malvasia bianca

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda game for the DS, and Nintendo decided to go whole-hog. No D-pad and buttons for them: you move by touching the screen in the direction you want to go, you attack an enemy by either drawing a slashing motion or by touching an enemy.

Which must have taken a lot of guts to decide on; I commend them for it. And it works well enough; unfortunately, enough of the other decisions that they made in the game grated on me that it ended up being the first new Zelda that I didn’t finish.

Hmm, how to structure this post? Let’s try an experiment:

Good: Moving and fighting with the stylus works surprisingly well.

Bad: It’s partly good in a “talking dog” sort of way: my expectations were pretty low, so I’m impressed that it works at all. To be fair, it works fine for core stuff, but it has its rough spots (switching between items, in particular), and I don’t think it actually improved movement/combat at all.

Good: You get to draw on the map. In particular, that’s a nice way to set your course while sailing the ship.

Bad:: It’s only a nice way because the ocean environment is so plain; ship travel is less tedious here than in Wind Waker, but I still far prefer dry land overworlds. Also, drawing on maps to take notes in dungeons mean that you got lots of puzzles of the form “there are four switches over here, and you learn over there in which order to hit them” (And then write the numbers on the map to remember them.) Which gets a little old.

Bad: The microphone-based puzzles were really annoying. (And limited the locations in which you can play the game.) I particularly disliked the bit where how loud you shouted into the mic determined the cost of your salvage arm.

Good: Uh, there were only three or four of them?

Good: I liked the grappling hook item where you could draw on the screen to connect two posts.

Bad: The cartridge only has two save slots.

Good: Only two people can be annoyed by the game at once?

Enough of that; basically, it’s a series of interesting experiments, most of which weren’t too bad, some of which had some real benefits. I hope that they tone it down in their next offering, but I hope that they take some of those techniques and use them on their next DS outing. (Some of the ideas might even work on the Wii.)

But partially successful experiments don’t add up to a reason for me to stop playing the game. The reason why I stopped is that one of the dungeons isn’t like the others. There’s this central dungeon that you start and (I believe?) end the game in, and return to after almost every other dungeon. Each time in the dungeon, you retrace your steps, going a bit farther.

Unfortunately, there are two things I didn’t like about that dungeon: it was stealth-based and it was timed. Stealth-based games may be other people’s cup of tea; they are not mine. I’m not violently against the notion, and certainly I would have been fine with one or two dungeons with a significant stealth element. But I didn’t want to play a stealth-based segment over and over again.

And having it timed was just rubbing salt in my wounds: if I can’t figure out how to retrace my steps and do the next two levels of the dungeon that I’ve unlocked quickly enough, my reward is to replay my last fifteen minutes. None of your traditional wandering around, thinking about puzzles, wondering how on earth you’ll get to that chest over there: you have to be focused on optimizing your path through the dungeon. It also hurts your ability to stop playing the game at a moment’s notice, which can be important on a handheld system, and you probably don’t want to take a couple of weeks, off from playing the game. (Or even a couple of days off, depending on your memory.)

I played through most of it; at the place where I stopped, I had (as far as I can tell) two trips remaining to the annoying dungeon and one traditional dungeon that I hadn’t explored. (Which I couldn’t get to without going back to the annoying dungeon first.) And I decided that it was unlikely that I’d enjoy or learn enough from the remaining traditional dungeon to make it worth going through the annoying dungeon again.

Other people may well like the game more (indeed, clearly have); I probably would have thought it was pretty good if I basically enjoyed stealth games. And I’m glad I gave it a try, so I could see what the controls were like. But it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

Reviews of three games that don’t deserve a full post:

Beautiful Katamari

If you’ve played its predecessors, you know what to expect, and you’ll probably be disappointed. More of the same; the music is still good, but no track was nearly as good as, say, Everlasting Love from the second game. They continued to ratchet up the scale of the later levels, to bad effect: you lose the detail when you get to rolling up islands, which this game goes far beyond. The good news is that there was only one level with a significant non-size-based goal. (Which was by far the most annoying level in the game!)

The main bad news is that there are too few levels, especially since it’s getting priced at close to a full game price (the original launched at 20 bucks); to make things worse, a quick scan through the game’s downloadable content suggests that Namco is trying to get greedy and nickel-and-dime fans to death. A thin enough experience to switch the series from “default buy” to “default don’t buy”, which makes me sad.

Hexic HD

An XBLA game that came for free with the system. It’s a puzzle game, and an awful one: I tried it once, and lasted for 20-30 minutes, not because of my l33t puzzle skills but because there’s no way to lose. Or win. Actually, there is apparently a way to win (but it’s really hard without interesting intermediate goals), and there are ways to lose if you play for long enough, but the basic tension that this style of puzzle game should provide is completely absent: reducing the feedback to how many points you’re getting meant that I never felt that I was doing well or badly, and after five minutes or so I was just waiting for me to die somehow, anyhow.

Reading other reviews of the game, it would seem that the other gameplay modes have a bit more potential for tension. (I did “marathon mode”, because it was first on the list and sounded like a sensible default puzzle game mode.) I have no desire to give them a try.

Gradius III

A shooter. I enjoyed playing Life Force, which is one of its predecessors on the NES, so I thought I’d give this one a try. I remember that game being a fair amount of fun, though its power-up mechanism was a bit off: when you died, you lost all (or all but one) of your powerups, and the game structure was such that, after that happened, you were basically screwed, but it was a pleasant way to spend time if you didn’t mind that.

Either my skills have atrophied, or Gradius III isn’t as good: I had a harder time making it through the earlier levels (though, oddly, the level 1 boss is actually noticeably harder than the level 2 one, so if I made it through level 1 I had a good chance of reaching level 3), to the extent that I wasn’t really enjoying the game. Some of that was due to my not wanting to invest the time in memorizing where every enemy entered the screen, which I recall doing in Life Force. (Also, playing while either Miranda or Zippy was acting antsy made it quite difficult to concentrate enough to avoid swarms of enemies.) Though the good news is that, even when I died, losing powerups didn’t hurt me so much, so I didn’t always have to start over from scratch.

I think it’s probably an okay game in the right context, but right now I have other ways that I’d rather spend my time, so rather than banging my head against it to improve my abilities, I decided to move on. Hmm, that seems to be a theme for me with Virtual Console games…

I (correctly) didn’t think that I’d have enough video games on consoles I already own to get me through the holiday break, so I got an Xbox 360 a couple of weeks ago. Some notes:

