Something Completely Different

Ever wonder what a student podcast looks like? Check out the following link.

http://www.vimeo.com/4597442

Perhaps every question you've ever had will be answered in the following three minutes.

But You Can't Make Me Care

Before open-ended videogames were commonplace, most followed one predetermined story. The player controls the pacing -- whether or not to do sidequests, or perhaps kill a few monsters for the hell of it -- but all roads lead to the same end. Other genres, such as rail shooters and brawlers, don't even offer the luxury.

Playing a videogame no longer guarantees a heroic role. Dungeon Keeper players are cast as wicked overlords. Command and Conquer gives players a choice between GDI and NOD. Sonic Adventure 2 begs the question: blue or black?

Open-ended videogames go one step further. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura allow players to choose not only between good and evil, but also how they will enforce that choice. Why not play an uncouth jedi with a heart of gold? Why not play a charismatic, devious halfling with a penchant for explosives?

As it turns out, "why not" is remarkably difficult to answer. From a game designer's point of view, the most practical solution is to implement a system of reward and punishment.

Picture this. Let's say that you're a mighty paladin -- a champion of the people, perhaps adorned with pretentious +5 shimmering plate mail -- who decides to pick up various sundries for your next epic adventure. Upon entering a store, the drunken shopkeeper snarls at you and is unwilling to sell anything. After pleading for what must be four full dialog boxes, he finally relents. You try to buy 10 healing herbs and notice that the cheeky bastard doubled the price. You've had it up to here with this jerk.

Decision time. You could decline the herbs and simply find another store. You can buy the herbs at the inflated price (after all, you're quite rich and probably sexy). You can try to bargain with the merchant once more. Of course, you could always just kill him and rob him and his entire store.

I'm betting that, if you are ingratiated with the story and your character's reputation, you'll opt for one of the first three options. If however you approach the game casually or with disinterest, killing the shopkeeper is your best bet. So what if a virtual widow and child will hate your avatar? You'll get no less then 50 healing herbs and 250 gold!

Videogames using this sort of system only play at moral obligation. Good and evil boil down to quest rewards, and ethical quandaries are resolved by a quick trip to GameFAQs.

As Is

Erratic posting will continue to be so for a while, given my school schedule. Bear with me. With any luck, I'll be able to customize the site as my CSS final project.

Up and coming posts include Guardian Heroes tips and tricks, as well as soundtrack analyses of the Ys and Star Ocean series.

Seriously Whack

J.J. told me an interesting analogy the other day: Videogames are like high school teachers -- each one assigns homework with the assumption that no other teacher has done the same.

Take the Gears of War 2 achievement "Seriously 2.0", wherein the player must, throughout the course of the game, kill 100,000 enemies. This is absolutely ridiculous, considering that beating the game yields anything between five hundred and a couple thousand.

What makes the achievement even worse is the fact that it's an achievement at all. If the same prerequisite resulted in, say, a medal or a title, that would be one thing. Achievements, however, are a modernized method of measuring score/percentage of game completion. Do I really need to play Gears of War 2 for several hundred hours just to say I've finished it?

A Far-Fetched Analogy

Your best friend calls you at two in the morning. He's a nervous wreck; words haphazardly tumble off his tongue, and it is evident that he's been crying. "I can't go out there tomorrow" he says. "The competition will rip me apart!" You tell him the usual -- take deep breaths, get some ice water, watch TV for a while -- with little effect. It's going to take more than that to defuse his panic.

The two of you talk for an hour. Then a brief silence, punctuated by a whimper. "Do you really mean it?" You nod in reply, and your friend somehow receives the message. "Thanks, man. I'll call you afterwords." Tossing the phone aside, you sit up and collect your thoughts, your gaze fixed on the carpet. A glass of ice water sounds good right now.

Three days have past, and still no word from your friend. The phone buzzes. You get a text: "Audition went great. En route to Hollywood. Thanks for the talk!"

Ten years pass. Aside from the occasional phone call, you and your friend hardly hear from each other. Your second daughter is due shortly, and his career has nowhere to go but up. He sends complimentary copies of his work on a regular basis. This last package however is a little different. No box of any kind, but instead a standard envelope.

"I can't seem to find a way to use this. Maybe you can?" Out flutters a check; apparently he decided that you could use ten million dollars.

