Fallout 3 is a "memento mori"

America

Fallout 3 is a memento mori, one of those pieces of art that mediaeval artists drew with skulls and rotten fruit to remind us that we will all die someday. Maybe it's a sign that the 20th century has ended and we can admit now that our modern civilisation maybe won't live forever. We can think about what it will be like after we're gone.

That makes Fallout 3 a frequently wistful game. Well, frequently for a 50-hour game, at least. It was about every other hour or so: I would be set upon by bandits who had nothing to live for. Or talk to some hopeless villagers relying on their inadequate walls to keep the big, scary world at bay. Or sneak through the crumbling hallowed places of American democracy, while quiet horns played in the background, evoking patriotism for a dead country. Or just looking out over the crumpled remains of a civilisation's corpse.

At a higher level Bethesda reinforced the wistfulness by the four (or so) factions, all in some way claiming to be legitimate heirs to the mantle of the United States. Some of them military, by right of force (most of them really), some by right of possessing artefacts, holy relics, of the old republic.

In a way the game is more about the resurgence of the mediaeval, life after the fall of a civilisation, than specifically life after the fall of the US. The shape of life in Fallout is clearly inspired by the European dark ages. The game gives the player a picture of what post-civilisation life would be like, and in fact would have been like.

Nuka-Cola

Of course the setting is still uniquely American in its details -- even if the details are clearly satirical. Do you remember Motel of the Mysteries? In it, the amateur archeologist Howard Carson/Carter visits America almost 4000 years after it is buried under a 100-foot layer of junk mail. He discovers a buried hotel room and begins to misinterpret the contents as fast as he can. Motel of the Mysteries could have been the inspiration for Bethesda's obsession with in-game junk.

In actuality, I suspect it was an obsession with providing enough loot to populate a post-apocalyptic world. Bethesda's previous games were well-populated worlds where you couldn't possibly loot everything without becoming some kind of Broom King. In Fallout, the mundane items are not only worthless for trade, they're actual junk. Otherwise it wouldn't be realistically post-apocalyptic.

It fits the fiction, even though I think this is another case of Bethesda succeeding by mistake (see also:most of Morrowind). Fallout is set 200 years after nuclear war, but it gives the sense that most of the devastation wasn't from the nukes. It was from the fall of civilisation that resulted. We got so good at producing stuff that even 200 years after we stopped, the survivors do little but fight over the remnants. Scavenging is the main method of survival, not farming or hunting or commerce.

RPGs

Fallout is a memento mori for RPGs as well. RPGs are not dead yet, but it's not long before it will make sense to ask "Who killed RPGs?" (much like Old Man Murray asked "Who killed adventure games?") What this really means is that games are growing up and nearly all games now incorporate RPG elements.

The same thing happened to adventure games much earlier -- all that's left of adventure games today is (1) nostalgia (2) Capcom and (3) the good parts that live on in other genres. The story-telling of adventure games was their primary innovation, and their primary legacy. The actual gameplay of adventure games was an odd sort of item management and puzzle-solving, which in its extreme form is essentially insane (see again Old Man Murray's essay, this time looking for references to Moon Logic), and in its mild form, not that interesting.

So why are RPGs the next to go? Let's step back and look at what makes games unique: interactivity. Games started with tiny interaction loops, story-free--nothing but the joy of pushing buttons and getting a reaction from the machine. In contrast, adventure games focused on the long loop -- so long, in fact, that it was essentially the narrative arc found in other kinds of narrative art. RPGs, then, are the original medium-loop game genre. That is, they were the first genre to give the player something between twitch gaming and thoughtful (?) stories and worlds like Zork. In replicating table-top gaming, they created a gameplay loop measured in minutes, not seconds. And the loop offered a sense of progression which could be tweaked and tuned, unlike the simplistic short-loop systems of the 80s, where the only progression was More Speed Until You Die.

Because of sense of progression, RPGs had the first narrative arcs that emerged from gameplay. Ultima 4 is a good example: the medium-loop, RPG gameplay is similar to Ultima 3, but the dungeon questing and dialogue are in service of a overarching, vaguely stated narrative. The real genius of Ultima 4 is the way that most of the narrative emerges through gameplay mechanics instead of through traditional story-telling.

Fallout is an interesting case in which the emergent narrative conflicts with (or at least doesn't support) the explicit narrative. The explicit narrative is a really boring Hero's Journey that's about as floaty and disconnected as Bethesda's combat systems. There's, like, scientists and water purifiers and neo-American military, and ... I just didn't feel any connection. What's worse, they throw in a non-sequitur (charitably: "twist") ending which makes it really obvious that they played Portal (2007) a bunch of times before releasing their game a year later.

