The game asks me if I’m ready. I’m not sure if I am. The first time I entered the Chemical Plant Zone, I was a child, playing on a cousin’s Genesis. I was blown away. It was weird, there was unexplained floating platforms, unused catwalks, pink water, and a mutant following me the entire time. But it didn’t have to make sense to me, because it made sense to itself. It was a level in a game that knew who it was, knew what it wanted to be, and did it’s damnedest to be just that.

I’m still bathing in my memories when the game throws me into action. I manage to get a grip before the hallway opens ends and the level begins its tricks. But as soon as the level is laid before I loose all of my senses again. Everything is there. The extraneous roller coaster catwalks, the pink water, robot spiders, balls of goo flying in arches between grates in the floor. All of the iconic set pieces from the Genesis days are back, and rendered in full HD 3D. It brings joy to my heart. It would bring tears to my eyes, but they’re already being stressed by trying to keep up with the blur that is the world I’m flying through.

Chemical Plant Zone isn’t the only bit of the past coming back to life. Green Hill Zone is as lush and ideal as ever. Watching the Death Egg rise through the crumbling Sky Sanctuary Zone gets my blood boiling for the mere thought of knocking it out of the heavens again. Oh fuck, there’s a truck trying to run me down as I hurry to escape from the city. I never even played the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog, but that lava tornado over there is really freaking sweet.

Listen, we both know it's just a Death Star knock off, but that doesn't make its smirk any less infuriating.

It was never even a fantasy that this game was made as anything but a wet dream for nostalgic Sonic fans. I believe that’s what the title “the game that Sonic fans have been waiting for” implied. And I thought this game was doing a great job of it. At one point, I did think that, yes. This was before they tried to let us relive our experiences with sonic games from this console generation. Without the dizzying blast from the nostalgia bomb, my vision clears, and I can see all the bullshit going on. It must stem from a place of complacency. Designers, knowing the fans will fall into a euphoric comatose at the sight of their dreams rebuilt, get to the point of “good enough is more then enough.” If you can cut the work and still get boatloads of money, odds are the work will get cut.

Maybe that’s not entirely their fault. Taking the vision of someone else and trying to build it anew is a tough job. I know, for I have tried to do just this. Before you can create, you have to study what has come before. You have to analyze it, learn what made it work, and come up with the ingredients to make it happen again. Then you start with the building. It’s at least double the work.

Unless you just don’t care. And I really wouldn’t be surprised if no one actually cared about the Sonic that exists today. Even the Sonic fans that buy these games and push for more don’t care. They care about what they remember. As long as something comes out that makes them remember, they’ll be sated. But no one cares about what came out. No one cared to work on it. And that’s what leads to bullshit. Like this staircase.

This is lazy nonsense. City Escape deserves better then this.

This isn’t something that happens when level designers care. This is something out of a dreamscape, where geometry is based on ideas and concepts, rather then on designs. They had a look they were going for, and as soon as they had it, they didn’t look back. Literally, I imagine, because you wouldn’t notice this atrocity if you constantly move forward and ignore the human instinct to explore. As soon as they could say, “Yep, looks like city escape,” they moved on. Never took a moment to improve, or to ask, “could I put something neat in this kinda boring spot?” Not even something new and innovative and different, but just something neat. Shit, they couldn’t even be bothered to consider ways to make the controls anything more then passable. And C- at best, guys.

Neat stuff was one of the tenets of the classic Sonic games. Yeah, there was a lot of, “run right, jump over spikes, maybe go through a loop,” but every level managed to mix it up. “Over here, don’t drown. On this level, ride an iceberg through some walls. Pull levers to keep the lights on and ward off ghosts. Hell, be a pinball-slot machine for a level. Why? It’s a city wide casino, baby!” Have your level idea, and find something cool to do with it.

It’s something I never thought I’d say about a game, but I think think the Sonic series needs to take notes from God of War. Make it all about the set pieces. Push it to the extreme, make it look amazing and be memorable. Instead of mashing square between set pieces, just push right or sometimes forward instead.Then add some unique gameplay bits to match the setting. And I know if that’s the plan, quick time events are way easier, but coming up with sequences that don’t gimp player agency will make the game all the better in the end. “Let’s have a sequence where Sonic is flying to catch up with the Death Egg.” “So, we’ll just make that a…doge bullets level…?” “Nah, that would be really weird to just stick in near the end of the game. If we just have Miles keep his plane constantly under Sonic’s feet the player will still have something to jump off of.”

Well, this sure is different. But not startlingly different.

That’s a solution they had in 1996. What happened?

Well, actually, Sonic Colors happened.

They were on the right track. The set the entire game in an amusement park, which meant that everything was a spectacle. Levels weren’t just unique, but bright, colorful, and distinctive. The game had some hooks for gameplay too. Areas introduced new mechanics in the form of the alien creatures known as Wisps. We’re already used to being a hedgehog, so in one level you learn about being a drill. The level after that lets you experience the thrilling lifestyle of a blimp. Now they weren’t all directly tied to the levels, but that’s because they were trying to crib from Metroidvania games. Each new Wisp gave you new ways to interact with levels you had already completed. Trying to be more like Metroidvania it totally a valid excuse.

From what I heard, most people were assuming that Generations was going to be building on Colors.  I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but that’s not what happened. It was actually a step down in every way, save for fan-service. It picked up the old levels, it came with some gags about Tails not being in the first Sonic game, and it took on all the old characters. It had some of the Chaotix in it. Did you know they had a detective agency? I sure as shit didn’t. But Generations also dropped a lot. It dropped the interesting gameplay hooks, it dropped the vibrant settings, it dropped the competent and well paced level designs, and it even dropped a few hours off of play time. Generations even included a level from Colors. It was one of the most uninteresting levels from that game, they took out the fun bits from it, and somehow even managed to make it look worse then it’s Wii counterpart. How do you even let that happen?