--------------------

Here is where you get to make a crucial decision. Remember, your best friend is successful, happy, and wealthy, and he's attributing all of it to your friendship. He can afford to slip you ten million dollars, which means that you, your crazy-hot wife, and your children will never go hungry. The odds are stacked ridiculously in your favor for as long as you walk the earth. What is the very first thing you do?

A. Place half of the money into savings
B. Plan a cruise to the first country that pops into your mind when you hear the word "booze"
C. Invite all your friends over for a week long "Life Is Good" party
D. Donate X amount of your fortune to a noble cause
E. Curse your best friend with lycanthropy and force him to fight endless hordes of inconsequential creatures with stretchy arms.

Decisions, decisions...

Nothing Is Sacred

Several months ago on a dark and stormy night, a group of Sega suits gathered around the water cooler. Their mission: determine the fate of their once beloved mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog. They paced, pondered, pontificated, even pranced (briefly), but to no avail. Benson reached into his coat pocket and produced special brownies.

After being thrown out of the office for disorderly conduct, the lot of them crashed at Benson's pad and watched Underworld on pay-per-view.

"Werewolf! That's it! The key to Sonic's revival is werewolf action!"

As much as I would like to dismiss Sonic Unleashed as another failed attempt to redeem the Sonic franchise, doing so would prevent both game developers and the unsuspecting public from learning from their mistakes. What follows is not a review - we already know that Sonic Unleashed is not, nor can it ever be, a good game. This is a full-blown analysis.

WHERE SONIC UNLEASHED SUCCEEDS

Daytime: Oddly enough, the depressingly few levels that you get to play as the real Sonic are a blast. Some of the new moves (quick side dashes, i.e.) take a while to get used to, but are a great asset once you adapt. These levels also change between 2D and 3D perspectives, delivering mixed messages of "See? We can make 3D work" and "Remember the Genesis?". The sense of speed is well implemented, and there's satisfaction in nailing all the shortcuts.

Engine: There's something to be said for the technical quality of its graphics engine, particularly evident in the game's cinematics. Content aside, the opening movie looks fantastic. For what it's worth, I got a kick out of the water effects in certain levels, and loading time is (usually) minimal.

Failing a Mission: For one reason only - the sounds. Should you fail to complete a training level, you hear Sonic say "Not my best try" or, if you're really lucky, "NO!". This is immediately followed by an off-key dissonant rendition of the main theme. Call me crazy, but I'm particularly susceptible to audio humor, and failing a mission delivers.

Dr. Robotnik: It never fails. Robotnik, as always, is awesome. And yet most of the voice actors that played him are dead. Is there no justice?

WHERE SONIC UNLEASHED FAILS

The game opens with Dr. Robotnik's space fleet orbiting Earth, no doubt for some nefarious purpose. Sonic makes a flashy entrance via slaughtering several dozen robot sentries. Sonic confronts Robotnik, eventually transforms into Super Sonic, and has the good doctor at his mercy. However, Sonic is a loudmouth, rendering him blind to Robotnik's personal panic button which, like most villanous personal panic buttons, traps the protagonist in a space cannon. The cannon leeches the energy from the Chaos Emeralds, fires, and splits the earth into neat little sections organized by continent. This in turn releases an ancient evil spirit (Dark Gaia), which dispurses across the somewhat deformed planet. Also, Sonic is now a werehog - a werehog who is shot out of an airlock, along with the drained emeralds, into the ionosphere.

You would think that the plot has already been established, asinine though it may be. Get Sonic back to normal, restore the emeralds to grace, and put Earth back together. And because it's a Sonic game, all three objectives can be met simultaneously by beating Dr. Robotnik. Game, set, match; let's play!

Hold your horses! Every good Sonic game needs a subplot, right? Following Mr. Werehog's involuntary airlock escapade, he crash lands on the noggin of a deranged hedonistic flying chipmunk beast. Said beast loses his memory (natch), so Sonic offers to help it remember why it exists. In addition, that whole splitting the planet thing takes a backseat to this new, clearly superior plotline. Ug. At least we can play now, right? Right!

