marginalia 7.9.09

GameSpy:  And another franchise gets a major reboot.  MechWarrior will be lumbering onto shelves sometime in the near future.

GameDaily: Activision is delaying some game called Singularity because some game called Modern Warfare 2 is coming out.

GoErie.com: Get ready for more Angry Teen Youtube videos.  Check out the "GameDr," a timer that parents can configure to shut off consoles after a predetermined period of play.  Looks like we'll take more gadgets over hands-on parenting any day of the week.

Destructoid: Command & Conquer 4 announced. They must have heard my bitching.

Gamasutra: Come on, people. How hard is it to release functional DLC?

Joystiq: The Modern Warfare franchise isn’t ready to ditch the safety of the Call of Duty brand just yet.

Continue...

the future of portable gaming

Nintendo and Sony, those titans of portable gaming, are doing a pretty okay job. Nintendo has created a well-loved and versatile juggernaut in its DS, and Sony has made a solid if directionless dent in Nintendo’s marketshare with its well-intentioned PSP. But where does handheld gaming go from here?

To find the answer to this question, you have to look at companies with little interest in competing with the DS and PSP: Microsoft and Apple. If the lackluster DSi refresh and the interesting-but-certainly-inconsequential PSP Go! are any indication, these two companies are content to rest on their laurels – both platforms are right around their fifth birthdays, and despite persistent rumors Our Benefactors in Japan don’t seem to be interested in updating their handhelds in any significant ways. The third and most recent of the Big Three, Microsoft, seems totally uninterested in creating a handheld gaming platform, but I think a lot of the ideas that have made their Xbox platform such a success could go a long way in the portable space. By the same token, Apple seems uninterested in positioning the iPod Touch and the iPhone against the DS and the PSP, but that platform also strongly informs the future of handhelds.

The first and most obvious innovation is Internet integration, which the iPhone and the Xbox 360 have firmly established – it’s hard to believe, but Sony and Nintendo have had years to challenge Live and haven’t yet managed success.

This failure to compete has bled into their handheld products – the DS is only peripherally aware of the Internet, and while the DSi takes steps to correct this I don’t know that DSiWare has yet proven itself in the eyes of gamers. Sony, despite being very close to releasing a handheld which relies exclusively on the Internet for all its content, hasn’t made as strong a case with the PSP as they might have. Full PlayStation network connectivity was added only recently and the interface is still clunky, and their Web browser doesn’t have anything on the iPhone. Trophy support remains elusive. I like the PSP’s Internet connectivity features, I just wish there were more.

An ideal handheld would steal from Microsoft their Xbox Live integration – Achievements, messages, chats, and Live Parties across platforms, and full access to the game and video content of the Xbox Live Marketplace. From Apple, you’d want to take an excellent and fully-functional Web browser, productivity apps to go with your games, and perhaps the ability to connect to their Internet via cell phone networks. The ubiquity of the Internet is key to the iPhone as a platform, and if Nintendo and Sony teamed up with phone companies to offer some sort of data plan, my bet is that there would be interested parties.

Another page to steal from the Apple playbook is, of course, multi-touch – this is different from the DS’s touch screen, which can only interpret one touch at a time. I’m honestly surprised that no one has tried this before now. There was some speculation that the DSi might include multi-touch functionality, though that was ultimately unfounded, and the PSP’s large screen and awkward typing interface are just begging for a good touchscreen to fix all their problems. With the next version of Windows and the Mac OS both touting touchscreen-centric control schemes, the inclusion of multi-touch in the next generation of handhelds is a no-brainer.

User-interface improvements are also a must. Never has it been more evident that Sony and Nintendo are not software companies. The Wii and the DS are usable but Spartan, and Sony’s XMB is a good start but throws things together into groups that sometimes do not make sense. The Xbox 360’s New Xbox Experience is a slick and coherent user interface that gets you where you need to go while also cramming in the requisite extra content and advertisements. The iPhone’s strengths are its ease-of-use and customization. The ability to move different icons around as I’d like sounds simple, so why can I only do this on my iPod?

I like my DS and I like my PSP. They both provide good game experiences and, largely, they’ve both been accepted by gamers. This is no reason to keep churning out mediocre refreshes, though – user interfaces and Internet connectivity have defined this generation of consoles, and those factors are only going to become more important as time goes on. It’s time for your Game Boy to catch up.

