LVL Headed

So here’s a picture of the new Star Trek film coming out…

You can find more here.

Alright Hollywood, I’m sick of this.  I’m looking at each of these people, and none of them look older than 25.  Captain Kirk looks like he’s the captain of a college swim team.  I don’t care how advanced the future’s education system is, these people look way too young to be at the helm of a starship.

And while this specific complaint has been brought about by Star Trek, don’t peg me as some kind of geek purist.  I’m not bothered that they got different actors to play in this remake of Star Trek.  I’m not really bothered by Star Trek at all, it’s the entire movie industry I’m bothered by.

I guess this is a little better than it was before.  Before, Hollywood was infamous for making movies about high schoolers starring actors in their early thirties.  I can tell that’s over because I watched Superbad, the first movie about high school that starred people who looked like they were actually still in high school.  But now we’ve got the opposite problem, young-looking actors playing the roles of older characters.  Let’s look at Superman real quick-like…

Here’s Margot Kidder as Lois Lane.  My apologies to Kidder, but she looks like she’s the appropriate age to be a Metropolis reporter.  Not old, but not rediculously young.

Here’s Kate Bosworth who acted as Lois Lane in Superman Returns (though the picture I’m using here obviously isn’t from said film).  Odd that in a film that supposedly takes place after the original Superman movie that Lois seems to have lost several years.  I do like the picture I’m using here because it looks like Bosworth’s kindergarten teacher has just flipped the book she was reading to show all the kids the illustration on the opposite page before she goes back to reading the book aloud.

Hollywood, I know you think we like looking at college-age supermodels.  And I guess that’s probably true.  But nothing pulls me out of a movie more than to see Muppet Babies cast as thirty-somethings.

There’s just too much youthful handsomeness in the movies these days.

So No More Heroes 2 is coming out. Personally, I’m elated.  That’s because I’m a fanboy.  However, in order to become a competent blogger, one must be able to sell one’s own opinion as hardline fact.  So let me just wax a few sentences of why grape is the best candy flavor.

I’ve played No More Heroes.  And I liked it.  The graphics were a little shoddy, the hit-boxes on the cars were way too large, the open-world style hub was completely unecessary, and some of the bad guys were a bit too predictable.  But I still like the game because of the attitude.

No More Heroes is a game that takes our culture of cool violence and strange chivalry, exagerates it, and turns it into a serious parody of itself.  It’s ultra-cool while pointing out how absurd everything cool is.  I mean, you play an assassin who has to do odd jobs like mowing lawns in order to afford your hobby of killing people.  The most mundane parts of our real lives are mixed with our game lives in which we spend most of our time mowing through baddies, not grass.  It’s fun to see that contrast inside the game world.

Suda 51 is said to be an auteur.  I think that’s kinda true.  In this young medium you don’t often see too much experimentation.  Most designers seem to be looking for formulas, for a “science” of game design, while it seems that Suda 51 wanted to play around with expression and experience a bit more than fun.  And so he succeeds with the two former but comes up a bit short with the latter.  Suda 51 is important because he’s making games more personal, giving them something to say, but he (like every other game maker) hasn’t quite gotten everything right yet.  The medium is young, but games like No More Heroes help to bring on adolescence.

I’m excited about No More Heroes 2.  I’m hoping that it won’t just be a retread of No More Heroes, as I want to see more new ideas coming from Grasshopper Manufacture.  At the same time, I’m also hoping that they pin down some of the problems of the earlier game.  In some areas they can definitely do better, but everything behind the game is strong.

At least, that’s what I can come up with to hold up my opinions.

Well, the new Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! is up, and it features a suggestion and quote by yours truly… except he got my name wrong.  Oh well, I don’t really mind since No Twinkie is a great series of articles.  Each one delves into common design decisions that make games less fun instead of more fun.

If you’re curious, I sent in a suggestion about escort missions and waist-high impassible obstacles.  Yes, I know these are the most obvious things to gripe about when it comes to bad game design, but I just wanted to be a part of something.  Do you really want to take that away from me!?

So check the article out.  I’m gonna go get some twinkies.

I lived in the age of the original Megaman games, and I also own the Megaman Anniversary Collection.  In playing through the Megaman franchise, you see a little love lost for the game and level design.  All the NES titles are good to excellent, but as the series moved on to other consoles, it seemed to loose something.  To see what I mean, pull up YouTube and watch a playthrough of Frostman’s stage:

There doesn’t seem to be any of that “spark” that you find in the earlier titles.  The stage doesn’t throw any tricks at you, it just seems to be a straight line through a bunch of enemies with some rocket-snowboarding tossed in as a minigame.