Oh man, doesn't this look awesome? Too bad it's from the Wii game everyone overlooked.

In my mind there’s no doubt that Sonic Colors is the better game. No doubt that it’s the best modern Sonic game. But I know why people still tell themselves that Generations is better. It’s because of that “modern” qualifier. The modern Sonic’s pale in comparison to the classics because they can’t get away from the classics. They can’t come to terms with what they’re becoming, and refuse to stop trying to match the shadows of the giants that acme before. It’s like the series is going through a mid life crisis. Maybe this comes from developers, maybe it’s the demands from the fans. Either way, I can’t see a really great Sonic game coming out until after we sit the series down with an after school special about being yourself not giving into peer pressure.

Then this morning I was thinking about heats. In drag racing, each match up is called a heat. Heats is also the name of the Getter Robo title track. This was an important click, as it quickly led to the following idea.

I want to see a new Tech Romancer type game, but with a specific hook. Instead of normal fighting games “best x out of y”, I wanna see it with either tennis style “have to win by 2 matches”, or even just a 2-3 in a row to win (the Next Tetris does this, and it’s got a kind of amazing balance to it which I guess I’m trying to recapture here). What you get is that each match could theoretically go on forever when it’s a super even match up.

BUT HERE’S THE RUB!

After each bout in a match – or rather, after each HEAT – both players get ability points. The winner gets 2, the loser gets 1. Players imedeately are able to use those points to power up one of the aspects of their character (their mech suit in my mind, because why would you have the characters be people when you could have them be giant robots?).

I could see 4 aspects: attack, health, speed, and technique (classic~).

Attack is simple. It makes your attacks do more damage.

Health, similarly, just increases the amount of health your character starts a HEAT with.

Speed increases general speed of the character, attack animations, dodge distance, etc. I guess.

Tech corresponds to how fast your special / charge gauge builds up. All special moves (not just super moves) require charge. So more tech means you’ll be firing more lasers and such. I actually get the feeling that it’s not built up over time, but it goes up every time you block an attack. I bet there’s even an ex-block that requires special timing, and when used correctly gives a boost to collected charge.

So there you go. As a match wears on, each HEAT gets more powerful. I imagine the ratio of ability points is what would be tweaked to make sure that the swing of character power across a match is subtle. There obviously has to be some kind of power shift if one player is winning more matches, otherwise matches will go on forever. We just need to shove it to one side eventually.

Yet, I would love to keep in the idea that a match could go on forever, but just gets to a ridiculous point. A heat where one player could literally kill the other with a single hit from start, if only he could hit the other player who is now basically voiping around the screen. You just need to make sure that the balance is right. The amount of ability points and the bonus that they give shouldn’t be enough to make this situation happen after only 3 heats. But if it happened around 20 heats later, that might be alright. In real time, if each heat is about 90 seconds, we’re talking a half hour of solid fighting to get to that point. Then to max out every ability, it would take2 hours of fighting. And then both players would be GODLIKE.

But I also wonder if there should be a max to stats. Let’s think about it. If there isn’t, then maybe it’s more then broken. Both players dump every point into health forever, eventually no one gets hurt enough ever. Well, then we can put a timer in, and it would be hilarious to find that at time out, one person won because they only lost 1/255 of their health, while the other lost 1/250. Silly, but it still comes to a conclusion, it’s ridiculous, and it’s an edge case because players would have to be playing for a long time to get there, and ignore all other stats. (it’s the length of time to get there that makes it an edge case).

Both players dump everything into attack. Well, this is what we call sudden death. Every Smash Bros.  game has done that, and I love it (partly because that’s one of the only times I rock house). Not a real problem, again because the time to get to that point, people will want a sudden death anyway.

Speed is an interesting point. As that gets higher, a character may actually become impossible to play. Think about Tetris. Speed goes up over time, it get’s harder to control and make discrete actions. In a fighting game, it would be “press left, you’re against your side of the screen, press right, you’re in the enemy’s face, jump and you’ve already landed.” Although capping that stat at a certain speed would be the easiest way to fix it (and give us as designers a way to adjust difficulty), if we make speed only adjust certain things. Attack speeds, recovery frames, jump height and dash distance/speed. More technical fighting thigns, so that’s cool. Would probably work fine. I still feel like normal movement speed should get faster, but it could be some smaller ratio based on the stat, or only that could get capped at a certain speed, while the rest is only limited by frame rate (imagine each punch being at 60 frames per second!) If the stat getting to high is a punishment, then it’s not what I wanted to see out of this. I just want it to get ridiculous.

Tech would be silly. Block one hit, do a super. Of course, still on the idea that supers them selves are more about covering more of the screen (MvC style) rather then doing more damage, so that way it keeps more focus on the attack stat. So with tech, yeah now you’re hitting the whole screen all the time, but still doing only nominal damage. The same kind of damage that a normal attack would do, but you’d just have to be in melee range to hit with. This makes sense. Yes.

Now remember, these examples are all worst case scenarios. This is at at the 20 heat mark, where most heats probably wouldn’t get past 5, with general skill match ups being what they are.

In fact, if we consider match making, I would make it a separate mode. Like the “ranked” matches would be a ladder style play, so you’re always matched with someone either 1 or 2 levels wither above or below you. Then you either move up, or stay where you are, and all the matches are inherently off balance to facilitate shorter matches. But I’d also do a “DEAD HEAT” search mode where it matches you with similarly ranked players, just to try and get even matches that go on forever. Maybe this is a super broken matchmaking idea and is something no one would want, but it’s something I would like to see. In theory, at least.

