Deathsmiles part 2: The tweaks and twixes of Mega Black Label

K got the slightly-non-scrub clear of Deathsmiles (all stages Rank 2+, beat the penultimate boss for real and beat more of the final boss than I expected (only used 3 bombs I think)). Ultimately it's definitely not a game I'd call bullet hell (**danmakuu** \'>_<'/ kawaii densetsu gaiden, senpai!! *\^o^/*) - the multiple aiming directions and handful of bullet-clearing techniques make it much more about planning how to keep bullets from piling up than about herding or tap dodging or reading geometry. In fact, sans the final two bosses, if there are ever enough bullets on screen that I'd have to go into weave mode, I just bomb. That's how rarely it happens (if you're playing decent at least). Nearly all of my character movement is with the goal of orienting my option or lining up a shot - in the final playthrough I made good use of Sakura with her reverse option, alternating locking it into place as Double or Tail. This time I was playing Mega Black Label, a mode that tweaks the scoring and adds some content but not much else (I'll be referring to the base game as "vanilla").

Before we start discussing the updates, you might want to check out my full run-down of Deathsmiles' score items and Power-Up mode. There's one detail of the base game that I left out, which is that the Overall Counter maxes out at a value of 10,000, after which all item drops will be crowns (which can still break apart into tiaras and skulls when hitting the ground). I've seen this state called "Frenzy mode", but nothing in the game or manual uses that terminology. I didn't mention that because I forgot to, but it also has no bearing on gameplay incentives - Power-Up scoring is two orders of magnitude greater than Normal even without it, and raising the Overall Counter as quickly as possible is inherently beneficial.

Mega Black Label's two biggest changes are meant to send scores into the tropoplosphere: first, Power-Up can be deployed at any Item Counter value above 500, and second, the Overall Counter is never reset. The scoring is so inflated that the second extend now sits at 300 million, far above my top All-Clear score for vanilla. Better still, the Overall Counter is now displayed directly below the Item Counter (just like I suggested in my previous post!). There's also a new playable character, a new optional Chapter 4 stage, and Rank 999, a fourth selectable difficulty alternative for each stage.  I'm not going to go into the new content, but I ought to note that playing stages on the highest available rank is necessary to maximize score, because higher rank means more enemies, and more enemies means more items. Since I'm interested only in scoring within the confines of a 1CC, I pick stage rank based on what I think I can (learn to) survive, and work on score only after.

Into the weeds on the first point first: the lower threshold for Power-Up. Transparently, this opens up a lot more flexibility in planning where to deploy the transformation, and it likewise makes doing so less costly. It's quicker to charge and it's quicker to recharge. This has obvious survival utility (Power-Up still boosts attack and clears bullets when transitioning), but also allows burning off some Item Counter value before a big item flow is known to be coming up to provide a refill (for instance, I know the ogres in Chapter 5 are going to spill gallons of items, so I make sure I'm always coming up to them on empty). At the same time, there are new costs to consider. Fever mode, which you'll recall lasts as long as the Item Counter is kept at 1000, remains unchanged - from Item Counter values of 500 to 999, the player character remains in Normal mode, despite Power-Up now being available. And if the transformation is triggered in this range, the Item Counter will immediately drop to 500 and count down from there, meaning any progress toward Fever is lost and the transformation duration is artificially shortened. Because of that counterbalance, it's still worthwhile to think ahead to get the most out of the Item Counter.

This wouldn't be as meaningful if the Overall Counter was resetting to 0 at each of these refills, as it was previously established that OC is the driver of exponential scoring. A shortened Power-Up would mean lesser Overall Counter values and probably wouldn't be very consequential. Likely with that in mind, Mega Black Label drops the Overall Counter reset (that in vanilla Deathsmiles occurs at the end of Power-Up) and also drops the cap value of 10,000. Now the Overall Counter is free to grow and grow throughout the entire run of a game, ramping up the suspension of a scoring run while also sacrificing most of its atomic nature. Although it's value is preserved throughout, it's still only active (i.e. applied to item pick-ups and able to grow) during Fever or Power-Up modes. If the player loses a life, the Overall Counter takes a big hit (maybe 30%? hard to track precisely during gameplay). More significantly, for the entire duration of boss battles the value quickly drains. Bosses need to be killed as quickly as possible or milked for items (which is only possible in Power-Up) to keep the counter up. This also seems to discourage the all-Fever style of play I briefly mentioned in the previous write-up.

These changes are interesting, but as my descriptions probably convey, I haven't fully wrapped my head around the best ways to use them. More flexible planning is ultimately more complex planning, and the full playthrough suspension of the Overall Counter throws massive flux into potential scores. I remarked about the vanilla game that you can completely blow a stage and still get consistent results in the next - that's no longer the case in Mega Black Label. There's more happening in parallel, more choices available at every point and more potential for tradeoffs, all making it harder to identify where one strategy is outperforming another. At some level of play I could see myself enjoying this granularity, but at the moment I find it more satisfying experimenting with routes and timing my Power-Ups in vanilla, getting that more straightforward feedback.

A review of Deathsmiles' scoring

This isn't a guide to scoring in Deathsmiles, nor is it a review of Deathsmiles. It's just an attempt to reconstruct the scoring system as a big picture that is neither as cryptic as the manual nor as prescriptive as a guide.

When it comes to score in modern arcade shooters, the classic question is always "does it really need that many zeroes?". When I started playing Deathsmiles, I was reaching the final boss with scores around 3 million, wondering why the extends were sitting up at 20 and 45 million. After taking a few minutes to read the manual, I was instantly able to adjust my play such that I was grabbing both extends and reaching that same finale with scores over 50 million. What's odd about this is that it didn't at all involve dying less or killing more enemies, and barely even affected my routes on screen - the initial change was completely orthogonal to the core survival challenge of the game.

Scoring in Deathsmiles is driven entirely by the collection of point items dropped by enemies; drastic variability in scoring derives from the player's ability to determine how many points each item is worth. This stems from a transformation dynamic; in Normal state, the player will be collecting items worth hundreds of points, and thus only total a six- or seven-digit score (hundreds of thousands or millions). In the transformed state, aka Power-Up Mode, the same items are worth thousands and tens of thousands, and will thus accumulate to eight- or nine-digits (tens or hundreds of millions). Therefore, scoring in a Normal state will be completely drowned out by Power-Up scoring and ultimately does not matter. A single 30-second burst of Power-Up at the beginning of stage 2C (the volcano) can score twenty times as much as an entire single-credit playthrough without it, and serves as a good illustration of how useful this technique can be (incidentally, the manual points out this location explicitly).

Anyway, the way it works is that you have an Item Counter, 0-1000. Picking up point items dropped by killing enemies increases the counter; when it reaches 1000*, press B to go into Power-Up Mode. While powered up, the counter gradually decreases, and at 0 the player returns to Normal. There is no way to prematurely exit the state, but it (and the counter value) do carry over between levels (i.e., if the player kills a boss in Power-Up with their counter at 350, they will start the next stage in Power-Up with their counter decreasing from 350). The Power-Up state lasts about 30 seconds, during which: 1.) player shot coverage and damage is substantially increased 2.) collecting items will not increase the Item Counter, and 3.) the score value of items is compounded with an additive modifier (Overall Counter) which continues to increase as more items are collected, thus creating an exponential effect (each item increases the score AND increases the value of the next item). The modifier, Overall Counter, doesn't exist outside Power-Up and is reset to 0 each time Power-Up ends*; it's therefrom implied that this modifier, and thus the quantity of items collected during Power-Up, is the key to scoring.

As long as the Item Counter sits at full (waiting to be deployed for Power-Up), the player character will be in Fever Mode. In this state, all enemies drop crowns (the most valuable point item). The Overall Counter also becomes active, but builds very slowly. Fever Mode does not affect any gameplay aspect outside of score, and will continue indefinitely as long as the player doesn't Power-Up or take damage. It mostly acts as a way to prime the Overall Counter while waiting for a planned transformation opportunity; there isn't any strong incentive to stay in Fever (it scores worse and leaves the character weaker than Power-Up), and the incentive to reach it is redundant with the incentive to reach Power-Up*. That said, supposedly the proest of the pros play the entire game in Fever and never use Power-Up, benefiting off the long-term Overall Counter growth.

