Read the first part here.

And the second part here.

Check it out!

Keep in mind, the footage is from an incomplete prototype version, and has pretty much zero artwork. This essentially a less spoilery version of the pitch I submitted to IndieFund earlier this year. It also should be the first footage that you will have seen of the game, period. So that’s pretty cool, right?

psst…There may or may not be some media coverage of Duet soon. Keep your eyes peeled.

Video games don’t typically handle weighty topics with any finesse. Grand Theft Auto has always caused such controversy because games are still seen as a medium that cannot effectively communicate adult themes. Games are childish, and as you get older you put aside such things. The reason that games are not taken seriously is precisely because they have thus far not proven that they should be.

The Call of Duty series is mass market. It reaches the lowest common denominator. These types of games tend to be base experiences, loaded to the brim with cheap thrills and explosions. War is anything but fun. I am not the game’s target audience, so I have been reasonably worried and somewhat hesitant to play the Modern Warfare games.

I pick up a used copy of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare from Gamestop. Two days later, my mind is changed.

Call of Duty 4 is both impressive and dissatisfying. It is a triumph of modern game design, tackling war in an effectively terrifying way. A line can be easily drawn between the fantasy war that the game presents, and the real global conflict against terrorism. The game depicts suffering up close and personal. It is frank and honest, even if it occasionally exaggerates. It doesn’t shy away from showing you the brutality of war, but it also manages to never feel gratuitous. A sense of reality is preseved throughout the experience. And it’s weight is traumatic and oppressive.

In a word, it’s haunting.

But the game is conflicted. Although it is clearly not a simuluation, it attempts to be unbiased and never really forces any particular interpretation of what is happening. It just puts you in the shoes of a soldier and throws you against an aggressive situation. But on the sidelines, the game makes comments on both sides of the anti-war sentiment. The game tells you that war is terrible, but then raps atop the end credits with a tone slightly south of “Guns! Fuck yeah!”

The game leaves you with a taste of onions and sugar. It would be insufficient to call the game anything less than a monumental achievement–it is both more affecting and more intense than it’s best film counterpart, Saving Private Ryan–but it’s botched delivery leaves me terrified that many people will see it as a simple glorification of war, fun in the same way as Halo or Gear of War.

Perhaps it’s impact only comes from within the player: The game gains it’s weight from the connection that must be intentionally drawn between reality and what the game represents. Surely there are many adults who play the game without consideration of the tragedy of murdering people who you have never even met for causes that don’t really personally concern you. People will not wonder what these “bad guys” might be like if you just got to know them. Instead, some will posit that real war is “just a game.”

I am no longer worried about the content of the game, merely the shallowness of its players. Games will not truly be revered as a mature artform until the artistic appreciation thereof is reflective of the strength of the content rather than the perseverence of its players.

On the last day before the deadline, after a rush to the bank to deposit the 95 dollar entrance fee into a check card ready account and a 40 minute drive back home to get the thumb drive holding the code for the prototype, following a late arrival for work with a sneaky ftp upload when I was supposed to be retouching, Duet is now officially entered into the 2012 Independent Games Festival.

It is competing alongside 568 other games: a record turnout. Submissions come both from first time developers, as well as seasoned veterans. Unfortunately, the production version was not yet complete enough for a viable submission, so that means no fancy graphics or sound. Here’s hoping Duet wows some judges with it’s intellectually stimulating puzzly goodness!

I will admit, Dark Souls isn’t for everyone. The game is not fun in any typical sense of the word. The intrinsic reward that you get from victory is all there really is. If you do not find the challenge of mastery that it presents to be compelling, then it’s true value will never reveal itself.

Dark Souls is like cocaine. It doesn’t come to you, you have to come to it.

To excel at Dark Souls, Parry and Riposte must become as second nature to you as walking. The game teaches like a strict Buddhist, smacking you with a board and commanding you to focus. It forces you out of your cognitive slumber. You will be reprimanded for the tiniest mistaken impulse. If you do not prove yourself, you will be punished. Those who are easily frustrated by failure will find no solace in it’s tradition.

It expects you to ignore your phone calls.

It doesn’t let you pause.

Fittingly, there is a dark side to Souls. Something about the game drags the worst of your qualities into the light. You will find yourself cursing audibly when you lose 2000 souls to a simple skeleton. You will scream at and hurt your pets. You will let your girlfriend’s phone call ring wildly while you cower behind your shield, surrounded by the hordes of the undead. You will think about pain. You will cry. In your transformation, you will realize that you are as deeply insecure as a child.

But like or unlike meditation, the surprising thing about Dark Souls is that is isn’t, in fact, masochistic. Yes, you will die quite often, but mastery gives you such an intense satisfaction that it all feels worth it. In this way, it is unlike any game I have ever played. You genuinely feel accomplished when you skillfully defeat a boss who had crushed you so many times before. You can’t resist the urge to smile as you stand glorious in your victory, content that you will never have to face your tormentor again. It is in these moments, that the world of Lordran is at once both haunting and beautiful.

After grinding for a while, I begin to grow weary of the Undead Burg, so I try to tackle the tough monsters who were holding me back earlier. I gather enough Souls to purchase eighty or so bolts for my light crossbow. The merchant seemed upset when I walked off without closing his menu screen. Stingy guy I guess.

I try to aim the crossbow to no avail, the shots just seem to go off randomly if I don’t lock onto an enemy with a click of the right thumbstick. Eventually I get the hang of the crossbow. And I seem to be getting better at this Parry-Reposè thing. The undead still swarm me occasionally and I die, but the combat is something I’m at least grasping now. So, with much ambition, I head off to fight the big black knight. I shoot him from as far away as possible.

He smashes me.

With some resolve, I try again. I retrieve my Souls from a blood stain where I fell before, but to no avail. The knight kills me again.

Okay. I guess I’ll try that freaky boss thing up there on the bridge. There was a little tower with some undead hanging out on it. Perhaps I can hang out up there and rain down some bolts on him.

I’m standing on the roof now, the Taurus Demon is rushing across the bridge towards me. My hands clench around the controller.

And nothing happens.

The demon just stops next to the tower where I am standing and stares blankly at me. I pull out my crossbow and try to get a good angle on him. After some fidgeting, I manage to lock onto his face while retaining my safe position. Then I hammer down on the right bumper and a bolt sails into the demon’s nose. He shrugs it off. I fire another. Each bolt lands with a thwack and chips off a little bit of his life meter. I grow weary of shooting, and the excitement of the battle dulls into a strange exercise in pity. I sort of feel like a bastard when the demon finally falls to the ground and disintegrates.

I don’t know how many Souls a demon has. Apparently a lot.

I climb into the building that lied past the Taurus Demon, stepping through some musty hallways full of old empty barrels. At the end of a downward staircase, I find a balcony with a strange, vaguely human looking thing on it. I approach cautiously, clicking the thumbstick furiously to make sure that it isn’t hostile. Big burly things usually are deadly in this game. I walk next to the man and talk to him. He tells me some fancy exposition that metaphorically represents the online component of the game.

I’m not playing online. At least he seems to offer me some of his own help, if I can find his obsessively placed sun logos, scattered about.

I turn from the man and march across a large bridge towards a castle. There seems to be an army amassed on the center of the bridge. I hold my shield up high, valiantly blocking their feeble bolts. Then I get roasted.

What the hell was that?

A dragon flies overhead and perches atop the castle. He then makes another swoop and burns me to a crisp.

YOU DIED. Familiar. Like a dream.

I’d hoped to find a bonfire. Ah, well.

I try to make my way back. I die on the way, losing the souls from the boss fight. This game is just merciless. I’m not sure what kind of relationship I’m creating with this thing.

After a few failed attempts to outwit the dragon, I give up and set my sights on the monster in the basement. The mans with the giant club. He smashes me. I try again. His club crushes my feeble spine once more.

I try to slip past him on my next round. I make it outside to a beautiful forest. I see a strange, vaguely Atronach-esque creature in the distance. I glance at my quarter length of health and turn around to run back, when I notice one of the creatures right next to me.

I jump and shriek in terror. I run for my life. Right back into the arms and club of the monster in the basement of that tower.

Might as well give up on those souls.

Eventually, I just make my way back to the shrine, somewhat frustrated. I spend the rest of my session looting the graveyard downhill of the shrine. I fight skeletons. I fight giant skeletons. One of the giant skeletons falls off a cliff clumsily. I laugh.

What a bizarre game. Where will I go next? I’ve gathered 3000 souls, I’m not sure what to spend them on.

Dark Souls. They sure do make this an event. Free upgrade to the collectors edition with a pre-order. The tin has a plastic sleeve around it, emblazoned with the usual box art amenities. Prepare To Die, it says. So I open the tin to find the standard box as well as a fancy-smancy hardcover art book that smells of fresh ink and dead tree pulp.

Hope the game lives up to all this packaging…. I go to sleep.

Eight hours later I dust off the Xbox, perform some system updates and dive into the world of Dark Souls, not to resurface for air until six hours later.

In case you didn’t know, Dark Souls is a role-playing game and the sequel to what has been heralded as one of the hardest games in recent memory, Demon’s Souls. The previous game was a Playstation exclusive, so I missed out on the experience. Dark Souls will be my first foray into this delicious masochism.

The game begins, innocently enough with a simple menu allowing me to create my character, and prompting me to set brightness and controls. A bit unusual that it starts with a control setup, but that sort of fits in with the focused aesthetic. Then I am immediately thrust into a cold and dark dungeon full of the undead. I feel my way along the wet walls of the Byzantine dungeon, and I find messages left for me. Simple messages about the controls, how to move the camera, how to swing my broken sword.

Finally, I make it to a large empty room with an open ceiling. The twilight spills across a courtyard, and I walk across. A gigantic monster falls nonchalantly and yet directly in my path. A scrawled note on the floor tells me to get away. Yeah, too late. I swing my sword heroically, but it is in vain, and the monster smashes me to bits. “YOU DIED,” appears across most of the screen in a garish-looking font.

Way to rub it in, guys.

After a load, I head back to face the monster. This time, upon further investigation, I find a hole in the wall, and scurry away from the monster. “Hmm,” I ponder upon what I have discovered, “they are at least being honest with me. Getting away was what I was supposed to do.”

I explore the dungeon, learning more and more about the combat. How to brandish a real sword, what the value of a shield really is. The game isn’t really hard, it just demands you abide by it’s rules. While traveling, I find a stranger who happily lends me some flasks of life giving juice. He tells me that he won’t need them much longer, and I abide him with some steel. I comment somewhat remorsefully when I notice how little the game seems to care that I take the life of an innocent man. This surely is a brutal world, and I must attempt to be a light of some kind. Since my character does not speak, I can only see myself reflected through his actions.

There is no pause, there is no reload. No takesies-backsies.

I silently vow to not do it again.

After a while, I make it back to the monster, this time armed with some real equipment, and a little half-baked knowledge. I just manage to defeat it after only one death. The game congratulates me, and I find a note on the ground that says, “Good Job.” A very large and somewhat slow moving Raven takes me to my next destination, the name of which I cannot remember. It’s interesting that something so light on story can be so compelling.

I spend the next few hours making an admirably small amount of progress in terms of taking ground, however I do make considerable upgrades to my character. He gets a little stronger, a little quicker. With each life I take, I gather a bunch of Souls, some sort of mystical energy that even lives inside of the undead and giant rats. ( But not skeletons. ) After I gather a lot of Souls, I can meditate on my ventures and level-up my stats. The exact amount of Souls I will need to do this, I’m never quite sure.

As I make headway, I come up against what may be my first wall. There are three paths to choose from. On one of these paths, a giant beast attacks me, and will kill me in one hit. On the second path, there is a tall dark–featured prominently on the box–knight, whom I can block 100% with my shield, but will kill me in one hit if I so much as think about trying to swing my slow lumbering arm at him. And my third option is a normal sized undead with a giant club, who will flatten me if I get near, killing me in one hit.

Dark Souls, thus far, is somewhat hard to describe. It’s not really true that it is designed like an old-school game. It is very modern, but it is just very focused. There isn’t really much else like it. I am enjoying the experience, but it would be hard to classify it as “fun.” I just hope I can figure out my way past these insta-kill baddies. Either I’m barking up the wrong tree, or the game is setting the bar high to teach me a lesson. I will report back tomorrow…

It’s so easy to get attached to a project when you work on it for a long time. I’ve already been looking at Duet for a year. Despite that, for the past six months or so I haven’t made much progress. This is partly due to laziness and working a full time job. Staring closely at what you are doing can make it seem so much bigger than it really is.

The fact is that Duet is a small game. If I’m being realistic, it probably won’t change the world; it probably won’t change much of anything. But I’ve become so intimately close with the project that it has grown an importance to me that isn’t really due. I’ve created an abstract idea of what Duet is, and it seems imperative that I must create that. I can feel the importance of what I’m doing, and I find that paralyzing.

Instead, I just need to relax and enjoy working on it as much as I can. Taking a more laid back attitude about the development allows me room to fail. This freedom is the only real path to success. The importance of achieving my artistic goals with the project has occluded to me the probability that I don’t even have any idea what Duet should be. I have become so terrified of making a misstep and pushing the project in the wrong direction that I’m no making any steps at all.

Alec Holowka has talked on his podcast and elsewhere about the depressing nature of deeply personal involvement in game projects. Although I want Duet to be deeply personal and compelling, the concept is so abstract that there really is no direct path to achieving that goal.

I am where I am in the project, and I cannot clearly see the end of the road ahead. It is truly a circuitous route to the final game. Earlier, this was not a problem, because I was the only one working on it, and the missteps required relatively little investment. So throwing out bad ideas was not a big deal. Now, for some reason, I have been unable to take this attitude with the production. In some sense, I must learn to trust my instincts a little more, but I must also not be afraid to change my mind.

ThatGameCompany has gone as far as to throw away fundamental mechanical systems in favor of achieving a specific “feel”. Although I hope to create an evocative experience, I am not really designing in that way. The game started with the mechanics and the feel I want to pursue has just arisen naturally from observation of those interactions.