But the emergent narrative -- well, I already talked about it. It's the story of Mediaeval America. I think it's a story we need to hear, and I think Bethesda meant to tell it. In Morrowind, I felt like the emergent narrative was there by mistake. In trying to make a "realistic" world, Bethesda inadvertently tweaked some variables just far enough in one direction to not only model racism, but make it an issue that players would have to encounter. I think that Fallout forced Bethesda to outgrow their purely "realistic" aspirations. Without that, they would have continued to make detailed games that are good by mistake. (I haven't played Skyrim--maybe Fallout is a fluke. Which would be sad.)

But back to the original question: if RPGs are so good at emergent narrative, why are they dying? Well, if we look at RPGs as they developed, the truth is that, while their medium-loop gameplay was innovative, their short-loop gameplay was dismally dull for a long time. At best, they had a simplistic rip-off of Stratego; at worst, a simulation of choosing Copy and Paste from OS 7's Edit menu over and over again. Bethesda's games have always aimed to improve this, but even there, if you compare the stealth in Fallout to that in Metal Gear or Splinter Cell, it's pitiful. If you compare the swordplay to Demons' Souls, it's double pitiful, because Demons' Souls also has the numbers. You just can't win on their strength alone.

But games have grown up. They have huge teams working on them, and they can afford to give you great short-loop action, great medium-loop systems and a great long-loop story. And it turns out to be easier to add RPG elements to an action game with sound short-loop gameplay than it is to add action elements to an RPG. Why? I'm not sure. Maybe RPG designers spend all their time modelling an entire world with numbers, while action-game designers spend all their time making sure their characters feel awesome when they move. And unless you're an idiot savant, it's easier for your brain to appreciate exciting moving things than it is to appreciate a numeric model.

Deus Ex is "Deus Ex translated to Canadian French and back again"

Video games are software. They're also art, but they're made out of software. I've complained about this before, after playing Fable 3.0, I think. For a game that I don't love, like Fable, I'd rather just play the last of the series, the best one. The Fable series, and a lot of others, consists of successive repetitions with improved software at each new version. The trend of trilogies, which I'm pretty sure started for monetary reasons, may prevent this gormless repetition--if nothing else, they are pumped out so fast that only the content designers get a chance to refine things--the tech guys don't get a chance to overhaul the engine. And even if the designers view episode 1,2,3 as successive chances to refine the game mechanics, at least the writers will feel an obligation to make a coherent story line, one that won't make you feel ripped off for playing the same thing 3 times in a row. (Disclaimer: I tricked a friend into playing Fable 1.0 for me while I watched. But I did play all the way through Fable 2.0 and 3.0)

So Fable exemplifies the Sequel Remake, when someone decides that they'd really just like to make a few tweaks and release the same thing as a 'sequel'. Games have been around long enough now to have another kind of remake: the Borges Remake, in which the creators of Fallout 3.0 are not at all the same people that made Fallout 1.0 and 2.0. They are instead people who liked it so much that they wanted to recreate it from scratch. Like Borges' French author Pierre Menard, they take a break from writing nonsense like Les problemes d'un probleme to write chapters 9 and 38 of Don Quixote. From scratch. In the original Spanish. To be exactly as good as when Cervantes wrote it; in fact, exactly the same as when Cervantes wrote it. You can easily tell when a game is a Borges Remakes because usually the title is the same as the original. No additional numbers, only maybe a tiny subtitle in small font.

This seems like the ultimate fanboyism, and in the world of literature, that's probably all it is. But in video games, there's real money. After the one-two punch of the Nintendo Wii and the Great Recession, Borges Remakes have become proven safe moneymakers. Not only can you find plenty of people who want to make Prince of Persia again from scratch, you can find plenty of people want to play it again. Or Mario. Or Wolfenstein. When you only play a game or two a year, it might as well be the 'same' game that you played when you were 12. Anyway it sounds a lot like the remastered editions of Star Wars, or maybe the Lion King. They probably won't even notice if you change a bunch of stuff! (That's actually good--games have improved over time, so even an average game today will have some usability improvements compared to the brilliant games of the past.)

Eidos Ubisoft Montreal's Deus Ex is a whole-hearted Borges Remake, one of the pure-hearted fanboy ones (probably) (maybe). They decided to make Deus Ex. And they did. Really well. It's almost an exact copy. But over a decade has passed, and the innovative things about Deus Ex are no longer innovative -- almost all games have incorporated the good things from Deus Ex. So Deus Ex (by Ubisoft Montreal) turns out to be a very competent sneaking/shooter with a lot of dialogue options, while Deus Ex (by Ion Storm) was a brilliant genre-bending hybrid of FPS, RPG, and tactical stealth espionage action mumble mumble whatever Kojima sticks on the end of Metal Gear titles.