The type and number of point items dropped by an enemy is determined by the enemy type and which weapon it's killed with - rapid, focus, or lock-on shot. Each enemy has a defined 'weakness' that has to be discovered via experimentation; that is, a specific shot type that generates extra items (rather than doing extra damage). You'll usually see dozens of instances of each enemy in its given habitat, so deducing weaknesses isn't too hard until things get frantic at the end (actually remembering them can be a bit tougher - and I would swear a few enemies have different drops for different player characters). Of course, there are also practical/survival incentives for using different shot types, so this sets up a balancing act for the player. (Mushihimesama Futari has a similar, simpler system: when the item counter is Blue, use focus fire to get the most items, when it's Green, use rapid fire; the color alternates at fixed counter values).

There are three types of point items of increasing value: skulls, tiaras, and crowns, the last of which only appear in Fever or Power-Up modes. Items fall to the ground from the point where they're spawned; upon landing, the larger items break into a multitude of skulls. Each item collected adds to two independent sums simultaneously: the player's score and the Item Counter (in Normal state) or the Overall Counter (in Fever or Power-Up)*. Probably the most confusing aspect of the game is that a collected item adds a different value to each of the aforementioned sums, e.g. a skull adds (+1) to the Item Counter, (+100+OverallCounter) to score, and something like (+log(OverallCounter)) to the Overall Counter, while a tiara adds (+5) to the Item Counter, (+800+OverallCounter) to score, and the same (+log(OverallCounter)) to the Overall Counter. So at an Overall Counter value of 250, three skulls = 3*(100+250) = 1050 are worth the same amount of points as a single tiara = 1*(800+250) = 1050, and are worth three times (3*(log(250) compared to 1*(log(250))as much to the Counter itself, which will increase the value of the next pickup. Since a tiara breaks into three skulls upon hitting the ground, this means that in Fever or Power-Up, it's better to let it break apart before collection - i.e., the highest quantity of items drives the highest score.

It's definitely complicated, but it's not AS complicated as it at first seems, due to the confusing presentation. The Item Counter should just be a super meter, because presenting a number so prominently suggests that the numerical value matters, which it does not (all the player needs to know is whether it's full and how soon it will be); the Overall Counter should be named something like Item Bonus, because it does not count anything "overall", in fact doesn't really count (the rate at which it increases is exponential), and sounds too much like Item Counter; the Overall Counter should be displayed where the Item Counter* is such that the player can actually read it (presently it's displayed as a +XXXX next to the item acquired, meaning it's in the middle of the gameplay area and somewhat hard to track), and enemies should somehow indicate that you killed them with the correct weapon (e.g. in MushiF, using the right weapon generates large gems and the wrong one small gems. In Deathsmiles it's more like the weakness gives you 3 crowns and 2 skulls, and the wrongness gives you 5 tiaras, so you need to mentally track your expected reward while determining weapon choice).

Overall it's well done, if maybe a little too meta-level for my tastes. It all comes down to deploying Power-Up at the right time, something that carries over between levels and therefore creates suspension (especially with a level select in play), yet also is self-contained enough that the barrier for entry to experimentation is low (you can totally butcher or totally ace the early stages and still get consistent results later). Contrary to my first impression, the counters do tie survival strategies to scoring, both because they can be exchanged for weapon power and because the type-weakness aspect of enemies is a counterpoint to which weapon might seem practically useful. The stage design is a bit monotonous and the bosses are too easy until they're too hard, but turning up the rank helps a little. Still, it's the abstract systems that drive a game like this, not the design.

*See MBL

Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter "Resident Evil" 4

In the words of Shakespeare's MacBeth himself: Exeunt stealth. Here in Chapter 4 of The Evil Within we complete the transition from pure stealth to pure action, confronted with arena combat scenarios conquerable only by chopping down all foes and seeing that "GO-->" arrow appear. The particular combat scenarios on hand are almost impossibly reminiscent of Resident Evil 4 and my skills have made the transition surprisingly well.

So we pick up on our way out of Death Village, Population: 0. Dr. Nonsequitur keeps up his run by pointing to the building ahead and assuring me it's his long-lost brother's clinic, so we pop inside for a chat and hopefully a couple dogs grilled up real nice. I'd barely tied the strings on my Paul Stanley "KISS: The Cook" apron when the doc started insisting we find his brother. I said okay we save the dogs for later let's go. The brother, it turns out, is the kind of nerd that pulls out a dweeby Zombie Teddy Roosevelt every Halloween. He was also elbow-deep in some kinda hellish surgery even The Great Compromiser couldn't have approved. Something about itching. The guy had a nasty skin condition, to tell the truth. 

Upon discovering a Junior Mint in the surgical cavity, the bad doctor came at me with arms outstretched, sure I was the culprit. Fat Mama Joes like him take a lot of ammo to put down, so that little scripted encounter fully drained my handgun reserves (moral of the story - I need to be quicker to draw my shotgun when appropriate, otherwise I'm gonna end up relying on shells for easy encounters after wasting handgun rounds on tough ones). What really gets my goat is that after absorbing all those bullets, Teddy didn't even have the courtesy to stay down! Like a bad VCR, he glitched out and skipped back 30 seconds to his peaceful evil surgery observance. You know, this isn't the first time Evil Within's used video tracking as a scary effect. I'm starting to wonder if the whole game doesn't take place inside a VHS - a Video Haunted System. 

After TDR vanished into blue smoke, I noticed an x-ray on the table next to the surgery showing that his cadaver, perhaps a former star of the Saw film series, had partially digested a set of keys. So I let my puppet Sebastian plunge his hands into the corpse (which of course did a scary thing) to find them. I'll talk about keys next chapter.

Moving on through the poor man's halfway house I bumped into another creeper and took 'im out, but it was quickly time to move on. That's when I came to the clearing outside, where a zombie was carrying what looked like a kicking screaming woman toward a bonfire. In my ammo conservation panic, I didn't manage to get off a shot until the woman had been torched - to be honest, I do feel kinda bad. But I'm not gonna waste two bullets to save a stranger's life, come on. That'd be insane!

Anyway, I escorted the regular doctor, still in search of Leslie Nielsen, into another old-fashioned home. As soon as we found lil' baby Les (whose annoying ass needs to die already), things got surreal. Stuck at a dead end, the lights went out and were replaced by a red glow. That's when cordyceps-face phased in two inches from my face and grabbed hold. As soon as I struggled free, my attacker inviso'd out again, and a shotgun blast at the air where he should've been hit nothing. I stumbled around the room for a bit, fending off grabs and trying to counter-shoot, but to no avail. I grabbed a bottle and threw it across the room, hoping to draw him out with a decoy, but that didn't work either. 

That's when I glimpsed a porcelain bowl unnaturally spin across the floor and keyed in on the trick - he's invisible, not immaterial. Keeping tabs on environmental clues, I finished my unsightly pursuer with a couple shells and an explosive bolt. As far as I can tell, these guys warp as soon as they vanish, so they're only vulnerable on the approach. I'm not sure how I could've won this fight without shooting - the door didn't unlock until my attacker was down.

After looking it up, I guess these guys don't look that much like Last of Us zomgis, but they did call it to mind

Now's as good a time as any to talk about the crossbow. The crossbow feels almost like it was meant to be the sole weapon of the game, with at least four types of ammo, its own upgrade menu, and bolts craftable on the fly. If I haven't mentioned yet, disarming traps nets Sebastian the creatively named "trap parts". Trap parts can be converted into crossbow bolts from the regular inventory menu. A spear-like harpoon bolt or a blinding flash bolt will require 2 parts a piece, explosive "proximity mine" bolts cost 3, and wide-radius electric trap bolts demand a whopping 4. The only way to have a new bolt type added to the selection is to encounter it in the wild. Sebastian can only carry a couple of each - only 2 to start - so it isn't realistic to stockpile on a single favorite type (crafting on the fly is prohibited by a non-pause inventory). The main catch to the crossbow in the fray is that it has a very short (5m?) arcing range - it's more like aiming a grenade than a gun*.

*Sure it's a valid gameplay mechanic, but boy is this a face-palming portrayal of crossbows. If my history / Age of Empires education serves me, even medieval crossbows could shoot hundreds of feet away. In fact I just looked it up: modern hunting crossbows are accurate up to about 60m. That means it should be equally, if not more effective at range than Sebastian's revolver (which could rate 25-200m depending on many factors).