The game development process is liquid and ideally requires both top-down and bottom-up design practices. It just requires the freedom to fail. It demands a certain mobility of design direction. It’s like trying to hit a moving target from a moving target, with a moving target. But I can’t let the fear of missing the mark keep me from trying.

So, are games really art?

Roger Ebert has quite famously come out to say that Games cannot be art, or as he calls it “high art.” ( Essentially meaning all forms of art that most people consider when they talk about art. Art as in “artist,” as opposed to “artisan.”) I’m not sure this distinction was entirely necessary to make. I don’t think that many people were attempting to argue that games should be considered art alongside dance or pottery. The question is really about whether games are or are not a medium for communicating ideas and emotions in at least the same capacity as film or books.

I am not simply dismissing the issue imposed by Roger Ebert’s statements, but it would seem to me that he does not truly understand games as an art form. More specifically, he does not understand that the way in which games function artistically is quite different from films and other media. Unfortunately, many modern game designers do not understand this distinction either. Viewed as works of art, most games are quite meaningless when compared to great works in other mediums.

So, can we solve the dilemma we face in dealing with Roger Ebert’s belief? He stated that “If you change [the ending of a story], you become the artist,” proposing, “Would “Romeo and Juliet” have been better with a different ending?” It is here that he makes his claim most poignantly.

Mr. Ebert claims that that the reason games cannot be art is because of player agency. As he sees it, if a game lets the player change the plot, then “authorial control” of that plot is lost and, without an autuer it cannot be art. I agree with this statement, with the exception that most games do not have a plot which can be nearly as radically changed as his Shakespearean example. With a few exceptions, games typically give you no real control of the narrative at all. Clearly, a happy ending to Romeo and Juliet would destroy the play’s potency, but to say that simply adding a variable to a traditional play, as an example of how this type of game story would be written, is making it clear from what poor perspective his argument comes from.

Of course, plot may just not be a good match for games. As Jonathan Blow stated in his lecture at the 2008 Montreal International Games Summit, games which offer challenge are putting friction into a plot. Plot pushes a narrative forward unceasingly, and challenge holds it back, pushing in the opposite direction. The solution to this problem is either to remove the challenge, or to remove the plot.

Another option is to pursue a type of plot that reacts to the player’s failures. ( An option most notably pursued by Heavy Rain, and to a lesser extent, Quantic Dream’s earlier title Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit) ) Though this is quite an interesting frontier for games, It is questionable that a plot, when you insert agency into it and make it malleable, is even definably a plot at all.

It may, in fact, be misguided that games so often place plot at the center of the experience. You play for a little bit in a defined play-space, and then you watch a little movie. Next you go back to your defined play-space and then back to another little movie. Repeat until the end of the game, which is hopefully a longer, more grandiose movie.

Now, I don’t intend to tell anyone that they should not make a game this way. I could certainly be completely wrong, and people should be free to make whatever kind of game that they would like. However, a game centered around this type of experience is not actually working to the artistic strengths of either the game or the movie that is interleaved into it. If major games continue to be designed in this way, our medium will continue to be a sort of deformed parasitical twin of cinema, relying on the more developed medium to do all the heavy lifting. I believe it would be a small positive change if both game designers and players became comfortable admitting that video games are just worse at pacing and presenting plot than other story-telling mediums.

“Video game” can be a limiting term, suggesting a challenge to overcome and that the experience must be fun. Recently, the term “art game” has arisen to define a type of experience which sits outside of what people typically expect from a game. Games such as Jason Rohrer’s Passage, and Rod Humble’s The Marriage are two examples where this term is often used. Jonathan Blow has quite publicly used the term to describe his own games. However, while working on his artistically ambitious game, The Witness, Blow has come to a conclusion that it is somewhat ineffectual, stating that we don’t typically refer to a deeply personal work of literature which intends to provoke thought or emotion as specifically an “art book.” It’s just an accepted and perfectly normal thing to do with a book.

Occasionally, the debate about games as art, combined with the frustration of the loaded concept of a “video game” has led to a surprising concept: that “if games cannot be art then the art that I’m creating must not be games.” Two notable figures who have rejected the nomenclature of games altogether are the acclaimed (but self-stated “retired”) game designer Chris Crawford ( Also the author of the excellent book “The Art of Computer Game Design”, a must read for aspiring designers (PDF download) ) and the independent development studio Tale of Tales.

Tale of Tales specifically has made a ironic point of calling it’s works “NotGames.” This is primarily a reaction to the criticisms levied by some players, who have stated that their games are not really games at all. In one of the studio’s more interesting creations, The Graveyard, you simply play the part of an elderly woman as she visits a graveyard and thinks back on her past. Strangely, a purchase of the game only adds the possibility that the woman may pass away while sitting in the graveyard. Some people consider this to be a pretentious move, and that claim could probably be made of the rest of Tale of Tales’ “NotGames” as well. But at least they are trying something different.

It is obvious that game designers are nowhere near a set of best practices for artistic expression in the medium. Some famous figures inside the industry, such as Shigeru Miyamoto ( Mario, Zelda, Metroid, among others ) and John Carmack, ( Doom, Quake, Rage ) have taken offense to the notion of games even being art. So it may not yet be possible to come to a final conclusion on the subject of whether games are provably art or not. However there is definitely a lot more interesting discussion to be had on the subject of art in games, and whether there really is such a thing as an objective experience of a narrative in any medium. (I don’t think there is.)

No matter, it has always long been clear to me that games ARE art, despite any derision I may have about how bad they are at being so. I cannot put my finger on why I feel this way, and it is in this sense that I may be, as Ebert stated, “prejudiced” in favor of games.

After finishing Catherine, I haven’t really found myself in a financial affordance to purchase anything new, although I’ve been thinking of purchasing something old. Quite old, in fact. The game I’ve been considering is a PC game called Planescape: Torment.

Planescape has a reputation for being one of the most well-written RPGs ever. It is often brought up anytime a new RPG is about to be released, as some sort of evidence of a by-gone era of good game writing. Unfortunately, I never played this game and find myself somewhat intolerant of my ignorance. It is uncomfortable for me to proclaim the utter failure of games as a narrative medium when compared to film and books when I have not experienced what many consider to be such a great story.

Discussion of narrative in games is always a bit challenging, because the terms are so poorly defined in most cases. By which, I mean, most people do not understand any clear difference between the terms “narrative”, “plot”, and “story.” Plot being a unchanging linear sequence of events; narrative being an all-encompassing term for a collection of characters, plot, setting, dialogue, and themes; story being the cohesive experience created by the narrative as it’s parts come together in the mind.

Most of the time, people think of these as basically the same thing. But if narrative were just plot, there would be no room for the story to exist separately in the mind of the person experiencing it, and thusly there would be no need or room for discussion of a narrative. We would all be in agreement about the plot, and there would be really nothing else to say.

I think that games can be privy to many of the elements of narrative. But plot is something that they just do not excel at to the same extent as other mediums. However, they can effectively communicate themes, characters, and dialogue. And in the case of setting, I would argue they do better than any other medium.

So if I do choose to buy the game, ( which is conveniently available for download on Good Old Games, along with a bunch of other older PC titles ) I will be interested to see the way in which the game communicates it’s narrative. Especially if it is not as plot-driven as most modern games are.

On an entirely different note, I have just purchased two great books on games. I read the sample previews and just knew that I wanted to spend a little more time with them. The first book is “A Theory of Fun for Game Design” by Raph Koster. The second is “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter” by Tom Bissell. I will hopefully have more to say about those books very soon.

Two cords hang from the ceiling. “Has anyone ever called you stingy?” I put the controller down. I’m not even sure what stingy means, but I’ve never been called it.

I get up and walk to the kitchen for a drink of water.

What does that even mean? Why does it matter?

Suddenly I remember that I’m playing a game. I sit down on the couch, push the stick right and press a button.

“No, no one has called me stingy.”

Catherine asks me questions, it makes me think. It beckons me and tempts me to indulge in it’s intoxicating cocktail of self-reflection and devious puzzles.

I blast off in my confession chamber. Off to solve another staircase. I die. I try again.

“Now’s not the time to be dead.”

I make it to freedom. I help the lost lambs around me. Another question beckons ahead. I feel my eyes burning. I shut off the game.

In my sleep, I’m pushing blocks around. Trying to find a way up. Desperate. Katherine needs me to commit. Catherine tempts me with candy.

There’s something a bit addictive about the game’s blend of seemingly unrelated ideas. Part dating simulation, part pure puzzling pain, and definitely straight from Japan.

Japan. When was the last time I even cared about a game from that faraway country. The sun has been set for too long. Catherine is delightfully quirky. And that follows through all the way to the end credits.

Even though there are eight endings, only one was needed to make me think about myself in ways even okCupid’s dating match questions have not.

Perhaps you should indulge yourself. You might be surprised at what you find.

I find it funny that people can catch flack for actually critically reviewing a game. Readers spout back nonsense like, “This review didn’t tell me if it was a good GAME or not, though.” Worshipping “gameplay” is like looking at the cost of the pigments in a painting to decide if the painting is good or not. Gameplay is just a piece of a puzzle, and critical thought about games is not about gameplay. It’s about the experience as a whole. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think that gameplay is a factor. It’s just that critical evaluation must look at how gameplay jives with the artistic purpose of the entire work. Building games around mechanics is fine, but as a designer, you have failed if you haven’t look at what the mechanic is saying. If mechanics were all that video games were about, then I would be done with Duet already. Gameplay is just half the story. You need to do the extra work to make a complete game. And judgement of a game definitely involves looking at the gameplay, but a half-rotten banana is not saved by the half that’s still good.

The FPS is dead, if your game is not going to do something about it. Then I don’t give a damn. I don’t want to play it.

I’m currently in the middle of L.A. Noire. And although it’s certainly not the crowning achievement of what video games could be. I must commend it for being a step in the right direction. Even though some would criticize me for supporting something that is only a small step, that seems to be the best that I can do. I try to vote with my wallet, and currently my vote is “no” to more thoughtlessness.

A brilliant game is not afraid to bore me. Games are slices of subjective experience, and all the possibilites of experience in life definitely over-shadow the “fun” section. Games like GTA and Gears are great, but mindless fun is overrunning the mainstream industry. Why can’t game with a budget actually deal with something besides how cool explosions, space marines and goblins are.

However, there are some newer 2D games, such as Braid, or Aquaria which use a entirely different method for their graphics which is not tile-based, but instead uses images which can be repeated positioned, rotated, and scaled arbitrarily to build a level. These images are rendered to the screen using modern 3D graphics hardware, which—being designed for 3D games—is rather fast for this application. Even still, there can be quite a large number of these images building up a level, so it is useful to devise an accurate and speedy method for determining which objects are on screen, and which are not.

Ideally, our solution should draw only the objects that are completely or partially on the screen and cull (or do not draw) the ones that are completely off the screen.

The Ideal Culling Situation

Culling is simply the result of a collision detection routine of some kind, in which every asset in the world is tested to see if it intersects the area of what is actually visible on screen. As evidenced by the numerous games featuring realistic physics simulations with objects of all shapes and sizes, it is possible to do nearly perfect collision detection between any two shapes, and rotated quadrilaterals are no exception. However, modern graphics hardware is so efficient at drawing textured quadrilaterals, it is likely that if our culling method is too accurate, it could take longer to compute than it would take to simply draw every asset in the world un-culled. Since part of our desired solution is to be as speedy as possible, we are willing to sacrifice some of the accuracy afforded by perfect mathematical calculations if we can be reasonably efficient at our culling, and actually increase the frames per second of our game.

A Simple Solution

One of the simplest and fastest types of collision detection is between two axis-aligned rectangles. Therefore if we simplify the collision detection between the possibly rotated assets and the rectangle of our camera’s viewing portal into a axis-aligned rectangle-rectangle collision, then that would be ideal. So how does one simplify an arbitrarily rotated rectangle into a axis-aligned one. One solution is to bind the asset with a square having sides at least as long as the longest side of the asset.

...But Not Accurate Enough

However, this solution does not bind the object accurately enough. The resulting square is too small, and when the asset is rotated, it’s corners will still poke outside the bounding box. If this square were the basis for visibility, objects might not be drawn when they should still be visible. So we need a square that is larger, but how much larger?

Taking a cue from an totally unrelated article on simulating motion blur, There is a fairly simple technique for determining the maximum area which a rotating quadrilateral may take up. A circle can be efficiently be bound inside a square with sides the length of its diameter. Since the area occupied by a rotating quadrilateral forms a circle, by determining the length of the diameter of that circle, we will have the size of our bounding box. Luckily, the diagonal from corner to corner of our quadrilateral is the diameter of that circle, therefore we simply need to find the length of that diagonal. This can easily be determined using the Pythagorean Theorem.

C²=A²+B²

In order to solve for the hypotenuse C, we need to know the lengths of sides A and B, these are fairly simple to find, as they directly correspond to the width and height of our image asset. The length of side C is the square root of the sum of the squared width and height of our asset. We then bind the object inside a square having sides of length C. This bounding square will completely cover the area of the circle occupied by our rotated asset, and therefore will be exactly the right size for our simplified, axis-aligned rectangle based culling technique.

A Perfectly Sized Bounding Rectangle

Now, although rectangle-rectangle collision detection is one of the simplest types of collision detection, there are a few pitfalls that a beginner can easily fall into when attempting to devise his implementation.

A Simple, but Incorrect Solution

Perhaps the most obvious, but incorrect solution is to test if each of the vertices, or corners, of the rectangle is inside of the other rectangle. Since point-rectangle collision detection is fairly simple, this seems like a good idea. All we must do then is check if each point (x,y) is inside the bounds of the other rectangle. For example, if we label the sides of the rectangle as x1, x2, y1, and y2. Our solution would work somewhat like this:

for each point in each rectangle:
if ( other_rectangle.x1 < this_rectangle.point.x < other_rectangle.x2 and other_rectangle.y1 < this_rectangle.point.y <
other_rectangle.y2)
then a collision has occurred.

However, in practice, there are certain situations in which two rectangles may be intersecting, but neither rectangle has
any vertices inside of the other. In these particular situations, our solution will fail to detect the collision. Because of this inaccuracy, we must devise a better solution.

