By Michael Lowell

March 24, 2010

Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves
Playstation 2
Developed: Sucker Punch Productions
Published: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Released: September 26, 2005  (North America)

Note: This review contains spoilers.

I got a question that needs to be answered: What the hell happened to Sly Cooper?

In the world where Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex never happened (and it’s perfectly okay to pretend that game didn’t), Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus was the sequel to Crash Bandicoot: Warped.  It wasn’t bad.  Touted by games journalists as a sleeper hit, Sly crept his way into million-seller status. Problem with that: The bandicoot was selling millions.  That is, multiple millions.  Sly Cooper was the heir apparent to that gravy train.  As far as Sony was concerned, “one-million-seller” wasn’t getting the job done.  And thus, changes were made.  Sly 2: Band of Thieves was Grand Theft Auto with more animals and fewer vehicles.  Nobody understood that open-world games had and still have issues.  Good luck delivering on quality level design when your selling point is “Massive, sprawling worlds!”  But hey, games journalists liked it even more than the first!  And positive reviews push sales, right?  Ka-ching?  Not really.  The Sly 2 sales racket was a disappointment.  The game sold worse than the predecessor.  It’s very easy to get the image of Sony suits breathing down the backs of the employees at Sucker Punch Productions.  “The first three Crash Bandicoot games sold twenty million fucking copies!  What the hell is going on down there?  Get your shit together!”  I doubt that the corporate office was going to accept “But the market for platforming games on the PlayStation 2 is loaded!” for an answer.  Clearly, the formula sucked and it needed to be fixed.

Well, how should I explain this?  You ever watch a sports team dump quality coaches because the team’s level of success is not successful enough?  “We respect that you got to the second round of the playoffs.  Now get the fuck out.”  Those franchises eventually get the coach they deserve.  And then the team tanks in the standings and the head coach gets into fist-fights with his assistants and Al Davis really needs to stop being old.  Such is the life of the Oakland Raiders.  Come round three, that’s the Sly Cooper series.  The first and second games were good but they “weren’t good enough”. Sly 3 now gets to pose as the big mistake of a coaching hire and a change in philosophy for the series.  Sly 3 is a single-player party game stuck in the Sly Cooper universe. What the hell?  A party game?  Really?  Yes, it’s a party game.  It’s a party game and I plan to judge it as such. Sly 3 has all the hallmarks of party games: Minigames posing as critical mission objectives; an entire roster of playable characters (many with little rhyme or reason for their appearance in the game); a markedly lighter and more relaxed tone than previous games in the franchise; characters emerging from previous games for the purpose of “But I thought I took you out!!1″  It is time to explain why this is a very bad idea.

Think of some party games.  What are the best in that bunch?  If you answered with Mario Party, you completely missed the damn point.  “Party game” is to video games what “family-friendly” is to movies:  It’s a way of selling sub-par products to an ill-informed audience.  Most people will see their favorite characters and the “brand recognition” bulb will pop over their head.  “It has Mario on it!  And he’s playing basketball!  That must mean it’s a great game!”  That is why Namco released Pac-Man Party for the Nintendo Wii during the same week the company released Pac-Man Championship Edition DX for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360: Because your mom doesn’t know what Metacritic is and doesn’t know Pac-Man Party has an average score of 59.* She just knows that Pac-Man Party is a “party game”, and that’s a much easier sell than “2010 Game of the Year candidate”, whatever that is.  Yup.  When I think of great party games, I think of Doom, I think of Perfect Dark, I think of Rock Band, I think of Super Smash Brothers.  The best party games aren’t defined by marketing labels.  They best party games are great video games.  “Party games” never have a chance to develop an identity because they don’t want to.  They’re looking to dance from level to level and mission to mission with such force that players don’t pick up on the faults.  They’re deliberately shallow.  Now, I’m not arguing Sly 3 was marketed as a party game.  I’m arguing that the philosophy of party game development had its hands all over Sly 3.  And now, Honor Among Thieves has nothing honorable to present the paying audience.

The warning signs should have been apparent from the start, where you’re looking to crack the Sly Cooper family vault with the help of new-but-anonymous team members.  Any long-time television viewer knows that “new characters” is a death sentence.  But it’s still easier to do in television.  You don’t have to make each of those new characters “fun to play”.  You don’t have to customize “missions” and tailor “levels” to match each of those characters’ “skill sets”.  One playable character and one skill set is almost always good enough for the world of platforming.  Sucker Punch vehemently disagreed and bumped the magic number of playable characters from Sly 2′s three all the way to eight.  Unfortunately, “number of characters that are fun to play” is still hammered at one.  Sly Cooper is once again the lone hawk.  The rest of the army is total throwaway.  Two different characters settle their duties in third-person gunfights, both featuring a form of aim assistance that makes Modern Warfare 2 look like microscopic surgery.  One character usurps Bentley’s established duties as “remote control guru”, splitting one character’s skill set into two.  Another takes up deep sea diving duties.  And for what?  One acrobatic squirrel can’t handle the platforming duties and leave the change-of-pace missions to the supporting characters?  This is the bad side of complexity, children.  You introduce new characters in order to increase the number of ways that a game can be played, not as a means to streamline and simplify the utility of each character and their playstyle.

Remember what I said about retro games: The simpler the mechanics, the harder you have to punish the player for failing at them.  From character to character, Sly 3 plays simpler.  It’s less complex.  So where’s the difficulty spike?  It’s not there.  Sly 3 is the easiest of the Sly Cooper games.  It’s almost laughably easy.  The only counter-balance to the shallow difficulty level is a pocketful of aggravating and poorly-designed missions.  Take a look at how the game overworlds handle difficulty.  Sly 2 had it right.  In the previous game, alerting enemies to your presence meant taking some scrapes.  You very often had to fight your way out of the situation.  The problem was not the difficulty level, it was the level design.  Navigating your way around those guards could become a chore.  There weren’t many interesting ways to evade the enemy when you were caught in an alleyway or stuck atop a cookie-cutter roof.  Sucker Punch had to fix the level design and they didn’t.  They simply made the artificial intelligence less aggressive.  They made the game less difficult.  The crack-shot watch-guards are now gone, replaced with a cast of stumbling idiots who would feel at home in a Halo multiplayer match.  The guards are also far more comfortable with giving up.  Sucker Punch hasn’t addressed whether traveling through the overworld was fun.  They simply made it easier to do so.  And I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve played a lot of games where you can run from Point A to Point B and ignore every obstacle in your path.  If it didn’t have “Mario” on the front of the box, the consumer usually savaged it.