I like to think that this is what Capcom realized when they set upon the creation of Megaman 9.  The graphics are retro, for sure, but so is the spirit.  Megaman 9 brings back the wonderful level design of the earlier games with some of the lessons of today to make what may be the best in the series.

What makes a good Megaman game is the level design.  In the older games, the levels were tests of your memory, reflexes, and (basic) intellegence.  Megaman wasn’t about tossing different enemies on the stage, it was about adding enemies as an extension of the stage.  It isn’t about destroying tons of enemies, it’s about finding your way to the boss with as much health, lives, and weapon energy as possible.

Level design in Megaman 9 seems to have had as much thought put into it as it was in Valve’s Portal.  Level obstacles are introduced gently: in Galaxy Man’s stage, you walk into an empty room with two portals.  Hopping into one flings you out of the other one (so I guess the game has a little more in common with Portal than I originally stated).  Then, the challenge is ramped up: after this room, the player finds spots in which they must hop in and out of portals over a bottomless pit.  This is repeated in every level, players encounter a safe example of what’s to come to learn what to do when the real challenge comes up.

You might argue with me on this point that there are plently of levels in which something will come flying out of a bottomless pit without warning, causing you to fall in yourself.  To that I say… well, yeah… but even these instant-kill situations pop up at the beginning of each level before the player has gotten too far.  If the player dies towards the end of the level by this means, it’s not because it hasn’t happened before.

Megaman does have a reputation as a game in which you have to die multiple times to know what to do.  I’d say that for Megaman 9 this isn’t quite true, though you’ll die a few times for sure.

Well, I still have plenty of game to finish, but it seems like the guys at Capcom have put some real love into this.

The other day, just sitting around at work like I normally do (I’m employed now, didn’t you know?), I had a sudden vision of something so obvious that I couldn’t believe Nintendo hadn’t cashed in on it yet (like they have everything else).  It had come to me as my coworkers were discussing whether they should stick it out with World of Warcraft or hop the fence to Warhammer Online, where the grass is greener.  I have personally had a fairly dissapointing history with MMORPGs.  Warcraft had interested me just enough during it’s free trial period that I thought I could spend a few bucks a month just to keep at it, but then I learned that I had to buy the $50 game disc as well… even though I already had the entire game loaded on my hard disc and already had my credit card out for the monthly fee.  A little bit of money a month would have pulled me in, but that fifty dollar deposit was a big brick wall.

Anyways, back to the post as I originally had intended it.  Nintendo.  They’ve played around with the quasi-social gaming experience, bringing us casual games like Wii Sports and interesting experiments like Animal Crossing, but they haven’t really dove into the lucrative world of reaching into gamers’ pockets every month via a subscription model.  But it somewhat makes sense, as Nintendo doesn’t do a lot of “War,” and that seems to be a necessity for modern MMOs.

But wait!  There’s one property that would make perfect sense in a massive online environment!  One that Nintendo is already squeezing the life out of, and has enough popularity that it would immediately grab a demographic here-to untapped in the world of MMORPGs.  One with dueling and fights with wild beasts, and even ranking system.

My god… Pokemon would make a perfect MMO.

Think about it.  An entire world of free-roaming Pokemon to catch, train, battle, and trade.  A server-wide ranking system of wins and losses, creating a giant never-ending tournament.  Raids on dungeons not to collect epic loot, but rather epic Pokemon.  The RPG elements are there, they’d just have to be tweaked a bit.  And obviously there are a few off bits, but the game fits well in the mold.

Just like in the old Gameboy game, a player would start by picking out his or her first Pokemon.  This decision would choose their hometown, much like choosing your race sets your starting point in World of Warcraft.  Players could style their characters however they liked, not worrying about having to wear rediculous-looking armor later.  There’d be no armor, no weapons.  All of these things would be built into the Pokemon themselves.

Ah, and the classes!  No more rogues or paladins, just different types of Pokemon.  Not only that, but players could switch out their Pokemon at will, meaning one player can hold a multitude of classes all at once, able to use just a fraction of their abilities at a time by carefully tossing a Pokemon to the battlefield.

A game like this couldn’t have a weapon or armor marketplace, but players could teach their Pokemon different skills.  Though the amount of skills available would be great, each Pokemon would only be able to remember about four, meaning players would have to be very careful of how they trained their Pokemon.

Well, this is just what popped in my head at the office.  I haven’t played Pokemon since Blue and Red, but I’ve always appreciated the catchy idea behind it.  I just thought it was interesting enough to share (and also I haven’t posted in a while, so I needed to put up some content).

I’ve got some special stuff coming up soon, so just hold on.  Just take this post as a “I’m not dead” notice.

