Whenever I write about a topic I've already covered, I'm in fear of accidentally contradicting myself. My thoughts and feelings change over time, and this is perfectly natural, but each finished piece of writing is static (unless and until I feel compelled to go through the trouble of changing it). Each and every post on this blog is a frozen snapshot of my thoughts and feelings at a particular time, and all of those snapshots are displayed simultaneously in the same place. When I do change my mind, and if I don't have the time or the patience to eradicate my outdated thoughts from wherever they were written, it might just look like I'm saying two different things at once.
For example, I might have been too kind to a certain piece of interactive fiction in this post about games as art. I dismissed the criticism that Dear Esther was bad for its lack of gameplay because it's not a game and therefore should not be judged as a game. Dear Esther, I wrote, should be judged instead as a piece of interactive fiction or as a work of art. A direct quote from the other post: "A valid criticism of Dear Esther should focus on what's there — the writing, the visuals, and the music — rather than obsessing over exactly how it's not a game." Even now, I stand by all of these claims about how Dear Esther should be judged, but if I ever implied that Dear Esther comes up smelling like roses when judged in this manner, I'm about to disagree with my former self.
The writing, the visuals, and the music in Dear Esther are all fine. The lack of traditional gameplay elements is also fine. The lack of meaningful interactivity of any kind, however, is less so. Dear Esther is a walk through a virtual landscape set to music and narration, and the act of walking (but nothing else) is left to the player. The experience is interactive in the sense that the player can choose where to walk and where to look within the confines of Dear Esther's explorable space; the problem is that those confines are limiting to the point where the interactivity becomes nothing but a nuisance.
The player can move freely, but aside from a few wide open areas and a couple of briefly diverging paths, there's only one way to go from the beginning to the end. The game has no real exploration, and the player's actions have no real effect on the story. The experience is essentially linear, and yet the player is forced to interact; one cannot get to the end without walking there, a tedious and potentially frustrating task when there's hardly anything to do along the way. Dear Esther might even be better if it would just play itself.
It's a common problem in story-driven games, so-called interactive fiction, and everything in between. The story is there, and the player input is there, but the potential for truly interactive fiction is lost when the player is unable to affect the narrative. If the story is the most important aspect of a product which insists on being interactive, shouldn't the story itself be interactive? It's no surprise that a truly interactive story is a rarity in the typical video game, which is gameplay-driven and includes a story only as a contextual backdrop no matter how obnoxiously that story shoves itself down the player's throat during unskippable cutscenes, but developers should take more care when adding game elements to a story instead of the reverse.
A couple of weeks ago, I played To the Moon, which tells a nice (albeit awkwardly written) story and contains more than enough gameplay to be considered a game. Unfortunately, while it clearly strives to be interactive fiction first and foremost, the interactivity and the fiction do not blend well. The only genuine gameplay consists of occasional puzzles and a few brief mini-games, while the bulk of the player's time is spent alternating between reading dialogue and making sure to click on all the clickable objects in a given area. The game is so heavy with dialogue and so short on meaningful player input that, per click or keystroke, the majority of one's interaction with the game consists of telling the game to continue to the next line of dialogue. Yet, for all this time spent manually moving through the story — I used the word "tedious" in reference to Dear Esther's walking and I think it applies here as well — there's no real interaction with the story itself. The ending is always the same. Player choices sometimes have an effect on a few lines of dialogue, but that's all.
I get it. The developers wanted to tell a very specific story. Not every story will have branching paths and multiple outcomes. However, if the story is to remain static and immutable, two things need to happen. First, the player needs to be able to step away from the story long enough to have a satisfying amount of control over something. For To the Moon, this would mean a lot more puzzles and mini-games, or perhaps a totally new gameplay element. Second, the player needs to be able to sit back and watch when no meaningful input is required. This would turn Dear Esther into a movie, but I guess that's the whole problem with Dear Esther.
My examples so far are pretty extreme, but the problems in Dear Esther and To the Moon are things that all story-driven games need to avoid, and not all of them do a very good job. In my old post on Alan Wake, I mentioned the frustration of needing to follow a character around or simply idle about while listening to dialogue and waiting for the next scripted event. The same thing happens in Half-Life 2, thanks to the developers' decision to forgo cutscenes for the sake of having everything (including story exposition) happen in real-time. Alan Wake and Half-Life 2 both have plenty of gameplay to keep the player entertained, but the occasional need to sit through real-time in-gameplay dialogue always left me wishing that a skippable cutscene were used instead, especially when continual but meaningless player input was required (e.g., when following another character down a linear path).
I'm actually beginning to think that the hybridization of gameplay mechanics with interactive fiction is a failed experiment, and that the game industry should stop insisting on doing it over and over again. Games with excellent gameplay don't need mediocre stories tacked on in the form of unskippable in-game sit-around-and-listen-to-people-talk scenes from which the player cannot walk away. Meanwhile, the "interactive" requirement of an interactive story cannot be adequately satisfied with badly implemented gameplay mechanics, like mini-games and puzzles that occur with the frequency of a cutscene in a traditional game.
You want to make a shooter? Don't annoy the shooter fans with superfluous dialogue and scripted action sequences. You want to make an interactive story? Don't force your customers to play through stupid shooting sections. Am I wrong? I mean, clearly, there's an acceptable balance somewhere, but not many developers find it. Why can't the video game and the interactive story be two distinct things, each with no obligation to step on the other's turf? I guess it's because mashing the two things together broadens the target demographic. Shooter fans buy it for the gunplay, people who like interactive fiction buy it for the role-playing aspects or the built-in dating simulator, and everyone is just barely happy enough to keep playing.
