Mile Zero

September 2, 2010

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.

May 18, 2010

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.

March 15, 2010

I'm still trying to figure out why I'm playing No More Heroes 2. I loved the first game, which wrapped every bizarre idea that Suda 51 has ever had in gleefully hideous, plush-velvet-and-8-bit upholstery. It was gaming's Grindhouse, all poor taste and subversion. Either the joke's wearing thin, or that's just not working anymore for the sequel.

The plot, for example, is more complicated but says less. It throws in two extra playable characters, one of whom gets only one (short, uninteresting) boss fight and neither of which is terribly interesting. It involves revenge for the death of a character that nobody remembers or cares about. Then it wraps all of the above in a series of flashbacks by some kind of stripper, the details of which are apparently supposed to be a big mystery, but who never really says anything that couldn't have been better summarized or left implicit. There's a lot going on here--and none of it hangs together particularly well. Possibly because it's actually trying too hard: attempting internal consistency asks a lot of an audience when the material is this dumb. It comes across as more unfocused than lovably eclectic.

The new game promises you a lot of fights by starting you at assassin rank 50 instead of 11, but then it cheats by jumping multiple ranks--sometimes lots of them--after a boss. The least interesting boss from the first game was probably Bad Girl, a filthy pop idol who batted bondage slaves at you from a conveyer belt. Few, if any of the new assassins manage to be so amusing, almost none of them have the elaborate setups that were the best part of NMH, and most of them (particularly the Resident Evil-ish Matt Helms and Metal Gear Solid parody Chloe Walsh) fail to rise above their obvious inspiration. Indeed, the parody settings themselves are half-hearted at best, although the bit where the stealth level almost immediately abandons sneaking in favor of killing everybody is a nice meta touch.

They kept the combat system, which is still very good and probably the main reason that I've stuck with it. They eliminated the overworld driving and replaced it with a static map, which would be fine, but then it's like they needed to do something with the old motorcycle code, so there's a couple of completely pointless driving segments (literally pointless--you can't fail them, and they don't have any enemies or challenges, just driving on a gently-curving road). Oh, and there's a gratuitous cameo by Takashi Miike for the hardcore, which is the kind of special feature I can get behind. I wish they'd pitched that in big letters on the box, just to confuse the average Best Buy shopper.

What I miss the most, oddly enough, are the phone conversations from the first NMH. Before each boss fight, assassination promoter Sylvia would call you on your cell phone, which you'd answer by pressing one of the wiimote buttons. Then you'd physically hold the thing to your ear while Travis did the same onscreen with his phone, both of you looking pretty stupid, and listen to an increasingly abusive, sociopathic, and demoralizing series of rants on the boss and your pitiful chances against it. Each ended with a plea to "trust your force, and head... for the Garden... of Madness!" Like so much of the game, they seemed mainly to exist just because the developer thought they'd be fun. But they also served to reinforce the game's driving dynamic: weird, immature nerd Travis chasing his way up the assassin rankings in order to impress a girl who is not only way out of his league, but also completely nuts.

Well, honestly, the whole game was nuts. And I can't decide if my problem with No More Heroes 2 is that it's not crazy enough, or I'm now acclimated to the crazy and the seams are showing through. But I suspect it's the former. For all their flaws, I always figured that part of the fun of games by Suda 51 was that they were one-offs by a disturbed auteur, without a lot of pressure to be successful in the market. Maybe that's why his first real sequel comes across as forced. And while mechanically, it's still one of his better games, I didn't really buy it for the mechanics. There are relatively few people who can still make a video game as outright odd as Killer 7 or the first No More Heroes. It'd be a shame for that to get lost in the rush to a franchise.

March 1, 2010

There's a moment early in Mass Effect 2 where your character, the resurrected Commander Shepherd, answers a series of questions about the events that occurred in the previous game. I think what they're trying to do is remind you about those plot points so you won't be taken quite so much by surprise when other characters mention them later on--or, if you're a new player, establish a little context so it won't seem completely random. But because the writing is a little awkward, it doesn't come across as an establishing infodump. Instead, in a surreal twist, it sounds like the characters are participating in a kind of retcon--letting the player's answers redefine their past actions. I love this idea, and wish it wasn't an accident.