Moving on with Lessy in tow, Sebastian tripped down a hallway across space and time and fell face-first into another Bloodpool. Maybe this game's about wormholes, just like Event Horizon. I hope Sam Neill bursts out of someone's chest. Until then, I was left exploring a big garbage-disposal-y room with catwalks, ladders, a pool of blood, a sub-room, some tripwire traps, a couple switches that seemed to do nothing, a puddle of oil, and some explosive canisters. Maybe it's just me and RE4 (that's what I call my subconscious), but the obvious placement of the traps around a complex but empty room told me "enemies are on the way". When I made my way to the one and only exit, I could only pretend to be surprised that the villain materialized to summon a swarm of blood-nanites to summon more zombie men from the bloody depths. Blood, zombies, blood, zombies. Yeah. Oh, and he locked the door. With blood.

There were a LOT of creatures emerging from the blood lagoon, so I hop-skip-jumped my way through the traps I'd picked out, incinerating swaths of them with the oil patch (ignitable with matches) and the fuel cans (ignitable with bullets). After pulling a few of the standard RE4 tricks (funnel 'em with ladders, corral and grenade 'em), I was through the swarm and the door re-opened. Important new trick in The Evil Within that draws from the same well but balances things out quite nicely: any downed enemy can be torched and will alight nearby foes. It's possible to convert a knee-shot and matches into a lot of kills this way, essentially taking the place of RE4's headshot-then-roundhouse group-clearing combo. It's also more dangerous to pull off (no invincibility frames and the context-sensitive match toss is super-short range) and is doubly resource-intensive (matches are equally as rare as bullets), so it feels appropriate to the increased tension of Within.

After the door unbloodlocks we head down another hallway and hey there's a locked door on my right so let's keep going to that brightly lit room oh neat some handgun ammo what's that in the corner BALAGAGHAGFEHRERHG BLOOD MONSTER! Yes, with no cutscene to relieve the tension, a horrible six-armed girl-hair thing spewed forth from a puddle of blood and started phasing toward me. Zig-zag phasing. But she's still shootable and hey, this is a Resident Evil game, so as long as I run by quickly, it doesn't matter how close I am - she won't grab me! So I dragged her for a few loops around the room until I eventually fouled up and got my head smashed down to a one-hit KO.

While mentally prepping for round 2, the loading screen told me the kind of thing that a loading screen should never, ever tell. I am pretty dumbfounded that the loading screen had the audacity to say what it did. More on that in a second.

I died again, but I took away an important observation: the door out of blood girl's surgical boudoir was still open even after the fight started. So for round three I set up a string of traps in the corridor before allowing her to spawn. I kited her straight through two explosive bolts (which didn't even phase her) and into a shock trap, whereupon I let the grenades fly. This is where I made another shocking observation: the door that had initially led me into the hallway (from the blood pool) was gone and the previously locked side door was swinging open. I ducked through and, just about completely out of ammo, I speared her with a harpoon bolt for the big kill. Back down to a paltry 8 handgun rounds, I picked up the 8000 upgrade goos and headed on toward the end of the stage.

As I made my way through the remaining corridors, I couldn't help but notice the ready-made traps on hand. A door to slam here, an explosive tank there, and at the very end, an elevator to take me away. That's when it occurred to me that I was meant to discover the open door sooner, conserve ammo, and play this one like a Verdugo - draw the boss into delaying traps and make a run for the elevator.

Or, that's when it would've occurred to me, had the loading screen after losing to the boss not explicitly told me: "It's unwise to fight blood girl head to head. You can kill her, but maybe you should just run for it." DON'T TELL ME THAT ON A LOADING SCREEN! You've ruined the entire tension of the fight, spoiling both the risk of spending ammo on a perhaps-invincible foe and the urge to find a secondary means to victory. I ignored the tip and played how I would've anyway because 1.) I was being honorable and 2.) I always fought Verdugo to the death anyway. In fact, I think I didn't know he could be waited out until a friend pointed it out to me. That's just too scary for me. I'd rather fight.

The monetary (here goo) reward for defeating the boss makes it worth it anyway - I may have spent 3x as many bullets as I needed, but I was able to upgrade my guns til they were 3x (or something) more effective, thus conserving ammo in the long run. That's another RE4 trick for ya. Even ignoring that, it gives me a payoff for being smart with ammo earlier and resets my position so I'll need to be again, so it's good game design all around. That loading screen is just ass though. I can only hope that was put in by some dumbass publisher/localization goons.

So before things came to a close I bumped into Ruvik on a staircase. When I tried to run by he insta-killed me (this game likes insta-kills - it's encouraging the player to play safe with the unknown), so the second time I turned and ran as soon as he appeared. Cutscene, end chap.

I gotta be honest, I think Ruvik is the dumbest looking element in a game with otherwise great art design. Even if they didn't mean for him to look like Assassin's Creed, the resemblance is too hard to ignore. At a certain point you just have to be honest with yourself and admit your design is too close to an existent (and extremely popular) one and give it up.

Here's a plot theory. Leslie is an albino. The main villain, Ruvik, is hard to make out under his Assassin's Creed hood, but I'm pretty sure he's an albino too. Leslie is only around in the forest stages and Ruvy seems to be more a mental hospital guy. Are the hospital and the forest parallel worlds cohabitated by parallel versions of Ruvik (which, unsurprisingly, is an anagram of "Leslie")? Or is Lessy some kind of gate? Because as soon as he showed up we were back in the hospital. This merely reinforces my gut feeling that Sebastian needs to kill this annoying babbling weirdo. I mean, if the world was falling down would you really waste your time dragging around an mindless loon? Unless the world was his mind!!!!

Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter 3: What was that noise?

So, if it hasn't occurred to you yet, things might get kinda spoily from here. Probably not plot-wise, but it's impossible for me to narrate the gameplay without revealing monsters and their locations. It's been a pain just finding screenshots without seeing every last twisted boss. At least it's made me confident that chainsaw guys and zombies are just the tip of the iceberg.

At the onset of "Clause of the Horde" Sebastian and I pulled ourselves out of the muck and started working our way into the village on the other side of Chapter 2's stone bridge. Approaching through the mist, the town square seemed quiet. Nothing was amiss - nothing except the bodies hung upside down below a wooden walkway. I busted through the window of the nearest house and was startled by a loud beeping - that's when Sebastian exploded into a dozen pieces.

Restarting from the checkpoint I returned to the same window and this time ran into a corner as soon as I'd hopped through. The beeping died out as I moved away from the entry point, and turning around I got a look at a new type of exploding trap: the exploding trap. A quick tutorial window told me I could sneak up to exploding traps to disarm them, so I gave it a try and was snapped into a QTE minigame. Not ready for what was happening (other traps are automatically disarmed when you press A), I failed Sebastian and he exploded again. Returning a third time, I timed a button-press for when the rotating dial crossed a safe zone and the trap was safely disarmed. I moved past another one, dropped by a safe house, and made my way through the upstairs until a cut-scene was triggered.

Here Sebastian joins up with Dr. Dave and some very confusing dialogue. The doc points out a heavily guarded gate as the only escape from the village and suggests one of us should create a distraction so the other can make a run for it. Then he says "you're the one with the gun..." and gameplay restarts. Now, maybe I'm stupid, but I could not figure out from that line who he was suggesting should be the diversion. I kinda assumed he meant me, since gunshots would grab the zombies' attention. Before I had a second to think it over, I heard zombies breathing down my neck and he streaked off across the square yelling "HEY, LOOK OVER HERE!!!".

So he meant he would be the one getting their attention. Whatever. I made a run for the gate and got immediately swarmed and killed by zombies. So... did the diversion not work? Did I not understand what was happening? When I retried I went with a different route, this time going behind the houses, but there were still zombies everywhere and I couldn't open the gate - not to mention my diversion had locked himself in one of the houses. Still confused, I decided to ignore the "make a run for it" plan and just hid in a closet while Dr. Retardo did his thing.