2 more things to consider. First, with each heat, you would probably need some kind of “blind reprogram” option. Much like in football games or general character picking, some way to allocate your skill points without the other player knowing where they are. I’m sure in many places you wouldn’t care. Casual battles, or battles where you’re trying to achieve those edge case ridiculous matches. You could do the normal kind, where each player gets to blank out their selections, make selections without on-screen feedback, or make their selections, but then make false selections afterwards. I would like to see it almost as a puzzle mini game. Like the Fallout 3 hacking minigame, hide the stats and their numbers inside a jumble of code, so that way each player has to figure out their own puzzle to get ahead, and aren’t afforded the chance to watch the other player or they would miss out or mess up their own allocation. Again, this could be aggravating to some players, but I think it would be neat. Different, at least.

The other option is about starting stats for different characters. It’s normal for some characters to be inherently more healthy, or hit hard or such. So that wouldn’t be anything new. But, Depending on how wide the variance starting is, it would have to be a careful balance so that it doesn’t start at too strong of a swing, or to weak of a swing so that over a short amount of heats that swing would be pointless. Maybe this is just some weird paranoia I have, but it’s something I feel is worth considering. I don’t think I would mind the difference between characters being solely based on appearance and moveset. Specfically, hit location, style, etc. Look at the move sets in Touhou 12.3th and BlazBlue.

But yeah, that’s basically my idea and the thought so far on it. Of course, I still don’t know how to code. But if anyone else likes it…welp, new project time.

F*R*A*G: Everyone will only get half of the initial comparision. This was a unique click.

At the same time, this machine has a beauty about it. It set out to do nothing, and it does nothing. But it does it so perfectly. It is still a machine – it has mechanisms. A rock just sitting there also does-nothing, and probably does it just as well. But the rock is doing-nothing as a by-product of being a rock. This machine activates in order to do nothing. Although logically that is still dumb, there is a concept that is so clear and then executed so perfectly that you have to admire it. It stops existing as an example of a stupid concept, and starts existing as a tribute to execution of a concept.

It’s a clever and powerful turn around, but it is difficult to pull off.

It can happen with a lot of things, and I think a lot of viral video showcase it. But viral videos can be ruined when it’s picked up. Parkour is strange like that. “Let’s just run and jump off some stuff.” “That’s kinda dumb. Oh wait, they’re doing some really cool shit.” And then a movie like Live Free or Die Hard comes along, and kinda ruins it. It’s still cool, but there’s a purpose behind it now. The concept is at least decent, and then you pull it off well. That’s not what I’m talking about here. You lose the beauty inherent in how a excellent execution can overpower a concept.

When I started thinking about this, I was actually thinking about it in terms of stupid outfits. A lot of little kids whose parents dub “creative thinkers” will, at one point or another, decide one day to pull 5 random pieces of clothing out from their closets and wear them all at once. And enter into public like that. It’s basic, and it’s pretty dumb.

Okay, some people will try to say that it shows the bliss of ignorance that children possess. Yeah, sure I can see that. But for us real people and for the sake of argument, it’s dumb.

So a kid dresses dumb, and it passes for some reason. There’s an age limit on doing that, after which you will be smacked. But if my idea is correct, there are ways to get around it. You wanna do this dumb thing still, so do it well. Start color coordinating that random shit you pull out of your closet. Give is some sort of a theme to tailor it and give it a sense of completion or attendance. Take enough care in it, and suddenly people will start seeing it and admiring it, and forget how dumb of a concept actually underlies it.

People might point at a fashion designer here and say, “but Nick, isn’t that just what these people are doing?” Nope. They’ve gone too far. Perhaps once this is what they were doing, but no longer. Now the themes and colors and coordination are the point. The execution is part of the concept. Whether it’s dumb or cool it is being so with it’s entirety. For this idea, that is of no difference, and it’s boring.

On the other hand, there’s Bjork. She’s not doing it right either, but she’s got it wrong from the other end. If you start going high concept and not putting the effort into the execution, then you’re still failing. You’re essentially doing what the child is doing in their naivete. Credit can be given, however, to the fact that your concept will indeed be far far higher then what a child would come up with. But to be fair, the point is basically that the concept is pointless, random, or otherwise stupid to begin with. To start high concept just makes more work for yourself.

Is this a useful idea? I don’t know. Maybe it’s pointless. Does that mean I could make it admirable by pulling it off notable well? Maybe, but I sure as hell know I don’t care enough to try.

F*R*A*G: Of course he’s not musically named. HE’S CHOPIN.

I’ll tell you what game I do have. Alien Swarm. Such a good game. Running around, shooting things, friendly fire, flamethrowers, welding doors… and all on the UT2k4 engine! Well, it was. Then they beefed it up, and it uses a bunch of code from Left 4 Dead. I can’t tell you all of it, but look at the glow around the items, and then watch the way the tool tips pop up and float around. I don’t like Lefties 4 Deadsies, and I don’t like being reminded of it. But it’s a valve game, so what do you expect. Besides, once the mission is on, and you’re back to back with your buddies nailing enemies left and right, protecting the one tech who needs to get the door open, it’s a hell of a good time. I’m not going to say much here cause I think we’re going to cover it on the podcast soon, but still. Great game.

Other then that, iPod Touch. It’s a thing. I named mine Twit-com, because that’s really what it’s best for so far. Read my tweets, have some aim conversations, play some music, and then have the equivalent of a flash game to waste some time with when I’m waiting around. Okay, that’s a broad generalization. The machine is a surprising powerhouse, and I’ve even seen full 3d racing games, a Morrowind like 3d rpg, and some very animated tactics battle games. A lot of them are generic, and some were just put out to try to get hits, but there’s a lot of good stuff that you don’t need to look very hard for (I’m sure apple makes sure of it). But it’s really nice to have aim and tweets and a simple puzzle game all in my pocket. That’s really what I wanted it for. It’s basically all of my communications stuff, but in a device that can fit in my pocket (so I don’t have ot bring my big laptop everywhere), and on top of everything it’s replacing my zen as a music player. That’s the cool part, all the other stuff never really gets in the way of it playing music.