Or maybe it's because interactive fiction just hasn't matured enough to stand on its own without being shoehorned into a traditional game or having a traditional game shoehorned into it. After all, a sufficiently interactive story is probably hard to write. Giving the player a satisfying amount of control within a well structured story sounds pretty difficult, if we assume the player's control must be over some aspect of the story itself.
Perhaps most disappointing of all are games which seem to be built on the premise of a player-controlled branching storyline but end up being almost entirely linear anyway. Playing through the first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead was a great experience, but a lot of the magic was gone when I realized after the fact that the ending I got was the only ending. Player choices determine which characters live or die and, to some extent, the characters' feelings about each other, but the protagonist and his group go to the same places and do the same things regardless. Ultimately, the only thing that changes, as a result of character deaths and the relationships between those who remain, is the dialogue.
Obviously, not every game needs multiple endings in order to have a satisfying story. However, in The Walking Dead, the player's ability to shape the story by making (often binary) decisions is the primary mode of gameplay. The rest is just occasional puzzles, and some shooting sequences which could rightly be called mini-games. When gameplay consists almost entirely of manipulation of the game's story through dialogue and moral choices, the ability to manipulate the story in a substantial and meaningful way is pretty important. The Walking Dead provides more illusion of choice than actual choice... but I guess I wouldn't have known if I'd only played once and never looked back.
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Sunday, July 20, 2014
On Killing Thousands of Robots
For the past few months, during my unintended (laziness-induced) hiatus from updating this blog, I've been playing a few different games. I spent some time on Planetside 2, which is fun with friends but isn't something I would ever play without them. I also tried and failed a few more times to make further progress in The Binding of Isaac, whose randomly generated dungeons and mostly unexplained item system are a great source of replayability despite all the frustration that inevitably comes with such a strongly luck-based game.
More importantly, however, I've wasted far too much time playing a game called Hard Reset and also I've fallen back in love/hate with another time-sucker called Ultratron. I didn't expect much, since I didn't pay much — Hard Reset came as part of a $4 bundle from Bundle Stars, and Ultratron came in a $1+ bundle from Humble Bundle — but I've played almost 50 hours of the former and nearly 40 hours of the latter, so I probably got my money's worth.
Hard Reset is a gorgeous first-person shooter with some interesting weapon design, a minimalist heads-up display, and a heavy emphasis on using environmental hazards to destroy the seemingly endless waves of mechanical bad guys. The game was developed by some of the same people who made Painkiller and, like its occult-themed cousin, Hard Reset is often described as an "old-school" shooter — a throwback to the days of Doom and Quake. To some extent, this is accurate. Unlike so many modern video games, this one doesn't try very hard to be a movie. It's not filled with excessive dialogue and exploding set pieces and scripted action sequences. It's non-stop running and gunning all the way through. It's all about challenging the player. It's a real game. It does attempt to tell a story — perhaps it even tries a little too hard — but, just as in Painkiller, it's not a very good story and it should probably be ignored anyway.
Most of the exposition takes place during loading screen cut scenes, drawn and badly animated in the style of a comic book. When you get to one of these loading screens, I suggest that you go and make a sandwich or something. The plot hardly makes any sense, the acting and writing are both profoundly awful, and the protagonist (made immediately ridiculous by a hilariously typical video-game-action-hero voice) was apparently designed by some 12-year-old kid who thinks the unnecessary use of profanity is just the coolest thing ever conceived. For all intents and purposes, Hard Reset doesn't have a plot. It's far more story-driven than Painkiller, but even if you manage to decipher what's going on, you're not going to care in the end.
Where Hard Reset really strays from its old-school shooter roots is in the adoption of some modern gameplay mechanics. If you'll allow one more comparison to Painkiller, I'd like to point out that its demon-slaying protagonist could run circles around almost any enemy... or, more accurately, he could jump circles around any enemy. While running speed was rather slow in Painkiller, the player could accumulate a lot of extra speed by repeatedly jumping. Although this trick was not explained in any tutorial, it was crucial. This high mobility was a staple of Painkiller gameplay, and provided an advantage over the enormous hordes of enemies that would otherwise surround the player. Hard Reset, on the other hand, has painfully slow running speed and no "bunny hopping" ability. Instead, you just get a sprint button which allows a modest boost in speed for only a couple of seconds.
The limited sprinting ability does manage to be useful, but only marginally so. I must stress that "a couple of seconds" is no exaggeration. The protagonist runs out of breath faster than a morbidly obese pack-a-day smoker with one leg. The result is a game that feels maddeningly sluggish to fans of the same fast-paced old-school shooters to which games like Hard Reset and Painkiller draw so many comparisons. The problem is exacerbated by certain enemies whose attacks often seem unavoidable and — I'm convinced — sometimes are. Running at the speed of a tortoise, armed with only two seconds of slightly-faster-than-tortoise sprinting, can be extremely frustrating when you're being bombarded with missiles and you can't think of a way to output enough damage to kill the enemy before his carpet bombing attack kills you.
Even switching to the right gun can be a bit of a chore — a waste of time when there's no time to waste — thanks to the game's interesting but gimmicky weapon system. Most of the first-person shooters of my childhood days would allow the player to carry a totally unrealistic number of weapons (usually the game's entire arsenal) at once for the sake of fun. On the other hand, most modern shooters limit the player's holding capacity (usually to two or three guns) either for the sake of realism, or for ease of access when using a console gamepad instead of a full keyboard, or for the increased challenge that might be faced by the player when he or she is forced to drop a useful rocket launcher in order to pick up a needed sniper rifle. The weapon system in Hard Reset almost seems like a parody of these modern trends in that, technically, only two guns exist in the entire game.