A retcon, for the non-fandom crowd, is a portmanteau word for "retroactive continuity," and Wikipedia (unsurprisingly) has a fine list of examples, ranging from Nero Wolfe's birthplace to the altered appearance of Klingons in post-Kirk Star Trek. The retcon is a tradition as old as humanity, but it's rarely invoked in a planned fashion--in part, because it's usually so clumsy. Humans are good at maintaining continuity in our narratives, and we don't take kindly to authors who break their own fictional rules unless they can do so very, very elegantly.

But in video games, we have a sort of special case. Often here (and specifically in the Mass Effect games), the player is in control of continuity to a greater degree than other media. Is Commander Shepherd a woman of principle, or a ruthless pragmatist? The player chooses between these two, or even mixes them on a case-by-case basis. You don't know, necessarily, what kind of person she is until the player makes that decision: does this Commander Shepherd approve of the Genophage bioweapon, or find it deplorable? Does she believe in killing mutineers? What about the murder of treacherous former allies? And if those answers differ, it's up to the player to mentally reconcile them as a coherent character, offering up retconned justifications as necessary.

So why limit this to just the character arc, when a virtual world could offer so much more? ME2's dialog misfire offers a glimpse into a game mechanic where dialog doesn't just define a character, it can redefine the events that led up to the current moment, or the world around the player's avatar (cross a gap by insisting that you funded a bridge, perhaps, or clear out dangerous animals by bemoaning their extinction). If I had the time to spend on personal coding projects right now, that's something I'd explore: a game where you can redefine the state of play just by verbally disagreeing with it. I think it could even be an opinionated statement, not just about the way we adapt stories over time, but also the power of rhetoric to effect change, and the subjectivity of human history.

Or maybe I'm just describing a pretentious version of Scribblenauts. Either way, surely it's an opportunity missed.

December 1, 2009

At some point, every American television series does The Chinatown Episode. This is particularly true for cop shows, because crimes that take place in Chinatown are always exotic entryways into an inscrutable foreign culture, while those in immigrant neighborhoods of, say, Latino or European extraction are just garden variety crimes of a Real American nature. Sometimes the showrunners will substitute another nationality of origin--Koreatown, most likely. This is because someone has told them that Asia is not a single country.

So it was probably inevitable that Grand Theft Auto, a series whose main schtick is to recycle every possible variety of gangster movie into interactive form, would do its own version of The Chinatown Episode. The surprise is that it's actually pretty good so far (I'm about halfway through, I think). Despite the name, Chinatown Wars is not really based on the immigrant experience (or some screenwriter's shallow appropriation of it). Its roots are more in Hong Kong crime dramas like Infernal Affairs, even if its ambitions are markedly lower.

I've spent a fair amount of time here picking out faults in the race or gender politics of various games--enough, perhaps, to seem a bit like a scold at times. And I didn't expect much from Rockstar, frankly. So it was a nice surprise to find that Chinatown Wars acquits itself fairly well. Nobody speaks in a chop-socky accent, and hackneyed talk about honor or faux-Confucianisms are, when used, rightfully dismissed as shameless politicking and clearly-marked irony (these are low bars, but ones which are regularly uncleared in pop culture). When the dialog is funny (and this is a funny game, albeit in a typically crude way), it's because of the exaggerated character flaws of each individual (the head gangster's idiot son, for example, or the power-hungry lieutenant) and not at their expense. There's even a few jokes about stereotypes, like this (paraphrased) exchange between the main character, Huang, and a corrupt cop:

Cop: ...so we'll work to take down the Wonsu together.

Huang: Yeah, that's great. One question: what's this Wonsu thing you keep talking about?

Cop: It's the name for the leaders of the Korean gang.

Huang: Right. Why would you assume I know that terminology? Racist idiot.

