Converted To Modern Games

Modern games are better and more fun to play than retro games.  That may not sound like a bold proclamation, but for me it represents a complete attitude change.

It’s been about a year since I bought an Xbox 360 and started this blog.  If you remember, I mainly got the Xbox is order to play old school style games.  A good example is Bionic Commando:Rearmed.  At the time, that was exactly the type of game I was looking for (and still the best remake of an 8-bit game ever, in my opinion).

But, if you look over my blog posts over time, I started to be more enthusiastic about modern games.  It started with Batman:Arkham Asylum.  Then it was Transformers: War For Cybertron.  But the final step of my conversion has been Red Dead Redemption.

Early on, I thought that playing the modern games was just a diversion, and that my main interest would still be old school games.  The games I was looking forward to most were Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, Bionic Commando: Rearmed 2, and Hard Corp: Uprising.  Those games are all out now.  They are good games (well, I have problems with Castlevania:HD).  But, I have no plans to buy the full versions.

The reason is, I just find them boring.  The control is too basic.  When I’m used to 3D games with deep, complex controls, I just can’t “switch gears” to enjoy the old school gameplay.  I mentioned this in my assessment of the Limbo demo last year.  At the time I didn’t realize that was I was feeling was not temporary, but a permanent change in my attitude.

Simple mechanics are one of the reasons that many people prefer retro games.  You can pick up and play them without having to learn much or train your hands.  Games with deep controls can have a steep learning curve that can be intimidating.  I can speak to that because that I how I felt a year ago.  But I can now say, the learning curve is worth it.  It seems daunting at first, but you will adapt in time.  And it doesn’t even take that much time.  At a certain point, the controls become second nature and don’t even seem complex.  And when you reach that point, playing the game becomes entertaining and rewarding beyond what’s possible in an old school game.  Here are a couple of examples.



In Batman:Arkham Asylum, you can use Batman’s line launcher to zip-line across a room and knock down a group of henchmen.  Before they get up, you can use a ground takedown move to knock one of them out.  By that time the others will have gotten up and and will most likely be ready to open fire on Batman with machine guns.  At that point you can either retreat by grappling up to gargoyle, stun them using Batman’s cape, use batarangs to knock them down again, or just run at them kicking and punching, hoping to take them out before Batman is critically wounded.  There are so many options – you can let your creativity run wild.  It takes a high level of comfort with the game’s controls to be able to do all that, but the gamer does get to that level, and it happens naturally (in this game, at least).



Another example is from Read Dead Redemption.  You can take something that happens in the game fairly often – a thief steals a horse and a townsperson asks you to get the horse back.  You have a lot of options in RDR, but I like to return the horse and the thief alive.  Here are the steps required for that:

1. Whistle for horse
2. Mount horse
3. Equip lasso
4. Look where thief is on mini-map and chase after him
5. Once caught up to thief, ready lasso
6. Enter dead-eye mode
7. “Paint” thief in dead-eye mode
8. Throw lasso
9. Dismount house
10. Run to to thief and hogtie him
11. Pick up thief
12. Put thief on horse
13. Mount house
14. Chase down stolen horse and lasso it
15. Lead horse back to robbery victim
16. Dismount horse
17. Remove thief from horse
18. Drop thief off ground

That is very complex process, but it’s something that becomes easy to do after a while.  When I started making that list, I included the necessary buttons that need to be pressed for each step, but I couldn’t finish that aspect.  I couldn’t remember some of them, and others I was just unsure about which button.  But when I play the game I can do it easily because of muscle memory.  So, what sounds daunting and complex (and is daunting and complex at first) becomes second nature.

So why is that more satisfying than say, defeating a monster in The Legend of Zelda.  I don’t know.  It’s something that I know experientially.  Maybe I’ll try to think of the specific reasons in a future post.  For now I can only say that I am a convert.

Demo Assessment: The Bourne Conspiracy

For reasons too boring to go into, I decided to check out the demo of The Bourne Conspiracy game that was released about 2 years go.  The demo covers the escape from the US Swiss embassy that’s depicted in The Bourne Identity movie.  This Youtube video covers what’s in the demo:

The demo was frustrating for me.  Early into it, Bourne has to slide under a closing gate.  You can see this in the video.  If he doesn’t make it, you can reload the last checkpoint.  The load times aren’t particularly long, but attempting the gate slide (and failing) took less time than the checkpoint loading.  Nothing’s more certain to make a game frustrating than load times longer than gameplay times.  In addition, in order to slide under the gate, the player needs to press a button.  The specific button changes per attempt, and is revealed to the player at the time he needs to press it.  I’m not against this Dragons Lair-type system for getting past obstacles.  I thought Shenmue’s Quick Time Events worked well enough.  But, I don’t understand the need to randomize the button.  Shouldn’t the button roughly correspond to the action that the button will perform, and not just be random for the sake of making the task more difficult?  Also, does every wrong or late button press have to be a game-stopper?  Some contingencies would be nice, especially in the game’s demo where I would think they’d want to ease players into the system.

