A day for Session Play

Really not feeling the energy to grind out a post today. Mayhaps the fog lies heavy on the soul. Allow me to enjoy you with a poem:

the rain falls sad and slow

as I look out my bedroom window

Not much of a poem, was it? More along the lines of a maudlin goth platitude. I'm not even in my bedroom, nor is it raining. I guess true sorrow is always a fabrication.

Let's crack into a new topic. Maybe we can muster the strength just to make a scratch and leave all the hard work for later. I kinda wanted to talk about logical stopping points - those places where the game tells you "set down your controller and power down for a little while". That balloons into a massive subject quickly; the nature of session play and longevity. Strangely, this is one respect where games and books have a lot in common and movies are bumped to the sideline. I read a piece by some dude at some point in the last year or two that you don't need to bother with, because I'm going to summarize it right here. He posed the question: if it takes you the same amount of time to complete Dark Souls or A Tale of Two Cities (or it mighta been War and Peace), shouldn't you come away from each similarly enriched?

The immediate response (and I think I read a companion piece that covered this) is that, well, games are play. They satisfy a completely different desire in our mentality, which would need to be satiated regardless, and which War and Peace can't touch.

I'm not going to tackle this debate head-on because I find it to be, you know, contrived. Frankly I don't give a shit how long it takes to read a book, and regardless, it's my personal observation that books only seem to be effective at a very specific window in an individual's life. As if citing the lame kitchen-sink tomes doesn't discredit the argument immediately. Nonetheless. Part of the fabric of gaming is the understanding that you'll be returning to the same work repeatedly.

A long time ago, this separated games into two categories: those where you could save, and those where you couldn't. Shit, back even further the division was between the games that let you continue and those that reset when you died. These days you can't tell as easily, but the divide is still there. It's something about games to play vs. games to experience. Some games (Sleeping Dogs, Skyrim) draw you back with predictability. You know you're going to get the same beginning-middle-end experience each time you sit down, and each session functions as a game within a game. These games take after Mega Man. The other kind draws you back with unpredictability. You pick up the controller because you want to know what the next giant boss will be or when a train will unexpectedly crash into a helicopter (e.g. Vanquish, El Shaddai). These take after... Alien Soldier? To get arbitrary up in here.

Alright, there's your starter. Gets that topic going.

XCOM: is it survival horror? Hafta think.

Let me note that I'm again referring to Enemy Unknown, though this discussion will also mostly apply to the original UFO Defense, and it is specific to the higher difficulties, though not necessarily Iron Man mode (for those who haven't played the game, Iron Man is a one-file-only auto-saving mode that prevents the practice of "save scumming", i.e. reverting to an earlier save when you're losing).

As usual, we need to start from a definition of survival horror. Seriously, at this point it won't be long before I've defined just about every genre ever, I'm moving at such an annoying rate. Horror is something in which video games can really excel beyond any other medium, because the player has a much more vested stake in the action. They can't look away from the screen, because the character in the horrifying situation is an extension of themselves. Yet that notion is not what makes the genre - that's why there's that whole other word in the title. Horror can show up in action games like RE4 or Devil May Cry, RPGs like Shin Megami Tensei, or shooters like DOOM. Survival is the real gameplay meat here. Survival. What the hell does that mean. Not dying?

That creature you see before you is the antithesis of survival

That's quite the insight, "not dying". But that's common to nearly all games. If all we want to do is survive these games, surely dying must factor in more prominently than it does elsewhere. Constant threat of death? That's closer. Survival horrors are going to go for unexpected kills. Unpredictability is part of it. That's not good enough though. Jumps scares, eh. You can unexpectedly fall into a pit in Super Mario Bros. and it'll make for a hilarious moment rather than a terrifying one. I'm gonna go from my gut here. Forget the semantics. I think... survival horror is gameplay in which every forward progress the player takes raises a lethal threat to his success. A game where everything is always at risk. Because when I think about it, RE4, BioShock, and Dead Space were when the genre started to transcend itself. And why did that happen? What was lost, that made these games no longer about survival? That there were conflicts in which you felt no life-threatening stake.

Whew. That felt good. These definitions aren't always easy, because it has to be simple. If it can't fit in one sentence, you've lost it. I'm happy with this one though. Survival horror means you put your life on the line with every step. I'm not really interested in conventions and all that baggage, that's what I mean when I say the definition has to be short and snappy. We want the heart that drives the classics, so we can look at it in a new light.