So the game’s left to fall back on its mission and level design.  It’s the only thing that can save the game.  That’s where the fantastic party fun walks through the door! One mission requires the player to stymie a sabotage operation by using the face buttons to activate traps.  Another requires you to out-pirate-talk another pirate.  Seriously.  That’s only the beginning.   There’s helicopter wars.  There’s racing segments featuring remote-controlled cars.  There’s also chapters built around airplane battles and pirate wars on the high seas.  A number of these modes seem to exist simply to fill in a checkbox for the marketing team that “For the first time ever, Sly Cooper does battle with his friends in new multiplayer modes!”.  Gimmicks at their finest.  That is, party gaming at its worst.  The majority of these missions get progressively more difficult while you’re attempting to complete them.  That is, the opposition bands into progressively larger waves of baddies.  The problem?  You don’t have to think more creatively about dealing with the added baggage.  The missions simply get more difficult rather than more challenging.  (And let’s note: “More difficult” is relative.  This doesn’t mean any of these missions prove to be any hard.)  That means more baddies flowing through the floodgates, more targets to destroy on the second lap of a race, more zombies to kill as you protect critical mission targets.  Platforming is secondary now.  Proper run-and-jump action is all secondary to minigames and flying missions and racing missions and shit that doesn’t need to be in the game.

At least the previous titles were good for a couple of laughs.  If Sly 3 was a nineties cartoon or an animated Disney sequel (think The Jungle Book 2 or The Return of Jafar), I’d think the game was created for the sole purpose of hocking merchandise.  We’ve already gone over the roster additions.  A number of these additional characters are villains from previous games.  You put them in jail.  For whatever reason, you’re now soliciting for their help.  Yes, the criminals you had little problem disposing of are now necessary allies for “the big heist”.  As far as delivery and dialogue and storyline are concerned, the first and second Sly Cooper games were obscenely dead-pan.  That’s what made the characters and situations amusing.  The third game openly acknowledges the absurdity, as characters inquire and ask “What did you just say?”  The characters don’t know how to respond and it doesn’t seem like the writers do, either.  If a completely different writing crew didn’t create this third act, then somebody had an out-of-body experience.  The game teases a much darker universe (Murray has disappeared and committed to a life of non-violence following the accident that confined Bentley to a wheelchair at the end of Sly 2) and gives up on the premise about two chapters in.  The tight and deliberate writing is toast.  The “adult game for kids” now feels like a “kid game for kids”.

Let’s example-toss to set the situation.  It’s a solid summary of the story problems.  The third chapter requires the player to court the services of a remote-control whiz by the name of Penelope.  The Cooper Gang™ requires her moxy to conduct the series of remote-control missions that Bentley had little issue conducting in the first game.  The goal?  Prove your worth by winning a dogfighting competition.  No, the airplane kind.  Despite having zero flight experience, this proves little trouble for Cooper.  Sabotaging the competition doesn’t hurt, but “Sly Cooper wins” is still a stretch.  After defeating the Black Baron at his own game, it’s down to a battle of fisticuffs.  Bentley warns Sly that the Black Baron is a “master pugilist”.  And after Cooper wins the battle, the Black Baron outs herself as Penelope!  See, she was just trying to get around the event’s age requirements!  So she made a disguise and won the thing!  And his celebrity boiled over to the point where she was able to organize and sponsor the whole tournament!  Sound ridiculous?  No?  Two chapters later, your latest adversary captures a terror-stricken Penelope who has apparently forgotten that she is a “master pugilist”.  She does nothing to stop it.  Because apparently, she’s defenseless.  Or something.

The storyline is irredeemable and most of the game seems to follow suit.  It’s sloppy stuff.  There’s clearly a decent platformer to be found in this ruckus.  The first game was pretty good at platforming and so was the second.  The game engine hasn’t significantly changed.  The camera is still wonky, but it’s tolerable.  Sly 3 simply doesn’t play well.  But hey, there’s supposedly a fourth Sly Cooper game on the way.  That’s what the Sly Cooper Collection teased.  Go for it, Sucker Punch.  You tried to throw a rocking party game with Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves and you only got one party quality down: I’m trying to get the taste of something out of my mouth.  The “final game in the trilogy” simply didn’t get the job done.

P.S.: Oh, and the game is packaged with red-blue three-dimensional glasses.  You can play some of the levels with these glasses.  And then stereoscopic input was never heard from again.  Or at least that would be a proper reward for the headache I received.

1 out of 5

(Games rated one-out-of-five have problems. Big problems. Unplayable? Possibly not. But even the target audience won’t find much to like.)

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Special Thanks To:

IGN’s Screenshot Gallery For The Pretty Pictars

By Michael Lowell

March 20, 2011

Bulletstorm
PlayStation 3, PC, Xbox 360 (Reviewed on PlayStation 3)
Developer: People Can Fly, co-developed by Epic Games
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Released: February 22, 2011

Note A: The grammatical errors have been fixed.  Totally sloppy and inexcusable on my part.  Won’t happen again.

Note B: This review contains spoilers.

The breaking point is going to come.  It has to.  It’s been ten painful years since Halo.  The genre that once used a twenty-five-month span to serve gamers System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, Half-Life, Starsiege Tribes, Quake III: Arena, and Unreal Tournament has dissolved into a putrid grunge of tactical shooters.  That’s not to say they’re all bad, but the genre has become a mothering owl puking regurgitated bile into eager and open mouths.  And regardless of what you think it takes to become a Console Shooter Legend™, the audience is getting a little bit too skilled for Call of Duty: Black Ops.  The rejection of urban warfare would seem to be inevitable.  They’ve been playing the same game for way too long.  Console shooters are eventually going to want “more complex”.  With the exception of the side-scrolling platformer (a pursuit typically aimed at younger children), it’s happened in nearly every major genre: Space Invaders becomes Gradius becomes Parodius and becomes a whole platoon of “bullet hell” shooters; Final Fight becomes Streets of Rage and then finds a niche in arcades and eventually transforms into Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden and God of War; Street Fighter becomes Tekken and Soul Calibur and eventually leads into Guilty Gear and BlazBlue; even the computer-oriented development phase for the first-person shooter yielded Wolfenstein 3-D which led to Doom that gave us Quake which gave us a whole wealth of varied shooters (and only devolved when the industry used console shooter development as a reset button).  “Console shooters feature more moving parts and more complicated playstyles” is bound to happen.

If we’re lucky, Bulletstorm is going to be the reminder of how good shooters were in the nineties.  Bulletstorm developer People Can Fly got their claim to fame with 2004′s Painkiller.  Unfortunately, it was a run-and-gun shooter closer to Serious Sam than Quake.    Fortunately, People Can Fly figured it out this round.  Bulletstorm takes the genre back to the late nineties by leaping into the twenty-sixth century and reminding us that the first-person shooter genre was built by men.  Not your girly team formulas and your pussy snipers, but fucking men.  Your laser beams and your rocket launchers?  Fuck them.  I’ll take them all on.  Come meet me in the middle of the room and let’s dance.  You do the same, People Can Fly.  But I don’t wanna shoot you guys.  I want to shake your hands.  Bulletstorm isn’t perfect.  It’s far from it.  You made some mistakes and your game has some baggage.  But here’s the good part: Bulletstorm is the first console shooter I have ever played that felt as if it was designed (rather than ported) for computers.  In other words, Bulletstorm’s a shooter that plays well on a computer.  Know what that means?  It’s a pretty damn good shooter.