Really, the only place where Deus Ex (by Ubisoft Montreal) is worse is the overarching conspiracy theory. The conspiracies in Deus Ex (by Ion Storm) turned out not be that gripping, but it was mostly because they were so tangled and the game went on for so log, adding layer upon layer. The writers must have been really into it. The conspiracy in Deus Ex (by Ubisoft Montreal) is actually kind of stupid, and I didn't pay much attention because the Real Villains were introduced in the first five minutes via dramatic camera zooms and big explosions.

On the other hand, the new Deus Ex is better in a few places, mostly places that were 'modernised' and 'consolised'. Those two words mean pretty much the same thing except for the connotations. Basically, we (as a race (of programmers, and maybe of humans)) have figured out simpler ways to convey the same feeling of progression that a complex orchestration of numbers does. I support this change, although people who really like numbers may not.

Finally, the single worst aspect of the game was the translation. I don't how much of the game was written in French Canadian originally, but many of the in-game item/power descriptions obviously were. Also, a nice multi-cultural culture (or whatever it is that Canadians do better than us) turns out not to automatically translate into cultural knowledge of the US. Surprise!

Even though setting the early parts of the game in Detroit was a nice dodge for all the Canadian voice actors they hired (linguistic research has now discovered that as many as 80% of Detroit natives are actually speaking Canadian without even realising it), they apparently don't know that skin colour is not a perfect predictor of accent in Detroit. The voices are doled out strictly along lines of skin colour, so a white gangster sounds like a college student from Toronto, while a black one sounds like a Harlemite practising a Chicago accent (badly). That's not how gangs work! Everybody tries to sound the same to show that they're members of the same group.

The same problem applies to yuppies, and there are a few even more obvious and embarrassing errors, like the Hispanic ex-Marine who barely knows English (how did he survive in the Marines then?), and the African-American Detroit bum who apparently just arrived from Alabama, but has lived there for years developing a network of bum contacts for the police to use (? ? ?).

Overall, the voice acting and motion capture suck pretty ferociously for a AAA game, even for the main characters. Again, this feels it may have been conscious imitation of Deus Ex (by Ion Storm), or perhaps just clever allocation of a limited budget. It didn't stop me from enjoying the game, but it did make me want to pace around, sarcastically imitating David Sarif's always-enthusiastic monotone. I so wanted him to turn out to be completely evil, but he never did. At least I think he didn't. My sense of the moral landscape was fuzzy by the end, mostly because I stopped paying attention.

Megaman Legends is "8-bit mysterious".

As you stray more and more toward narrative videogames, it becomes clear that games have real trouble competing with novels in telling a coherent, interesting story, often because you can short-circuit the whole thing just by getting a game over. And they have trouble conveying deep emotions as well as movies, because you can always ruin the mood by deciding to jump in place for 20 seconds. The strength of games is in conveying a sense of place. The best narrative games tend to drop you in a place and let things play out from there. Shadow Moses. Tallon IV. Hyrule. Even, and I want to emphasise that I do not speak from personal experience, Azeroth.

So what's the minimum you need to convey a sense of place? Often the best art is found where the constraints of technology are the tightest. The imagination is powerful, and if you can use that to populate your world, just the smallest hint of a thing will be enough to fully flesh it out. When I played the tiny Gameboy version of Zelda (Link's Awakening), my imagination was the one providing the dreary, leaf-swamped forests, the sun-drenched plains, and the cold, steely dungeons.  

There are a lot of parallels between the bleary four shades of grey-green that Link's Awakening builds on and the shaky, barely textured polygons that Megaman Legends uses. On both the Gameboy and the Playstation, games appear to struggle just to paint pixels on the screen. It doesn't leave a lot of room for atmosphere-building--only the good games manage it. The secret, I think, is to stylise aggressively. Also, strict control of scope. So, two secrets: make the world stylised, keep the scope small, and make sure that detail is concentrated where the player is looking. Among the three secrets of atmospheric games are ...

Seriously, these are all one thing really. Find a fit between the hardware and the player's brain. Easier to do today, harder to do back then. Megaman Legends does it. The tradeoffs are draconian, and they weren't appreciated at the time, but I think they're the right ones for 3-D games on the Playstation. The biggest technique: reducing detail with draw distance, which is standard procedure now, but was rare at the time. Truth be told, the tradeoff is a little extreme. Small rooms are full of detail and actual clutter (a novelty for the Playstation). Big rooms are full of detail...in the immediate vicinity of the camera. About 10 meters away, a black fog makes the rest of the world invisible (note: sometimes it is a white fog). Face-to-face, the characters are the most detailed and animated on the Playstation. 10 meters away, they're a few big blocks stacked up.