Continue...

Marginalia 7.8.9

DailyTech: Sony to Activision: Shut uuuup.

Joystiq: The Japanese game market is shrinking so fast, you'd think it had been submerged in cold water.

Joystiq: Of the three million people who played Dead Space, only about half of those bought it new. Cue grumbling from publishers about the unfairness of it all.

Destructoid: EVE Online in-game banking exec absconds with space money, spurs space-panic and run on space-bank; government bailout imminent.

Destructoid: Alan Wake dev: PC-shmeesee.

Gamasutra: The Independent Games Festival is now accepting submissions. You've only got a few months to make the next Audiosurf or Dyson.

CVG: Uncanny Valley be damned; BioWare thinks there's nothing wrong with sex scenes in mature, sophisticated videogames. Call me when the money shot isn't suffering framerate issues.

MTV: Boivin, get ready. There's a new Mortal Kombat movie on the way? And Chris Cassamasa's going to be Scorpion again? Does anybody else remember that martial arts show WMAC Masters? Continue...

Army of Too Soon?

In Fall 2007, mercenaries employed by Blackwater Worldwide, an American military contractor, killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. Iraqi officials were outraged, demanding the mercs be prosecuted under Iraqi law; in response, America muttered something about no-law-binding-contractors, extradited the contractors and kept mum. While the incident damaged Blackwater – it lost its goldmine contract with the Americans in Iraq; it changed its name to Xe – the gunmen escaped justice.

When the massacre occurred, Electronic Arts was still five months away from releasing Army of Two. By that point, millions of dollars had been invested in a shooter that barreled headlong into what was suddenly frontline news. Undoubtedly it occurred to someone that the game’s jaunty, arrogant, frattish tone was glaringly inappropriate. Hopefully, someone made the suggestion to reverse course – it wasn’t too late to eliminate the games more offensive patches.

If any efforts were made to blunt the game’s calloused attitude towards war, they were utter failures. Army of Two aggressively engages contemporary issues within contemporary conflicts, blundering past all boundaries of good taste and common decency.


In all fairness, I’m having fun with AoT. I laugh at is ridiculous plot, its mawkish man-love and cartoonish villains. It’s a more-than-competent shooter, delivering an experience that, while not transcending its contemporaries, certainly sets itself apart. I’m enjoying myself roughly 200 percent more than when team suck played Resident Evil 5.

That said, come the fuck on. I didn’t laugh at the cartoonish villains because they were clever; I laughed because they were basically unimaginative racial jokes, and I couldn’t imagine who among the sane, sentient and reasonably intelligent could let them be pressed onto a disk.
Want to make an Army of Two villain? Mix and match!

First Second
Ali Baba
Al Hussein
Aladdin bin Laden

Let’s assume they managed to name their villain with a modicum of sophistication. They’d still need to write into him a modicum of reality; for instance, would Aladdin Hussein really burst out of a garage, wave his chaingun in the air and yell “LONG LIVE SADDAM!”

Oddly enough, I’m okay with the bro-love. Politically-correct reviewers and pundits who never so much as breathed on a controller say it’s insensitive to give your pal a fist-bump after cooling a few dozen terrorists; if it’s insensitive, it’s also accurate. Read any account of the Iraq War, and you’ll find that wherever there’s a Marine traumatized by taking the life of an enemy combatant, there’s also one who thinks it’s fucking righteous. And aren’t they right? They just survived a firefight. They won. They did what our government paid them to do.

There remains the issue of using mercenaries in games. Look: it’s been done before, and well. Using a mercenary for your main character opens up design doors that might otherwise be closed, and it accesses an interesting moral dimension. Do you take the morally proper job, or the profitable job? The easy road or the high road? If Army of Two even approached these issues, I’d view its frattish attitude with more sympathy. Instead, it uses your mercenary status as a mere plot point and plots along in a linear fashion, knocking over the vases and dragging tastelessness all over the carpet.

Turning a contemporary war into an action movie is one thing; turning it into a Micheal Bay action movie is another. EA designers have promised to lend a more serious tone to AoT’s sequel, The 40th Day. I hope so. If not, they risk damaging not only their franchise, but the medium at large.

Props to Craig for the baller title. I got you in my eyesights, dawg.

Continue...