Bulletstorm is out to mock muscle-bound shooters, their foul-mouthed participants, and the attack squadrons they’re a part of, the ones featuring names that wouldn’t feel out of place if they were part of a college fraternity.  It’s all there: The overconfident, beer-swilling cowboy who insists that rumbling sound isn’t going to be a setback (Grayson Hunt as voiced by Steve Blum), the cyborg desperately trying to keep computer circuits from taking over his brain (Ishi as voiced by Andrew Kishino), the rogue and pissed-off cutie-pie (Trhiska as voiced by Jennifer Hale, and it’s becoming more convenient to list the games where she does not voice a character).  It’s all standard stuff, until Bulletstorm teaches humanity there are hundreds of ways to use “dick” in a compound word.  Those expressions of disbelief are then used to introduce five-hundred-foot, setpiece-destroying movie monsters.  And as the situation rolls from worst to worstest and Grayson triggers one clusterfuck after another, sworn enemy and hilarious adversary General Sarrano (voiced by Anthony De Longis) will constantly taunt you for killing the “innocent soldiers with families” that he sent to wipe you out.  Breath of fresh air, refreshing take on the genre, blah blah.  It’s great stuff.  Yeah, there’s plot holes.  The idea of escaping a twenty-sixth-century neutron bomb (the kind of bomb that kills all life on a planet and leaves every structure standing) by using its explosive thrust to escape the planet’s orbit in an evacuation capsule is, well, kind of stupid.  That may be the point of the game, though.  So essentially, Epic Games subcontractor People Can Fly is parodying the Gears of War franchise, produced by Epic Games.  That’s deep.  It’s kind of like the corporate movie studios that have no qualms distributing Michael Moore’s anti-corporate message.  (Why?  There’s too much money to pass up.  Duh.)  It works a hell of a lot better than 2010′s Bayonetta and its beat ‘em up comedy variety hour.  Bulletstorm doesn’t get caught up on the details.  No secret cults or five-hundred-year wars or any of that bullshit.  Something’s in your way, they’re pissed, and killing them will cause even worse things to happen.  That’s good enough.

Just like real life, throwing a human being off a tall cliff and to his death yields 100 points.

That doesn’t mean the parody has completely cleared the runway.  Parody has proven very fucking hard in the video game gig.  It’s very easy to say one thing and then program another.  The Simpsons Game was certainly funny, but didn’t blink an eye as it employed the game mechanics it openly mocked.  Hyperdimension Neptunia attempted to parody the entire video game industry and wrecked its chance at “teh funnay” by transforming into one of the most formulaic role-playing games in recent memory.  And if you only spent sixty minutes with Bulletstorm, you’d really think People Can Fly really fucked it up.  The game parodying the current generation of on-rails single-player missions?  Surprise!  It’s on-rails!  Whoops!  You’ll find the occasional ammunition case in the lonely side of a war zone and you’ll shoot the occasional news droid.  There’s your element of non-linear level design.  Bulletstorm is completely detached from the days when secret rooms were abound.  You aren’t going off the path and dammit, you’re going to enjoy it.  Those guys who are pissed off at you?  They’re your target.  They’re always going to be dead-ahead.  There’s not much need to poke your head left and right.  It’s not much of a surprise that the best firefight in the game takes place in a small square room with a balcony, no choke points, and enemies flooding from every angle.  That is, “OH GOD THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!”  It happens about once or twice and that’s all the creative level design you’re getting.

Why is the level design such a nightmare?  I’ll be pretty blunt about it: Unreal Engine 3 is a gigantic piece of shit.  Unreal Engine 3 is a tool set packed with dynamite, electric saws, industrial stepladders, and all I need is a god damn hammer.  It’s not that the game controls poorly because of the game engine.  It’s the environmental interactions, which are pretty crucial in a game whose scoring system is predicated on environmental interactions.  I don’t think it’s any surprise that the list of non-shooters to receive critical acclaim currently is limited to Batman: Arkham Asylum.  As far as I can gather, every environmental interaction has to be programmed into the game by the developers rather than having a game engine that can automatically figure that out for you.  This means you can’t leap back over a barricade after you’ve made the move, because the “Press X to Jump” function is only tethered to the front.  This also means you can walk up a pile of debris and find yourself locked to a hand railing with no way of getting down except tracing your steps backwards.  Your characters weren’t programmed to jump twenty-four inches to the ground.  And thanks to a rather muted color palette, every environmental action requires an overlay.  (In a previous review of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, I held this against developer Ninja Theory.  Apparently, I should have just yelled at the company for licensing Unreal Engine 3.)

“So it’s just another crazy shooter with a straight-forward single-player mode and no deathmatch present.  Sure, it has a score-basedco-operative mode!  But that’s not why I’m paying for Xbox Live!  What’s supposed to be so exciting about that?”  Oh, the consumer will find things to hate.  “Bulletstorm’s single-player campaign sucked!  It was too short!  It was only nine hours long!  Why did I pay sixty dollars for this crap?”  The paying public will miss the point.  Short single-player campaigns are perfectly fine.  There’s an entire library of legendary Cave shoot ‘em ups that can be completed in half an hour.  Many of the best games for the Nintendo Entertainment System can be completed in under an hour.  Nobody seems to have a problem with any of those.  It’s the single-player video games with no incentive for a second or third playthrough that are the problem.  Know what we call those?  Bad video games.  Great (and also very good) video games can be played on multiple occasions and remain interesting.  What does People Can Fly do to make a nine-hour single-player campaign interesting?  We’ve already learned the modern single-player campaign has to cater to casuals.  If any of those players die at the same junction four times in a row, it’s going to be a pretty angry GameFAQs post.  The developer doesn’t need that sort of negative attention.  So that’s the question: How does Bulletstorm give the casuals an entertaining time and still challenge the better players?

It’s funny.  The idea was there for years and nobody realized it.  Call of Duty has been rewarding people for “mission objectives” and “killing two people with a single bullet” and “destroying an attack helicopter by saying the secret word”.  All these games have been using wonderful metrics to measure multiplayer combat.  So there you go.  The purpose and meaning of Bulletstorm is to play for the highest score possible.  You don’t play to complete the game.  Both the single-player and co-operative modes are about score.  Contrary to the history of video games on eight-bit video game consoles (where “beating the game” was the achievement), scoring systems can go a very long way in measuring a player’s ability to master the system.  Playing for score can make things a hell of a lot more interesting.   If it wasn’t for score, Bayonetta would simply be another beat ‘em up where you find the best combo and abuse the hell out of it.  (Yeah, I’m totally aware of that Kilgore exploit.  Totally aware.  It still needs to be used tactfully in order to earn a maximum score.)  Instead, Bayonetta is one of the best games of 2010.  If it wasn’t for score, the people who play Cave shooters would simply rest their moxy on beating the game and becoming good enough to do it as part of a one-credit-clear.  Instead, you can now back and improve upon that one-credit-clear.  Is it a revolutionary concept to wire score into the single-player shooter?  Hardly.  There was once a first-person shooter genre where Wolfenstein 3-D, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, Corridor 7: Alien Invasion, and Descent all used scoring systems, an archetype that quickly faded as Doom became the blueprint for the genre.  The problem was pretty obvious: With the exception of the Descent franchise (which, when cranked to their highest difficulty levels, may feature the hardest single-player campaigns in the history of the genre), nobody really found a way to make the scoring systems mean a whole lot.