This is not to say, as I've continued to play through, that it's all sunshine and kittens. There's still a fair amount of sexism, a near-total lack of actual female characters (the most interesting of whom is killed about 30 seconds in), and some jokes that edge into homophobia. A lot of the material also probably falls under "satire," which I'm normally happy to engage with, but at some point in Rockstar's career the satire excuse has started to seem a little strained, particularly given their geographic location (the UK) and resulting distance from the material they're satirizing.

I haven't played a lot of GTA, for one reason or another, so from a purely mechanical perspective it's been interesting so far. The series is often described as being "sandbox" games, but I think that's a misnomer. They give you a big level to play in, sure, but it's less wide-open and more just non-linear--you don't have to jump on the main quest right away. At one point, maybe that was more revolutionary than it is now, I don't know, but with every game I play these days offering about a million collectibles and side missions, I'm not exactly suffering for choice. Besides, when I think of a sandbox game, I think about something that lets me build, like Simcity. There's not a lot of building or world-changing in Chinatown Wars.

The real genius of it, and maybe what leads people to use "sandbox" as a description, is the mechanic for the wanted meter. The rules for when the meter goes up or down are simple and easy to understand, and the cop AI is (intentionally) stupid and suffering from tunnel vision. You can raise the heat, wreak some havoc, and then clear out the meter and keep going, which is a nice way to blow off some steam. This is probably why every time I've seen someone play GTA in the past, they're usually going for a joyride in a tank and seeing how far they can get before the SWAT team takes them out.

This is something that was always frustrating about Assassin's Creed (the first one, the second is currently sitting outside my apartment door), because losing your pursuers was more complicated--more "realistic"--than it needed to be. There were places you could hide, which wouldn't always work, or you could run far enough away, depending on the size of the alarm, but it was never entirely cut-and-dried. The result was that you felt less like an invisible killer and more like a grade-schooler playing hide-and-seek. Realism, counter-intuitively, becomes the enemy of immersion. GTA's wanted level, like the combat system in Arkham Asylum, is all about taking skilled actions that are appropriate for the main character and making them fun and easy for the player to accomplish. Developers should simulate for the narrative feel, in other words, not for the nitty-gritty.

And seriously, let's make a promise: after this, no more Chinatown Episodes in games. There's only so much cliche a single medium can take.

September 10, 2009

OF COURSE we bought Beatles: Rock Band the day it came out. Belle is a full-fledged Beatlemaniac. Her calendar has eight days a week and when I say goodbye, she says hello--it makes our home life confusing, but you can't fault her taste.

The game was obviously created by equally-intense fans, which comes into play in interesting ways. Not being a real Beatles listener myself, a few things leapt out at me:

• If you lose a song, it just fades to black. Nobody's going to boo the lads from Liverpool off stage in this game.
• The whammy bar is disabled on guitar and bass. It still affects the note trail, and for all I can tell it still increases your score, but there's no audible effect. There will be no dive-bombing during "I Am The Walrus," no matter how much you want to.
• Especially since, in the more production-heavy songs from their studio days, the guitar controller is actually playing strings and synth parts.
• The songs are arranged chronologically, and have Harmonix's usual care with note placement (for the most part--"Birthday" and "Come Together" are going to bug anyone who's played them on a real instrument, but there's nothing they could do about that). This means it's a great process of discovery for someone who loves the band, but the difficulty level is all over the map. These are easily some of the most difficult Rock Band songs I've seen--not just in the Guitar Hero showers-of-notes sense, but because they're complex songs to begin with. The game provides a helpful "difficulty meter" when choosing a song: pay attention to it. They're not joking around.
• I love some of the achievements, particularly "Authenticity:" "Finish any song as a bassist with Lefty Mode turned on, hitting at least 50% of the notes." They should really make you sing at the same time--Sir Paul is a monster bass player.

We played for about three hours, and beat every stage but one last night, only stopping when my hands started to cramp up. I think Belle likes it.

