Mile
Zero

There are three consoles stacked behind our TV. They're the retro platforms: my SuperNES and Dreamcast, and Belle's PS2. I think they're hooked up, but I can't honestly remember, because I rarely turn them on or dig out any of the games that go with them. They just sit back there, collecting dust and gradually turning yellow in the sun, like little boxes of electric guilt. I'm almost starting to hate them.

Most people probably have a media backlog of some kind: books they haven't gotten around to reading, movies they haven't had time to watch, music they can't give the attention it might deserve. But I think gamers have it worst of all, for two reasons. First, the length of the average game, especially older games, is a huge obstacle to completion. Second, there's a lot of hassle involved for anything going back more than a generation.

Belle and I are trying to reduce our physical footprint, so having to keep older consoles around "just in case" grates, but emulation's a mixed bag even when it works. Worse, I have a really difficult time tossing old games that I haven't finished: how could I get rid of Virtual On, Chu Chu Rocket, or Yoshi's Island? Those are classics! I'm also prone to imagine unlikely scenarios during which I'll finish a game or two--my favorite is probably "oh, I'll play that when I get sick one day" as if I were in grade school, a plan that ignores the fact that I'm basically a workaholic. If I'm sick enough to stay home, I'm probably too ill to do anything but lay in bed and moan incoherently.

Having realized that I have a problem, one solution is simply to attack it strategically--if I can only decide what that strategy would be. Should I work backward, from newest to oldest? Or start from the SuperNES and go forward through each platform, gradually qualifying each one for storage? Clearly, the "play at random" approach is not narrowing my collection with any great success.

There is, however, another option, and ultimately it's probably for the better: to simply accept that the backlog is not a moral duty. I don't have to play everything. I think gaming culture is very bad about this: the fact that many gamers grew up with certain titles lends them a nostalgic credibility that they probably don't entirely deserve. And frankly, if the titles I'm considering were that compelling, I wouldn't have to force myself to go back and play them.

I'm hardly the only gamer I know caught between practicality and sentiment. The one plan that would unify both would be digital distribution on a neutral platform--the current XBox and Wii emulations fall far short of this, since they just lock my classic games to a slightly newer console. I'd love to see a kind of "recycling" program, where I could return old cartridges in exchange for discounts on legitimate ports or emulations on a service like Steam or Impulse. After all, even without the trade-in value, I sometimes buy Steam copies of games I already own just because I know they'll then be available to me, forever, without taking up any physical space.

Game publishers probably won't go for that plan. I can hardly blame them: the remake business, just as with the "high-def remaster" film business, is no doubt a profit machine for them. But I don't think it'll last forever. Just as I buy fewer movies these days, since I'd rather stream from Netflix or rent from Amazon Digital, the writing is probably on the wall for buying software in boxes. That won't eliminate the backlog--but it'll certainly clear up the space behind my TV set.

Our cat will be thrilled.

I always kind of hoped that they'd never release Duke Nukem Forever. It was like the game industry's version of The Aristocrats: this protracted, ostensibly-unfunny period of anticipation that became more and more amusing the longer they insisted that there would be an actual game produced at some point. After 3D Realms went kaput, publishers could have traded the title amongst themselves every few years without any intention of actually, you know, publishing it. Just to keep the joke alive, they'd change formats every few years--now it's a flight sim! A platformer! A hybrid of RTS and five-card stud poker! For people like me who played Duke3D in high school, it would be a kind of warm, nostalgic touchstone.

Unfortunately, Forever is getting a not-a-joke release this year by Gearbox, and that means we have to be reminded of how unbelievably stupid its predecessor really was--a legacy Forever seems intent on continuing (my favorite part of the linked article, in which it's explained that there will be a "capture the hysterical stripper" mode in the game: "Expect outrage from the mainstream media." Well, yeah. As there should be.) Enter the Suck Fairy, stage left.