But yeah, Alien Swarm is fun, and I wanna play it again soon. Then I’ll go back to Bioshock, but more importantly, playing Front Mission 4 again!

F*R*A*G: It tells me “don’t shoot team mates,” but really it should be telling my team mates “don’t stand in front of the guy with the minigun!”

Wii’s are interesting. I’m generally kinda off-put by the Wii, as discussed in OSPC GAIDEN #7. But…when they make an imersive experience on it, they make an imersive experience. Trauma Center is a game on my must get list, along with Boom Blox. Sadly, I don’t have either of those games. Yet. What do I have? Mario Kart Wii. Guess what, it’s still Mario Kart.

It still has the old problems of…I guess I would call it power-up balance. You can be in first place for 2 and 9/10 of a race, and then at the final moment get nailed with a blue shell, and lose it all. At the same time, you can go from last place to top 3 in a single lap just by getting a nice run (and because you’re not being picked on for being ahead). More often then not, this isn’t that big a problem, and you get a really fun competitive experience out of it. It’s just that everyone once in a while, you get a total bs moment that can frustrate you beyond words.

I really haven’t been a fan of Mario Kart since…the SNES days. And I feel that was a lot more to do with my unfounded and inexplicable love of mode 7 more then anything about the game itself. And I never owned it. I rented the SNES one very often from the local Blockbuster Video, and then I didn’t even play the n64 one at all until…possibly less than 3 years ago. The first one I owned was the DS Mario Kart, and I hated it. I hated it because it was everything that Mario Kart is. And I was damn good at it. I 100%-ed that game, and was more often then not the winner of our 7 player lunch period matches in high school. And those were fun times indeed. But I still hated the game.

But there’s something cathartic about it. It’s a lot like how I look at Tenchu Z. It’s not a game you like, but it’s a game you can understand, and you can see how to win and how to get to the end state, and you can do it to enter into a trance. The only reason you do it is to watch the gold medals appear next to each track, just waiting to see what happens when every track has the gold. Even though you know nothing will happen.

That’s the strange part about it. Games like Mario World, Ninja Gaiden, and Castlevania all have an ending. The credit roll, the destruction of the castle, the escape with the princess, the whatever it happens to be. It’s something which, once you get there – get to the end of the game – you see it, and you become one of the esteemed few to ever have seen it. Even if the ending sucks, it’s still magical because it was there, and you saw it. Mario Kart doesn’t have this. When you get to the end, there will be just the end. You know this, and it’s not why you’re doing it. You’re doing it for…

…

…

And that’s why right up until I started writing this, I was playing. I don’t even really like it, but there were more tracks. There were more cars, more trophies, more victories. I guess I don’t care about the purple loot, because I have my list of grand prix wins.

As far as the ipod goes, I’ve been browsing some apps and stuff, and really it’s a great twitter / aim device so far. IRC too if it didn’t log me out of channels when I need to check my other conversations. And I’m still shocked by the graphics power packed into that device, even tho I probably shouldn’t be, considering as an apple product it has to look pretty or it wouldn’t have been released. I dunno, as long as it holds music, I think it’ll be what I need it to be. I’ll keep playing with it, and we’ll see how it goes.

F*R*A*G: Come on, Mario. Let’s do this. Let’s FUCKING do this.

I don’t really like the scale. And I mean that in 2 senses. First, the small scale. They’re issues more with control and feedback: The player character is slow, tiny hops, I’m not always sure what the extent of my own space is (using the wrench and some desperate reach hacking really suffer from this), and most of the time I can just eat hits, but every once and a while I die for some reason I will never truly know. I look back and a lot of the games I end up liking are ones where moving is fast and fluid. Even in RPG’s I find I enjoy myself more when the player isn’t moving mind numbingly slowly, it’s just that such movement is always associated with action and platformer games. Along with that consider means of immediate interaction.

Games that focus on creating a world might give you tons of ways to interact with characters and events and civilizations. But if you can’t break the glass at a bus stop, I feel like there’s not much I can’t do (not a literal example, but along those lines). For fps games, the most basic interaction is shooting things, and then you could throw in a use button if you want. The Specialists had a lot of diving-sliding-wall-jumping stuff. Just Cause 2 has the grappling hook. Dead Space has zero-g, time slow, cutting, and the stomp. Zelda games let you bottle fairies, cut grass, and pick up chickens even! The telekinesis plasmid is one of my favorites in Bioshock because I can pull stuff closer, throw stuff, and even pile stuff up by carefully dropping it at my feet. It’s what gives me the greatest sense of interaction in the game really (people who watch me play will notice that I hit EVERYTHING with the wrench, just to see if anything happens). I’m very psyched for Bulletstorm for these very reasons, even tho really the epitome of this theme exists with Gary’s Mod. But then you get into the Empty Canvass issues, and that’s a topic for another time.

The other scale is the sort of global one. Rapture is supposed to be an underwater metropolis, right? Every area, sometimes even every room, seems like it’s own cordoned off ecosystem. Now, this is what was cool about Megaman, but in a big world with few breaks, it can get a bit unsettling. You’re in a laboratory, which is full of science equipment and shaped sort of like an office complex. behind this door is a glass tube between buildings which shows lots of underwater wildlife and the sprawling buildings all around you. After that short, short trip, there is a forest. Next to a Mediterranean street market. With a room full of bees behind that. When you’re coming up with the detailed plans for your underwater metropolis, the person who suggests a flow like that gets shot. Such a flow doesn’t evolve with increase in population either. (I would say the later is a lot more predictable: start by water, the middle becomes a place where people meet and work and trade, products are made in a layer around that, and people live in a layer around that. Sound like any city you know?) I guess this isn’t really an issue with gameplay, but it is an issue with pacing, which can be related to gameplay.