Even though still screenshots make it look bad, it works better than you'd expect. The eye expects closer things to have more detail, even if the drop is extreme. The eye prefers to see real clutter instead of bare spaces, even if the clutter is 8-bit mysterious in its simplicity. ("Is that a key...or a clock?"). With most other Playstation games, you can tell that the game struggles just to put polygons on the screen. Megaman Legends, on the same hardware, has atmosphere.

So what does its atmosphere convey? Well, large parts of it are probably down to my imagination. Maybe you'll read its atmosphere differently. What I got was a sense of mystery at first. The world seemed designed for exploring; the beginning of Megaman Legends felt like the beginning of a Zelda game. But where a Zelda game spirals into a steady progression of tools and accomplishments, of dungeons completed and bosses defeated, Megaman Legends fosters a slow dread. Unlike Zelda, the dungeons aren't well-defined puzzle spaces--most are simple journeys to the bottom, then back again. Monstrous robots will try to kill you, because they guard some secret that no intruder must learn. Your weapons are puny and hard to aim. They are unreasonably powerful. You can see less than 10 meters. They lumber at you from the dark, audible long before they are visible. Killing them is hard, and often the only reward is money. No secrets: they die defending them, or the secrets never existed in the first place.

You quickly learn to fear any new noise in the dark. You can respond by ruthlessly grinding for money to upgrade weapons, or you can do what I did: get really twitchy and run away at every noise. Inch into rooms and jump back out if anything moves. Constantly dither between turning around and going deeper. Beat bosses by the skin of your teeth.

It's not clear whether this atmosphere happened by accident. I'm really tempted to say that it did, but I think I may be unfairly judging the Japanese game industry of the late 90s by the nearly-dead Japanese game industry of a decade later. You know what makes me decide that it was no accident? Another instance of genius--the control scheme. Seriously, the control scheme. Here we have another case of the game precisely fitting its limits--when Sony added two analogue sticks to the controller, Megaman Legends sprouted the same third person shooter controls that are used today. In 2000, the game had a control scheme that would be common by 2006.

So what happened after 2000? I titled this "Megaman Legends series" for a reason (though one reason is that I wanted to cheat and consider the best of both games at once). Capcom, after publishing the seeds of the modern third-person-shooter, abdicated to the West, which proceeded to incorporate all those seeds into the standard by 2006. Then in 2009 (or so), Inafuna, the creator, got a chance to make Megaman Legends 3.0. At least, I assume that this would have been a progressive, software-like refinement. It's possible that we would have gotten Megaman Legends: The Reboot. Of course this is all moot because Inafune left Capcom and Capcom canned the game. Inti Creates has made a number of Megaman spinoffs, but I don't think they will get the IP to Megaman Legends, so this really is the end.

Monster Tale is "evocative in a good way".

As Gabe says, the difference between an homage and a rip-off is whether or not I like it. Monster Tale is an homage to Castlevania and Metroid, plus a little Pokemon and Monster World. I liked it. It reminded me most of Symphony of the Night and Metroid Fusion.

Castlevania's levels are meant to be explored. They want to be explored. They're filled with the beautiful tension of enemies that mean to stop you (in the most ridiculous or undead way possible). With every new screen, you get to see a little more of the craziness that Dracula decided to pack his castle with. With every new screen, you may run out of health before finding the next save point. Symphony of the Night finds the best level of difficulty: every time the path forked, I stopped. I tried to guess which path led to a save point. And I debated whether to go back and save my exploration up to that point. It's no mistake that there's a huge exploration percent displayed on the map screen.

Compared to Castlevania, Metroid Fusion seems bossy. It's always telling you where to go, because Nintendo (unlike Konami) must have written down a policy early in the life of the GBA that games must be playable in 5-minute increments. That means a game that is not quite as mysterious as Super Metroid or Metroid Prime, both of which have the Valve Property: wandering around lost will get you where need to go--but it may take more than five minutes, and you may have a chance to absorb your surroundings first.

Like Fusion, Monster Tale sacrifices this organic mystery to 5-minute playtime, with the additional handicap that its target audience appears to be 5-year-olds. Not that a well-crafted Metroidvania can't get by without a good story (see: Portrait of Ruin, or, to a lesser extent, every Castlevania <i>ever</i>). Actually, Monster Tale is a lot like Portrait of Ruin in that its overall structure is a disconnected Mario-3-esque Theme World design. At least they aren't the literal Mario 3 Themes--instead of Desert/Water/Air/Ice we get Halloween/Runaway Train/Seaside/Club(?). I guess these Theme Worlds are places the authors think kids would enjoy, but like Portrait of Ruin, the Themes are skin deep coverings over level design that is actually a bit bland. A lot bland, if I'm being honest.