Hey, I thought Duke3D was hilarious: the one-liners ripped out of cult action movies, the pig cops (see, they're cops--who are pigs!), the seedy locales filled with pixelated women. I was also fifteen years old. These days it's just cringe-worthy. And kind of sad, when you think about a team of forty people all working hard to build a seedy, low-fi red light district. It's true that the game was a work of shaggy creativity in multiplayer, but we forget how much of that was true of the unpolished genre of the time: Heretic let you turn your enemies into chickens with a "peck" attack, after all. Gameplay doesn't excuse content.

Duke Nukem Forever probably won't be the dumbest thing released this year, or even the most offensive. Frankly, I have difficulty getting up the energy to even be annoyed at a franchise that's so obviously lazy. But I wish they'd just be honest about it. You don't see the writers on Epic Movie insisting that their tedious, offensive film actually draws attention to the problems of sexism and plagiarism, but that's exactly what Gearbox has done with Forever: they've claimed that it's a net positive for society if women's groups get some publicity out of Duke's misogyny. On an unrelated note, the Arsonists' League of America apologizes if they set your home on fire, but you have to admit: it really drew attention to the problem of arson-related crime in this country.

Back when I was in college, I bought a Dreamcast and a copy of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, and played a metric ton with my roommates. We actually maxed out the "time played" counter at 99 hours that summer. The thing about MvC2 is that it looks like a button-masher, but if you're at all competitive (and we were), it becomes a gateway to systematic obsession with the underlying mechanics of Capcom fighters. The Dreamcast was also the first chance I'd really had to experience the SNK style of fighting game, via Garou: Mark of the Wolves. You couldn't pick two more extreme examples, really: one being a hyperkinetic display of increasingly ridiculous special moves, while the other featured a slower, tactical focus on basic technique executed well.

Super Street Fighter IV falls as much on the SNK side as Capcom is likely to get, post-Third Strike. It's slower and more deliberative than previous iterations, with a greater emphasis on basic moves, and the dual special meters (Capcom loves special meters like Square loves RPG menus) serve to keep matches unpredictable by linking one to offense and the second (more powerful) meter to damage taken. Several of the new characters (Juri and C. Viper in particular) have a very SNK-like flavor, both in their character designs and the feel of their special moves. They also borrowed the "ridiculously cheap final boss" design, although he's toned down markedly from the non-Super version of the game.

Maybe they didn't borrow enough, though. SSIV is apparently meant to be a reboot of the series for the kind of people who, unlike me, are not interested in the nuts and bolts--the kind of people who have no idea that there are 2D fighters that aren't Street Fighter. But that isn't actually backed up by its execution. Part of what I liked about the SNK fighters is that they were diverse in character style, and special moves were almost consciously depowered. SSIV, on the other hand, continues Capcom's love affair with the Ryu/Ken shotokan move set: fully a quarter of the characters are variations on this basic template (seven, if you include Sagat). There are a lot of multi-button special triggers, some of which are overloaded (a two-button chord fires a different move than three buttons), which makes it easy to whiff on the intended move. Plus, I've got a pretty good history with the series, and I still can't pull off half of the super combos consistently, particularly the charge-based ones. I can't imagine a real newcomer jumping in without a lot of frustration.

If I were designing a casual fighter for the home console crowd (and, let's be honest: given the decline of arcade gaming, that's what they're doing here), it seems to me like the first priority would be to drop the classic six-button layout and switch to the MvC2 four-button scheme. There hasn't been a common controller on the market with six face buttons since the Genesis, and using long-throw triggers for basic attacks in Street Fighter is a timing disaster. SFIV uses all six buttons, combining them with some directional movement for alternate attacks, which is a lot for ordinary people to grasp. Although I don't typically enjoy 3D fighters, this is one thing that they got right.