• I messed up a couple of cables when installing; probably because I’m conditioned to think that they’re all broken, it took me a little while to find my mistakes. (A misleading bit in the manual didn’t help.) Works fine, though.
• The initial games that I bought for it: Beautiful Katamari, Mass Effect, and Portal. I imagine I’ll try the other four games that are packed in with the latter, too; other games that I expect to try soon are Bioshock and Eternal Sonata.
• I spent too much time typing on virtual keyboards when setting it up, but at least that’s a one-time thing.
• I paid the money for a gold Xbox Live account; not sure how much I’ll use it, but since online features seems to be one of the defining things that the console does better than the others, I figured I might as well give it a try. My username (sorry, “gamertag”) is “malvasia bianca”; if any of my blog readers also have accounts, please let me know.
• You can see my vast number of achievements on my gamercard. As far as I can tell, there’s no way for you to see my actual achievements without having an account of your own; I’m under the impression that this is my public page, for a narrow definition of “public”.
• As far as I can tell, the support for multiple users on the same console is pretty bad. I guess the right way to handle that is to create multiple Xbox Live accounts? And if we all want to do online multiplayer with separately tracked stats, we have to fork over fifty bucks a person a year? Seems a bit much. I like the Wii’s idea of just giving everybody a Mii; I only wish more games used them. (Of course, using them as your character in the game is rarely appropriate, but just using them to identify your save file, as Super Mario Galaxy does, is a great idea.)
• The interface is rather busy, and has ads; I much prefer the Wii’s simplicity. (At least at the top level of the interface.) Though the two interfaces are trying to do different things; I haven’t really thought about what that means.
• It came with a bunch of preloaded content on the hard drive, mostly demos but also some videos and one (bad) full game.
• I can easily imagine myself getting hooked on trying out demos (I went to the store and downloaded several more), and switching over to having that be a big way in which I evaluate games for purchase; I can also imagine playing them just so I have a better idea of what people are talking about, even if I have no intention of buying the game. The existence of downloadable demos seems all to the good to me.
• The download service has issues, though. On several occasions, it had problems downloading a demo, but it didn’t automatically retry, and marked it in the store as being downloaded. So I had to go out of the store, double check that I didn’t have a copy saved, go back into the store, tell it to download it again, and reassure it that, yes, it’s fine for it to erase the non-existent copy that I’d previously attempted to download.
• When I add up space for the downloaded content and the free space on my hard drive, it still doesn’t add up to 20GB. Where’s the rest of the space? I’m used to drive numbers not adding up, for various reasons, but this seems excessive. Does it maintain a few gigabytes of free space that games can use as a cache? That would make sense, I guess.
• I wish it came with a larger hard drive, but I refuse to pay a hundred bucks for an extra 100 gigs of disk space.

I’m happy so far, and I’ll have to be disciplined for the next few weeks to stop playing Mass Effect at a reasonable time of night lest I turn into a zombie at work. Team members, if you see me yawning in the daily standup, feel free to chastize me…

• Beautiful libraries. (I think I linked to a similar gallery before, but this one’s better.)
• From Pink Tentacle: the chopsticks bra and two bathroom-related entries.
• Remarkable underground temples. (Via tecosystems.)
• If video game systems start doing head-tracking, watch out:

  (Via Games Are Art 2.0; the good stuff starts at around 2:30.)

• A fun word-association game. (Via Mark Gritter; even with Googling, I couldn’t get very far…)
• Don’t trust encryption standards. (At least not that one…)
• Give it a few seconds.

Ken Robinson’s TED talk on “Do schools kill creativity?”

You can also watch it at its web page; I like the chapter markings on the full-screen version of the video player on their page. (Not the embedded one here.)

I heard about this talk via two separate routes: Presentation Zen and Evolving Excellence. Two blogs which don’t normally have much in common, but in retrospect it makes sense that you’d see this in both places: in particular, the lean folks know as much as anybody about the value of encouraging creativity at all levels of your organization.

Lots of good stuff in the talk; some ideas I particularly liked:

• Students who are in school now will still be working half a century from now, yet we have a hard time predicting what the world will be like half a decade from now; can we afford to do anything other than do anything other than encourage their creativity and capacities for innovation?
• To be creative, you need to make mistakes; yet schools punish you ruthlessly for making them. (They could take a lesson from Super Mario Galaxy: feedback doesn’t mean punishment. Or, for that matter, from more sandboxy games: you don’t need pervasive feedback, either.)
• Different people have different strengths, yet schools focus on an obscenely small portion of those. If somebody is fidgeting in your math class, perhaps discovering that they’re a dancer is a better idea than putting them on ADHD drugs.

As always, I’m very glad that we found PACT. It’s not perfect, but it’s worlds better than what I hear of schools elsewhere.

My thoughts on Super Mario Galaxy got long enough that I spun the first part off into a separate entry. In short, we’re back to linear platforming, with tons of jumping, done very well.

One question that any platformer has to answer is: what non-core player abilities will it mix in? Jumping is great, but platformers always go somewhat beyond that: the fireballs in the original Super Mario Bros. to the suits in SMB3. There are different ways to handle this: in particular, you can add one pervasive theme (the waterpack in Super Mario Sunshine, which didn’t turn out so well), or you can sprinkle in different capabilities (SMB3 again).

Galaxy does some of both: they add one general capability, a spin attack, activated by shaking the wiimote. About which I have mixed feelings: it’s probably useful to have some sort of general mechanism other than jumping, and the small radius of many of the planetoids can make it a bit hard to judge offensive jumps accurately, so a spinning ground attack works well enough. But I don’t like having to shake the wiimote quite so frequently, and I wish the spin attack wasn’t quite as prominent as it is.

There are also a handful of secondary capabilities, accessible by wearing suits that are available in certain areas. (Levels or sections of levels that are designed around them.) I liked the gameplay choices here: it adds a pleasant variety and gives the designers new options that they can use to extend the basic platforming concepts without distracting you from what the game is about, or for that matter what individual levels are about. None of the suits are anything special, but that’s okay, they don’t have to be: they increase the variety of levels, and that’s enough. (And I am fond of some of the new puzzles that the ice suit allowed.)

What I really want to talk about, though, is the line the game walks between challenge and frustration. Any video game is trying to keep the player from getting annoyed while providing the player who wants challenge a way to get that challenge. (Providing interesting environments to explore is also a plus; Galaxy does that well enough, too, though (as I said before) it explicitly doesn’t do that by providing big worlds to roam around in.) And I’m very impressed with how Galaxy balances those two constraints.

The early levels are pretty easy; in a couple of not very long sittings, I’d accumulated about 40 or so stars. Granted, I’m a relatively experienced player of platformers; probably a less experienced player would find them more of a challenge. Even so, I didn’t feel like I was wasting my time getting to the good stuff: they were fun levels, well designed, throwing a grab bag full of concepts at you. They also provided an easy out for the non-completists, or for people who aren’t as fond of platformers as I am: you can reach the final Bowser challenge after you’ve finished 60 of the stars (out of the 120 that the game contains), so you can happily route around challenges that you don’t particularly enjoy. (Incidentally, for those of you who are completists, you should still beat Bowser early on: you need to do that to unlock some of the stars.)

They also avoided the cheap, annoying ways to extend replay value. Within each level, there are relatively frequent checkpoints, so you never get stuck having to repeat yourself too far: the levels are broken up into relatively discrete challenges, you have to accomplish each in one go, but you can die between challenges without serious repercussions.

And, speaking of dying, you’ll do that a lot - it’s easy enough to fall off the edge of many of the environments, and your life bar is only three units long. (Which was kind of shocking at first—I can’t remember the last game I played with that short a life bar—but was absolutely the right choice.) Except for when it’s six units long: in certain, well-selected places (usually before relatively tricky end-of-level boss fights), there’s a mushroom that temporarily doubles your life bar. (A great example of slightly tweaking the gameplay to enhance the design of a portion of a level.)

But dying isn’t a big deal: on tricky sections, there’s almost always either a 1-up mushroom near the star of that section or enough star bits that you can almost always collect 50 of them, earning an extra life, before dying. (Star bits are a minor gameplay addition that exist both to give a spectator something to do—a second player can optionally collect them for you—and to provide a less-heavy-handed way of giving frequent extra lives.) The result is that I have no idea how many hundreds of times I died while finishing the game, but I ran out of my lives exactly once over the course of my playing. (The purple coin challenge on the Luigi picture with disappearing/rotating floors, if you’re curious; I entered it with 25 lives, but that wasn’t enough!) The result is that dying, instead of a punishment, is simply a feedback mechanism, and manages to enhance the gameplay instead of detracting from it.