Marginalia: 7.7.09

Joystiq: Bioware guys dream of a game world without combat - nothing but talking! Unfortunately, the point-and-click adventure game beat them to the punch by about two decades.

Kotaku: The PSP Go! has been announced, so that means it is time to start speculating about the next one. If you listen closely, you can hear the continuing sound of nobody in the world caring about the PSP.

Destructoid: Assassin's Creed 2 devs talk about their sequel to 2007's runny, jumpy, stone-cold-knife-a-bitch game.

Destructoid: Announcement!: Left 4 Dead 2 will have three, possibly four new zombies! Still missing: anything that distinguishes it from its predecessor in the slightest.

Gamasutra: Crytek man Cevat Yeril will deliver the keynote at GDC Europe. The topic? The future of graphics. Sneak peek: In the future, computers still can't run Crysis.

Gamasutra:  Christopher Nutt on how murder plays an integral yet emotionless role in contemporary game design.

1UP: They guy behind Gears of War says the upcoming title Borderlands is a sci-fi shooter with RPG elements and that “the future of shooters is RPGs.”  Way to catch up to rest of us, Mr. Bleszinski.  We’ve been playing BioShock and Fallout 3 for a while now.

The Escapist: Anthony Burch manages to articulate why I had such a good time messing around with Spelunky a few months ago.

Continue...

This Week on Audiosurf Radio – 7/7 – My Ever Shifting Tastes Edition

I’ll admit it.  My tastes are mercurial.  Especially with regards to electronic music.  One week I’m praising Radio for including some upbeat trance.  The next I’m deriding it for providing more upbeat trance of a questionable quality. 

So it should come as no surprise that after last week’s dismal rides I should leave this week’s offering elated, happy to have heard some interesting music.  We’ve got more from last week’s saving grace, Serberis, who (according to his MySpace) hails from Lesser Poland.  I didn’t even know there was a Lesser Poland.  Think of all the screen-door submarine jokes we could be elaborating on!  Also, Killing Jazz brings us some jazz and blues all the way from Madrid.  It’s not electronic, but I’ve been hot and cold on American-influenced European groups, so it definitely fits the bill.

I’ve already ruined the mystery and told you that I enjoyed this week’s rides.  But you should still hit the jump for some band name-dropping and highfalutin video game talk.

Recommendations

“Findings” scratches a similar retro itch as Rocket Riot: it evokes older material without simply ripping off ideas and repackaging them.  Don’t let me mislead you, you would never mistake this for a track off an old NES game or anything.  But the computerized melody line sounds awfully like it came from a late 80s sampler.  The subwoofer-punishing warbling on the low end is what makes it sound more modern, as well as the long, low-pitched drones that contribute to some of the best sweeping curves on the track.  It sounds like 8-bit for a new millenium.  Were Square to come out with some modern, 3D entry in the Chrono Trigger universe, this would be at home on the soundtrack.  Behind all the din, the drum machine pumps out enough snare rolls and syncopation to generate rolling tunnels and plenty of bumps along the way.  Is it probably a minute or two too long?  Yeah.  Is it better than some of the other techno I’ve recently railed against?  Certainly. 

If you listened to the radio in the late 90s, you may recall the Swing Revival.  Building off the bizarre popularity of ska, bands like The Squirrel Nut Zippers, The Big Bad Voodoo Daddies, and The Brian Setzer Orchestra all stole time slots on top 40 and alternative rock radio.  Killing Jazz is trying to make it happen again ten years later with “Safronia B.”  Of course, they’ve got their Spanish accent to deal with.  It isn’t too much of a hindrance, however, save the one line where he sounds like he’s singing about a monkey even though I assume he isn’t.  It’s upbeat, but the backbeat vibe keeps the ride from speeding out from under you.  During the harmonica solo (don’t assume anything, it’s actually decent), the drummer rolls out some nice offbeat accompaniment, sending syncopated hills rolling through the track like shockwaves.  Look out for the hard bank during the first chorus; it accurately channels a feeling of inebriation that I’m sure pertains somehow to the song’s subject matter.  If you’ve ever enjoyed a song from the Swing Revival, even if it was just to impress a girl at a middle school dance, you should play this song.