Well, what has Metal Gear Solid taught us about human beings?  Why was Batman: Arkham Asylum able to persevere with a simple combat scheme?  Well, we’re a bunch of gigantic assholes.  We’ve found having one means for killing one-hundred different enemies is far less entertaining than one-hundred ways to decapitate, maim, and incapacitate a single type of target.  It’s not about blood and guts.  It’s how we get to the blood and guts.  There 131 “skillshots” in Bulletstorm spread across seven guns (all featuring an alternative fire capacity), an energy whip that acts as a leash (also featuring an alternative fire method), and the always-reliable kick in the gut.  These nine weapons (along with the environmental hazards they can be directed into) are some of the most satisfying I have ever used in any first-person shooter.  And that’s before you begin finding all the cool ways that you can render flesh.  Doing that requires some pretty deft execution.  (Do yourself a favor and untoggle aim-assistance.  It will make this a hell of a lot harder.)  It’s one thing to brag about achieving every skill shot.  It’s another to consistently unload a variety of them on every enemy that gets in your way.  And damn, it’s a lot of fun.  That’s why I’m not holding the level design against Bulletstorm and I don’t even have the room to hold the console-ized weapon scheme against the game.  “Two specialty guns and your machine gun” just adds strategy to determining which weapons to equip when you come to the next checkpoint.

Good shooters let you trace your steps by following the trail of blood backwards.  Great shooters
let you find the next area by following the trail of blood forward.

Not that the scoring system is perfect.  It’s way too simple.  Diminishing returns on various abilities don’t come quickly enough.  So in a lot of firefights, it can become very tough to top the easiest option, where you kick half-a-dozen men into a cactus patch or a row of errant electrical wiring.  This becomes much less of a problem as your weapon roster opens up, though the game never gives you an option to repeat the previous levels with your new goodies.  And it’s quite unfortunate that those 131 skillshots don’t even cover the entire range of creative mayhem.  Most notably, I found a way to use the Flail Launcher (featuring chain-connected, remote-controlled grenades) to turn a portable trash incinerator (one of many spread about the game world) into a bootable incendiary grenade.  Disappointment abound when I only received environmental damage rather than a dedicated skillshot bonus.  Boo.  The biggest mistake with the scoring system has nothing to do with the scoring itself.  It’s the display method.  If you simply hammered your way through every level, it’d be very easy to miss that the game is recording your output on a per-chapter basis.  You have to dig into the deepest parts of the start menu to discover your performance.  And after all, this is the crux of the game.  It would have gone a very long way to silence an audience that’s too stupid to read into the Grayson Hunt cue that “I’m being graded on my performance!” if they actually showed you were being graded on your performance.  That is, somewhere in the field of play.  Not the darkest part of the menus.

So we have a scoring system.  Does it work?  That is, “Does it force the player to play the game in a more interesting manner?”  Absolutely.  What’s the sin holding Bulletstorm back?  You know, the game trying to be separate itself from the wannabes on the market?  Every significant tactical shooter has used regenerating health of a mechanic that emulates it.  Competitive Counter-Strike is split into “rounds” that reset the action and the player’s life total.  Call of Duty and Halo allowed the player to regain their health after evading fire for a number of seconds. There’s a reason it works in tactical shooters: The first is that regenerating health allows for a small life bar, thus enforcing the futility of the one-man army.  Coupled with a lack of defensive counter-moves (your dodges and your jumps and your blazing run speed current in Quake and Unreal Tournament), it ensures the better player will get the better end of a one-on-one situation but never a one-on-two situation.  This makes the games much easier to sell to an audience that goes all butthurt when one man is dominating a round.  Too much firepower to overcome.  The second reason for regenerating health is that it streamlines tactics.  It makes tactical shooters faster and it makes them more fun.  Health tallies would overcomplicated the formula.  Forcing players to adjust for map layouts and the enemy’s armaments is already good enough.  It allows players to run set plays and set strategies without having to worry about a teammate having zero health because your twelve-year-old brother is running around the map playing “Al-Qaeda suicide bomber”.

Basically, regenerating health is a reset button.  It works in those games because they’re built for it.  It does not work in Bulletstorm.  Let me explain it this way: What if your enemies had regenerating health?  What would be the first thought in your head?  You know, other than “Who thought this was a good idea?”  Think logically.  You couldn’t have monsters with gargantuan health totals.  They’d take way too much damage.  Then they’d hide behind a corner and get all their health back and it would ruin your day.  It’d be frustrating.  What would be the point of a crappy machine gun?  Fuck that.  You need guns that can dispose of the opposition in one or two hits.  That is, “I need to make sure that the enemy’s regenerating health doesn’t become a factor.”  Regenerating enemy health would standardize your weapon roster because it would standardized the enemies you would face.  It would tether enemy design to that formula.  “But Borderlands had enemies with regenerating shields!”  It did.  And in that game, your ability to kill those monsters was bound to your character level, no matter what class, armaments, and skills you were using.  Borderlands standardized damage output to make it work.  So what happens when the player has regenerating health?  It standardizes enemy damage.  Regenerating health is simply not capable of a diverse enemy roster.  Sure, they can take a hell of a lot of punishment.  But regenerating health is not conducive to a diversity of damage.  Enemies can’t one-hit you with rockets because that would be bullshit.  They also can’t chip damage you because “Why bother?”  And if you played Doom, you would know that the enemies had no problem doing both of those and everything inbetween.  The regenerating health system in Bulletstorm is good for just about one thing: The machine gun kind of opposition.  That is, middle-of-the-road damage and rapid-fire.   Just about everything hits that hard, even the bosses. And even that’s got its kinks, because the use of “hitscan weapons” (bullets that travel directly from the barrel to the target) by artificial intelligence has never worked in any shooter ever.  Bulletstorm is now the 653rd shooter to neglect that lesson.  Regenerating health does not work in games built for diverse enemy rosters.  And it would have been an exceptional benefit to the player in a game built on the basis of “grading your performance”, where the player could have been judged by his ability to see how good he is at not getting hit.  It’s lazy design that absolves the developer of having to properly place item pickups for the right place and the right time.

Ain’t it amusing?  Bulletstorm is flawed.  It has a ton of notable flaws.  But you know what?  Bulletstorm plays half as well as the Quake and Unreal Tournament that inspired the Gears of War that Bulletstorm sets out to parody.  That immediately makes it one of the best shooters of 2011.  See, console fanboys?  The genre can still be fun when it’s not called Halo, Killzone, or Call of Duty!  Oh, and consider your victory won for a single day, Mr. Cliff Bleszinski.  Your studio’s name is on a game that finally got the taste of Unreal Tournament 3 out of my mouth.

Just kidding, dicktits.

4 out of 5

(Games rated four-out-of-five are very good. In a slow twelve months, they’re dark horses for Game of the Year. Even if you don’t care for the genre, you won’t feel like your money is going to waste.)