Our Ideal Solution

Ideally we want to instead test if each of the sides of the rectangles are inside of the other. This concept, although
relatively simple to the human mind, can be somewhat non-trivial to implement correctly inside of a computer. So in order to simplify the problem somewhat, and build up an understanding in the mind of the reader. We will bring this collision detection down into the realm of a 1-dimensional universe. A one-dimensional universe exists entirely on one line. Therefore, we will be only determining collisions between line segments on that line. For the sake of clarity, our illustration shows this one dimensional universe exploded into two dimensions.

In one dimension, testing for collisions between lines based on the end points of each line does actually work in all situations. Therefore, we can accurately determine if two lines are intersecting simply by seeing if either point on one line is between the two points of the other line.

For each line:
if (other_line.x1 < this_line.x1 < other_line.x2 or other_line.x1 < this_line.x2 < other_line.x2)
then a collision has occurred.

This principle does not apply to lines in 2D, however. But by extension, it does apply to rectangles. Instead of testing the points at the corners of the rectangles, we must test each axis of the rectangle independently. In other words, we split the problem up into two one-dimensional line segment collision detection problems. Consider the left and right sides of each rectangle to be the end points of a onedimensional line segment. Do the same for the top and bottom sides. Then check to see if each of those segments intersect. If there is at least one intersection on each axis for at least one of the rectangles, there is an intersection. This is how we will solve our problem:

The Sides of our Assets, Labeled

For each rectangle:
if (other_rect.x1 < this_rect.x1 < other_rect.x2 or other_rect.x1 < this_rect.x2 < other_rect.x2) and (other_rect.y1 <
this_rect.y1 < other_rect.y2 or other_rect.y1 < this_rect.y2 < other_rect.y1)
then a collision has occurred.

Although I have attempted to make these concepts as easily understandable for a beginner as possible. It is likely that I am still talking over many peoples heads. For this, I apologize. However if you can gain any insights by my technical ramblings, then I would be delighted to have helped. As shown in the graphs below, by implementing the techniques described here, I gained a significant performance boost when drawing a level containing around 400 objects.

All Values are in Frames Per Second

The two different “Culling” bars shown are simply different methods of solving the pythagorean theorem, either by using a function which returns a number to a power of x, or simply by multiplying the number by itself. Although one would think that the square root function would be the biggest performance hog in this culling technique, my experimentation showed that eliminating it by leaving my asset’s bounding rectangle size as a squared value and squaring all the other values I compared it to was actually much slower, at 326 frames per second even being slower than just drawing all of the assets in the level un-culled.

On games, versus Puzzles…

Duet is a puzzle platformer. But that really just describes the mechanics of the game, without really delving very deep into the definitions of such mechanics.

So, in the worst style of writing, let’s define these terms with help from the internet.

A Platformer is a type of video game “mostly presented in 2D” which features “jumping to and from suspended platforms or over obstacles” Requiring the character to start from point A and get to point B by jumping and traversing various obstacles.”

A Puzzle is a type of problem that “tests the ingenuity of the solver”, and according to puzzle collector Stan Isaacs, it is “fun, and has a right answer.”

So, these definitions seem about right to describe Duet. But my research seems to suggest a divide between games and puzzles. So the question that I’m proposing, is where do I draw that line? Is Duet a puzzle or a game?

There are many definitions of what a game is, but my favorite is:

“A Game is a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable.” – The Game, The Player, The World: Looking for Heart of Game-ness

Games typically are designed to be as replay-able as possible, the idea being to explore the nebulous space afforded by the game’s mechanics. Once that exploration is completed to the satisfaction of the player, Playing the game is no longer necessary or interesting. Therefore all games must be inherently educational and interesting, but one must remember that a person’s prior experiences in and outside of games can reduce the novelty of an previously unplayed game to a point where she may find it not worth her time.

Puzzles–as defined earlier–however are intrinsically free of replay value. Once a puzzle has been solved–deliberately and with understanding–it is no longer valuable to the solver. This is to say that puzzles are only replayable if the solver does not understand why he solved the puzzle in the first place. Puzzles are similar to games in that prior experience with similar problems can nullify the intrinsic value of a puzzle to the point where the intellectual gain from solving it becomes trivial. However, the primary difference between puzzles and games is the goal.

The goal of puzzles to find the solution, the goal of games is to win against an opponent. However, there are still contradictions within these definitions. What exactly is an opponent in a single player computer game, what exactly is a solution?

Duet, as well as other games (Braid, Portal) are (perhaps uncomfortably) straddling the line between games and puzzles. On one hand, they quickly fit into the earlier definition of a game, they are based on formal systems and rules, they do have quantifiable outcomes with different values assigned to them, the player does exert effort to influence the outcome, she feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences are negotiable. However, the games also fit the definition of a puzzle, they have a solution–solvable only once– having limited replay value.

So where do these games lie exactly, are they really games at all? Is a game a type of puzzle? Is a puzzle a type of game? Are puzzles, by their very nature, inferior to games?

The process by which I create new mechanics for the game goes something like this:

Idea – From somewhere, either through playing the game, or from other games or other media, get a possible idea for a game mechanic.

Mentally Prototype – Imagine how the idea would affect the game. For some ideas, this is very easy. For instance, if the element has already been in another game. For others, I may have to skip mental prototyping, since the idea cannot be easily imagined.

Mentally Check for “Core-ness” – An interesting idea that does not fit with the games core theme is not worth implementing. For my game, the core theme is cooperation. In life, people like to establish relationships with people who have strengths where they themselves are weak. (In addition to common interests and similar experiences) Based on this aspect of human relationships, the players in my game must always have different abilities. Usually the bad ideas are those which do not create a give/take relationship between the players. Bad ideas are those do not create interdependence, but instead spur self-centered behavior.

Prototype – If the idea that I have cannot be discarded through mental prototyping, and seems like it may fit in the core of the game. Then I program it in, in the simplest way possible. Usually creating a bunch of dirty code. (But that’s okay, if it’s a bad idea, it’s a waste to write clean code)

Test – I try the mechanic out in many different situations, and in combination with existing mechanics. If the new mechanic creates any interesting puzzles that I couldn’t imagine when I first thought of the mechanic, then it is a candidate for the final game.

But how do I decide which things are interesting enough to make it in the game? That is certainly a tough problem, and there are many solutions. The simplest solution is to include everything that might be interesting. However, for my game, I have some fundamental guiding principles. I believe that the player of my game is an intelligent person, and should be treated as such. They are not stupid, and will be able to solve any of the puzzles that I can create for them, without breaking them down into simpler elements. I also believe that this player’s time is valuable to them, and I should respect their time, and not waste it. So therefore, I should never put filler into the game by repeating ideas that I have already explored.
Based on these principles, I will remove any puzzles which either waste a lot of player time on execution, or have very obvious solutions and may only be different than a previous puzzle in insignificant ways.

Even still, I struggle with this game every day. Sometimes I have to ask myself if the entire game is not just a waste of time for the player. It is certainly possible. But I am a game designer, and I want to make games, not incomplete products. So it is better to ship a game that I found interesting, even if no-one else will, than it is to not ship a game. As the Duct Tape Programmer says, “Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.”

So time marches on…and there is much work to be done.

Me and my fiancee have been working on some concepts for the art style of the game.

These are very work in progress. They are mainly intended to help discovery of the mood for the game.

I always feel that it’s best to get the bad news out of the way first, so that the good news can give me some hope in the end. It’s more dramatic that way. So the bad news is that Fij is postponed indefinitely. Meaning that I most likely won’t work on it for a while. Truth is, I probably won’t finish it, looking at my history of unfinished projects. However, I definitely have some ideas that I want to pursue with Fij, so it will sit on my back-burner.

The good news is, I’m working on a new project in Game Maker. Which I know probably seems like a step back from real programming. But it’s actually going great.

Standing on a precipice

The game is about cooperating to solve puzzles. So it’s naturally a two-player game (at the minimum.)

A puzzle!

I don’t currently have a name for the game, so it’s just Untitled Cooperative Platformer in my mind right now. I also don’t know whether the current graphics are any indication of what the final game will look like, but the little blocky people have a certain charm to them, don’t they?

The design process is sort of an exploratory one, I just doodle out levels and try out any gameplay elements that I might be thinking of in different ways. If I can make it through the level some how, then it’s a puzzle. But usually I don’t know if I will be able to make it through the level before I test it. So the game is telling me what it should be. And I’m just sort of letting it become itself. Not to say it doesn’t require work, or that there aren’t bugs. But I do keep an open mind before I squash bugs, and try to see if the bug is actually functionality in disguise.

And just in case you want to test it out in it’s currently simple state, here’s a demo-ish length version of the game. It is my first game maker game, so if there’s some wierd .dll file you need, then let me know. Feedback of any kind is gladly appreciated. However, do keep in mind that it requires two players to play the game. It is possible to get through it on your own, but it would require some serious skills.

(Sorry, demo is no longer available for download.)

Jumpman in Paradise

The 2D platformer genre is one of the most common among indie games. And lo-fi graphics seem to be all the rage these days, So why should you play Jumpman?

Because Jumpman brings the platformer back to life in a beautiful way and then hammers a few more nails into the coffin. Despite the familiarity, Andrew McClure has created a game to which all platformers following should be compared. Jumpman not only feels like something new, but it raises the bar for inventiveness so high that you will be left wondering what more can be done with the genre. If you are a game designer, it’s a damn tough act to follow, and every bit as important as a study of the genre as Super Mario Galaxy. If you’re not a game designer, this is a crazy inventive and mind-bending game which may just make you feel like a kid again, in a good way.

Many of the best independent games have deconstructed familiar genres in order to build them up again into something entirely (or at least mostly) new. Although VVVVVV and Braid do this by completely stripping off basic mechanics, the ability to jump (VVVVVV) or the threat of death (Braid). Jumpman is a fresh experience, even with all of the standard platformer mechanics present. Much of this freshness is due to a blatant disregard for the conventional platformer feel. A game designer’s inner voice begs “Tighten these controls down. Make this level easier. Hard does not equal fun,” but Andrew McClure does a rare and wonderful thing in Jumpman, he shuts up and actually listens to the game.

So yes, the game plays like you are on ice, and yes, it’s certainly not a cakewalk, but it’s these seemingly frustrating aspects of the game that make it truly special and beautiful. If Katamari Damacy didn’t control like a forklift, do you think it would have been so successful? So I beg of you, don’t give up when you die for the 50th time on a level. Persevere.

I will warn you, Jumpman is deceptively long. Several times,  you will think, “I thought it would end here.” So, please have the time to play all the way through to the end. I guarantee the final stages of this game will stay with you forever.

Overall: I’m done with these number ratings…

Link to download page.

There’s also an iPhone version.

But first, an update on Fij: Work has been stalled a bit recently. But I hope to get back on it soon. The next feature I hope to implement will be a bit difficult to…uhm…implement. Trees.

Alrighty then, on to the reviews…

Bruno

So, I’m sure by now, everyone in the world and their mom has seen Borat. It was undoubtedly a great film, with an honest-yet-scathing look at the heart of America’s xenophobic culture during the last decade. Sacha Baron Cohen was deemed a comedic god, and everyone wondered what he would do next. So Bruno is a little of that, and a lot of something else.

Whereas Borat on the surface appeared to poke fun at Middle Easterners, underneath the surface of offensive Kazakhstanian stereotypes, the movie was really poking fun at Americans. Much of the joy that came from the scenes in Borat was the sense that the people Cohen was duping really just deserved what they were getting. They never seemed to see Borat as anything other than innocently uncultured.

The picture in Bruno is much different. Not only is Bruno a flaming gay stereotype which will quite easily offend the entire gay community, but as an audience member, you never really feel as if the people deserve what they’re getting. It’s mostly painful to watch, with little reward for your suffering. (I mean, what did Ron Paul do to deserve that?)

So, Bruno doesn’t just make homophobes uncomfortable, he makes everyone uncomfortable. This just makes Bruno into a rather unlikable fellow on-screen. In Borat, there were comments that the unwitting participants would make that truly shocked me. I couldn’t believe how ignorant people were, and I was amazed at how these people reacted to Borat in a natural way. But in Bruno, I can completely understand why everyone is freaked out or annoyed at Bruno. He’s annoying! He’s a prick. Of course you’re gonna be pissed off at someone who’s rubbing your back and telling you “Good job…” while you’re having sex with a girl at a swinger’s party. It’s not just homophobia, it’s just douchebaggery. The whole affair becomes more of a big prank, than it is anything else.

Sure, there are moments in the film that really work, but those aren’t the parts dealing with homophobia, which is certainly the main thrust of the film’s themes. The parts that work deal with the hollywood culture, and the desire for celebrity. Seeing parents eagerly sign off their infants to be covered in bees or exposed to dangerous chemicals, as long as their children will be seen in a photograph. That was quite telling. It’s not as if I needed someone to explicitly tell me that, what with Toddlers in Tiaras doing an excellent job of showing the seedy underbelly of Mom’s living vicariously through their daughters “beauty.” But it was still quite funny, and for a different reason that the majority of the film. Bruno himself is not a very humorous character. Borat was funnier and more likeable than Bruno, yes, but I don’t believe that that was the key to the success of the film. The film succeeded because of the performances of the everyday people. The reactions were really what made the film special. Bruno falls flat in this department, nothing is learned from this brutal homophobic escapade that I couldn’t have already guessed. Yes, rednecks don’t like gay people, this is a shame. But Bruno isn’t winning any points for the team. He’s just a joke.

Overall: 5/10

It made me laugh. There were a few thought-provoking scenes, but the film never achieves it’s goal of showing homophobic America just how wrong it is. If anything, this movie has simply done a disservice to the gay community, by giving mainstream America another negative stereotype to add to their collective unconsciousness.

World’s Greatest Dad

Everyone else is way ahead of me. They all just download their movies off the internet, or rent them from Redbox for one night. They sit on the comfort of their couches and download their movies from Netflix, or grab the discs out of the mail. Well, this was the first time that I tried the “new media” model. I saw a trailer for World’s Greatest Dad while browsing, and I decided to download it on Zune and watch it.