The player is immediately given an assault rifle and a plasma rifle. The gimmick is that each of these guns can be upgraded with up to four additional weapon modes, and most of these weapon modes have both a primary and a secondary function. So you'll get your shotgun, your grenade launcher, your rocket launcher, your lightning gun, and your big laser canon. You'll even be able to hold them all at once. Unfortunately, all of those functions will be crammed into two weapons, which means you often have to switch to the correct gun and then to the correct firing mode instead of just going directly to the weapon you want. This can be a problem when you need to pull the right weapon quickly, especially since the timely use of stunning weapons on fast enemies is all that compensates for the protagonist's lack of speed.
Despite these issues, Hard Reset is pretty decent. You'll need to adapt to the unusual weapon system, and you'll need to get over the fact that the main character can't run twenty feet without taking a breather, and you'll need to pretend the laughable plot doesn't exist... but none of these are reasons not to play. If there's a reason not to play, it's a lack of patience and an unwillingness to lose a lot before winning. Hard Reset is a rarity in modern times — a truly punishing game whose higher difficulty levels will be deemed impossible by many players.
As for me, it seems I'm a masochist. After starting at the easiest difficulty setting, I decided to work my way up to the hardest. Normal mode all right, Hard mode was frustrating, and Insane mode nearly caused me to smash my computer on numerous occasions. At this level, the game becomes a nightmare. The toughest enemies are bullet sponges, practically unavoidable projectile attacks can kill you in seconds, and you're forced to adopt strategies that weren't necessary before. The use of immobilizing weapons, like stasis grenades and EMP bursts, becomes an absolute necessity, and players who fail to utilize environmental hazards like explosive red barrels will find it difficult to overcome the cruel mathematical problem of dealing enough damage to the enemies before inevitably being shredded to pieces. The infinite waves of little enemies that harass you during boss fights are suddenly a real threat, and they'll kill you as often as the bosses themselves do. Splash damage from explosive weapons will kill you even when you think you're behind cover. When playing the higher difficulty modes, you will die a lot, even if it's not your fault. The game isn't fair.
But I beat it anyway. I kept trying even when I thought it was impossible. I responded to the game's unfair tactics with some unfair tactics of my own. I had an all-out battle of patience and reflexes and wits against a computer and won.
The only problem is that Insane mode isn't actually the highest difficulty. There's one more, called Heroic mode. It's even harder. Worse yet, mid-level checkpoints are removed. You have to beat entire levels without screwing up at all, and the levels are long. Throughout most of Insane mode, I died at least once or twice in every fight, and dozens of times in others.
I think this is where I give up. I don't think I'll ever get through Heroic mode. Even if I'm capable, I just lack the willpower. I've played through the entire game four times and it's no longer fun enough to justify that kind of frustration. And that's okay — I'm fine with that — except that my completion of the game will forever be stuck at 98%. There are just two achievements left: one for beating Heroic mode and then, stupidly, another achievement for unlocking all achievements.
It's just so close that I can't not be annoyed.
I don't usually care much about achievements. Some people can't get enough of them, and some people absolutely despise them. Most of the time, I'm indifferent. Optional challenges are great, as long as they're actually fun, and whether those optional challenges come in the form of "achievements" or some other functionally equivalent feature with a less silly name is irrelevant. If I play all the way through a game and I want to play it some more, the additional challenges are something worth considering. Sometimes I decide to ignore them.
But that's hard to do when I've already done all but a couple of them. It's not even about the pride of reaching 100% completion; it's about leaving things unfinished. It's about the fact that achievements on Steam are a permanent record that I have to see whenever I look at the game in my library, even if it's not installed. It's about something being so close to perfection and not being perfected. As far as I'm concerned, 0% is just as good as 100%, but numbers like 1% and 99% are the worst.
I have a similar issue with Ultratron, the other beautiful, chaotic, punishing, evil-robot-themed game I've been playing recently. If you understand that the title is a reference to Robotron: 2084, you probably already know that this one isn't a first-person shooter. Ultratron is a top-down arena shoot-em-up with highly stylized faux retro graphics and a multitude of ridiculous power-ups. Much like Titan Attacks, the over-the-top Space Invaders clone made by the same developer, Ultratron starts out slow and then gradually becomes an unforgiving hell of colorful projectiles and flashy explosions. And it's more addictive than heroin.
I loved Titan Attacks so much that I played it until I had all the achievements unlocked. I thought I loved Ultratron that much too, but a few of the achievements are just stupidly difficult. Once you're past a certain point, the game becomes extremely intense, and you only get a checkpoint every ten levels — after, not before, each boss. Worse yet, some of the most challenging achievements require a certain number of kills, and the counter resets to zero if you start playing from a checkpoint. If you want the game to count your 10,000 kills, you'll have to get them all in a single playthrough without ever dying. It doesn't have to be all in one sitting, since you can save at any time, but that save disappears after it's loaded. Saving is for taking breaks, not for backing up your progress.
I got fed up with Ultratron after a while, and stopped playing it for months, but I'm back at it again. I told myself I was just going to play a few rounds, but now I'm looking at those last few achievements and saying "yeah, I can totally do that." And I probably can't, but 94% is so close to 100% that it's hard not to try. I should also note that we're not really dealing with additional challenges, in this case, since Ultratron is one of those arcade-style game that goes on as long as you can keep winning. The game doesn't have a real "ending" so the completion of achievements is really the only form of "winning" there is.