Right to the village map! Remember Mario Is Missing? Remember all the parts of that game you hated, like walking around foreign countries picking up scattered orts of trivia, the sum of which had nothing to do with the MIA plumber? That's sort of exactly what the village map is. Instead of wandering about the streets, you pick a marker ("Back Street" or "Town Hall", say) and listen to civilians chat about ice cream and that weird old guy who lives near the SACRED SHRINE. Once we find the civilian who says SACRED SHRINE, the marker "SACRED SHRINE" appears on the map. Hmm...maybe we're supposed to go to the SACRED SHRINE.

The SACRED SHRINE turns out to be a room connecting Mr. Werehog to the actual game. In other words, it's a hub within two other hubs. There are three doors at the back of the room, marked with a sun, a moon, and a star respectively. Like any good game, none of these doors open. With nowhere else to go, we go back to the village map to click on various markers and hope that some sequence of ugly people nets one of three tablets: sun, moon, planet. Each tablet allows our bestial hero to open a door, and finally gain access to a real, purebred level.

Sort of. As I mentioned before, the daytime levels are legitimately fun, and the sun door is the first one we can open. Sweet! But instead of the full level, you have to play a training mission first. It's not too bad, as it's merely a means to practice the controls. The first mission is, in essence, learning how to jump. The game counts down. Here we......GO!

GO directly to "Chip"! Chip, dear readers, is the name Sonic bequeeths to the pint-sized amnesiac (for his love of ice cream. No, seriously.). The instant you hear GO!, the game freezes, and up flutters Chip to tell us what we already knew. "Hit the A button to perform a jump! Jump on ledges to proceed! Here's the obvious stated in irritating detail!"

NOW we can play, and for the 30 seconds we need to finish the level, we have a pretty good time. Mission complete! You got one Moon Medal! Uh...okay, I'll take the medal. On to the real level!

Wrong again! Repeat the entire training mission scenario six times to cover every single move. We end up with seven Moon Medals without having played a single level in its entirety. Remember, not one level has been played, and Chip is already the worst thing to exist in the history of ever.

Then we get to play the full level, and you know what? It's a damn fine level. Wind blowing through your quills, the thrill of killing robots by running really fast, and the confusion of your friends and family watching you shake the Wii remote to run even faster. All good things. Your reward, aside from whatever score you got and a number of Moon Medals, is the Moon Tablet...I think. We (and by "we" I mean "J.J.") got it from somewhere. In either case, it's time to sample life as a werehog.

When I think of werewolves, the three qualities that come to mind aren't "stretchy", "bumbling", and "formerly Sonic the Hedgehog". Nuts to that, says Sega. Sonic's new form is considerably slower, but has enhanced combat abilities. Instead of merely jumping or spin dashing for an instant kill, Sonic can now gradually pummel hordes of identical twin baddies with his extendable arms. MUCH better.

Platforming as this howling mistake is a different story. We (J.J.) can now double jump, which is nice. We (still J.J.) also gain access to a horde of different "swing to and fro on this thing" devices, all of which make gratuitous use of the Wii remote. Inertia is not a universal constant, and can come and go as it pleases. The concept of wind is equally fickle, and is best explained by citing an instance wherein J.J. (we) lifted a box to prevent a fan-like enemy from blowing him off a ledge. It worked before. Then this happened: "See, if I'm holding this, it won't blow me away...what oh shit no no! No!"

There was a third door, a "planet" door, back at the SACRED SHRINE. We mused, "If the sun door led to a daytime level, and the moon door led to a nighttime level, then the planet door must lead to some weird outer space level or something". False alarm. The planet door, which really should be called the star door, leads to a boss, which may or may not be Dr. Robotnik.

After beating a few levels, it's back to the village for more pointless conversations, maybe a boss fight or two, and passage to a new continent with more of the same. Somewhere out in the planet's orbit, Dr. Robotnik is watching, waiting for his relevance to be made known, then giving up and eating a sandwich.

WHERE SONIC UNLEASHED ROLLS A 1

The soundtrack is hard to justify. The music isn't outright bad (some of it is reasonably catchy), but it has no place in a Sonic game. The main theme is a malcontent, fitting somewhere between John Williams stereotype and Super Mario Galaxy wannabe. Level music is hit and miss, and there's only one track for werehog battle - an obnoxious jazz combo piece. The soundtrack is definitely Sega, but it's unfit for cursed hedgehogs.

