Goodbye, Joystiq.

Today is (was, shall be) Joystiq’s final day, and it’s making me think about the things I take for granted.

It’s only in retrospect that I realize how much I loved that website. It was a constant. I enjoyed reading it whenever a headline caught my attention so I had to read more. It was the one of the few gaming websites in my RSS feed with regular updates about gaming. Twitter has taken up a lot of the “news” section of with regards to gaming nowadays, but Joystiq consistently showed me things I didn’t see anywhere else. Sometimes they used the same press releases that everyone else used, and sometimes they gave us wonder, wholly original content (For example). It seems like the most trivial of compliments to give, but really, they kept me up to date. I’m struggling to think of a website that fills the void they’ll leave behind I’ll like as much. (Kotaku is the standout here, of course.)

I didn’t realize how long I’d been a dedicated reader, either. I remember Cole days, Chris Grant days, when the shift to Polygon caused a change in leadership and made the site what it is today. I remember being excited when Jessica Conditt was promoted from weekend editor to full-time. I remember a lot of post titles. It’s only now, knowing they’re not going to be around anymore (at least, not in their current form, all in one place), how much I’d sort of developed an affinity for certain editors’ styles and continued to read their bylines. I know who these people are, in a small way without ever having met them, without even following them on Twitter (sorry! rectifying that now!)

I remember reading a post on Joystiq and immediately going to Amazon after seeing a daily deal. These are the sorts of minor moments that I remember when I think about Joystiq. I laughed when I saw some funny image for the header, even the ones I didn’t really get. There were some images I’d see over and over again, like the image of GameStop as a bank with a huge dollar sign they used for just about all of their stories covering the company’s financial doings. These small moments that I took for granted because, in the latter days of readership, they were a Feedly scroll of headlines. Boredom in public places lead to taking out my phone, and I’d swipe a few times, stopping to read a review or brow-raising post. Again, Joystiq was a cure for boredom, in minor moments between other, more “substantial” activities.

But those moments add up, to the point where I now realize I think I’ve been on Joystiq more than just about any other gaming website. I realize how much the site was to me now, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Joystiq should have always been there for me. And it’s sad to see them go.

It’s also terrifying, in a way. As a freelance writer, it’s heartbreaking to see people in your field need work, but in twisted, selfish way, it also means my side gig just got way harder. People find their way to the kind of talent Joystiq had. A week before the announcement, I’d pitched to Managing Editor Susan Arendt a column about indie games. Being among the most cheerful people I’ve ever worked with (I’d pitched a few articles to her during her days at the Escapist), she told me she wouldn’t be able to take the pitch in a way that left me feeling excited about the prospect of pitching to her again. It was the nicest rejection I’ve ever gotten.

Which made the announcement of their closing all the more heartbreaking. It sucks to realize things in hindsight, but it’s given me perspective about cherishing things in the moment, even when they’re something as seemingly minor as a video game blog.

Thank you, Joystiq. I miss you already.

Video Game Excitement

Video game excitement doesn’t happen at conferences anymore, or at show floors. Conglomerate announcements were what we waited on E3 for back when, and a 24/7, 365 news cycle doesn’t accommodate that as much. For the viewers, E3 has been years of promise of “this will happen, this game will come out, and it’ll be good.” Every game is supposed to be good, and we should be excited for everything. Watch more than one E3, however, and we’re more likely than not have at least one broken promise to carry around with us. What’s big at the show, the biggest new trailer, the most dazzling conference presentation, we eventually learn, isn’t at all a predictor of what will actually excite us. So unless the announcement of a game itself is exciting, it’s harder and harder every year to muster excitement.

But I suppose I shouldn’t speak for everyone. For press the show is still exciting because they leave with impressions on how the games touted in trailers actually work, whether they’re fun or not. If the show weren’t exciting anymore, message boards wouldn’t have to go down during conferences. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say there wasn’t anything at the show I didn’t want to play: The Dead Rising 3 DLC, the The Witcher 3, and The sequel to Kirby Canvas Curse all come to mind as games that I want to play. But nothing screams “I can’t wait to play this” anymore, because nothing is a guaranteed. Everything becomes “that could be cool.”

I still have games I dismiss, games that I root for, and I don’t think I’ve lost a sense of wonder or I’ve become jaded or anything like that. Instead, I’ve reallocated my excitement to the surprise of finding out that something is good. Not to belabor the point, but Dota 2, a current all-time favorite, came out of nowhere for me. Most of the time, my favorite games are those that surprise me as I play them, not those that fulfill an excitement quota I set out the first time I saw it. I’m much happier when I’m surprised by A Link Between Worlds, the new DMC (which I admit I’d written off), Dishonored, or Fez when I didn’t have much of an idea what they’d end up being. That’s where my excitement comes from. Not from the umpteenth trailer shows me nothing of what the game actually is, or wants us to pretend that roller coaster of a scripted sequence counts for much outside of spectacle. I guess that last part does read as cynical.

The reason I say this is because it’s easy and fun to write off the state of video games from a lackluster showing, or something that may not leave us in a tizzy. But we should remember that shows like E3 are not representative of what video games are from a number of angles, and that every year megashows like this become less and less relevant.

A bunch of tweets in a blog post

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A Quick Dota 2 Primer

I had the odd and gratifying experience of introducing some of my friends to Dota 2 over the weekend. What started out as watching a game while we waited on people to go out became a marathon as we sat through most of the longest game of Dota 2 in professional history. Another six (!) or so hours followed on Sunday as we watched the last day of matches. By the time Alliance finally took the last game, they were invested, even if they didn’t know half of what was going on.