September 8, 2009

Some three hours into Batman: Arkham Asylum, we are introduced to the Lunatic after someone opens all the cell doors on the island. The Lunatic is a shambling, almost-skeletal enemy dressed in a straitjacket. His attack entirely consists of leaping onto Batman's back and thrashing wildly until thrown to the ground and knocked out with a blow to the head. Because that's therapy, superhero-style: brutally beating the mentally-ill senseless with your heavy, armored fists.

I'm not the only person who has found this a little unsettling: Justin Keverne calls it "the intellectual and social equivalent of bumfighting," and Travis Megill follows up with a post discussing the stigmatization of mental illness perpetuated by the game, and recommends using it as a consciousness-raising opportunity. Both make some great points.

One of the things that I like about Batman as a character is how plainly ambiguous he has become. Other superheroes may be able to perpetuate the myth of vigilante justice, but after The Dark Knight Returns (a barely-disguised John Bircher fantasy styled after Red Dawn), The Dark Knight (the film, which bears little plot-wise resemblance to the comic but touches on many of the same themes), and (most importantly) Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, it's difficult to imagine an interpretation of the character that isn't a damaged, near-fascist personality locked in a feedback cycle with equally-psychotic "supervillains." Calling the modern Batman a hero is hilarious.

So while his treatment of the "Lunatic" enemy is unsettling, I could almost believe that it's purposefully so. Likewise the depiction of the asylum itself: while the game never explicitly comes out to say so, this is clearly not an enlightened institution (and never was, as the hidden story items make clear). The inmates are locked into tiny, solitary cells and effectively left to rot. The guards are vicious, unpleasant people, and the doctors are using their patients as experimental subjects. In Killer Croc's case, they've just dumped him into the sewers, dropping rotten meat to feed him. The warden is a political animal more concerned for his career than for those under his care. It's like something out of Nellie Bly's undercover reporting on the Blackwell's Island asylum. No doubt anyone sentenced to Arkham would emerge more damaged than when they entered, and many are sent there as much from a desire to remove the undesirables as to rehabilitate them.

Indeed, one thing I found interesting, particularly while listening to the "interview tapes" scattered through out the game, is the degree to which several of the inmates are not insane at all. Killer Croc, for example, is violent and dangerous, but he shows no signs of being disconnected from reality: the outside world really does see him as a monster, and Croc merely reacts accordingly. Poison Ivy has entirely valid reasons to identify more with plants than humans--she's half-plant herself. And the Joker, as voiced by Mark Hamill, has never seemed crazy to me--sociopathic, perhaps, but no more so than many mobsters and criminals. It did not surprise me to find out that Paul Dini, the writer for both The Animated Series and Arkham Asylum, has written a story titled "Case Study" that frames the Joker as an entirely sane criminal using a deranged persona to pursue a vendetta against Batman.

Regardless, I have two reactions to the Lunatic. First, as Megill points out, focusing on the individual inmates (such as the Lunatic) or the institution is to overlook the overarching message of the game's view on mental illness, which is firmly rooted in unsubtle stereotypes. In its universe, disorders aren't a continuum of mental function, but a strict sane/insane dichotomy. This isn't necessarily Arkham Asylum's fault--it's derived directly from the comics themselves, which have always treated insanity as a shortcut directly to wearing tights and planning crimes centered on random concepts. ("Calendar Man?" Really?) As counted among the offenses perpetuated in our pop cultural psyches by Marvel and DC, I rank this relatively low on the list, but it's good to see it noticed when it pops up.

Second, the game's unsympathetic portrayal of the asylum itself doesn't really excuse its dehumanized view of the patients themselves, or Batman's enforcement of the status quo (he beats the inmates, but frees the crooked administrators to return to their jobs). It's one thing to say that Bruce Wayne is an anti-hero at best, but another to watch him blithely ignore the conditions around him. This is where Batman sends people, remember, after he's caught them. And it's not like he doesn't know about Arkham's policies: he's on the island enough to have built a fully-equipped Batcave there. Talk about your bad neighborhoods. If that's not indicative of the unhealthy relationship the "Caped Crusader" has with his foes, I don't know what is.

