AOOFAD and Silent Hill 3 Exciting Explosion Review

AOOFAD and Silent Hill 3 Exciting Explosion Review

Yeah this took about five minutes to whip up.

There are two things that make good video games. Likewise, good video games are good because of the same two things: atmosphere and mechanics. Without these two elements a game is either bad, or not a game in my opinion. Things like story can be found in a book, graphics in movies or television, but mechanics and atmosphere are unique to the interactive medium.

That’s not to say a good game can’t have a good story, or a bad game has it’s graphics to blame. I love the Phoenix Wright games for their story, and I love seeing a painstakingly rendered historic city stretch out before me in Assassin’s Creed. But these are just contributions to a whole, facets that catch the light and bend it towards the center of something that’s worth seeing or isn’t. That’s what we’re all about here, right?

Mechanics and atmosphere. Games like Tetris are good because of their mechanics, games like Jet Set Radio are good because of their atmosphere (it’s basically a barebones Tony Hawk clone made awesome by style and FUNK). Games like the Fallout series are good because of their synthesis of the two elements. The atmosphere influences the gameplay and vice-versa. I mean, you wouldn’t scrounge and pick up every little piece of scrap and ammunition unless it was the apocalypse, right? The point is, the two elements can be present alone or together, and with that said I arrive at the review proper.

All of Our Friends are Dead. Yeah.

All of Our Friends Are Dead(amalgam really) - one out of one - Henry Arrambide

All of our friends are dead. – 1/1 – Henry Arrambide

We play, we push, we want to finish the game. We kill what’s thrown at us, chase whatever goals are fed to us no matter how little sense they make. Use what mechanics are given to us, because they’re all that we have within the game, all that we can do to survive, push forth, make sense of things. It’s satisfying, destroying whatever stands between us and our end – every little pop or crumble as our foes burst into blood and fail before us – we did that, we accomplished that. Sure, it was only in the context of this game, only inevitable considering there is no ultimate game over pushing us back to the start – all we can do is move forward. The game wants us to - we can choose to just stop, but it's too damn appealing. We want to beat and conquer this…thing before us, and in the end what does that even mean? You still have your real world debts and duties at the end of the day. I highly doubt having all the achievements in Modern Warfare 2 will somehow fix that. The question that it boils down to is why? Why do we play? Not just why do we play All of our friends are dead, but games in general. That's something only the individual can answer.

Easy to learn, tricky to master, pickup and playable – I think the best games aren’t the ones that ask you to take fifty hours of your time and invest in their intense dictionary of terms and rules. WRPG’s suffer the most from this, feeling to me as if they lack any real structure outside their shell of DnD derivatives. That’s another rant. A game should be accessible from the start, laying out the core rules in the first ten minutes or so, and then allowing the player to work from there. Length shouldn’t be an issue – granted that there can be games which cut themselves short and length is a glaring problem – but in the big picture, a 6 to 10 hour game shouldn’t be a problem when executed well. You can comeback with your knowledge of the rules, apply them better, have fun. Speed running, or just a lazy afternoon; if done well a great game can be played for almost ever. Mega Man and Contra still hold water today; Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest (not counting the fabulous remakes which change the rules and make the games playable again), not so much. There has to be a lasting friction - a feeling that you, the player, are actually doing something within the game world.