So in case you had a similar experience, and want to start playing the game, here’s primer I wrote up a while ago that might help nudge you along.

It’s true that Dota 2, like most games that spawn from its predecessor, is a “hard” game to learn. You could play for over 600 hours (like I have) and still feel like you know nothing. Even after that much time spent, I haven’t messed around with every character, and I sure as hell haven’t played most characters to their fullest. By that time, you’ll still learn something new with every match — mostly minor details and combinations that learn when they’re used against you. For example, you can send Axe, Silencer, and Outworld Destroyer into a lane where they may not belong individually, but combining Axe and Silencer’s abilities to drain health and mana with OD’s mana replenishment means your opponents will starve as you collect some easy gold. You may not know what a lot of that last sentence means, and that’s fine. Dota 2 isn’t necessarily “hard” to learn; it’s just too big to hold all at once.

I could make this a “proper” primer by describing the rules of the game and such, but that’s not the best thing to tell you (you’ll learn all that stuff anyway, should you choose to dive in). What’s important is that you understand that Dota’s too big. It’s too big because you have to keep track of a lot of seemingly nonsensical rules. It doesn’t make much sense that a courier — a donkey (or chicken, or ferret, or a gnome carrying a pig) on wings that ferries items to and from the base you buy them from — is slower while carrying an empty bottle item than with a full one. It doesn’t make sense that you can “stack” neutral creep monster groups by luring them away from their camps at the right time, then going back and attacking the second group that spawned while the first was away because no one could see into the camp. But shake off the dissonance for the sake of balance. I swear it pays off.

The tutorial is a good place to start, but it won’t teach you everything. It’ll teach you the basics of last-hitting and a little bit about laning, but it will also teach some bad habits. If you just sit there in lane, bashing creeps until you last-hit them, you’ll push the lane, putting you and any allies with you at risk. If you spam spells the way you’re encouraged to in the first tutorial, you’re not going to do well. And you won’t learn about specific character item and skill builds, which can vary per match. I found that the easiest way to learn was to read up on some guides, and ask as many questions as I could — if you tell people you’re bad going in, they’re a little more likely to be helpful.

You may also suffer from being unable to keep track of everything you need to do at once; in one match, you may remember to check the runes, but you’ll forget to harass the enemy properly to deny them gold and experience, and that your ward (which gives you crucial vision to counter ambushes) placement was poor. Early on, you’re very likely to have a match where you have no idea what you’re doing and will be overwhelmed by teamfights, asking what the hell just happened. It may even cost your team the match.

Again, just fine. You can’t hold all of Dota 2 at once. You don’t really have to. Perhaps the best thing about Dota 2 is that, like Team Fortress, it lets you to help your team in different ways, which allows the game to cater to different player tendencies. Have a knack for hotshot daredevilism and don’t want to worry about teamwork early on? Play a ganker like Nyx Assassin or Night Stalker. Are you the quarterback that wants the glory for every win? Play a carry like Luna, Lifestealer, or Faceless Void. Prefer to sit back, set up kills, and be a team player? Play a support like Tidehunter, Omniknight, or Witch Doctor. This variety begets longevity; you can play five different matches in a day (not recommended for socialites, but I’ve done it before) and play five completely different “games”; you can lane support one game, jungle-farm another, and carry the team on your back the third.

Yes, Dota 2 has lots to learn, and you’ll never really stop learning, but it’s just about the most fun I’ve had in multiplayer gaming in years. I’m still getting my ass kicked constantly, still cursed out by people who don’t speak my language, but I enjoy the game enough to go back in again and again. And, when you finally have the experience of winning a close game (and you will, trust me), it’s a high few games can match. With the game finally out, it’s much easier to find groups of people to play with online and learn together, and once you have a semi-regular group of players to join up with, it gets even better. I still can’t hold all of Dota 2 at once, but I’m bursting at the seams to tell you about self-indulgent anecdotes that once every hundred games or so. And dammit it if I just didn’t talk myself into going and playing another match by writing this.

Fireballs, lame play, and watchability

It’s hard coming across articles like this recent VentureBeat community article and stop yourself from immediately laughing it off or writing a scathing response. I myself decided to call it “painful to read.”And it’s so easy for the people in the fighting game community, people who know the games being talked about inside and out, to dismiss this kind of viewpoint. Where they see an opportunity to make a game more watchable by changing certain elements and making the game more fun to watch, people who’ve played (or even watched) the game for a long time can clearly see why separating the Street Fighter IV tournament into fireball and non-fireball brackets is such an absurd idea.

And, had that article come to my attention a little more than two years ago, I might have actually agreed with that kind of suggestion.

I’ve been watching fighting games regularly since EVO 2011. I’ve watched every EVO since 2009. I almost failed a pushover computer management class in high school because I spent so much time watching old Capcom VS. SNK 2 matches instead of “learning” how to use a computer. But I didn’t watch streams regularly, didn’t fill entire weekends with match after match of Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, and other fighting games until I heard that EVO wasn’t the only time people sat around and played fighting games, which was only after I saw a video of an interview with EVO 2011 Super Street Fighter IV champ Fuudo, and the youtube recommended videos lead me to Excellent Adventures.

So I haven’t been around the scene all that long, and I think the issue at the core of a no-fireball tournament is one we should discuss. But first, allow to elucidate why a no-fireball tournament is not a great idea.