What saves Monster Tale is the difficulty. Although the target audience appears to be kids, the difficulty is aimed at, um, slightly older kids. Really, we were playing (and beating (some of us (not me))) games this hard by age 10 at least--Mario 3 is easily twice as hard. By modern standards, though, this is a hard game. I had to play four of the five bosses multiple times, learning patterns, fiddling with my pet to get the right combination of skills, balancing offence and defence. That's above average difficulty in today's world, especially for kids.

So parts of the world are Genuinely Dangerous, and health drops don't happen that often; I knew they had re-captured the Symphony of the Night feeling when I stopped for an internal debate at every fork in the road--which path seemed more likely to lead to a save point? Which would wear me down, kill me and waste my hours (5 minutes) of exploration? I could ignore the bland levels and haphazard enemy placement because I was having fun beating enemies and getting beaten. The enemy-juggling mini-game contributed to that, but it was mostly good old-fashioned meaty Castlevania Action.

Last, and actually pretty close to least, there's that Extra RPG Spice, permeating the gameplay like MSG whenever the actual flavour gets too boring. Here, the Spice is Pokemon, or something like it. Sure, it's manipulative, but watching your pet level gives the mind something to do when the body is backtracking through the lower-level parts of the world. Anyway, it's not completely straightforward--after I finished the game I visited gamefaqs and found out why some forms of pet never became available; the reason is that they have specific conditions besides "level up like crazy". So that's nice. It wasn't a lazy copout; they actually cared. In fact, most of the "innovation" in the game revolves around the pet, but it turns out most of the "fun" comes from core game copied from Metroid and Castlevania. Take that for what it's worth.

 

 

Machinarium is "professional".

There is a certain class of games that just make other games look amateur. "You can play around with your guess at 'fun'," they say with lordly caliber to other games, "but when you are done, the big boys will be over here with the quality." These are the kind of games that define a genre and spawn imitators. These are the kind of games that people will still play after the imitators are gone.

That's not to say that these games are perfect, but they exude so much confidence that we ignore their failings. They rewrite the rules for what a game in their genre has to be. Mario. Half-Life. Final Fantasy. Uncharted. Metal Gear. And, amazingly, sequels as well: Mario 3 and FF4, for example. (Maybe because the team didn't change between games, and they were brilliant TWICE?)

Without these games, a genre stagnates and falls into repetition. Look at JRPGs. For at least a decade, the only innovation there has been the guts to not have a spiky-haired, conflicted protagonist once in a while. Breaking with the mold isn't as exciting when you immediately pick up the previous mold. 

Western adventure games lacked confident games for almost a decade too--probably the confidence got worn down during the period when FMV adventures were supposed to be pretended to be good, then later when 3-D graphics were supposed to be pretended to be good (at that time, neither were, but nobody was allowed to say so). In the meantime, the good adventure games were the kind of innovators that boldly went back to non-3-D graphics and proceeded to nail one part of the old formula. Like Longest Journey, which did dialogue really really well. (And really really long.)

Machinarium defines the new standard for western adventure games. All adventure games after this must have a built-in hint system. Little puzzles scattered throughout. Maybe even wordless interaction.

More importantly, the reason that Machinarium is great is that it builds a world skillfully, like a pencil sketch, from a few well-placed lines. Despite the spare characterisation, the world is internally consistent. The game is funny, but lets the humour arise naturally from its whimsical world, not by making constant wisecracks. Every puzzle, even when it is frustratingly hard, is a delight to watch in motion.

Like other great games, the small points of brilliance outweigh the memory of the whole in my mind. Watching a robot use a ball-bearing pop-gun for target practise. Flooding a smoke-filled poker room. Refueling a diesel elevator from the kitchen food dispenser. Returning stolen instruments to a robotic jam session. Bringing a robotic greenhouse back to life.

Machinarium. If you haven't played it, you should.

(henceforth, New Mario)

New Mario is "Mario 3".

I'm not sure what to say about New Mario. It's not like Star Wars where the old is clearly better than the new, and only those unacquainted with the old say otherwise. New Mario is good. But the reason it's good is that it's the same as Mario 3 and Super Mario World (and to a lesser extent, Yoshi's Island).

New Mario is even more polished than those two old games, but otherwise there's nothing new. If you ever wished that Mario World just had a few more worlds, then New Mario is precisely for you. On the other hand, if you ever wished somebody would come up with the Next Thing after Mario World, you might be more interested in, say, Mario 64, Braid or Super Meat Boy. And if you wished you could just reclaim that feeling from childhood of spending hours with your cousin trying to beat world 3-2 in Mario 3...

Well, don't be an idiot, Nintendo SELLS Mario 3 on the Wii. Just buy that and play until you reach World 3-2! If you're the type that hasn't played games in twenty years, you'll probably start dying there just like you did as a kid.

