What I'm Playing: November '13 - April '14 - Part 2: Games Started

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

I am wildly behind here. This post was mostly drafted back in April when its companion piece was published, so I'm going to cap off the untouched games with perfunctory summaries so I can quickly take care of May and then all the months I failed to track.

Games Started:

Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 (Xbox 360)

I can't say I've ever had an opinion on Dynasty Warriors, having only played/enjoyed Mystic Heroes - and that at a time before I had any exposure to modern 3D combat. Unfortunately I loaned my copy of Mystic Heroes to a friend with whom I shortly thereafter had a complete falling out, which only goes to proves the old adage: don't loan games if you want to have a strong opinion about Dynasty Warriors. For many years Greg L. refused to loan me games for exactly that reason. Eventually one day he caved and let me borrow his copy of Star Fox 64 and, quickly realizing that he still had a strong opinion about Dynasty Warriors, learned it wasn't so bad after all. Which just goes to disprove the old ad

Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 doesn't have anything do with being a regular action game (i.e. Devil of Cry, God May War). Not sure why anyone would talk about the combat in those terms. It's an arena fighting game with a light real-time strategy backbone. Each player starts with a base at their end of the arena and move across the map, capturing territories as they go, with the primary goal of conquering the enemy HQ. The players (or the player commanders and the CPU commanders) are equally matched when they come face to face in attacking/defending zones. Those giant hordes the series is known for actually aren't the main combat - they just provide an interactive life bar for zones. Instead of standing on a flag while a timer ticks away to signify "capturing", DWG3 requires you to chop through X amount of cannon fodder robots - before an enemy commander can kill you or drive you away. The whole thing would make a perfect competitive multiplayer model - it's almost exactly a MOBA - and I don't know if I've missed the game where they did that or if they're just not going to because Japanese.

Not really a Gundam fan, just grabbed this one because it was (at the time) the most recent Dynasty Warrior

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES / Wii VC)

This game's pretty awesome, it's far better that Zelda I: The Adventure of Zelda. Solid action combat that mixes up one-on-one brawling mentality for Iron Knuckles et al with the larger scale action platforming sensibility of a Castlevania or Ninja Gaiden for larger rooms and caves that have you dealing with a fixed enemy layout built around a level architecture that you can't just run through. There's also a satisfying risk-it-or-lose-it RPG questing structure granted by the tight life limitation that gives the game a Dark Souls pace.

XCOM: Enemy Within (Xbox 360)

This is an expansion of Enemy Unknown, but there are so many new ways to develop your trooper corps that the game takes a different shape even from the beginning. Considering that Unknown was one of my favorite games of the last couple years with a fantastic combination of tactics, survival horror, and sim gameplay, it's not like I need an excuse to play again. But giant mech troopers and biological supermen are a great excuse anyway. It might just be that I'm rusty, but it definitely seems like the game's gotten harder to compensate for the new player capabilities. As much as it breaks my heart to see a soldier die, the fact that it gets such a response is exactly what makes this game great.

Super Mario 3D World (Wii U)

Sure is convenient having a roommate with a Wii U. Don't have to buy stupidconsolewithnogames but still get to play Mario. I had a blast playing through the first eight worlds of 3D World (in fact I guess this kinda coulda gone in Games Finished), as the game was loaded with all kinds of gimmicks and tricky puzzley bits leading to collectibles.

I can complain that it felt on the thin side, but this is a solid action-platformer that fills the dimensional niche between New Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Galaxy 2, so just in regards to the way it utilizes 3D space I think its worth investigating. Of course, that's me who's only played 2 of 4 NSMB games and skipped Super Mario 3D Land, so I may be fresher than the true Mario die-hard who is approaching this game with a fair amount of world-weariness. It's definitely too safe to feel like a worthy successor to the 3D Mario legacy, feeling instead like a spin-off game.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (Nintendo 3DS)

So far this game had two surprises for me: 1.) just how insignificant it is to have access to all the weapons from Scene 1 and 2.) just how significant a goofy gimmick like the wall-walking actually managed to be in shaping dungeons. While it's nice to rent weapons and the idea offers a tiny bit of improvisation potential, the overworld isn't actually any more open than previous games like Link to the Past, in that the price of rental is totally trivial (you will have all the weapons all the time) so the actual important parts of the world are just locked off beyond stuff not related to the weapons. Improvising dungeon order isn't that cool either. What is cool is that now that Link has a timed ability to cross gaps, moving platforms of all sorts have been incorporated into dungeon layouts, making this the "platformer" Zelda (I suppose in addition to Zelda II of course).