And then I would think very carefully about what a "casual" 2D fighter actually means. It would be great for such a game to introduce new players to the actual, hidden dynamics of a "fighting" game: control of space, timing, priority, and reading your opponent. Piling on with a second (segmented) super meter, two-button counters and specials, and motions like "↓↘→↓↘→PPP" overcomplicates matters. It seems like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too--taking out "advanced" (but easy-to-understand) mechanics like parries and air-blocking, but refusing to cut back on years of tournament-player feature-creep (EX cancels and specials, for example). The result seems "casual" to critics and long-time players, but it's really no more accessible than it's ever been.

Some other random thoughts:

• Surely, at some point during the conversion from 2D sprites to 3D models, it must have occurred to someone on the staff that Sakura's "fetish schoolgirl" outfit and stalker schtick are incredibly creepy and revealing about the people who created them. Cammy should also maybe put some pants on.
• Likewise, to modern eyes there's really no excuse for blatant-stereotypes-turned-characters like T. Hawk (stoic, leather-and-warpaint-wearing Native American) and Dee Jay (maraca-shaking, breakdancing Jamaican).
• It's definite now: the worst part about playing Street Fighter is, in my opinion, the shotokan characters: Ryu, Ken, and their variations. It's not just that there's too many of them (with Sakura being the rare version that actually feels different). It's that in mid-level play, they're just way too dominant. As I said above, fighting games are not really about simulating a fight. They're about control of space and timing, and anticipating your opponent's actions. At heart, each character represents a set of tools for accomplishing that task--some through projectiles, some through close-in attacks and throws, other via high-priority combos.

  Usually those strengths get countered with weaknesses, like a lack of long-range attacks or a difficult joystick motion. But a shoto character is all strengths: they've got a projectile (fireball), a high-priority close-in attack with anti-air and reversal (dragon punch), and a screen-covering travel attack (hurricane kick). That combination makes it easy to set traps and take control of a match. For more than a decade, a large part of the Street Fighter metagame has been devoted to overcoming the generic shotokan character, and it bores me senseless.

Wet is one of those cases where there are interesting things to say about it, but the game itself is not actually very interesting. I feel much the same way about Kill Bill, one of Wet's obvious inspirations: there's a lot of very good commentary on the films, and they serve as a vast trivia nexus for aficianados, but as actual movies they still bore me senseless.

There was a lively comment thread on The Border House a little while back, when Wet protagonist Rubi Malone was included in a list of "disappointing characters." The conversation went something like this:

• For whatever reasons, Rubi is incredibly unlikeable. It would be nice if she had a redeeming quality or two.
• On the other hand, it's pretty sexist to insist that she show some kind of overt "vulnerability" or "kindness" when the landscape is littered with unlikeable, psychopathic male characters who do no such thing.
• In other words, to what extent would someone's reaction to Rubi be different if she were cast as male? Or if she were surrounded by a wider range of well-written female protagonists?

To be fair, those are better games with better production values, and that makes it a lot easier to ignore their sins and suffer through their cutscenes, much the same way that someone could enjoy superhero movies while still remaining aware of their numerous philosophical shortcomings. Gears of War may be a gynophobic, racist, power fantasy, but it's a polished game that's painstakingly animated and (despite a paper-thin plot) features good writing and well-directed voice acting. Eliza Dushku, on the other hand, seems to be a very nice actress stuck in "menacing femme fatale" roles after her stint on Dollhouse. As Rubi, she's stunt-cast into a role for which she's not particularly well-suited, represented onscreen by a jittery marionette, and apparently not given much direction. Even Jennifer "the real Commander Shepherd" Hale would have trouble selling the character under those circumstances.

So it doesn't help that Wet is mechanically and technically poor. The controls are imprecise (although I do like the guns-akimbo aiming mechanism) and the slow-motion feels half-baked. Its main gimmick is that it looks and feels like 70's exploitation cinema--all film grain and blood spurts. This is another a callback to Tarantino (or more accurately, co-director Robert Rodriguez and Planet Terror). But part of the pleasure of watching Grindhouse's double feature was the painstaking craftsmanship put to the service of cheap, disposable cinema--it functioned as both an example of, and a tribute to, its subject matter (it doesn't hurt that Death Proof is some of Tarantino's best work). When the game looks cheap because it is cheap, the joke is ruined.