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Special Thanks To:

Destructoid, for the pretty pictars.

IGN, for the pretty pictar that became the pretty header.

March 15, 2011

By Michael Lowell

Angry Birds
Android, DS, iOS, Mac, PC, PSP, et. al (reviewed on Android with Nook Color)
Developed: Rovio Mobile
Publisher: Clickgamer Media (Mobile)
Release Date: December 9, 2009

Let’s pretend the year is 1990.  That was a pretty damn good year for video games, right?  Take my word for it.  North America was greasing their grips with Super Mario Brothers 3 and role-playing introduction Final Fantasy, two critical installments in two of the medium’s most significant franchises.  The Western end of the Pacific pond was getting an introduction to the Super Nintendo and flagship title Super Mario World, a game that will probably get its own wing in the Platforming Pantheon.  And if you were one of those fat virgins playing video games on a personal computer, space shooter Wing Commander and cult franchise Commander Keen were getting a lot of your love.  Where am I going with this?  Pretend that in this great year for commercial video games, tech magazines and industry executives are sending praise down unfamiliar roads.  Video game journalism™ and the video game industry are raving about a man by the name of Wes Cherry.  Wes Cherry?  Who the flip is Wes Cherry?  Oh, he’s important.  Wes Cherry’s video game is on its way to killing productivity at business offices around the Western World.  And people are demanding that Wes Cherry’s incredible achievement get “the respect it deserves”.  Tech magazines are penciling in his work as an atypical Game of the Year candidate, asking how one man could slay the gigantic Nintendo dragon and create one of the most popular video games of 1990.  A video game for adults in a market crowded by products for children?  A video game for men and women who don’t play video games?

The game that I’m referring to?  You probably figured it out.  Either that, or you had Minesweeper in the back of your head.  I’m talking about Solitaire, a freebie add-on for the Windows 3.0 operating system.  “What are you talking about?  That’s crazy talk!  Nobody would have been dumb enough to label Solitaire a Game of the Year candidate!  Solitaire is just a simple time-waster!  It’s a game you hook your brain into when you get a couple minutes of free time!”  You’re totally correct.  That love-triangle between Cherry, Solitaire, and the public is totally hypothetical.  I was creating a course of events where Wes Cherry actually got some recognition for his work and Microsoft didn’t screw him out of any possible royalties.  I was fabricating the ridiculous course of events that has now swarmed the release, rise, and fascination with mobile phone killer app Angry Birds.  It’s the mobile gaming sensation that’s sweeping the nation!  And if you ask somebody why they like the game, you’ll probably hear something like this: “I can play it when inbetween the important Facebook comments that define my day!”; “Angry Birds speaks to my level!”; “It’s easy to learn and difficult to master!”  I have one hell of a news flash for you: The Street Fighter series is easy to learn and difficult to master.  Starcraft: Brood War is easy to learn and difficult to master.  Civilization is easy to learn and difficult to master.  A child can pick up any of those games and play them competently.  Getting good at them can take years and decades.  If you concluded your last gaming session and convinced yourself that Angry Birds is “easy to learn and difficult to master”, I would like to address a statement to you and Mr. Mobile Gaming Consumer Base: The ballistics genre is decades old and it’s been done a hell of a lot better.  Just because nobody could market an archetype for ballistcs games doesn’t mean they never happened; that nobody found the Halo that spawned a tactical shooter frenzy in a genre dominated by a diversity of deathmatch, squad-based, and single-player shooters.  The consumer’s ignorance of the niche market for ballistics games does not mean Angry Birds is any good.

As a success story, Angry Birds is McDonald’s.  It’s cheap and it’s disposable and nobody’s claiming it’s the height of the business.   (At least I hope not.)  As a game, it’s best compared to another famous multi-multi-platform puzzler: Lemmings.  Angry Birds is Lemmings in reverse: Rather than using your specialized, disposable critters to construct a means of conquering the environment, you’re out to destroy it.  What are we planning to destroy?  Well, there’s a bunch of pigs.  They stole eggs from a bunch of birds.  Just like the real-world rivalry between birds and pigs, shit is going down.  Clearly defying their name sake, these Angry Birds are going to disperse retribution for the loss of their unborn loved ones by flinging themselves at the pigs’ strongholds.  Ever had a bird fly into your window?  Yeah, that’s Angry Birds.  Staying true to the shallow mobile gaming market, Angry Birds is not complicated: It’s your job to snuff out those pig bastards with an army of willing participants. Tiny bluebirds can be sent into a spread formation at the tap of the screen; black birds act as bombs; white birds act as bombers.  But see, there’s a catch: Blue birds work well against ice blocks; red and yellow birds need to avoid the stone structures that black and white birds can dispatch.  The onus is on the player to make sure the birds get to the right spot.

It’s so easy, a smartphone user can do it!

Absurd theme?  Totally.  It’s befitting of a product likely inspired by flash game developer Armor Games and their popular Crush the Castle, itself a ridiculous cacophony of faux medieval machismo.  There’s a reason Angry Birds’ commitment to senseless violence is earning the franchise some “animated series” treatment.* (The lone gripe?  In a war between cartoon birds and cartoon pigs, emphasizing the “total” in total warfare isn’t a good idea.  The kid-friendly Advance Wars got it right: No civilians allowed; the only participants were the ones who wanted to pick up a gun.  Angry Birds begins with a siege upon the finest castles and bunkers in the Swineland and works its way to the enemy’s houses and swimming pools.  Awkward.)  The actual artwork and the actual sounds are not going to win any awards.  At least the Rovio art team got the basics down.  In their mad dash to fashion a web of unappealing backgrounds and sprites, they at least notched a clean color palette and the uncluttered action necessary for a good ballistics game.  (The “great minds” behind the industry’s “triple-A titles” haven’t been able to figure this out during this entire generation of video games, but the guys “making cheap mobile phone games” got their heads around it.  Amusing.)

So it’s simple and it’s cute.  What’s wrong with the game?  For starters, I don’t think much of “polished simplicity”.  You can grind your Super Meat Boys and your Pokémanz into fucking gemstones and I would still call them average games.  I’ll choose “polished complexity” or even “imperfect complexity” over “polished simplicity” every single time.  There’s a reason that Deus Ex, Starcraft, and Civilization are still played as they came out of the box and games like Tetris and Pac-Man had to reinvent themselves in order to remain successful.  Of course, this all assumes that Angry Birds is a polished game.  This assumes that Angry Birds is only being limited by a developer’s desire to secure a large consumer base.  That’s not the case.  Angry Birds is trying to be a puzzle game.  It’s simply using ballistics as a means of execution, where no amount of planning is going to get the job done if you whiff the shot.  The star of the show is deciding where to fire at.  For this reason, you need good physics that can recreate the same scenario time after time.  The physics system in Angry Birds is absolute shit.