So, simply enough, World’s Greatest Dad is about the world’s worst father, played by Robin Williams. William’s performance is really what carries this film. Without it, the movie would probably be nothing.

I can’t really say anything terrible about the film, the ending is good for not being depressing, without being terribly out of place. The overall story is dark and funny. There’s also a certain discomfort involved in watching the story unfold, as William’s character loses his grip on his own ghost-written infamy.

The story is interesting for it’s take on the perils of fame, and the eternal suffering of the starving artist. It’s not the most influential film I’ve ever seen. But it’s not a mindless teenage-sex-drive-fueled comedy either. It’s very adult, and very modern. It’s a movie that should be appreciated for what it is, but I’m not certain exactly what it is not. Either way, I can only suggest that you watch the trailer and just decide whether you want to watch it or not.

Overall: 7/10

It won’t change your life, but you won’t regret seeing it. But then again, you most likely won’t regret not seeing it either.

The Princess and the Frog

When I was a kid, I grew up watching Disney animated movies. This is just a fundamental experience shared by many kids of my generation. As I got older, I sort of drifted away from those films, and Disney drifted with me.  The only kids films that I’ve watched recently have been Pixar films. Apart from being stuck watching Monsters Vs. Aliens. So it was certainly refreshing to hear that Disney was going back to the drawing-board, literally. CG films are great for what they are, but there’s a certain charm to hand-drawn animation that I have missed for a long time.

I don’t really know whether it’s just nostalgia, or the actual merits of The Princess and the Frog that caused me to enjoy it. It’s certainly the former which encouraged me to see the film in the first  place. The overall story is definitely rather predictable, but that doesn’t prevent the ride from being an enjoyable one. The cast of characters are all…well…characters. They’re quite memorable, and they each have their own quirks.

If there’s one thing that I found very odd about the film, it was it’s tone. Princess and the Frog is much darker than any Disney film that I remember seeing. As a child I was given nightmares by Disney films on more than one occasion, so I can’t imagine the horror that children seeing this film had to endure during their sleeping hours. There’s a lot of spooky voo-doo stuff going on in this movie, and there’s a tragic death. So, basically it’s fodder for childhood insomnia.

I had heard some rumors in negative reviews that the film was misogynistic, but I didn’t really get that out of the story at all. I mean, the main character is a girl, and it’s not like there’s some man in the story who’s beating her and holding her down. I guess whoever wrote that comment must’ve been a militant feminist or something, because the only potentially offensive thing I found was that she falls in love with a man and gets married. I guess that’s sexism these days.

Overall: 8/10

It’s a good ride, and it fits quite well into the current line-up of Disney films. But it’s not terribly original, and doesn’t do a whole lot to differentiate itself from the classical Princessy Disney-fare.

Up in the Air

Now, I never saw Juno, or Thank you for Smoking. But I can tell you that I am certainly excited to see them both after seeing this film. George Clooney is superb as always, and the other performances are quite top notch.

The film is a dark comedy about a man who spends his life flying around the country firing people. However, as he’s getting older, he finds himself becoming obsolete. Technology is replacing him. The legacy is dying. The movie is a coming-of-age story for a generation which never really grew up. It may be a film which doesn’t quite speak to my generation. But it’s an honest story that feels very real. Clooney’s character is a real charmer, and it’s sad to see the way his life is going in the story.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t really end well, but then again it does. It’s more of an ending in which the main character has received all the tools he needs to be happy. Although he doesn’t actually appear happy in the film, and many sad things happen along the way. Clooney’s character is finally able to come back home and be part of his family, and he’s finally able to give up his life-style of non-attachment.

Overall: 9/10

The movie is inventive and honest. The characters are interesting and feel very real. The story is quite reflective of reality, for good or bad. But underneath the mellow ending, there’s a message of hope for disenfranchised people.

Things are going rather well with the game. The game itself is up and running, although the features are quite minimal at the moment. I may or may not have a video soon. I’d like to have something more interesting looking before I show it off. The editor and the game have split off developmentally, so that I can continue work without having a huge mess of code that’s unrelated to the game. Although it would be nice to have a one button game-test inside of the editor. I feel that I’ve made the best decision for the moment. The game engine itself is designed to hopefully be the start of something I can reuse on more projects. Although I haven’t gone overboard on making it reusable. The important thing is to complete this game, after that, if I have some pluggable elements for the next one, then that’s just an extra bonus. I’m also in the process of looking for music that suits the themes of the game. It’s a bit difficult though, as I need to find either royalty-free music, or pay-licensed music. Of course, I could write my own music, and I may still consider that option if I can’t find anything better.

Now, on to some more reviews:

Up

Pixar movies seem to just fall from the sky every few years. And 3D animated movies are certainly a dime-a-dozen. But Pixar’s films have always had something special about them. The stories in the movies rise above the usually mundane writing of children’s films. Which is great, because while I may be a child at heart, I’ve certainly matured a lot since I was eight.

So, Up is no exception to the history of Pixar’s film aptitude. The story is interesting and funny and cute and just all around good. And the imagery in the film is quite mesmerizing and beautiful. Although not super-realistic, the film has a very painted sensibility to it’s art. Pixar continues to create great films that just happen to be computer animated.

Simply put, see it if you haven’t already. It’s much better than the Incredibles. (Why did anyone like that movie, am I missing something?)

Overall: 9/10

Sorry I don’t have more to say about the film, but I don’t really have anything to complain about. The only problem was that I saw the film in 2D, and it was a drive-in theater, and the last reel of the film had a bruned spot in the middle of every frame that sparkled. So I don’t really remember the last little bit of the movie, as I was too busy focusing on the sparkle. But what I remember was a good ending.

Precious

Ah, yes. It seems a typical example of an independent film. A movie which tries so hard to be meaningful but mostly ends up depressing the hell out of you. I don’t think that it’s just me, but getting older, I have less interest in movies that just make me feel bad. I mean, life has enough reasons for you to feel bad without going to the theater to feel bad some more. Maybe it’s that when I was younger I felt like I identified with the pain that the characters were experiencing in the film, maybe I was just angsty. I just feel like I deserve to come out of the theater feeling refreshed and hopefully happy.

Precious doesn’t do that. Not at all. I’m not intending to imply that it is a bad film. There’s nothing particularly bad about it. The writing is quite excellent, and the cinematography is brilliant and loaded with tricks which make such a low-budget film really stand out visually. But the overall story is not one of triumph, as much as the premise (an inner city teenage mother, pregnant with her second child, who is struggling in school) would suggest it. Really the story is a stifling testament to just how difficult it is to escape the unhappy life which comes out of a terrible childhood and misguided parents.

SPOILER: I mean, by the end of the film, Precious Jones has finally achieved some independence, and she no longer has to live with her abusive mother, or be raped by her father. But she has AIDS! I mean, I guess the story is based on a true story, but that’s just awful. That’s not inspiring at all. The littlest triumph in her life, which may have been the only triumph she ever really felt–getting away from home–has to be framed in the film with her learning that she has AIDS. So now Precious is destined to be unhappy and alone forever, apart from her two children. She will never know the real love of a man. I suppose I should feel happy that she will be able to start anew with her kids, and give them happy lives. And she will be happy because they will be happy. But I don’t know that for sure. And the movie just ends on that note.

Overall: 7/10

Not because it was a terribly made film, but because it got me so invested in the happiness of a character, just to end without me ever seeing her smile.

Monsters vs. Aliens

Honestly, I don’t even know why I’m writing a review of this. It’s just one of the films that I was unfortunate enough to see this year. Not because I went to the theater to see it, but because it just so happened to be playing at the drive-in theater, where I went to eat a double cheeseburger with my fiancee and one of my friends. (Don’t laugh, the Midway cheeseburgers are the best cheeseburgers in the universe.) So I ended up watching this movie just because it was on while I was there.

The story, in a word, awful. Although there are some likable characters. The movie never outreaches the confines of a “children’s movie” and certainly doesn’t rival any of Pixar’s efforts, Incredibles included. The story just has moments where I feel like the director of the film said “Ah, they’re just kids, they won’t care!” The attitude taken by some of the writing choices is beyond lazy, and borders on stupid and immature. The movie is written as if it were a 2 hour epic story, but the film is 90 minutes at the most. After only 20 minutes of knowing these monsters, the main character gives a sentimental speech rivaling Braveheart. I mean, geez, am I really supposed to identify with how attached she is to a goat thing, a blob of goo, and an oversized caterpillar–when she’s only known them for less than half an hour of on-screen time. It’s not like the movie has a title saying “6 months later”, even. It literally seems like they’ve only been together for that time. Worse still is a point in which the Alien wierdo sends out his clones to attack the “heroes”, and he breathes the oh-so-thought-out line “Aliens, attack all Monsters!” Why in God’s name would an alien refer to himself, or his own kind as ALIENS!?

I don’t even remember the end of the film, so whatever…I don’t even care that I didn’t see it “In RealD!” If this is the kind of crap that people have been serving the world in 3d, it’s no wonder that Avatar is such a game-changer.

Overall: 3/10

I guess I have to give it that, I did watch all of it.

Drag Me to Hell

Horror movies aren’t typically known for being good movies. I don’t intend to put down all of the people who really like Horror as a genre. It certainly explores  interesting territory that many films don’t go into very deeply. However, it’s obvious that Horror films simply don’t have the level of artistic grandeur that some of the greatest films have achieved. They are simply a guilty pleasure among movie-watchers.

Quite unusually for a horror film, Drag Me to Hell received great critic reviews. After all, the director (Sam Raimi) was responsible for the Evil Dead trilogy– perhaps the only horror film series to have gone over well with critics,–as well as the Spider-Man trilogy, which was definitely the first of the recent films which redefined what a comic-book adaptation can be.

Although Spider-Man was no Dark Knight, I felt that it would still be worth investigating Drag Me to Hell. And as you can gather from the tone of my writing thus far. I wasn’t terribly impressed. Now, it’s not that the movie is badly constructed or poorly written. The acting is quite good, considering that the heroine’s boyfriend is “that guy” from Dodgeball. However, the movie just didn’t have a lasting impact in my film-watching experience. It’s not a film that I can see myself watching again.

SPOILERS: Of course, one could blame the un-rewatchability of the film on the plot twist, but I think that might be unwise. I would certainly watch The Sixth Sense over again, and I’ve watched Fight Club innumerable times. Both of those films have shocking plot twists which only work once. But also, those films have another thing in common, that the entirety of the experience of watching the film changes on a second viewing. In a sense, the movies are constructed around a plot twist. The stories can be seen from multiple angles, and this is precisely what makes them interesting for a second watch. The fact that they have such shocking plot twists makes the reexamination of the story seem necessary.

STILL SPOILING, MAYBE MORE THIS TIME: So, the plot twist of the film is fairly simple. So simple in fact, that my fiancee pointed it out about 30 minutes before the end of the film, when the twist finally makes it’s appearance. The twist happens because there are two similar looking sealed envelopes which both contain similarly shaped objects. One happens contains an object very important to the third act of the film, and the other one contains a collectible coin. So, they get mixed up, and although we think that the heroine has saved herself, she is still doomed to be “dragged to hell,” right before the credits roll.

Yes, it’s a shocking plot twist, which I feel was well executed. But I believe that my experience of the film was partially ruined because I knew about the envelope switch-a-roo way before I was supposed to. I don’t think that normally people find out about plot twists that early. But my fiancee just seems to have a knack for examining stories in-progress. Hey, she figured out Ender’s Game before the end.

Or maybe I’m just slow.

Overall 7/10

An interesting an rather well-written horror story. However, my experience is somewhat unusual and I can’t rate it higher than this. I wouldn’t watch the movie again.

Alright, still got Bruno, World’s Greatest Dad, The Princess and the Frog, and Up in the Air left. Oh, and I refuse to acknowledge having seen the Hannah Montana movie. Seriously, another review of that won’t help anyone…

No offence if you’ve played Bioshock and loved it, but I just don’t understand why people would score the game better than Half-Life 2. And I don’t want to seem stuck in the past, I just feel that Bioshock was a flawed game.

Also, if you haven’t played Bioshock, I warn you that there are spoilers below:

The most obvious flaw, which I won’t go into very much because Jonathan Blow has already done it quite well, is the Little Sister dilemma. Simply enough, the game isn’t any harder if you save the Little Sisters instead of harvesting them. If you save them, you’re artificially rewarded for doing the right thing with bonus packages of ADAM and plasmids. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that it happens often enough to become a feature. I found myself knowing that if I rescued just a few more sisters, I’d get the gift and could keep going. But this isn’t my only point, and if you want to hear more about that, listen to Jon’s lecture.

The biggest flaw that I found with Bioshock was the design decision to explain all of the abstract gameplay elements as part of the narrative. When I play a first-person shooter, I don’t expect anyone to explain the purpose of health packs or grenades lying around for no reason. I’ve become accustomed to these things, and I understand that they are just abstract devices which are used to make the game function as a piece of entertainment (if not art). For this reason, I found it refreshing that Bioshock chose to explain devices like Vita-Chambers and to leave most ammo that I find in relatively reasonable places such as dead bodies, and not just lying about. The design choice helps the immersion in a real environment. However, this pattern is somewhat half-heartedly used in the game, with Ammo vending machines healthily distributed about Rapture with no indication as of why they were installed in the first place.

So, I understand the reason for the decision, but the problem is that the “reason” for the Vita-Chambers conflicts directly with a major plot point in the game. An audio log in the game states that the Vita-Chambers were created for Andrew Ryan and that they only work on his DNA signature. This sort of makes the chambers make sense. You’re almost Andrew Ryan’s DNA, and nobody else is. So everyone else just dies, but you’re repeatedly revived at the nearest Vita-Chamber. So obviously, the next question is, why didn’t Andrew Ryan revive at a Vita-Chamber after you kill him?

I’m sure now that it’s just a ridiculous oversight on the part of the designers. But before I completed the game, I sort of expected that it would come up later in the story after Ryan’s death. Perhaps Ryan would show up just before the credits to set the stage for Bioshock 2? Nope.