Wet doesn't quite manage a perfect mimicry of celluloid, but more importantly there's no artfulness to it. In his review of Kill Bill Vol. 1, Roger Ebert noted that "for [Tarantino], all shots in a sense are references to other shots -- not particular shots from other movies, but archetypal shots in our collective moviegoing memories." In contrast, Wet is a game that features overcooked settings like a Hong Kong temple and a British mansion, but it doesn't have anything to say about them--they're just there. Same for the vintage concession stand ads that play between levels, or the obligatory smashable crates: there's nothing about these inclusions that's more than surface deep, so they never transcend cliche.

I do find the idea of "grindhouse" in games fascinating. For one thing, it's interesting to see one medium satirize another (see also: the use of video game culture in the Scott Pilgrim comic, and then again--in completely different ways--in the film). On the other hand, there's already a lo-fi gaming aesthetic for developers to call upon for self-parody. Nobody's done this better in the past few years than the original No More Heroes--an overstuffed melange of 8-bit graphics, hideously tiled textures, ridiculous boss fights, and Star Wars jokes. It wasn't a better game than Wet, really, but it had a sense of perspective, and that made a world of difference.

So where does that leave Wet? Unrecommended, certainly. But maybe that's what makes it useful for criticism. In better games, the violence and aggression of the main characters gets buried under a gloss of high production values and the well-worn cliche of Yet Another Space Marine. Maybe it takes a game like Wet--a game that gender-swaps the main character, that controls like Tomb Raider crossed with Tony Hawk--to make it a little more obvious just how much we accept the mediocre in interactive narratives.

Like I said, it's not a very good game. But it is, from the right point of view, interesting despite itself.

One of Belle's favorite hobbies is to take a personality test (such as the Meyers-Briggs) once every couple of months. She makes me take the same test, and then she reads our results aloud. The description for her type never explicitly says "finds personality test results comforting," but it probably should. I'm skeptical of the whole thing, frankly, but then someone with my personality type would be.

I found myself thinking about profiles after having a conversation with a friend about the appeal of Diablo (or lack thereof). I understand the theory behind the Diablo formula--combining the random reward schedule of an MMO with a sense of punctuated but constant improvement--but games based on this structure (Torchlight, Borderlands) leave me almost entirely unmoved.

For better or worse, game design increasingly leverages psychological trickery to keep players interested. I think Jonathan Blow convincingly argues that this kind of manipulation is ethically suspect, and that it displays a lack of respect for the player as a human being But perhaps it's also an explanation for why Diablo doesn't click for me, but other people obsess over it: we've got different personality profiles.

I think the idea of a Meyers-Briggs profile for game design is kind of a funny idea. So as a thought exercise, here's a quick list I threw together of personality types, focused mainly on psychological exploits common in game design. I figure most people--and most games--have a mix of these, just in larger or smaller proportions. Some of them may even overlap a little.