From the closet I could hear loud rasping zombie mouth-sounds, so I knew I wasn't alone. After a minute or two it looked like no one was going to waltz by and invite a stealth kill, so I wandered out and headed down the hallway. That's when I heard footsteps on the roof or a ladder thudding against the wall and two baddies splashed through the window right on top of me (RE4). With exactly two bullets to my name I dished out a couple swats and made a run for the basement. On the way I took out one of my pursuers by ducking below a trip-wire that he blindly triggered. The other went down with an ax to the head (the occasional expendable ax provides a one-hit kill identical to the torch). There was one more zombie waiting in the basement, so I carefully lined up a headshot and splattered an unreasonable amount of blood across the room.

It definitely felt nice (heart-pounding, but nice) to get some fast-paced spontaneous gameplay going. There were enough bullets in the basement (four) to take out my attackers, but the pressure was so high that I was taking the immediate reflex solutions which let me continue to conserve ammo. That said, I took a lot of hits and used up all my healing items in all that fumbling around. Maybe the smartest thing would've been to run and re-hide after I had been spotted, but I was alive and armed, so I kept going.

Though there were no other monsters in sight, I was still surrounded by wheezing, gurgling sounds that reminded me they could be anywhere. Let me tell you, the moans these things make are so much creepier than your run-of-the-mill "braiiiiiiiiiiiiins"ing. They sounds like demonic cats trying to hock up barbed wire hairballs. I'm desperate to kill enemies just to clear the air of that awful fucking noise.

After sneaking out of the first house I shot my way through two more zombies into a barn that looked mostly empty. Again, it didn't sound particularly empty, stirred by metallic scraping sounds, more groaning, and even some pig squeals. I collected some supplies in the rafters and moved on.

On my way to the next house I got a good view of a zombie's back and tiptoed up for a stealth kill... except a goddamn bear trap latched onto my leg and ruined that plan, causing me to waste another two bullets. When I got inside and took out another three foes head-to-head (with the help of a torch and some matches), I had two exciting discoveries back to back: an attache case (RE4) holding a shotgun, and a crossbow leaning against a barrel. The crossbow is a little unusual, but I'll talk about how that works in a later chapter. As a veritable walking arsenal (I had also picked up some grenades by this point), I was feeling pretty confident and plowed through another two houses, mostly relying on stealth kills and crossbow bolts.

In the attic of the final house (which didn't have to be the final house, it just happened to be thanks to my approach), I bumped into The Doctor. This triggered some more confusing dialogue, starting with "How did you open the door so quickly?" I assume he meant the gate out of town, but I hadn't even opened it yet, and even Sebastian's line (something like "Gimme some time, doc") acknowledged that. It just... is this bad translation or what? The dialogue doesn't connect. It's not like it's mysterious, it's just non sequitur after non sequitur. Like someone cut-and-paste rearranged the script.

Once I had the town cleared I checked out the gate, which of course was locked tight. Sebastian suggested we find a chainsaw to cut through the chain holding it in place, but I had pretty thoroughly cleaned out the place already, so I was a bit perplexed. Combing through a second time, I noticed the barn was still ringing with that metal noise and moaning. I took a closer look around the ground floor... and that's when the Chapter 1 chainsaw guy Kool-aid Man'd his way through a wall and sawed off Sebastian's head.

Something unusual about this chapter, which was set in a single free-range area, is that after every four or five kills I would see the game saving a checkpoint. Whenever I died, I was reset to the center of the area and I guess all the kills/pick-ups up to the checkpoint were remembered. It was hard to tell since the zombies would never be found where I remembered killing them, and my location got reset pretty far from where the checkpoint was recorded or where I died. In this case, when the chainsaw guy killed me, I didn't remember when the last save had been so I had to retrace my steps for a while, making sure I still had all my supplies, and even found a few zombies in new locations. I guess in theory it revives the tension that threatens to disappear on a replay, but realistically it was disorienting in a tedious way. Hopefully other areas don't suffer from this problem.

Since I now knew where Mr. C. Saw was hiding, I was ready for round two. I used my crossbow to place a couple proximity mines and got my grenades at the ready before triggering his appearance. It wasn't hard to drag him into the traps, but he was too fast to easily peg with grenades. My shotgun didn't seem to slow his pursuit, but thankfully two mines, a grenade, and ~3 shells were enough to put him in the dirt. Chainsaw in hand (sadly as a key item rather than a weapon), I cut open the gate and completed the chapter.

The thing that worries me about Chapter 3 is I have no clue how I would've beaten the chainsaw guy had I missed the crossbow or the shotgun, or even if there had been zombies still wandering around. If there's no other way to kill this guy than to clear out everyone leading up to him, that's action, not survival. It worked with my current approach, but I'm not sure what I would've done - except die a lot - had I stumbled across him when I was in the barn that first time.

Actually, I just looked it up, and there are a bunch of other ways to kill him. Still seems like it'd be hard if you haven't mopped up the zombies, but there is an alternate crossbow way and a complete no-weapon way (similar to Verdugo, U3 and most of the RE4 bosses). I also learned I missed a whole bunch of items :-(

Overall, the pacing of this area felt a little off. Going through houses became methodical and that whole intro with the doctor was just bizarre and confusing (I still don't know what the plan was and feel like the game was telling me to do something I extremely was not supposed to do). Also, three new weapons at once is a lot, as I suddenly went from completely outgunned to teeming with firepower. As a stage of RE5 this would be great, but Chapter 2 had such a perfect balance that by comparison this hits as overblown. I think realistically I don't have a problem with Chapter 3 so much as I just don't want the remainder of The Evil Within to be this. The game could definitely work if it continues to oscillate between the super-stealth of Chapter 1, the Goldilocks balance of 2, and the heavy action of 3.

Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter 2: Deep forests with deep gameplay

Maybe I'll do a daily journal of Evil Within chapters. We'll see how long they get. I know there are 16 and the game is said to be about 15 hours, so they might be just the right length to play one a night. Depends on how much I die.

So Chappy 1, as mentioned yesterday, is an uninspiring Mental Hospital Chainsaw Massacre. The gameplay is purely run-and-hide of the Clock Tower variety; however, the environment is complex enough to provide numerous avenues of sneaking. Crowded rooms with boxes, curtains, and lockers all over - not to mention bottles that can be thrown for distraction - allowed me to at least experiment as I repeatedly died and retried.

The player character is called Sebastian Castellanos. I just felt like getting that out of the way instead of trying to work it into a sentence.

Chapter 2 provides the tutorial that's missing from the dramatically hard intro. Sebastian is back to walking/running at normal speed - a bit faster than the standard enemies - and he's got a loaded revolver in hand. After an introduction to the save/upgrade safe-house accessible through mirrors, it's - as the saying goes - out of the hospital and into a nighttime forest encircling decaying cottages.

I know what you're saying. "First a chainsaw, now a forest? What is this, RE4?" Trust me, we haven't even scratched the surface of the RE4ness of this game, including bear traps, trip wires, not-a-zombies, the part where you use binoculars to look ahead at a villager gathering (just weird that that minor moment would be reused), and the being chased across a stone bridge by a torch-waving mob. Yes, from what I can tell, The Evil Within is Resident Evil 4. That is to say, the tagline should've been "Within this game resides an evil. That evil... is Resident Evil. Fooouurr.". Still, the open forest is a much cooler and scarier setting than a mental hospital and it doesn't look much like RE4 - the palette uses deep greens, blues, and greys rather than dusty reds and browns - so I'm not complaining.

Sorry, I wish I could use my own images for this coverage but I don't have any way to screen-cap from a 360 game

Shortly after I set off through the trees, I was forced into a showdown with a standard enemy. Three misses and a headshot later, I was down to two bullets and had a good idea that these sorta-zombies were faster than actually-zombies, liked to charge straight at me, and were soft in the skull. Against the next guy I wasn't so lucky - quickly wasting my remaining bullets, I had the choice to run or swing my fists. With a dead end behind me and no clue what was ahead, I thought it would be safest to test out the melee combat. It took about a dozen pistol whips and some stomping to put my foe down, not to mention almost my entire health bar, so it became apparent that melee was not to be relied upon.

Some dimly fire-lit houses lay ahead and I could make out a few zombies standing guard or walking in rigid patrol routes. In my ammo-less state and still not confident in my ability to run, I decided to go with a stealth approach. The first couple foes were easy to take down - just sneak up behind them and press A for a knifing - and I was cued onto others from their groaning sounds. Gradually clearing out the opposition gave me space to disarm traps that I would've tripped straight into had I been running.