The game moves so slow for me. Not like I was complaining about before, with the actual movement speed, but in an overall sense. I usually think of it in terms of the Simpsons. After so long, you can compare a show to itself (which makes for really good comparisons, since so little is different in what you’re comparing, and that’s perfect for science experiments), and I think one of the traits of the really good shows and seasons is the amount of time spent in a scene. You can make a lot happen in a half hour, meaning more jokes, more developments, more actions. There’s a couple of tricks to this tho. People build up a big library of assumptions of the world around them. Exploiting these assumptions saves a whole ton of time.

Classic setup, a guy walks into a bar. Then the joke happens. You don’t have to say “a guy walks into a bar.” You don’t have to have the guy saying “I’m going to the bar.” Visual cues. There’s a bar, there’s bar stools, a bar tender, and alcohol behind him. The guy walks into this scene. You’ve just accomplished the same setup without saying a word – without wasting resources. In an instant the joke is set up and you can go right into it. Whole point is, you don’t have to hold the audience’s hand. That’s just wasting our time and yours. Exploit assumptions and get right to the action. Okay, some things will need to be explained if there’s basically no way that your audience already has experience with the topic, but this just means you really need to know your audience so that you know where to put that effort.

Bioshock has a weird relationship with this concept. Some rooms you walk into, and even if there wasn’t an explicit sign, you see a bar, you see tables, you see a dance floor, and you know it was once a club. Okay, that’s cool, that’s nifty, that’s a nice way to express things. But then when it comes to explaining their unique bits of world, they do a lot to hold hands sometime. Basically nothing happens without someone coming onto the radio to give some sort of back story to why this person went crazy, or why you need to go collect pictures or why this seemingly random hallway is completely frozen over so you need a fire plasmid to continue. I don’t really need that. I guess it’s not so much that actions speak louder then words, but they at least speak a whole lot faster then words. If I didn’t have to listen to you go on about this and that and what have you, then I feel I could get thru areas at a more reasonable pace, and not have to stay everywhere until I’m so sick of where I am that I’m moving out west to see the new exotic frontier known as “the next bit.” I’m a fan of well thought out worlds, just find a more elegant way of expressing it to me.

F*R*A*G: It’s decided. The helicopter sentry bots are my favorite characters. They think they’re people in the same way that a dog with a jaded look on his face sitting at a bus stop thinks he’s people.

I resent Plasmids.

I use the wrench more then any other weapon by a large margin.

I avoid killing Big Daddies wherever possible.

I’ve given up searching every nook and cranny and box and corpse meticulously.

And that’s just my play style. My narrative experience is taking a dive for 2 major reasons. First, I would much rather be supporting Andrew Ryan. Simple logic really: this is a man who was powerful enough to BUILD AN UNDERWATER METROPOLIS, I don’t want to fuck with him. Plus, the whole reason he built it is to escape everything he found sucked on the surface. Decided he could surpass that if he tried it on his own. That’s a feeling I can really empathize with. “Anything you can do I can do better” is basically the reason I get out of bed every morning. He did it on a grand scale. I like his gumption.

My second barrier to being submerged in the narrative is the fact that I can’t help but keep foremost in my mind that I, the player character, was just THE LONE SURVIVOR OF A HORRIFIC PLANE CRASH. I almost didn’t enter the tower at the beginning of the game because character motivation wise, there was no reason to. If I stay on the surface, there’s at least a chance to be spotted by another plane passing by, be rescued. Not like I’ll freeze to death, there’s that big fire going. Also, if I’m a normal person, I’m in a debilitating state of emotional shock. THEY’RE ALL DEAAAAAAAADDDDDDD!! I should be sitting in the back of an ambulance wrapped in a fire blanket with a cup of coffee in one hand and a police councilor in the other. NOT being entranced by the inexplicable gold plated and mildly run down tower which serves as only god knows what.The simple fact that it’s there is only adding more therapy sessions to the coming years, trying to sort out if it was all a delusion or not.

So really this whole game is loosing points because as far as I could tell, it couldn’t happen. Not by the rules of the world they created (which, is probably the best thing they have created with this game), but by an assumption of motivation which makes no goddamn sense. Now, some people are trying to tell me that’s part of the narrative, and that it’ll “probably” lead to a big character development / plot twist reveal later on, and suddenly it’ll make sense. Okay, maybe it’ll fit, but it won’t make sense. The player character is something you’re giving to the player, and you have to keep that in mind. So either you have to let the players have their own motivations and give them choices, or give them pre-existing information about their characters so that the choices you force them to make are logical, and not just something you’re forcing them to do.

For example: There’s a scene where you’re walking to the submarine bay, as Atlas has asked you to help him save his family and let him into the bay. Ryan comes on the radio right after him and says that if I help Atlas, then I have become an enemy of Ryan. So I’m looking at the switch, and I think to myself. See, that’s the key. I have only the most minimal setup for this character I’m playing (see: “THEY’RE ALL DEAAAADD!”), so in this situation I can’t help but step in and use my personal judgment to think about the decision “Do I push the switch or not?”

But it’s not a choice. Literally. A box pops up, “Current goal: Hit the switch.”

To my personal judgment, this is the last thing I should be doing. I already like Ryan’s gumption, and I don’t want to make him an enemy. And really, I’m a bit unsure about Atlas, because I just showed up from a plane crash, and he’s asking me to save his family. So he’s just as insane as anyone else down here; He has poor prioritizing skills. Either he needs to decide his family is most important and go after them himself (instead of entrusting them to this PLANE CRASH VICTIM), or decide that they’re all dead and focus on just getting me to some sort of safety (the best plan of which would have been to throw the bathysphere into reverse and get my dumb ass back to the surface where everything was okay. Ish.). So at they’re very core, all these happenings are irrational, and I can’t get past that.