• Completionist: Enjoys the feeling of finishing all items in a list of goals. Probably has sub-categories, depending on the type of task required (story-related, achievement-based, simple collection).
  Prototypical games: Pokemon, Crackdown, Donkey Kong Country
• Storyteller: Enjoys the creation of emergent stories, particularly in sandbox-type games. These can range from actual narratives, to the construction of Rube Goldberg-like scenarios within the rules and physics of the game world, or simply games that offer "great moments" during regular play.
  Prototypical games: The Sims, Minecraft, Deus Ex
• Audience: Enjoys playing through a linear story. Would, if all else were equal, be just as happy watching a really good movie.
  Prototypical games: JRPGs, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, adventure games
• Explorer: Enjoys finding new locations and entities inside the game world. Prefers expanse and novelty to either realism or deep-but-restricted scenarios.
  Prototypical games: Metroid, Castlevania, Fallout
• Grinder: Enjoys the process of slowly improving an avatar, either by levelling up or obtaining new equipment, or both. Becomes invested in the game as a long-term product of effort, creating an artifact that's a source of pride.
  Prototypical games: World of Warcraft, Diablo, Borderlands
• Mechanic: Enjoys figuring out, then mastering, the underlying gameplay system, even if that limits the overall scope of the game. Prefers rulesets that are predictable, and "levelling the player" over increasing an avatar's stats.
  Prototypical games: Street Fighter, Team Fortress 2, Legend of Zelda
• Munchkin: Like a mechanic, but with an emphasis on learning how to break/exploit the system. Ranges from people who read David Sirlin's "Playing to Win" and loved every word, to people who just like turning on cheat codes in GTA and seeing how far they can get in the tank.
  Prototypical games: sandbox games, broken games, broken sandbox games, Marvel Vs. Capcom
• Competitor: Enjoys being ranked against other players, either AI or human. Likes the interplay of competition and cooperation, and prefers "winning" to simply "finishing."
  Prototypical games: Halo, Geometry Wars, Defcon
• Partier: Enjoys playing with other players, particularly in single-couch co-op. More interested in an enjoyable play session than "winning" the game.
  Prototypical games: Rock Band, Mario Party, Wii Sports
• Thinker: Enjoys making comprehensive strategic decisions, often at a slower pace. Not necessarily a wargamer, but often is.
  Prototypical games: Advance Wars, Defense Grid, Age of Empires
• Buttonmasher: Enjoys reflex-based games that offer a lot of rapid stimulation. Not necessarily a shooter fan, but often is.
  Prototypical games: Ikaruga, Super Mario, Demon's Souls

There's probably a good way to simplify these, or sort them into a series of binaries or groups, if you wanted to make it more like a legitimate personality quiz. Still, looking over this list, I do feel like it's better at describing my own tastes than a simple list of genres. I think I rank high for Audience, Mechanic, and Buttonmasher, and low for Storyteller, Completionist, and Grinder--makes sense for someone who loves story-driven FPS and action-RPGs, but generally dislikes open-world games and dungeon crawlers.

Such a list certainly helps to describe how I approach any given title: concentrating more on getting through the narrative and learning the quirks of the system, less on grabbing all the achievements or experimenting with the environment. I almost wish reviewers ranked themselves on a system like this--it'd make it a lot easier to sort out whether my priorities sync with theirs.

In general, I agree with Blow: the move toward psychological manipulation as a part of game design is at best something to be approached with great caution. At worst, it's actually dangerous--leading to the kinds of con-artistry and unhealthy addiction in Farmville and (to a lesser extent) WoW. I don't think we can eliminate these techniques entirely, because they're part of what makes gaming unique and potentially powerful. But it would probably be a good idea to understand them better, and package them in a way that people can easily learn to be aware of them, similar to the ways that we teach kids about advertising appeals now. After all, as other sectors adopt "gamification," industry-standard psychological manipulation is only going to get more widespread.

For every form of media, there are certain works that are considered essential for cultural literacy: albums, books, or films that are so influential or important to the development of the art form, a well-rounded critic should at least have glanced at them. You don't have to like them, but they're part of the zeitgeist. The same is true for gaming, I think. Maybe it hasn't had its version of The Wire yet, but there's no arguing that there are certain canonical games that you're supposed to have played.

Is Planescape: Torment one of those titles? Many people would probably say yes. I'm not sure, but I do know that I feel guilty for quitting it. Not enough to keep struggling through it, unfortunately, but guilty nonetheless. Parts of Torment are still brilliant--they make it obvious why so many people speak of the game in such reverent tones. But those pieces are wrapped in a design that has aged poorly (and it wasn't much to write home about even then).