Sure, it's silly to be so irritated by falling short of 100% completion, but at least I have the sense to know I'm being silly. At least I'm not so determined that I'm willing to keep playing these games past the point where they stop being enjoyable. When I wanted to unlock the last few achievements in L.A. Noire, just for the sake of neatly wrapping up a fairly enjoyable game, I just used a walkthrough for those idiotic scavenger hunt achievements (Star Map, Auto Fanatic, and Hollywoodland) because doing it myself would have taken so long that I would have hated the game by the time I was done with it.
Not everything can be helped with a walkthrough, though. So should I try to beat Ultratron? Should I bother to clear that last hurdle in Hard Reset? Surely I've blown up more than enough robots this year, with a combined 85 hours in these two games alone (plus whatever uncounted hours I spent playing them with Steam in offline mode). I guess the answer is "maybe someday."
Or maybe I'll just use Steam Achievement Manager — a tool whose use I never understood before now — to unlock these practically impossible achievements just so I'm not tempted to waste endless hours actually attempting them. Trying to master everything I play is exactly why I'll never get through my backlog.
More importantly, however, I've wasted far too much time playing a game called Hard Reset and also I've fallen back in love/hate with another time-sucker called Ultratron. I didn't expect much, since I didn't pay much — Hard Reset came as part of a $4 bundle from Bundle Stars, and Ultratron came in a $1+ bundle from Humble Bundle — but I've played almost 50 hours of the former and nearly 40 hours of the latter, so I probably got my money's worth.
Hard Reset is a gorgeous first-person shooter with some interesting weapon design, a minimalist heads-up display, and a heavy emphasis on using environmental hazards to destroy the seemingly endless waves of mechanical bad guys. The game was developed by some of the same people who made Painkiller and, like its occult-themed cousin, Hard Reset is often described as an "old-school" shooter — a throwback to the days of Doom and Quake. To some extent, this is accurate. Unlike so many modern video games, this one doesn't try very hard to be a movie. It's not filled with excessive dialogue and exploding set pieces and scripted action sequences. It's non-stop running and gunning all the way through. It's all about challenging the player. It's a real game. It does attempt to tell a story — perhaps it even tries a little too hard — but, just as in Painkiller, it's not a very good story and it should probably be ignored anyway.
Most of the exposition takes place during loading screen cut scenes, drawn and badly animated in the style of a comic book. When you get to one of these loading screens, I suggest that you go and make a sandwich or something. The plot hardly makes any sense, the acting and writing are both profoundly awful, and the protagonist (made immediately ridiculous by a hilariously typical video-game-action-hero voice) was apparently designed by some 12-year-old kid who thinks the unnecessary use of profanity is just the coolest thing ever conceived. For all intents and purposes, Hard Reset doesn't have a plot. It's far more story-driven than Painkiller, but even if you manage to decipher what's going on, you're not going to care in the end.
Where Hard Reset really strays from its old-school shooter roots is in the adoption of some modern gameplay mechanics. If you'll allow one more comparison to Painkiller, I'd like to point out that its demon-slaying protagonist could run circles around almost any enemy... or, more accurately, he could jump circles around any enemy. While running speed was rather slow in Painkiller, the player could accumulate a lot of extra speed by repeatedly jumping. Although this trick was not explained in any tutorial, it was crucial. This high mobility was a staple of Painkiller gameplay, and provided an advantage over the enormous hordes of enemies that would otherwise surround the player. Hard Reset, on the other hand, has painfully slow running speed and no "bunny hopping" ability. Instead, you just get a sprint button which allows a modest boost in speed for only a couple of seconds.
The limited sprinting ability does manage to be useful, but only marginally so. I must stress that "a couple of seconds" is no exaggeration. The protagonist runs out of breath faster than a morbidly obese pack-a-day smoker with one leg. The result is a game that feels maddeningly sluggish to fans of the same fast-paced old-school shooters to which games like Hard Reset and Painkiller draw so many comparisons. The problem is exacerbated by certain enemies whose attacks often seem unavoidable and — I'm convinced — sometimes are. Running at the speed of a tortoise, armed with only two seconds of slightly-faster-than-tortoise sprinting, can be extremely frustrating when you're being bombarded with missiles and you can't think of a way to output enough damage to kill the enemy before his carpet bombing attack kills you.
Even switching to the right gun can be a bit of a chore — a waste of time when there's no time to waste — thanks to the game's interesting but gimmicky weapon system. Most of the first-person shooters of my childhood days would allow the player to carry a totally unrealistic number of weapons (usually the game's entire arsenal) at once for the sake of fun. On the other hand, most modern shooters limit the player's holding capacity (usually to two or three guns) either for the sake of realism, or for ease of access when using a console gamepad instead of a full keyboard, or for the increased challenge that might be faced by the player when he or she is forced to drop a useful rocket launcher in order to pick up a needed sniper rifle. The weapon system in Hard Reset almost seems like a parody of these modern trends in that, technically, only two guns exist in the entire game.
The player is immediately given an assault rifle and a plasma rifle. The gimmick is that each of these guns can be upgraded with up to four additional weapon modes, and most of these weapon modes have both a primary and a secondary function. So you'll get your shotgun, your grenade launcher, your rocket launcher, your lightning gun, and your big laser canon. You'll even be able to hold them all at once. Unfortunately, all of those functions will be crammed into two weapons, which means you often have to switch to the correct gun and then to the correct firing mode instead of just going directly to the weapon you want. This can be a problem when you need to pull the right weapon quickly, especially since the timely use of stunning weapons on fast enemies is all that compensates for the protagonist's lack of speed.