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Fireballs, as boring as they may look being flung out over and over, make the characters who have them who they are. Disallowing their use in a tournament (even if it was just a tournament complementary to the regular one), would effectively make some characters who rely on their fireballs useless.

But instead of seeing “a whole bracket where every fight felt unique, shedding light on unexplored matchups,” we’d see characters whose main weakness are fireballs dominate instead. I’m not incredibly tuned to Street Fighter IV’s balance, but I suspect we’d see a lot more of Crimson Viper, Seth, E. Honda, and Zangief¹. While the change in characters and the lack of fireball wars would be a refreshing change of pace for a while, that feeling wouldn’t last long. It doesn’t have the novelty of a gimmick (like having a low-tier character tournament) to see it through. Instead, we’d see people complain about the new characters that dominate those brackets, and instead of being bored by the fireball wars, viewers would eventually be tired of the constant coin-flip battles that characters like Cammy and Crimson Viper create.

In fact, one of the main reasons Zero is currently one of the most-hated characters in Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 isn’t because he’s too good at keepaway, it’s that without enough keepaway to prevent his mixups on incoming characters, he can just tear through entire teams who never get a chance to even play the game properly.

Then there’s the issue of the legitimacy of a no-fireball tournament. The article asks for there to be a side tournament for the game, not unlike the two or three-man team tournaments you’ll often see on the first day of some major tournaments. These can be fun (and occasionally produce great moments), but they’re not the main event. No tournament that changes the standard rules of the game without good reason can really serve as the main event. A tournament where certain moves are banned, and therefore where balance is affected without the intent to make the game more fair (i.e., banning unfair characters like Akuma in SF II), would be playing the game at less than its full potential.

In some cases, such as the ban on O.Sagat in Street Fighter II in many Japanese tournaments as more of an unspoken rule than a concrete one, rules will be set in place to make the game more “fun” to watch, but that’s mostly so that a dominant character won’t ruin the game for viewers and competitors. Fireball characters aren’t dominant or overpowered in Street Fighter IV. In fact, a comment on the VentureBeat article breaks down the SFIV tournament’s character choices:

Rundown for Top 48 (mains, didn’t count counter-picks):
5: Cammy
4: Ryu
3: C. Viper, Fei Long, Sakura, Sagat, Yun
2: Ken, Zangief, Rufus, Adon, Makoto, Akuma, Guy
1: Gen, Ibuki, Balrog, Seth, Rose, Vega, Oni, Gouken, Abel, Dhalsim
Breakdown:
24 different characters were represented in the Top 48.
20 of the 48 players main a character that has a fireball (41.66%). This means that 58.33% of the characters represented in the Top 48 do not have a fireball.
Of the 24 various characters used in the Top 48, 50% of them had a fireball.
Cammy, whom many consider to be one of the top characters, represents the most played character in the top 48 with 5 (about 10.5%).
24 different characters were mained in the top 48. Out of 39 total characters, or 61% of the cast in the game. That’s pretty impressive considering this is a sample of 48 of the top players in the world.

So what a tournament where fireballs are banned for reasons purely based on “watchability” and not balance would do is simply change the dominant characters and likely reduce the overall character variety. Less variety, in turn, would make the tournament less interesting to watch. What’s more, because the ban is based on how fun it would be watch (and not balance) players wouldn’t take it as seriously, because they wouldn’t be playing the “real” game. This tournament would be a distraction at best — something for players to do while they wait around for the real tournament to start, while everyone is still arriving. People would still end up watching the Akuma-Akuma mirror on Sunday night primetime.

So when people complain that Akuma is boring to watch because of his diagonal fireball, it absolutely irks me, not because the character isn’t less fun to watch, but because they’re making judgement based on a superficial understanding of the game they are watching.

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The point here isn’t to look down my nose at someone who doesn’t understand why a no-fireball tournament is such a bad idea. It’s to help those players understand the game they’re watching, which is a chronic issue with competitive gaming². This also, of course, does not address the main concern, the reason why some viewers would think that a no-fireball tournament could work. The fact of the matter is: watching people trade fireballs, or watching a character dominate with them, isn’t as much fun to watch to most people as aggressive play. Even if you don’t know the specifics, you can’t change the fact that lame play can intrinsically be more difficult to watch.

Even the author’s favorite game at EVO, Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, suffers from this. ChrisG is one of the most divisive players of the game, in part due to his consistent dominance, but also because watching his team win is often frustrating to watch; if ChrisG’s gameplan works (and it usually does), characters have a very difficult time even moving as Morrigan fills the screen with fireballs in front of and behind his opponent. For someone who doesn’t understand what’s happening, let alone why it’s happening, this fireball war does indeed seem boring. This is not a recent problem, nor is it only experienced by people who are only spectators. The ChrisG hate is pervasive across the entire scene, by casual and hardcore players alike, and people have hated current people’s champ Justin Wong’s “lame” play for years, going back to his Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Street Fighter III days.

I, for one, actually enjoy this kind of style, because rather than focus on what is currently happening (the fireball barrage), I’m thinking about what isn’t happening: In the Akuma-Akuma mirror, I’m learning how Tokido and Infiltration have completely different styles of play using the same character, how they both have different ways of breaking the fireball war and get in on their opponent, and I’m eagerly waiting for when they’ll finally see their chance and break sequence. But that’s an acquired taste, and you probably won’t like watching it the first time you come across it.