So the core gameplay works well for people who want to play some of the game, and see bits and pieces of it, but not bang their head against it for hours on end. What about those of us who want more? Here, too, the game provides a range of pleasing solutions. The most basic: the levels are collected into galaxies, and the main galaxies each have three paths in them. (Diverging almost from the start, but sharing at least themes in common.) On one of the paths, though, there are actually two stars, so you need to keep your eyes open for a place where you have two choices as to what to do. Often, you don’t have to keep your eyes very open—half the time, there’s somebody there offering to open up a path if you feed him star bits—but sometimes you have to look harder.

Which could suck if you had to look through all three paths to find which one contains a hidden route. Fortunately, you don’t have to: the game is happy to tell you which path contains the hidden route, so you can narrow your search. (If you don’t want to be given that hint, you also have that option; nice to be given that choice.)

Or what if you want to be given a harder challenge once you’ve proven yourself capable of beating a given star? There, too, the game has an answer: each of the fifteen key galaxies comes with one comet challenge, where you have to do some or all of a level you’ve played before, but with a new rule: maybe you have a time limit, maybe you can’t get hurt, maybe enemies are faster. All of which (well, almost all of which, the one full of top-like enemies annoyed me) are great examples of tough but fair level design: they’re hard, but when you fail, it’s your fault, you know that if you’d done some one thing a little better, you wouldn’t have died, and you’ve usually gotten an extra life somewhere along the path so dying doesn’t do you any permanent harm.

The best example of those are the purple comet levels: you also get one of those in each of the key galaxies. (They only open up once you’ve beaten the final Bowser level, so don’t wait too long before doing that.) In each of those levels, they give you a portion of one of your original paths, and strew it with purple coins; you have to get 100 of them. So the focus isn’t on, say, enemy/boss fights at all: it’s all about proving that you know your environment.

Which I fully support (and, if you don’t, that’s fine, they’re optional), but it turns out that there’s more to them than that. They start off with an introductory one where there are relatively obvious paths through the environment, and it’s easy to get all 100 coins. After that, though, the gloves are off. In some of them, the challenge is looking everywhere without missing anything or falling off the edge or getting hurt by the environment. (In particular, the ice level is a masterpiece in that sub-genre, with some remarkable jumps that you have to make to find them all; there’s nothing unfair about the level, but the challenges that it presents you with are wonderful.) And some force you to really learn your controls; in particular, there’s one jump in the ghost ship purple coin level that’s almost impossible to pull off.

Some are timed: one of the ones on a bee level has you going along an obvious path, but doing it without stopping at all. But, in the game’s commitment to fairness, not only are the coins all in fairly obvious places along that path, there are even bees at various checkpoints telling you “you should have 50 coins by now”, “you should have 70 coins by now”, etc. So you never have to worry about missing something: the level is about quickly going through it while picking up the coins, not about doing that except that you have to magically know that one extra one is hidden somewhere even though you don’t have time to search for it.

In three or four of the timed levels, you have a very short timer, but, to compensate, the level has 150 very tightly-packed coins, of which you only have to get 100. Those have their own joy: you have to frantically make your way through the environment, never pausing, always heading to the densest areas of remaining coins. Which could be a bit boring, but usually the environments are hazardous in some fashion, so you also have to not screw up while doing that. I wouldn’t have wanted every level to be that way (and, in particular, there was one of these that I probably died 50 times before I finished, without any easy access to extra lives), but having a few of them scattered in was a great capstone experience for that particular aspect of platforming challenge.

It’s really a remarkable game. It’s focused on a single gameplay theme, while working in an amazing variety of experiences around that theme. It gives a wonderful range of challenges, while never stooping to cheap tricks for “extending” replay. Because of its narrow genre focus, it’s not for everybody—shooter fans need not apply, for example—but it’s by far the best game so far on the Wii in any of the traditional genres.

Picross is Nintendo’s name for a certain genre of picture logic puzzles. Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation, and it’s easy enough to find places where you can play them online (this site seemed like the best of the first page of search results): the game consists of a grid, together with a set of numbers for each row and column. Those numbers tell you how many squares in that row/column are filled in, and how they cluster, so if the numbers are, say, “4, 5″ then you know that there’s a set of four black squares, then one or more empty squares, then a set of five black squares. (Possibly with white space before the first set and/or after the last set.) The easiest example of how this helps is if you see one number that’s more than half the length of the row: if the row just contains an 8 and the row is 10 squares wide, then you don’t know exactly where the 8 goes (it could touch the left side, it could touch the right side, or it could leave one empty square on either side), but you know that, no matter what, the middle six squares are filled in.

Liesl and I had been doing these for years in Games magazine. (We also worked through most a book of them.) So, when they released Picross DS, I knew we had to get it. In particular, I was really curious how it would turn out on the DS; it seemed like a natural fit for the stylus interface.

At first, I wasn’t too impressed. It doesn’t have multiple save slots, in a blatant attempt to get people to buy multiple copies for their household. (The flip side is that it only costs $20, so even two copies don’t add up to much.) They’d advertised online features, including online competitive gameplay and new downloadable puzzles every week; I got connection failures when I first tried the former, and no puzzles were available for the latter. Puzzles are hardwired to play in either “normal” or “free” mode; in the former, you get told whenever you fill in a square that you shouldn’t, which I found fairly annoying. And the stylus controls don’t work well for puzzles larger than 10×10: you have to move around the puzzle instead of seeing it all at once.

But I kept on going, and soon none of that mattered. It has two control modes, and the D-pad + button version works just fine: you can see the whole grid at once, and it’s easier to mark squares as known to be empty in that control scheme. I let Liesl work puzzles first, and did a row of puzzles at a time; with that, it was easy enough for both of us to keep track of where we were. I still wish there were an option to do all puzzles in free mode, but I can deal. Downloadable content started appearing (every two weeks, though, not every week), and I even got in some online matches. Which turns out to be pleasantly different from the regular game: I treat the regular game as “prove that there’s a unique solution”, while on the online version you really have to go as fast as possible, so you can use things like symmetry and guesses about what the picture will look like.

And then the puzzles started to get nice and hard. They go up to 25×20, which is actually a bit much for me (not so much because of the difficulty but because of the increased amount of fiddly counting), but the hardest 20×20 puzzles were really something, and even the hardest 15×15 puzzles were quite good. Only a few of the puzzles were at the best difficulty level, but there’s a wide range that requires at least some thought, and I enjoy even the easy ones.

I’m not sure how much time I sunk into the game; it comes with about 400 puzzles, I’ve downloaded another 150 or so, and while there are a lot more that take only a couple of minutes than ones that take an hour, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve spent 50 hours on the game, or even more. Add in Liesl’s time spent on it, and we may have gotten 100 hours of gameplay out of our $20 purchase; hard to beat that for value.

I wasn’t expecting a simple puzzle game to be the second best game I’ve played this year, but there you have it. (Hmm, maybe third best, and some other contenders may also force their way in over the next few days.) A perfect game for a portable system; you can pick it up and play it anywhere, for minutes or hours at a time.