Sorry guys, but Vita-Chambers just don’t make sense, they wouldn’t make sense if the game was in the future, and they certainly don’t make sense in a dystopian steam-punk alternate past. You don’t have to explain these things. It’s cool if you try to, but please don’t make the mistake of forgetting about the lore of your own universe when it comes to major plot elements. And alternatively, if the Vita-Chamber explanation idea came after the plot was written, which it most likely did, somebody on the team should have noticed. At the very least, that Vita-Chamber explanation went through three people, the guy who wrote it, the guy who said it for the diary, and the guy who recorded it. And nobody noticed that this completely deflated the major turning point in the game.

But then again, EA did spell Bret Favre’s name wrong in Madden 09 even though he was on the cover. So I guess these things slip through.

Should be back soon with film reviews…

How do you forgive someone who never apologizes for what they’ve done?

Well, it’s 2010 now. In the past year, I watched a lot more movies than I usually do. Well, at least in theaters I mean. So perhaps I should talk about some more recent things I’ve seen. Or at least the ones that I didn’t already talk about…hmm…

So, I guess I’ll just go through all the movies I’ve seen that came out in 2009, including Up in the Air, which I just saw the day before yesterday, so I didn’t exactly see it in 2009, but it’s a film from the last year, so I’ll keep it in here. So, here’s my brief, or maybe not so brief reviews of 2009 in film.

Avatar

Ah, James Cameron, after proving everyone wrong who said that Titanic would be a massive failure, he just sort of went into hiding for like…eleven years. Well, I mean there was that documentary about the Titanic, but really… That doesn’t count. So, he obviously had big shoes to fill with this one. And being a big fan of Titanic myself, (Yeah, I know – chick flick, right? But hey, give it a chance, it’s great ) I was certainly the type of person who Cameron needed to work hard to impress.

And he certainly impressed me. Before the movie came out, I wracked my brain trying to find out why he would spend so much time and money on making the film 3D, but now I know. The movie is simply amazing to behold in 3D, and after seeing the film. I can see a revolution in film-making on the horizon. Finally a film has come out which has done 3D right. Treating it as a tasteful extension of the current film-making techniques which serves the purpose of immersing the audience even more in the film’s world. There’s never anything in the film that jumps out at you as “Woah!! 3D!!!” But this fact does not in any way explain how amazing the experience of this film in 3D is. The movie has plenty of “Wow” moments from the visuals. (I mean, when have I been astounded at computer screens in a movie? But they’re in 3D gahdammit, it’s awesome!)

However, many people have complained that the story underlying the film is “overly predictable”. Personally, all I have to say about that is, “Seriously? What movie have you seen that’s like this?” Sure, there’s that part with the tanks rolling in that’s kinda like that seen in Ferngully. Sure the basic story of a soldier who falls for the enemy’s way of life has been done before in movies like The Last Samurai. But that movie was great, and the story is just as great in Avatar. It’s just a good story. It seems like these movie critics either have trouble appreciating the movie because they don’t actually have to pay to see the film. (Which, in my opinion should make me more critical of the story anyways) Either that, or they are too cynical to feel good about a movie which ends well. Is it so bad that the things we want to happen in the movie happen. We all want the main character to fall in love with that girl, we all want it to end well. What gives guys? I mean, did you want everyone to die a horrible death? Frankly the movie wouldn’t have benefited the slightest from any possible “artsy” ending, and I’m glad for it.

Perhaps it’s just me, that I’ve entered a state in my life in which I want to see movies which actually make me feel good about being alive as I walk out of the theater. Maybe I should be glad when a movie has a disappointing ending, and the characters are unhappy. I’ve certainly seen my fair share of sad movies. But having a movie that ends sadly for no reason is just as bad as the supposedly “hollywood audience pandering” good ending that people like to blame movies like Avatar for. The movie is good, the movie makes you feel good. Isn’t that enough?

Overall 10/10 <- I totally need to stop doing this numerical ratings, I mean, you can’t compare movies like that. Numerical ratings come from rating appliances or tools, which can be compared on a apples-to-apples basis. Forms of entertainment and art simply aren’t like that. It’s objective. Okay, I’ll get on with it now.

Avatar is definitely a must see movie. Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, go see it now. Make sure you see it in 3D, and yes, it is completely worth the extra $3.

District 9

District 9 is such an interesting film. Where in the same year, we have Transformers 2, which has completely un-called for and over the top special effects, we have this little sci-fi masterpiece.

The movie starts off slowly. In fact, the start of the film is down-right mundane, with the unlikely hero trying to evict the aliens from their homes in the eponymous District 9, to move them to essentially a concentration camp. However, after an encounter with some wierd liquid in a container. The hero begins to have some strange experiences.

I won’t continue to summarize the film, but the point I wish to make is that the end of the film, which is every bit a spectacle as the best from Michael Bay, is totally deserved. The movie has to work to get to the point at which the hero can charge around in a mech-battle suit guns blazing with explosions all over the place. Because the underlying story is so personal and small, the big things that happen later in the film feel more meaningful. It’s not just special effects for the sake of special effects. The story just happens to have elements which require the CGI.

Although the story doesn’t completely “end” at the end of the film, the important things have happened to set the stage for the hero’s future happiness. So, it’s a fairly cheerful ending.

Overall 8/10

Honestly, looking at the score I just put up there, I don’t know why I rated this movie lower than Avatar. Avatar just felt so much more important to me. But that’s not to say that District 9 isn’t a good film. It’s just not one that I feel like I would want to see again. The story isn’t that deep, although it is interesting to watch unfold, and the characters aren’t terribly memorable. I hate to say bad things about the film, but there has to be some reason the movie doesn’t rank higher in my mind.

Star Trek

Seems like this is a no-brainer, as I’m sure everyone has already seen it, but I suppose I can say a few things.

First off, the film is the best Star Trek film I’ve seen, period. Better than all the old ones. Which is quite a feat, considering most franchise reboots don’t go so well. The story is radical and features enough time-travel to satisfy me. (I know, everybody hates Generations, but I loved that movie, and I love my Voyager just as much)

Enterprise let me down in a lot of ways. I’ll admit, I haven’t watched much of the show to judge it. But the show just doesn’t feel like Star Trek to me. The show is too dramatic, in a Battlestar Galactica sort of way. Which is not in-and-of-itself a bad thing, but it’s not at all Star Trek. The thing that I’ve always loved about Star Trek, is that every episode left you with a good feeling. One of the only other TV shows that I know of which had this same effect one me was Stargate SG-1. No matter what, the show always made you feel good about life, and optimistic about the future. (Unless it was a “To Be Continued…” episode) But Enterprise felt totally different. The show was in some ways, downright depressing.

So in contrast, the new Star Trek movie brings all the things that I love about Star Trek back to life for me. It makes me optimistic about not only my own future, but the future of the Star Trek series. The next one better be damn good though. Please J.J. Abrams direct this one too!

Overall 9/10

Love that alternate timeline shit. I just eat it up.

Where the Wild Things Are

I never read the book on which this movie was based, nor can I remember the name of it’s author. However, I don’t really care, because this film is fantastic despite my ignorance of it’s source material. The film is adventurous and helps me, as a 20-year old who already feels like an “old freaker”, to re-connect with that part of me that’s still a 12-year old boy.

I guess that leads me on to my interesting point about the film, which is that it’s a PG rated film for adults. The movie is great, but not great for kids. I believe that the themes explored in the film would go over most kids heads. Not that I think children are stupid or anything, I was a smart kid. It’s just, the movie is about how adults find themselves unable to use their imaginations. The movie is about how adults don’t take children seriously because they’re “just kids.” Flying off to space in an imaginary rocket ship is just not something that grown-ups like us do. We just don’t feel comfortable with that. I wish that we would, but for as long as we don’t, we will still have this movie, and I can still feel like it’s okay to believe in things which don’t make sense.

Overall 9/10

The story of the film goes some dark places, but I think it’s an uplifting film. The overall style of the film is quite unlike any other that I’ve seen. I can’t point out anything wrong with the film, but it just doesn’t get that extra point for some personal reason.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

I do however, know the author of the book upon which this film is based, Roald Dahl. I don’t know if Roald is a man or a woman’s name, but I do know that he/she also wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, upon which two films (at least) were based. I also have no clue whether or not the movie adaptations of either book were in any way accurate to the original material. However, again, I don’t really care because Fantastic Mr. Fox is inventive and interesting in it’s own ways.

Unlike many claymation movies, this one just has a slice-of-life mundanity to it that’s simultaneously astounding and overwhelmingly wierd. I don’t intend to imply the film is unwatchable or anything, it’s just unusual. The story itself is quite simple, and is able to be interesting without really stepping outside it’s bounds. There’s nothing about the film which really tries to be heroic or epic, and it’s rightly so.

Similar to Where the Wild Things Are, this movie seems more for adults than for kids, despite it’s PG rating. Much of the dialog is perhaps funnier for more mature adults than for kids. With all the swear words being replaced with “cuss”, as in “What the cuss do you think you’re doing?” This might seem like a compromise, but it certainly doesn’t feel like that when you’re watching the movie. The voice acting is very dry-humor, and consequently the characters all take themselves seriously in a very real-life sort of way. I don’t really know that I can describe the way the characters act and talk in the movie, but it’s something that has to be seen. And believe me, the trailers don’t really “get” the feel of the movie.

Overall 8/10

A good simple movie about a fantastic fox, his wife, their son, and their son’s much more fantastic cousin.

(Whew, this is a lot more work than I thought it would be, I’ll be back soon with reviews of Up, Precious, Monsters vs. Aliens, Drag Me to Hell, Bruno (did I already review that one?), World’s Greatest Dad, The Princess and the Frog, and Up in the Air.)

Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia is one of the oldest gaming franchises there is, with the entries spanning nearly two decades. The original Prince of Persia is somehow considered a classic, and appreciated for its astonishingly smooth animation for the time. Even despite its horrid laggy controls, which are caused mostly as part of the “smooth” animation. It’s somewhat surprising that such a flawed game has spawned so many sequels. I mean, there’s the first sequel, which was basically like the original, only different levels, then there’s a remake… At one point, someone decided that the franchise was worth bringing into the 3d era, and the god-awful “Prince of Persia 3D” was born. Not surprisingly, after such a flop, and with the Nintendo 64 and Playstation already in their waning years, the idea of a 3d Prince sat stagnant for a while.

But then, an idea was born.

The primary appeal of the original game was the atmosphere of a heroic Persian prince who was a master at acrobatic feats. The only problem was, in the original game, in order to perform these acrobatic feats, you had to spend hours getting used to the strange laggy timing of the game. When the original came out, this wasn’t really an issue. Nobody knew how games were “supposed” to be, so there weren’t any real pre-concieved notions about how a game should behave. However, by the Playstation 2 era, gamers, and especially reviewers weren’t willing to put up with “control lag.” So, in Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, the controls were fine tuned and acrobatic feats were made as easy as possible. Everything seemed good, the game came out with a nifty rewind mechanic and people wanted more.

Unfortunately, in the two sequels that followed, they had missed something. The fact of the matter was, Prince of Persia has always been an unfair game, including the stellar Sands of Time. What with all the spikes coming out of the ground and killing you when you walk too fast across them. Most of the dangerous traps in the dungeons require the player to “learn by dying.” This practice was of course quite common back in the era the original Prince was released. But today is generally considered a design “no-no.” Sands of Time relieved the unfair feeling by allowing the player to rewind time when he died. Although the rewind mechanic itself was somewhat gimmicky and didn’t add much gameplay, it was still a key point of the games design.

Luckily, someone at Ubisoft realized that the unfairness of the later Playstation 2 Era Princes was a problem, and set to remedy it by once again re-inventing the franchise. And thus, “Prince of Persia” was released.

Now I guess I can get to the real review, now that I’ve ranted on about something you probably already know about.

Prince of Persia succeeds in creating a smooth easy-to-control and acrobatic Prince. Suprisingly, he’s even easier to control and more acrobatic than Sands of Time. The controls in Sands of Time were quite specific and although not difficult, were somewhat complex. This meant that as the game progressed, you learned new things and were accquianted with new gadgetry at a reasonable pace. However, this new Prince manages to cram in all of the controls and the major environmental obstacles into less than an hour of gameplay. Now, this isn’t bad because it’s confusing, because it’s anything but. In fact, the controls are so simple, most actions are performed automatically or with one button. This is bad because the rest of the game is set up as a non-linear experience. Now, I know the big buzzwords in gaming right now are all about “non-linearity” and “sandbox gameplay” and “emergent behavior”. But the issue is that these things just don’t really work in Prince of Persia’s puzzling platform universe. It’s sad to see that the game had to make it to full production before anyone truly realized just how much it doesn’t work.

The problem is that the game lacks a real sense of progression due to it’s “Go anywhere” approach. There are four different worlds with 5 stages in each, and each stage ends with a boss. So, there’s twenty stages in total. Now, this would seem like a decent amount of content if this game had followed the linear style of it’s predecessors. Unfortunately, the freedom the game offers you in allowing you to pick which worlds and levels you want to tackle in which order makes all of them kinda taste like beans.

The fundamental controls are introduced in the intro part of the game, and after that, there are really few additions. With the major ones being these “plates” which require you to press the “Y” button when you land on them. There are four plates, which are each unlocked after collecting a large number of “light seeds.” The light seeds themselves are basically just an incentive to re-explore areas that you’ve already been to, as they are only available after you have completed the stage by defeating the boss and “healing the land” by rapidly pressing the “Y” button. The plates offer several different “moves” which will be performed upon activation. Two of the plates require interaction from the player to avoid hitting obstacles while on a sort of spiritual train-ride against the laws of physics. And the other two basically just play an animation which takes you somewhere else in the level. Unfortunately, none of the plates add anything really interesting to the puzzles in the game, and they all require the press of the same button. So they eventually just add up with the rest of the elements in the game into what feels like an elaborate Simon Says game. When I see the grappling ring, I should press “B”, when I see the plate, “Y”, Press “A” before you get to the edge, “Y” if it’s really far.