Of course, there’s no real way to “fix” the natural watchability of lame play. You can balance a game so that lame play is discouraged, but even at the heart of the most aggressive game is a tinge of lame play, because sometimes, using the clock to your advantage, or waiting for your opponent’s patience to break, is as viable a fundamental strategy as giving them no room to breathe.

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The best way to “fix” the viewership issue is to educate the viewer, to help them acquire the taste for and understand of lame play. So let’s watch that Akuma mirror match.

Some quick background information to spice things up: Infiltration (the dark-purple Akuma) was the person to beat at this year’s EVO; not only did he win last year’s tournament undefeated, but he made it look easy, and he took almost every other tournament he attended over the following year. Tokido (the red Akuma), though one of the five Street Fighter “gods” of Japan, had fallen off a bit as the world’s premier Akuma, but as mentioned in the video, he’d finally defeated friend and rival Daigo Umehara in a major tournament and made it all the way to winner’s finals, where he lost to Xian, who would go on to win the whole tournament.

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/l87Ltwv4nxs&source=uds

You can tell their playstyles apart even from the first move; Infiltration is aggressive, moving in close and poking, while Tokido immediately jumps back and starts using the air Hadouken. Tokido decides the spacing of the match, but Infiltration sets the pace by not ever letting Tokido settle in for a fireball war — knowing Akuma’s weaknesses, he moves in and lands the first hit. Infiltration continues to poke and Tokido continues to go for fireballs. Infiltration will occasionally meet Tokido’s fireballs with his own, but he’s never content sit and trade Hadoukens for long. Then, the second Tokido sees Infiltration’s pokes overreach, he punishes him with a knockdown from a sweep, then promptly feeds him a combo for over a third of his health bar. Then, with a huge lead in life, he goes back into fireball mode instead of trying to finish off his opponent, acknowledging Infiltration’s knowledge of the character’s mix-ups. Now Infiltration can’t play the fireball war, but being aggressive becomes too predictable, and Tokido waits for his chance and punishes overreaching aggression a second time and wins. That’s a lot of action in a single round of “lame” play.

The second round, Tokido goes for more fireball setups, and Infiltration starts playing along a little bit; he still moves in whenever the opportunity presents itself, but he has to adapt to the keepaway with a bit of his own, but Tokido’s setups are just too safe, his ability to see Infiltration’s approaches too good for Infiltration to get through. Tokido is adapting a style similar to what ChrisG does in Marvel; he keeps you at distances that make it easy for him to create openings when you try to get in, not just “away”. And he’s not just spamming fireballs, he’s making sure that he can follow up the relatively minor threat of the Hadoukens with something strong in case you decide to try to break sequence. Infiltration is known for utilizing Akuma’s vortex options (i.e., aggressively knocking you down once then knocking you down again with Akuma’s various options after he knocks you down³), but that doesn’t work against Tokido’s knowledge of what Akuma can do at what position, and he doesn’t crack under Infiltration’s pressure. Even when Infiltration gets some momentum by learning to anticipate Tokido’s rhythms, he changes up his play and catches him off-guard.

Infiltration eventually adapts and begins shifting the game to his favor, continuing to go in again, but this time focusing more on punishing Tokido when he gets too comfortable or aggressive. He gets enough momentum to take a match by simply trading health for knockdowns, which are his bread and butter. Infiltration only really needs to catch Tokido off-guard a couple of times to get a lead, and it’s much easier for Infiltration to punish Tokido’s offense when he’s ahead than it is to get in on Tokido when he’s behind, and the match in this case ends up being in his favor. Then, finally, Tokido shifts the momentum back by cooling off and playing defensively, except this time with a bit unpredictable aggression; Infiltration matches him closely here, since he’s able to fight offense better than defense, but Tokido wins the fireball war, and eventually wins based on his ability to read Infiltration’s counters to this defense.

Yes, there’s lots of fireballs going around, but even when there are two or three of them on-screen at once, you don’t see either player sticking with the same actions for long — they always make sure to do something different after every Hadouken, so that neither player read the other too easily. There’s so much happening in the midst of Tokido’s fireball play that it’s astounding how many variations he’s able to come up with (though part of that has to do with Akuma in general).

Next, we should look at the next match, Tokido vs. Xian, to show that not only are fireball characters not boring or dominant, but that fireballs are not the only source of “lame” play.

http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/CKrK-90htjg&source=uds

Tokido starts the first round off the same way he did versus Infiltration: jump-back fireball. But Xian focus-cancels right through it, gaining some meter and effectively nullifying the spacing Tokido hopes to create with the fireball. Tokido still manages to keep Xian at bay, but Xian knows how to weave through the barrage, which means Tokido can’t chip him to death. Xian then trades some health for a knockdown just as Infiltration did, but he capitalizes more effectively; now Tokido doesn’t have the room to go for fireballs, and Xian’s offense overwhelms him, even when, by the end of the round, he starts switching to offense.

Tokido uses fireballs more aggressively in the second round, pushing Xian back until a fireball lands, which Tokido uses to put Xian in the corner. Tokido’s vortex pressure then blindsides Xian, and by the time Xian turns the tables, Tokido is in a position to switch back to defense, and a single punish is all it takes for Tokido to win.

Then Xian manages to take around by using the timer against Tokido. Tokido continues to keep Xian away and punishing aggression, but Xian eventually gains some momentum, and then turns the tide of the match by pulling off a Super-into-Ultra combo, and without the life lead, Tokido has to go in. Xian keeps Tokido, who is no longer throwing fireballs, off his back long enough that by the time Tokido puts Xian back in the corner, it’s too late.

