of horse hockey.

God of War. It’s one of the more successful recent franchises. God of War 1 was a Playstation 2 game, in which you played Kratos, a half-naked Greek dude who violently slaughtered things. I’m going to assume I don’t need to continue the joke here – you can probably figure out what God of War 2, God of War: Chains of Olympus, God of War: Betrayal, and the upcoming God of War 3 are about.

The important thing to realize about the God of War series, which sets it about as far away from Dead Space as is possible for it to be set, is that God of War is a myth. It’s not about some average-Joe engineer, thrust into a terrifying situation against his will. It’s about a living legend. Kratos, the Ghost of Sparta. Kratos, the Hand of the Gods. Kratos, the God of War. Kratos is the main character in a world which fundamentally revolves around him – he is Revenge, he is Fate, he is Destruction.

On top of that, Kratos is the main character in a game that is, itself, fundamentally about fate and gods. Scratch that – fundamentally about Fate and Gods. Both of those tend to bend the laws of probability around them. Unlikely things become expected when prophecy is involved. When Kratos makes his way through a half-destroyed forest of columns, swinging from one to another as they topple around him, we don’t think “ha ha, how silly, why were they all so precariously balanced in the first place, this game sucks” – we think “this is a test, we will vanquish the test and fulfill our destiny”. When you realize that half of the puzzles involve destroying large blocks of stone, thereby proving that the puzzle has never before in the history of the universe been solved, and that some of them actually rely on certain parts of the puzzle being age-worn and easily shatterable, we don’t think “ha ha, are we seriously expected to believe that Kratos was the first one here?” – we think “see how everything falls into place! Truly, we are the chosen one, and we cannot be stopped!”

This wouldn’t work in Dead Space. Dead Space is not a myth – Dead Space is a story. Isaac isn’t a Chosen One. Isaac is an unfortunate man in an unfortunate situation. The world does not care if Isaac lives or dies – Isaac can be shredded by industrial machinery, or devoured by zombies, or simply freeze to a cold lonely death in space, and fundamentally, nobody in that game will care (besides, obviously, Isaac.) Isaac isn’t being pushed through by the Forces of Fate, there is no greater being controlling his actions – he’s just a guy, trying to survive.

And this, incidentally, is one of the curious things about Star Wars. Star Wars is a myth about a random guy. On one hand, it is a myth – Luke Skywalker is the Chosen One. But on the other hand, Luke Skywalker is just some backwards hick from Tatooine. Most of the time, Star Wars feels like a story about some poor teenage dude who’s way, way, way in over his head. Luke gets his hand cut off. Han gets frozen in carbonite. Luke gets beat up. Luke gets dropped into a fighter cockpit and told “we’re all counting on you!” and, holy shit, they’re all counting on him! Even when Luke is being ridiculously badass and slaughtering dozens of stormtroopers, you kind of get the feeling he’s not quite sure what he’s doing here.

And then he ends up in the Emperor’s quarters, and everything shifts a little . . . and suddenly it’s not a story about Luke Skywalker, Desert Farmer, it’s a myth about Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight, and oh hey lookit that, there’s a reactor vent in just the right spot. What a coincidence! Almost as if it were fated to happen.

I’m not entirely convinced that shift was intentional. I think it was a lucky accident, and that the writers never sat down and said “okay, and here we change from story into myth”. I think they just wanted to throw the Emperor into a reactor core. If anything, this is what I want people to get out of this:

Myth is good. Story is good. But you have to understand which form you’re writing, and why.

And for bonus credit:

Arguably, I lied to you again. Sorry. Figure out where, and explain why it doesn’t matter. (You’ll need to know one of the two games I talked about in order to do so.) I’ll post more about this later.

Games, movies, and magic have one major thing in common – misdirection. Show people one thing, then indicate to them that they saw another, and usually they’ll believe you. In magic, it’s harder because they’re trying to figure out what you’re doing while you’re doing it. In movies, it’s easier because the person is really just going along for the ride. In games, it’s really easy, because the player is being assaulted by zombies and doesn’t have any attention to spare.

At least, they don’t the first time they play the game.

The second time, they’re probably paying a lot more attention to what’s going on around them. The zombies attacking, yeah, sure, they’re a problem – but we’ve dealt with them before. Let’s look at the other things around us!

This is when they discover how careful the game is at showing you exactly what they want you to see, and keeping you from doing anything besides what you’re supposed to.

Not supposed to go through a door yet? It’s locked. Got a cutscene to watch? I can guarantee every door leaving that room is locked – even if you just came through it ten seconds earlier. You can walk through a door, have it lock behind you, and then have the very same door unlock the instant you’re done with a cutscene or a movie. Happens all the time.

Sometimes they even force you to look in certain directions. Sometimes, this is to make you look at something you’re supposed to see. Sometimes, this is to make you look away from something you’re not supposed to see. In the first level, there’s an exploding shuttle. I bet you remember seeing it explode, right? It was really cool? No! You didn’t. Because you can’t have. The camera is jerked away from it at the last second, and when you turn back to it, it’s already exploded. You’re carefully prevented from seeing the exact moment it explodes.

The reason for that, of course, is that animating something large exploding in a realistic manner is expensive and hard. It’s easier to just not show it. And it works great . . . up until the person realizes what’s going on and decides to try exploring the boundaries.