Earth Defense Force 2017 (Xbox 360)

Not since Jet Force Gemini has ant discrimination reached such lethal levels with such drastic consequences. EDF 2017 is categorized as a third-person shooter, but due to the lack of cover and the sheer volume of enemies, it takes on a different feel than what is the prevailing style of the genre (games like Max Payne 3, Gears of War, and Transformers: War for Cybertron).

A small handful of games has always stood out in my head as "the non-cover shooters", though design-wise they remind me most of 2D eight-directional shoot-em-ups like Robotron 2084, Smash TV, Total Carnage, and Shock Troopers. 3D shmups is I guess what I'd call them: DOOM, Resident Evil 4, Lost Planet, now EDF 2017.

3D Space Harrier (Arcade / 3DS eShop)

In space, no one can hear your hair. Hence the birth of 3D Space Hairier, a 3DS port of the arcade classic that incorporates stereoscopic third-dimensional viewing into the gameplay of this rail-shooting arcade classic. The port also adds touchscreen controls that I found far too touchy to be usable. Anyway, this is still Space Harrier. That old game of basically Star Force with a Z-axis. As much as I like Space Harrier, after all these years I still can't figure out how to play well past the seventh level or so without simply memorizing the layouts - I just can't see what's happening.

3D Galaxy Force II (Arcade / 3DS eShop)

Closer to Star Fox than Space Harrier and closer to Panzer Dragoon than Star Fox, the arcadey shooting here is pretty fun but never "takes off" and is hampered by a kinda lame Adventure Island-style mixed health bar / timer (that runs down through the entire game, not just each level) that could only belong to an arcade game.

Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (Xbox 360)

What I was most impressed by here was the flow of the story and the game environment and how successfully it evoked the escalating madness of classic comic events like the original debut of Venom or Maximum Carnage.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 (Xbox 360)

I am a Lords of Shadow fan so it is no surprise I like this one - short of the Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry series, this is as good as modern melee action gets - what it lacks in gimmicks it makes up for in the challenging and deep enemy design that earns it the Castlevania name. Okay the stealth segments are wildly unnecessary but they're at least scarce. One of my favorite things about this game is how off-the-rails the art design goes, evoking the grotesque horrorscapes of 2D classics like Ninja Gaiden, Splatterhouse, and Super Ghouls n' Ghosts. I can forgive the use of an interconnected world over the preferable level structure of the first game just because there's so much cool stuff to see.

Hexen (PC / Steam)

Hexen is one of the earlier first-person combat games that was focused on the combat rather than the RPGing (opposed to Ultima Underworld or Elder Scrolls: Arena) - while the combat is more basic than I'd like, the game is set in hub-based mazes which is nice if not fun.

Don't Starve (PC / Steam)

This one really took off. I'm glad to see that's the case, not because I'm particularly in love with the game, but because I've been following Klei for a while now and want them to stay in business for as long as possible. The Shank games were some of the best 2D action of their generation and Mark of the Ninja's stealth platforming worked on every level. I'm guessing the games did well enough (Shank got a sequel after all), but they were never all that recognized. There's no question about Don't Starve though, I'm still seeing that in the news pretty regularly. Maybe it's because it was a solid game in the early PS4 field, but more likely it's because...

Don't Starve is a carefully crafted exploitation of every addictive game trope of the last five years. The game is Minecraft + Farmville + Diablo + (the catchy art of a) Braid or Limbo. While it's great fun to play and its varied inspiration does translate into varied gameplay, it's almost cynical in execution. Procedurally generated environments? Check. Reset player progress after failure? Check. Tedious harvesting for huge quantities of materials? Check. Crafting that in turn makes harvesting quicker/safer? Check. Building bases/farms to increase the rate of production? Check. Rare dungeons with huge rewards and extremely high risk? Check. It follows the model of these folded games where the goal of the game is actually to be able to continue to play the game, with the illusion that you're playing "better" as you keep going.