But I hear that some serious stuff goes down later on, so maybe this really weak beginning gets explained in a way that so awesome and fitting that it gets made up for. It could happen. But it’s going to take a lot to over come the fact that the opening scene has you enter into a little oval pod, which then descends down a pipe while a giant man watches you go down. That, my friends, in an intro where you are flushed down a toilet. Perhaps it’s clever symbolism of how Rapture is such a shitty place.

At the very least, maybe I’ll find out why this game is reminding me so very much of F.E.A.R.

F*R*A*G: I see you have a tortilla there. But where is the chicken and cheese?

Here’s what I tunes has: accessibility. It’s what’s Apple’s good at. It’s basically their brand. They have a Simple but well rendered media library (what I like in Winamp 3), they have parallel playlists (which I like in Foobar 2000), and they have built in file and metadata organization (which I have yet to find implemented as well and to such an extent in any other freeware program). They even fixed the problem of loosing playlists, because it treats the media library as a default playlist of all your music at once so it just adds things there and plays them without overwriting anything. Hell, if I had an iPod I’d probably like how well iTunes syncs with that too. Giving me simple useful features in a way where it’s easy to find and use them has always been what I liked most. If that’s all iTunes was, I wouldn’t be mad.

Unfortunately.

Unfortunately iTunes is still an Apple product, and as such is designed as an Apple experience, which means it’s designed as an all-in-one experience. So it does have all-I-like-from-those-other-programs-I-mentioned-in-one, but it also has a-lot-of-crap-that-I-never-use-but-is-still-there-bloating-in-one too.

iTunes store: Don’t need it. The majority of my music is from official CD’s which I held in my hand mere moments before those songs were ripped from that CD and put right into my library. Plus I still don’t have an iTouch / iPhone, so I don’t need to access the app store, nor will I use it to just browse around to “discover new music”. I hunt down my music. I’m not freaking Magellan.

Library sharing: Don’t need it. And I don’t need people I don’t know but just happen to be connected to whatever access point I’m connected to snooping at my stuff. I worked hard to get this much music, and if you would like to share in it you need to at least show the minimal amount of effort possible by actually interacting with me and asking me. Besides, you’re making it take longer to load Fist of the North Star from Hulu, so bug off.

iPodService: Don’t need it. I have never owned an iPod, and I expect to never own one in the future. So why give me computer constantly be running a program in the hopes that I’ll bring one home one day and it’ll jump up and lick my computer’s screen like a new puppy and the computer will hug it and they’ll be all happy. …Okay, so the metaphor is a bit extended (they tell me) but I still feel the same. iPod is not gonna happen, stop looking for one.

Apple Software Updater: Don’t need it. See, it’s not even really part of iTunes, it’s just part of the Apple experience which comes with iTunes. I don’t want any of the other crap you want to give me. I don’t even want iTunes to get newer. Every time it does, whatever bit of my experience may have gotten better is overshadowed by whatever bullcrap was also included in the update.

Smart playlist / party dj playlist / genius: Don’t need ‘em. I don’t even know if there’s a difference between them. First of all, I’ haven’t found another person who groups their music in the same way that I do, so I trust that the algorithms they use wouldn’t please me. More importantly, I don’t like things that think they are smarter then me. It’s the principal of the thing. Without getting into the big “can the artificial intelligence community create and actual intelligence” argument, the fact is that I am my own thinking individual, and I want to make my own choices. Even the choice of what group of music I want to listen to on shuffle. And hey, you gave me playlists and a shuffle button, so you don’t need to remind me that there’s at least 3 other ways I could be “discovering music I didn’t even know I had”. I know what I have, get out of my face.

Album art: Don’t….really know how I feel about this still. Album art is nothing new, of course. Hell, much of the landscape in Brutal Legend for the 360 was based off of old metal album covers, so that’s a sign that the album art can be just as influential as the album itself. It’s part of the album experience, one could even argue. But is it still so? We are moving into an age of digital distribution, and even if we can have equivalents of such things as album covers and inserts and first printings and even shelf space. I look at my music library, or even other people’s, and I think “Gee, that’s a lot of music. I bet there’s some cool songs in that collection.” But I go down to WRPI and walk into their physical CD and vinyl library, and I am awestruck. I have trouble wrapping my mind around it. it seems so much more impressive, even tho the actual amount of songs / total playtime is probably far shorter then what is in the digital libraries. But now there is actual physical space associated with those albums. There is a physical item made up of mass. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a chemical thing. We are organic creatures, after all. I would expect that on some elemental level coming into contact with the item gives some transference of chemicals, or even just transfers a knowledge of the existence of the object that hits us on such a primal, instinctual, basic level that we never even consider it. I may know every word in a text document on my laptop by heart, but doesn’t change the fact that it is impossible for me to pick it up. Putting a little fucking picture in the corner of my screen while a song is playing does NOTHING to overcome this gap.

Okay, maybe to harsh and to deep. Maybe it’s just a piece of art to associate with some music, and that’s all it is. Maybe that still offends me a bit. If your music can’t stand as memorable on it’s own, then maybe it isn’t good music, or at least isn’t worth listening too. Okay, maybe too deep again. But maybe it still bugs me. It almost feels like they’re offering two together so that if I like at least one then I’ll like both by relation. Even if it’s not on purpose, I can’t help but think that’s something that a salesman would do as a dirty trick to make a sale (somehow – I don’t know the exact con, I’m not a salesman). Putting that aside, I think I’m just very keenly aware of ties between media and emotional states in my head. Why is the album Europop by Eiffel 65 tied to the opening video loop from Donkey Kong Country? Why is Around the World by ATB tied to the orthodontist’s office I used to go to in the city? why is S Night at the Roxbury tied to Star Road? why is In a Dream by Rockell tied to Megarace 2? Why is One Must Fall 2097 tied to everything I find awesome? And most importantly, why are all of these things tied together?