Let's get the positives out of the way first. More than anything else, Torment's writing is fantastic. It has to be decent, since the game's graphics are crude (evocative, but crude), and there are no cutscenes or close-up shots (everything takes place from a 3/4 perspective). But the writers turned that limitation into a legitimate strength: the world and characters they describe are bizarre, comical, tragic, and rich. Even in the first few hours, they toss out more ideas than most games contain in their entirety: an underground town of well-adjusted undead, sorcery made of blood and thorns, and a main character whose body is a gnarled mess of tattoos and scars. It's hard to imagine how someone could create the kind of imagery in polygons that they accomplish with a little prose, particularly given the technology of the day.

The other thing Torment does right is to completely ignore conventional wisdom on death and experience for an RPG of the time. The Nameless One cannot die by conventional means. This makes for some fun story moments--rummaging around inside your own body for items, waking up in the morgue, using your own severed arm as a club--and if he's killed in combat, he wakes up a few feet away. As someone who hates dying in an RPG and realizing that my last save was two hours ago, I think this is brilliant. I also think it's brilliant that making clever dialog and story choices earns an order of magnitude more experience than fighting. That's a clear declaration of what's important in Torment: story, not swordplay.

But if they were willing to undermine that much of the traditional RPG design, it is simply beyond me why they didn't jettison the rest. If you're going to remove the punishment of combat death, not to mention making it largely unrewarding to fight in the first place, why keep it around at all? Why make me struggle with inventory and healing? Obviously their heart wasn't in it, but they couldn't bring themselves to anger the nerds by dropping it completely.

It's clever to make dialog count for extra experience points as an incentive. It's hateful, on the other hand, to abuse that incentive by restricting dialog choices based on the character's attribute scores. At that point, you're punishing the player for thinking that their choices during the game are meaningful, when really it was the first decision they made--assigning points during character creation--that determines success. The result is profoundly, deeply frustrating: I met a riddling skeleton, for example, but I'm not even given a chance to solve his riddles, because my scores have already determined that I'm not smart enough.

That was pretty much the point where I closed the game and put the disc away for the forseeable future, incidentally.

If only this game had been made a few years later (when RPGs started to become a more fluid genre), or a few years earlier (when adventure games were still profitable). If only it weren't shackled to the Baldur's Gate-derived, AD&D-centric Infinity Engine, or maybe if it could have been made by an indie team willing to shoulder a few more risks. There's a fantastic SCUMM-style puzzler somewhere in Torment, but it's buried under mountains of system and cruft. As it is, I know why this game is important. I know why people like it. But I can't bring myself to start it up again.

Literally the second thing you see after booting up Final Fantasy XIII, immediately following the Square-Enix logo, is a message asking you to "Press any button to continue." This is before you get to the title screen, mind you--before you have even mentally registered that the game could be asking you for input. It ambushes you, frankly. I thought it was a joke at first. It's not. The reward for pressing any button--for me that's the A button, being an XBox gamer by way of Nintendo, instead of whatever wacky "continue" button location Sony started using for the Playstation--is another OK-only dialog asking you to pick a location for your saved games. I don't have a memory card or anything in my XBox, so there's only one possible storage location.

That's three button presses, and no actual choices, in the first minute. First fifteen seconds, if you've seen this before and just hammer your way through it.

The Final Fantasy games have never been about open worlds and nonlinear choice, but they've at least maintained the illusion that the player has options. The thirteenth outing drops all those pretensions. It combines save points with shops and upgrade stations, so there's no side trips. It puts levelling up right in the pause menu. As of the ninth chapter (out of 13), every level is practically a straight-ahead corridor, with a handy automap that reminds you which way to run in case you forget. It is, in other words, lots of button presses, and no actual choices.

This extends to the new fight system as well, which features no small amount of hot A button action, usually to select "auto-battle" for a single character (the others are controlled by the AI). Eventually, Square introduces a "Paradigm" strategy layer on top of all the auto-battling, where you get to choose between different roles (tank, healer, mage, etc.) for party characters, but even granting that complication this is a game that my dog could probably play, if I could just train him to press the big green button on the fighting stick. And then he could play Tekken, too, which would be good for a laugh.