The best twist of Don't Starve is the adventure element, the mysterious world that makes you want to survive so you can keep uncovering its secrets. Minecraft fell flat because the world was so plain that after 3 hours you'd seen everything and all that was left was to play Legos. The weird altars and wormholes and pig huts scattered throughout Don't Starve suggest something larger at play, and while I've yet to survive long enough to uncover it, it's enough to give purpose to a good run.

Master of Darkness (Game Gear / 3DS VC)

Leave your shame at the door, because tonight we're ripping off Castlevania without abandon. Mr. Society or whatever is the weird dude you control fighting off yet more famous movie monsters in this competent but unengaging action platformer.

Counterfeit Monkey (PC / Gargoyle)

Yes, it's America's very first original text adventure, 2012 or 2013 or something's Counterfeit Monkey. I've only dabbled in text adventures, and almost beat Wishbringer like that once, but I always thought I liked them. I mean, I still think I like them. The old Infocom ones, that is - the ones where you can screw with anything and ruin the whole game and the dialogue is funny and the game is self-aware. Monkey showed me that there is a lot to hate in this style of game, predominantly when it's used as an interactive novel that simply requires you to type "N" instead of turning a page. As far as I played there was nothing wrong with the puzzles - they quickly became predictable and a bit easy, but I've been told other mechanics are introduced that spruce things up further down the line. Aside from the fact that the humor didn't work on me and the characters severely grated, my biggest problem with the story that eventually caused me to give up was simply that I wasn't drawn into the world - it felt more like someone had come up with some wacky rules for a game and then struggled to piece together a story that could somehow support them. While author Emily Short did a respectable job in making that world functional, I didn't particularly find it engaging, relying too heavily on cliches like totalitarian regimes and surly sailors. 

Soldier Blade (Turbografx-16 / Wii VC)

Bigger enemies, less stupid weapons, and better level variety makes this the best Soldier game I've played.

The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure (GBA / 3DS VC)

I dunno I only played the tutorial and it was like a puzzle game which wasn't what I thought it was.

Adventure Island (NES / Wii VC)

I played this as part of a project that you'll all soon be experiencing for yourselves from a first-person narrative perspective. It's really hard but a lot of fun and I think kinda underrated. Maybe. It's true that it's not as original as Mario or deep as Sonic, but it hits a middle stride for people that can't quite handle all the action of Ninja Gaiden, and it makes modern retro platformers like Super Meat Boy and Dustforce look redundant (as redundant as something declaredly retro can be).

Adventure Island II (NES / 3DS VC)

Same. You'll read about this soon. The much underplayed sequel.

Metal Black (Arcade / Taito Legends II)

Crazy ass arcade shmup with Darius roots that has fantastic boss design and such great music and visual style that it is quickly becoming one of my all-time favorites.

Taito Legends (PS2)

I mostly got this for the Space Invaders games, though the surprise hits of the collection were Gladiator, an early scrolling action/fighting game, and Rastan, a pretty tight action platformer.

Taito Legends II (PS2)

Incredible collection of shmups on here - Metal Black, Raystorm, Darius Gaiden, G-Darius, and Grid Seeker, not to mention a handful of unexpectedly decent action plaformers and beat-em-ups.

Shatterhand (NES)

One of those buried treasures that is buried for good reason, Shatterhand has a very awkward gimmick (floating sentinel power-ups) that leave it with watered down shooting and watered down platforming.

Shining Force II is like chess, plus it has a chess level!

Isn't that sweet? Right in the middle of this serious-ass fantasy campaign about a late-term evil abortion comes a chapter titled "Rick Moranis vs. Archon" in which the player characters get shrunken down and thrown on a living chess board. It's a game of chess... for survival! Plus Harry Potter hadn't even done it yet so this is literally the first time in the history of fiction that real people were portrayed as fighting against chess pieces. 