My current spate of video game playing began in grad school when my friend Wayne gave me his old NES, together with Super Mario Bros.. If I’m remembering correctly, Jordan later found a copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 at a yard scale, after which I was doomed to several years of platforming addiction. Not that they were the only NES games I played—I was rather fond of Solomon’s Key, and Jordan will be pleased to hear that Blades of Steel was just rereleased on the Virtual Console—but I sunk by far the most hours into the two SMB games. I loved running, jumping, and stomping my way through the levels; I loved the way the focus was on the level design, with combat largely there to keep you on your toes; I loved the way you could explore every nook and cranny of the levels and find hidden stuff; I loved it that, even when I died, I knew it was my fault, and if I just tried the level again (and sometimes again and again and again) and just, you know, didn’t screw up, I’d get past it eventually!

So, when I got a job offer, I celebrated by buying a Nintendo 64, and one of the first games I got for it was Super Mario 64. (It was temporarily out of stock, else it would have been the first N64 game I bought; that honor fell to Extreme-G instead.) And it was great! All the crazy jumping and lightweight combat that I liked, just in 3D, but there were these huge areas for you to explore, with stuff all over the place. In fact, the environmental design in some ways took even more pride of place in Super Mario 64 than in the 2D Mario games: there were goals (stars) for you to accomplish, should you choose, but, unlike the persistent forward drive of the 2D games, you could simply wander around the levels if you wished, just poking your nose in places and having fun. There wasn’t even a strict correspondence between levels and stars: each level was big enough to have six different stars in it. (Plus a seventh that you could get by collecting 100 coins.)

I was blown away, and I wasn’t the only one: this wasn’t just the natural evolution of the platforming genre, this way a statement about how 3D games should be made, with lessons for the entire industry in its transition to the first generation of consoles that could really support 3D gaming. I collected all 120 stars, and would happily have collected twice as many; fortunately, Rare released Banjo-Kazooie a few months later. (I didn’t buy an N64 until a year and a half after launch, so they’d had almost two years to learn the lessons from Super Mario 64.)

Again, I played straight through that one, collecting every puzzle piece, finding all 100 notes on each level, and so forth. Those notes are worth mention: one aspect of 2D platformers that turned out not to translate quite as well to 3D platformers is the “find a way to hit every block to uncover secrets” part of the gameplay. I’m not sure entirely why, but my guess is that, in a 2D world, it’s easy to have constricted areas with multiple levels, which means that it’s easy to place lots of blocks that you can jump up to hit. In a 3D world, however, you need many more open spaces, otherwise the camera can’t see anything; while they still have a lot of vertical exploration, they come more in the form of hills (perhaps with paths cut in the side), trees, or just mounds with no open space between. This means that you don’t have as much freedom to place blocks to break open; Banjo-Kazooie’s solution to this, which I think is as good as any, is to scatter 100 musical notes lying on the ground (or on hills or in trees or in caves or …) in each level. This is great for the game player who, like myself, wants to prove that he can explore every nook and cranny; if I can get all 100 on a single play through a level, I know I’ve mastered exploring that level. (I’d remembered that as unlocking a puzzle piece, but googling shows that I was wrong, so it really is quite optional.)

More platformers followed, but they didn’t have nearly the same spark for me. I finished them, but I didn’t track down every loose end, and they felt like a slog by the end. They kept the same core gameplay design; that was great the first couple of times, but it was getting stale. Levels got larger; at first, I thought this was a blessing, but at times it started to feel like a slog. Also, part of the core platformer tradition is giving your character access to a range of different abilities (the most prominent example of this being the suits in Super Mario Bros. 3); each new game experimented with new vehicles for delivering abilities, but none of them worked very well. (Rare was going through a “let the player switch between multiple characters” phase at this time, and Donkey Kong 64 showed that at its worst.)

The one shining bulwark against the rising tide of platformer mediocrity was Conker’s Bad Fur Day: it was one of the last games on the N64, and one of the best. The reasons, however, had nothing to do with the platforming gameplay, but rather had everything to do with the humor of the game. (And the pop culture references, though I probably didn’t get as much out of those as most people, since I basically hadn’t watched any new movies since moving to California.) The best example, one of my single favorite video game sequences of all time, is the “Great Mighty Poo” song; YouTube has this version with non-singing gameplay edited out, and this longer version without cuts. Please go watch one of them (warning: quite possibly NSFW) and come back. Basically, the main character in the game is a quite profane squirrel; I still laugh when I see a button described as “context-sensitive”, because of a sequence in that game involving such buttons after Conker’s been drinking rather heavily.

Conker was a glorious end to platformers on that generation of consoles, but there’s only so much that the industry could have taken from it as a model going forward. By this time, I was pretty burned out on the genre; in the next generation (Dreamcast/PS2/Gamecube/Xbox), I played almost none, and I don’t think I missed much. I did, of course, play Super Mario Sunshine, and it was pretty good, but nothing special: the core level design was solid, but the new gameplay mechanic wasn’t anything to write home about (in fact, in some ways, it weakened the traditional jumping mechanic), and I thought the “explore every nook and cranny” mechanism (blue coins) was actively annoying.

What’s going on here? The basic problem is that Super Mario 64 got so many things right that it’s hard to see what to do to incrementally improve on it. (Hmm, maybe I should spend more time thinking about lessons from completely different games with strong platforming elements, e.g. Shadow of the Colossus.) The idea of big, wide-open world that you can explore to your heart’s content is pretty compelling; Miranda has spent hours and hours over the last three or so years roaming through the environments of Super Mario Sunshine, not trying to get the stars at all, and she’s still not bored with it.

You can tweak this platforming/exploration design by adding new gameplay mechanics (which is inherently hit or miss, since jumping is always the core of platformer gameplay), you can make the worlds bigger (as happened every year), you can even stitch the worlds together so you have more one big world instead of a hub world that can magically transport you to other, distinct worlds. There’s a bit of the latter in Super Mario Sunshine, but to see where the idea of one big world leads you, it’s best to go outside of the genre entirely: if you stitch together all your worlds into one big world, keep the idea of multiple goals (”stars”) within this big world, and give up on the idea that the goals should have anything to do with jumping, then you’re led to the direction of GTA-style mission-based gameplay within a massive world. One of the biggest platformer series during the second 3D console generation was Jak and Daxter, on the PS2; by the time I got around to giving that series a try, in Jak 3, it was no longer a platformer, but had turned into a sort of GTA with furry animals and (much) less brutality.

So: was the platformer dead? Had we mined everything we could out of it, and had the time come for it to step aside and make way to the new genres that it had helped give birth to? I was wondering that myself, and I certainly wasn’t optimistic about Nintendo’s ability to do significantly advance the genre. (See my standard Nintendo review.) But then something funny happened: a year and a half, Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, bringing back old-school 2D platformer gameplay, and the world has lapped it up to the extent of more than 12 million copies sold. Which is a staggering amount of sales (significantly more than any Final Fantasy or Halo game, for example), and this for a game that brings nothing new to the table, just revives a genre (2D platformers) that’s been rather out of fashion for a while.

So maybe there’s more to be mined from 2D platformers than we’d seen? Let’s go back and re-envision how the genre might have transitioned differently to 3D. In particular, as we’ve seen above, wide open levels with multiple goals evolved into mission-based gameplay; this is, in retrospect, a significant departure from the linear, independent levels that 2D platformers had. So what if we went back to lots of linear levels, and made sure to turn up the jumping knob even further?