This is the reason I dislike New Mario: it doesn't need to exist.The target audience is not the person who appreciates New Mario for what it is (more 2-D Mario levels), but the nostalgic who has forgotten that the Wii has a Virtual Console. Nintendo made New Mario solely because they would otherwise be selling Mario 3 for $5.

Disclaimer: The one new idea in New Mario, multiplayer, doesn't seem to work. I suffered through a five-minute griefing session on level 1 and a twenty minute attempt to two-player-coop through 1-1 to 1-4. That ended badly at the vertically scrolling section. If the top player gets too far ahead, the bottom dies unless he's quick enough to push A to bobble up and let the top player reach a stable platform. I learned about that trick after we burned through our 10 lives in 2 minutes. Tycho calls it marriage poison and I suspect he's right.

Disclaimer 2: Yes, I know there is a New Mario on the DS. It's a bit simpler than this New Mario. If you must you can pretend that the DS version is the moral equivalent of Mario 3 while the Wii version is the equivalent of Mario World. But that's kind of stupid.

Did I mentioned that Final Fantasy 13 is super long? I've spent over 12 hours at it now, and it still feels like it's just warming up. Here are some second impressions.

1. The game is drawn out. I can understand games that are long because they have to be long. But every linear area in FF13 has FOUR sections where one would do. If you weren't trying to give people their money's worth*, you wouldn't need to have your characters comment on the scenery in one section and then make them walk through an hour's worth more of it. I think this became prevalent around 2006 in games—I'm thinking specifically of FF12 and Zelda: Twilight Princess, both of which have the same problem.

2. It's STILL super linear and single-minded. Didn't earlier games have stuff to break up the monotony? Like, I just got to a part where you're trying to avoid soldiers. You'd think there'd be a sneaking game like in (say) FF6, FF7 and FF9. Not that I'm asking for a million mini-games, I guess. Just one or two that don't suck. Err, well, wait. Strike that. Just fix (1) and make the game shorter, so that if I want to play mini-games, I can play good ones like Tower Defence or Zelda Fishing For Idiots or whatever.

   All FF13 has to break up the monotony is flashbacks. And only one so far has been playable--it's like some manager said that FMV was to be minimised during gameplay, so they came up with flashbacks as a way to give the otherwise unemployable FMV artists something to do.

3. The battle system is still fun once you get used to it. Even two-character, while not as good as three-character, has a good amount of strategy once you figure out that you need to switch roles all the time.

   But the UI sucks. The most important things on-screen—the player health gauges, enemy health/stagger gauges, and active time gauges—all disappear during the fairly stupid role-switch animation. So if you're switching roles all the time like you should with two players, half the time you can't see if the boss is about to recover from stagger while you were off healing up. Also, if they were going to restrict the player to just four role combinations, a button-mapping would be easier to use than an ordered list. Even a Psychonauts-esque ring menu would be better, despite privileging the cardinal directions. Exciting menu-based combat, indeed.

   Besides that, the enemy health gauge is separate from the stagger gauge, and it moves around on-screen, and it's too hard to see whether you're making a dent, especially in bosses. The damage numbers that bounce all over the place are totally useless--I don't know how much health MY characters have, let alone some random enemy. The numbers are always changing/ratios staying the same so they are useless.

4. Compared with the other big/serious JRPG of this generation, Lost Odyssey, FF13 at least makes its combat hard in an interesting way instead of just cranking up the numbers on FF4 and saying "go grind for a while, sucka". (PS: Have there been any other big/serious/classical JRPGs this generation? All the rest are like Tales games and ripoffs thereof.) I've put in about the same amount of time into both so far, but I can't even bring myself to pick up the Lost Odyssey disc any more. FF13 is at least weirdly addictive even if it's not outright fun.

*Note: I did not and would not spend $60 on a Final Fantasy game. Don't be an idiot.

I mean, I've played 8 hours so far, but FF13 is surely super long, so I guess 8 hours only qualifies as 'first impressions'. Actually, the real reason is that I've read Real Reviews that view the game as a two-part contrast between a restrictive/single-path/one-world-government and a wide-open/lawless/chaos. I haven't got to the second part yet, so I can only talk about the restrictive single-path side. Or something. If I didn't know about the two-half structure, I'd say the first 8 hours are just a bad remake of FFX ("hold up and tap X to complete game").

Overall, the best part of the game is the battle system. The rest is a mitigated disaster. Face it: JRPGs have some systemic problems, and any JRPG that isn't crazy innovative will share those problems. FF13 is innovative, but not crazy innovative. You'll have to look elsewhere for that. (Hint: Elsweyr is across the Pacific in Maryland)

But first, the battle system. It's quirky and fun. The basic idea is that you are boosting enemies' combo gauges without letting your gauges falling to zero. The names are shockingly unrelated, so I can't remember the actual names, although I'm pretty sure Your Gauge is called HP. To max out the enemy combo gauge, you choose one set of roles, and to avoid dying, you choose another set of roles. Swap as needed. Of course there are variations and complexities, and that's what makes it fun after the first two hours.