Although, should I be bothered that the board isn't correct? Is that a thing of Japanese game designers not knowing much about chess (is it as obscure over there as go is over here?), or did they put like five queens and not nearly enough pawns on the board as an attempt at balance? Because they could've defined the pieces however they wanted to be balanced (since it's not like they behave like actual chess pieces). It's just kinda arbitrary that the board is wrong.

This really made me smile though. The Shinings Force, Fires Emblem, and even Xs-COM are what I mentally categorize as "chess plus" games, where the principles are the same as chess - threaten units with attack ranges, create traps, use placement for blocking - but rather than movement type as the major determining factor of units' value, you have numeric statistics and rock-paper-scissors balances (like Fire Emblem's sword-axe-lance cycle). Interestingly enough (to mention in this context), Shining Force II* is the game that really got me thinking along those lines.

Initiated combat in Shining Force II is unidirectional**. That means the immediate act of attacking an enemy unit does not negatively impact the player unit. Thus, instead of considering dealt damage against received damage (as is a key factor in Fire Emblem), an attack is valued by dealt damage vs. positional advantage. "Is it worth breaking my line for a big attack on that archer?" "Should I box in that high level unit instead of spreading out to attack weaker ones?" The matter of numerical damage aside, this is chess tactics, where the key determining factors of a move are positional - as important as whether a piece is captured are which pieces the move attacks (places in immediate danger of being captured) and which pieces it defends.

Turn order in RPGs usually follows one of two paradigms: the first, that used by Shining Force II, is unit turns, where the game determines a turn order of units based on their statistics, and the player moves a unit once when its turn comes up. The alternative is team turns, where teams alternate order and during their team's turn, the player can move each unit once (as in Fire Emblem). I don't think I've ever seen an RPG using straight up chess ordering, where a turn consists of a player moving any single unit once; you can see how that doesn't really facilitate RPG leveling/balance.

Team turns lend to a more predictive style of play where it's best to map out the opponent's likely next move and plan accordingly. Each player has complete control of the board that the opponent will face in their next turn. Though this does have its similarity to chess on a broad strategic level, the primary consequence is that players are actually making moves with gigantic multi-armed units rather than with individual pieces. There is so much a player can do with the moving parts of their army that a great deal of build-up is required, then rarely paid off, to execute individual turns. Though the player is controlling ostensibly independent units, they need to take into consideration a butterfly effect of consequences if the opponent makes a single unexpected gambit. Though this hints at grand scope, in effect it leads to an extremely safe mode of play wherein turns are constructed in such a way as to focus solely around guaranteed plays for one or two units.

With Shining Force II's style of turns, unit moves regain their chess-like significance as the primary agents of player strategies. Essentially, there is feedback after every decision point: when the player relinquishes control of a unit, they relinquish control of the game. The next turn may be theirs or the opponent's, but they won't be able to revisit that unit until the round is completed. Successful tactics need to account for how each unit on the map can benefit from each individual move, because they will get a chance to take advantage of it before an overall position is composed.

A more specific chess tactic available in Shining Force II but not in XCOM or Fire Emblem (referencing them a lot, but they really do provide the perfect counterpoint) is the sacrifice. Units are reset at the beginning of every battle in Shining Force II - a battle has no lasting repercussions except for experience point gains. Thus sacrificing a unit becomes a viable tactic. A sacrificial lamb can be used to spread out an enemy formation, lead an all-out attack, provide a momentary barrier, or to bait a trap. The lack of consequence threatens to lead to lazy play, where as a player gains the upper hand their strategy loosens and risks lose their meaning. The simple fact of it is that Shining Force II is balanced so that just isn't the case. There are of course guaranteed-win scenarios during endgame, but the pacing of the battles as tiered skirmishes means that a casualty at any point can lead to a substantial statistical disadvantage in the next skirmish. Sacrifices are still a major trade-off, and the presence of such a tactic only makes the game more strategically rich.

It may not inherently be a strength for a game to be chess-like in nature, but in my experience with strategy RPGs and Shining Force II in general it proves to be nothing but a boon. There is a reason chess is the most popular board game in the world and Warhammer isn't. That reason may have to do with date of origin and which game contains orcs; nonetheless, it's combinatorial complexity is something to aspire to, not compete against.