This is exactly what Super Mario Galaxy did, and carried it off extraordinarily well. I’ve seen people say that it’s the Super Mario Bros. 3 of the 3D platformer genre, and I don’t agree: SMB3 is an evolution of the original Super Mario Bros. design, while Galaxy goes back to the 2D roots of the genre and imagines a different way in which the gameplay might have evolved. Like Super Mario 64, it is divided up into a collection of worlds, each with multiple stars in them; unlike its predecessor, however, you go on a linear path to each star, and those linear paths diverge almost immediately after entering the world, sharing only marginally more context than the different levels on one world of SMB3 did.

And gone are the wide open spaces, which are largely incompatible with linear gameplay. The “galaxy” notion isn’t an arbitrary choice of setting in the way that Super Mario Sunshine happened to be set on an island: instead, the astronomical setting lets Nintendo create a level out of a sequence of planetoids. (Or other random surfaces - they’re happy to plunk a water slide with no means of support floating in the middle of nowhere.) On each planetoid, you run around and accomplish a sub-goal (sometimes just reach a location, but frequently you beat a monster or hit a block which triggers an event or any number of other things) which opens up a transportation mechanism to the next planetoid. So you’re still moving in a 3D world, but at the same time the gameplay is always along a clear path, driving you towards the star at the end of the level.

The galaxy setting also lets them turn up the platforming mechanics to insane heights. They felt absolutely unconstrained by logic when designing the planetoids; in particular, if they wanted to have, say, a huge mesa rising out of nowhere that you’d run around the outside of, platforming your way up, they would freely do so, giving a very good approximation of a traditional 2D platforming mechanic in a 3D world. But they also used gravity to great effect, having levels where different regions have gravity tugging you in different directions (up, down, left, right), or having traditional “moving platform” segments where, in addition to jumping to avoid obstacles, you could walk around to the bottom of the platform to avoid them.

I could go on to describe the game in more detail; I think I’ll leave that to a separate blog post. Suffice it to say that Nintendo/Miyamoto have revisited the genre’s roots, rethought some very basic decisions that they made in the initial transition to 3D, and ended up with a very convincing alternate notion of the core concept of a 3D platformer. In fact, it’s rather more convincing a translation of the genre than Super Mario 64 was, and, partly because of that, I think it will ultimately be significantly less influential.

In retrospect, Super Mario 64 was an explanation of how to design a general 3D game, and happened to do that in a fashion that involved a lot of platforming. Whereas Super Mario Galaxy is a platformer through and through; I love that genre, a lot of other people love that genre, but I don’t expect to see a thousand flowers bloom from it.

But one beautiful flower has bloomed, which is ultimately all I want out of a game.

Whenever I start a new Nintendo game in an established series, I do so assuming I’m going to be disappointed. Their core series made the leap brilliantly to 3D, opening up gameplay in ways that I’d never imagined. And then, with one idiosyncratic exception, Nintendo has mined that gameplay in subsequent installments, not adding anything to the mix. (Actually, I’m happy to say that there’s now a second exception, which I hope to have time to write more about soon.) The resulting games aren’t bad; they’re building off of extremely solid core gameplay, and they’re not doing anything to actively screw it up. They just don’t have the freshness of the originals, or of the best of other recent games.

Which brings me to Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Any new ideas here? Are they, perhaps, doing something interesting with the Wii?

The answer: no, not really. It’s a good game, I’m happy to have played it; in fact, I ended up with a better feeling about it than its predecessor. I’m not an FPS connoisseur, but the controls seemed good to me: I could aim where I wanted, I could turn reasonably freely, my hand didn’t get excessively tired from having to stay pointed within a fairly small region of the screen (unless I wanted to turn). (And yes, I do realize that the game, while in the first person and involving shooting, isn’t best described as an FPS: I’m just talking about (part of) the control scheme, not the gameplay structure.)

Hmm, other than the controls, what else is there to say, given its predecessors? You go to different worlds instead of different areas of the same world; okay, but it doesn’t make any real difference. The scanning is starting to get to me, especially at the start of the game. I still like searching through the environments enough to revisit them once, trying to get power-ups, after I’ve leveled up fully. Nice that the different beams stack their powers on top of each other, removing the need to switch between them. Ship commands are kind of silly, but not actively offensive.

As I increasingly prefer in my old age, it’s pleasantly easy. Gone are the days when I have the time or desire to devote dozens of hours to master most games, especially games that make it actively difficult to do so; while I gave up its predecessor in disgust at the final boss battle, I had no such problem with this game. I had to fight some of the bosses two or three times, but I always felt that I was learning something, and just as frequently I beat them the first time on my last energy tank, with a pleasant sense of accomplishment. Hmm, now that I think about it, its predecessor’s bosses weren’t bad except for the last one, and in this game as well they committed the same structural flaw of having your last fight go too long without a save opportunity; it would have been better if they’d fixed that flaw instead of addressing the problem by making the last boss a bit of a pushover, but I’ll take what they ended up with.

As always when I write this sort of review, I feel guilty at the end. Really, it’s a good game; really, if you haven’t played another 3D Metroid game, you should give something in the series a try, and this one is a good choice. And even though I wish I were seeing more new, I’m glad to have invested 15 hours (or however much it was; a good choice of length, incidentally) of my life in playing it. In fact, I really should go give Super Metroid a try, now that it’s been released on the Virtual Console; if only there weren’t so many allegedly great games out this fall…

Over the months of reading server usage states for the blog, I have noticed that many of the search results that bring people here include the word “bianca”. Hmm, I thought, I didn’t recall writing about “bianca red latex”. Is Bianca some character in a video game that I wrote about but have since forgotten?

It only dawned on me this weekend that the frequency of the word comes from the title of the blog. I am slow at times.

Though that did get me thinking: I should have an Xbox 360 arriving tomorrow, I plan to sign up for Xbox Live, so I will need a gamertag. (I believe that’s what account names for the service are called.) I normally use names that are relatively closely aligned with my real name, but I assume said service is popular enough that carlton, dbcarlton, etc. will be taken. But surely nobody has taken “malvasia bianca” as a gamertag? The idea of using a female-associated name on the service (which is apparently full of sexist, bigoted assholes) has a certain sick interest.

Not that I plan to play multiplayer much, if any.

To all you Wii owners, I add my voice to the chorus of recommendations for Zack & Wiki. I’m not sure whether to call it a point-and-click adventure game or a puzzle game: it’s a sequence of set pieces all revolving around manipulating your environment to get to where you can open a treasure chest. Say you, for example, see a chest behind a door surrounded by bad guys. If you just go down there, you’ll die, so you go around the side passages until, say, you find an item that you can use to distract them. But the door is locked; you need a key. Oh, there’s a key hanging from a peg that you can’t reach; can you find an item that will let you reach up there?

The pointing and clicking to move and examine is, of course, done with the wiimote. But using items is also done with the wiimote, and is one of the better uses of its motion sensing: you hold the remote like would hold the actual item, and turn it or shake it or flip it or whatever to cause the item to do what you want.

We’re all playing; the puzzles are usually too hard for Miranda to figure out completely on her own, but she likes watching us and giving us suggestions, and then replaying the levels on her own later. I suspect that the levels will soon be hard enough that Liesl and I won’t be able to solve them independently, and will need to both work together to solve some of the tougher ones.

Something new, and the game isn’t getting nearly the publicity or shelf space of some other titles, so I wanted to help spread the word. It’s even a bit cheaper than your typical game.