That’s my own crazy search, but I do have a more easily related experience on the same note. Dirty Little Secret by the All-American Rejects was a song that I was pretty much apathetic towards. Then high school happened…and long story short I came to hate that song because it was tied to an event which triggered an unpleasant emotional state. Okay, life moves on. Then the song came out on Rock Band, and I found myself surrounded by people who didn’t have that emotional tie. In fact, whether by merit of the song or by it being in Rock Band which is a fun game, people were enjoying it. And I was …enjoying it. But it wasn’t full enjoyment. It’s like when some kid picks on you in school, and then you run into them a few years later to find that they started a charity or something. You grind you teeth while you smile. I believe the term I learned for this in 11th grade English class was “Cognitive dissonance”.

Maybe that’s not it. But the conversation about it did lead here, so maybe that is it. Maybe it’s just tied to this, so I dislike it by association. Either way, I don’t use album art, but there’s a part of me that knows it’s entirely possible that one day I’ll say “fuck it” and just let it get all the ones it can find for my music. Then I’ll just be sad that I wasted my time because I still won’t look at them. But some artist had to make the art, so one of my artist brethren got paid. Whatever, it keeps coming out zero-sum.

But anyway.

I think I may have found a solution. I haven’t yet found an independent freeware program to act as a “iTunes lite” and all the ones I have found are all missing some part of what I want, and on top of that have some way of doing something that takes more effort then I find worth it. So while the search continues (or until someone pops out of a bush and shows me what I’ve been looking for), I think I’m going with the plan that I should have stuck to in the first place. Thanks to OldApps.com I can go back to using an earlier version of iTunes. Ideally, one that was before all the bullcrap, except I’m pretty sure that version doesn’t actually exist. At the very least I should be able to get a version where the ratio of improvements to bullcrap is acceptable. I think that might be around version 5 or 6. I remember first getting mad at the excess of excess around version 7. However, just for the sake of doing things to extremes I’m starting with trying version 4.1. The first version which was available for windows. OLD SCHOOL. HARDCORE. I’ll let you know how it goes.

By the way, Old School Hardcore is going to be the name of my second album.

F*R*A*G: For the record, I don’t think we can create an actual intelligence because I have yet to see people with actual intelligence.

Since windows 95/98 days, I’ve trusted Winamp to be an excelent mp3 player. Winamp 2 has always been a good because if you just want to play mp3′s, then you could load that onto whatever hardware you have near by and be good to go. Even if all you had was a tin can with an orange peel stapeled to it, then you could still load Winamp 2 on it and be listening to the Barenaked Ladies in no time (while playing Starcraft, no less.) But that’s old tech, and with modern hardware I decided to move up to Winamp 3. Gotta say, it’s pretty nice. Tho at times it can be slower to react, there’s a lot of nice points that make it worth it. The media library keeps track of all your music and makes it easy to browse and search and render media in a useful manner. (although, if you keep your music on an external drive, and that drive gets it’s drive letter switched around often, then it’s possible to load Winamp, see all your music in the library, and then get miffed when Winamp tells you that it can’t actually find any of the 80 gigs of music that you’re looking at. But I can’t really take points off for this, because if I was keeping it on an internal drive then I wouldn’t be having this problem at all.) On top of that it has some ripping and transcoding features, it acts as a podcatcher, and has nice mobile mp3 player integration. I use a Creative Zen Vision M, and I actually find that Winamp is a much more streamlined, useful, and reliable way to interact with my Zen then even the official Creative software (not to mention that these are the only two peices of software that I’ve been been able to get to talk to it).

There are only two really problems that I have with Winamp. The first is that it wants to play videos for me too…and it really shouldn’t… The media library seems to me to be optimized to show audio files / metadata, and even if you are just playing a file from drag and drop it has an issue where it seems like the video player wasn’t incorporated properly. Specifically, when playing a video file all the keyboard shortcuts and even the standard player buttons stop functioning (forcing you to use the player controls in the video window, but these don’t include a “close winamp” button). Now, I don’t know the root of this problem, so it’s entirely possible that it’s something local to my copy, or that it’s even been patched since the last time I updated. It’s just an issue I have, so I mention it. The other issue I have isn’t really a big one, but it irks the designer in me. To me, one of the best features of Winamp is the very high degree to which you can customize the skin of the player. Winamp 2 had this, and Winamp 3 is totally backwards compatible with these skins, but it also takes it up a level. You can change the shape of the player, the buttons available on the interface, you can have the playlist and video player slide out from the player, and a whole bunch of other nifty looking things. Very nice…sometimes. Some skins try to incorporate too much into the main player window, and just end up creating something that looks just as bloated as the program beneath it. It makes it hard to find the features you’re looking for, can be hard to interpret what settings it has on, and in some cases can just take up far more of the screen space then it has any right to. Maybe this isn’t a real complaint, because the default skin is simple and clear enough and nothing forces you to go out and get new “more modern” skins. But the problem I feel is deeper then that, because even with a streamlined skin you can end up with windows all over the place. Media library, artist info browser, playlist, equaliser, visualiser, podcatcher, mobile devices, coffee grinder. If you want to use what it has to offer then it ends up taking up tons of screen space anyway. And god forbid if there is a video in your playlist of music, because if it need to bring up a video window it isn’t ashamed to just PUSH WINDOWS OFF THE SCREEN. So now you’re trying to find an open spot to grab to move the entire get up to some vantage point so you can stop playback or close the video window or something BUT NO IT’S OKAY THOSE BUTTONS WON’T WORK ANYWAY. HUFF.