XCOM is a good way to do that. Taken through the lens of SRPG, it's still a smashing game, but a familiar one. Units are fragile and expendable, weapons are inaccurate, fog of war. That about covers it. But if we look at it as a survival horror, it's a unique and expansive experiment. Now I know the other Greg out there reading is all riled up right about now and gonna tell me this is completely a writing gimmick, but hear me out. I think the game very much invites this analysis and reflects some interesting ideas back at surv-hor.

The very premise of the game is to operate a military force which ensures the survival of humanity against otherworldly invaders. On the large scale this "survival" is represented as "panic", though clearly the understanding is that if the player loses the game, civilization ceases to exist. So this is kinda like the mother of all survival games! Where the risk/progress core really unveils itself is in the individual battles. Every mission requires you to deploy 4-6 soldiers. Each soldier deployed may not come back.

You can plan and strategize and play it safe as much as you want, but in the end you just never know who might die. The situation can always escalate. This is worked into the turn-based gameplay with simple die-roll statistics. For everything that should happen, you never know that it will. This tension builds up with every move, as you ask yourself whether you want to take that step into the dark.

Yeah. I think the answer to the title is yes. XCOM is survival horror, in its own way. So the genre's not as dead as someone wants you to think you believe. There's Dark Souls too.

Ouchies; Sine Mora revisited

How the motherfuck is it pronounced. Come on. Someone tell me. It's eating me up inside. It's eating a sandwich inside. It made a sandwich from my insides?! That is FUKK'D.

Certainly the game was the belle of the 2.5D ball

Hang on let me invent this thing called a search 'train' engine and then invent this thing called the Internet and go 'on' the Internet thing and post the answer to my question and then rediscover the search brain and wait how did I discover it without having something with which to search oops plot hole well let's just move on because this is Hollywood. It looks like it's Latin(o?) for "ohne Verspaetung", which is German for "without delay(o?)", which is English for "turkey time". My high school Latin experience tells me that there isn't really an official pronunciation of Latin words, so you generally just say all the syllables as if they were phonetic English. I don't know this for a fact. That was like ten years ago and I was never super-sure that I could take my teacher's word for anything. So let's stick with what I've been saying all along, "SEE-nay MORE-ah". Of course, the game was developed and titled by fucking Hungarians, so they probably say it completely differently. OH MY GOD THIS IS ALL SO FUKK'D TO READ ABOUT!

See how hard it is just to pronounce Sine Mora? That sets the tone for the entire game. Not simply because it's hard as FUKK'D. Because it's hard in a way that you can choose to ignore, or choose to tear out your hair over. Just about any player can putz their way through story mode, the same way a four-year-old could get through the title as "Sinnamer". And just like a four-year-old, they can be proud of their work and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. We can think of this as "critic mode". Sine Mora also offers a far more difficult to perfect Arcade mode, which provides extremely punishing piecemeal challenges that force you to constantly use all of those tools that were previously forgotten.

This isn't so original in the world of the console shmup. Yes, Sine Mora actually justifies the presence of Story Mode, but the notion of being able to cruise through, spamming the Insert Coin button, is present (and oft-criticized) in everything from Mushihimesama to Mushihimesama Futari. What makes the challenge more worthwhile and entertaining in Sine is that it's not simply in pursuit of score. The game offers a mode that actually makes survival a challenge, and weirdly enough, it evokes in me a tension very similar to survival horror games.

You know what, it's just a tension similar to tense games. Because the only survival horror example back-flipping across my brain at the moment is Dead Space. What made that game scary was the constant threat of space coming back to life as a zombie. See, in the beginning, your character gets fed up with killing time. He gets bored. So he reads a book that says "time & space are a continuum, that's why they call me Albert and Ernie Einstein", and says, holy shit, if I kill space instead of time, maybe that will give me something different to do while still accomplishing my main goal (kill time). That all happens in the form of a minigame, and then something about a ship which crashed into space's corpse. It's a tense game because you're left wondering, "is space rly dead tho?" Wait none of this sounds right where's my script?

Since when does Space look like THAT?

Another tense game is Dark Souls, which can be shortened to DS if you're brave enough to risk it being mistake for a video game platform or Dead Space. Dark Souls is scary because sometimes your entire game gets ruined because SOME BULLSHIT FROM THE CEILING.

King's Field IV: A Treaty Bird, revisited

No I don't have any clue what King's Field is. Did he run out of Quests and start assigning farming duties instead? Apparently it's a series that runs far longer than the brain existed. Game has weird controls. We're talking pre-dual-analog FPS. I don't know why they opted for pre-dual-analog controls when dual-analog controls were right there in front of them and had been established for like, I don't know. Since Turok at least. You have to use the shoulder buttons to strafe and the right analog to look up and down, it's like Goldeneye or something.