The map at this point had really opened up and enemies were spaced far enough that it was easy both to manipulate angle/order of attack and to accidentally expose myself. Without an in-game map I was constructing a mental one instead - in an open, dark space with irregular geometry, that quickly became disorienting. There were a lot of houses to investigate and I occasionally came across ammo and healing items that I would've missed had I been taking a more rigid path to avoid/flee enemies. Then again, those extra items may not have been necessary if I wasn't relying on close encounters. Essentially the game was rewarding my style by facilitating it, encouraging thinking ahead and commitment. That's solid survival design.

At one point I picked up a torch from a fallen foe to help disperse the overwhelming blackness. Unfortunately it quickly gave away my position and I ended up with two zombonis bearing down on me. I swung the torch at one for an instantaneous - but single-use - kill, and blew through all the bullets I'd just found taking out his friend. Here the game kicked my ass for screwing up my own strategy, but it was fairly balanced - the bullets I had spent time collecting got me out of a sticky situation.

When an enemy went down its corpse remained, giving me a chance to torch it. The game doesn't explain why that's necessary, but matches are limited so I opted to conserve them during most of Chapter 2. That set up the best scare of the night: when I found some spare matches in one of the houses, I went back to torch some bodies I had left behind. But I couldn't find the bodies! At first I thought I was just lost, then I found the bloodstains where they had lain and realized they were actually gone. I don't know if this was a glitch, if they rose up and wandered off, or if they'll come back to haunt me later. Regardless, considering the implications was freaky.

After I made it through the cottages I came across a big zombie gathering. Before Sebastian had time to finish his cautious "I should leave them be" I had walked too close and drawn their attention. With what felt like a dozen enemies coming at me there was no way I could fight, so I made a run for it. It was pretty worrisome at first - I had no clue where I was going - but after I hit a wall and managed to loop around while still keeping the mob behind me, a lot of the tension dissolved. It was a little too easy in the open space to outrun the zombies, even slowing down every few seconds to let my stamina recharge. When I reached a bridge, a cutscene took over and I was home free.

Ultimately, stealth remains key to offsetting the scarcity of ammo, but the options to shoot or run are now open. There's no requirement to exterminate the enemies, so it's my call whether to run, gun, sneak, or assassinate. As a matter of fact I have half a mind to replay the chapter and see if I can run through, though I think that's better saved for a later play. Circumstances can quickly change to force adaptation - getting spotted forced me to shoot and running out of ammo necessitated melee and later flight. This is definitely starting to feel like classic Resident Evil-style survival horror. 

Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter 1: Rebirth or plain old neo survival horror?

Look at me, playing a current events game. Aren't I proud. With nearly (exactly) six games knocked off my queue in the past month, I had the "allowance" to grab Shinji Mikami's latest just in time for the pumpkining season. Mikami is perhaps the single most relentlessly visionary and effective director in the past 200 years, so I'm always excited to put in one of his games and see what it has to say. The Evil Within was much hyped in regards to a return to survival horror, but where exactly will it fit in the survhor portmandu?

Survival horror has traditionally been a merging point between adventure and action, where key goals are built around exploration and puzzles but accomplishing those goals requires the utilization of limited means to overcome active opposition. The player is driven not by their need to kill enemies, but by their need to open doors, thus they must press on regardless of their ability to fight. Preparation is meant to trump technical skill.

They say street ball leads to street violence

In the most iconic games, namely the Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill series, that concept manifests as mazes with ammo limits. There are always going to be zombies between you and that hexagonal key, and every bullet spent is one less available for the rest of the game. Exploration and survival feed into each other: evading enemies and taking shortcuts means ammo saved, finding stashes means greater reserves, and better weapons make for high risk/reward. You can choose your fights, but the imprecise action means that you can rarely rely on technical skill to get you out alive - supplies are a necessary fallback, and supplies can only be replenished through further exploration.

In the last decade or so, the progeny of Resident Evil 4 ran with that model until demanding action standards successfully honed out all the adventure/action exploration/combat interplay that defined 'survival'. Tighter controls, mandatory combat, performance-regulated ammo, and structural linearity dragged mainline horror into the greater action portmandu, largely in the name of "improving" visceral feedback and pacing. While fans of the classics might blame the low-brow demands of the conquering casual gamer, it could also be said that this was simply the natural progression of the style - by the fourth (really the eleventh) Resident Evil game, should it be any surprise that the architecture needed a blast of minty freshness? Whomever you want to blame, Resident Evil 5/6, the Dead Space games, and The Last of Us have more in common with straight-up shooters like Lost Planet and Gears of War than with their own origins.

But there was always a second kind of survival game aside the classic scrimp-and-shoots. Going back to Clock Tower (and before) are combatless games wherein the player must rely solely upon running and hiding to survive. Longevity in games like Fatal Frame falls more to knowing the environment than managing supplies; the style trades player-driven variety for elegant simplicity, creating a more "on rails" - but also more spontaneous - experience. While Resident Evil is all growing dread at increasingly dire circumstances, Clock Tower is a histrionic up-and-down roller coaster. Though sometimes described as "adventure horror", these games generally do rely on action techniques like reflexes and stealth, so ultimately they meet the action/adventure quota that defines a survival challenge. It's just a different approach where preparation comes down to knowing escape routes rather than wagering on excursions.

"Riding scissors" is actually the Japanese equivalent of "riding shotgun", thus imbuing this scene from Clock Tower with a humorous pun-infused tone

While the Resident Evil approach has been blending into action games at large, simultaneously there's been a serious reemergence of the run-and-hide haunted house. Just recently we were graced with the AAA release of Alien: Isolation and shortly before that came the acclaimed Outlast. Thanks to indie hits like Radiohead's Amnesiac and The Slendering, type 2 horror is probably at a peak in popularity, bigger and more accessible now than it's ever been. If anything, the on-rails style has taken over and formed a basis for neo-survival horror, while it's the ammo management games that have lost their significance and assimilated.

So that makes it a bit interesting when The Evil Within entrenches itself in hype about a revival of survival horror. Mikami's been totally off the horror wagon for years, his post-Resident Evil resume being more a who's who of deep technical action, from P.N. 03 to God Hand to Vanquish. And of course the game that spearheaded the trajectory into pure action was his own Resident Evil 4. Even his last horror game, the Suda 51 co-created shoot-em-up Shadows of the Damned, seemed to confirm that the father of survival horror had acknowledged its dissolution. But survival gameplay has survived - thanks to those Clock Tower-type games like Alien: Isolation - so one could take the hype to mean Shinji and co. had something else in mind. Most likely that extinct breed of ammo maze games that was absorbed by third-person shooters.

That makes it all the weirder that The Evil Within starts with a stealth/evasion sequence that could've come straight out of Amnesia or Metal Gear Solid. The player is being stalked by a chainsaw guy through a mental hospital and has to sneak around behind boxes and in lockers to get through the stage unharmed. It feels downright conservative in its reliance on principles that are all very popular right now. Hopefully this is just a starting point for more evolved gameplay, but over the first hour Evil Within feels kinda like an acknowledgement that Clock Tower was right and Resident Evil was wrong. I just got a gun in chapter 2, so fingers crossed that things open up and some classically resonant (or original) gameplay emerges.

Also, it probably isn't coming through, but the actual reason I care is nothing to do with the hype and everything to do with the fact that I don't particularly like the run-and-hide type of game. It is boring and lacks tension. It is a lot less scary to replay a segment for the sixth time because I keep getting caught than it is to waste all my ammo on a mistake and have to go into the unknown with only 3 bullets. As illustrated by my session last night in which I died like 10 times trying to get past that guy and tension turned into tedium. 

While I'm at it, a chainsaw guy in a mental hospital? Come on. I know everything under the sun has been done, but that is as cliche as cliche gets and is really hard to get excited about. RE4 was a horror pastiche and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: They Took My Baby Away from Me reference fit in both the context and the gameplay, not to mention it was fairly original for its time in gamedom. Seeing it in Evil Within just makes me think Mikami is out of ideas, especially when the death animations are nearly identical to those in RE4. That saw revving sound used to be genuinely scary. Today I respond to it the same way as the sound of some asshole's loud car exhaust. Again, hopefully this is just setup stuff and the content will get more interesting as the game moves on.

Also, moving further along the tangent of things that have nothing to do with anything, why isn't there acceleration on the aiming controls??? Who does that? It feels extremely awkward after having played any video game ever made.