I've played a fair amount of this game while on a week's vacation, in between dance practice and dog walks, and at times it almost seems like it was satire. But it's Square, so of course it's hopelessly self-important. The writing's incoherent, the characters are shallow, the voice acting is sometimes flat, and the cosmology is vastly overcomplicated. If it were any more deadpan, we'd have to check for rigor mortis. On the other hand, I'm still playing and will probably finish this weekend, so it must be doing something right. Not that it would take much: bear in mind, I watch low-budget SciFi channel movies for fun.

I think what fascinates me about FF XIII is the ornery throwback quality of it all. In ruthlessly trimming everything about the game down to the very core of JRPG-ness, Square has made the game more streamlined--easing players gently from one barely-distinguishable fight to the next with only the occasional video clip to separate them--but also made it clear how little their conception of a "video game" has evolved. For all its sound and fury, the result is about two menus (and oh, how Square loves their menus still) away from Chrono Trigger.

There are some great games in my collection that you couldn't have done on a Super NES. Rock Band and Guitar Hero wouldn't work without higher-capacity media. Sands of Time really needs 3D to sell its acrobatic puzzles. And it's hard to imagine Burnout without the hyper-realistic, slow-motion car crashes. But there's very little in this Final Fantasy, apart from the admittedly-gorgeous art direction, that wouldn't play equally well in 16-bits or less.

And so ultimately, FF XIII occupies a weird space. It's clearly an incredibly expensive game in terms of production values. It's a continuation of one of the most well-respected video game franchises in existence. It's a certain amount of fun to play. And yet, if I were a complete stranger to gaming culture, I have no idea how I would react to this odd combination of lavish graphics, active time battles, and simple menu trees--a distillation of old-school RPG mechanics in a shiny new shell. I suppose I'd just have to press the A button, until it told me to stop.

The Internet has many virtues (and no small number of vices), but its most surprising effect has been the way it has made research both easy and addictive. While you have to be critical of what you read, of course, at no other time in our history has it been easier to scarf down information like a big bowl of knowledge-flavored ramen.

But this is mainly useful for certain types of knowledge--mainly intellectual, abstract data. For example, when I was in high school I decided to learn how to play the harmonica, which is not a skillset that you can really pick up from written description (although I certainly spent enough time on the HARP-L list, just in case). Likewise, I may have mentioned my recent interest in breakdancing--you can watch a lot of videos and read a lot of forum posts, but I think that's a relatively ineffective way to learn. I don't mean to say that online communities for these activities are useless, because they have value in other ways. But for concrete tasks, you can't beat physical instruction.

So anyway, I'm kind of intrigued by Kinect (and, to a lesser extent, the Playstation Move/Eye or the Wii remote/balance board combinations). We have been working for a while now toward a world where we can query the Internet's store of information based on a macro-level location in space and time, via smartphones. Inventions like Google's local search, and to a lesser degree Foursquare or Yelp, add geographic location to human input. Kinect and its brethren, on the other hand, are attempts to turn the perspective around: interaction based on the topology of the user's body itself.

These early attempts are primitive. They'll be used in crude ways, for gaming and parlor tricks, and they'll have limitations like Kinect's inability to handle prone positions and relatively low resolution. But think of the potential here one that's only hinted at in Harmonix's Dance Central. Among other things, real motion interfaces are a first step toward extending the tremendous communication and educational value of the Internet out into the realm of physical movement. Imagine an educational program for athletic skills that could see your movements, compare them to a model, and tell you how to correct them--or a video chat session with a teacher who could walk "around" to critique your technique in 3D space. Even if it were non-interactive, this could have real advantages--I'd love to have a clean motion-capture of Vic Wooten's slap bass technique to study in slow motion. And surely there are commercial applications, like virtual dressing rooms or telepresence tourism.