Apparently this was what From Software was up to before the reign of Demon's/Dark Souls, since the PSX era at least. Slow-paced first-person exploratory adventure RPGs. Hrmph. Not exactly my cuppa tea. I tend to like action-heavy or adventure-heavy games, making a game about exploration really hard sometimes kills my spirit. I do it for Dark Souls because it's damn fun, even if an emotional roller-coaster. The games... well they have their audience. I'm giving it a try, reluctant though I may be, because niche games often click with me. It's also appealing to the eyes and ears, which keeps you moving.

I'll say that so far I've only played like a half hour and I've successfully: missed the first weapon they give you, and died three times without yet finding a save point. I uh don't think I'm doing it right. And you thought Dark Souls was unwelcoming. Yes you did. Fucking idiot. Not gonna have time to delve much deeper for a few days at least, so we'll have to return to this later. Suffice for now to say, yeah it has a LOT of elements in common with their now popular games.

This is kinda stimulating though because now I know what From Software is. Before, I was all, "where are these guys From? Software?" They're one of those companies that makes the same game over and over and over again, making a tiny little tweak here, a midget little tweak there, releasing it year after year. And the fans take adamant, unflinching stances on which is OBJECTIVELY the best. It's a formula most prominently associated with Capcom and their iterative series: Mega Man, Resident Evil, Street Fighter, so on. That's not the same incarnation we're dealing with here though - this is something specific to the niche market, catering to an exact person's tastes (and not costing too much on the development end). I'm talking Koei, Nippon Ichi, Natsume; Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Disgaea, Harvest Moon. Add From Software and games about exploring a cursed and barren land to that list.

Well fuck

Kinda looks like he took a rocket to the head and this is what's left

Just beat the Depths, that much apprehended chapter of Dark Souls where once I felt forced to quit. What happened in the very next second, barely a minute into the next locale? I screwed up for the first time in this run. Double-died, permanently losing the huge soul reward from beating the Depths boss. Had to shut off the game for the night, but this is doubtful the end. Finally moving on to new territory!

Revisiting an old friend and nemesis; Dark Souls, revisited

Looks like the blog finally managed to do something good! When I booted up Dark Souls to write that last CCCR, I decided to play around for a couple minutes. I had a save that was only about ten minutes into the game which I had abandoned months ago after moving on to fresher, greener, fresher, more fertile pastures. It gave me enough of a stimulus to convince me to give the game a second shot - it's probably been nearly a year since I gave up on it. Yeah, I haven't seen this old boy for a long time... not since... the accident. But with no action RPG on my plate since I finished The Witcher 2 (though I am replaying that on Dark) and no enthralling enveloping Japanese RPGs except for the occasional Xenoblade session, there's nothing to stop me.

Let me tell you a funny little story about why I quit Dark Souls. It's a story likely familiar to anyone out there who's played the game or its predecessor, or any fucking annoying-ass piss-you-off-so-much-that-when-even-a-tiny-thing-goes-right-it-feels-awesome games. I had been playing the game for about 25 hours, had (what I thought) was a relatively decent character who had come across a lot of lucky finds, and had done it all on my own - no guides, no shortcuts found on youtube, not even the Drake Sword. So I was pretty happy with where things were going. Then I stumbled into the Depths, and things all went to hell.

Although I stumbled through some trapdoors and found myself utterly lost with no clue how to get back to a bonfire (spawn point, for those unfamiliar with the game), I was also on a huge streak and had tons of souls and humanities saved up, which I was about to use to buy some really nice gear. Then a stupid blob fell from the ceiling and I instantaneously died and was cursed. The long and short of this is that your max HP is cut in half  until you can find a cure - in a game where it's already easy to die in one or two hits, this is beyond damning. So with half HP and absolutely no clue how to find my way back to my body to recover my souls, I quickly died, losing everything permanently. That was a huge blow, but what was worse is that the game tells you by name who/where can cure the curse, but I had no fucking idea where to find either. So I'm trapped with half HP, no end to the curse in sight, and the only recourse being to go to GameFAQs. So I quit.

Anyone who's played the game knows this asshole

At that point I didn't really have any desire to start again. As I said, I had lucked into a lot of cool stuff with that character, and wasn't too excited by the notion of doing things again and having to cross my fingers. Moreover, all the joys of finally defeating X boss or clearing X area after struggling for hours would be significantly diluted by the fact that I had already done it all before. And despite what most gaming magazines and forums these days would have you believe, 25 hours is a goddamn LOT of time to sink into a game. Some of us aren't 12 or employed solely to play games. Even 10 hours isn't exactly a trivial investment of time. Anyway, realizing that this hard a game isn't going to be nearly as rewarding on a second run brings up some interesting questions about the very nature of its difficulty. Because I don't think at all the same can be said of Contra or Bit.Trip Beat or Donkey Kong Country. That's an interesting subject I'll have to come back to later.