It's pretty obvious that they were going for something that mixed the best aspects of the last few iterations of the Final Fantasy battle system, which were all quite different. On the surface, the result looks like it has the automatic management of FF12, the fast pace and role changes of FFX-2 and the single-minded emphasis of FFX (on combos, not precise ordering). But it actually feels quite different. Actually, wait, no, it doesn't. When the battle system is being boring (eg with only one or two characters, see below), it feels like FFX-2. When it's most interesting, it actually does feel like it balances the fast auto-battle of FF12 with the strategy of FFX. All in all, a success. (I still like FF12 better because I'm a programmer--who can resist an ordered rule engine?)

The story is pretty awful. All the characters are so far caricatures, and they're unreliable, switching from caricature to caricature. Well, except for Vanille, who is a caricature of a psychotic. At least she's a consistently psychotic caricature. The story has three stereotypical JRPG problems: bad writing (or whatever those caricatures are—it's hard to imagine them being intentional), story/gameplay mismatch and fake anime depth, where the writers imagine that talking about very deep subjects in a shallow way somehow makes the story have meaning. Only people who haven't seen many good stories will be able to ignore these problems.

FFX had these problems too, but managed to transcend them by telling a good story. Also, most of FFX's characters were interesting, even if they were unlikeable. Except Lulu and Kimahri. Actually I think they must have had six characters by gameplay fiat, because they could easily have ditched Lulu and probably Kimahri and the story would have been stronger. I mean, Braska had two guardians. Yuna had five. No wonder she was the one to finally defeat Sin.

But I digress. Note how FFX's story, while intrinsically hoky, is at least interesting enough to talk about (a little). FF13's is a wash. Compared to FFX and FF12, this story exudes much more a T for Teen vibe: it's all about boringly saving the world, and dude the government is evil, and everybody is a parody of themselves and in the first two hours you have three women in your party wearing bikinis/miniskirts. The heroine, who wears slightly more than Lara Croft, is on the conservatively-dressed side of things. (This is presumably because she is a member of SOLDIER or whatever the acronym is this time around.) It feels to me like Square decided to refocus on the teen audience over the slightly more ambitious goal of 18-24 for FFX. At best, the result is an exaggerated copy of FF7, but if you don't feel so forgiving, it's an amalgamation of the Most Average JRPG Anime Stories of the 90s.

So, I'm reviewing this as an adult, and overall I'm bored and a little insulted. Find a review by a Japanese teen to see if they satisfied their audience, I guess. (Note: I want to reiterate that previous Final Fantasies were not all that much better in this regard.)

Finally, as a nitpick, there's this annoying point-of-view switch happening every twenty minutes. It actually wouldn't be so annoying if I didn't care about the story at all AND if the game designers didn't use it as an excuse to constantly swap which two-person party I use in battle. The battle system is the most fun with three people, so this two-person business just makes stretches of the game more tedious.

Another nitpick I have is the low framerate and logy camera. The only time the camera moves quickly is when you turn completely around. Besides making the scenery less fun to gawk at, this combination makes preemptive strikes impossible. You're supposed to play the badly implemented sneaking mini-game to get preemptive strikes, but the camera is much more interested in getting a good view of the player character than the surrounding enemies. Furthermore, when you mess up and flee, the camera swings around wildly, trying to figure out why you would TURN AROUND I mean seriously what is so hard about "press up and tap X to win"? Then the enemy attacks and you don't get your preemptive strike so you start tapping X even when the active time bar is still filling up and pretty soon you win.