Despite these issues, Hard Reset is pretty decent. You'll need to adapt to the unusual weapon system, and you'll need to get over the fact that the main character can't run twenty feet without taking a breather, and you'll need to pretend the laughable plot doesn't exist... but none of these are reasons not to play. If there's a reason not to play, it's a lack of patience and an unwillingness to lose a lot before winning. Hard Reset is a rarity in modern times — a truly punishing game whose higher difficulty levels will be deemed impossible by many players.
As for me, it seems I'm a masochist. After starting at the easiest difficulty setting, I decided to work my way up to the hardest. Normal mode all right, Hard mode was frustrating, and Insane mode nearly caused me to smash my computer on numerous occasions. At this level, the game becomes a nightmare. The toughest enemies are bullet sponges, practically unavoidable projectile attacks can kill you in seconds, and you're forced to adopt strategies that weren't necessary before. The use of immobilizing weapons, like stasis grenades and EMP bursts, becomes an absolute necessity, and players who fail to utilize environmental hazards like explosive red barrels will find it difficult to overcome the cruel mathematical problem of dealing enough damage to the enemies before inevitably being shredded to pieces. The infinite waves of little enemies that harass you during boss fights are suddenly a real threat, and they'll kill you as often as the bosses themselves do. Splash damage from explosive weapons will kill you even when you think you're behind cover. When playing the higher difficulty modes, you will die a lot, even if it's not your fault. The game isn't fair.
But I beat it anyway. I kept trying even when I thought it was impossible. I responded to the game's unfair tactics with some unfair tactics of my own. I had an all-out battle of patience and reflexes and wits against a computer and won.
The only problem is that Insane mode isn't actually the highest difficulty. There's one more, called Heroic mode. It's even harder. Worse yet, mid-level checkpoints are removed. You have to beat entire levels without screwing up at all, and the levels are long. Throughout most of Insane mode, I died at least once or twice in every fight, and dozens of times in others.
I think this is where I give up. I don't think I'll ever get through Heroic mode. Even if I'm capable, I just lack the willpower. I've played through the entire game four times and it's no longer fun enough to justify that kind of frustration. And that's okay — I'm fine with that — except that my completion of the game will forever be stuck at 98%. There are just two achievements left: one for beating Heroic mode and then, stupidly, another achievement for unlocking all achievements.
It's just so close that I can't not be annoyed.
I don't usually care much about achievements. Some people can't get enough of them, and some people absolutely despise them. Most of the time, I'm indifferent. Optional challenges are great, as long as they're actually fun, and whether those optional challenges come in the form of "achievements" or some other functionally equivalent feature with a less silly name is irrelevant. If I play all the way through a game and I want to play it some more, the additional challenges are something worth considering. Sometimes I decide to ignore them.
But that's hard to do when I've already done all but a couple of them. It's not even about the pride of reaching 100% completion; it's about leaving things unfinished. It's about the fact that achievements on Steam are a permanent record that I have to see whenever I look at the game in my library, even if it's not installed. It's about something being so close to perfection and not being perfected. As far as I'm concerned, 0% is just as good as 100%, but numbers like 1% and 99% are the worst.
I have a similar issue with Ultratron, the other beautiful, chaotic, punishing, evil-robot-themed game I've been playing recently. If you understand that the title is a reference to Robotron: 2084, you probably already know that this one isn't a first-person shooter. Ultratron is a top-down arena shoot-em-up with highly stylized faux retro graphics and a multitude of ridiculous power-ups. Much like Titan Attacks, the over-the-top Space Invaders clone made by the same developer, Ultratron starts out slow and then gradually becomes an unforgiving hell of colorful projectiles and flashy explosions. And it's more addictive than heroin.
I loved Titan Attacks so much that I played it until I had all the achievements unlocked. I thought I loved Ultratron that much too, but a few of the achievements are just stupidly difficult. Once you're past a certain point, the game becomes extremely intense, and you only get a checkpoint every ten levels — after, not before, each boss. Worse yet, some of the most challenging achievements require a certain number of kills, and the counter resets to zero if you start playing from a checkpoint. If you want the game to count your 10,000 kills, you'll have to get them all in a single playthrough without ever dying. It doesn't have to be all in one sitting, since you can save at any time, but that save disappears after it's loaded. Saving is for taking breaks, not for backing up your progress.
I got fed up with Ultratron after a while, and stopped playing it for months, but I'm back at it again. I told myself I was just going to play a few rounds, but now I'm looking at those last few achievements and saying "yeah, I can totally do that." And I probably can't, but 94% is so close to 100% that it's hard not to try. I should also note that we're not really dealing with additional challenges, in this case, since Ultratron is one of those arcade-style game that goes on as long as you can keep winning. The game doesn't have a real "ending" so the completion of achievements is really the only form of "winning" there is.
Sure, it's silly to be so irritated by falling short of 100% completion, but at least I have the sense to know I'm being silly. At least I'm not so determined that I'm willing to keep playing these games past the point where they stop being enjoyable. When I wanted to unlock the last few achievements in L.A. Noire, just for the sake of neatly wrapping up a fairly enjoyable game, I just used a walkthrough for those idiotic scavenger hunt achievements (Star Map, Auto Fanatic, and Hollywoodland) because doing it myself would have taken so long that I would have hated the game by the time I was done with it.