• xkcd:
• One person, one vote in the Texas legislature: (Via Lawrence Lessig.)
• Starlings flocking; it starts to get good at about 2:00, though if that’s not good enough for you, go to 3:20. (Via Cosmic Variance.)
• Weird Hand-Drawn Game certainly qualifies on the first two counts… (Via Game|Life.)
• I don’t have much to say about The Wealth of Networks, other than to second Lawrence Lessig’s recommendation and to say that it’s useful to be reminded that, from the point of view of mainstream economy taking a snapshot of one isolated state the market, copyright makes no sense. (The book is available for free, by the way.)
• Synesthesia meets color blindness.

Also, some notes to myself: these are links that have stuck around as saved items in my blog reader where I can’t imagine what will either trigger me to act on the information therein yet where I want to keep them around somewhere. So I’m moving them here.

• Ergonomic keyboard recommendations.
• Martin Fowler on board games.
• Zelda reorchestrated. (Via Opposable Thumbs.)
• OpenID notes.

I essentially finished Brain Buster Puzzle Pak some time towards the end of the summer. I’d finished all the built-in levels for the puzzles that I cared about; it has a random puzzle generator, though, which I wanted to explore more. But I never got around to doing that, and then I looked for it last week, and couldn’t find it! Annoying because, if those random puzzles are good (which they were in my brief experience), it’s actually a perfect game for having available at odd moments. Not sure if I like it enough to buy another copy, but I’m considering it. (If I can even find another copy; Amazon for one doesn’t carry the game.)

Enough blathering: I suppose I should tell you what the game is. As you might suspect from the title, it’s a collection of puzzle games. (Of the pen-and-pencil variety as opposed to, say, the falling blocks variety.) It has five types of puzzles in it: Sudoku, Kakuro, Nurikabe, Light On, and Slitherlink.

The sudoku interface is crap, at least compared to the interface in Brain Age. (Or, for that matter, the interface in a random physical book of sudoku puzzles.) And I don’t particularly like kakuro. So I gave up on those puzzles ten or twenty into them, and only made it that far because the initial puzzles were so mindnumbingly easy.

The other puzzle variants, however, were much better. I’d seen nurikabe and slitherlink before; they’re both pleasantly geometric (or perhaps topological would be a more appropriate adjective?), and have a completely different feel to me than most other puzzle types that I’m aware of. (Masyu is another example of that; a pity there aren’t any examples here.) Nurikabe is actually the reason why I’m currently subscribed to Games magazine: before a trip a few years ago, I picked up a copy to go through on the plane, and they had some really fun nurikabe puzzles. Of course, not all puzzle makers are of equal quality, but the ones in Games magazine and the ones in this game are both by Nikoli, and they definitely know their stuff.

So: good puzzles. The DS screen is only so large, and they decided to avoid scrolling, which meant that there weren’t any enormous nurikabe puzzles that take an hour to solve. I can live with that. The slitherlink puzzles were actually done on a grid that was a bit too small, so it occasionally read me as trying to draw a line somewhere other than where I intended; annoying, but I could deal. I’d never seen light up before; it’s a pleasant genre, though all the puzzles that were included were basically trivial, which makes me suspect that it’s impossible to make difficult light up puzzles unless you’re working on a larger grid.

And, in my brief experience, the randomly generated light up puzzles were good, too. I didn’t get around to trying the randomly generated nurikabe or slitherlink puzzles before I lost my copy of the game, unfortunately.

I recommend the game, and Liesl enjoyed it as well. Having said that, if you’re only going to get one DS puzzle game, then Picross is the one you want: Liesl is sitting to my left playing it right now, and it is insanely addictive. But this is good, too; writing this review, I want more of those puzzles to work through! Hmm, I was thinking of doing an order from Amazon Japan soon; I should throw in some of Nikoli’s puzzle books…

• Deterministic and probabilistic software product management.
• Pen tricks. I’ve been doing what he calls “the helicopter” for decades (though in a slightly different way); obviously I have more to learn.
• Beautiful movies. (Sorry about its non-embeddable nature, and for all the talking and the fact that it’s an ad; I couldn’t find anything else to use with high enough video quality.)
• I love the music, I love the way he lays down loops at the start. (Via 37signals.)
• Who wouldn’t like a song whose refrain is “You are likely to be eaten by a grue”? (Via GayGamer.)
• This is, perhaps, not news, but the music industry is truly fucked-up: apparently the people who have the power to license music want to keep that very fact secret.
• This hacked-up insanely difficult Mario is oddly amusing. (Via Game|Life.)
• Photos people are uploading to Blogger.
• The rice paddy art I referred to before has now gotten harvested. (Via How the World Works.)
• An interesting take on the (surprising lack of) value of time-boxed iterations.

Apologies for my recent silence; the cause is a combination of watching movies (well, DVDs, mostly Last Exile) and being pretty busy last weekend. But now I am, for once, caught up with my other odds and ends (i.e. reading blogs) early enough at night to actually be able to write something.

As I mentioned before, Miranda seems to have gotten serious about the idea of us writing a video game. And we actually have been spending some time on it over the last month, mostly at her prodding. So far, I’ve mostly been playing around with programming, while she draws pictures in a notebook. I’d been using rubygame as a programming framework, and I still might stick with it, but it doesn’t have support for sprites at different depths; this is a problem if, say, you want to have a character walk behind a tree. So now I’m thinking I’ll go with gosu: not much documentation yet, but it seems to be able to do what I want, its sample game is extremely short yet fully functional, and when I was poking around its web site, I saw several pages that showed signs of having been edited within the last hour. All good stuff.

So, right now, I’m trying to find time to convert my rubygame spike into a gosu spike; assuming it goes well, I think I’ll go with gosu. But what should Miranda do while I’m doing my programming?

She’s drawn lots of neat pictures, and I’m sure she could profitably continue along those lines for quite some time. But, if you’re doing things incrementally, you want something functional crossing all layers as soon as possible; by now, my programming is coming along well enough that I could imagine using a picture of hers, and she has drawings to give me. So the only thing stopping us from putting the two together (other than that I’m switching development frameworks!) is that I don’t know how to get her pictures in the game!

Given that, the next step is clear: rather than puttering around with game libraries, I should face up to my fears and attack that problem head-on. So when Miranda asked me this morning if we could work on the game this evening, I decided we should start on digitizing her pictures. Fortunately, my brother was kind enough to give us an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax doohicky last Christmas; time to break in the scanner functionality. Which we did, giving us an electronic copy of one of her designs.

Next, a graphics editor: at the very least, we need the backgrounds of her images to be transparent instead of white. I’d considered and mostly rejected Pixen earlier, but hadn’t found anything better in the interim, so I decided to give that a try. Somewhere either from Scott McCloud or Penny Arcade I’d gotten the idea that the proper technique is to take a scanned-in drawing, add a transparent layer on top, re-ink and color the drawing on the new layer, and then hide the original drawing. Which took us half an hour or so to figure out, both of us being new to the software and ignorant about the details of the process, but ended up working out just fine. So the result is that two black-and-white pencil drawings have turned into colored PNG files with transparent backgrounds; I should be able to just stick them into the game (maybe doing a bit of resizing first) and see how they look. Which will be very exciting!

Watching her do this has also gotten me more convinced of the merits of graphics tablets: she was happy to ink in the lines with the touchpad, but I’m sure it would have been much easier with a tablet. I’m not going to go out and buy one immediately, but she’s sticking with the project well enough that my worries that she would lose interest in a graphics tablet are quickly diminishing. (She’s also spent a lot of time playing around with SketchUp over the last few months, incidentally.)