The way I put it, the game may sound boring. And I’m sad to say, the truth is that the game is rather boring. The choice of non-linearity allows nothing in the game to build upon anything else, and so it never gets more complex than the first stage you play. Sure, they throw in a few new baddies that you must avoid, and each of the bosses has a slightly different weakness. Unfortunately, these aren’t really enough to add interest, because all of the fighting in the game follows the same sort of Simon says feel with many “Press A to not die” events that pop up if you get too close to the enemy. Although the combat in the game, like almost everything else, is more forgiving than Sands of Time. It’s not really as satisfying or interesting. At the beginning of the game, we are introduced to the novel aspect of combat that we will be controlling two characters during combat. With the Princess’s magic attacks being assigned to the “Y” button. However, as the game progress, we realize that you will never fight more than one opponent at a time, and that all of your opponents will basically be proxies for one another. Sure, one of the bosses you have to push off the cliff because they’re too big to actually feel your sword. And the wierd feral cat-chick thing has some interesting “illusion” battles. But overall, most of the battles involve the same sort of back-and-forth “Simon says” feel as the rest of the game. Oh, now I have to start with an “A” attack, now I have to start with “Y” attack. Uh-oh, he’s charging, better press the buttons on screen so I don’t die.

Of course, as I’ve said earlier, the game is quite forgiving. Almost too forgiving, you can’t even die. Every time you fall to your doom the Princess magically teleports over to you and saves you. (Kinda makes you wonder why you go through all the trouble of helping her out when she can fly the whole time.) Every time you might die in battle, or get sucked in the black “corruption” you get saved by Princess Elika. There are some penalties, if you fall while on a series of acrobatic moves, you get moved back to the last solid ground. If you “die” in battle then the boss regains some health. But overall, the game is easy to an almost ridiculous level. There was a certain joy to being able to let my Prince smack into the ground and die in Sands of Time. There was a certain other joy in being able to just rewind it back when I felt like it. (or didn’t, you bastard prince. *smacks into ground repeatedly*)

Well, anyways. The non-linearity is obviously a problem. And the most interesting bits are the start and the end of the game, where the designers could actually have some idea of what you’ve experienced up to that point.

The story of the game reminds me of a Super Nintendo era game, such as Zelda 3, with the majority of the real backstory and lore being contained solely in the games instruction manual. (Which of course, is entirely in black and while, because no gamer would ever consider reading the instruction manual.) The story in the game is primarily conveyed through conversations between the prince and Elika. Unfortunately, these conversations are completely optional, and only activated when you press the left trigger button. So, you can play through the whole game without actually knowing anything about what’s going on. Many of the conversations pop up at inopportune moments, such as in the middle of a daring escape sequence from a crumbling tower. And due to their disposable nature, all of the conversations feature the same camera angles. This is sad, considering the interactions in Sands of Time worked quite well with conversations that continued regardless of what the player was doing. Although this sometimes created strange situations which didn’t quite match up to the writers intentions, the game didn’t suffer from the same feeling of having a big back-story crammed into a tiny game that the new Prince has.

The game’s ending leaves the story open for a sequel, and is perhaps the highlight of the entire game. If there is a direct sequel to this Prince, I hope the fine folks at Ubisoft will see their mistake and make the next one a linear experience.

But maybe they won’t. After all, the series must be making some good money, for them to be making a Disney movie of the thing. Jerry Bruckhiemer is even jumping on that cash cow. Let’s just hope that movie has a deeper story than this game, and it might just turn out to be watchable.

Overall Score: 6/10

The game is very playable. There are a few interesting moments, but the game as a whole is rather forgettable. Sad, because the art style of this game was a positive direction for the series.

Saw V

It’s pretty difficult to keep a horror movie franchise going for five installments without the whole story becoming stale and boring. Most notably because in the typical horror movie, the majority of the protagonists don’t make it to the end of the movie. Or at least, they don’t make it there alive and in one piece.

So, it’s easy to see why there would be fairly low expectations of the fifth film in the Saw series, a series of films centering on a not-quite-serial-killer named John, who has been nicknamed Jigsaw, and who has been dead for several films now. Of course, the expectations weren’t that high in the first place, considering the first Saw only scored a whopping 46 on Rotten Tomatoes. (My aggregate movie review site of choice) And the review scores have only gone downhill since then, with this latest installment only receiving a 15 percent positive rating.

It’s obvious why someone wouldn’t like the Saw movies. First and foremost, they are extremely horrifically violent films, with all kinds of gruesome deaths shown on-screen and relatively un-toned down. (I say relatively because the theatrical cuts of the films often have large sections of gory footage removed.) And secondly, the plot of the films continues to build and rely heavily on minor characters from films as far back as the first. (This being an unfortunate side affect of the aforementioned death of all the major characters.)

However, if you are willing to pay attention to the movies, and maybe watch them more than once, you will find a quite interesting and satisfying story which unfolds over the length of the series. The story itself is quite comic-book like in nature. (Meaning, it isn’t very realistic, but you’re expected to take that for granted.)

Now, as for Saw V in particular, I suppose I will need to begin again.

Saw V was released on October 24, 2008; The friday before halloween, as with the tradition set by the previous films. It has a different director than the past three films, which were all directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. (who also was involved in the creation of a quite interesting musical horror number called “Repo, The Genetic Opera”, which you may be interested in checking out.) The first film in the series was directed by James Wan, and he continues to be involved with the production of the series, along with his fellow writer and D-list actor, Leigh Whannell.

The story of Saw V was written by Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, the writers of the previous film, and the story of V jumps off fairly easily from the end of that film. (Which is a somewhat unusual turn for the series, which has been a bit notorious for not making it clear how much time has passed between films) The story itself centers around John, or Jigsaw’s, apprentice–a police detective named Mark Hoffman–and the pursuit of him by Agent Strahm. The story of the film is similar to Saw III in that it features two main narratives which primarily only intersect at the end of the film. The second narrative features five contestants in a series of traps which require “teamwork”, as much as that is really possible in a saw film.

The primary narrative of the film basically involves Agent Strahm discovering some things by delving into Detective Hoffman’s past. Through his discoveries, we learn more backstory. (a frequent device since the death of Jigsaw in the third movie) However, there is a somewhat interesting new element added involving a new character named Seth Baxter, who dies at the beginning of the movie to the hands (steel?) of an un-winnable trap inspired heavily by Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum.”

The primary narrative begins to be fairly dry, but it is the secondary narrative about the reckless fight for survival inside of Detective Hoffman’s latest Jigsaw-style game that really makes the film exciting. The overall series of traps are somewhat straightforward compared to some of the previous films, however this simplification allows the grand scheme of things to be somewhat more clear at the end. Compared to Saw II, in which the viewer is left wondering… “Well, what if they did something else?” So, the trap is certainly less Rube Goldberg-ey and unrealistic. But still, it provides the primary thrust of the film, and helps speed up the otherwise slow (and admittedly boring) primary cat-and-mouse narrative.

The biggest complaint I have about the film is it’s lack of a twist. And that’s not to say that I dislike movies that do not have twists, or that I think that the Saw films must have amazing twists to be really great. The main reason I’m frustrated by the lack of a twist, is that the tagline for the film, “You won’t believe how it ends,” blatantly suggested a killer twist. However, I am here to inform you that there is no twist, and if the only thing that seems like a twist at the end of the film, is in fact supposed to be a twist, I can only pity the writers of the film. As is, the tagline for the film seems to be one of the more ridiculous taglines I’ve seen. Without a twist, the line might as well be attached to any film.

Napoleon Dynamite, you won’t believe how it ends.

Overall: 7/10

The primary narrative of the film is probably the least interesting of the series. But the secondary storyline provides enough thrills to be worth a watch.

However, I have seen quite a few movies and played a few games since my last post, so I suppose I should give an update on them. Or at least on a few of the ones that I haven’t reviewed.

Orphan

I guess if I would’ve researched this movie somewhat more I wouldn’t have gone to see it at all. With a 56 on Rotten Tomatoes, I wouldn’t have gone to see the movie normally. But I was hooked in by the trailer and, on a whim, decided to go see it without checking online about the movie or the director’s history of not so excellence.

I suppose it may be too much to expect anything special by the director who re-made…

Holy crap! A rooster just jumped up on the hood of my car!

Anyways… where was I? Oh yeah, I suppose I shouldn’t expect much from a director who remade a 1953 Horror film, which itself was a remake of a 1933 Mystery film, originally based on a short story called The Wax Works, as a horror film House of Wax in 2005. But of course, I have never seen House of Wax, so I expected something special from Orphan.

The movie’s premise is certainly interesting enough. A family who has recently lost a child due to miscarriage is looking to adopt. So they go to a local orphanage, where they are quickly drawn to a young girl named Agatha, who seems to act quite maturely for her age. Then of course, after they bring the girl home, things slowly seem wierder and wierder. Of course, Agatha appears nice to the parents, but to everyone else, she acts like a psychotic sociopath.

This in and of itself, could’ve been a good movie. Had the story went to a conclusion with a reasonable twist, or no twist at all, I would’ve left the theater satisfied. After all, the movie had superb cinematography, with many clever and quite beautiful shots. The storytelling was quite inventive, especially a scene in which the mother tells a story to her near-deaf daughter. During this scene, the daughter takes out her hearing-aids, and the film is silent except for music. All of the storytelling her mother does is through sign language, and is shown as subtitles on the bottom of the screen. Now, I’m nearly certain that this was probably inspired by some other movie that I have not seen. And the director may have counted on this. But either way, it was a nice touch.

But the movie immediately loses credibility after the third act twist, which if you do not want spoiled, I would advise you not read the following section.

spoiler:::

During this end scene, after driving away her adoptive mother, she dresses herself up, gets her father drunk and attempts to seduce him. This is, of course, rather uncomfortable to watch, and also makes very little sense. This is intended to get your mind whirring about the twist. And just after you’ve figured it out, the movie tells it to you. Which is of course, ideal for a good twist. But this is not a good twist. This twist is just ridiculous. According to a foreign mental hospital where Agatha had been staying before coming to the United States, she has a condition known as hypopituitarism, and is actually 30-something, despite the appearance of being a 12-year old. So it is apparently her built-up anger about being treated like a child her whole life which has led her to attempt to seduce older looking men.

What. the. Hell?

I mean, the idea seems to make sense at first glance. But if she is so upset about people thinking that she is a child, then why is she dressing like a child, and putting on make-up to make herself look younger, and staying at a god-damn orphanage!?? This is just bizzare. And dumb. Bizzare and dumb as hell.

The rest of the movie is just a typical run-for-your-life thing which ultimately ends in the death of Agatha due to being kicked in the face by her adoptive mother.

Thank god there won’t be a sequel.

::end spoiler

Overall Rating: 6/10

At least the cinematography was good. There were a few clever acting moments as well. But the movie just sinks on it’s terrible twist, which was the brunt force of the marketing campaign anyways.

Indigo Prophecy

Now this was a game that interested me originally when I played a demo of it on my computer back when it came out. But I didn’t have the money to buy it at the time, so it just sort of went away and I forgot about it in the wave of hype for the next generation of consoles.

Until I found it a Gamestop for like nine dollars.

So, I bought the game hastily, hoping to finally enjoy the rest of this promising adventure game.

And the game was quite promising, despite some honestly awkward voice acting by the main characters. Up until about two-thirds of the way through the game, it was still interesting. There was a wierd mystery unfolding about why Lucas Kane had involuntarily stabbed a man to death in the bathroom at a downtown diner. The story was subtle, and the characters were developing slowly and realisticly.

Yeah, there’s some spoiliers that follow, but I really wouldn’t worry about it.

Then the end of the game comes. First, Lucas Kane re-hooks up with his ex-girlfriend. Not a bad thing in and of itself, however his girlfriend is immediately kidnapped by the trademark “spooky bad guy in a cloak”. He has a vision of his girlfriend falling to her death at the old run down theme park thing. So he goes there and follows a raven or crow or something until he realizes he must climb up to the top of a roller coaster to reach his girlfriend. So he goes up there, and just when he is about to reach his girl, the spooky cloaked guy destroys the roller coaster and Lucas Kane falls with his girlfriend to their presumable deaths.

Or not?

Now, it would have been fine by me if Lucas Kane died, he wasn’t a particularly interesting character. Plus the game has you playing scenes as the two cops in pursuit of him, so he’s really only 1/3 of the game. The game could’ve ended quite well without the mystery even being solved. Not every thread has to be tied up for a story to be completed.

But of course David whatever-hell-his-name-is-director-of-this-crappy-video-game-story has other ideas entirely. Instead of leaving the story in sane territory. He decides that Lucas Kane will still be alive in a sort of zombified wierd half-dead sort of state.

At this point, the world in the game is getting colder and colder every day, and the temperature drops, hence the name of the European released version of the game, “Fahrenheit”. (However, they changed the name for the US release to avoid confusion with the recently released Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore)

The story just goes downhill farther and further as the game continues. Rather than leave some things a mystery, David-whatever tries to tie everything up with this BS story about 3 secret societies who Illuminati-esque rule the world. (One of these societies happens to be made entirely of energy robots, by the way.)

So, the old lady in the wheelchair (who was creepy already with her crazy house and crows in cages, but the game forced you to trust her despite your inhibitions, and who had died earlier in the game to boot) reappears after the death/resurrection of Lucas Kane. But then we find out that she’s actually a robot, and she wants to kill you. Then Lucas Kane and the robot fly around Matrix Revolutions-style while you play a game of simon says with the two analog sticks.

Well, I’ll just leave it at that. Needless to say, the game does not disappoint in its stupidity towards the end.

Oh, well, I suppose I should add one more thing. The female cop who was pursuing Lucas Kane through the whole game, suddenly falls in love with him shortly after meeting him in his quasi-dead state. Oh, and they have sex. Oh, and she has his baby at the end of the game. Even though HES FREAKING DEAD ALREADY!!!!

Overall: 1/10

And it only gets that one point because the game didn’t have any glitches preventing me from completing it.

Well, hopefully I’ll be back soon with a review of the new Prince of Persia game, and maybe some other stuff.