*For the record, I'm pretty sure everything here applies to Shining Force as well. I've just only played II.

**there is a tiny exception to this. Defending units, probably depending on their stats, have something like a 5% chance of doing a counterattack. It's so rare that it's not so much a factor in tactics as it is a forced non-determinism. I'm okay with this in Shining Force II (though it seems unnecessary given that the make-up and exact statistics of a player's squad in a grind-enabled game provides plenty of non-determinism anyway), but the similar implementation in Fire Emblem bothers me because of the drastic implications of a mistake in Fire Emblem. Get a bad roll on that 95% accuracy attack and you may lose a squad member permanently. 

Musicommendation: Laika & the Cosmonauts

If you're playing XCOM: Enemy Within this week (and who isn't (me for one - haven't had time)), I'm sure you're desperate for some great future-surf to replace the game's nearly non-existent ("scary") soundtrack. For the original game I found Man or Astro-Man? to be the perfect complement, with their array of pumping guitar riffs, eerie electronic effects, cheesy B-movie quips, and MST3K theme songs. Hanging around the same tree farm as MOAM one might find Finlanders Laika & the Cosmonauts, who I'm here to tell you about today.

Now I know what you're saying to yourself. "Wait on a second - Finland? Isn't that the world's musical toilet? The country where they listen to this kind of music?" (that band I linked is Norwegian, but apparently you're a racist who thinks all Scandinavians are the same - a fair enough conflation). But this ain't no cringe-inducing "folk-metal" dreck, nor is it "viking-metal" human waste, nor even "pagan-war-funeral-metal" I'm not even making these terms up. Laika & her Cosmonautic Buddies are a group of very small instrumental surf rockers who incorporate some sweet elements of awesomeness into their music. Honestly I'm not going to describe it. I'm no master of the musical vernacular and you can listen to a song in the same time as you can read a heavily-cribbed-from-AllMusic paragraph. 

My biggest problem with a lot of older surf rock like Dick Dale and the Ventures is that it's like a boring single guitar line that doesn't feel like a song. Thus '80s/'90s covers of surf classics which fill out the mix with multiple leads and neato-FX tend to be light-years more enjoyable than the originals. Luckily Laika is on par with their latter-day contemporaries - their songs are deep, layered, and full-bodied, like a voluminous head of hair using Head & Shoulders, now with conditioning action.

I realize the other #1 ranked shortcoming of surf rock is its tendency toward repetition, but with covers like Laika's of the Pygmies' "Don't Monkey with Tarzan", who could ask for more? 

Anyway, the "unoriginal genre" complaint is a "labels are stupid" problem, not a problem with the music itself. It's like when Greg L. told me Sin & Punishment couldn't be an arcade third-person shooter because it's "too clever". That's an inherent bias against the label, the same as when the Dead Kennedys or Secret Chiefs 3 are excluded from surf rock because they're "too unique". So are the Beatles not pop because they're "too crappy"? Bob Dylan not folk because he's "too revolutionary"? I think people forget that genres are adjectives that lend partial description to artists and works, not boxes that fully contain them. Some genres are more precise than others - obviously "surf rock" has a more specific meaning than "blues" and thus boxes in less bands. That doesn't mean it's limiting, it just means there's plenty of room to build music upon the basis of surf rock. 

Good tangent. Anyway - I highly demand you grab at least Surfs You Right from your local music repositorium. It surfs you write!!!!!!!! If you like guitars, rock, music, things to listen to, sound, or "Sloop John B", Laika & the Cosmonauts is indeed the band for you!

A logical stopping point to the discussion of logical stopping points.

So we've now established that a session is the frame in which a game needs to develop its ideas and create impact, and we know how this session is defined: logical stopping points. Bookending save points, quests, or a flexibly sized series of micro-tasks. We acknowledge that it's important for every session to have a beginning, middle, and end, not just every quest/level/task, because once the session ends, the game is out of the player's mind. Now the question remains: if each sitting is its own unique experience, how do we justify that a game can be composed of anywhere from one to a hundred of these? How do game sessions differentiate themselves from repeated viewings of the same movie?