In a way, I guess this is going to turn into a small review of Spiderman: Web of Shadows, a game I was forcing myself through when a friend recommended All of our friends are dead. Web of Shadows avoided the flaw of investment – it doesn’t ask the player to hold out and follow its rules. Spidey is given a weight to his controls that makes you feel like you’re slinging a person through the air – each swing and shot has a momentum to it that’s just right. The game isn’t about mashing the swinging and the jumping, but controlling it, limiting it and using it properly. The character is a vehicle, a real superhuman machine. Mission accomplished. For all intents and purposes – do not play Web of Shadows. That momentum is wasted by a game that asks you to use that avatar to follow markers from point A to point B, collect 2000+ tokens littering the land, fight with a needlessly complex albeit fun combat system – through the same three mission types a million times over for ten hours too long. All in the most awkward graphical detail. You will be seduced by Spidey and then tricked into doing his chores. Web of Shadows was a game so in tune with its physics and how the player interacted with their avatar – yet totally unaware of how to make the avatar interact with the world. Mario runs and jumps, so let’s place him in an environment where the floor is glass which will shatter at any small application of pressure – now walk twenty miles to the right without making even a crack in that damn glass. I guess it had something to do with the development team, or the fact that it was under the Marvel license. Someone cared about that game in the start before every other interest vested in the game mandated that it had to contain Wolverine and be finished at a certain date - so Wolverine was awkwardly thrown in, and the missions, rather than well structured, became filler and padding that added length to the game. 

There’s that connection between the player and the avatar, the avatar and the game-world, and thus the player and the game-world, which is so rarely utilized in gaming. There’s multiple levels to work with that could really be used to effectively tell a tale in ways no other medium could – and that’s what the best games do. Not push us through cinematic choke points of text and dialogue so burdened with references to outside works of philosophy or literature which render personal interpretation null – all while making us play an entirely different game between cutscenes in which the mechanics of the game are totally divorced from otherwise in-universe rules. No, you want what the player does to feel like it has some weight in the world, make the player question not only what his avatar is doing, but why he is doing those actions with his avatar.

All of our friends are dead is by no means the best game ever, but it is a damn fine exercise in these mechanics. Pick it up, learn the rules, execute everything. Wonder what it all means. The game wants you to think about it – so get to it. Give it a shot.

En ruin twist and tumble, forget the smell of home

No soil beneath our footsteps, no marrow in the bones

Listen at us will you? Share with us your head

Do hide behind the iris...as all of our friends are dead.

New Super Mario Bros - zero out of one - Henry Arrambide

New Super Mario Bros. - 0/1- Henry Arrambide

A Nintendo title for the Nintendo DS

          ‘Platformer’ is a retroactive name for the genre which came about with the jump to 3D. Back in the day Mario, Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man, and all those bad movie adaptations such as Batman and Terminator – those all fell under that vague hat of Action/Adventure. The fact that floating platforms existed within the game was secondary to the design, a means to an end. Going back to the games, you see that the levels were structured not around the sole fact that they contained platforms – Castlevania the best at this – but the levels were structured as to lead you into the next climatic piece of the game. This doesn’t mean the level design was bad; eight-bit display limitations call for extreme attention to detail to ensure the player can tell where they should be going. What I’m getting at is that the game had a purpose to which everything served – you were storming a castle fighting horror icons, so the structure of the levels had to reflect the interiors of a castle, had to make sense spatially, and had to entertain. Every piece had its purpose; no platforms placed for the sake of the game being a “platformer”. Not only do they make sense, but they fit together perfectly, giving you a Dracula’s Castle which is architecturally sound.

Notice that the levels actually correspond to the map you're given in game, despite the fact that you never zoom out and see the castle in total. The player never needed to know if the levels didn't match up.
This was done years before the internet and emulation allowed fans to map it out and appreciate it. Additionally, towards the end of level 3 you can see the keep in the distance, which corresponds perfectly
with the actual keep level's placement. Castlevania's architecture had purpose to it's design, whether you realized it or not. (Click to view this in all its majesty)

            Mario was not about fighting Dracula. Mario wasn’t confined to a castle. The stages in Super Mario Bros were the purpose of the game, much like Dracula and Medusa were the purpose of Castlevania. There’s a certain visual language at play in Super Mario Bros. When you start, you have no clue what you’re doing, no text box displaying a “PRESS D-PAD RIGHT”. You mess with your two buttons and d-pad, Mario jumps and moves. Alright! The screen scrolls, you can’t go back. Suddenly an ugly little brown guy is moving left, towards you. He is opposition, obviously working against your flow. You jump over him, maybe hit one of those bricks. A mushroom comes up, you snatch it, get bigger. You keep moving right, jumping over things – and there’s the game. For the rest of the game the jumps get narrower, the enemies come in higher numbers, and you meet a lizard spitting fire left – but you’re always jumping, moving to the right, using those same principals set up in stage one. The levels simply grow longer, feature more pits and platforms, but all they ever do is ask for you to get better at jumping and moving to the right. The purpose of the game is to push you through harder and harder jumps, and so the levels are built with that in mind. There wasn’t a cult of Mario at the time, so the game wasn’t about wacky Bowser plots and crazy goomba characters – it was the challenge of jumping and running, getting farther and farther into the mushroom kingdom.