So here I am now, returning to Dark Souls, despite lamenting the proposition last time I played. I had played a melee-type character on my first run, so I hoped switching to a sorcerer would help keep things interesting. Turns out it has, and even crazier, I'm blowing through the game as if it's not a challenge at all. I find it hard to believe it's my familiarity with the territory, and I'm not sure it can be attributed entirely to my class choice, but something is completely different this time around. In barely 6 hours, I've caught up to my first character's progress over 25. And my character is already well above his level. Simply put, I'm not dying. Many of the bosses that were nightmarishly difficult previously I've vanquished in a single bout. Only ONCE have I taken multiple lives to clear an obstacle. And hey, I've still been getting lots of cool random gear unique from the last run. Is this game far more replayable than I thought? Is it nowhere near as hard as it was cracked up to be? Well, I've now reached the Depths, where I got cursed and quit last time, so we're about to find out. This post is already tediously long, so I'll have to bid you adieu for this afternoon and hope to see you next time on Dark Souls, revisited - revisited.

Sorcerer says: welcome to Lazerbeamville

Back in the CCCR Double Feature - The Witcher 2 and Dark Souls

Control customization Tim here with your weekly Back in the CCCR. Let's cover a little 360 title, a little 360 title that was ported from an even littler PC title called The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. While I maintain that the title of this particular game has been carefully calculated so as to completely vanish in the mire of generic fantasy that piles store shelves, it somehow has managed to make a bit of a name for itself. A lot of people say that this is a game that lets you actually make big choices and change the story. Some say it's got a strategically-grounded but challenging and action-heavy battle system. Others have made claims to the effect that it is chocked full of engaging morally ambiguous narratives. I'm going to stay away from those delusions of grandeur and keep my attention focused on what really matters to you, the everyday gamer: control customization.

Alright! This menu's got nesting! A menu within a menu. 

A control map: why have a tutorial when you can have a picture?

Y axis inversion: Always necessary

Toggle auto-rotating of Y and X cameras: this is because Witcher 2 was designed for PC. 

Vibration on or off: Kinda don't care about rumble. Note to self: post about this later.

The Verdict? The Witcher 2 gets a: I expected more from a PC game out of 10

This is the main stuff that happens in the game, so I guess they figured it didn't matter. Why do I feel like this screenshot should be from Kingdom Hearts?

For a special treat, I've decided to cover ANOTHER game, one which many seem to hold as a Japanese analogue to this western RPG: Dark Souls. I don't know why these many choose to do so, because it makes absolutely zero sense - the games have almost nothing in common beyond their grimdark setting and surprising difficulty.  Dark Souls is hardly an RPG in the traditional sense at all, instead falling closer to a Metroid style open-world adventure. The supposed RPGing aspect, the collection of souls, in fact functions a whole lot closer to a traditional high score counter.  Score. There's an interesting concept. Save it for later. 

Dark Souls has

X, Y axis inversion: of course ALWAYS. if you can't program a -1 then I [jumps off cliff]

Camera speed: it's called sensitivity in every other game but okay

Toggle auto lock-on: This is just confusing. Am I toggling auto lock-on, or am I toggling toggle auto lock-on?

Camera auto wall recovery: Uhh? Am I supposed to know what this means? Some debugger must've really wanted this and told the localization crew not to bother explaining. 

Vibration: there's a meter here so you can set how much vibration you want. How much vibration do you want? Seems stupid. On or off.

The Verdict? Dark Souls gets a: feigning uniqueness through absence of the option not to use the fucking triggers as attack out of 10

Quick, which button makes me block? Fuck, I just jumped off the ledge. Thank god they aren't getting cheap difficulty out of stupid restrictions! Developers know best! Fucking idiots.

I've hidden a secret within this post for all you Easter egg bunnies and cryptographers out there. See if you can find it! I'll give you one small hint: the secret is that the number 2 is referenced multiple times in the post. The Witcher 2, Dark Souls is the second game in a series, 360 is the second Microsoft video game console, I reviewed 2 games' CC options, From Software is a 2-word company name and so is CD Projekt (double double!), my middle initial is the second of my initials, there are 2 little humps in the letter M. Write in with more 2s that you find!