One of Those "Has it really been that long?" Things

1988

1997

2008

It took longer to have someone make a game based on Fallout than it took them to make a game based on Wasteland.

Obviously Fountain of Dreams doesn't count.

And if that doesn't make an old gamer depressed then let me remind you that VGA is now eighteen years old and is eligible to vote. No presidential candidate has yet come forward in support of 320x200 resolutions and 256 colors.

Review - Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King

Let me start with the conclusion: I don't recommend this game for everyone but if you have any real interest in game design then you should play this game. It's a perfect example of how to take some great concepts and completely break them in game play. This is more than just a weak game, it's a broken one with things that should have never left the design game. It's rare that a title with such an obviously broken design makes it to the public in such a high profile manner and that turns it into a wonderful object lesson in what not to do.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King is among the first wave of new games released through Nintendo's WiiWare service which lets users download games. Players take the role of a king with an empty town surrounding his castle. Magic gems let you build new structures instantly and from them you get adventurers and can send them out to clear dungeons around you castle so you can get more gems and repeat. There are structures to support the adventurers and townspeople. Eventually you'll clear enough dungeons that you'll be able to send them out to beat the Dark Lord (that's not me using an euphemism; that's actually the name given to him) and save the kingdom.

It's not the first game to do this but it's the only recent one that comes to mind. I liked earlier kingdom building games so I purchased this and started playing. I was having fun designing my town and slowly filling out the world. Then I hit the wall. The irritations started piling up one after the other, the fun parts slowed down for hours of pointless repetition, and the promise was lost.

The first time you play the game it starts immediately on "normal" difficulty level but normal level lacks large portions of the game. To get them you have to beat it once on normal and then you can start the game on hard with your adventurers retaining the buffs that you gave them in the first play through. Since many of my complaints have to do with the how the game play flowed I played it once on "normal" and once on "hard". The changes were not enough and I actually found new problems when playing on "hard".

Problem one: the resources are not balanced. The heart of game design is the management of resources. You have X of something to complete task Y, how do you expend resource X to maximize your opportunity? There are two key resources that the player has direct control over: crystals which are used in construction and gold which is used in developing abilities. At the beginning it's tight and you have to make choices. By midgame, however your income far outstrips your payments and the income keeps flowing in even after you have nothing you can spend things on. It removes the decisions that should be driving the player's experience.

Problem two: managing adventurers is not interesting. This isn't a big deal at the beginning of the game; you send your few adventurers out to the nearest dungeon and then get to your real work. When that work starts slowing down, though, the other set of decisions that the player has to make are not challenging. There typically is only one or two valid places to send them to so it's an effortless choice. Hard mode does improve this in the midgame by giving the player a range of locations which make the player prioritize their exploration, but then loses it in the last portion by reducing it to one long path again.

The adventurers have moral that must be maintained and again, it's difficult at the beginning and simple enough to be ignored by the midgame. Allow me to present this simple scenario; you obtain the ability to create a structure that will let you pay your adventurers more according to four levels (their pay does not come out of your resources) that you must buy. You make enough income that you can buy out those levels without putting strain on your pocketbook by the time you are one-third of the way through. Do you buy each only when you have to just barely maintaining the morale or do you buy out all four instantly and make morale something you don't have to put any thought into for the rest of the game? The designers of this game thought that the answer was the first one.

And you'll note that theme: by the midgame things are dragging and by the end it's boring as hell. Once the construction is done and the adventurers are sent on their way you can improve your kingdom by building the morale of your citizens. You do this by talking to them for the three to five minutes days. So you finish off the stuff you need to worry about in thirty seconds and then do repetitive actions with no thought involved for three minutes. And you do this two hundred times a game. So across a full game you play for roughly ten hours and eight of those are the equivalent of walking around a town in Final Fantasy and talking to the civilians who do nothing. Eighty percent of this game is not fun to play.

What's more there is no challenge. In a strategy game there must be a give and take, a cost that has meaning. There is no cost to anything. You collect so much in resources that you can't screw it up for long unless you're trying. Your adventurers always bounce back to get send out again. Even the Dark Lord doesn't recover from wounds so once you've encountered him there is no challenge; just throw bodies at him until he dies.