Thanks to some literal handwaving, the vision of motion control since Minority Report has been to provide a fancy, grand gestural control mechanism for data manipulation--because there's a problem we've all had, right? In much the same way, the current focus on camera-view augmented reality ignores its real, current applications in relatively dull location-sensitive mapping, probably because most critics are more interested in the human-machine interface than the way these new technologies shape our culture. But surely we should have learned by now: in the age of networked communcation, it's the mundane social uses--chatting, teaching, and sharing--where innovation will get really interesting.

There are some games that you really ought to play under emulation only, and Shadow of the Colossus is going to be one of those. It's a beautiful, interesting game held back by the terrible, terrible PS2 rendering chip. Depending on your hardware, if you haven't played it already, you might even be best off emulating it now.

It was kind of surprising to me how bad the texture handling actually was. I skipped the PS2 when it was current, and only really got to sit down with one when I started using Belle's for Guitar Hero. I had bought a second-hand Dreamcast instead, or played a lot of older PC titles on my low-budget tower (calling it 'hand-built' implies, I think, a level of craftsmanship that wasn't present). Both of those had their issues, but they were capable of handling basic texture filtering, and character models didn't shake like a pair of cheap maracas, neither of which seems to have been a priority for Sony's Emotion Engine designers.

Normally, I'm not a graphics snob kind of guy. I enjoy Wii games for what they are, and I've never owned a computer capable of running new games at their top detail levels. I think Link's Awakening was one of the top two Zelda games, even in four shades of Gameboy Green. But my first reaction to SotC when I finally got around to firing it up this week was "wait, is there a way to turn off the Awful, Shimmery Moiré Filter?" Under the Playstation's dubious rendering context, anything more than five feet away from the camera becomes a shifting, grainy distraction. The development team has clearly tried to integrate this into the art style--I think the elaborate hair and stone textures, not to mention the blown-out bloom and grain filters, are a direct result of accepting the platform's limitations--but it doesn't really work. Not right away, at least, and not without interruption. And these ambitious effects come at a cost--even on native hardware, the game's framerate is notoriously unstable.

Unfortunately, the elaborate tricks used to push the PS2 as far as it can go mean that Shadow of the Colossus is a punishing feat for emulators. While recent PC hardware is easily capable of handling titles like the Final Fantasy games, SotC barely manages more than 10 frames a second on my 2007-era laptop. But it's a tantalizing slideshow: even at its native resolution, without the shaky landscape textures and shifty light bloom, you can really see just how beautifully-designed this game was. If I had a little more CPU to throw at it, I'd love to play it there instead of on Sony's temperamental black box.

As a long-time PC gamer, I've been using emulation for years, and this isn't the first time that the experience has been better on a virtual machine. If nothing else, it means freedom from the idiotic "save point" systems, particularly in console RPGs. I've always preferred the ergonomics of a keyboard or my favorite PC gamepad to whatever weirdness the original manufacturer has invented for their input device (Dreamcast, I'm specifically looking at you and your RSI-triggering monstrosity of a controller).

And more importantly, emulation has historically allowed the technical limitations of the day to be upgraded behind the scenes--from removing the flicker of NES sprite rendering (then restoring it, for the diehards) to the addition of mip-mapping and texture filtering on the PS2. My favorite, of course, is the gorgeous pixel-art enhancement of the Super 2xSaI algorithm. If you ever forget how well-crafted the peak of 16-bit gaming could be, play the first few rainy minutes of A Link To The Past in high resolution through a modern emulator. I think if you look at something like Pixeljunk Shooter, it's an unmistakeable tribute not just to 2D gaming, but to the advances that were first made in emulation, now brought back into the fold.

Which brings us back to Shadow of the Colossus and the poor, palsied PS2. As one of those games that'll get name-checked for years to come, and with the PS3 dropping backwards compatibility, emulation may end up a real blessing in disguise for SotC--new players will get the benefit of its stunning art and sound design, but without the crappy rendering. It's just too bad it takes such a monster of a system--a colossus, if you will--to do it, but that problem will solve itself over time. To be honest, I'm almost a little envious.