A Belated Sunday Sites

To all my readers, I’m still alive. Just busy as hell.

In all seriousness, here are the belated Sunday Sites

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/32300/The_Year_In_Video_Game_Criticism_A_Look_Back_At_2010.php A Review of Game Criticism, now with more Tom Bissell!

http://wii.ign.com/articles/114/1144014p1.html Can you say badass? Fan-art is awesome.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/38/20110118/tod-cat-summoned-for-jury-service-045b8e8.html wut?

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/01/26/but-can-games-teach-morality/ Can games teach morality? I’m currently in the process of writing an essay on video-game morality and the deontological approach that games force upon their players.

http://myfacewhen.com/ For all your social networking needs!

Platformertown Developers Diary #2

A few solid months into the project and I’ve successfully completed my first full character animation set. I’ve made revisions to previous designs to thin the arms, fix proportions and add more frames to the running animation.

Hard stuff, the entire animation set took me about several hours to make, coupled with an entire game consisting of tens of characters, game-art is one of the hardest jobs involved in development.

Having previous designs rejected is also infuriating, but ultimately, its satisfying and meaningful work. Asking for critique on 4chan’s /v/ board was mostly scathing, in spite of a few honest and very useful comments that greatly helped with the character’s design.

Work has began on some of the other characters. To conserve time on the project, most other characters will be pallete swaps of our player-character, with subtle nuances in hair and facial design.

Music

My friend Jack Taylor, a.k.a. Droid Song is a LA based chiptune musician and has had several 8-bit and rock concerts in the past. He joined Marcus Goldschmidt in producing the audio-side of Platformertown. Try some of Droid Song’s other songs, there’s much to like about them. In its current state, Platformertown will sound pretty good. Sound effects will start production later on.

Nonetheless, our background artists and level-designers have gone missing from the project with most of their contributions lost. While the engine has been made and the source-code of the level-design tool is now live, lacking publicly shared progress leaves most of the team confused as to our current progress.

Platformertown’s most current alpha can be found at http://cosmos.brandonicus.com/index.php?title=Platformertown_NPCs. This version has operable NPCs. Stay tuned for subsequent developments on the project. If you’d like to contribute to the project, email me at wikipedianmarlith@gmail.com. Until then, peace!

Vanquish Review

In a future Earth, overpopulation has limited Earth's livable space. The Marin Headlands are blanketed with Skyscrapers, Hillary Clinton's clone is president and a country-sized satellite floats above the planet. Communist robots wage war on the United States and a bionic-armed commando engages in ridiculous banter. Yes, this game is Japanese, and yes, it's a Hideki Kamiya game. It's Vanquish, and it is the most creatively gleeful shooter to come out of Japan since Kamiya's own Resident Evil 4.

History

Hideki Kamiya is one of Japan's most beloved game-directors, rivaling the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima. The mastermind between Resident Evil 4, Phoenix Wright, Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, Kamiya's games are renowned worldwide for their sheer uniqueness and style. Vanquish, much like his previous projects, is a Japanese game intended for a Western audience. Kamiya's latest game is an Eastern take on a decidedly Western genre, the third person shooter.

Gameplay

Vanquish, being developed by a Japanese studio, bears a considerable uniqueness from its Western third-person cousins. Where Gears of War and Army of Two focus decidedly on moderately-paced movement and strategic cover, Vanquish has more in common with classic 2D shooters of the 8-bit era. Pattern recognition and bullet dodging rule the day here and are controlled by mechanics similar to those of other Kamiya games.

Besides the prerequisites of moving, shooting and taking cover, Vanquish features two other major mechanics, those being boosting and slowing time down. By using a constantly replenishing power meter, Sam Gideon, Vanquish's cigarette chomping protagonist, can use suit-mounted rockets to propel himself forward at lightning speeds. Boosting from cover-to-cover to behind enemy lines for a powerful melee attack only to again boost away makes for thrilling action that is incredibly fun to watch. By tapping the boost button as an evasive dash is made, Sam can enter a mode of slowed-down time, where careful decisions can be made and weak points specifically targeted. Combining these powers allows for a tactical strategy of attack-and-retreat to be preformed. Needless to say, a strong influence from one of Kamiya's previous works, Viewtiful Joe, can be seen explicitly here.