Other Selections
Serberis’ other tunes aren’t quite as engrossing as “Findings,” especially “Nights,” which sounds like a found audio piece about computers.  With all the whirring and buzzing, it would feel right at home scoring some performance art installation where people dressed like robots mime boring, impassionate sex with one another (it’s a commentary on how technology is depriving us of our innate primal qualities - duh).  I actually liked “Digging” quite a bit, especially the Centipede-like samples that transition into a richer sound as the camera zooms in behind your car.  The song, however, leaves almost no lasting impression; I finished riding and kind of went, “Well that was a fine few minutes, but where did I go?”  Killing Jazz’s second track “I’ll Go Crazy” still evokes that 90s swing/blues revival sound, but the singer’s attempt to be Bluesy turned me off.  He drew a line in the sand with “Safronia B” only to promptly leap over it in “I’ll Go Crazy.” Have you ever heard a Brit do a New York Jewish accent?  Or get embarrassed when one of your friends tries to imitate Michael Caine and ends up sounding offensive?  Yeah, that’s kind of what the vocals in “I’ll Go Crazy” are like.

Author’s Note
Each song was played at least twice on the Pro difficulty using the Eraser and Vegas characters.  Killing Jazz’s tracks were played a few extra times because A) “Safronia B” is a lot of fun and B) I wanted to double check that the solos in “I’ll Go Crazy” were based on an eight-bar blues pattern – which they were. 

Continue...

marginalia 7.6.09

Kotaku: So Bayer made this thing that can help diabetics keep track of their blood sugar levels. Neat!

Joystiq: N+ developer Metanet Software shows off some PHYSICS from its upcoming Robotology.

Kotaku: The ongoing recession is changing the way we buy and play games, apparently.

Destructoid: Brimming with wealth, health and free time, the Russians have taken to balls-out LARP-ing. Check out these Brotherhood of Steel costumes.

Destructoid: First they came for Counter-Strike, and I said nothing because I was not Counter-Strike.

Destructoid: Once again, PS3 owners can be excited about something Xbox owners have enjoyed for months.

1UP: LucasArts announces a flurry of classic titles to be released via Steam.  WHERE IS MY FULL THROTTLE?

Gamasutra: Ubisoft plans to open a new studio in Toronto, due in part to its "established film production history."  Really?  Toronto has an established film production history?  Huh.  Go figure.

IndustryGamers: Instead of just making wild claims like most analysts, Jess Divnich crunches some numbers to prove that DLC poses a real threat to retailers and publishing competitors.  Sure, it's a bit of a foregone conclusion, but it's always nice to see some legwork.

Continue...

demo monday: xbox community games edition

Something a little different this week – in lieu of downloading a single demo, I decided to go slumming in the Xbox Community Games section of Microsoft’s marketplace. For the uninitiated, the Community Games truly put the indie in ind(i)ependent, as they’re developed by individuals or small groups of individuals with no backing of any sort by major developers or publishers.

There has been noise around this here Internet about the coverage, or lack thereof, given these games by Microsoft, whether Community Games are even financially viable, and whether Microsoft takes too big a cut from the games’ revenues. I’m not here to address any of these issues directly, but I am here to tell you whether any of the three games I picked this week are worth your time.

Bennu

AlMra’s Bennu starts with some promise, or at least, the game select screen is reasonably polished looking. It opens with an overly wordy and pointless story before actually letting you play the game – apparently some Egyptian god has done something that some other Egyptian god finds unacceptable. Because of this (?), you become a little round wheel that shoots chains out of its mouth.

Roll your little wheel person around using the control stick, and shoot the chains to latch onto walls or other structures and swing around. The object of the game is to swing your wheel thing into blocks of certain colors, though you can only take out one color at a time – say there are red and grey blocks in a level, for example. There will be a receptacle with red fire in one corner, and one with grey fire in another corner, and you need to change colors and take out all the blocks within the time limit.

It sounds interesting, but in practice it’s too clunky to be enjoyable. I would have liked the game much more if my chain had an infinite reach, or if, once suspended by said chain, my character actually responded to my input – a game like this one needs to be fast and fluid to be truly satisfying. As it is, though, your character rolls around a little awkwardly, and after failing a couple of levels because I couldn’t move the way I wanted to, I started to lose interest.