A fun way to spend the hour between getting home and starting dinner.

I ran across a couple of video demos of interesting music hardware recently. Both are basically sequencers with unusual user interfaces:

First, Tenori-On. (Found via GayGamer):

And Reactable. (Found via Lost Garden, which throws in some neat ideas of its own.)

I don’t have much to add; I’m curious how they work in practice. Especially Tenori-On: it seems to have a more limited set of choices than Reactable, but the output is also far more interesting to listen to / watch. Is it really that easy to produce good-sounding music from it, or is the video just the result of somebody who knows the device inside and out?

Incidentally, one side effect of my going through tons of others’ posts about videos is that it’s now clear that I prefer embedded videos to being requested to click on a link to get through a video; I’ll switch to embedding videos myself whenever possible, on those few occasions when I want to refer to one.

As I mentioned before, I’ve started tagging my saved items in Google Reader. I did this partly because of a general worry about the saved items getting out of control, but also because there were three specific categories of saved items that I was afraid were getting buried: items that I wanted to read but didn’t have enough time/focus to read right then, items that I’d commented on and wanted to read others’ comments on later, and items that I wanted to blog about in the future. I had another ten or so categories that I came up with, but I didn’t seriously expect to get through the items in them: their purpose was to make it clear that I had 60 or 80 or whatever videos saved up to watch, that I was clearly accumulating more faster than I was watching them, and I should just delete them now.

The three short-term tags have served their purpose quite well; I’m definitely glad I took up tagging for that reason alone. What was unexpected, however, was an unexpected benefit I’ve gotten from the other categories. (Or at least an unexpected side effect - it’s not clear that my spending more time web surfing should be categorized as a benefit.) Namely: when I was finished reading through my normal feeds and didn’t feel like doing something else, I started going through my saved video items. (Because that was the tag that I was accumulating the most new stuff at the time.) And what I found was that it actually wasn’t hard to go through the videos faster than I was accumulating them.

When I see a blog post with a video, my mind had been thinking “that will put a dent in my blog reading time”. And it is true that watching a video takes longer than reading a normal blog post. But it doesn’t take that much longer: most of the time, I stop watching after 30 seconds or so, and most of the rest of the time it takes less than 5 minutes to watch the whole thing. (And curses to people who embed videos in a way that doesn’t show how long they are.) So it’s not that hard to go through 10 or 15 or 20 of them in half an hour; after doing that a few times, most of the category is cleared out.

It’s not completely cleared out: there are still 23 items, typically ones that will take a while to watch but that, I suspect, are worth it. Of those 23 items, however, a grand total of one of them is newer than my blog post announcing the advent of these queues. So I’m managing to keep the queues quite well under control.

Or at least that queue: if I’m concentrating on clearing out videos, that probably means that other queues are building up? To some extent, that was the case, so next I turned myself to the queue of flash games. Which, fortunately, hasn’t been building up at a fast pace recently - Game | Life hasn’t been writing about flash games very often recently - but there were still a lot that had built up. (Incidentally, if you’re looking for a flash game to play, check out the Game | Life logo!)

Flash games are potentially a worse problem than videos - most of the time, you know how long a video will take, but who knows how long it will take to evaluate a flash game? It turns out, however, that the answer is “not very long”: in most cases, it only takes a minute of play time for me to decide that I have something better to do. So now the queue is down to 15 games, of which only 2 are relatively new entries to the queue. (Most of the stragglers are adventure games.)

The flash games queue was actually rather disappointing: I enjoyed watching many of my saved videos, but I didn’t enjoy playing almost any of the saved games. I would like to think that there are good flash games out there that I’m missing, games that are equal in quality (if not duration or production values) to good commercial games, but I’m just not seeing it: there is currently only one flash game author whom I particularly like. (I should blog more about his games one of these days.)

So: two long queues attempted, two successes. Next, I turned to the category “many-links”, of blog posts referring to lots of other pages. The same story as before: yes, it takes longer to read such a post as a normal blog post. (To be specific, if such a post has N links, it takes about N times as long!) But it’s not an unmanageable amount of time, or anything: I’m still going through this category, so I have 43 items saved, but none of them are new, and I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to get this category down to 0 items without too much work.

This is the one place where I’m using multiple tags. Say that, for example, I think the second link in one of these posts is worth blogging about. When that happens, I’ll replace the “many-links” tag by the “blog” tag. But that’s not good enough - it might take a month for me to have enough bloggable items saved up to make a post, and by then I’ll have forgotten which one I wanted to blog about. I could add a more specific tag, but that will screw up tag completion and such. What I’ve decided to do is to tag the post with both “blog” and a number (e.g. “blog, 2″), where that number is the number of the link that I want to blog about.

I still have a ways to go (I currently have a total of 194 tagged items, while ideally I’d reach a steady state of under 10), but the contours seem clear by now: once I break things into categories, the saved items start dwindling. I’m actually curious if the categories themselves matter: would I have the same effect if the tags I used were just the days of the week? Not entirely clear: maybe I learn something about how to efficiently process video posts by focusing on them for a little while, but maybe not. It may well be the case that some of the tags will prove resistant to this process: in particular, I’m worried about the “long” tag. I doubt it, though: my bet is that I’ll be down to 50 items in another couple of months, and will be down to 10 items in half a year.

Incidentally, Google has fixed one of the UI flaws that I whined about before: they now do tag completion based on the start of the tag, instead of completing from the middle of the tag. But they still insist on defaulting to showing me unread tagged items, which continues to make no sense to me.

• Ninja Town. I love the character names.
• A great video review. (Even though it’s of a demo of a game I’ve paid no attention to.)
• Tim Bray speaks sense on drugs. “Um, let’s see… the cost of pushing back a brutal ugly slow path to death is getting high from time to time. Yep, I could make that sacrifice.”
• An oldie which I just recently read: XML on the Web Has Failed.
• Mary Poppendieck on Train-Wreck Management. Ouch. (And ouch on my eyes, too, with that font size…)
• Love in the Age of Software: slides from what looks like it was a fascinating talk.
• Dave Nicollette’s analysis of how software development roles have been and will be changing.
• Linked to from the above was Scott Ambler on Generalizing Specialists. That is what I would like to be.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All is the second game in the Phoenix Wright series. It’s very similar to its predecessor, which is a good thing: its predecessor was excellent. So go and read my review of the first one, and come back.

They tweaked the game mechanics slightly. For one thing, they added a “psyche-lock” mechanism, where you have to drag secrets out of people during the investigation phase. This increases the texture of the investigation phase, and makes it feel at times a little more like the trial phase. All in all, a good thing: it decreases the importance of hunting and pecking through the environments in the investigation phase, and I was rarely stumped by the psyche locks. When you first discover them, you’re never able to unlock them, and when you get the information that lets you unlock a given lock, it’s pretty obvious what to do with it.

The other addition is that you can now present characters instead of just pieces of evidence when talking to people, either during investigations or during trials. So, for example, when you’re claiming during a trial that somebody else has committed a given act, you can now select that character to present. Again, a fine thing: it gives you more to do, and, in those situations where you’re really stuck and having to do an exhaustive search, it’s usually at least pretty clear whether you’re supposed to present evidence or a character. So the exhaustive searches haven’t gotten any worse.

So both additions are pleasant enough. Having said that, neither is a significant advance, and if they keep on adding new gameplay tweaks like this, I imagine the game will get a bit busy by the third or four installment.