My other big problem in the game is the hand-to-hand combat.  This was an aspect of it that was praised in most reviews, but I didn’t like it, maybe because I’m just spoiled by the “Free-Flow Combat” system of Batman:Arkham Asylum. 

In the game, when Bourne fights a guy, he squares off with them boxing-style.  This doesn’t make any sense when there are multiple opponents.  Why put your arms in front of you when you’re surrounded by enemies?  That’s a great way to get a rifle butt stock to the back of the head.  Beyond that, when Bourne fights even low level embassy guards, he trades blows with them until knocking them out.  I’m sure the makers of this game saw the Bourne movies, so I’m not sure how they would have gotten that aspect of Bourne so wrong.  The only opponents that Bourne trades blows with are the highly-trained Treadstone/Blackbriar assets.  Everyone else he takes down with incredible speed and efficiency.

I know that the developers have to make it challenging, but the challenge should be true to the character.  If Bourne had to rely on primitive pugilistics to incapacitate enemies, he wouldn’t be able to function.

Batman:Arkham Asylum got it right.  They made Batman fight in an authentic, overpowering way, but still made the combat challenging and fun.  Of course Batman:AA was released after this game, so you can’t blame the developers for not studying a superior combat model.

That’s all I have to say about The Bourne Conspiracy.  I wanted to like the game.  It has good graphics and seems to capture the tone of the movies, but the gameplay doesn’t cut it.

The Juvenile Plea for More Darkness

This recent post in IGN.com asks for the upcoming Batman:Arkham Asylum 2 to be darker than its predecessor.  More specifically, it asks for more brutality and on-screen violence, including torture:

“…let's have some villains establish why they belong in Gotham's home for the criminally insane.”

“Let's have [Talia al Ghul] take three cops out in her first appearance.”

“Let's have [Two Face] flip his coin and shoot a nun or something.”

Is this writer asking for this type of content because he has some some kind of misanthropic worldview, or does he want to provoke gamers to contemplate something about the nature of man or the nature of the universe?  No.  Here are the reasons he gives:

“Let's have some villains establish why they belong in Gotham's home for the criminally insane.”

“Rather than let the audio diaries and in-game bios tell players why these people are bad, show us so we know who we're up against.”

I wonder how much this writer really wants to see.  Does he really want to see people getting murdered, beaten, tortured, raped and even cannibalized?

I would hope the answer to those questions would be no.  But if the answer is yes, my follow-up would be, “Really?  In stark detail?”

If the answer to that question is yes, then I would really want to know why someone is so eager to view vivid acts of violence in a video game.  Is there really a lot of entertainment value to be gotten out of that?  If so, isn’t that a little concerning?

But I suspect that someone would say that they want to see violence, but not in too much detail and nothing too heinous.  To that I would ask, “Why the limits?  If some carnage is effective in doing the things you say it does, wouldn’t more carnage and more realistic carnage be even better?”

I think that this demonstrates that pleas for more darkness are disingenuous.  They want darkness, but they want it to be stylized and sanitized.  And they want it because it looks cool and has the superficial appearance being “serious” and “adult” -- not for any philosophical reasons.

Nazis are common villains in games, and it’s common for games to have Nazis doing all sorts of black magic, occult rituals, experiments designed to create supermen, summon demons, and other things out of comic books.  But I’m unaware of any games that get into the real acts of evil committed by the Nazis.  Gamers don’t seem to want that.  Real evil tends to be be sad and depressing – quite the opposite of the glamorous and stylized “darkness” that the juvenile-minded want more of.

That being said, the first Batman:Arkham Asylum is a dark, and the darkness makes the game more effective.  The game is a fantasy with a strong sense of realism that draws the gamer in.  The sense of realism is aided by the idea that the villains in the game are dangerous criminals that commit violent crimes.  Gamers aren’t likely to make an emotional investment in a universe where the villains are cartoons.  So a dark, serious tone is necessary for the game to be effective.