The second match goes by quick, as Xian shows that he’s figured out the fireball game. He’s not afraid of Akuma’s keepaway, and can now see the holes and punish them more easily than before. This again prompts Tokido to go on offense, and this is where Xian shines. Tokido is simply not ready for Gen, and even after a close round, he still can’t manage to build momentum or keep Xian away.

Xian eats Tokido alive in the first round of the third match by using Gen’s own powerful vortex game to completely fluster his opponent, who’s not as used to being on the receiving end of ambiguous mix-ups. In the second round, however, Tokido’s offense finally starts paying off, bullying Gen long enough to starve him of space. There is, however, a particularly telling moment in this round. Tokido follows up an EX fireball with a Demon Flip-into-divekick (a common vortex setup), but Xian sees right through it and punishes it. After that, when Tokido’s aggressive momentum wears off, he’s much more careful with his fireballs, firing them lower to ground, but losing a bit of space advantage. This is all Xian needs to take his final round. The tighter, safer spacing allows Xian to move in much more easily, and after punishing the most innocuous fireball with a Super, Gen’s vortex does most of the work afterwards. Next, with a sliver of life left, Tokido can’t risk using fireballs, what he initially thought was his safest option. This is the first real time Tokido’s decided to play are ground-based spacing game (read: footsies), and it doesn’t work out.

Xian forces Tokido to not rely on his fireball pressure after seeing the holes in the strategy, then simply waits for him to switch strategies, after which he’s easily able to counter a character that uses fireballs to bully him. It may not seem like it at first, but Xian outlames Tokido.

And if you’re still not convinced that lame and fireballs have a lower correlation than you might think, Justin Wong and Snake Eyes would like a word with you.

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I’m still bad at fighting games, and have only just gotten to the point where I can see matches beyond “this guy hit the other guy a lot more, so he’s winning.” I can’t count frames, and don’t know my Option Selects from my resets. And getting to that point takes a little bit of work, for sure. But even for someone who hasn’t been around long, once you begin paying more attention to what players are doing than what’s happening, you can find lots to see, and the games in general become more fun to watch. This is why it’s difficult to watch fighting games at first, and why it’s difficult to demo them at events. If you don’t have even a basic understand of the systems in place, matches can just look like nonsensical button-mashing. Fireball wars are harder to watch because there doesn’t seem to be as much going on, but there’s way more going on and it can be just as exciting as any other kind of play. You just have invest in knowing what you’re watching a little more. Whether viewers are interested in making that initial investment is up to them.

And yes, it’s easy to read an article from someone who may not see the games we watch the way we do, roll our eyes, and leave a scathing comment. But we should remember that even some diehard viewers and players share a core issue with the author, and that it’s better to educate than malign.

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1 These are educated guesses based on two years of spectating and casual training. I’m probably wrong — feel free to blow me up about it.^↩

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2 Fighting games are among the most watchable genres in gaming (it’s much easier to grasp why being hit in Street Fighter is bad, versus knowing why a counterpick or clutch deward in Dota 2 may have just turned the tables in a match) and EVO did a better job this year of explaining a lot of the terminology used as well as the actions on-screen. But unlike sports, which are so ingrained in modern culture that it isn’t too difficult to sit down and watch them, you’re going to need a lot more viewing time with a video game to understand what’s going on.^↩

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3 This is, by the way, the reason I find Akuma more difficult to watch than other characters: not because he’s too passive, but because he can be too aggressive and not get punished for it. Watching the Akuma vortex is the most frustrating part about the character, not his fireball keepaway.^↩

Faux-Chaos

They Bleed Pixels’ faux-retro look mirrors its masocore design — necessity disguised as stylistic choice, more well-adapted crutch than renaissance. Put together a relatively cheap pixelated art style and a tendency to focus on fewer, harder challenges that extend a game’s lifespan through repetition, and you have a potent kick of faux-nostalgia.

 To their credit, developer Spooky Squid Games introduces a bit of chaos to a genre that typically relies on rote memorization and execution. Longer levels, fodder enemies, checkpoints, and a combo system make They Bleed Pixels more like a regular platformer, and upset the “perfect run” mentality masocore games often cater to. Portions of pure traversal and fighting are mixed in directly with the masocore challenges, and makes the entire experience feel novel; at one point or another, most masocore games make you feel as though you’re just bashing your head against a wall, but They Bleed Pixels considers pacing more than you’d think.

 The “flow” of difficulty in They Bleed Pixels, then, becomes more varied when it introduces adaptation as a necessary skill than when a challenge falls back on lessons from the masocore school of learning by dying. But this isn’t necessarily a positive. The zombies, bomb-spiders and Samara Morgan knockoffs complicate the precise, twitch-based challenges more than they should, and they can make success and failure seem based on chance. If, for example, a zombie guarding a ledge you need to hop on to proceed doesn’t attack you immediately after you land on said ledge, when it’s done just that every other time you’ve tried, it’s hard not to feel lucky (it’s conversely frustrating when the opposite happens).

 Adaptation is certainly a skill. But the kind of challenge They Bleed Pixels is going for — maneuvering through a sawblade-riddled obstacle course — doesn’t benefit from ambivalent challenge. Here the unpredictable factors are frustrating for the wrong reasons, and when the obstacles are static, they’re unremarkable. The conflicting challenges of dealing with variables and mastering a challenge through repetition turn They Bleed Pixels into an uneven mess, and the game becomes even worse when they’re one in the same. If the “classics” They Bleed Pixels takes inspiration from were this fucked, then they probably aren’t worth revisiting, and there’s not enough faux-nostalgia in the world to fix that.