Puzzle Gaming 101: The same action should always lead to the same events.  Every time.  Puzzle games are not supposed to be slot machines.  Puzzle games are supposed to be a science.  Look at Bejeweled.  That game has somehow defied its own mediocrity, a game built around a chain reaction system (undoubtedly inspired by the also-mediocre Columns) best described as a gift from God.  Bejeweled strategy discussion is “clear the rows and pieces that lead to the largest random chain reactions”.  So what, you think it’s unfair to compare Bejeweled with Angry Birds?  After all, Bejeweled is a true puzzle game and Angry Birds is a ballistics game, right?  At least that’s what you thought?  A number of levels in Angry Birds (particularly in the early game and then scattered through later words) require the player to aim a single shot and call it a day.  And then you will find that your one-hundred separate-yet-equally-accurate blasts will yield one-hundred different outcomes, all varying slightly in the way that Swineland comes crashing down.

Is that a problem?  You bet.  It wouldn’t be a gigantic issue if the game was transparent in its display of critical information.  Worms was comfortable in disclosing how much damage the enemy was taking and how hard the wind was blowing over a decade ago.  Worms gave you all the information you needed to work with.  Even if the outcome proved to be random, you could get a gauge of what results to expect.  Information is critical.  The player needs access to the methodology.  Angry Birds does not display these figures.  The player is essentially clueless on what to make of the resulting carnage.  Pigs take bumps and bruises, buildings take wear and tear, buildings come crashing to the ground.  That’s it.  You can’t see a percentage of remaining health and you can’t determine the velocity and trajectory of your shots.  Well, as one internet critic proclaimed in his personal roast of Civilization V and its artificial intelligence, erratic and indescribable outcomes are inherently random outcomes.* And guess what?  Random outcomes do not work in the delicate nature of puzzle games.  Period. The developer’s job is to minimize any and all occurrence of chance in their puzzle games.  The developer gets to randomize the player field and mirror that playing field in a versus mode.  That’s all we’ll let him get away with.  Make all the comments you would like about the random piece generator in Tetris, but later iterations were tweaked to stop passing out consecutive L’s like I was tuning in weekly to watch the Detroit Lions.  Random equals bad.  Static equals good.

Where they drop, nobody knows!

So let’s pose the question: Why would Rovio code their puzzle game to feature a rather noticeable element of chance?  And yes, this was a deliberate design decision.  Angry Birds wouldn’t have made it out of testing if “I can’t recreate the carnage” was an oversight (and if you want a second opinion to go with that scrap of tin foil, you can consult the level that is shaped like a plinko board).  It’s a very easy answer: The long-standing complaint of mobile phone games is that they lack depth.  They’re simple games for simple audiences.  This market is proving quite tough for dedicated mobile phone developers.  Sure, they don’t have a problem turning a profit.  But the companies making games for mobile phones don’t have the money to compete with the incredible body of knowledge that has forged the great computer and console games.  Rovio did an incredible thing: They did not have the money to create depth.  So what did they do?  They created the illusion of depth.  Voila!  Random physics! The player now believes there are numerous ways to complete each level, and if that boulder just keeps on rolling…wait for it, wait for it, there we go!  That doesn’t work in a puzzle game.  Puzzle games aren’t interesting if you can find dozens of ways to complete each of these very small levels.  The levels in Angry Birds are mazes with one entrance and a dozen exits.  “But you’re playing for score, stupid!  You’re trying to get a three-star score!  If you want to puss out with your one-star solution, go ahead.  But I’m finding the optimal way out!”  But that’s precisely the issue!  Without an element of chance, the only thing standing between a perfect score and the player is a little bit of practice and their imperfect touch screen.   (And yes, the touch screen is imperfect.  Rovio is fully aware of this.  You won’t find a level where you need to actually control the velocity of your birdman.  It’s “fire the fuck away” in this game.) The best players in the Angry Birds player base would quickly conquer Rovio’s most devious levels.  The player base would then recreate that “world record” video they saw on the internet, and the game wouldn’t be a lot of fun.

So that’s the idea: Rovio created a universe where even their own online walkthroughs (and I giggle at the idea of a developer showing their own fans how to beat the game) feature substantial incidents of dumb luck.  And how better to build confidence amongst casual gamers than designing a system where they can achieve the maximum three-star rating by utilizing the occasional bout of luck?  And then you will understand why long-time gamers show confusion and bewilderment at the assertion that Angry Birds is “easy to learn and hard to master”:  It’s hard to master because, very often, success hinges on luck.  Hell, Super Meat Boy at least had the right idea.  A portal didn’t randomly appear in front of the player and take him to the end of the level and allow him to side-step difficult jumps.  Super Meat Boy’s god status as a trial-and-error clusterfuck clicked for a lot of people because the player had to do everything right in order to conquer a level and move forward, even if the game mechanics were stacked firmly against the player.  What’s the joy in a game where my own input doesn’t mean as much as it should in getting me to the next level?  Where I conquer a level on the twentieth try because “everything just happened to fall my way this time”?

Does that mean Angry Birds is inherently unsalvageable?  Not necessarily.  Rovio at least had the presence to continue supplying a large amount of content for the game.  And in this flood of physics-kill-frenzy-based levels are a small batch of intelligently-designed battlefields that focus on the player’s ability to aim his shots and his ability to manage his ammunition.  Those are a pair of skills that still rest entirely on the player himself.  (Unsurprisingly, I’d posit most of these levels are the least entertaining sell for the wider audience.  You know, since they result in the smallest spectacle of destruction.)  In this handful of quality levels, Angry Birds is able to capture what the Lemmings late-game was able to do exceptionally well: Limit the margin for error and force players to be exceptionally deliberate about decisions.  Chance didn’t play into anything.  It was you versus the playing field.  That’s what a good puzzle game does.  And Angry Birds only does that some of the time.  After all, it can’t do it all of the time.  Not for a mainstream audience that simply won’t tolerate the punishing, grinding difficulty level that’s absolutely necessary in this kind of game.

“Stop your whining!  I like the game!  You’re thinking too hard about it!  Angry Birds tries to be fun and that’s what it is!”  Well, too bad.  Your scant knowledge of the medium isn’t the barometer.  The barometer is the medium itself.  A good video game compares favorably to the history of other good video games, not just the ones you’ve played.  So what does that mean?  It means that Angry Birds needs to be compared against the entire ballistics genre that inspired it.  That includes Crush the Castle, the game whose successes and failings inspired Angry Birds.  That includes the Worms franchise that has chugged along for nearly two decades and earned a  lot of praise.  That includes the Gunbound that took the Worms blueprint and turned it into an online multiplayer extravaganza.  I am not giving Angry Birds any bonus points for being the most popular of those games.  Not until you give me a decent physics system and build your levels around a course of events the player can actually recreate.  Figureheading the rise of mobile phone video games and dominating a market where “fart apps” rule with prejudice is a wonderful success story.  But America Online was also successful.  That doesn’t mean the service was any good.  I regret to inform you that the same criteria applies to your mobile gaming love child.

2 out of 5

(Games rated two-out-of-five will appeal to their target audience. But against the body of work produced in this forty-year-old medium? Against that copy of Beyond Good and Evil sitting on the rack for eight bucks? Yeah, it has issues.)