Sonic games have no need of a supporting cast. Save for Tails and Knuckles, the other animal characters are of questionable value. What really fouls the experience is the interactions Sonic needs to have with humans. Dr. Robotnik should be the only remotely human character - period. I don't want to talk to old guys about their grandkids. I don't want to talk to grandkids about their favorite foods. I certainly don't want to rescue Amy from dancing with a frenzied Italian.

And then there's Chip. Putting up with him through the training missions was bad enough. Putting up with everything else is beyond reason. Chip gets his own cinematics, wherein he offers every NPC chocolate, talks about how sad he is that nobody knows him, and drooling over ice cream. He also makes everything VERY CLEAR so that THREE YEAR OLDS know what BUTTONS do. Helpful advise includes quips like "What's this weird switch? Think it operates something somewhere?" and "Let's find someone in Holoska who can put the planet back together for us". Oh, and he tells you that you can open a door when it's unlocked.

The actual gameplay does little to redeem these faults. The daytime stages can be beaten, on average, under three minutes. The nighttime stages often take more than ten. There are also three night stages per day stage. Throw in the village map and the tablets and you've got quite a lackluster experience. What's more, the game knows it's a lackluster experience. Every time you beat a regular level, the game literally asks "Continue Playing?"

Sonic Unleashed is a calamity. To add insult to injury, it's not even an original calamity. In trying to decide what genre the game should be (I thought for sure the answer would be platform), Sega blatantly ripped off other franchises. The orchestral theme was desperately mimicking Super Mario Galaxy. The splitting of the planet/evil spirit business is (so I'm told) straight out of Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within, in both premise and presentation. The village map is a disasterous tip-of-the-hat to Mario Is Missing [other console versions have it worse, apparently. I'll have to get back to you on that]. Oh, and the entire werehog battle system -- I can't believe I just typed that -- is a beta version of God of War having an affair with the Twilight Princess. You gain spirit points which drop as orbs, which are later accumulated in a skill wheel, earning new moves and upgrades. Stretch Hogstrong combines the Blades of Chaos with Midna's hair, resulting in an entirely new way to suck.

Finally, the one thing that doomed the entire project from the start: the belief that Sonic needed some crazy shapeshifting gimmick to catch on, both literally and figuratively. Sega has the impression that Sonic games of old were broken in their simplicity, and that throwing in five genres will somehow fix the problem.

Look at newer Mario games. Super Mario 64 was a great game because Mario jumped on goombas, picked fire flowers, and saved the princess; being 3D was circumstancial. Super Mario Galaxy kept the same premise; space travel was circumstancial.

The DS Sonic games had the right idea. Sonic ran through loops and rolled through quirky machinery. All they added was the Super Boost and dual-screen support. Hell, even Sonic Chronicles got good reviews (Bioware can work wonders). The new 2D Sonics add a few new moves. Sonic Unleashed introduces the werehog, battle modes, village navigation, Chip, Professor Pickle, a plethora of NPCs, and downplays what made Sonic great in the first place.

And Sega wonders what they're doing wrong.

Story and Song

Christmas is messing with my originality at the moment, so my first post will be a reply to H.T. Parnell's take on Interstella 5555.

My earliest experience with Daft Punk was in August of 1999, listening to Around the World while carpooling to high school. Catchy to be sure, but not groundbreaking. Years later, I heard excerpts from Discovery, which yielded very different results.

Every song was melancholic. Something in the chords, the keys, and/or the tonality made listening to Daft Punk unpleasant, if not painful. Equally confusing was the fact that many of my friends really liked the album, going so far as to play it during hang out sessions and parties. I mean, Amistad was a good movie, but it's not my idea of recreation.

So why did I watch Interstella 5555? Maybe it was my affinity towards anime. Maybe Willie really knew how to sell it. However it happened, I was able to enjoy Daft Punk immediately after seeing it. In retrospect, I know why.

Good soundtracks tell stories.

By watching Interstella 5555, Discovery became a soundtrack that I could associate with a wacky anime music video. The premise was nothing short of ridiculous, but I'm a sucker for the romantic. The prince saves the princess; them being groovy space aliens is circumstancial.

The movie won't convert anybody who flat out detests Daft Punk or music videos, but I'm willing to bet that it could sway people who are on the fence.