This is a common issue in games. There are a good number of games out there that pretend you’re given choices, but actually prevent all choice. The Half-Life 2 series is a perfect example – the first time you play it feels like an exploration, but every time after that you realize, hey, wait, I’m not allowed to go anywhere else! That exploration feeling was a ripoff!

I should mention that this is not necessarily a bad thing. The fact is that most people will never start a second playthrough – in fact, many people won’t even finish the first. It’s arguably kind of silly to triple your budget by making content that 95% of your users will never even see. (It’s also arguably not. I’ll post an entry about this someday.) But it does mean that going through the game a second time is kind of like being invited backstage at a live performance, or having the magician explain his tricks – all those cute things you noticed the first time turn out to be your own fevered imagination running a bit too fast.

Solution? There isn’t one, besides solving the hard AI problem and writing programs that can generate content for us. Unfortunately, this is a ways off, and if we ever do solve it, we’ve put ourselves out of a job.

All I can say is: be aware of it, and try hard to keep the player from feeling constrained. At least, on the first playthrough.

Dead Space takes place on board the the USG Ishimura, a colossal “Planet Cracker”-class mining ship. It’s a ship designed to literally rip apart planets to feast on the tasty, tasty ore inside. The ship’s architecture varies from tight constricted maintenance corridors to huge open industrial spaces. At various points you visit the hydroponics bay, personal quarters, the medical bay, the bridge, and pretty much the entire set of possible important ship locations.

Most of the places you travel make sense in context of the ship’s purpose. There’s equipment suitable for its purpose, the layout is at least plausible, the lighting looks like it would be acceptable before zombies smashed up the place, etc. Some of the places do not make such sense. The ship is weirdly infested with inexplicable circuitous corridors. There are industrial areas that can best be described as mazes of walls. Why is there a maze in this ship? Did the crewmen just want a maze in their ship? There are strangely-placed high-speed trams that lead from one near-dead-end to another (the asteroid cannon being the most notable WTF moment). Why isn’t, you know, there just a door which is closer? Are you seriously saying there aren’t any other corridors within a kilometer? Overall, a good chunk of the ship just plain doesn’t make sense.

Now, if the ship were designed by zombies – yeah, sure, go for it, zombies are crazy, who knows how they’d design it. But they aren’t. It was designed by people. And when you’re told that you’re walking throughout a human-designed spaceship, and 3/4 of the ship makes perfect logical sense, those moments when you find yourself thinking “wait, why does this area even exist?” are painfully jarring. Why does this maze exist? Well, it exists because the game plans called for a maze, and by gum, we’re putting a maze in!

What’s the fix?

The only fix I can think of is to be excruciatingly careful that each location makes perfect sense, both for the game and in the context of the universe. It’s hard, it’s really hard, but I think it’s important. This isn’t an issue that’s restricted to games – it’s something movies get constantly wrong as well (please, explain to me why the Emperor’s chamber on board the Death Star has a hole leading directly to the reactor core without even a guard rail) – but that’s not an excuse, it just means we get more people to laugh at when we finally get good enough to avoid it.

For each zone, for each object in the game, you have to answer two questions. Why does the game contain this? Why does the world contain this?

If you can’t come up with good answers to both questions, get rid of it.

Traditional game animation is (mostly) pregenerated. An animator sits at a computer and carefully poses the motion of each limb. Eventually, you have a spider that crawls across the ceiling and shoots acid in your face. Done!

In motion, this looks pretty good. In death, it’s problematic. First, unless you’ve gone to the trouble of multiple death animations, creatures always die the same way. If you kill five hundred Basic Guards, you’ll end up with five hundred identically-posed corpses lying around. Uncool. Second, death animations have nothing to do with the weapon you kill them with. Poke them a thousand times with a needle? He’ll scream, fall over, and lie with his face on the ground. Shoot him with a portable nuclear warhead launcher? He’ll scream, fall over, and lie with his face on the ground. Uncool. Third, death animations tend to “snap” from other animations. Basic guard takes a flying leap, jumps at you, you kill him midair . . . and suddenly he plays the Death Animation, which involves him instantly standing up in midair, then screaming, falling over, and lying with his face on an imaginary ground, while his corpse eventually falls into a pit. Uncool.

There’s a solution to this. Games have gotten sophisticated enough that most modern 3d games include a basic physics engine. You don’t need perfect physics for this, something simple is pretty effective. Animations are already based on a simple skeletal model – arms have two “bones”, legs also have two “bones”, etc – and it’s easy enough to allow these bones to just move via the laws of inertia and behave properly on impact.

So you kill someone on a tower of boxes, his corpse will tumble down the boxes. You shoot someone with an air cannon while he’s standing in front of a railing, he’ll backflip over the railing. Rocket launcher to the feet? Flying guard corpse! Cool.

There’s problems. (Of course there’s problems. You think I’d be writing about it if it really were that simple?)

Ragdolls tend to be used only for actual death. It’s just too hard to recover from a ragdoll collapse if the creature isn’t actually dead. You knock a Basic Guard into a pile of boxes and he gets jackknifed between two – how does your Basic Guard recover from this? He doesn’t, but now there’s a living Basic Guard jammed uncomfortably into a pile of boxes. It doesn’t work well. So ragdolls are only used for death.