August 21, 2009

I never played the original Castlevania on its original platform in its original era. I only got around to it when they released it on GBA. So I think my opinion's unclouded by nostalgia when I say that, with reservations but in general, I like it.

In the pantheon of retro classics, Castlevania slots in right next to Ninja Gaiden. Both are sidescrollers emphasizing close combat (as opposed to Mario-style hopping), with health bars and a rudimentary power-up system. Castlevania has better secondary weapons. Ninja Gaiden has better level design, and is probably the superior title overall--the flow of its levels is pure 8-bit choreography. Either way, they're simple games. Over the years, Ninja Gaiden has stayed fairly simple. Castlevania has not.

Which brings us to Order of Ecclesia, the most recent side-scrolling title in the series. It's not that OoE is a bad game, so much as it is way more complicated than it needs to be.

I'm giving up on the game about seven levels in, having gotten through the first four bosses or so. I'm doing so because the level design (which is awful, having largely abandoned the intricate "Metroid-vania" style of navigation) has begun throwing in enemies that completely wreck the difficulty curve (specifically, the demonic gravediggers). The options available seem to be either learning an attack pattern that's not particularly enjoyable, or improving my character. Since neither appeals, I'm ditching it.

"Improving my character"--what a fun turn of phrase that is, as if Castlevania were Emily Post and Buddhism mixed together. What it really means is going out and either leveling-up (a long, painful process left over from RPGs that I thought we had largely abandoned in the civilized world) or tediously killing the same enemies over and over again until they drop a more powerful weapon. It's all the worst parts of World of Warcraft, but without a sense of humor!

This complication doesn't have any particular justification for its existence. Its only point is to add a pseudo-cerebral tint to an otherwise fluffy and unredeemable arcade experience, something it has in common with the vapid plots that Konami insists on jamming in there, as if I really cared. "We're not just engaging your reflexes," OoE defensively protests, "we're engaging your mind!" Yeah: because making me constantly interrupt play to struggle through a poorly-designed menu system, all to find the collectible weapon that will harm this particular recycled sprite from the last seven Castlevania titles is certainly a challenge that will stretch my capacity for non-linear thinking, isn't it? Give me a break. These games are basically mental Diet Coke. The least they could do is have the dignity to act like it.

Let's make a deal, video games: you don't make me grind for a frakking sidescroller, and I won't sell you on eBay.

July 2, 2009

I have probably started four or five games of Chrono Trigger, across four or five different computers (I didn't own an SNES at the time), and never gotten past the Prehistoric Era segment. So while Square's habit of re-releasing its entire classic catalog every time a new platform reaches critical mass may seem grating and money-grubbing (probably because it is), it is sometimes valuable. The DS port of Chrono Trigger is the first time I stand a chance of finishing it. This is probably because, like a lot of adult gamers, I use portable games as a way of multitasking. It's something I can pull out if a movie or TV show starts to drag but I still want to see the end, as well as a time-killer during the inevitable Metro delays. And while I've always got games loaded on a smartphone of some kind these days, it's rarely as satisfying as the experience on an actual console--not to mention that the battery life is far better. So compared to the emulated versions, I've gotten much farther this time around.

Chrono Trigger is almost fifteen years old now, which is pretty amazing if you think about it. It's held up well. More than that: I'd argue that it's better than most anything Square's put out during the intervening years, on either portable or home console. Mostly this is because it's such a lean design: unlike the excesses the company developed in the 32-bit era, there are no collectible card games (FF8) or watersports (FF10) that you have to learn to navigate, and the battle system is relatively simple. It feels like this left the development team free to concentrate on the worldbuilding: the result is a series of rich, often comical time periods linked to each other by a decidedly quirky kind of causality. Great characters, as well, although I'm not the biggest fan of the art style.