Limbo is "twenty-year old transparencies that didn't even have the roach droppings swept off" I hate the genre "puzzle platformer", because there are only like 8 games in the genre, and they mostly all start with "Prince of Persia" or "Oddworld". It's one of those stunted genres like twin-stick shooters that's really a sub-genre of a larger genre of no-longer-fun games, and whose creators aren't creative enough to do more than copy the one game that actually was fun. Limbo is, at its heart, exactly this: just another puzzle platformer. You traipse along, getting killed every ten feet. Sometimes, you'll push a box along. Others, you'll jump a pit just before the slavering monster grabs you. There's even some jumping from column to column over spike pits. Still, I like Limbo. The gameplay isn't really the point. The atmosphere is. And the graphics. The graphics are good. I mean really good. It's the first non-realistic game in over a decade where I've said "How did they DO that?". The game looks like it's running on twenty-year old transparencies that didn't even have the roach droppings swept off before being projected on the stained walls of a sweltering research facility somewhere in Central America. Actually, the atmosphere is really supported mostly by the graphics. There are a few nice ambient uses of sound, but the gameplay doesn't support the atmosphere in the way that, say, Braid or Portal's gameplay does. Put down in print, that sounds bad, but trust me: the graphics are really good. The well-drawn environments outweigh any lack of depth they have. (And, still, it doesn't hurt that the later puzzles are pretty good.) Still, my feeling is that Limbo will not last as well as Braid, if we were to start comparing. Braid made an artistic statement using all aspects of the video game, including the heart: interactivity. It will be a game people still recommend 10 years from now. Limbo's innovation is much more surface style, and I think in 10 years it will be mostly of historical interest as the artsy puzzle platformer that came right at the end of the photorealistic era. In my opinion, that's better than Abe's Oddysee, which is now best known as the artsy puzzle game that came right at the end of the pre-rendered 3D era. Why better? Abe's Oddysee was one of the *last* pre-rendered games. Limbo is one of the *first* of what I hope is a wave of non-realistic style.

Spirit Tracks is "Zelda for kids".

On the one hand, Zelda was originally for kids. It's just that I'm not a kid any more. I like Zelda, but when a sequel comes out, I want to see a new take on the old formula. That was the high point of Twilight Princess (though it wasn't very high&mdash;it wasn't as original as Ocarina of Time). I mean, It's cool that Zelda is finally an NPC in Spirit Tracks. But she's basically Navi, reminding me of things I already know; and have known for the last two decades. Actually, she's more like the fairy from Majora's Mask (Twingli? Zwingli?), in that she also has an annoying personality in addition to giving chatty reminders. It's a pretty good game, but it assumes you haven't seen it all before. If you have played another Zelda, there are some changes, but it's overwhelmingly a Safe Sequel.

Games are largely software, so sometimes you don't need to change the narrative. Instead you get improvements in graphics, usability, scope or level design. See for example the Elder Scrolls series. But Zelda technology and usability haven't improved since Wind Waker, and that was small and incremental over Ocarina of Time, and THAT was because they were solving all new problems in 3D. In this case, this is not Wind Waker 2.1. It's just Wind Waker 1.0, DS, 2nd release. Cool if you're 13, boring if you're 31.

On the other hand, there are some real problems with this game. It's formulaic: there are four sections, unveiled discretely one at a time. You never get to visit two screens worth of the next section while exploring the current one (the 90s Zeldas did this; it makes exploration more interesting). The exploration isn't as organic, because there is such a huge distinction between travelling segments and town segments, as well as town segments and dungeon segments. Because of the huge travelling distinction, you are unlikely to be walking by a place and notice that you now have the tools to get there. It's all explicit backtracking. I guess they wanted you to use the note-taking feature the DS makes possible.

On the gripping hand, you could look at most changes as just .. changes. They're there. They're kind of what I asked for, but .. uh .. they're not <i>better</i>. Just different. For example, the side quests are not collecting random things in the overworld (no overworld, see). They're fetch quests for people. There are only two things to find in dungeons, the boss key and a new weapon. Specific obstacles are super telegraphed: there is ONE specific structure that you can swing on, and it always looks exactly the same. That's good for game design, bad for interestingness.

The dungeon puzzles are pretty good. I would say better than Phantom Hourglass, but that's also because there aren't any more repetitious segments: the dungeons are better designed for mobile play. I was finishing my dissertation while playing Spirit Tracks, and you can solve a floor or so of a dungeon in 20-30 minutes, then put the game down. The dungeons are designed so that a solved floor can be mostly skipped, so it's easy to come back the next day and continue.

Overall, the game is good, probably higher quality than Phantom Hourglass, despite being even less creative. Its overall structure is a formulaic copy, and you probably won't enjoy it much unless you can pour hours and hours in to explore every little cranny. Even then you won't enjoy it a <i>lot</i> unless this is the first time you've done that for a Zelda game. And I already did that for Link's Awakening, which, by the way, is also much better designed. The bottom line is that it just makes me want to switch from my DS to my old GBA, which now has Link's Awakening DX permanently embedded in it.

Actually, I think I'll go do that.

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Post-script: You know how I said that you need to pour a lot of time into Spirit Tracks to get real enjoyment out of it? Isn't that what Nintendo is all about: making games that are fun to pick up and play without a personal investment? So why are so many of their games NOT like that? Zelda hasn't been pick-up-and-play fun since it switched to 3D. Anyway, come to think of it, maybe that's just my bias from playing the 2D ones as a kid. Maybe even they weren't that good. See? This is what I hate about bad sequels: they make you doubt your enjoyment of the earlier games. I wish we could declare the era of Games As Software over and tell game designers to stop making sequels.