And they kept the difficulty at a good level: during most cases, there were one or two frustrating moments, but I never had to ask Liesl or gamefaqs for help during this one. And yes, Liesl finished this game, too: in fact, she started and finished it before me, because I was still playing Etrian Odyssey at the beginning of the vacation where we started playing this game. Still no second save spot, grr, so we had to take turns.

Having said that, it was starting to get a bit stale. Four cases this time; the second one injected some non-uninteresting pieces of plot development, but no great shakes. And, by the third case, the game was starting to feel like a rehash: this game swapped out the prosecutor from the first game with an excessively cardboard new prosecutor, your new sidekick was nice enough but nothing to make me sit up and take notice, and the occasional typos in the translation didn’t help matters, either. So I was having serious doubts about the future of the series.

The fourth case, though, was stunning. The initial investigation wasn’t very exciting: you got to say hello to some friends from the first game, one plot twist that was maybe kind of fun but maybe signs of grasping at straws. But then the trial started, and Edgeworth reappears as the prosecutor. And all of a sudden the emotional and moral complexity of the game got quite a bit deeper. (Of course, some of that may just be a reaction to the shallowness of Etrian Odyssey…) I spent yesterday morning finishing off that case, and now I am completely hooked on the series again.

Again, a sign of the health of gaming these days: rather than just seeing the same genres remade over and over again with better (and more expensive) graphics, we’re seeing games in a wide variety of genres (new or exhumed) pop up, games that make up for their low production costs with distinctive art, wit, and well-done niche gameplay. Keeps me happy.

I’ve talked about Etrian Odyssey before. It’s a dungeon crawler, which isn’t my favorite genre, but it also has the gimmick that, as you play, you have to draw the map of the dungeon on the bottom screen of your DS with your stylus. And I love (and miss) drawing maps while playing games, so I figured I had to pick it up and give it a try.

And the mapping was a lot of fun! No big surprise there, and I’m sure there are lots of people who would give it a try and wonder how anybody could possibly consider doing that sort of basic mapping to be entertaining; those people are not me.

What was more of a surprise was that I enjoyed the dungeon crawling as well. The difficulty progression was well done, the levels were acceptably varied, there were some at least somewhat interesting choices to be made in the character classes that you use and how you level them up. Each time you level up you get to either unlock a new skill - a spell or a new attack or something - or improve an existing skill. (Which may, in turn, make more new skills available for unlocking.) So you have a good amount of choice in how you develop your characters, instead of being forced along a single path by the choice of character classes.

Often, when playing games like this, I actually get frustrated at the number of choices, because I want to explore them all; here, though, I was okay with only focusing on four of the classes, and with exploring one way of developing each of those. (Except for Alchemists: I had two of them, which I initially leveled up along different lines.) And, actually, I enjoyed the dungeon wandering enough to keep a second party around, representing the classes that weren’t in my primary party.

As to difficulty: the monsters normally get gradually harder but not in any threatening way. There’s a big boss at the end of every fifth level that’s quite a bit harder as well. And occasionally there’s a tough boss elsewhere, most notably at the start of level three. Which worked out well: I was rarely bored during my normal progression through the game, I was rarely frustrated when I got to the tough bosses, and on those few tough bosses that I couldn’t beat on the first couple of tries (levels 3 and 12 - hmm, I guess the really toughest bosses aren’t on the multiple of five levels, are they?), I didn’t have to do too much wandering around and leveling up (combined with intelligent upgrade selection) to get to beat them.

So all was fine and dandy through the first ten or fifteen levels. At that point, though, problems developed. For one thing, two character classes aren’t unlocked at the start, leaving hope for interesting new opportunities going forward. The first one, Ronin, was okay; after suitable leveling up, I swapped out my previous fighter type for one, and was happy enough with that choice. But I didn’t feel that I got anything great from the new class, either: I’m fairly sure I would have been just as happy with my previous class.

The second new class, though, was an active disappointment. As mentioned above, I’d been with a party of two Alchemists, the stock magic user type. (The rest of my party was a Landsknecht (= generic fighter), later to be swapped with a Ronin; a Medic; and a Dark Hunter, a rather fun fighter type who also has paralyzing whip attacks that are extremely useful against boss monsters.) The last class to unlock is a Hexer; I’d been hoping that would be an interesting twist on an Alchemist, allowing me to vary my party a little more. In fact, though, a Hexer wasn’t very much like an Alchemist; the result was that I kept my party the same (I like my elemental spells!), and was unhappy.

Also, at about this time, the plot took a turn for the worse. All along, the plot was, to put it gently, threadbare. Which is okay: that’s really not what this sort of game is about. At around level 15 or level 16, though, they introduce what seems to be an interesting turn of events. I expected here that I’d be able to choose between a good way of proceeding and an evil way of proceeding. Which has been done a zillion times recently, so it’s no great shakes, but would at least have been a sign that they were taking some small amount of care of the plot.

In fact, however, there was only one way to proceed, and that one way involved proceeding in a banally evil fashion. This left me with a bad taste in my mouth for two reasons. One is that it drove home the lack of quality in the plot. And the other is that I don’t particularly enjoy slaughtering people, even random cardboard enemies, just to proceed through a game, if I’ve been given active reason to believe that they have more right to be in that part of the game world than I do.

And then I reached level 20. The level started off as an interesting twist: there were no random encounters, but instead the level was full of mini-bosses. Which I couldn’t all kill, so I assumed the level was about mapping it out properly and picking my way through them to find a stairs somewhere. Eventually I had the whole level mapped, though, with no stairs; on to theory B, that the boss in the center was special, and once I beat him I would find some stairs.

And indeed the boss in the center was different from the other monsters in several ways, but beating him didn’t turn up anything. After a bit of scratching my head, I looked on gamefaqs: it turns out that you have to beat all of the mini bosses plus the central boss in the level without dying.

Which, for me, crossed the line from a pleasantly tough challenge to actively disrespectful. I could have done it after a bit more leveling up, I’m fairly sure. But each attempt would have involved an hour or two of battles, with no guarantee at the end that I’d succeed, and with monsters respawning if I left in the middle to save. I probably would have soldiered through it if I’d had a more favorable impression of the game by then, but my two recent disappointments had already left me with a bad taste in my mouth; at that point, the game had spent too much of my goodwill towards it to leave me willing to invest further potentially unproductive hours to make it past that barrier.

So I stopped. Lest I end this on a depressing note, however, I want to emphasize that this was a quite pleasant game through the first 15 levels or so. I’m glad I played it, and it did a lovely job of helping me through the summer game doldrums.

But I’m also confident that I stopped at the right time. For one thing, there were a few other games that I wanted to give a try in the second half of the summer. And, right now, all hell is about to break loose: as far as I can tell, if I want to spend all of the next nine months playing video games that are better than this one, I will be able to do so. Metroid drops next week, the DS Zelda and Zack and Wiki in October, Mario in November, Professor Layton (for single-player fun) and Smash Brothers (for multi-player fun; Miranda has recently discovered the Gamecube version and quite enjoys it) in December. And hopefully by the time I’m done with those I’ll be confident enough about the quality of Xbox 360’s that I’ll be able to buy one of those, at which point Bioshock, Eternal Odyssey, Rock Band, and Mass Effect will keep me quite busy. The rest of this year looks like it will be the best four months of games that I can remember; maybe I should just burn my vacation time and hole up in front of the TV for a few weeks…