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Special Thanks To:

Rovio Mobile’s own web site, whose main-site screenshots comprise the illustrations in this review.* Why not take screenshots with the Nook?  Because I found out how to take screenshots but had no way to get them from Nook to computer.  Deal with it.

By Michael Lowell

March 5, 2011

Nintendo and Their 3DS Dilemma: Part Two

Part One: A New, Smarter Competitor
Part Two: Convenience, Casual Gaming, and Domination

“Mikey Lowell, you’re so crazy.  The Nintendo 3DS isn’t about price points and market saturation and consumer psychology!  Nintendo is simply doing what smart companies do: They’re making the best product they can.  Companies want to milk the stereoscopic input gravy train before consumers suffer headaches thinking about the technology.  That’s all.  Stop being such a cynic!”  Hey, I said Nintendo was stubborn.  I didn’t say they were stupid.  Nintendo knows the industry and they know the business.  They know the history of the portable gaming market.  Hell, they created it.  They know that the Nintendo 3DS is a statement claiming the best of portable video games can stand with the best of console and computer gamers.  Well, it’s always possible.  There have been some great portable video games.  The problem?  Those great games have never dictated the sales charts.  In-fact, they have been harmful in the pursuit of sales.  High-quality console games have never sold portable devices and that is not going to change in the near future.  Not now, it isn’t.

This was settled a very long time ago.  Nintendo settled this with their Game Boy.  That device made its way to the United States in July of 1989.  And even in 1989, the Game Boy wasn’t much of a device.  It was cheap in more ways than one.  The ninety-dollar trinket could display games in four stunning shades of gray.  The marketing sounded something like this: “You can play video games while you’re outside of the house!”  Surely, Nintendo wasn’t claiming the games were going to match their console counterparts.  But what about the competition?  It wouldn’t be a discussion of video game history if we couldn’t invoke the good name of Atari.  That is, “Atari finds another way to screw things up.”

After the Crash of 1983 and the complete burnout of the Atari 5200 (a “premium” video game console in a market that was still satisfied with the Atari 2600), Atari went to work on the Atari 7800.  The device was slated for a 1984 release and (whether market trends or corporate bureaucracy held it back) was horribly dated by its 1986 release.  By this point, Atari’s name was synonymous with the Crash.  That certainly didn’t help Atari’s cause.  But Nintendo kick-started that whole “Japanese make better console hardware than Americans” narrative with the Nintendo Entertainment System.  It was a superior piece of hardware.  Better graphics, better sound, better hardware.  The console sold consumers on massive and colorful worlds that the Atari 7800 was never capable of matching.  Nintendo won, Atari lost.

By 1989, Atari had enough.  They were not going to get fucked over by “inferior hardware” again.  By the late eighties, the first sixteen-bit video game consoles (a combination of eight-and-sixteen-bit hardware under a single roof) were making their way to consumers.  At the same time, Nintendo was figuring out how to make video games portable.  It was a completely untapped market.  Portable video game devices dotted the late seventies and early eighties, but other than the Nintendo Game & Watch series and a constant supply of handheld devices from Tiger Electronics, this market was a non-entity.  Nobody had devised a portable video game device with changeable cartridges.  Atari decided they were not going to miss out on this one.

I lifted this picture from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can lift content from.  Stop me.

Making its way into the United States a month prior to the Sega Genesis, the sixteen-bit Atari Lynx made its way to American consumers in September of 1989, two months after the Game Boy hit the States.  Ignore the terrible battery life (approximately six hours on six AA batteries) and you had a damn good piece of hardware.  And the Lynx wasn’t a case of the Atari Jaguar, where Atari fashioned an advertising fellatio frenzy for the device’s hardware specs and forgot to secure publishers who could program decent games for the console.  A number of the games on the Lynx played very, very well, including a very good air combat game in Blue Lightning and excellent ports of Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon, Rampart, and Klax.  In contrast to most of the failed hardware that dots the history of video games, the Lynx wasn’t lacking in the software department.

The Lynx was an incredible counter-point to the Game Boy.  When it came to hardware, the only thing going for the Game Boy was its price point, selling for half the price of the Lynx.  But better hardware allows for more complicated games, and “more complicated” usually means “more interesting”.  What were companies going to do with a Game Boy that couldn’t even render color?  Four shades of grey?  That’s all you’re giving me?  The Atari Lynx had better graphics than the Nintendo Entertainment System!  And then the Game Boy kicked the ever-loving shit out of the Atari Lynx and banished it to history, “that portable device Atari released before they put the nail in the coffin with the Jaguar.”

“Wait, you’re serious?  People gave up on that thing?”  Nintendo did a couple of things to assure that the Lynx could not compete with the Game Boy.  First off, Nintendo was still in the “If You Make Games For Competing Devices, We Will Destroy You” Mode that American courts eventually declared illegal.  That cut off a number of prospective developers from creating games for the Lynx.  But more importantly, Nintendo did two other things: They released Super Mario Land as a launch title.  Then they made Tetris the pack-in title.  Game over.  Atari lost the portable gaming war before the Lynx had even made it to shelves.  And by the time Sega released its Game Gear during the early nineties, Sega had also lost the portable gaming war.  Nintendo would parlay this dominance into fifteen years of uncontested market control.

“So Nintendo had brand recognition!  That’s why they won!  You even said it yourself: Atari’s name was tarnished.  Anybody over the age of sixteen didn’t want anything to do with the company.”  That would be a misunderstanding.  See, both Tetris and Super Mario got to the public in 1985.  Neither game was particularly complex.  Mario needs a directional pad, a run button, and a jump button.  Tetris needs a directional pad and a button to rotate the pieces.  That made them ideal for a 1989 portable gaming console.  With the exception of the graphics, they were totally faithful to their predecessors.  (“But Super Mario Land wasn’t very good!”  That had nothing to do with the conversion.  Shigeru Miyamoto had nothing to do with Super Mario Land.  Miyamoto equals “Good Mario Game”.  Go look it up.)  Super Mario Land and Tetris would combine to sell nearly fifty million units and became the killer apps for the Game Boy until Pokémon: Red and Blue were released in the mid-nineties.  The first major successful portable game device taught us the most important lesson of successful portable video games: The best portable games don’t lose anything in their transition from a console or computer to a portable game device.  And if a franchise began its life cycle on a portable device, it would not gain any utility if it was ported to a console.  These games then offer more to the consumer because they are portable.  “Game X” versus “Portable Game X”.  “Portable Game X” will win every time.

So, why is that?  Why do simple games rule supreme on portable gaming devices?  And why has that held true for over twenty years?   Portable gaming technology is now catching up with the aging seventh-generation of consoles, so this is a pretty good time to pose the question.  This simply isn’t a case of “on-the-go gaming needs to be simple”.  Modern portable devices have sleep modes and those devices can be adjusted to the busy lives of non-gamers.  And the hardware is quite good now.  After all, a Nintendo DS is simply a portable Nintendo 64.  The Nintendo 3DS has been sold to consumers as a portable Nintendo Wii.  And there’s a lot of good games for each of those consoles.  Companies are going to be playing the marketing card.  And you know what they’re going to ask?  “What sounds better to you: A PlayStation 3 that can only be played in your house?  Or a PlayStation 3 that you can take anywhere you would like?”