But that introduces a new, irritating problem. Ragdolls can be used to detect death. Dead Space includes a gun that fires a shockwave which knocks things down. When knocked down, a lot of the zombies will cheerfully play dead, only to eviscerate you when you turn your back on them. However, it’s trivial to determine if they’re dead or not. See, when you knock them down, they always fall on their backs, with their legs facing you, and their left leg (from your perspective) slightly lower than their right leg. I know this very well from knocking down dozens and dozens of zombies this way.

When I see them fall down this way, I know they’re just going to get up again in a few seconds. When I see them fall down any other way, I know the ragdoll mechanic kicked in, therefore I know they’re dead, and therefore I can forget about them.

It’s not very suspenseful.

I’m not sure what the solution is. It really is incredibly hard to recover smoothly from a ragdoll-based collapse. On the other hand, unless you have your artists make dozens of death animations, it’ll always be easy to distinguish a “real” ragdoll death from a “fake” non-ragdoll death.

But it’s a problem, and in a game like Dead Space, where detecting Proper Death is a very valuable skill, it’s distracting like you wouldn’t believe.

Dead Space is a fantastic, fantastic game.

Dead Space is a third-person science-fiction horror game. Your character exists. A large spaceship exists. A shitton of zombies exist. Mix and enjoy. Technically, other humans exist as well, but in terms of gameplay they’re really only there for cutscenes.

There is you, and the ship, and zombies, with the zombies attacking you when you do not expect it and scaring the crap out of you. This is not Doom-style “a closet opens in the wall and a monster pops out, and you kill it, and you grab the health pack in the closet, and a second, smaller closet opens up and another monster pops out”. This is “you hear a squeaking down the hallway and moving shadows, and you inch around the corner and finally see a bloody corpse hanging from its neck through a vent shaft, and then you turn around and something tries to claw off your face before vanishing through a hole in the floor. Also, there’s clanging noises and screams coming from around you.”

It’s actually quite, quite creepy, and extraordinarily well-done. I quite recommend picking it up, assuming you enjoy playing scary things.

As anyone who’s been reading this journal knows, this means I’m going to complain about it. That’s just the way things seem to be going.

Dead Space is an immersive game. If you’re “playing a game”, zombies aren’t going to scare you. If you’re actually fighting your way through a derelict spacecraft, they are. One of the critical and most difficult parts to any immersive game is to not break immersion. This is hard. Very hard. Dead Space goes to extraordinary lengths not to do so. For example, there’s no HUD in Dead Space. You can see your health by looking at your character’s back (third-person, remember). Your inventory screen, and any windows or tooltips that pop up, do so via in-game holograms that exist in 3d space. Turn the camera and you can see the hologram from another angle. Monster jumps at you, and, well, it’s not like the game pauses – now you’ve got a monster on your face with an inventory screen obscuring your vision. Good move, dude. Video cutscenes? Another hologram projection from your helmet. “Click here to pick this item up”? Another hologram projection, centered on the item. Everything – and I do mean absolutely everything – exists within 3d space in the game world.

Largely, it works. We, as game developers in general, have gotten better at this sort of thing. It’s a constant battle, but one we’re winning.

Mostly.

Dead Space has three problems that I’ve found. Three big, complicated problems, that deserve their own entries. So I’m giving them their own entries. Yeah, this is a series. So there’ll be another post in a few days.

But I’ll end this with a question:

What common, constantly-ignored immersion issues do you see in games? What common problem causes you to go “hey, wait! This isn’t real!”

And how can it be fixed?

LocoRoco: Cocoreccho

Developer: Sony

Completion level: Not even close

Spoilers: I’m not sure how this would be possible.

I just got a PS3.

What this means is that you may be bombarded with short dissections of short downloadable games. I might eventually make a post about the PS3 in general (summary: it’s pretty dang awesome now and Microsoft’s lunch is about to be eaten by Sony) but I may not.

The thing about small short games is that some of them are really really weird. Cocoreccho is an exception to this, mostly because I’m not entirely sure it’s a game.

LocoRoco was originally a PSP game. You played the Earth, and tilted your surface to help a bunch of singing blobs defeat a small army of flying dreadlocked heads. I swear I am not making this up. If you think the gameplay sounds distinctive, the art style was even more so, consisting entirely of deformable solid-color 2d cutouts – on the PSP, no less, where most people were expecting gore and explosions. Add to that one of the most catchy and cheerful soundtracks I’ve heard in a long time (keep in mind your blobs sing along, with lipsynched animations, in chorus) and LocoRoco made Nintendo games look dull, stodgy, and moderately depressed.

It’s a great game, and I highly recommend it. It’s also a near-natural fit for the PS3’s tilt sensor. All they had to do was port it over, add a bunch more levels, bam! Game!

What they actually made was, in the words of the lead developer, an “interactive screensaver”.

You still have a large number of singing blobs (it wouldn’t be a LocoRoco game without singing blobs) but instead of getting from one side of the linear level to another, you are instead exploring what can be best described as a humongous Thing. Its behavior will be familiar to anyone who’s played the PSP game, as it includes spinny things, bouncy things, sloped things, things with holes, and every other joyous device that we’re used to from the PSP game. Your goal is to move a magical butterfly around which attracts singing blobs, use that explore the Thing, find more singing blobs, and wake them up.

That’s the game.