Thoughts on the oncoming singularity*

I almost skipped Binary Domain. Its hackneyed boxart, its plastic characters and environments and its Final Fantasy-esque user interface — all of these things gave me the impression of a game attempting to emulate, rather than adapt, the modern standard. But the third-person shooter is such a stagnant, conservative beast that even minor changes in its formula tend to pique interest. So while Binary Domain is still “just another shooter,” it’s the minor differences that are worth mentioning, and ultimately what prevent the game from being entirely forgettable. For the first time in a while, a shooter feels human.

For one, there’s a lot more talking in Binary Domain than I was expecting. The central question of the game, whether sufficiently sophisticated AIs can be considered human, gets harped on constantly by the entire cast of the game at length. But rather than give me varying perspectives, though. Binary Domain makes its mind up early on, and makes it point to tell me how terrible automatons mixing with humans would be. Only in the last act of the game did I ever question the game’s stance and, call me a extreme futurist, but I don’t find integrating robots and humans all that offensive.

The amount of cutscenes and conversations with teammates (including dialogue choices that are anything but, since agreeing with the person asking the question is the only viable option if you want combat to go more smoothly) in Binary Domain sound completely removed from the image of the average shooter, but the surprise isn’t that it was there, it was that I liked it. Much as I disagreed with the game’s thesis, the fact that I was even arguing with it is noteworthy, and I much preferred that to engaging in combat.

I haven’t said much about how Binary Domain plays, but that’s because it’s “just another shooter.” A crash-course on the design of Binary Domain: the level design is poor when it isn’t boring, the bosses are tedious, and most of the guns, upgrade system an all, are interchangeable. Of course, those criticisms are important, but they’re the robotic failures. The human failures are there too, but that Binary Domain even has human flaws is the most interesting thing about it. The theoretical prototype android will likely have plenty of defects, but I think most of us would say its existence will itself signify a success.

*Yes, I hate coming up with titles.

On Suda Goichi and Surrealism

Michael Thomsen’s recent Kill Screen articleon what he calls “the nonsense art” of the games of Suda Goichi makes a few points that I’d been mulling over for a while. Firstly, his assertion that writers and critics see every piece of art they encounter as a fundamentally interpretable and cohesive. This is true enough; non-fiction writers can be seen as interpreters, of sorts, in that they take information either not available to the masses or not easily discernible by them, and distill it into a more digestible format, lest we all comb over patentsall day. This may or may not aid us when examining art, since, as Thomsen puts it, “Irreducibility is a defining characteristic of surrealism,” so when something doesn’t discernibly make sense, game critics might push against it.

I love the absurd, the surreal, when put to good use — but I can’t completely fall in line with Thomsen’s way of thinking. At times, I think Thomsen gives Suda a little too much credit, doing what he calls out others for doing: overinterpreting minor details. He calls the simplistic movement in Killer7 an “elegant and obnoxious decision“that is part of Grasshopper games’ tendency to be “hostile to interpretive idealization in every aspect” when really, Suda himself, in an article Thomsen linked to, has explained his use of the simplified control scheme:

“In many action games you control the character directly. But there are many people who find that too difficult. They don’t know how to hold the controller, or how to use the analogue stick. I decided not to use that complicated control scheme.”

If you take that quote at face value, any artistic statement made by Killer7’ssimplified movement is an unintentional byproduct. Later on, Thomsen interprets the overbearing sexuality of Lollipop Chainsaw “as a bizarre ventilation of guilt, acknowledging how lurid and disfiguring these clichés must always be—men depicting themselves as monsters who need defeating at the hands of their own cultural creation,” He then makes the point of dismissing any interpretation of any of Suda’s games to make his real point: that Suda’s games are surreal art because they’re fragments and small correlations of meaning that don’t cohere, and don’t do so on purpose, and that it’s “trap surrealism lays for us,” that trap being a pile of non-sequitors rife with potential meaning that maybe, just maybe, connect into a grander statement. Of course, the grand joke here is that by Thomsen’s logic, his own interpretation is itself meaningless (though to be fair, he kind of makes that point himself).

His argument isn’t that all interpretations of all forms of art are meaningless, just that Suda creates his works in such a way as to defy easy interpretations. This might be true of his earlier titles, but not of his later ones. Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw, both of which were more collaborative efforts and whose surrealism is more aesthetic than intrinsic, for example, both seem less surreal than absurd, using ludicrous setups as backdrops while they engage in more traditional gameplay (another point Thomsen makes). They’re not as weird as we’re used to from Suda (a case I’ve made before), and to me seem easily interpretable as the exploitation-inspired fare they appear to be at first glance. They’re crazy for the sake of being crazy, and while not every piece of art needs layers of meaning to work, the nonsense Thomsen identifies in them as isn’t there as statement; it’s there because elephant motorcycles and giant cock guns sound cool and edgy, and for the purposes of creating a game that’s fun to play, that’s good enough. I don’t think there’s an intentional surrealism — it’s just a byproduct here.

And really, the term “Nonsense art” seems like a dismissive pejorative, especially considering that Thomsen correlates Suda’s games with surrealist art, which I’d argue might be a more appropriate title for the article. He’s not chastising Suda for making games that don’t follow a neat string of logic — he’s reveling in their absurdity. And I do too, going as far as considering Suda one of, if not the, best designers in the patently odd.