Saints Row 3 is about the War on Terror... and you play as the terrorists

It's not that strange a premise for a game, I suppose. Then again, it is a strange premise for a comedy sex game. Saints Row: The Third is an unabashedly stupid game, there's no doubt about that. It just doesn't realize quite how stupid it is. And it would be kinda funny to see, for instance, a U.S. Iraq War veteran play the latter half of the game. It wouldn't actually be funny, because the game is so busy making stupid unfunny yolks about how WEIRD sex is and how CRAZY it is to be gay and how COOL it is to shoot someone in the dick that you don't really notice what's going on unless you're the kind of person who stops for a second to say "hey. what's going on?"

It's actually just now that I'm remembering, and this really lends a massive heaping of credence to my theory, that the Red Faction games are overtly about joining a terrorist cell and taking down the military.

I thought it was ill-justified and kind of politically despicable in those games, but hey, that's most video game stories for you. Didn't really bat an eyelash. Sad to see it peddled to teenagers, but smart teenagers will figure out what's going on anyway, and dumb teenagers will be impressioned by something else dumb sooner or later. Why accuse some idiot game devs of being idiots? They made a fun game, they get a pass.

FOR NOW.

The premise of Row 3 is that the Saints are an Ivy League crew club that go a little overboard after winning the World Crew Cup, deciding it's time for them to take over Fake City. I wish that was the premise. It's actually that you're a member of a purple-themed gang, and despite the fact that literally thousands of people are dying left and right in this lightly futuristic open gang war, you get pissed off that your friend dies. It's not clear why. Presumably he was in Saints Row 1 or 2, and your character was a fan of those. So it's time to take it to the Red Gang, who has managed to unite the Blue and Green gangs against you. I'm not making up this color shit. It is pretty literally Power Rangers. Anyway, you have to build up the reputation of Purple Gang from scratch (dunno why, they appear to be some kind of Disney-level mega-corporation with their own department stores and television channels and record labels), such that you can be strong enough to kill Red Gang (sigh, whatever), then you move on to Blue and eventually Green. That's all so preposterous that I kinda liked it. The gangs have goofy themes like cyber-ninjas and luchadore-commandos and it's got an, I dunno, Running Man kinda feel?

At some point Sarah Palin shows up and says "wow, this gang shit is getting out of hand. We need a military crackdown here". I don't know why this had to happen, or why it had to be played as a mockery of right-wing politics, because if gangs were literally patrolling the streets in tanks, the military would be exactly the most sensible and desirable solution. People would be demanding it! It's not like "everything was going just fine until these jarhead assholes showed up!" It was anarchy approaching apocalypse. And that was fine! I was enjoying that! Taking a ridiculously fantastical situation (color-gang wars) and introducing what would be the level-headed and logical result (martial law) ruins the fun - especially if you're going to sit there and act like martial law wasn't the natural resolution. So now we're left with an anarchic organization trying to establish street-level power through violence (player-side Purple Gang) and an invading military force attempting to reimpose order with the declared purpose of reestablishing peace. So the player is Al Qaeda in Baghdad fighting against the US military? That's a little awkward, especially considering the game's hesitance to acknowledge it.

It's funny that now I know I can go to Volition games if I want to play out juvenile terrorist fantasies about wanton murder and oppressing a populace through random acts of destruction and violence. There's apparently a market for that! What disappoints me is that they don't embrace the evil spirit of it all. It would be genuinely harmless fun, completely removed from reality if they just let the fantasy run wild, let it be destruction for destruction's sake. Make the protagonist someone like M. Bison or Carnage. Instead, Volition thinks the player will better be able to connect to nuking an entire city of innocent people if their character seems 'honorable' and the villains seem 'mean'. It's okay to drive a tank over a baby, as long as you're using that tank to shoot at someone who betrayed your best friend (who was also a psychopathic murdering asshole but honor, dude)!

I'm arbitrarily peppering in screenshots here. I have no images to help illustrate my point.

It's certainly a case of show-me-don't-tell-me, where what the characters seem to think is happening is not what is actually happening, and we're apparently supposed to be as ignorant as they are. This creates an irksome disconnect, making it more difficult to enjoy the rampant destruction. If the game is going to ask me to murder hundreds of soldiers whose only sin is trying to stymie the highest domestic death toll since the Civil War, could it at least not patronize me along the way? The "saintly" portrayal of our protagonists as a bunch of comic goofballs "just tryin' to have a good time" undermines my own good-time-rampage, not to mention it gives the game a weird pro-capitalism cultist propaganda vibe (that Red Faction: Guerrilla bore as well). I'm all for, you know, fightin' the man. I don't need society. But I feel like if the DKs had done a video game in 1981 instead of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, it would have been a bit smarter than this.

Skyrim: When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around

Can't believe I'm fucking sick again. Anyway, I wrote this post a while ago and didn't really like/finish/proofread it, so I'm putting it up today in lieu of a reflection on the Fire Emblem: Awakening demo that I can't get off the ground.

Skyrim wants me to save the world, but I'd rather just turn it on its side.

By this point, The Elder Scrolls has gained a bit of a reputation for awful main plot lines. They're macguffin-heavy, more rigid than a chicken bone, boring, and cliched. Frankly it's emblematic of video game storytelling in general. None of the "primary" quests have been any good for quite a few games now - Morrowind I don't know - people defend it, but I don't believe people, and I haven't seen for myself. The point is, Morrowind through Skyrim at least (that's ESIII - ESV), they all come down to "save the world". That world's name changes from Vvardenfell to Mournhold to Solstheim to Tamriel to Cyrodiil to The Shivering Isles to Skyrim back to Tamriel back to Solstheim, and the big bad awakening villain/god/demon from Dagoth Ur to Almalexia to Hircine to Mehrunes Dagon to Umaril to Jygalaag to Alduin to Harkon to Miraak, and yes the point of listing all those was to highlight that if you've been playing The Elder Scrolls for the last decade, you've saved essentially (often literally) the same world from essentially the same villain nine times. Sometimes you have to stop a dragon from being reborn, sometimes you have to stop a dragonborn from being reborn. I'm not even making that up.

This tale as old as time sucks everywhere, but I'm picking Elder Scrolls because I want to point out how little it actually makes me want to save the world. Wander Skyrim a bit or read up on the history through the in-game books (or Wikipedia), and you'll realize that everyone in Tamriel (the continent where the whole series takes place) is a dick, they've had like a million apocalypses and world wars, and it's generally just a nasty place. Okay, I admit, maybe the real world isn't super-nice either. We all remember that time that Morgan Freeman quotes Ernest Hemingway at the end of Se7en, which I've memorized by heart and will now quote with exact precision: "the world isn't very good, but I guess I'll fight for it, if I really have to". The real world works like that because it's the real world. Our lives and loves and futures are there. The Tamriel world doesn't get that freebie. It's kind of shitty and honestly feels like it could use a cleaning of house. Especially to get rid of all those demon-gods mucking about. As a matter of fact, that the game would even dare to suggest that Tammy is worth saving seems like an outright mockery of the worth of (IRL) human civilization. It's like The Elder Scrolls is saying: "you idiot. If you'll fight for this, you'll fight for anything."

I ain't about to get all philly [philosophical] in here about val/human/life or whether Earth is all that great; I'd rather just point out that it's why it's so crucial for the game to make me feel like a god. Because if the world is already going to be this fucked, you may as well let me fuck around with it further. And by "fucking around", precise a term though it is, I don't just mean running through towns and lighting people on fire like a GTA/Prototype-type kill-'em-all sandbox. I mean killing the giant spider that no one said could be done. Skyrocketing to the head of every major guild and organization. It's like, hey, this world is a bitch, so I guess I better get on top. Who gives a shit about saving it from impending ruin - I am impending ruin.

So was the reason I didn't like my first character because he was a weakling?

Anarchy Reigns: To be damned by optimism

Before I get any further, let me clarify that I have NOT played Anarchy Reigns. It merely represents the latest in an unfortunate trend of games: those with good ideas reliant on community support.