Unlike the PSP game, your little blobs have more autonomy than they did before. The Thing has several large “loops” of behavior in it, where the blobs will naturally wander down slops and jump into new areas with wind blowing them back up to the beginning, and your blobs will generally follow the loops on their own, meaning that even if you’re not really paying attention they’ll be wandering around the level without any help required. This is pretty dang neat – in many places you can just point the screen at a segment and let it sit while blobs fly through it. I’m pretty sure this is where the whole “interactive screensaver” part comes from.

Unfortunately, as a screensaver, it’s a bit of a failure. You see, the screen itself doesn’t move around. Wherever you leave it, that’s what you’re going to be looking at until you move it again. And while the blobs are largely self-motivating, the areas they travel through automatically aren’t really particularly interesting. In order to make them do anything of interest, you have to not only control the butterfly manually, but you have to know where the interesting things are – making it impossible to just sit down and poke at it for a few minutes. Getting anywhere really interesting can easily take fifteen minutes to half an hour of work.

Which is a pity, because I think the idea of an interesting interactive screensaver that could be left on is a really cool one.

I’m going to diverge into philosophy here for a second. Games started as a thing that was Not Business. If you were using a computer for it, it was either Business or Games. It took quite a while for computers to be used seriously for any other sort of recreation (like reading blogs) and even then, it pretty much came down to Business, Games, or Communication.

We’re finally moving into using computers for other things. Cocoreccho is something I would consider Art. It’s clearly meant to be art, on some level. Unfortunately, it’s art jammed into the mold of Game. The artistic things they could have done have been hampered by their desire to make something that should be both played and won. Which is, I have to say, sad. It could have been something More – but it isn’t, and it won’t be, because it’s a game and it’s proved unable to break out of the template of Game.

Cocoreccho is interesting. I’m not sure it’s good. But it’s interesting, and if what I’ve been talking about intrigues you, and you have a PS3, you might want to check it out.

Phoenix Wright: Justice for All

Developer: Capcom

Completion level: Finished game

Spoilers: Plotline may be spoiled. Sorry. Finish the game first.

Many many years ago, there was a developer named Sierra, who made adventure games.

You played a character (and oh boy, some of them were Characters) who wandered throughout a world, usually a strange, bizarre, twisted world, generally with some goal in mind. (Not always with a goal in mind.) You collected random items as you went and jammed them in your inventory. There were puzzles. You solved puzzles, frequently using your inventory, the “plot” continued, and the games were well-received and quite enjoyed at the time.

In retrospect, most of the old Sierra games were terrible.

I don’t mean the graphics weren’t up to our current standards, because obviously they weren’t, we’re talking really old games. I mean the gameplay was atrocious. The games penalized you for exploring (by dying), they penalized you for logical deduction (by dying), they penalized you for taking a reasonable approach to the problems (by dying), and even if you somehow managed to pass all the hurdles and read the developer’s mind you would still frequently end up in a spot where you couldn’t possibly finish the game . . . with no way of knowing that you were stuck. And when I say “read the developer’s mind”, I really do mean “read the developer’s mind” – puzzles were byzantine at best, and at worst they were an exercise in surrealism that has rarely been matched since.

Adventure games got more and more complicated, increasingly weird and unsolvable, and nobody realized it. Hell, I didn’t realize it at the time – I loved those games, and it’s only looking back on them that I realize how much sheer frustration and guesswork went into playing them. People stopped buying them, they died a grisly protracted death, and considering that Sierra was responsible for much of the genre at that point, I place most of that responsibility squarely on Sierra. Adventure games became entertainment non grata in the industry, and roleplaying games sort of awkwardly shuffled into the niche that adventure games had previously filled.

Many many many many many years ago, there was a developer called Infocom. They made “interactive fiction” games. You had an inventory, you solved puzzles, the puzzles got increasingly complicated and byzantine over time . . . you see where this is going?

Infocom doesn’t exist anymore.

Yeah, I bet you did see where that was going.

Phoenix Wright is a game about a defense attorney.

Each game is broken up into four or five independent cases. At the beginning of the game, someone is murdered. Someone else will be accused of murder. You defend that person.

The gameplay consists of two segments, which often repeat several times within a case. Occasionally, you’ll be in court, picking holes in the witnesses’ testimonies, using court evidence and their own words to ferret out the truth. This is amazingly fun. The developers did a wonderful job of making it suspenseful, through music, dialogue, and fabulous art. Alternatively, you might have to inspect the crime scene, interview witnesses, interview people who you can call to the witness stand, etc etc. This part isn’t quite as fun, for me at least, but it’s still damn entertaining and it makes the first part all the better.

“I’ve never held any sort of weapon. I’ve never even touched one!” “OBJECTION! Why are your fingerprints on this sword, then?” “Where . . . where did you get that? That . . . it must be a mistake!” “From a broken locker . . . behind your car. With your fingerprints on the lock!” “Nooooooo!”

Phoenix Wright puts a lot of work into ensuring that you can’t get yourself stuck. For example, there’s no “I’m done, go to court!” button – if there’s stuff left to discover, then you keep wandering around until there isn’t. If there isn’t, you go to court immediately. The same philosophy works its way into the entire game. If you’ve discovered all you can from a witness, the cross-examination ends. If you haven’t, it doesn’t. At all points, you know you have what you need to finish the next segment, because if you didn’t have it, you wouldn’t be here.