Thomsen actually leaves out some of Suda’s earlier works in his analysis, which would’ve actually aided his arguement. Flower, Sun, and Rain, for example, fits nicely within the surrealist label. But FSR‘s surrealism doesn’t just come from its Groundhog Day-esque time-loop premise, or its fever dream of a story. Playing the game itself is often frustrating and weird, which I’ve argued before is an intentional design decision. And all you need to see of Michigan: Report From Hell to conclude that it’s surreal apart from its title is this clip. These titles are surreal to their core, whereas Damned and Lollipop are only superficially so. You may be in punk-rock hell or fighting zombies in an arcade, but you’re doing the same shooting and slashing you’ve done in so many other games. Suda’s history seems to heading towards something resembling an avant-garde director losing his patented touch over the course of becoming more mainstream, though he’s thankfully not there yet.

I do think that Suda’s earlier works, like FSR and Killer7,cohere into a grander statement. FSRstands as one of the few early parodies of game design, and makes the point about the intrinsic absurdity of videogames while laughing right along. Killer7 is the closest thing video games have to a David Lynch film. But they’re full of practicalities, like the decision to make movement simplified because anything else was too complex for Suda, who simply wanted players to see his vision without worrying about spatial awareness. They’re likely also nonsensical at first not because of some artistic intent, but because of some fumbling in presentation (see this link for a great interpretation of Killer7’s plot). So while Thomsen’s point of some interpretations often reading too much into nothing does work, it’s not for the reason he thinks, and even if it’s self-admitted, he makes the same mistake. It’s not nonsense, even if that can be a good thing — it just takes a little more work to interpret. And while interpretations can completely miss the mark, if enough of them overlap, there’s probably something there. Of course, the final say is up to Suda.

Now, if Grasshopper can bring The Silver Case over to the States, we may have this conversation again some time.

Addendum (Spoilers): Thomsen makes a factual error when he says that Harman is not a definable character, and that his multiple personalities “eliminates any conception of self that we might have for him.” It’s actually Garcian Smith/Emir Parkreiner who assimilates the Killer7, including an avatar of Harman Smith. This is important because the game does make an effort of fleshing out the game’s real main character (Emir), so he does have a sense of self. Even Harman, as complicated a character as he is, does have a backstory. He is not simply a surrealist trick used to rock the player off-base.

Of Log Traps and Pride

Taro Ebine’s victory at Final Round XV’s Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 tournament may have been a surprise, but it wasn’t unheralded. By the time Ebine (or as most of the chatters on Twitch TV came to know him, “Kusoru”), made it to the Grand Finals match, he’d gone from novelty to underdog to favorite. He’d already defeated several of the Marvel 3 vets – Peter “Combofiend” Rosas, Ryan “Filipino Champ” Ramirez, and Job “Flocker” Figueroa – on his way to the top 8 bracket without so much as breaking a sweat. Veteran pro player Justin Wong, who’d been eliminated earlier in the tournament, mentioned on Twitter that in a first-to-ten set earlier that weekend, Kusoru had defeated him 10-8. Justin’s prognosis for beating him in a tournament set was grim.

But it’s not just Ebine’s remarkable skill that made the Marvel 3 finals so much fun to watch. To the Final Round crowd, he was in every way a foreigner; he was a Japanese player (not something you see often in the Marvel 3 tournament scene) and was using characters and tactics that few pro players were even aware could work. Both in and out of matches, there was a sense that he messing with both the players and the audience as he decimated the competition. After every match, Ebine went for the dramatic – cocking his hands like guns or doing bat-swing motions when he won a round with a Hyper Combo (which gave him enough time to do poses), and contorting his face in agony when he lost. Regardless of whether this was an act or common behavior, Ebine was a cheerful showman, which galvanized the online audience and polarized the tournament crowd. Players are usually cheerful between matches, but it’s all business when sitting down to play at a tournament. A violation of that unwritten rule changed the atmosphere.

The narrative Ebine’s presence both in and out of the game created also broke ground. The Japanese player’s in-game team comprised of Viewtiful Joe, Frank West, and Rocket Raccoon, none of which are considered top-tier characters by most players (Ebine himself, though somewhat jokingly, doesn’t regard them that highly, either). All three are goofy characters, which is at odds the rest of the top 8’s character selection – high-tier, oh-so-cool fighters that take themselves too seriously. In that sense, the characters the players used reflected the attitudes of the players themselves – goofy and offbeat versus serious and conventional. And goofy won every time. From the moment Ebine defeated Ramirez’s Dark Phoenix team in two equally spectacular ways, the baffled online viewership was with him (even Ramirez himself walked away from the match with his hands up in confusion).

He was showing players and viewers alike something they’d never seen before: top-level players being slaughtered by out-of-left-field tactics that didn’t look like they should work. Between Viewtiful Joe’s barrage of of dive kicks and Voomerangs, Frank West’s general trickery, and Rocket Raccoon’s now-infamous Log Trap assist attack, Ebine didn’t just beat his opposition – he made fools of them. Log Trap specifically was his primary way to wreak havoc; a long-range attack covering most of the screen, it usually allowed Ebine a fatal combo every time it hit, regardless of what character he was using. Every match he played became a matter of when, not if, the Log Trap would hit, and watching people who are usually on top of their opponent scramble on defense fundamentally changed the game people were watching.