Angry Barry

arrogancy’s Angry Barry is a sidescrolling beat-‘em-up featuring the 44th President of the United States in the starring role. Punch and kick the crap out of all comers to win their votes, which spray from their fallen bodies in the form of acorns – haha, get it?! Again, I cannot go very far into a description of this game without talking about its problems.

This is a gaming blog, so gameplay first – this is as bland and boring a beat ‘em up as any I’ve played. There are two planes your enemies can be on, an upper plane and a lower one. You can jump between these two planes. Your enemies can but generally don’t. This is sort of boring. Your walk from left to right is uninterrupted by special events or messages telling you to GO! or leveling up or anything else. This is sort of boring. You fight crowds and crowds of the exact same enemy over and over again. Sort of boring pretty much sums it all up – I’ve been more entertained by licensed Super Nintendo games.

I have roundly critiqued the gameplay, now allow me to critique the subject matter. I do this not on political grounds – I have no idea for whom this game’s developers voted, and I don’t really care. My beef is with the fact that they released a game about the 2008 presidential election in May 2009, replete with references to individual manufactured mini-scandals – the ACORN reference is a case in point, or perhaps I should point you to the boss battle with a floating version of Jeremiah Wright.

One could forgive the bland mechanics if the game had been released eight months before, but as-is it causes the strange feeling of time displacement you feel when you watch a JibJab video or listen to the Obama Girl song after the fact. Things age quickly in this Internet epoch, and even if this game is irreverent or politically incorrect, my response is a resounding “so what, this happened forever ago.”

Gravity Bounce

toddm’s Gravity Bounce is perhaps the game I liked best of the three, and as such it’s probably the one I have the least to say about. The playing field has several spheres in it, all bouncing off one another. You launch another, red sphere onto the field, and begin to charge the globes that were already there. Charging the spheres causes them to orbit around you until you let go, which sends them flying off in whatever direction you sent them. Get two charged circles to collide, and they disappear – make all the circles disappear to win.

There are wrinkles that make this task more difficult – most levels will only allow you to charge a certain number of spheres at once. Getting two charged circles to run into each other while they’re bouncing off of six other circles is sometimes difficult, though in this case it is the fun kind of difficult and not the frustrating kind. While Bennu and Angry Barry are just about on the same level as your average browser game, with a different background image I think Gravity Bounce could just about make it to the bundled-with-your-operating-system level. Honestly, flat black would be a much preferable background to the squiggly MS Paint art that’s back there now.

Also notice how I made it through that entire write-up without once saying “balls.”

In closing

I don’t think these three games should be regarded as indicative of what is available on the service, but I can say that all three were in either the Most Recent or Most Popular category. I know these games have low budgets, and I know that we shouldn’t expect them to be nearly as polished as even the smallest game given backing by a major studio, but while these games are occasionally entertaining distractions they simply don’t have a lot to offer. There aren’t new ideas here, and there aren’t mechanics that, given time and resources, could be the foundation for the next Big Thing. None of these games are ever going to be the Narbacular Drop to anyone’s Portal, and while that’s unfortunate, I think maybe that’s why interest in the service is so low.

Bennu, Angry Barry, and Gravity Bounce are all available in the Xbox Live Game Marketplace in the Community Games section. Gravity Bounce goes for 200 Microsoft Points, while Angry Barry and Bennu both go for 400 points.

Continue...

pod shot: arcade!

Subscribe to the podcast via the feed, or find us on the iTunes store!

This week, Craig and I turn our week-long obsession with Rocket Riot into a scattershot discussion about arcade games. I dunno. It’s pretty cool.

Music this week is from the Game Boy version of Tetris. This music sustained many a ten-year-old on many a ten hour car trip.

Continue...

Finding New Ways to Command & Conquer

Franchises can pass into irrelevance. It’s as natural as dying of old age, really. This came to me while walking into the Rehoboth Beach, Del. Kmart, itself way past natural expiration. In 1999, I braved Hurricane Floyd to drive here and buy Command & Conquer: Tiberium Sun, sequel to 1995’s genre-establishing Command & Conquer. Previews and screenshots showed a game poised to advance the field, as its predecessor did.

It did not.

Nor has it three games later – Red Alert 2, C&C 3: Tiberium Wars and Red Alert 3, while successful and fun in their own right, did nothing to change the core formula. While there’s merit to ain’t-broke-don’t-etc, it is now 2009, and the RTS genre is itself in danger of irrelevance; you can’t waggle, shake or hop with it, and despite the modest success of Halo Wars, you can’t play the damned thing on a console.