Not everything can be helped with a walkthrough, though. So should I try to beat Ultratron? Should I bother to clear that last hurdle in Hard Reset? Surely I've blown up more than enough robots this year, with a combined 85 hours in these two games alone (plus whatever uncounted hours I spent playing them with Steam in offline mode). I guess the answer is "maybe someday."
Or maybe I'll just use Steam Achievement Manager — a tool whose use I never understood before now — to unlock these practically impossible achievements just so I'm not tempted to waste endless hours actually attempting them. Trying to master everything I play is exactly why I'll never get through my backlog.
Monday, April 28, 2014
Unskippable Cutscenes & Other Pure Evil
I often say that if a single-player video game isn't worth playing twice then it's not worth playing at all. That might be a slight exaggeration — surely "game worth playing exactly once" does lie somewhere between "game worth playing twice" and "game worth uninstalling" — but honestly, if I get to the end of a game and I don't want to do it again, it probably wasn't very fun. In my opinion, one should be able to enjoy a game multiple times, twice being the bare minimum.
Surely, some people will disagree, and their counterargument will most likely go something like this: "After the first time, you already know how it ends!" Well, yeah, it ends with me winning. If your experience with a game is spoiled because you already know the end of an underlying story, which probably exists only to provide context to some otherwise meaningless depictions of violence, the game isn't a very good one. It's supposed to be a game, after all, not a movie. Do I like story-driven games? Sure. But a game needs to be fun for reasons other than its plot twists. Otherwise, it should have been a movie, and anyone who likes it could have watched a movie instead. Moreover, if there's a game whose plot is the primary appeal, it should have a plot that's good enough for an eventual second run. Lots of people like to watch a good movie more than once, right?
But let's say the plot isn't so great that I want to see it and hear it again. Let's say I'm about to play a game a second time because the actual game was fun, or because I missed a few optional objectives the first time, or because my high score isn't high enough. If that's the case, I shouldn't be forced to see and hear the story a second time, and since no reasonable person would ever disagree with that statement, I don't understand why any video game developer ever thought unskippable cutscenes were a good idea.
I recently finished L.A. Noire. Played well the first time around, this game might not warrant a second play-through, but I missed plenty of clues and botched more than a few interrogations, so I decided to go back for the five-star ratings (and a few achievements) I missed. And it would have been pretty fun if I didn't have to watch every single cutscene a second time. Why can't we skip the cutscenes in L.A. Noire? I have no idea. I've heard that cutscenes in Max Payne 3 are unskippable because the game uses that time to load, but L.A. Noire has separate loading screens, so I doubt it's the same situation. So, disguised loading screens aside, why would a game ever have unskippable cutscenes? It turns out that there are no good reasons.
Sometimes we wonder why and how a serial killer would decide to brutally murder dozens of people. That a human could do something so senselessly awful is almost beyond comprehension. Two possible explanations come to mind: either the serial killer is very simply insane and his or her actions are the result of a mental defect, or true evil exists in the world and it lives inside that person. Unskippable cutscenes are a much lesser crime than repeated homicide but the same two explanations apply and I can't think of any others. The developers of a game must be crazy (or profoundly stupid) to think that a person playing the game for the second time won't be annoyed by the inability to opt out of re-watching something as pointless as a cutscene. On the other hand, if they do know that such a restriction annoys players, the only reason to implement unskippable cutscenes would be to annoy players and that's pure evil. Surely it's a lesser evil than murder, but the evil is still pure because the only conceivable objective is to cause suffering.
Whether it's intentional or not, the unskippable cutscene often acts as an irritating punishment for failure. In games that forbid players from opting out of having a mediocre story shoved down their throats, there always seems to be a difficult boss fight (or a difficult something) preceded by a long and boring scene that's only entertaining once. And you end up seeing it fifteen times. If that's not bad game design, I don't know what is. Fortunately, none of the cutscenes in L.A. Noire are extremely long and no particular part of the game is likely to be repeated numerous times (since nothing in the game is very challenging and there's an option that allows awful players to skip action sequences). Still, there's no reason for unskippable cutscenes, especially since the concept of skipping a cutscene has been around for approximately as long as cutscenes have existed.
I guess the developers think their story is so important that we shouldn't attempt to enjoy the game without it. They think they need to save us from ourselves by preventing us from "accidentally" missing something important. Sometimes, a story is important enough that it shouldn't be skipped; if I saw someone skipping cutscenes while playing Alan Wake for the first time, I'd probably recommend that they just play a different game. But that's no reason to take away options.
This is one of those things that would cause us to boycott a game if only we had an ounce of self control. Unfortunately, we don't. It's unforgivable, but it's still tolerable enough that the developers and publishers are unlikely to suffer financially as a result, so they won't learn any lessons no matter how much I complain.
Surely, some people will disagree, and their counterargument will most likely go something like this: "After the first time, you already know how it ends!" Well, yeah, it ends with me winning. If your experience with a game is spoiled because you already know the end of an underlying story, which probably exists only to provide context to some otherwise meaningless depictions of violence, the game isn't a very good one. It's supposed to be a game, after all, not a movie. Do I like story-driven games? Sure. But a game needs to be fun for reasons other than its plot twists. Otherwise, it should have been a movie, and anyone who likes it could have watched a movie instead. Moreover, if there's a game whose plot is the primary appeal, it should have a plot that's good enough for an eventual second run. Lots of people like to watch a good movie more than once, right?