The end result of this is that, generally, it’s obvious what you’re supposed to do. Either you need to wander around the game world a bit more and look for more clues, or you need to find a contradiction in what the witness is saying right now. The upside to this is that it pushes you along in the game at a reasonably nice clip. The downside is that the game becomes rather linear, which exacerbated by the occasional “false choice” – you’re given a choice, yet all the choices lead to the same path. Still, the writing is skillful enough that you usually don’t notice these unless you’re watching for them or replaying the game (and, let’s be honest here, these games have zero replayability.)

The game almost pulls everything off flawlessly, and if I was writing about the first game in the series, I’d say it did – because the first game did. I ran into some trouble in this game, and it worries me.

Basically, the cases are getting more complicated.

There’s more stuff going on. There’s more surrealism. The puzzles aren’t byzantine yet . . . but they’re sort of nudging around the edges of it. They’re considering it. If I was a history major you’d be getting a cute historical joke involving “not being byzantine yet”, but I’m not, so just pretend there’s one here.

This creates some issues with the linear Phoenix Wright gameplay – namely, that you can occasionally logic things out better than Phoenix did, and you get penalized for it. And sometimes, even though you know exactly what you want to say, you can’t figure out how to say it within the confines of the game.

I’m going to spoil the hell out of the third case here, so, y’know, consider yourself warned.

The third case takes place in a circus. The ringmaster was found dead, the magician is a suspect, you’re defending the magician, blah blah blah. The real criminal is the acrobat, and at a late point in the game you’ve figured out that he had both motive and opportunity, but you’re still pinning down the details on how it happened.

Well, I wasn’t pinning down the details. I’d figured it out. His pet monkey helped him. (This is not abnormal in a Phoenix Wright game.) So when the judge asked if the acrobat had an accomplice . . . well, yeah, he did. It was the monkey. Duh.

But you’re not supposed to realize this at that point in the game. Despite being right, that was the wrong answer. I was not conforming to the exact pattern they wanted, and the game penalized me for it, and I had to work gradually through the guesswork they wanted me to guess at . . . eventually coming to the conclusion that, hey, the monkey helped him. The entire process was extraordinarily difficult, as it’s very hard to figure out what they want you to say when, in fact, you know the right answer but aren’t supposed to.

In a game like this it is vital to playtest thoroughly – ridiculously thoroughly – so you can see where people get stuck, and where people think too much and come up with an answer they’re not yet supposed to have, and figure out how to design the game so that neither of those are a problem. And this is really really hard, especially when you’re trying to make a game which is essentially linear.

There’s two more games in the series that I haven’t played yet (okay, the most recent one is Ace Apollo, not Phoenix Wright, but it’s still the same series) and at least one spinoff being produced. It is entirely possible that they’ve recognized and fixed the problem by then.

But it’s also possible they haven’t. And this worries me, quite a bit. We’re finally rejuvenating the old adventure game genre, after Infocom damaged it and Sierra did its best to finish the genre off. It’s a good genre. There’s a lot of fun to be had, there’s a lot of entertainment, and I don’t want to see it gone . . . but it’s also a genre that’s very easy to do badly, and very hard to do well, and painfully hard to tell the difference.

Still, I’m looking forward to the next game. We’ll see.

Patapon

Developer: Pyramid

Completion level: Finished game, not 100%

Spoilers: I am not going to spoil the plotline. I will be spoiling the gameplay mechanics. If you’re planning to play the game, however, you may want these spoiled for you.

I swear, it took me a week to figure out what I wanted to say here.

I keep notes on games as I play them, y’see. Anything that annoys me, anything that impresses me, any thoughts I have, it all goes into the notes. Eventually I finish the game, and I write up a dissection based on my notes.

Patapon has more notes than every single dissection you’ve seen so far put together – as well as two you haven’t. To say that I am divided on this game would be an understatement.

So let’s start at the beginning.

Patapon is a sidescrolling rhythm game. You control a bunch of little mobile eyeballs with weapons named Patapons, and you “control” them in a moderately indirect manner that takes the form of a rhythm game. You have a set of “commands”, and if you punch in the commands with the right rhythm, your little eyeballs do things.

Once you finish a level – whose goals are virtually always either “get to the end of the level” or “kill a boss” – you are returned to the Patapon Village, where you can play various minigames, buy and upgrade Patapons, and go out to a new level.

That’s the game.

First off, the game is pretty – I mean, look at that picture up there, that’s almost exactly what the game looks like. You fight giant enemies, ten times the height of any of your warrior eyeballs, weapons visibly stick in them as you fight, the animation is brilliant, etc etc etc I don’t really have a lot to say about the graphics besides “yum”. It’s worth buying just for the awesome visuals.

Besides that, though – Patapon has issues. Big, humongous issues. And it took me days to figure out why.

First off, your units do not have a vast repertoire of abilities. They have, for example, “move right”, and “attack”. They can also “defend”, “run away”, and “charge up the next attack”. You’ll never use “charge”. You may notice this gives you four useful abilities . . . in the entire game . . . and you would be exactly right. You will be doing those four things over and over again. There’s one more ability – “magic” – but to be honest you’ll use that one perhaps twice in the entire game. You see, it ends Fever Mode, and that’s something you never want to have happen.

So there’s the first problem – there’s no variety. Fundamentally you just don’t do many things in the game, and you do them over and over again.

The next problem is Fever Mode.