In an age that demands innovation, how can Command & Conquer survive?


Necessary background: Command & Conquer was (is still, really) an isometric RTS built around resource gathering, unit production and the overwhelming application of those units against a foe. Recent twists in the formula helped keep the franchise alive; 2000’s Red Alert 2 made the game smaller, faster and infinitely more fun than the plodding Tiberium Sun; 2007’s C&C 3 moved the franchise into 3D. EA is pretty good about giving the games worthwhile expansion packs – Kane’s Wrath for C&C 3, Uprising for RA3 – and tweaking the game with patches and fixes.

Problem is, Command & Conquer has yet to surmount the “Build a ton of shit and hurl it at the enemy” routine. Other games have managed to at least subvert it by eliminating the military-industrial complex altogether – I’m thinking of World in Conflict, where resource points are gained by enemy kills and can only be spent on airstrikes and new units, not base buildings. C&C 3, despite its incredibly well-manicured and thoughtfully designed campaign, still requires you to build a ton of shit, etc.

RTS philosophers may say that the build-toss process is, in fact, insurmountable; that it’s as much a part of the genre as harvesting more Tiberium and building more supply depots. I’ll give them that. What is war, after all, but having more boom-boom than the other guy? My little brother is an NROTC cadet, and he says it’s Navy strategic policy to maintain a 5:1 ratio against the enemy (you can imagine what a round of Supreme Commander is like when playing against Midshipman Third Class Phillip W. Kunzig). Still, games find ways to change or at least cleverly disguise the grind; right now, Blizzard designers are working (we hope) to make sure the units in Starcraft II play against each other in a unique, ingenious way.

For Command & Conquer, the path to revolution may rest in the most unlikely source: Command & Conquer: Renegade, a 2002 first person shooter that attempted to recreate the C&C experience from behind the gun of a commando. The Battlezone franchise tried to meld FPS action with RTS pacing and strategy, and to resounding success, in this writer’s opinion. It showed that one could build units, place turrets and attack the enemy from a boots-on-the ground level. It was a shocking invigoration of the grind, and in Renegade, we see shades of that brilliance. The multiplayer mode, for example, allows players to build Mammoth Tanks, take their helm and drive them into the enemy base. Watching guard towers turn their defenses on you, instead of your unit, is pants-shittingly fun.

Renegade wasn’t a bad idea – it was simply a bad game, flawed in ways that aren’t worth enumerating here. EA had another C&C shooter in the works, titled simply Tiberium, but they axed it around a year ago; it was a squad-based shooter anyway, something more along the lines of Republic Commando or Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. Their current plans to advance the franchise involve porting it to the iPhone. Instead of rolling my eyes, I simply advise the C&C team, buried deep within EA’s bowels, to return to a noble experiment. Give it another crack, and make the franchise relevant once more.


Continue...

Marginalia: 7.3.09 – One Word Summary Edition

Joystiq: Bahahahaha.

CollegeHumor: Awwwwww.

Kotaku: Yay!

1UP: “Please?”

NY Times: Surprise.

Kotaku: Hooray?

Continue...

Rocket Riot, or Retro Chic

Earlier this week, Team Suck started in on Army of Two.  They’re squeezing all the fun they can out of a bromantic romp through a not-so-fictional Middle East.  During one play session, I listened in via an Xbox Live party, delighting in their hilarious tales from the front lines – the “LONG LIVE SADDAM” moment had us in stitches.  But a few minutes in I kind of stopped paying attention.  I was busy. 

I was playing Rocket Riot.

I couldn’t accurately express to Andrew and Rob over headset what was so appealing about Codeglue’s new Live Arcade title.  “It’s all destructible blocks!” I cried to Rob, trying to tap into his fondness for Red Faction: Guerrilla.  “Every time you finished a level, a robot goes ‘rocket-riot-rocket-riot’” I said to Andrew, thinking the quirkiness would appeal to the Katamari-loving part of his brain.  They weren’t buying it.