(by the way, I notice at this point that some kind of obvious comparison to television exists, because these "sessions" I'm discussing are awfully similar to "episodes". The biggest difference is that games (like books) are terminal, while television programs often aren't. TV can meander and float about without any overarching purpose. Regardless, I find it no more sufficient to end the conversation by saying "TV works, hence video games work" than I do to use film or literature identically.)

Fun is a factor, but saying "make the game fun" makes me feel a bit brain-matter-deprived.  If you can't trust your game to be good enough that players can't put it down, give them something to come back for. Dangle the carrot. Good example: XCOM. It's fun sure, but is that really what makes it addictive? The game keeps its portions small and the rewards coming, so you can stop anytime you want. It makes sure you don't want to stop (and that you want to come back after you do) by tying rewards into a linear chain. As soon as you reach one, the next becomes available. You play in anticipation of the immediate goal, then as soon as you reach that and start enjoying the payoff (like trying out that new lazer rifle), a new reward pops up on the horizon. This can be dragged out in the way that MMOs, action RPGs, and any games revolving around the word "loot" do it: randomizng the cycle. You don't know what the next treasure will be, and you don't know exactly when it'll come, but you know there's a virtually infinite supply out there and that it'll show up eventually. This establishes a player mentality of "maybe it's around the next corner" and keeps them coming back indefinitely, but gives enough reward that they can stop anytime and still be satisfied. Dark Souls uses an even more direct dangling carrot: place the reward right in front of the players face, just an inch out of reach, and then make it impossibly difficult to take a step forward.

It's not just a betimes dubious reward cycle that keeps us coming back though. That's implying a primitive dedication, an almost involuntary urge. Those games can be fun, challenging, and satisfying, and make for a great way to spend time, but let's not forget that ultimately we're discussing a narrative medium. Forget indefinitely repeating action for a second and look at how to promise a return will be worth the time. This seems an almost trivial question; make this session good, and they'll assume the next one will be. But each subsequent session requires a little bit more to make it play-worthy. What was awesome once isn't necessarily awesome twice, and you can't exactly get away with using the same plot point twice. It seems idiotic to even need to say this, but the entire length of a game needs to be supported with original content. A designer needs to be able to judge how many times they can repeat the same sequence before it gets old, and how draw that out by interspersing different ideas. How long can you keep me in one village, and how long after I leave it will I want to go back?

This structure is open for escalation and variation, and allows one game to tell a lot of different stories, as a book or TV show may. I'll get more in depth with this some other time, but for now it's the only ending you're going to get for our discussion of session play.

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.

Top Ten SRPGs: Part Threeve

Wait, Earthbound isn't a Strategy RPG, that reference makes no sense. Can't change it now. Must... move... forward... to talk about a few unique occupants of the genre.

7. Gladius

Here's obscure for ya. A non-Star Wars LucasArts game from the middle of the Gamecube's life-cycle that I've never heard mentioned even once by another player. Did anyone out there play this game?

The game's advertisement is immediately misleading - it's not really a game about gladiators. Well, it's a game about tough guys who fight to the (kinda) death in a ring, but it's not historically set. The first (or second) quarter of the game takes place in an ancient-Rome analogue, but it turns out that this Roman nation sits directly next to Dark Ages Scandanavia, ancient Egypt, and the Asian steppes. These worlds are populated both by their traditional warrior classes and mythological beasts. This gives a memorable best-of-mythology feel to the setting where you'll see secutors duking it out with giant scorpions, mummies, and bearskin-adorned barbarians.

The game utilizes a combination of group tactics, rock-paper-scissors, and timed/metered critical hits along with a streamlined command system (where you can skip through movement turns directly to actions) to create generally fluid and fast battles that feel less disjointed than in other strategy titles. Some games go full-on board game and use turn breaks as an escape from realism, but Gladius (and as we're about to discuss, XCOM) feels like it could play out in real-time if you stopped the pauses for commands. This draws the player closer to the battle, making each decision feel more immediate and weighty.

8. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
A game I've of course much discussed recently, I debated for a while whether Enemy Unknown is really an RPG. I'm not gonna go through my entire justification here; the main role-playing principle which is indeed a central element of the game is your relationship to characters. They may not speak except for zingy one-liners and have no relation to the plot, but they provide a medium for the player to express himself uniquely. I doubt anyone could get through Enemy Unknown without feeling like they've been in the trenches with their squaddies, feeling every alien kill and human death in congruence with their collective avatar. This projected emotion is executed better than XCOM far better than many by-the-books RPGs, so it's clearly more deserving of the label.

The game feels almost like it needs to be labeled 'action' as well, but in reality there are no coordination-based efforts. XCOM's pacing is nerve-racking, between the fog of war obscuring anything outside the soldiers' fields of view, the permanent character deaths, and the immediacy with which friend can become foe. Even with its futuristic setting and extraterrestrial threat, the game displays the emotional depth of a true war narrative. The "terror missions" in particular evoke images of 21st century urban unrest and its consequences.

9. Knights in the Nightmare

Admittedly, I feel like it's almost an insult to include this game here, since it so completely defies the conventions of genre as recently discussed. Knights in the Nightmare (and many of St!ng's other games) picks and chooses what appear to be a few familiar ideas and mixes them so wildly that it's no longer recognizable as any remotely familiar formula.

KITN (I read it as "kitten") is SO weird. It's a game about ghosts. Each battle has you reliving the final moments of a new set of knights lives, as you are gradually worked into the immediately-post-apocalypse story. You play as the cursor (wha?) as it silently revives these tragic dying memories. Honestly it's all a bit beyond my capacity to describe. The story is a Germanic tragedy, one which in this presentation seems to say... nothing matters and all life is doomed? K, so we listen to death metal all of a sudden?

Don't try too hard to understand the gameplay from video. Just go try the DS version yourself.

Thus rooted in insanity, it's no surprise the gameplay should be so far off the rails. As you piece together your lost memories and one-by-one raise an army of dead knights, you'll be trying to construct logic out of a similarly disparate hodgepodge of systems that remind of this jigsaw approach to the whole. KITN is a narrative in which time does not necessarily pass linearly, but rather contracts toward a point. It is a game about taking small parts and embracing them without understanding (but eventually experiencing) what makes the sum work so well together.

How can you top the bizarre masterwork of KITN? Well I'd say you'd not only have to go off the genre rails, but you'd have to do it with like a goddamn Shakespeare of a plot. Which game is it? Come on, anyone who's reading this has to know by now.

Oh, sorry, not to blue-balls ya. Here:

XCOM Blogdier: The Late Captain Ezio 'Doomsday' Auditory

Guys this is really bad news. Soul-crushing stuff. I nearly cried, and I definitely did the Rambo thing (god fucking damnit why isn't this on youtube... you know, when he goes "RAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGHHHH" and shoots into the air). Doomsday didn't... he didn't come back from the last mission.

Captain Ezio Auditory, USMCXCOM, is survived by a turkey leg, a loving flute, and his pet Game Boy Advance. He didn't live the life he wanted us to live, he lived the live for which he wanted us to live, to have to have lived. His service for this video game campaign shall be forever remembered... mainly because I made a new soldier to look exactly like him.

Oh, right. Boo. Happy Halloween. Hope you enjoyed it / scared you.

This time the segue would have worked if I wanted to talk about tension or expendability. Dead soldiers in this game are a heavy burqa to wear. In your base hangs a memorial plaque bejeweled in their honor. Still, you won't feel any moral weight to these casualties, only a practical one. "Argh, that's another Heavy I have to start from scratch" were the words I said when Ezio died. Actually I can be pretty dramatic and probably did do the stuff at the top of the post. Okay. Whichever. I'll have some more interesting things to say tomorrow maybe. Right now the skin on my right hand is dry and cracking to the point where it hurts to type.

XCOM Blogdier: Colonel Andrew 'Andy' 'Ice' M

HOO-RAH! I'm not being patronizing - he says that all the time. Both in real life and the game. Because it knows. Here we have our tough-as-tissues de facto squad leader, who takes his anger out in the form of lazers, going through aliens' heads. Yeah, old Ice is so lazy he barely takes a step from the drop point before he starts settin' up shots and knockin' 'em down.