Patapon is, as I mentioned, a rhythm game. Each of the abovementioned “attacks” is four drum beats, which you press in rhythm. If you get the rhythm right, consistently, then your Patapons eventually enter “Fever Mode” and become useful.

Yeah, read that again. If they’re not in Fever Mode they are basically useless. Archer units fire three times as many arrows in Fever Mode and I think each of them does more damage. Mounted units gain the only ability that makes them worth bringing along. Units run away faster and go further – without Fever Mode they kind of run away, a bit, and then get stomped by the huge range of the enemy you’re currently fighting. Their defense gets stronger, their speed goes up, everything your units do is vastly improved, with the end result that your performance is directly correlated to how long you can maintain Fever Mode.

And Fever Mode is a fractious, unruly beast-queen. The manual is unclear on how it starts and ends. Sometimes you’ll enter it after a mere three commands, sometimes it will take ten. Sometimes you’ll have no trouble staying in it for long periods of time. Sometimes it will end for no obvious reason, even when the commands seem to have been input correctly. A frustratingly large amount of the time it will end on the very next command after you enter it. The timing that you need to push buttons is extremely tight, and there’s no visual or auditory clue as to whether you’re too early or too late. There is an auditory clue as to how close to the beat you are, but it’s subtle and if you start concentrating on it you’re almost certain to miss your timing a little bit – which sort of defeats the point of concentrating on it. On top of that, the mechanics involved with Fever Mode are byzantine and complicated, and never explained anywhere. More than once, especially at the beginning of the game, you’ll be fighting a boss, and you’ll think “oh, maybe I will beat him this time!” and then you’ll drop out of Fever Mode randomly and get slaughtered.

Yes, there are bosses that will one-shot your entire army.

Unless you’re in Fever Mode, of course.

And to cap things off, there’s the Patapon Village. You can buy new Patapons, but apparently randomly you’ll get a different kind of patapon – maybe one with bunny ears that can’t use armor? Maybe one that looks like a hedgehog! Or, hey, this one has angel wings. Unless you’re extremely observant you’re just not going to figure out what causes different Patapon types until you – like me – go and check a walkthrough.

It took me about a week to figure out what the underlying cause to all of this annoyance was.

There’s a concept I’ve heard of which is occasionally called an “expert interface”. The idea is that it’s an interface designed explicitly for experts to use it – not for novices. A lot of professional 3d software has this sort of interface – it has a grueling, brutal learning curve, but once you learn it you’re able to work incredibly fast – far faster than you would be able to work with a “novice interface”. Often these interfaces include many byzantine and inexplicable key combinations, and every aspect of them is chosen for speed of work rather than intuitiveness.

Patapon is an expert game.

The game isn’t designed for newbies. It isn’t designed for casual gamers. It’s designed for people who are willing to sit down and absolutely master the interface, and it’s designed to still give them a good gameplay experience once they do so. Experts don’t need to be told whether they were just a little too fast or a little too slow on a button-push – they just know. Experts know that dropping Fever Mode is probably death, and they just won’t drop it. Experts will understand the nooks and crannies of the interface and, honestly, probably won’t even notice them.

Patapon does a really good job of being an expert game.

Once you figure it out – which takes quite a while, admittedly – it has amazing flow. Yes, there’s only four things you’ll realistically be doing, but it like you’re coordinating the movement of all your little suicidal patapons rather than simply giving them orders. Enemy ahead! Pata pata pata pon! Attack! Pon pon pata pon! Keep attacking! Pon pon pata pon! Dodge, pon pata pon pata! Pata pata pata pon! Pon pon pata pon! Chaka chaka pata pon, pon pon pata pon, pata pata pata pon, pon pon chaka chaka, pon pon pata pon!

(Don do-don do-don.)

And that’s when the game shines – when you’re no longer fighting with Fever Mode, when you’re not trying to decipher what the hell a “Mofeel” is and where it came from, when you’re just assaulting these ridiculously gigantic and fantastic monsters with your army of little eyeballs.

It’s worth talking about Expert Games a little more, because I expect that this is going to come up again. I don’t think the people who made Patapon intentionally made an expert game, because if you intentionally make an expert game, you generally think to include a good detailed tutorial.

Accidentally making an Expert Game is unfortunately easy. It’s a common trap to fall into in game design. The game is yours, therefore you know everything about it. The mechanics are clear to you (since you know them all by heart) and therefore you see no problem with learning them. You can make a game which is fun, balanced, and polished, and then release it to the world and . . . nobody can figure out how to play it.

This is, incidentally, sometimes I’ve tangled with constantly in Devastation Net. Devastation Net is an expert game. You’re meant to get to the point where you fundamentally know the weaponry, and where you fundamentally know the abilities of tanks, and that is when the strategy takes place. Partially I’m trying to solve this by making all of the game balance numbers available to you, and in your face – move the cursor over a tank, you instantly see how tough it is and how fast it is. Choose a weapon and you should quickly see how it works. Partially, though, I’m having trouble with the learning curve, because teaching people things is hard, especially when it’s an uncommon game style.

Unfortunately it’s really not something game designers have much experience with in multiplayer games. Generally, the way you teach the game to someone is you lead the player through a single-player campaign that unlocks things one step at a time. That just doesn’t work with a multiplayer game.

I’m still trying to find a good solution, to be honest.

I’ve rambled on long enough at this point.