Winamp 2 didn’t have this problem. 3 windows: player, equalizer, playlist. All the same width, took up less then a third of the screen, and you probably didn’t even need the equalizer on screen most of the time (unless it would upset you to not be able to see Sailor Mercury’s midsection on your player skin). No libraries, no feeds to update, no videos. Just throw some music files at it, sit back, and relax. Deep breaths. Yeah…

But times move on, people change. Recently I’ve been giving Foobar 2000 a try. it’s pretty nice. It also is very open to customization, allowing you to put as many or as few panes into the player window as you want, even letting you tab sections. Very nice, I’m currently rocking a 2-up view with album list and metadata as tabs in the left column, and the playlists tabbed in the right column. That’s actually the feature that pleases me the most about it I think – multiple playlists. Technically, winamp lets you have multiple playlists too. But it treats them more as records of playlists, so when you select one it clears everything out of your current playlist and fills it in with the playlist you selected (which was still a step up from Winamp 2 where all playlists but the active one were just m3u files, you know, so it’s easy to forget what songs ThatNightInApril.m3u actually contains). It makes it very easy to overwrite the current playlist you’ve been working on with a single song from your desktop with no way to get it back without rebuilding it from memory. Not always a big deal, but infuriating when you were working with 100+ songs from 45+ artists. Foobar handles playlist by keeping them all separate, but malleable. So if I say new playlist, it creates a new playlist parallel to all my previous ones, and I can just start throwing stuff in it. If I wanna switch back, I can move to another one to pull songs from, while playing from a separate one. That’s another thing, playing songs from within the scope of the playlist. This means that you can mess with other playlists, change the search / sort order of your music library, and even move the locations of files around (to an extent), and your playlist will keep on playing until you decide you want to change that playlist.

That said, Foobar has 2 issues too. For one, it turns out that it actually is just as easy to loose playlists by wanton clicking. With this whole parallel playlist idea, most of the time it’s a conscious action to add songs to a playlist. But it you want to check a single song, whether from the internal library browser or just from your hard drive, it still needs to materialize that song into a playlist before it can play it. So it just goes ahead and OVERWRITES WHATEVER PLAYLIST YOU WERE LAST LOOKING AT. Even Winamp got smart and let the default action be to add it to the end of the playlist and play it from there. At least then you can find it, and get rid of it with no harm done to the rest of your music (except some possible embarrassment of having once been in a playlist with both a Robbie Williams song and a Limp Bizket song). If there’s an option to turn that off, then I haven’t found it yet. And so far I’ve avoided making that mistake AGAIN, but I could easily see it happening one day, followed by the cops arriving because the neighbors had assumed from the scream that I was involved in one of the sides of a murder. Aside from that, I just can’t really find a way to make the album list pleasing for me. I think it has to do with it being presented in a collapsed tree format. You can customize the way that the tree is structured (“album artist / album / disc / track no” or whatever pleases you), but none of the setups I’ve tried have given me something that I find always intuitive. I just leave it on “folder structure” and that works well enough. I’m sure it’s just a matter of it being different from what I’m used to rather then anything actually being fundamentally wrong with the system, but…meh.

Those are the 2 big contenders in my media software search. Music is the importaint one, mainly because that is what I have the most of. Video files I can keep track of mentally because all the folders fit on a single screen, so I usually just throw it into Media Player Classic (or VLC if MPC can’t load up the right codex). And with that all my bases are pretty much covered.

Later, I’ll cover why iTunes would be my hands down winner if it weren’t for it trying to be smarter then me, as well as the inescapable taint of the Apple Corporation.

F*R*A*G: I don’t want to frighten anyone when I say this, but I think I giant man made of metal is coming after us.

Instead of playing as mercenaries, you should play as postal maintenance crew. As it stands, claptrap is an annoying and slow mascot, but I could see there being smaller version of him. Their job is to act as a kind of carrier pigeons, scurrying messages and packages back and forth between people and towns. Then the big one could be like the post master-general, and there could be even bigger ones that are post master-colonel and post master-commander.

See, the mechanical reasoning behind this is that I’m sick of having to go back to town or T.K.’s shack when I was done doing what they told me to do in the first place. I never had a problem with linearity, and I don’t mind open worlds either. What I mind is having to go back to a town to tell someone I’ve done something, when it’s clear that both radio communication AND SPEEDY ROBOTS exist! Hell even Mabinogi uses owls to drop off items and quests, and it turns out that’s a damn fine way to do it. You go to the place, kill the stuff, and then a robot speeds up to give you your prize and take the maguffin. Then at least if you have to trek across the map, it’s because the next fun thing is there, not because you have to go talk to some psychotic jerk for a second before you go off to where you already were for the next fun part.

And then we tie it in. There’s bandits, right? And vicious animals? Well then the reason the players are there are to go bust up the baddies interfering with messenger bot service. Then maybe while you’re out doing that, you can pick up hints from other characters about this lost vault of Pandora or whatever. Or if you don’t want to bother making anymore character, those mail bots are there! If a bot is out of service, you have to go grab the mail they had so another bot can continue that trip, and while you have it it could be a series of notes and speculations about the vault and the power and wealth it holds or whatever. This is compared to the literal floating head voice telling you “hey, we should go to that vault, you know?” and then doing jack-all until you go kill these skags anyway. I’m not author, but I’m pretty sure that makes for much better story telling.

And you can’t use the argument “it’s not about the story, it’s about the guns and the shooting.” Because I agree with that, but then explain to me why these characters who don’t even have to be here are interrupting the flow of my shooting.

They’re jerks, that’s why.

F*R*A*G: I never thought I would say this, but, I love you, Bird Friend!