Although the game isn't non-linear, it's also impressive how well it fakes it. Shuffle the party as much as you want, they'll all still have appropriate dialog choices (some more appropriate than others, granted). Halfway through, it opens up a whole bunch of sidequests that players can approach in any order. The experience is still basically guided at every step, but in a way that feels empowering and entirely in sync with the time travel theme: at practically any point in the game, players can jump straight to the final boss, although they'll probably get creamed if they haven't done at least a few of the optional missions.

If anything has not aged well about the game, it's the mechanics of the battle system--more specifically, the endlessly frustrating menu options that must be navigated under pressure. At the time, this was how RPGs worked--hell, it's how a lot of them still work today. For a short time, Square seemed to have chafed a bit under that convention: FF6 (released a year before Chrono Trigger) supplemented the menus with oddball conventions like Sabin's Street Fighter-esque combos, while Super Mario RPG went to a far more manageable system of assigning different actions to the largely-unused face buttons. Then the Playstation rolled around, and the company apparently gave up on control innovation and concentrated on putting elaborate CG movies in between boring menus.

In the meantime, it cannot be stressed how annoying Chrono Trigger's menus are, especially since by default they let enemies continue to attack while you try and find the right $%!@-ing Dual Tech. I particularly love hunting for a single healing item through a vast inventory list using a tiny little window, during which time monsters have probably managed to kill the character I wanted to heal in the first place. Once upon a time, this was called "adding tension," but looking back on it, it's a lot like trying to solve sudoku while someone shoots you with a BB gun: a synthesis of tedium and tension that I could personally do very much without. The DS port of Chrono Trigger "solves" this problem by making the same menus into big, touch-friendly targets, which utterly fails to help. It may feel like a blow to your hardcore gamer cred, but I'd recommend switching from "Active" to "Wait" mode instead.

All in all, though, Chrono Trigger's an example of Doing It Right. If everything Square had made was this good, as opposed to say every Final Fantasy except for 6, it probably wouldn't be so galling to see them regurgitate the whole lot every time a marketable piece of hardware came out. There's even a theoretical justification for their actions: even more than other digital artifacts, console games age badly as the march to new platforms and formats makes them difficult--or even impossible--to play them as they should be played, and clearly emulation doesn't always cut it. In theory, I don't begrudge the company for reselling the classics, even if it is just locking them to a newer block of soon-to-be-obselete hardware. In practice, however, the only thing worse than watching them repackage both the good and the awful is watching all of it sell like hotcakes.

June 5, 2009

Like most people, I tend to write about games when I either hate them or love them. But in keeping with my new year's resolutions, there are also games I've stopped playing because I just can't bring myself to care about them.

• Disgaea DS: A critical darling, mostly for the writing, which is (unlike most J-RPGs) wildly slapstick and genuinely funny. Unfortunately, it's wrapped around a game that I just don't find terribly interesting, centering as it does around a single tedious mechanic (ganging up on enemies, then leveling up). Has been replaced by: the slapstick humor of getting the cat riled up and watching her ineffectually attempt to maul a dog five times her size.
• Zeno Clash: Critics love this one too, and I can see why: the art direction and storyline are a stunning, surrealist treat. Being a child of the eighties, it reminds me of the weirder items in the Jim Henson catalog. The game itself seems fine--repetitive, but fine. My main problem is just how sluggish everything feels. Blocking, pulling back for a punch, dodging--there's a maddening lag between pressing the key and actually taking action, and as a result I find myself frustrated as enemies easily work around my defenses. Has been replaced by: forcing Belle to watch classic science fiction movies Terminator 2 and Wrath of Khan, then sluggishly dodging her snarky comments.
• Uplink: The game that apparently gave Introversion the funding and confidence to create Darwinia and DEFCON, I'm grateful to Uplink but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Purportedly a game about Hollywood-style "hacking," as far as I can tell it's actually about clicking on menus. And if I wanted to wander aimlessly around a cryptic, mouse-centric interface, I'd run OS X in a virtual machine. Has been replaced by: OS X running in a virtual machine.

Future - Present - Past