And much in the same way the trench coat and spandex-clad characters on-screen had to change behavior, so did the players using them. As the American players grew increasingly nervous about being ousted by someone who is both an outsider and, to some degree, mocking them, the tournament became about national pride. Before the US’s last hope, Eduardo “PR_Balrog” Perez-Frangie, stepped up to fight him, players Ebine had defeated earlier engaged in huddle to advise Perez-Frangie on how to fight his strange opponent. The homegrown players had banded together to defeat the foreign threat. Even when Michael “Yipes” Mendoza faced off against Perez-Frangie after being defeated by Ebine to decide who would fight Ebine in Grand Finals, there was a clear camaraderie between the two, with a “give ’em hell” handshake at the end of the match.

During the Ebine/Perez-Frangie match, you could see that Perez-Frangie had indeed taken the advice he’d been given and adapted. He knew the Log Trap was coming, and towards the end of the set, he was properly working his way around the attack. He even utilized some tricks of his own, landing a powerful X-factor infinite attack a few times against Ebine’s team. As soon as that happened, the crowd and even the commentators became excited at the chance of a comeback. It never truly came, though, and as Log Trap after Log Trap hit, it was more and more clear Ebine had the match in the bag.

But as soon as Ebine won the final round, both competitors became people again. Perez-Frangie went to shake Ebine’s hand with a smile on his face but was overtaken by a mob of Ebine’s teammates rushing to congratulate their friend. Whether Perez-Frangie was happy for his opponent or amused by his antics and fatigue wasn’t clear. Ebine, for his part, did a tired gun-cock gesture one last time before throwing his head back in exhaustion, retiring his usual cheery self to just take in his victory. After leaving his home country for the first time (something he’s apprehensive about doing again), he’d made the trip worth it for him and his team, financially and emotionally. But most importantly, he’d blindsided the Marvel 3 scene. But the local players will be back next year, no doubt with a new few new tricks of their own. And you can bet they’ll have practiced their log-hopping skills.

You’ve read the book, now see the movie.

Better Living through Fusion

Despite being as gobsmacked by Metroid Prime as the critics were back when, I hadn’t dared to venture to the Metroid side of the 2D “Metroidvania” sub-genre, sticking with the DS Castlevania games and Symphony of the Night until recently. As it turns out, Metroid Fusion’s ambient running and gunning is more up my alley than recent Castlevanias’ RPG upgrade systems and overwrought plot. A guide character still points you to your next goal within the game’s more structured map setup – six sub areas versus a large single one – but between story snippets limited to bookends for each area, you’re left to your own devices, which can be as frustrating as it is liberating. I’ll confess to using a FAQ more than once, but I’m glad the game doesn’t resort to the gaming equivalent of baby-talk.

So that’s the setup for my run through Fusion, but here’s the kicker – Metroid: Other M, most recent Metroid title, has a distinctive smell, so to speak, and there are hints of it in Fusion. Rather, it should be the other way around; the divisive aspects of Other M had their origin in Fusion. Specifically, Fusion began the dangerous task of fleshing out Samus, a main character who before was a cipher for the player, albeit a non-traditional one (I didn’t find out Samus’ gender until a paused a Super Smash Bros. screen of her being electrocuted). She exposits the introduction of Fusion, her thoughts as the story develops, and her history with Adam Malkovich, who in Fusion leads Samus around as he did in Other M. In the former, it’s through an AI program designed to replicate him, but I’m splitting hairs. He also has the same knack for telling Samus when she should and should not use her weapons, though in Fusion Samus still has to find all of her upgrades instead of being told to do so.

In fact, after finishing Fusion, it’s hard not to see that Other M is to Fusion narratively as Ocarina of Time was to A Link to the Past – a retelling with a few twists. Allusions to Samus’ military past, the return of Ridley (though that one’s a running theme of the series in general), the hint of a “mysterious new threat.” Mostly, though, it’s the exposition. Odd, really, since intricate backstory seems at odds with Metroid’s desolate, quiet exploration. Metroid, from my experience (the Prime trilogy, mostly), benefited from the era of its inception, when 8 and 16-bit graphics didn’t do any sort of proper narrative justice. When most games either emulated arcade rulesets of trial-and-error or went with grandiose, sweeping narratives, Metroid and Super Metroid, whether they aimed for it or not, were something in between; the gameplay focus and wordless play of the arcade crowd and the consistency of the narrative group. That’s where the series’ trademark isolation comes from – being an arcade game with a lifespan longer than a few minutes. The dark backgrounds and eerie tunes also help.

Both Fusion and Other M tamper with that balance of game and enviorment. But surprisingly, Fusion comes out a winner and Other M a wreck. Why? It’s a simple matter of placement. Most of the cutscenes in Other M are placed in a scattershot fashion; before, after, and during fights and other checkpoints. They interrupt. They’re frequent. They’re long. In Fusion, they’re commercial breaks. Taking place mostly during elevator rides and in briefing rooms, where a rhetoric of waiting is already established. Even when the scene makes an elevator ride go on longer than it should, the expectation of downtime is there. Fusion takes advantage of its natural flow, while Other M meddles with your actions at times. Other M’s haphazard mechanics and control scheme didn’t bother me – in some ways, I preferred that simplicity – but its dull and intrusive narrative did. When all the melodrama of Other M sticks out more than any of its design decisions, the foundation almost seems besides the point.

Samus is a character interesting enough to flesh out. She’s more than a blank slate, and I’m fine with losing my sense of immersion for the sake of getting to better know someone I’m familiar with. But only when done right – as punctuation, not intrusion. Premise is important, but method matters more.