Let me give you the ice cream on Anarchy Reigns, since no one has heard of it. You should have, since it's the pseudo-sequel to MadWorld, one of the best action games of this generation, and since that of course means it's developed by Platinum Games, developers responsible (sometimes by different names) for everything from Devil May Cry to Okami to Bayonetta. MadWorld was basically a modernized Streets of Rage - sizable open-ended stages without linear guidance were stocked with respawning goons, mid-bosses, death-traps, and mini-games. Anarchy Reigns expands this into a giant continuous open-world brawl. Since it's just a big city full of hostile brawlers, why not fill it with human combatants? Because, after all, the Internet is a place of magic and wonder.

This is a pretty good idea. It's less ambitious (i.e. more reasonable) in scope than an MMO, but still dense enough to offer a repeatably unique challenge. You just can't replicate human behavior and unpredictability, even with today's high-tech technological advances in technology. This comes with an inherent risk: every role needs an actor, and they need to be present at all times for the show to go on. Without players fully populating matches, all you're left with is an idea on a drawing board. A great idea, but gamers can't play an idea. Only ghosts can do that.

That's a risk that any multiplayer-centric game takes, but it's a much smaller barrier to overcome in, for instance, a 1v1 fighting game that only requires you to have one friend and allows you to sit in the same room and share a copy of the game. Tatsunoko vs. Capcom had no reason to be successful, but since I could always find at least one person online, or just get a friend to swing by, all was well. Hinging your entire concept on the notion that there will always be like hundreds of people playing requires A.) a giant budget and marketing campaign (Call of Duty, WoW) or B.) a heart full of hopes, dreams, butterflies, and optimism. Sometimes someone strikes gold. Other times it's Anarchy Reigns.

The thing that bugs me is that Sega, Platinum, and everyone involved had to know that the game wasn't going to be popular enough to sustain an online community. MadWorld sold like 35 copies. It's full of weird subject matter, super-mature content, poor graphics, and was launched at a terrible time for this type of title, against the likes of Capcom's gargantuan Devil may Cry and Platinum's own (for a different publisher of course) Metal Gear Rising: Revengreances. That's not a recipe for success. So is this a case where we can say the game is genuinely bad for hedging a bet that definitely wasn't going to pay off? Platinum knew there wasn't going to be community support, but they propped up the game with it anyway. Isn't that the same as developing an offline single-player platformer where there's a 95% chance the game will crash after stage 1? Even if stages 2 and on are the most brilliantly designed levels in history, it doesn't matter if you don't get to play them.

Americans completely eat up weird shit like this, right? Wait, I forgot my "not a completely moronic thing to say" hat this morning.

Yeah, Anarchy Reigns has the token single-player mode, and I guess that ought to be fun. It's almost enough to get me to buy the game, just because I can't get enough Platinum combat. But that's clearly a patch on the giant gaping damned-from-the-start black hole of the would-be multiplayer beat-'em-up. In the analogy above, the single-player is the equivalent of a stage 1.

Anarchy Reigns is far from the only offender. Look at Castlevania: Harmony of Despair or the thankfully canceled Mega Man Universe. It's good to experiment, but sticking a power-drill into your pupil isn't an experiment. As a gamer I just shake my head - this is Sega's mistake and their loss, not mine. As to an alternative solution, how we could make that great idea actually come to life... well that would take the genuine commitment of a company with a genuine budget. That discussion is the territory of marketing, not game design, and one that seems could use a heaping dose of common sense.

Skyrim Revisited

You heard it here first - almost exactly a year after I got it, I'm making my glorious return to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - and this time, it's personal.

Here's the thing. I probably bitch a lot on this blog about Skyrim. It's hard to remember how much of this bitching is put into writing, how much is spouted off with friends, and how much just rolls around in my head, but I bet if you didn't know any better, you'd think I quite hated the game. And it's true that I spend a lot of time criticizing anything that achieves the amount of praise lauded on Skyrim. Sure it's partly because I'm a trend-breaking rebel with a bone to pick and a bone to prove about how I'm smarter than everyone else, but it's also because I think that to understand gaming as a whole, one of the most important steps is to scrutinize why we like what we do, and not be satisfied to declare it a masterpiece and move on. Something as massive as Skyrim, something that so well embodies the state of video games in 2011/2012, is bound to unveil many of the successes and flaws of the medium. So yeah, I'm going to give it a much fucking harder ride than a game carried by pure artistic vision like Black Knight Sword. I heap as much grief on every last Zelda and Blizzard and Valve game.

But at the end of the day, when I shut the fuck up and just play, this is a great game. So much time and effort, so many years of experimentation, so much vicious and worshiping fan feedback, and The Elder Scrolls V can't be anything but a triumph. Just like Nintendo knows exactly what made you fall in love with Mario and how to roll that out year after year, Bethesda has a masterful team that may not be overflowing with artistic genius, but that can come together and draw you into a fantasy reality. Every challenge thrown at Skyrim is framed as "how can Skyrim get away with X and still be one of the greatest RPGs of the era?"

If we roll back time a few years to the Year of Our Lord 2006, we'll find me wasting away my freshman year of Our Lord of college first being introduced to The Elder Scrolls by means of some 250 hours spent in Oblivion. At the time the game was an utter revelation to me, and to this day it remains one of my all-time favorites. Hopping my way across the Cyrodiil countryside to manipulate the skill system is a gaming experience I'll never forget. Fireballing my first rat. Deciding my second character would be a psychopathic mass murderer and almost entirely forgoing questing just to lurk among rooftops sniping the citizenry and evading guards. An RPG where you could be anyone was all I had ever wanted from the time I first picked up an NES controller at age 3 (well uh... kinda... the idea probably didn't hit me RIGHT at age 3).

It was probably this Oblivion saturation that caused my original hesitance with Skyrim. After you fuck around with a game for hundreds of hours, those colorful early highlights begin to dissipate into the memory of the little annoyances, like accidentally picking up an owned item and immediately putting it back, only to be charged with thievery anyway and forced to spend a night in jail. Or worse yet, the outrageously lax auto-saving system that demands you remember to save every few minutes, lest lose potential hours of content. To try to keep things fresh, I opted to go with a new and unconventional class, something I had never tried in Oblivion, a stealth destruction mage, and set off to join all the guilds and find the Dark Brotherhood et al.

This first round of play hardly lasted ten hours before I had had it. The little niggles were all I could see anymore, the new class was a hassle, and the iterative guild quests felt empty and unrewarding. Disappointed, I put the game aside for nearly a year. Determined to give it one more shot, I picked it up two weeks ago and decided to start from scratch. Forget trying to do everything the right way - I was going to make a plain old melee warrior and wander about the countryside until the fun came to me. And that's exactly what it did - I've hardly been able to put the game down and have probably dumped 30-40+ hours into this character in the span of just a few weeks.

I now realize the flaw of my original approach: I wanted to play the game as if it were still Oblivion, as if I had simply started it up and opened up a new save file. What this was ignoring is that I had gotten tired of Oblivion. I had walked away from it because there wasn't enough left to interest me, and all the really fun things I had already done. But the really fun things in Skyrim were still right there waiting for me, so why try to jump to what had been my Oblivion endgame - all that stuff I had first enjoyed was back again, fresh and tweaked and new. 

Also, this time I'm playing as a lizardman.

Black Knight Sword: First Impressions

What an inconvenient time to release a downloadable game. Two weeks into December, after the holiday AAA rush? I haven't seen one mention of Black Knight Sword in the media this week, despite coming from Grasshopper Manufacture and Digital Reality, the creators of the acclaimed Sine Mora. If anything, it goes to show that Suda 51 gets little respect as an innovator and is only followed by the press when he's up to something controversial like Lollipop Chainsaw. Then again, 2D platformers are now as quickly falling from public favor as they were rising in '08-'09.

Black Knight Sword begs to be remembered, though. The introduction smashes one out of the park with a haunting yet instantly humable tune that could only be composed by Akira Yamaoka, a Trine/Bastion-like narrator who is way too enthusiastic for his poetic script, and, naturally, the protagonist in the midst of a hanging suicide. Yes, the first task Sword assigns the player is to dangle from a noose, struggling back and forth until the rope snaps and releases the limp avatar to crumple on the floor. Since this is the beginning of the game and not the end, he pulls himself to his feet and slouches to the far end of the room. This sets the stage with ambiguity: has this man actually swung himself free from the rope, or is everything we're seeing a fever dream of his final moments? Perhaps he's taking his first steps into some kind of afterlife - we don't know any better than does he, so we put on our video game caps and do what we know best - walk right. Approaching a conspicuous heap of coal-black metal, the player employs a careful press of the X button to summon the spirit of what is revealed to be a suit of armor that seizes the surprised man and transforms him into the eponymous Black Knight. And off we set on our twisted fairy tale journey.