But let's say the plot isn't so great that I want to see it and hear it again. Let's say I'm about to play a game a second time because the actual game was fun, or because I missed a few optional objectives the first time, or because my high score isn't high enough. If that's the case, I shouldn't be forced to see and hear the story a second time, and since no reasonable person would ever disagree with that statement, I don't understand why any video game developer ever thought unskippable cutscenes were a good idea.
I recently finished L.A. Noire. Played well the first time around, this game might not warrant a second play-through, but I missed plenty of clues and botched more than a few interrogations, so I decided to go back for the five-star ratings (and a few achievements) I missed. And it would have been pretty fun if I didn't have to watch every single cutscene a second time. Why can't we skip the cutscenes in L.A. Noire? I have no idea. I've heard that cutscenes in Max Payne 3 are unskippable because the game uses that time to load, but L.A. Noire has separate loading screens, so I doubt it's the same situation. So, disguised loading screens aside, why would a game ever have unskippable cutscenes? It turns out that there are no good reasons.
Sometimes we wonder why and how a serial killer would decide to brutally murder dozens of people. That a human could do something so senselessly awful is almost beyond comprehension. Two possible explanations come to mind: either the serial killer is very simply insane and his or her actions are the result of a mental defect, or true evil exists in the world and it lives inside that person. Unskippable cutscenes are a much lesser crime than repeated homicide but the same two explanations apply and I can't think of any others. The developers of a game must be crazy (or profoundly stupid) to think that a person playing the game for the second time won't be annoyed by the inability to opt out of re-watching something as pointless as a cutscene. On the other hand, if they do know that such a restriction annoys players, the only reason to implement unskippable cutscenes would be to annoy players and that's pure evil. Surely it's a lesser evil than murder, but the evil is still pure because the only conceivable objective is to cause suffering.
Whether it's intentional or not, the unskippable cutscene often acts as an irritating punishment for failure. In games that forbid players from opting out of having a mediocre story shoved down their throats, there always seems to be a difficult boss fight (or a difficult something) preceded by a long and boring scene that's only entertaining once. And you end up seeing it fifteen times. If that's not bad game design, I don't know what is. Fortunately, none of the cutscenes in L.A. Noire are extremely long and no particular part of the game is likely to be repeated numerous times (since nothing in the game is very challenging and there's an option that allows awful players to skip action sequences). Still, there's no reason for unskippable cutscenes, especially since the concept of skipping a cutscene has been around for approximately as long as cutscenes have existed.
I guess the developers think their story is so important that we shouldn't attempt to enjoy the game without it. They think they need to save us from ourselves by preventing us from "accidentally" missing something important. Sometimes, a story is important enough that it shouldn't be skipped; if I saw someone skipping cutscenes while playing Alan Wake for the first time, I'd probably recommend that they just play a different game. But that's no reason to take away options.
This is one of those things that would cause us to boycott a game if only we had an ounce of self control. Unfortunately, we don't. It's unforgivable, but it's still tolerable enough that the developers and publishers are unlikely to suffer financially as a result, so they won't learn any lessons no matter how much I complain.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Neat, I'm Insignificant
For some horrible reason, I'm following Polygon on Twitter. Thanks to that mistake, I just came across this brief article about social interaction among us "video gamers" and how we aren't the "antisocial misfits, basement-dwellers and loners" that outsiders supposedly think we are. The headline and the first two paragraphs strongly contest the stereotype against avid video game players. Loners, we're told, are actually the outliers, going against the trend.
Great, right? Sure does sound great. But it's not great, and they're not even convincingly making the case that it's true.
The article — titled Research: Loners are the exception, not the rule, among video gamers — describes a study in which researchers from North Carolina State University, in collaboration with others at York University and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, observed thousands of video game players and surveyed hundreds more. The results of this study are published in a paper titled Public Displays of Play: Studying Online Games in Physical Settings.
Let's stop there.
Here's what you should be asking yourself: "Online games specifically? Physical settings in particular? Are we really using this study alone to make claims about 'gamers' in general?" Unfortunately. According to Polygon, the findings of the study are based on observations and surveys of MMORPG players at various "public gaming events." If either Polygon or the researchers themselves really do intend to draw conclusions about all consumers of video games based on this information, they're making just about as much sense as some guy who uses limited anecdotal evidence to argue that we are all basement-dwelling antisocial freaks.
It should be no surprise to anyone that the subjects of this study — the fans of massively multiplayer online games who meet up with other fans in person to participate in highly social activities — are highly social. Nobody would suspect they are "loners" of any kind. In other words, this isn't the shocking and counter-intuitive finding that Polygon wants it to be. It's the same kind of obvious, common-sense-confirming, almost insignificant finding that usually comes from sociological studies and experiments.
I'll admit right now that I have neither the time nor the patience to read the study in full, so I'm not sure if this not-so-amazing revelation — that the most socially active type of "gamer" you can imagine is by no means antisocial — is really the only point that the researchers wanted to make. On the other hand, I'm not sure if they really meant to draw outrageous conclusions about all "gamers" either. Judging by the title of the research paper and the abstract, I can only suspect that the conspicuous generalization of the study's findings to all "gamers" was Polygon's own invention.