Patapon is a beautiful game. It is also a fun game, once you get past the initial learning curve. Don’t be afraid to check a walkthrough on this one – read everything except the mission descriptions, and you’ll be thankful.

Super Smash Brothers Brawl

Developer: Nintendo

Completion level: Beat Subspace Emissary

This is going to be an extraordinarily short one.

I wasn’t even sure I would write on this topic for a while. What do you say about SSBB? It’s got standard Mario-style graphics (I touched on this in the Mario Galaxy dissection), it’s been painstakingly balanced to a knife-edge, and it’s hugely popular. I was originally just planning to note that, yes, I played it, and really didn’t have anything to say about it. They don’t do anything particularly notable extraordinarily right, and they certainly don’t do anything wrong. So there we have it.

But there’s one thing I decided I wanted to say.

SSBB has a single-player mode called the Subspace Emissary. In this mode, Mario and Co team up to defeat the Bad Guys. Most of the missions include a rendered cutscene at the beginning and the end, showing the interactions between the characters and the inevitable action-movie-esque “Hey! You really are on our side!” moments.

The cutscenes are fantastic.

They’re funny. They’re entertaining. They’re beautiful. They do a phenomenal job of setting the stage without ever actually interfering with the player’s enjoyment of the game. There’s no Final Fantasy “okay, go get a snack, you’re going to be here for twenty minutes” moments. There isn’t a single cutscene that becomes boring. They’re just all excellent.

And they’re done almost entirely without dialog.

I think Snake says something when he shows up for the first time. That’s all, though.

The interactions are shown with body language – and considering that we’re talking body language between an anthropomorphic fox, a mobile pink marshmallow, a monkey, and a lot of robots, this is a nontrivial task. These aren’t even simple interactions. There’s betrayal, there are turncoats, there are characters whose motives are unclear and contradictory in the beginning . . . and all of it is explained by the end. Nonverbally. It’s really incredibly impressive, and if you don’t plan to play the game, I actually recommend watching them. 1 2 3 4 5 6. Yeah, that’s about an hour of video. If you don’t want to watch that much, at least check out the Donkey Kong/Fox arc – 6:00 to 7:30, 1:50 to 3:40, and 7:55 to the end.

You’ll notice that this clip is in Japanese. You’ll also note that it doesn’t matter. The only thing you miss is what the names of the various characters are. Even with those short Japanese clips, you get a reasonable idea of their personalities and interactions.

That’s damn impressive.

I think, in my next game, I’m going to try hard to make the game’s plotline understandable with dialog removed. I do plan to have dialog – but I’ll add the dialog after the game makes sense without it.

And that’s really all I have to say on this game.

Yeah. I just wrote a page about Super Smash Brother Brawl, focused entirely on the cutscenes in Subspace Emissary mode. Deal with it.

Super Mario Galaxy

Developer: Nintendo

Completion level: 100% completed

This is NOT a spoiler-free review. In fact, in the next line I plan to spoil the entire plot of the game.

Okay. So there’s this princess, right? And she gets kidnapped by a giant dinosaur named Bowser. I know you’re shocked by this. I was too. But luckily, help is on the way! Some guy named Mario – who is apparently a plumber – rescues her.

That’s the plot.

It may sound familiar to you.

At the moment, there are, as I would count them, three major lines of Mario games. First, and best-known, are the Mario sidescrollers, starting with Super Mario Brothers and continuing up through Super Paper Mario. Second are the roleplaying games, which I believe started with Super Mario RPG and somewhat branched with the Paper Mario series and Superstar Saga series. And last, there’s the 3D exploration games, including Mario 64, Mario Sunshine, and Mario Galaxy.

You’ll notice a bit of confusion – I’m calling Super Paper Mario a sidescroller, but I’m also mentioning how the Paper Mario series is a roleplaying game. Super Paper Mario is an experimental intersection of sidescroller and roleplaying game. Nintendo has never been one to keep its games locked in tightly-defined precise boxes – Nintendo’s built around fun. They make games which are fun, and if a certain convention gets in the way of making the game they want, the convention gets thrown away.

For example: lush, spectacular graphics. Mario games don’t have those.

Their graphics certainly aren’t bad. The art is always good, and it’s always reasonably high-end by the standards of the console. But it’s designed to be effective. it’s not designed to be spectacular. it’s not designed to be flashy. it’s designed to convey how the world is constructed, and hold to a theme, and be consistent. All of which it succeeds at, quite nicely, but nobody will ever say “Oh man, did you see the latest Mario game? I didn’t know video games could look like that!”

We all knew video games could look like that. We saw it in the last Mario game. This one just has more triangles.

Plot is another thing that, with the exception of the roleplaying line, Mario games just don’t do. There’s a princess. She gets kidnapped by Bowser. Mario defeats Bowser. Everyone lives happily ever after, inevitably including Bowser, who, don’t worry, will try again next game. I don’t even want to think about how many times Peach has been kidnapped – I suspect she’s playing along with it at this point. Nothing else could possibly explain it. (At some point I should write about how Mario isn’t based in story, it’s based in myth. This is not that entry.)

So. “3D Exploration Game”? What’s that?

The Mario 64 series has a gameplay style which I honestly can’t say I’ve seen in any other game ever. Your goal (”save the princess”) is governed by a very simple game mechanic: a series of things you must collect. In Mario 64 it was stars. In Mario Galaxy, well, it’s stars. In Mario Sunshine you had to defeat Shadow Marios, and the way you got to them was by collecting “shines” . . . which look exactly like stars.