What did elicit a “That sounds interesting” from Rob was my attempt to explain Rocket Riot’s control scheme.  It borrows from the twin stick shooter model, popularized by titles such as Geometry Wars and Super Stardust HD.  You navigate your slightly customizable avatar through two-dimensional playing fields, usually attempting to ward off a horde of enemies.  What makes the controls unique (and worthy of a paragraph of discussion) is how the right stick functions.  Instead of simply aiming with the stick and either shooting constantly or pressing a trigger, you fire a rocket by flicking in the direction you want it to fly (a system reminiscent of the skill stick in recent iterations of EA’s NHL series).  It’s a surprisingly tactile, if not tendonitis-inducing, method of firing projectiles.  It’s remarkably satisfying, too, when a flung rocket soars across the board and smacks an enemy in the face.

Rocket Riot’s got more going for it than its subtle innovation in the twin stick genre.  It’s visual style is nothing if not quirky and delightful.  Each level looks like it was designed on an 8- or 16-bit system – until a rocket explodes, that is.  When a rocket collides with the environment, the level breaks away like a wrecked LEGO castle, showering the area with “pixels.”  Moving left or right on any game board causes it to tilt, showing off the 2.5D rendering of each pixelated level.  And as you progress through the game, any defeated enemy (save bosses) becomes a playable character, with models ranging from a space lion names Growls to a Sailor named…Sailor, all of whom also explode into blocks when struck by a rocket.  Despite all this visual chaos, the game runs silky smooth, a benefit of going retro on this generation’s hardware.

Just as Rocket Riot’s controls, graphics, and music (some downright hummable tunes and a rap to rival the infamous “DK Rap”) feel decidedly retro, so does its plot.  The developer Codeglue has admitted that they initially designed the game without a plot, instead choosing to simply churn out 80 challenge-based levels in a variety of themes.  At the behest of publisher THQ, they attached a goofy story about a pirate named Blockbeard who steals everyone’s legs (thus explaining the butt-mounted jet pack you use to fly around) and takes off on the open sea, out into space, etc.   In all honesty, this is no worse than being told that “President Ronnie has been kidnapped by the ninjas.  Are you a bad enough dude to rescue Ronnie?”  I actually appreciate that Rocket Riot wears its skin graft of a plot on its sleeves.  If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be a moment where a pirate shrinks you with a shrink ray then gets mad and threatens to blog about you when you fly into his computer.  More games should allow this to happen.

What’s been the biggest surprise to me is the multiplayer.  The Deathmatch is pretty standard, and Rugby Riot is a skin for a game of Capture the Flag.  But I’m impressed by the inspired Destroy the Object and Golden Guy modes.  Destroy the Object is a challenge that regular occurs in the single player campaign, tasking the player with busting up certain items without dying.  In multiplayer, two teams of rocketeers attempt to destroy a certain number of their opponents’ blocks.  It’s similar to the marriage of design and gameplay that I raved about in RF: Guerrilla’s multiplayer.  If your game revolves around blowing shit up, you’d do well to make a multiplayer mode about blowing shit up.  And Golden Guy is a translation of perennial playground favorite Kill the Carrier.  Players attempt to rack up time by possessing a Golden Suit power-up, which makes it impossible to defend yourself.  Andrew and I have logged a few evenings of Golden Guy and it’s been a blast every time.  It’s chaotic.  It’s frustrating.  There’s nothing like running away from four people determined to blow you up to get your heart pumping.

What makes Rocket Riot so successful is the retro feel that pervades every aspect of the game, from its arcade controls to its challenge-based levels.  This is reinforced in visuals that actually serve the gameplay – try digging through a pirate boat to escape your pursuers and you’ll see what I mean.  It’s a game we could easily have seen released in the heyday of the American arcade.  But thankfully it’s out now, taking advantage of unnecessarily powerful hardware and an online service capable of handling leaderboards and multiplayer.  If you’re still skeptical, try the demo.  Just be prepared to fork over the money when it asks you at rocketpoint. 

Continue...

marginalia 7.2.09

Ars Technica: There are plans for an Asteroids movie? I hope they also decide to re-imagine Pac Man as a procedural crime drama.

Joystiq: A PSP without a disc drive was apparently in the cards all along. Note: in this discussion, “all along” means “since the UMD tanked and everybody hated it.”

Joystiq: Oh hey lookit another Square Enix teaser countdown revealed another goddamn Final Fantasy game. Color me surprised. Note: in this discussion, “suprised” means “not very surprised really.”