             New Super Mario Bros is none of this. New Super Mario Bros is a game where the purpose of the stages is to “Do what Mario does.” It’s not making a game that’s particularly fun or challenging, but creating a game where you get to remember all those old days as a kid where you played Mario games on your NES. Let us look at World 1. The first level takes you through a few jumps and gives you a mushroom. Some coins serve as a visual aid so you know where to jump, even though where to jump is painstakingly obvious. It’s alright, it’s the first level, this abundance of coins is just for tutorial reasons – I hope. You notice that the goombas and turtles are sort of placed haphazardly, they move as if they aren’t even sure they should be there. Then you get a giant mushroom. Not a secret, not something you had to earn – it just pops out of one of those boxes you’ve been hitting. You turn EXTRA HUGE and then suddenly, you’re stomping through the level. Fuck design principals, you can just charge through everything, and then BAM, you’re rewarded with free lives.

             That’s New Super Mario Bros. The design isn’t random and lazy, but made because it’s “What Mario Does.” Every level is loaded with coins and mushrooms and big mushrooms and big coins not because they are needed, not because the levels get harder, but because “What Mario Does” is jump on bricks, collect coins, and get power ups. “What Mario Does” is navigate worlds and fight Bowser in castles, so why don’t we place the same world map multiple times over with slight variations to give the player a sense of choice? It’s the illusion of choice. “What Mario Does” is find secret power ups, so let’s give the player a mega mushroom that allows him to skip over the actual jumping, enemy dodging, and coin collecting. To top it off, “What Mario Does” is collect free lives, so let’s give the Mega Mario Rampage a bonus.

            It’s all artificial. The levels aren’t random and lazy, but made because Mario has a cool wall jump, so let’s force an obvious wall jump section, complete with coins and all to highlight that the passage is climbable. Did you grab that free life in the first level of Super Mario Bros because you saw it there on your first play, or was it a secret your older brother showed you? In New Super Mario Bros, you may not collect every big coin because they get tiring, but you will know how to get them. Small hole leads to it, you passed a small mushroom a few blocks back. It’s forced design, where rather than finding out nifty little secrets as you play two or three times, the game drags them forward and makes sure you know they’re there. No subtlety, no respect for the audience.

              Audience respect is what I believe many games boil down to. Good games expect you to learn, expect you to have some sort of intelligence and enthusiasm (hell, you wanted to play the game didn’t you?). Good games aren’t telling you how to jump or swim five hours in (sometimes after the water world has been cleared entirely); they're about giving the player a set of skills and asking the player to apply said skills. I believe that this is the major flaw with New Super Mario Bros. From the first stage to the last, there are coins littering the land, power ups on every screen, mushroom houses around every corner, and free lives are given away for simply breathing. There’s that soft Mario music remix playing through every stage. You get bounced into your first red coin collecting ring, and every other ring is just as obvious. The game doesn’t expect you to know anything ever, it just keeps feeding you lives and coins and super mushrooms because it’s afraid of getting hard, of asking something out of you. Sure the last world does have some semblance of difficulty, but once again it’s because that’s what NES games did. They give you a fucking platform for the first Bowser fight so that you can jump over him. They give you a platform because it might be too hard for the player to comprehend jumping over the firebeast and hitting the bigass switch behind him. Talk about kid gloves.

Nintendo doesn't think you can handle this one.