Several boss battles are impressive in scope and breathtaking to see, elevating awe at these moments to Shadow of the Colossus-levels. These battles are some of the highlights of the experience, and are influenced heavily by classic Japanese 8-bit shooters. These bosses frequently have one-hit kill moves that must be avoided or countered. Needless to say, battles against the giant Argus robots fit into the world of old-school pattern memorization, tell-recognition and reaction. The battles are fun, tense and look great.

Graphics/Sound

Fortunately, as a Kamiya game, Vanquish posseses an incredible visual style that is as fun to look at as to play with. Incredible artistic touches inspired by classic anime such as Neon Genesis, Casshern and Gundam lend the game a distinct flavor of its own, its bleached colors stand it stark contrast with the saturated greys and reds of Western third-person shooters. Character models are intricately detailed, and the number of moving, glowing or smoking parts on any given robot is incredible. Awe inspiring set-pieces are massive in scope, and with thousands of bullets and rockets flying about at any given time, it is surprising that the frame rate remains steady even on 7th generation hardware. Sam's ARS suit is a particular highlight, and its many animations lend combat an intensely visceral edge despite the minimal blood effects in the game.

Speaking of animation, static screenshots don't do justice to Vanquish's varied environs. The game looks better in motion, and the surprisingly unobtrusive QTE-sequences bring some of the absolutely coolest finishing moves to be concieved since Gear's original curb-stomp. Dashing up an Argus's leg to transform into a drill and punch a hole straight through its body is exhilarating, memorable and fun, the silly approach to such a concept bringing a smile to even the most jaded gamer.

Part of the fun of Vanquish is the vast variety of locales that the game's firefights are set. A collapsing highway in the sky, a giant zero-gravity tube and the innards of a skyscraper-sized metal behemoth are highlights in the experience. The sheer joy of discovering what new crazy idea that Kamiya's team conceived is a major aesthetic in the game.

Unfortunately, Vanquish does not sound as good as it looks. Voice-acting is as generic as the character archetypes that populate the game's treaded fiction. (Intentionally?) Highly theatrical gravelly voices characterize soldiers. Evil characters speak slowly and sinisterly and arbitrary curses are flung about that battlefield. Whether or not Kamiya intended to satirize the American shooter with this auditory portrayal of characters is debatable, but highly likely. The soundtrack is comprised mostly of techno, and while it may frame the action well, don't expect to download its tracks after playing.

Conclusion

Despite the praise that I have bestowed upon it, Vanquish is short.

Playing on the standard difficulty level, it took me several hours to complete the game beginning to end, including the numerous deaths I suffered. Uninteresting, rote-based challenge levels offered little incentive to explore non-campaign content. There are also no multiplayer modes avaliable at all. Vanquish is still fun to replay though, numerous online leaderboards offer a competitive incentive to blast through levels as quickly as possible, racking up high scores. The high quality of Vanquish's campaign also adds to its value. While it may be short, it is very sweet.

Ultimately, the question of the game's value comes down to you. Would the brief-but-fun campaign and gleeful style be worth sixty dollars to experience? Vanquish is brief and features generic story and characters, no doubt, but its smile-inducing sense of fun makes this a game that any shooter-fan must experience at sometime, albeit, not necessarily at full price. Recommended. 4/5

Sunday Sites 69

First of all, Happy New Year. Second, don’t laugh at the title. Just hear what this guy has to say.

http://kotaku.com/5720024/five-new-years-resolutions-for-gamers A self-improvement plan for game-consumers

http://versusclucluland.blogspot.com/2008/09/interpretation-of-braid.html I’ve recently went on a Braid analysis marathon, here’s a scintillating analysis on a blog. OXM also as another interesting interpretation.

 http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=190136

And that’s it for now, have a good year everyone!