There’s a gigantic problem with the idea of a portable PlayStation and the man or woman who finds a solution will become very rich one day.  Smartphones can do a lot of very useful things.  Unfortunately, nearly every one of these involve data consumption.  “You can surf the internet!  You can read things on Facebook!  You can play cheap games!  What an incredible device!”  These on-the-go devices are not built for data creation.  Say all the wonderful things you want about your iPad, but this site was built with a desktop computer.  That’s the only way it could have been done.  The desktop isn’t concerned with battery life, it’s not concerned with mobility, it’s designed to kick ass.  With a desktop computer, input is the important function.  Video game controllers work the same way.  The primary concern of a good video game controller is that it fits your hands and works well.  And if that input device isn’t suitable for the genre, you can switch it out.  You can buy a fightstick for Street Fighter.  You can buy a plastic guitar for Rock Band.  You can buy a dance pad for Dance Dance Revolution.  In the video game universe where computer gamers obsess over mouse sensitivity and mouse acceleration and the number of “pixels lost” with certain mouse settings,* precision is paramount.

With a phone or portable video game device, convenience comes first.  The precision, proficiency, and efficiency of input is secondary.  And long-time gamers have a pretty strong opinion on video games that are too complicated for the control scheme: They suck.  Game Design 101 says you can’t sacrifice the control scheme so the device can fit in someone’s pocket.  But Marketing 101 says you have to do that.  How else do you fulfill the “portable” in “portable video games”?  That’s why the Game Boy Advance had its issues.  The device was lauded as a portable Super Nintendo.  When companies ported their Super Nintendo titles to the Game Boy Advance, they were then confronted with two fewer face buttons.  The result was a bunch of games featuring stunted control schemes.  (See: Metroid Fusion.) That’s why the Sony PSP has struggled to make due without a second thumbstick.  One only has to look at Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, a game that stunts its difficulty to make sure the player has enough time to line up his shots.  The control scheme simply isn’t built to aim a weapon.  And then you have an iPhone where companies are forced to program their control schemes into the touchscreen.  And if there’s anything worse than a sloppy control scheme, it’s a sloppy emulated control scheme.  That’s why the best-selling portable games remain simple: You can’t over-exert a control scheme that isn’t capable of doing what you would like it to.  Once you build a complicated game for a portable device, you end up having that product compared to the competition on computers and consoles.  Once you do that, the hardcore audience you are targeting with that game asks a simple question:  “Why would I want to play this game on a portable device when I can get a better experience with my home gaming center?  You can’t even give me a proper control scheme!”  And they will be correct.

In the brief history of portable video games, “scaled-down versions of established games” have proven the most forgettable products.  The people anxiously waiting for Super Street Fighter IV 3D have forgotten that miniaturized versions of fighting games have all been lost to history, whether it’s Mortal Kombat for the Game Boy and Tekken for the Game Boy Advance; lest the people fawning over a sequel to Kid Icarus forget that the Game Boy already delivered on one of those.* Hardcore gamers agree with me on this.  Go through any “greatest games” list.  What are the usual portable suspects?  We already got the love for Tetris out of the way.  Next up?  Pokémon: Red and Blue somehow revolutionized the Japanese Role-Playing Game by dumbing it down further than was ever thought possible.  Its creators then used a robust, tradeable library of characters to create word of mouth between twelve-year-olds.  Most recently?  Angry Birds is built on the idea that casual gamers want something to do in the five minutes between the important Facebook comments that define their busy lives.  Out of thousands of games for Nintendo devices and tens of thousands of mobile phone games, those three games are just about it.  In the portable market where simple games light up the sales charts, I’m the only person who played Advance Wars and you’re the only person who played the Phoenix Wright series.  Think you’ll ever find Mario Kart DS on a greatest games list?  Not as long as Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 get the love and Mario Kart Wii dominates the console sales charts.  What about The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening?  It’s not topping Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time.  The hardcore gamers who argue about silly things like the “greatest games” have already determined that the portable format yields inferior versions of their favorite console games.  Nintendo is now asking those same hardcore gamers to purchase a Nintendo 3DS and play scaled-down versions of their favorite console games.

Arguably the best franchise nobody is willing to acknowledge.  Such is the life of a deep portable gaming franchise.

It simply doesn’t lend itself to an identity for the device.  Look at the current generation of video game consoles.  The Xbox 360 has a reputation as the console where you can play shooters online and aim dick jokes at your thirteen-year-old adversaries.  The PlayStation 3 is a carry-over living on the reputation of the PlayStation 2.  That is, “it doesn’t matter what genre you’re into, you’ll find something to like”.  The Nintendo Wii is the family video game console and dust collection box.  It’s the console that mom and dad can purchase for their kids and play Mario with.  What identity can a video game console develop when it’s built on hand-me-downs?  Nobody has found a way to make hand-me-downs play better with stereoscopic input and that’s not happening for a while.  Not as long as game developers are content with developing hand-me-downs for portable gaming devices.

The Sony PSP was supposed to demonstrate that hand-me-downs can’t work on portable gaming devices.  Sony sold 65 million of the damn things!  It only has fifteen million units to go before it reaches the Game Boy Advance.  And I mean, nobody thought ill of that device.  People should be lauding Sony for finding room in the market for a second dedicated portable video game device.  Instead, everyone is talking about the product like it was a colossal failure.  Nobody wants to make games for the thing.  (At least not in the States, they don’t.  The play-on-the-go Japanese consumer culture holds some scant objections to my comments.  Even in that market, they’re losing ground.)  Certainly, Sony didn’t do themselves any favors by thinking their inflated sense of brand recognition (i.e. Ken Kutaragi’s infamous PlayStation 3 comment that people “will work more hours to buy one”) and their reputation for quality hardware could trump an emerging-yet-voracious market for smartphones.  The Sony PSP lost its audience for a simple reason: If you had a quirky game, you published it for the Nintendo DS.  You had a much better chance of turning a profit because it was a cheaper device to develop for and boasted a much larger install base.  What did that leave the Sony PSP?  A development cast of mega-publishers who aren’t interested in taking any risks.  That meant an entire library of miniaturized console games based on established franchise.  That is, “precisely what does not sell on portable devices”.  That is, “what Nintendo now believes will sell the Nintendo 3DS”.

That’s Nintendo’s strategy and they’re entitled to run with it.  It’s one hell of a “damned if you do” situation: If Nintendo continues extending their appeal to casual gamers, Apple will price Nintendo out of competition; if Nintendo tries to win the hardcore gamer, they will reserve their services for a niche audience.  What is one of the biggest players in the history of video games supposed to do?  Eh, they’ll probably sell a hundred million units because “They’re Nintendo!”  I’ve found this whole “capitalism” and “free market” thing often defies logic when a company assumes “god status”.  Damn the irrational consumer.  Damn them.

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