I extremely hate this idea already. See I was going to try to talk about each of the character roles and use that as a segue into discussion of the broader game architecture, but my execution in writing hardly ever lives up to my ideas. In this case, I'm not sure how to keep you interested in the discussion of a combat class that you either already know about or don't need to (and don't care to) understand in order to comprehend the post as a whole.

He's a sniper. Guess what the aliens don't have. Snipers. So you've got a leg up right there. Then again, you don't have Chryssalids. And they have four legs up on you. So who's in charge now? I don't know, and I definitely don't care. XCOM never pretends the playing field is even - in the first mission you'll watch your entire squad die. The whole way, the game wants you to feel outside of your comfort zone, like you're facing an overwhelming enemy as horrifying as that afflicting the in-game (gameic? filmic.) Earth. A lot of tension is on the table, all over the table, oh come on now it's spilling onto the floor will you just go get a paper towel. You can never see the whole playing field, new enemy types are frequently introduced (the game smartly faces you off against an alien collective rather than a species, so it can jump from Greys to Cyberdemons to Xenomorphs while keeping you guessing), and there are fights that you just can't win.

Huh I got sidetracked for the last twenty minutes watching video demonstrations of Turok weapons.

Well anyway, it's fun having a strategy game with such different, unbalanced sides. Like StarCraft, but if the Terrans could only build infantry. One of the things that bores me about Firaxis' (the dev of Enemy Unknown) most popular series, Civilization, is that it's a tech race. Since everyone essentially starts on equal footing, whoever gets tanks first tends to win. Here, you know you're going to be outgunned, so while indeed there's a race to get up to par on alien weapons and armor technology, the emphasis is on tactically outsmarting your opponent - and that doesn't mean choosing units to manipulate a rock-paper-scissors cycle (Company of Heroes, Fire Emblem, etc.). It means thinking about every move and every shot. If you don't find yourself pausing and looking around the map and scrolling through a few characters before every single move in this game, you're having a much different experience than I.

Sometimes strategy/sim games with random battles get tedious to the point where you want to be able to auto-compute the result of small skirmishes so that you can focus on the larger conflict (hi Koei!). This game doesn't belong to that category. Not because the sim parts aren't challenging and satisfying on their own, but because each tactical battle is so enthralling and rewarding.

I'll talk about that worldwide economic and political management half of the game tomorrow, when I feature our next squaddie, Maj. Elesia Bowers.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Friends Known

Keep your eyes posted this week folks, because I'll be peeling profiles on the members of my brand new XCOM: Enemy Unknown squad:

Captain Ezio 'Doomsday' Auditory
Colonel Andrew 'Ice' M
Major Elesia 'Septic' Bowers (a soon-to-be blogger)
Major Greg 'Deacon' Livingston
and introducing Rookie Kyle Reese.

[note: nicknames and rank assigned by game, not me]

XCOM = Sw33t (updated to say FUCK YOU MICROSOFT)

Not a real post here, just felt like saying the XCOM: Enemy Unknown demo felt awesome, surprisingly cinematic for a turn-based strategy, surprisingly visceral for a turn-based strategy, and like it preserved just about everything that made the original game so deep and replayable while maintaining a modern level of accessibility. Only choice left is whether I should buy it for 360 or PC - my laptop can only stomach the lowest graphics settings and the framerate hiccups when the explosions really go down, but I'm really going to miss mouse control. Using a console pad to point to locations on a grid is plain tedious; there's a reason you don't see anyone using an N64 controller to make their monthly audit report in MS Excel.

I want to go play the old game but feel like now I've been spoiled by high-def head explosions.

Ah, figuring out these old pictorial interfaces is always such a blast.

Edit: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME MICROSOFT?! I actually did start a new game and then fucking Windows decides it's time to restart without warning (updates!) while I'm in the middle of a fucking fullscreened battle. Who the hell decided it was an acceptable practice to interrupt all processes and shutdown just for a stupid OS update? Pester me all you want with notifications, but don't take over my goddamn machine. How has no one ever lost money because of this and then turned it into a lawsuit against MS?