That effectiveness would actually be undermined if the game showed more violence/brutality than it does.  In the game’s opening Batman comes across Killer Croc being transported through the prison by armed guards.  He’s in chains and is wearing a shock collar.  A voice on the loudspeaker says that the guards have permission to use deadly force if he tries anything.  He promises Batman that he’ll hunt him down, and then proceeds to his cell.  Throughout the game we hear some recorded interviews with Croc that reveal some details of his background, the main one being that he’s a cannibal.  That’s about all we really find out about him before Batman encounters him later in the game.  But during the build up to sequence of the game when Batman has to venture into Croc’s lair, the little we’ve seen/heard from him up to that point create a sense of dread.

Now, if the author the IGN article had its way, the game would have shown Killer Croc destroying stuff, killing people, eating people, etc.  “He’s supposed to be a killer, right?  The game needs to show him killing people.  It can’t just tell us that he’s dangerous, right?”  But that leaves nothing to the imagination.  Part of the fun is speculation and conjecture about what something/someone will be like.  Showing too much can kill that.

So instead of making blanket pleas for more darkness, I’d suggest that we ask for an effective story first, and that the dark and serious elements are tasteful and not done in a gratuitous way.

Batman: Arkham Asylum -- How I Came Around

Since I acquired an XBox 360, I've downloaded a lot of demos of games that I have no interest in buying or playing for more than 10 minutes. I wanted to see the graphics and sound that the games today are capable of. But I didn't have that much interest in becoming immersed in a game. Batman: Arkham Asylum was the game that overcame that resistance.

I was initially impressed with the game's graphics. The demo first has Batan fighting a room full of goons. I found that fun, but it was nothing mind-blowing. I thought the best part was how the game zooms in and goes into slow motion when Batman delivers the final blow to the last goon standing. It was cool, but I didn't think I'd want to play an entire game of doing just that.



The demo then has Batman intervene in a hostage situation. This introduces the user to "detective mode", which is a visual filter Batman can use to see useful things in the environment. Using this mode, Batman has to sneak around a room and surprise the hostage-taker from above. I tried to complete this part of the game a few times and just couldn't do it. At that point I gave up on the game. I kept the demo on my XBox just so I could show the graphics to my friends and family members.

One evening a week or two later, I decided to take one more stab at getting past the hostage room in the demo. I was able to get past it that time. I'm very glad I did, because that's when game got really interesting.

The next part and final part the demo introduced me to "invisible predator" mode, where Batman has to neutralize a room full of armed thugs. If they notice him, they open fire and often kill Batman before he can escape. Batman can use a variety of tactics and gadgets to successfully neutralize all of the henchmen. Once I played though this part, I was hooked. Using Batman's different types of takedowns is just awesome and really makes the gamer feel like Batman. The moves are easy to execute, but timing everything correctly and using an optimal strategy is challenging and addictive. "Invisible predator" mode is just executed so beautifully. The game would be worth it for just those "challege rooms" that can be unlocked in the full version of the game.



So as I implied, the quality of the demo persuaded me to buy the full version of the game. I've now played through the game completely and remain impressed and really in awe of how good modern games can be. I'll have more thoughts about this game in an upcoming post comparing 2D and 3D games.

Batman: Arkham Asylum -- Playable Joker Levels -- So Wrong

The playable Joker challenges in Batman: Arkham Asylum are exclusive the Playstation 3 version of the game, but my criticism of them is not due to the fact that as an XBox 360 owner, I can't play them. I would feel this way even if they were an XBox 360 exclusive.

The playable Joker levels are so, so wrong. It's not that they're completely out-of-character for the Joker, which they are, but mainly because they diminish Batman's abilities by making them reproducible by a lanky, undisciplined lunatic. See for yourself:



I appreciate the fact that they gave him a gun and electric hand buzzer which he uses occasionally. It shows that they tried, a little, to make these stages consistent with who the Joker is. But it's still obvious that they basically re-skinned Batman as the Joker, retaining the fighting mechanics. So now the Joker has striking and countering skills that rival those of Batman, who honed his skills over years of intense training and extreme mental and physical conditioning. It does not make any sense and just looks ridiculous.

If they were going to do this -- which I don't think they should have -- they should have given the Joker meager hand-to-hand combat skills. Let him keep the gun and electric hand-buzzer and use them a lot more. Give him henchmen to do most of the fighting. Yeah, that would have been more difficult to execute, but if something's not worth doing the right way, it's not worth doing.