Beyond that opening, I haven't delved deeply enough into Sword to comment much on its thematic aspirations. The game has a very creepy look and sound, from the goofy babbling heads-with-legs that march straight toward you into their bloody demise, to the ghostly Phanto-esque masked female face that serves as your companion and utility ranged attack. By the time the first boss rips off his suit of armor to reveal that his torso is actually a gigantic, skinless mutant face, you really will start to suspect you've gone to hell. This suspicion will ring even truer for those who've played Grasshopper's 2011 Shinji Mikami collaboration, Shadows of the Damned. The gas-lamp streets conjure turn-of-the-century Europe, but the strange denizens could have walked out of Hellraiser or Nightmare Before Christmas. The characters are brought to life with a sort of papercraft style and the environments are composed of flat stage-dressings that are charmingly pulled behind the curtains and reset as you pass from screen to screen, presenting the entire game as a kind of stage-play or puppet show.

Super Mario Bros. 3 by way ofTerry Gilliam.

The idiosyncratic visuals aren't the only thing that evokes mid-'90s 2D, as much as they will remind you of Yoshi's Story and Symphony of the Night. The platforming itself also hearkens back to the 32- and 64-bit era, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on just yet. There are certainly some overt throwbacks, like collectible hearts and cat-head grass (?), one-ups buried off the beaten path, and secret alternate paths. Yet there's something about the whole game that just screams Actraiser 2 or Klonoa. Maybe it's the rigid jumps and patterned enemies, or the fragility of your character. I'll have to think on it more as I play. Until then, I think it's your turn to check it out.

Skyrim: Job

^Did you see what I did there?

Welcome to the world of Tamriel, or more specifically the Alaska-portion of Tamriel sans those lucrative and wildlife-annihilating oil reserves, called Skyrim.

I'm not going to waste anyone's time reviewing this game because if you are ever going to buy it you already did.  I got it fairly close to release and played a good 40 hours or so and then went back to school for the semester and forgot about it.  I recently picked it up again and my housemates and I have been skipping some serious amounts of class getting all coked up on dragons and shit.

The Elder Scrolls games have always been a blast for me, since Morrowind anyway.  I can't think of anyone who would honestly say they can't have a good time picking up one of these games, building a character, naming him something stupid, playing for 3 minutes, starting a new character because why do wood elves even exist, and then running around doing random shit.  That's the beauty of the series: you can take multiple approaches to playing the game.  And I don't mean that you can kill things with magic or you can kill things with swords.  I mean that if you want to play Skyrim like its a Lord of the Rings expansion to Grand Theft Auto, you can have a veritable shitton of fun doing that.  Or you can role-play to your heart's content, getting that sweeeeeet new gear and that axe the werewolf guild has, and putting way more time into taking care of your character than you spend in the gym or bathing for that matter.  Or you can pick and chose the best quests, or just do the main story line, and make it a similar experience to a more linear RPG.

Or all these things.  Probably all these things to some extent.  I mean everyone who has touched these games gets this point.  Let's talk about *maybe* a more contentious issue I have with Skyrim in particular but which can also apply to the two previous titles in the series.  That's of the incredibly shallow characterization and storytelling.

I know, I know, that's not supposed to be the strength of the game.  But it is such a let down that it takes away from what the strengths should be.  Let me illustrate this right quick.  In theory, Ulfric Stormcloak, leader of the rag-tag rebellion and the other dude who can speak dragonese, should atleast have some, I don't know, character traits?  Well spoiler alert, he has zero.  He likes giving nicknames.  That's just about it.

Dude sure can lounge though.

And this isn't OK just because the game has thousands of characters.  When I'm doing the Stormcloak questline I feel no attachment to the faction, the leader, or even my senseless murder of Imperials.  Even the battles themselves feel absolutely tame when they're supposed to be pitched castle-storming affairs against serious armies.  The game, at almost every major point in the main quest and the major faction quests, does a terrible job of making the player feel like he's done something important.  Furthermore, when you walk around after doing something supposedly world-altering, you get maybe a reference to it from some guard in a random city.  I got a "derrrr aren't you the mage dude deerrrr" once for beating the mage's guild and it blew my socks off because that happens almost never in this game.  I understand how difficult it would be to have the entire world changing based on such a huge variety of character choices.  I'm not asking for the impossible here, I'm just asking for more weight on character actions.  It's hard with a game this big, but if you going to be ambitious you have to be held accountable. 

If this game wasn't a Bethesda "sure to make millions because of its name and ungodly amounts of adspace" classic, then I would say, yeah well tradeoffs had to be made.  You can't have 5 gazillion caves to spelunck AND multifaceted characters!  Jeez, you are a greedy mcgreedystein.  But come on, its an Elder Scrolls game and I don't think it would have been too big a deal to work in both.  Just a little bit?

LPGA for the Holy Day: Christ, mas NiGHTS!

You heard your ear right, Greg and I are LPing Christmas NiGHTS to ring in the Christmas season! Is that what the expression is? "Ring in" the season? That couldn't possibly mean anything. Well anyway, we set out once again to prove that there's no time better than 3AM to record a meandering and uninspired commentary track.

Dishonored: A game about killing. In a real way.

Alright, "salsarito" is officially dead to me. Lucky you. If this were Dishonored, it would by now be throttled, decapitated, stripped of flesh by ravenous plague rats, or disintegrated by a wall of electricity. It's a brutally violent game, and that's a tough statement to make in 2012. What really gets to me about it is that every enemy is executed with an abrupt flourish of savagery. Your character makes a point to ensure that they are dead. This is an excellent touch of design in a game that at every point reminds you that killing is unnecessary. There is a tangible difference between nonlethal incapacitation and murder, far more resonant than a typical shoot-them-in-the-head-with-a-dart or shoot-them-in-the-head-with-a-bullet. As your character slits throats, plunges his sword to the hilt into tender joints, or straight up swipes a head off, you're reminded that you're taking lives, not just draining health bars.

The story wastes no time reminding you that this gory detail isn't intended (or at least, isn't solely intended) as a feast for the eyes of bloodthirsty desensitized gamers. Your first foes, as a politically motivated assassin, are the corrupt usurpers of power in a once honorable (hah!) regime. This of course means that the grunts in your way are going to be the police and soldiers of that empire, who believe it's their job to stop you. Perhaps some of these conscripts are as ill-intentioned as the bastard nobles writing their orders, but perhaps they think they're doing the right thing. On your first assassination mission, a friend of the revolution begs you to spare her uncle, a captain of the guard, who she insists is a good man trying to make changes from the inside. It's up to you to decide whether you give a shit, or whether you can afford to leave him alive. You may end up caught in a situation where he has you at gunpoint and you've no choice but to kill him. Average foes may furiously charge you after seeing a cohort stricken down, shouting "you've just made someone a widow!" These feel like real people - are you okay with killing a cop because you don't like the law?

If you aren't okay with that, then don't play that way. It may take a little lateral thinking and the occasional outright retreat, but the tools and skills are available to finish the game without taking a single life - not even those 'necessitated' by the story. Each situation can be approached with stealth or force, and may lend itself to one, the other, or neither. This is not a Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory or Mark of the Ninja, in which "you can go in guns blazing or stick to the shadows" equals "you're supposed to stay hidden, but if you're spotted you can (chaos) theoretically shoot your way out". There have been setups to which I started with a stealthy approach that was quickly abandoned when I simply couldn't figure out a way to progress. Nonlethal play isn't the correct approach or a challenge mode, it's simply an option left to the player.

The moment I realized that the game had been successful in rendering killing meaningful was when I met a gang of thugs trying to force their way into an old lady's home. Up until that point (about an hour into the game), I'd been mostly sticking to nonlethal takedowns on the guardsmen I'd faced (after I'd finished experimenting with the combat system). I started to prepare sleep darts to eliminate these three assholes, then I realized - fuck it. Why am I sparing a bunch of lowlife gangsters? I dropped from the roof - sword-first - onto the soon-to-be corpse of the first one, then slashed his punk friends to bits as they exclaimed "no one kills one of us!" Well, I did, and it felt damn worth it.