The game inevitably consists of a number of major areas – from seven up to around fifteen – and each one contains a number of stars, generally from six to eight. On top of that there’s some number of minor areas that include one or two stars each. In order to unlock a new major area, you collect a bunch of stars. In order to unlock a new minor area, you collect a bunch of stars.

You can probably see a theme here.

There are some variations. Mario Galaxy divides its “galaxies” up into six groups, and to unlock the next groups you have to collect the single Grand Star. There are green stars, and red stars, and comets, and star bits, and hungry Lumas who eat star bits and explode forming into new galaxies which you can travel to and, surprise surprise, get a star. But fundamentally, the game comes down to:

1. Collect a star.
2. Can you fight the end boss? If so, go do it.
3. Can you fight a midboss? If so, go do it.
4. Return to step 1.

And this is one of the series’s greatest strengths. There’s never any question on what you should do next. You should go find another star. The game is carefully balanced so that, once you get past the first few stars, you always have several options on where to go next. If you get stuck on one particular zone, or decide that you don’t really want to dodge fireballs today and you’d rather go play with flowers or space stations, you can always take a break and try another area.

It’s a brilliantly simple game mechanic, but unfortunately I think Mario Galaxy missed one of the things that made Mario 64 great.

As I mentioned, most areas contain multiple stars. But in Mario 64, you can frequently pick up the “wrong star”. Maybe you’re meant to go ice skating, but instead you explore in the wrong direction and end up on top of the mountain. There’s a star on top of the mountain, but despite the fact that the game said “Time for ice skating!” you haven’t done any ice skating. That’s okay. We can work with this. You can grab the star, and head back into the zone, and it’ll say “Congratulations! You found the MOUNTAIN CLIMBER star! Your next star is: ICE SKATING.” And then, when it would have normally said “Let’s go climb a mountain!”, it just skips that one – after all, you already found the mountain star – and sends you off to fight a Yeti, or collect a ton of coins, or race a penguin or something. Many of which you could have done instead of ice skating or mountain climbing.

In Mario 64, exploration is heavily rewarded. Each zone has several stars you can get at any point, and while you’re encouraged to get the “next one”, there’s absolutely nothing forcing you. In Mario Galaxy, this is no longer the case. The vast majority of the time, only one star even exists in an area at a time. There are a small number of hidden stars – precisely one per area – but that hidden star only exists if you choose the right “non-hidden” star to go after. If you choose ICE SKATING you can get to MOUNTAIN CLIMBER also. If you choose YETI SLAYING you’re going to go slay that yeti, or fail, and there simply aren’t any other options. Have fun, good luck.

And that’s sort of sad. In Mario 64 I felt like I could just wander wherever I felt like. Some feature of the landscape look interesting? Chances are good there’s a star there. Find a wall that looks challenging to climb, but still possible? Probably a star at the top. Whereas Mario Galaxy, once you choose what star to retrieve, is an annoyingly linear game. The exploration is gone, and for a game that balances right on the edge of having a glorious sense of wonder about it, Mario Galaxy stops just short of what I was hoping for.

(As I’m imagining the game I wanted Galaxy to be, I get much of the same feeling as I did with much of Aquaria – the feeling that there’s a small universe out there just waiting for me to find it. I didn’t get that feeling at all in Galaxy.)

There’s two other things I want to mention, but they’re both pretty short.

Like most Mario games, the developers have decided to spend the time to write quite a large number of minigames and game mechanics that only show up once or twice. There’s a section with you balancing on top of a giant sphere, for example. There’s a racing section with riding stingrays on top of a (completely awesome-looking) floating water course. There’s a quite neat segment with “spotlights” that cause matter to exist – if you jump in an area without a spotlight, you fall endlessly to your doom. In fact, there are exactly two sections of each of these. Despite all the trouble that these are to implement, the game designers saw fit to only use the code twice, in the entire game.

Partially this is annoying. Racing is fun. I want to do more of it! But on the other hand, it also neatly prevents burnout. I’m sure everyone reading this has seen a game which was fun at the beginning, but frustrating at the end. (Puzzle Quest is my most recent example of this.) Mario Galaxy doesn’t do that. It doesn’t even come close.

“Leave the audience wanting more.” There’s no other way to say it, and there’s no better way to get the player excited to try out your next game. After all, maybe there’ll be more stingray racing!

And finally, I noticed some neat subtlety with the music. The music actually changes depending on what you’re doing – some tracks fade in, some fade out, and the music rapidly morphs to emphasize whatever you’re currently doing. This is an amazingly powerful and beautiful technique, and I do not know why more companies don’t do this. Nintendo’s been doing this ever since the Super Nintendo (go jump on Yoshi in Super Mario World, the music is slightly different if you’re riding Yoshi) and it’s something I never see in other games. For a simple example, enter any Bowser boss fight – if you didn’t notice this when playing, I recommend checking it out. It’s worth it.

Summary.

Good game. Polished to a phenomenal level. Effort and money was spent on gameplay gameplay gameplay – not spectacular special effects, not a riveting plot, but on making sure the game was fun in every possible way. Game lacks the exploration sense that Mario 64 had, which I feel is a loss, but gets just about everything else right.

There’s a reason Nintendo is doing well right now, and Mario Galaxy is a great example of it.