Discussing the EMA Case with Senator Leland Yee

On Sunday, December 19^th, my good friends Sean Patrick and Devan Patel, along with myself, had coffee with Senator Leland Yee. Yee was the author of the controversial ABs 1792 and 1793, which attempted to governmentally regulate the sale of mature games to minors. The bills were deemed unconstitutional by the State Court in 2005, and their constitutionality was again discussed in a November 2 U.S. Supreme Court meeting. I wrote an open-letter to the Senator with my particular objections to the bill, for which the meeting was called to discuss.

After spending a short time watching Sean play Obsidian's Alpha Protocol, we walked down to Starbucks to meet with the Senator and his aide. We introduced ourselves as Juniors from Stuart Hall High School and talked about our relationship with gaming (Devan and Sean being consumers and me being a writer and artist). 

Yee, a developmental psychologist, began the meeting by discussing the “Bobo Doll Study” regarding youth aggression, in which children emulated an adult model violently abusing a human doll. It is common knowledge among the psychological community that exposure to violent imagery causes desensitization to violence. The Senator thus did not contend that there was a causal relationship between game-consumption and real-world violence, a position that I strongly object to. Several notable anti-game critics have held considerably more theatrical viewpoints on the matter, Jack Thompson and Hillary Clinton come to mind, such people have recognized Grand Theft Auto to be a public safety hazard. Yee thus held that the desensitizing effect of game justified the bill.

The Senator also held that it was the state's responsibility to protect children from harmful forces, likening his bill to laws passed in the early 20^th Century outlawing child labor. Whether or not the desensitizing effect of violent games would be on the level of the atrocities that child coal-miners faced in the Industrial Revolution is debatable. Furthermore, he again acknowledged that games did not pose a public safety hazard, if this was so, then why would the law be necessary to protect children? Is psychological desensitization enough to justify the distinct treatment of violent games to violent film, comics and literature?

Yee also emphasized the distinction between what he considered “violent games” and “ultraviolent games”. Nonetheless, the disparity remained extremely vague. I brought up Sony Santa Monica's God of War III, a game so graphically violent that even I recoiled at the gore. Yee responded by saying that God of War III would not be affected by the bill because the subject of its violence was not human in nature, “creature violence” did not fall under the bill. Apparently, the genocide of thousands of harpies and minotaurs did not deserve recognition.

Senator Yee stated that the “ultraviolent” games that would be affected by the bill depicted violence between human characters in a patently offensive manner. While Gears of War would not be considered “ultraviolent”, considerably tamer games would be. Nonetheless, the distinction remains extremely vague. The T-rated Uncharted and Goldeneye feature shooting human enemies as their primary mechanic. Over the course of their respective campaigns, the player kills hundreds of pirates and terrorists. Nonetheless, the relatively innocuous nature of such violence is on a level infinitely lower than that of Manhunt and Soldier of Fortune, which feature human dismemberment as an option. Under the law, would Goldeneye fall under the same group as the far more disturbing Soldier of Fortune? T-rated games feature human violence as a primary mechanic, and under the bill's verbiage, such games would be grouped with the likes of Postal, even while sci-fi/fantasy games like Halo are not affected.

The Senator also held that the bill was ultimately intended to assist parents in determining what content their children can access and that parents can choose to opt out of the policy by purchasing violent games for children, thus, pre-informing parents about content. Thus, the bill would reinforce the measures that the industry already takes in order to police its own content. Built-in parental controls by console manufacturers, the ESRB, ID check at retail and the refusal of console companies to license AO rated games are such measures. By governmentally reinforcing the industry's standards, notable risks arise given the degree of power the state gains over it. This ultimately makes the bill redundant to the industry's already held policies, rendering it a rather unnecessary exercise of political power over content advisory and the medium itself.

Senator Yee then asked us about our own gaming habits and the degree of parental control that our families had over our play decisions. Despite our dissenting viewpoints, the meeting was ultimately respectful, interesting and productive.

Upon the conclusion of the meeting, we returned to Sean's house to celebrate the merit of games by playing many matches of Call of Duty: Black Ops. I came out with mostly negative spreads, but found respite in the AK74u, stun grenade and claymore. Devan and myself were involved in an epic tug-of-war over the central control point in Nuketown.