I mean, seriously, it’s on Steam, if you haven’t played it now, just buy it already. It’s, in my opinion, one of the most impactful games that has been released in the past few years. And in addition to that, it’s just a really great game.

Don’t pass it up any longer.

I’m currently mulling over some ideas for my next programming project. My goal is to keep myself working on making game projects so that I can actually be a developer. Rather than sitting around hoping that I’ll “be a game developer one day,” I figure I should just jump in and start completing projects. So far I’ve been making pretty good headway. I just don’t know what exactly I’m going to do next.

I’ve got some ideas for tools to make my big project (Fij, of course,) but I think it might be better of me to stick to actual game projects that are quite small and should only take about a week of work to implement. (barring any serious bugs, like the memory leak issue with my Pong clone) The main reason that I sort of feel this push as a necessary thing is that I want to learn game development, not just programming. And that means I need to learn as much as possible how to design and manage the programming and development of my projects until they are completed.

So, whilst doing other random things later today, I’ll hopefully try to mull for some ideas deep inside my brain.

Either that or I’ll just end up writing a space invaders clone.

PONG

As you can see, the left paddle is going to lose.

Download:

Pong (release).7z (7-zip format) – 1.15MB

How to Play:

Uhm, seriously… It’s just pong. Try not to miss the ball while also trying make the opponent miss the ball. First player to 10 points wins. There’s a single player mode with AI, and a two player mode as well. Have Fun!

Libraries used:

SDL ,  SDL_image , SDL_mixer , SDL_ttf

TIC-TAC-TOE

As you can see, X is going to lose.

You can download it here:

Tic Tac Toe (release).7z (7-zip format) – 1.28MB

How to play:

It’s pretty straightforward, just click on the grid to place X’s and O’s. Sorry, there’s no single player mode, so you’ll have to come out of your cave and actually talk to someone.

In developing this, I used the following libraries:

SDL , SDL_image

I’ve been eating some Warheads candies for the first time in many years. They seem much less sour than I remember, but they still burn my tongue when I eat a bunch of them at once. They are certainly delishus.

Sad to say, not much progress on any game projects, as usual. My weekend has been spent with my fiancee, and not on any programming/flash goodness. So, I apologize to anyone who cares. Which is probably no one, but it’s out there in the open anyways.

Also not much progress on me becoming less sleepy. I have no clue why I am so tired all the time. Seriously. I got up at like 2PM, so I’ve only been awake like 11 hours, and I’m so freaking tired I feel like just sleeping all day tomorrow. But I do have classes, so I will not be able to do any such sleeping all day.

Dookie braing.

Maybe this could mean things for Fij, maybe not. I dunno. Just thought you might be interested. On second thought, you’re probably not.

*sigh* anyways….

Here’s something rather…interesting that I’ve found. It’s a little flash-based game about being trapped. I’ll just let you play it. Audience Award winner of the Nordic Game Jam 2009.

I’m so sleepy…

Oh, and the chick at the Taco Bell window asked me if I was Kurt Cobain, I’m not sure whether I should laugh or stab someone…

More progress should happen on the game during the next week, considering it’s Covocation week, which basically means that I don’t have homework and have to go to Chapel a lot.

In other news, I should have spent time writing an essay for my homework instead of creating that banner, so I’ll have to see you later.

Does anyone else find it odd that WordPress shows up as a misspelled word in WordPress’s post editor?

Look at it here!

And hopefully I’ll bring something a bit more exciting next time.

Meet Fij

He’s a squirrel by the way, not a fox.

I should be able to have some more teaserish thingies in the next few days.

Well, since it has been so long, I guess that means that I had better supply the goods when it comes to this post, which definitely means some sort of lengthy rant or a review. Hmm… what about?

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts

(quasi-review)

Well, I’ve been playing the new Banjo game for a few days now, and although I’m not quite far into it, (Only about the third world, which interestingly enough is the first world in the demo…hmmm) I think that I can safely give somewhat of an opinion about it now.

My first inclination after playing the demo was to hate the new game. After all, it wasn’t a real banjo game. They just took some wierd vehicle-based gameplay and slapped the banjo name on it after eight years to sell more copies. Those bastards. But after I played the demo a few more times, played the old N64 BK on Xbox Live Arcade, and had some time to delve into the juicy details of the vehicle building, I think my opinion has almost reversed itself. Almost.

The vehicle creation aspects of the new game are undeniably fun, and even if your vehicle controls like a turd half the time, it’s still fun to see something that you came up with…come to life, so to speak. The first time that I realized I could make a little “jetpak” out of basically a fuel tank, engine, and a propeller strapped together with a seat on top, well…it just made me smile a bit more than I expected.

For being what the average gamer today might consider a “kids game,” the vehicle creation tool is remarkably deep. By which I mean, it is way deeper than the creature creator in Spore. (Remember how they promised us things about how your creature would have a better chance of survival if you gave it longer legs and such.) It does actually matter that you build a vehicle that is well balanced, as cramming too much parts onto one side of a vehicle will quickly make a somersaulting hunk of junk.

The game does start out rather easy, but the difficulty ramps up strangely quick. Some missions are quite easy even later on, but some are more difficult than they should be. It’s a bit quirky overall in terms of the difficulty, but it’s forgivable considering as with all previous banjo games, you can kind of skip over certain jiggies and visit new worlds as soon as you open them up. Which brings me to another interesting aspect, the worlds seem to open up very quickly, almost too quickly if you ask me. After only 3 or four jiggies in a world, the next world opens up. However, the worlds also have several “acts” which only open up after you have collected the number of jiggies on the door. This means that you can revisit each world many times.

The whole act structure is quite a departure for the series, more closely resembling mario 64 than the “reward your exploration” banjo series. Among most of the other aspects of the new game, this is somewhat of a moot difference. Obviously the new game features completely different gameplay than the previous entries in the series, as all of Kazooie’s trademark moves have been whisked away and replaced with vehicle components. Most fanatics of previous entries in the series, who consider the original games to be untouchable pieces of gold, will be extremely off-put by the new game. However, from my experience, this is only the initial wave, and once you get over your hurdle of disgust that the game is actually something new, you begin to appreciate it as it’s own gem.

And it certainly is a gem, and not a piece of crap as some people may tell you. I have begun to wonder about many of the complaints I have seen reviewers make about the new game. After playing the original BK on XBLA, I realized something very important. IF THIS NEW GAME WAS LIKE THE PREVIOUS ONES, I WOULD BE VERY VERY BORED. Banjo-Kazooie featured a very distinctive gameplay, but unfortunately, this gameplay does not give over well to many self-similar sequels, unlike the mario series which has basically just been the same game over and over again with different power-ups for the past 20 years. Even Banjo-Tooie had to cut out some of the moves from the duo to add new gameplay elements. (This is if I am not mistaken.) But essentially, Banjo-Tooie was the same game as Kazooie, with some extra wonky elements tacked on, almost all requiring the usage of special in-game pads, since there was functionally no way to add new moves to the controller since almost every button combination had been used.

So, the point I’m trying to make, is that regardless of whether or not this new Banjo game was initially concieved as a “Banjo-Threeie,” (Which, as far as I know, it wasn’t.) the game is not something that should simply be overlooked. If you have a hint of desire for another entry in the classic series, the game is certainly worth checking out, and for the price, (a measly $40) it might be worth your buck. I will be truthful, if  you are looking for “Banjo-Threeie,” you will certainly be disappointed, as this is not really a banjo game, because the very specific banjo-kazooie gameplay style is not here. However, you will find oodles of all the other things that made banjo great, namely the witty writing and in-jokes. Heck, even Rare makes fun of how the game is a departure for the series. In Mumbo’s shop, if you look at a certain part, Mumbo says, “Add or else vehicle sink like this game at retail.”

Well, anyways…I can’t think of anything else in particular to say. But if you played the old games, there’s certainly plenty to like in the new game. Unfortunately, there’s also plenty to dislike, but if you can keep an open mind, you’ll certainly enjoy revisiting the old bear and bird.

Preliminary Review

8/10

Not quite the Banjo-Threeie that Grunty promised, but its certainly worth your time, and please don’t judge the game based on the demo.

Well, until next time folks…and hopefully next time will be rather soon.

Seriously, stop reading this and go play the game already.

Update on my life:

I’m enrolled at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, and I’m about to enter the amazing world of college life for the first time. To be honest, it’s a bit scary, and to be more honest, I’m not really excited about it, but I thought I’d let you know. My room-mate is some kid named Josh from Connecticut, I talked to him on the phone, he seems pretty cool from what we talked about.

My girlfriend got a settlement check from a car accident that me and her were in. She injured her neck and I guess they don’t want her to decide to sue later on if she experiences more trouble with it. So she got a check for $2000. Which her parents immediately took $500 out of for “bills.” *rollseyes* Anyways, so we got hers a computer and she bought me an Xbox 360 and GTA IV. (Which made me feel like crap…I don’t deserve that, I mean, seriously…DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THOSE THINGS COST???) Ahem… Well… I’m pretty grateful about that though, cause she didn’t really need to spend any money on me. But I won’t bore you with any more of this and I’ll get on to my impressions of GTA IV thus far.

Grand Theft Auto 4 – Early Review

From the moment you start up the game, it pretty much gives you high expectations. (Apart from the annoying little intro “movie” that plays everytime you start the game and that you cannot skip because it covers up the load-time.) The intro to the game itself it spectacular, well it’s not amazing, but definitely an improvement from the last game in the series, San Andreas’s, quite skippable intro scene. The production values on this game are immense, I mean, come on, the intro has floating 3D credit titles that move around and stuff.

The graphics are so good that you could easily wonder if the intro is just a pre-rendered video at some parts. (Perhaps this is just me though, I’ve been sitting in the ‘last gen’ for a bit too long.. : P ) Luckily, the in-game graphics are just as good as the cut-scenes. I have heard some criticize the game for it’s occasional graphic glitches (Sometimes a person, or even the whole world, dissappears for a single frame, and the shadows are a bit flickery) and slowdown, but I really don’t agree. (Again, this could be from sitting in the last generation for so long, so my standards are lower) I think the game is absolutely gorgeous, and if you don’t disagree with the washed-out art style, the game even gives you the option to up the saturation yourself.

The gameplay is a huge improvement from previous games in the series. The missions are generally of a similar nature, from what I’ve played, but the depth and life that exists in this Liberty City is enough to make any mission (even a replay of the same mission) quite entertaining. You may or may not remember how lifeless and drone bee like the pedestrians were in previous installations of the series, but this is definitely not the case with IV. These people are quite diverse and you can never be quite certain how a person will react to you. Not to say that it is impossible to point out flaws in the AI or some generic-ness to the NPCs, but they are certainly a cut above expectations. (especially considering the average life expectancy for these people could be pretty low depending on how good/bad of a driver you are, or if you just decide to go on a killing-spree.) The people are almost creepily life-like, to the point that I was somewhat disturbed on the thought of killing innocent people. The somewhat is important however, because I still enjoy venting my frustration on the hapless citizens of Liberty City. (In-fact this game is probably the best game I’ve found if you just want to vent your frustrations, although there is plenty of depth.)

The story is interesting and, perhaps for the first time in a GTA game, full of characters you actually give a crap about. Niko is a very interesting and like-able fellow, and a far-cry from the stereotypical black gangsta “CJ” from San Andreas. The characters are adorable in their own way, and amazingly funny at times. I can’t comment too much on the story as a whole, since I’m barely ankle-deep in it at this moment, but it looks to be the typical rags-to-riches fare for the series, but certainly not in a bad way.

I would like to bring up as a special note, that the story in this game is probably the most responsive that I’ve seen in any game. As an example, towards the start of the game, Niko’s cousin Roman gets held-up by some loan sharks and he calls you to ask for your help. At the same time, a girl calls you to ask you on a date. Most games would just let you pick whichever one you wanted to do and it be no big deal. So, of course, I picked the date because it sounded more interesting at the time. But in one of the biggest “Holy Sh*t” Moments for me, the game actually responded to my dickhead move to blow off my cousin in trouble for a chick. After the date, Roman called me back and asked me to pick him up from the hospital, and wouldn’t stop chastising me about “blowing him off for titties” all the way back to his house.

I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS GAME! <- Wow, I used an exclamation point.

I sincerely hope developers can take this game as an example and start adding more interactivity to their stories. Games, after all, are different from other mediums such as movies for this one reason, interactivity.

I would like to bring up one little nitpick though, although this itself is not exactly a problem with GTA IV itself, but more of a general thing that I’ve noticed about video games on the whole. The AI in this game is perhaps some of the most interesting that I’ve seen. It is extremely detailed, and even makes use of the Euphoria engine to add AI to the animations. However I realized while playing the previous games in the series, that many people on the roads would simply treat you as an obstacle, and would drive around your car if you moved too slowly, even driving on the sidewalk. And worse still, if you had an accident and hit one of the pedestrians vehicles, they would most often just wait until you were no longer blocking their way, and simply drive off. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I get in an accident, I get out of the car and see if everyone is okay, and then I call the cops. In GTA IV however, some people do just that, they get out of their car and say “Oh My God, are you okay?” and such. ( I don’t know if they call 911 or anything, I haven’t seen any do that) But many of the NPCs still just drive off after you crash into them, and some get out and try to beat you up. Anyways, the observation I was getting to was that when something happens in real life, like a guy driving around you on the curb because you’re going too slow, we think “God, what a dick!” but when it happens in a game, for some reason, my first instinct is not “What an ass…” but instead “Look at the stupid AI.” For some reason, the technology behind video games gives them a standpoint that if there is variation or human-ness added to the behavior of the intelligence, we don’t see it as a better simulation of a person, we just think ‘dumb AI.’ Perhaps the AI in GTA IV is so complex, that this diversity is built in, some NPCs are in such a hurry, they can’t stop just because they got bumped by some crazy dude in a smoking (I mean in the bad way) car. Perhaps the game contains such advanced NPCs that they actually get ‘fed up’ with waiting behind you and will try to pass you no matter what. But for some reason, this effort is actually recieved negatively by the end user. (i.e. me) We simply look at the AI being disoriented, angry, complex, and we just think ‘Geez, look at that dumb AI.’