-SKT

I came back from work today only to find some newspaper-clippings from New Orleans on my dresser.  The article within states that Electronic Arts is opening up a large testing center in Baton Rouge thanks to Louisiana’s new incentives for electronic entertainment companies.

I drove 2,000 miles across the U.S. of A., only to find that the games industry is branching out only 4 hours from where I used to live.  I spent four days in a car to get a job I now could have gotten without worrying about getting a new driver’s license.

Oh well.  It’s still better here.

I was thinking about trading card games today, and as I just want to chronicle this idea, this won’t be a long post.

I’ve played with the idea of time as a resource before.  As part of my Independent Project at Centenary College, I created a card game in which player’s cards had a limited amount of turns in play which could be manipulated a few ways in order to create a winning strategy.

But today I saw a card from the Street Fighter collectible card game, and it got me thinking about other ways to use time.  I’ve heard of other trading card games that go without turns in “real time,” meaning players are just laying down cards as quickly as they can.  I don’t think I would be into that, I’d like to give my games a little more thinking time.

Then I thought about timers.  Perhaps a special timer.  Each player would have a certain amount of seconds for their turn, and each card would cost time.  The timer would count down from, oh, lets say 30 seconds, but there would be buttons to subtract time from the timer for each card.  That way, the longer players thought about their turn, the less they would be able to do with it.  That just might make it like a real fight!

I’m going to keep this here so I can remember it.  If you stumble upon this, let me know what you think.

This week I got angry.  I read an article on Gamasutra by Ernest Adams (of No Twinkie Database fame) entitled “The Tao of Game Design.”  And during the process of reading, I felt the kind of inner-excitement I only feel when I disagree with something.

So to say that I became angry isn’t quite true.  It’s just that my vice is debate, and so when I spot something I disagree with I gain an urge to speak out against it, an urge that just won’t go away until I fall into temptation.

So if you now look at the end of the article in the comments section, you can see some of the “excited” messages I left.  If you need to know, I post under my name: Steven Turner.

Now it’s been a few days, and after looking back at it, I see what bothered me.  It wasn’t what he was trying to say, it was the details.  His point was good, but he lead up to it with things that, first of all, I still don’t think are correct (his observations about media, his juxtaposition of making a game fun or making it meaningful), and second of all, didn’t really have anything to do with his main point.  It was an awkward article, full of the kinds of assumptions that tweak me, full of filler, but with a decent (but definetly not eye-opening or discipline-expanding) conclusion.

To really get what Adams was saying, I recommend that you don’t read the article.  Instead, read the comment left towards the end by one Jacek Wesołowski.  You’ll get the point and you’ll understand it better.

For now, I’m going to try and let the technical stuff lie.  I know in my heart of hearts that Adams wasn’t really suggesting that fun games and meaningful games are diametrically opposed to one another, or that games are the only medium which require participation and thought from both the designer and the reader (technically, they all do), it’s just that he was probably trying to stretch out his essay a little bit.

So to Adams, who will very likely never read this…

Sorry.

The above video is from Game Trailers, with the narrator explaining some of the decisions made in the new Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe game.  I haven’t been keeping up with this game that much since I’m a diehard Marvel vs Capcom 2 fan (I’ll take Wolverine vs Megaman over Superman vs Scorpion anyday), but I just found this video a little interesting and odd.

The first thing gone over in the video is the inclusion of Superman and how the developers took his powers into account when making the game.  So how did the game developers manage to balance the game while keeping the characters true to their roots?  They did it with a plot device.

I was hoping for something cool, as if the developers had locked themselves in a room for months just trying to figure out “How do we make Superman a normal fighter?”  But instead we get some excuse about how Superman is weak against Kryptonite and magic, and since Mortal Kombat takes place in a universe of sorcery, everything works out just fine on its own.  Even this plot device excuse is a little weak, seeing as how in the video Scorpion is hurting Superman just by punching him.  Does Scorpion have magic fists?  Is this explained in story mode as well?

This seems to me just another example of how awkward these two themes fit together.  If they had said something along the lines of Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe Villains, then I could see how that would work out.  Both fighters from either side would come into the battle with the same goal – total havok.  But to have the Flash fight some guy with a bicycle kick and expect us to think it’s totally rational?  Does the Flash have a fatality?

I’ll admit that Marvel vs Capcom 2 kind of has the same problem, and I’ve already stated I love that game.  But Marvel vs Capcom just goes right around the issue.  There’s no plot, no reason, just a bunch of people duking it out.  Marvel vs Capcom doesn’t try to explain itself, it just is.  Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe could try doing the same, but then the basic premise of fighting and fatalities is comprimised by DC’s do-gooders.  It’s not just in the storyline where the two mis-match, it’s in the basic theme.

Anyways, I just thought this was weird.