GameDaily:  People in Japan are looking past the promise of Natal and into the future.  Maybe that's just because they don't like Microsoft.

Gamasutra:  If you have no plans for the rest of the day, curl up with John Harris' design-centric retrospective on 20 essential RPGs.

Continue...

team suck vs. army of two part two: missed opportunities

Yesterday you read Rob’s introduction to this latest phase in our co-op adventures. Yes, we both bought Army of Two for next to nothing, and I think it has definitely made us enjoy the game more. This post isn’t about that, though, or about the copious amounts of bro-love baked into the crust of every moment. This post is about the treatment of the game’s subject matter, and about some opportunities the game’s designers missed out on along the way.

I should make a note here – since this game came out over a year ago, and since our joint Resident Evil 5 playthrough resulted in an overlong and increasingly bitter series of posts full of synonyms for the word disappointed, we’ll only be dedicating two posts each to Army of Two – one now, at the beginning, and one after all is said and done. Now, to the topic at hand.

It started small, with a terrorist named Al Habib. A name is such a small thing, really, but Al Habib smacks of generic 24 villain terrorist name. They could have named him Osama Mohammed Al Qaeda Hussein and been more subtle. Al Habib then came out on a balcony, taunted us openly, and started firing from behind cover. If real terrorist masterminds were so brazen and easily wiped out, I honestly do not think they would be that big of a problem.

Small, laughable transgressions like this abound, and eventually fade into white noise – the screaming suicide bombers, the vague, implacable accents, and the fact that all terrorists everywhere would prefer to converse in broken English rather than their native tongues all fade into the background after the first hour or two. Just as we thought we were used to the level of vaguely racist undertones, another terrorist bursts onto the scene, wielding a huge-ass gun and shouting “LONG LIVE SADDAM.” Games that are trying to be funny aren’t this funny.

Given the sensitivity of their subject matter, though, shouldn’t they try to treat it a little more responsibly? Games like Modern Warfare have dragged game wars out of World War II and the Cold War and into the present, but few have so directly addressed the underlying causes. Early on, Army of Two renders the burning World Trade Center buildings in polygons before dropping Our Heroes down in Afghanistan to take out a target – not, incidentally, Bin Laden, or anyone who actually exists. Another mission took us to Iraq in 2003, but we weren’t hunting down Saddam or running through the streets of Baghdad or looking for weapons of mass destruction or anything even close – just taking out another fictitious insurgent. Army of Two wants to engage some of these contentious issues, but it doesn’t want to engage them directly, and it wants to water things down with a healthy dose of fist bump to boot.

Of course, the game isn’t to blame for its treatment of its subject matter. Eight years of exploitation by politicians and of books and television and movies on the subject have neutered 9/11, removed much of its significance and power in our minds. I see a game like Army of Two as something of a missed opportunity, as far as storytelling goes. Maybe 9/11 isn’t the best example since the event no longer carries the weight it once did, but when I see a game happening Right Now in the Real World, dealing with real issues and trying to be topical, I really want to see it take a more serious approach to things. I think the medium will take a major step forward when a game about terrorism or war or poverty or civil unrest makes me think instead of making me giggle.

Continue...

Marginalia 7.1.09

Gamasutra: Ian Bogost provides an offbeat take on all the motion control hullabaloo.

YouTube: The first five minutes of a documentary about creepy Chris Crawford and Charge Shot!!! darling Jason Rohrer. I think it says something that the music from Passage still causes my stomach to clench.

NY Times: Mr. Schiesel sheds some light on Tiger Woods the Gamer. Anybody else see him school Jimmy Fallon in Tiger Woods '10 the other night? No? Oh, that's right. Nobody watches Jimmy Fallon.

Joystiq: Hee hee, shamon - Battlefield Heroes is getting some Michael Jackson outfits. For free.

Kotaku: Xbox 360's last.fm implementation gets a price point.

Media Post: Microsoft Silverlight on the Xbox 360 could lead to Web-style banner ads. If Microsoft tacks ads onto its already $50-a-year Xbox Live Gold membership, are we allowed to rebel?

Destructoid: Fortune-teller Micheal Pachter looks into his crystal ball and says mobile phone apps are a passing fad.

Destructoid: Two guys robbed a cargo truck containing 1,300 360s. Um, sweet? Continue...