           Remember finding the secret warp zone because you put two and two together and realized you could climb up on top of the underground level? Skipping worlds was a fun thing to discover; it was also a useful strategy on shortening the route to the end – play some clever jumping games and the game rewarded you. Well…now there’s two worlds you skip clear over. They aren’t hidden worlds that the game doesn’t tell you about and hope you discover – that would require level design which encouraged exploration and independent thought. The game shows you on the bottom screen, plain as day, that you are skipping worlds. Like the big coin tracker and world maps, the game wants you to know you’re missing out – “Hey” it asks “stick around, sweep around every corner. I PROMISE there’s a secret or two here. SEE, LOOK! I’M HIDING STUFF!” It yells out to that little OCD gamer in us, hopes it can reach him and make us play the game for the sake of 100% completion – not because it’s fun or engaging, but because it’s there. This is what games do, right? Give you all kinds of secrets to explore? With NSMB's philosophy - those warp zones in Super Mario Bros or nifty flute chest in Super Mario Bros 3 would have signs pointing straight towards them. What fun would that be?

            There's a certain appeal of Mario games being so simple yet hiding so many nice little secrets around the edges. As I mentioned before, the first hidden free life in Super Mario Bros is a common secret known to most people who've ever touched a Mario game. The simplistic controls allow people to pick up, play, and get hooked. The little secrets in turn have created a fun little way for Mario players to socialize and trade secrets in the same way the original Legend of Zelda did. Pick up and play Super Mario Bros 3 sometime with a friend, the game was made for co-op. Notice every little mushroom house trick and warp whistle discovery - those little secrets that have accumulated over the years. The games themselves are short, sweet, and everyone knows Worlds 6,7, and 8 are royal pains - but sharing strategies and helping others is sort of a subculture that has grown out of the old Super Mario Bros games (hell, even Mario 64 holds water in this respect). With the designs of NSMB, there is no room for any of that - the game is too preoccupied with making sure the player is running through the motions, kicking shells and stomping goombas. All secrets are forced and straightfoward - there is no swimming under the ships in the eighth world or strategically saving your P-Wings and Clouds - when you get the mega mushroom, use it and stomp through everything - the designs weren't important enough to the developer in the first place, hence the game giving you the mega mushroom. Jumping couldn't possibly be fun - tearing shit up (get this: as Mario!) is what gamers want.

What’s the point? I’m not one to say you’re wasting your life on games, but when it comes to gaming, I expect a challenge. Not a mind numbing Master Ninja challenge, but I expect the game to ask something out of me. I expect some sort of substance. Without any kind of exercise in thought or skill, what’s left is masturbation, pressing one or two buttons as the game plays itself. I don’t know why Nintendo decided everyone deserves to beat their games when we know Mario saves the princess (modern Castlevanias suffer a similar problem - we retread cubicles collecting the stock powerups because god dammit, we just HAVE to kill Dracula - but that's for another review). The direct stories aren’t intriguing, the games are designed to be easily beatable, and so there’s no substance to the game. Why play the game? I understand it’s a handheld title, but does that really merit the excuse of “I can play it in my free time”? Time to sound like a total dick - aren’t there better things to do? If your defense is “It’s a good game to play five minutes at a time while waiting for the dentist”, then can you really take that argument and expand it into “Hey, it’s a good game” outside the context of being extremely bored and needing time to kill?

             In one of the earlier levels in the game, you stomp and turtle and get his shell. Literally two blocks over is a tower of breakable bricks which has an obvious “KICK SHELL HERE” gap. So you kick the shell there because that’s what Mario does. You proceed to stand there as you watch the shell run its pre-determined path. At the end of this whole demo of the game playing itself, you are rewarded with a free life and a gazillion points. This, in short, is what New Super Mario Bros is. It’s a game which doesn’t want to ask anything of the player, just simply reach out and say “Hey, remember how cool those old Mario games were?”

Why is there still points system anyway? Capcom found those superfluous and got rid of the points system after the first Mega Man.
Nintendo dropped them with the 3D jump. So why were they brought back for this game? Oh yeah…because that’s what Mario did.