In a way, I do admire what Polygon is trying to do with his article. They're trying to break down the worst negative stereotypes about "gamers" and to make video games a more socially acceptable hobby by exposing the fallacy of the antisocial, basement-dwelling, lonely game enthusiast. However, the article succeeds only in telling me (erroneously by the way) that I'm not representative of the "gamer" demographic because, in some ways, I am a loner. I'm not a creepy loner with no friends, but I do most often play video games alone. A lot of people who make a hobby out of video games are loners, and there's nothing wrong with that. We're not necessarily antisocial and I'd wager that very few of us actually dwell in basements, but it's not crazy to assume that a large percentage of people who might properly be called "gamers" enjoy playing video games at home by themselves and are less socially active, in the traditional sense, than people who prefer football. I'd conduct my own research if I had nothing better to do.
By making sweeping generalizations about "video gamers" based on the results of a study with no consideration of single-player or otherwise non-MMO games (i.e., almost everything) and no consideration of people who only play at home (i.e., almost everyone), Polygon is saying that those convention-going MMO fans are the only "gamers" who count. That's not really fair.
Furthermore, while I do, again, appreciate the effort to promote video games as a more socially acceptable pastime, I'd rather they didn't. Video games are already in a long transition from dorky to mainstream — in fact, that transition is almost complete — and while this does have benefits, it also causes problems. We've all seen what happens when developers and publishers of video games pander to the same demographic that used to shun video game enthusiasts as losers and nerds. People who actually like video games for reasons other than its new-found status as a trendy thing to do — people who, if you'll pardon the hipsterism, actually liked video games before they were cool — are now shunned by the video game industry, which is more interested in marketing to the casual "I've never played a video game before and I hate a good challenge" crowd.
So no, screw Polygon.
While I'm certain that most video game enthusiasts are far more socially active (and generally more "normal") than the antisocial loser stereotype, I'm also certain that this stereotype is outdated and no one actually believes it anymore. We no longer need use dubious interpretations of potentially biased studies, completely disregarding the majority of actual video game hobbyists, in order to remind people that we're people too.
Great, right? Sure does sound great. But it's not great, and they're not even convincingly making the case that it's true.
The article — titled Research: Loners are the exception, not the rule, among video gamers — describes a study in which researchers from North Carolina State University, in collaboration with others at York University and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, observed thousands of video game players and surveyed hundreds more. The results of this study are published in a paper titled Public Displays of Play: Studying Online Games in Physical Settings.
Let's stop there.
Here's what you should be asking yourself: "Online games specifically? Physical settings in particular? Are we really using this study alone to make claims about 'gamers' in general?" Unfortunately. According to Polygon, the findings of the study are based on observations and surveys of MMORPG players at various "public gaming events." If either Polygon or the researchers themselves really do intend to draw conclusions about all consumers of video games based on this information, they're making just about as much sense as some guy who uses limited anecdotal evidence to argue that we are all basement-dwelling antisocial freaks.
It should be no surprise to anyone that the subjects of this study — the fans of massively multiplayer online games who meet up with other fans in person to participate in highly social activities — are highly social. Nobody would suspect they are "loners" of any kind. In other words, this isn't the shocking and counter-intuitive finding that Polygon wants it to be. It's the same kind of obvious, common-sense-confirming, almost insignificant finding that usually comes from sociological studies and experiments.
I'll admit right now that I have neither the time nor the patience to read the study in full, so I'm not sure if this not-so-amazing revelation — that the most socially active type of "gamer" you can imagine is by no means antisocial — is really the only point that the researchers wanted to make. On the other hand, I'm not sure if they really meant to draw outrageous conclusions about all "gamers" either. Judging by the title of the research paper and the abstract, I can only suspect that the conspicuous generalization of the study's findings to all "gamers" was Polygon's own invention.
In a way, I do admire what Polygon is trying to do with his article. They're trying to break down the worst negative stereotypes about "gamers" and to make video games a more socially acceptable hobby by exposing the fallacy of the antisocial, basement-dwelling, lonely game enthusiast. However, the article succeeds only in telling me (erroneously by the way) that I'm not representative of the "gamer" demographic because, in some ways, I am a loner. I'm not a creepy loner with no friends, but I do most often play video games alone. A lot of people who make a hobby out of video games are loners, and there's nothing wrong with that. We're not necessarily antisocial and I'd wager that very few of us actually dwell in basements, but it's not crazy to assume that a large percentage of people who might properly be called "gamers" enjoy playing video games at home by themselves and are less socially active, in the traditional sense, than people who prefer football. I'd conduct my own research if I had nothing better to do.
By making sweeping generalizations about "video gamers" based on the results of a study with no consideration of single-player or otherwise non-MMO games (i.e., almost everything) and no consideration of people who only play at home (i.e., almost everyone), Polygon is saying that those convention-going MMO fans are the only "gamers" who count. That's not really fair.
Furthermore, while I do, again, appreciate the effort to promote video games as a more socially acceptable pastime, I'd rather they didn't. Video games are already in a long transition from dorky to mainstream — in fact, that transition is almost complete — and while this does have benefits, it also causes problems. We've all seen what happens when developers and publishers of video games pander to the same demographic that used to shun video game enthusiasts as losers and nerds. People who actually like video games for reasons other than its new-found status as a trendy thing to do — people who, if you'll pardon the hipsterism, actually liked video games before they were cool — are now shunned by the video game industry, which is more interested in marketing to the casual "I've never played a video game before and I hate a good challenge" crowd.
So no, screw Polygon.
While I'm certain that most video game enthusiasts are far more socially active (and generally more "normal") than the antisocial loser stereotype, I'm also certain that this stereotype is outdated and no one actually believes it anymore. We no longer need use dubious interpretations of potentially biased studies, completely disregarding the majority of actual video game hobbyists, in order to remind people that we're people too.
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