I just wish there was some way around this reaction, but I think until video games can accurately simulate humans completely 100% Turing-complete, we won’t be able to.

Just a thought.

Oh, I almost forgot…

Grand Theft Auto 4 – preliminary score: 10/10

One of the greatest games I’ve ever played. And yes, it will change your life.

p.s. Actually I can’t guarantee that.

p.p.s. Also wierd thing, Liberty City has no pigeons apart from the wierd collectible ones you have to blow up.

Alright, so lets talk about morality and moral choices in games. There’s obviously a lot of games out there that provide moral choices as a core game concept: the Fable series, Bioshock, almost all of Bioware’s games… So all of these games are supposed to be centered around this idea of moral choices between good and evil.

And the basic way in which these games implement morality is with what basically accounts to a slider with good on one end and evil on the other. So in order to become an evil character you have to have a lot of evil points, or if you’re wanting to play a good character you’ve got to have a lot of those points. But the problem is that in order for this to work, and for the game be able to determine where you are on this slider, every decision in the game has be reduced into a simple black and white decision; one choice will yield good points and the other choice yields evil points. Unfortunately, this also makes the most of the game’s choices uninteresting and defeats the initial draw the whole moral choice idea had in the first place, because all of the choices are so easy to make.

Alignment comes from pen and paper role-playing games, but the difference is in a pen and paper game, that your alignment was something that you chose before you played and you attempted to play the game to represent that alignment. So if you chose chaotic evil as your alignment, you would attempt to play the game in a fashion that represented chaotic evil, and you would attempt to be as backstabbing and ruthless as possible. Whereas in games that offer these moral choices like Fable or KOTOR, usually what you’re doing is not choosing your alignment before you play and attempting to make decisions based on that, you’re choosing your alignment on a decision-by-decision basis. But the problem is that usually when people play these games, they decide early on in the game, that “I’m gonna be good”, or “I’m gonna be evil,” and then the game just gives you opportunities to reinforce that decision you made when you first started playing. And when the consequences of your choices are explicitly declared to you in this way, the choices lose their meaning.

Now I’m gonna bring up Fable. I know it’s old, but I haven’t played any of the more recent games like Bioshock, and Fable pretty clearly expresses what I think is wrong with morality in games. So the center theme of Fable is that you have these moral choices that you make that affect your character in a visual way. So as you play the game you develop a reputation, and the way your character looks changes, and the NPCs in the game are supposed to react in a way that represents this reputation you’ve developed. But when you actually play the game it becomes again just that basic reinforcement of an good/evil alignment choice.

So you start out the game as a kid and you do tasks for your dad and he rewards you for doing good deeds with money so you can buy your sister some stuff, and anyway… One of the tasks you do is that this guy who’s guarding some barrels that he’s keeping in his shed; he wants to go do something else, and he leaves you there to protect his stuff. So you have the choice of whether you want to guard his stuff like a good boy or just run in there and smash all the barrels and steal everything. And I imagine initially, that most players weren’t aware they even had the ability to make a decision, so in order to counter that, they have this little kid run up and just scream at you the whole time that you should run in there and steal the stuff.

The problem is that what they’ve done is essentially a gross over-correction for a simple problem. The kid screaming for me to be bad didn’t make me want to go destroy the barrels to express my freedom, it made me want to stand still and not decide anything because the game was trying to force this freedom of choice on me in an obnoxious way. So the guy gets back and he thanks me and a little bubble pops up telling me that I get good points, and immediately afterwards I run into the guys shed and I bust all the barrels and take his stuff.

So there’s two problems: The first is that the decision isn’t really interesting because the game forces it’s choices on you, and the second problem is that it immediately rescinds that forcefulness after you’ve gotten the good points for staying there, because you can still go in and bust his barrels and get the bad points anyway. And doesn’t really feel like you had much of a choice anyway because the good and bad points were immediately made trivial and insignificant. Even worse is that these “morality” games do this so often that it’s sort of become a tradition to have this type of insignificance. And I think, If I’m really supposed be to playing a game about moral choices and dilemmas, then there should be some sort of real consequences to my actions, right?

So maybe a good/evil slider isn’t the best way to do morality in a game. Not to say that giving a player the choice to do something clearly good or bad is wrong. I’m all for as many choices as possible in a game, and sometimes good and evil are really that clear. But maybe there’s a way to implement moral choices in a game without having it pop up “You gained 5 Good Points!”, or “You got 12 Evil Points!” because you shot some dude in the head with an arrow. If you’re proposing a game where the main draw is issues of morality, then your choices need to have more depth and impact in how you continue to play the game.

Really I believe that games should be giving us more open-ended moral questions, which aren’t so much good or bad, because you don’t know the real consequences of your actions when you’re making the choice. GTA IV is a good example of this. Although it is clearly not a role-playing game or a morality centered game with good and evil points, it actually provides some very interesting moral choices. On an early mission in the game, you are directed to go kill someone, which is a pretty common mission objective for a GTA game, but when you arrive, the person tries to prove to you that they’re innocent. Now, as the player, you haven’t been given any proof that this person is guilty or innocent. So this creates this interesting choice where you’re not quite certain of the consequences of what you do choose until much later in the game when either the person comes back to stab you in the back or to lend a helping hand. But the thing is, it creates this feeling of moral choice without ever popping up a icon, or giving me a hint at where my character is on the good and evil slider. I mean, looking at this type of decision, think of how trivial and pointless the decision would feel if the game popped up a window telling me I did the right thing by not killing him, and then gave me some points for it. I think it’s enough of a reward if you feel like you’ve done the right thing, even if the game doesn’t tell you so. I mean, it could just as much be the right thing to kill the guy.

So I think the point I’m making is that these simple moral choices, by which I mean picking a good or evil alignment option continuously, are not the same as real moral dilemmas. A moral dilemma can only happen when you don’t have the information neccessary to be entirely informed about your decision. A moral dilemma is picking the lesser evil. If I’m playing a game about morality, I want to come out of the experience thinking, “Wow, that was tough!”, without having to fight a boss or kill some tough guy I had to beat up with a stick. I should be genuinely filled with doubt about what right and wrong really means to me. I want to be genuinely affected by emotions that came from the game. And I think that’s something that’s really difficult to do with games, because people typically play games to escape reality, to escape consequences. “I don’t realy want to shoot my boss, so I go play Half-Life 2,” or something. But if I’m playing a game about moral choices, in order for me to feel genuine emotions about something I’ve done, there have to be consequences that are real to me. I have to lose the ability to do something if I make a bad choice, I have to pay the price of staying in jail for a while when I kill somebody, because the guards caught me, or I get benefits for doing something that those around me appreciate. I mean there should be games that provide a fantasy world, that give you an escape. I’m not going to deny the thrill of being able to just do whatever you want and nobody can say anything. So, I’m definitely not saying that morality is the end-all be all of game design. We certainly shouldn’t all run out and make our gamers feel sorry because they jumped on a goomba and killed him in the next Mario game. But if you ARE making a game about morality and serious issues, and trying to push it as something new and exciting, (which most games of this type do. ) then you really need to consider whether what you’re putting into your game are simple black-and-white choices or real moral dilemmas.

Only to go on ANOTHER trip just a few days after I got back. Now I’m down in Orlando, FL. I LOVE FLORIDA MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THE WORLD… We went to Atlanta for the FBLA competition, which I wasn’t actually part of, and now we’re at the national TSA conference/competition, where I’m competing in the Promotional Graphics category (basically you make a poster which represents, in some way, this year’s theme. (Which happens to be “Shape the Future.”)

Well, these trips have been a lot of fun, and as great as it is to be staying in a townhouse condo in my favorite state…I can’t wait to get back home. I need some time alone. And I need to spend some time with my girlfriend. I’m lonely…

Oh well, I’ll stop being sentimental. Sorry that for all this posting on the blog, I still haven’t even updated any about my game projects. I’m currently working on a flash game, with sort of an asian theme to it. The game itself is meant mainly to be an experimental world in which I can explore certain feelings and emotions through music and animation. So, essentially, it’s not much of a “game” in the strict definition of the word, so much as it is an interactive animation. This is partially because I’m no good at coding in ActionScript, (or any other programming language, for that matter, except maybe some QBasic and a bit of Javascripting for games, but that’s kinda beside the point I guess) but it’s also an intelligent decision.

Adios.

You can visit Josh Goode’s personal website as well: JoshuaGoode.net

Hope you enjoyed it.

I’m working on my pixel art skills at a board called pixelation. The board is very good about giving criticism, (by which I mean most of the people there are brutally honest) which is amazingly useful to me as an artist. To boot, there are many genuinely talented people who post regular work on the board.

This next Sunday I’m going to be gone on a trip with my computer teacher to two competitions, National History Day, and TSA. In both of the competitions I will be competing on the national level, although at the National History Day competition, I’m part of a two-man group project. So hopefully either my documentary or my poster design will do well at the competitions. The whole trip is going to last about a week, and I’m traveling to just outside of Washington D.C. and then down to Orlando. (Or at least I believe it was orlando…)

Anyways, The last movie I watched was Good Night and Good Luck, so I suppose it is time for another movie review.

On the whole, I’d say the movie was pretty good. It’s a George Clooney film, which if you haven’t seen any of his other films, I highly recommend you see his films, especially Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Good Night and Good Luck is quite different than Confessions, although they share some similarities. (Both movies drop to music exclusively as certain moments in the film, although Confessions uses it to an entirely different effect)

Probably the best adjective I can think of to describe the movie is “informative.” The movie is about a television news host who brought “dangerous” newscasts to CBS during the early 20th century, when the government was pointing fingers at everyone who might even have thought about being a communist. The movie can be exhausting at times, when entirely *unedited?* clips of news footage are shown, but overall the whole film was quite interesting and certainly worth checking out if you haven’t already researched the topic.

Good Night, and Good Luck…

Final Rating: 7/10

Definitely not going to change your life, but shows a different side to the media. Consistently we blame the media for simply feeding us what the government wants us to hear, but perhaps there is another side to the story.

Well, until next time…

Good night, and good luck.

Well, I guess there’s not really any point to this post, other than me venting my frustration…. Oh well.

Well, I don’t even know if that paragraph made any sense, and I’m sure I could go rambling on about my future and my incertainties about it for ever and ever. So I’ll just stop and attempt to stop typing run-on sentences.

In other news, I just recently watched two movies that I’m sure you’ve heard about, even if you don’t really know what they’re about. Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. I think they’re a few years old already….geez time passes faster the older you get. Makes me feel like I’m actually getting old. I’m only 18 for crying out loud. Anyways, the movies are both Clint Eastwood films, he did them both at the same time, and they’re both about Iwo Jima, although from different sides of the story. I watched them both this last week, although I kinda sorta watched them out of order. I believe the intended order is to watch Flags of our Fathers and then Letters from Iwo Jima, but I did it the other way around. It would kinda have a different effect if you watched them in the other order. When you watch Flags of our Fathers, you get the American view, which shows a pretty limited understanding of how the Japanese felt about the war and the battle itself. The Japanese are pretty much just a faceless enemy that kills, but is still not powerful enough to overtake the awesomes Americans. Uhm…anyways. I guess the point of Flags, and basically Letters as well, is that War isn’t what people think it is. Which, now that I think of it, is kinda the point of all modern war movies, isn’t it…. Well, anyways. Flags is about that famous Iwo Jima flag-raising picture that we’ve all seen, and how it’s basically just a bunch of crap. Not that it didn’t happen, but that it didn’t really mean anything in terms of the war. The story kinda jumps back and forth between a present narrative, a past narrative during the battle, and another past narrative in-between the two…It’s kinda nauseating, and a bit confusing at first. To be honest, the first time it jumped through time, I thought the movie was going to just skip the majority of the Iwo Jima battle, which…well it sort of did…but sort of didn’t. Anyways, the movie wasn’t really about the battle anyways, essentially the entire movie was just about reinforcing this point that heroes in war don’t really exist… Well, whatever… I guess I’ll give the movie my rating…

Flags of Our Fathers, Overall Rating: 8/10

Not mind-blowing or life-changing, but a decent war movie overall.

Letters from Iwo Jima on the other hand, is one of the better movies I’ve seen in a while. For Flags to be such a simple movie, Letters is much more complex, and consequently about three times as interesting. Although there is perhaps the same amount, if not more, of fighting as Flags, Letters from Iwo Jima still feels like a much more personal story. Well, anyways, if you don’t already know, Letters from Iwo Jima is the story from the Japanese perspective, and thus, the entire movie (or most of it) is in Japanese, and requires subtitles. Initially this may seem as if it would be a distracting or detrimental move, but it really works, and it isn’t that difficult to see why. (especially with other movies, such as Pan’s Labyrinth, seeing success with American audiences despite language barriers) Perhaps the best testament I can give for Letters of Iwo Jima is that it brought tears to my eyes, even though I was essentially reading the entire story. The movie has it’s fair share of gory bits, which you’ve probably come to expect from war movies. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the two Iwo Jima movies is that they intertwine with connections in the story. Although these are few and far between, it is still interesting to see the tiny bits sneak their way between the two. Well, my reviewing skills are perhaps not the best organized in the world, and I’m sure I’ve done more to confuse than I have to give a good impression of these movies, but I guess practice is good. Well, I’ll go ahead and give my rating for this one two.

Letters from Iwo Jima, Overall Rating: 9/10

Probably not going to change your life, but still a damn good movie, and very very moving. Gives a good alternate perspective on a battle, and a war that most of us only know from stereotypes and old photographs.

Oh, and in other news, Dell appears to be adding to their awesomeness with some new “Dell Art House” series. Check it out. It’s basically their same awesome laptops, with even more awesome artwork on them. This first series features artwork from some artist named Mike Ming. Never heard of him? Me neither, but he can do some great designs. Apparently he’s a tattoo artist, or at least Dell would like us to think that. The laptop designs are pretty freaking awesome. So here’s hoping they continue this series and don’t let it end here.

This is my new blog where I’ll keep me or anyone else up to date on my game design/general life issues.

See you guys later, I guess.