This could have been changed easily. The walk and talk portions of the game should have been completely dropped turning the game into a straight turn based strategy. Resources should have been balanced so that the player would have to worry about them. Costs should have been given meaning. The world should have been framed so that the adventurers had more to do. All of this should have been obvious at the paper stage long before it reached programming. And that's what makes My Life as a King interesting.

Grand Theft Auto IV is...

Wow! Grand Theft Auto IV! Look at it! There it is!

Okay, I'm not willing to spend sixty dollars on a game that I've now played eight times. And that's counting only games in the Grand Theft Auto series; then there's the clones that add a few more times through the same type of game.

Instead I've been busy with:


I'm just too cheap to pay anything more than twenty dollars for games that do not feature an exploration of Japanese mythology or rolling everything on earth into a ball to make a star.

Why I don't like Resident Evil

Yeah, I know I'm twelve years behind the times but I spent some time this weekend trying to play through the Gamecube remake of the popular game and I loathed it. I've tried to play the game in the past (both original and remake) and failed to get very far into it. I'm not sure what prompted this attempt and while I got much further than I had in the past I've still given up. Resident Evil breaks every rule of good game design, does things that stopped being acceptable years before and does things that stopped being acceptable years before its release. The game's popularity is completely inexplicable to me.

First let us start with a premise: Resident Evil is an adventure game with some action segments. The survival horror theme directs certain aspects of the game (how effective combat is, placing the player in stressful situations) but the core game play element is to explore the environment and solve puzzles. That's what players will be doing 95% of the time.

Okay, so we've got a starting framework and Resident Evil does that badly. The puzzles are mostly have the key item at the right place; not a bad starting point but not very deep either. But then the game severely limits the player's inventory. Since most players will want a weapon, ammo, health item, whatever key you're currently exploring with that leaves two to four slots open for item found while exploring. Since a player is always conditioned to pick up everything those slots fill up fast. the only place you can drop things are special rooms so the player spends a lot of time running back and forth. "Oh here's a puzzle that needs the key item I found a while ago! Time to run all the way back, empty my inventory, pick up the item I need, come back, and hope I have enough slots for whatever I get once I solve the puzzle."

So the player spends a lot of time doing nothing but backtracking. Wandering around the same empty rooms over and over and over again is conducive to boredom, not horror.

So in addition to this punishment for exploring the rooms (like the player is supposed to do) Resident Evil stacks on another one. Zombies that are killed will eventually get up again stronger and tougher to kill. So if you explore a room and kill a zombie in there only to find out that you don't have the key item you could have to fight a worse zombie when you come back. Since the player's resources are severely limited (a reasonable design choice given the genre) the player has to spend more than twice the usual amount of their limited resources because they explored. It's like the game was designed to played with a walkthrough rather than puzzled out by the player.

And then there's the save system. I understand that consoles have limited space and so need a more structured save system than on a PC. The problem is that Resident Evil provides a resource (carried in those limited inventory slots, no less!) that is required to save. Once you introduce a limited resource you change how a player perceives it. Every time the player looks to save they're going to have to ask themselves "Is this the best use of my limited resource?" This is good for things like health potions, it's bad for things like saving. It means when the sudden deaths come (and it is a horror game so it can happen quickly) it's not horrifying, it's annoying. What made me stop playing was facing a repeat fifteen minutes of empty game time to get up to the point where I died again. And that wasn't the first time in the game it happened.

Resident Evil is game that punishes playing. It's not horrific; the closest it gets is throwing things out of blind spots and a shock is not a scare. The sloppy combat doesn't add anything to the game and the fact that the character handles like a drunk frat boy makes all the repetitive wandering even more painful. And the less said about the "story" the better. The whole thing just isn't fun to play and an embodiment of bad game design.

I have played Resident Evil 4 and I did like that game; the improved controls and the better designed environment made it more fun. Given my dislike of the first game I was shocked.

Rating the new Super Smash Brothers Brawl Fighters

Okay this isn't much of a review since if you're aware of Super Smash Brothers Brawl then you've already seen the acres of stuff telling you that it's not only the greatest thing since sliced bread but it will actually cure leprosy if you put the game in your Wii and then touch it. So who cares about that? The real question about the game should be "Is the new stuff in it any good?"

For those non-game players Super Smash Brothers Brawl is a game where popular Nintendo characters (and a few guests from other companies) decide to get together and beat the snot out of each other. Really you don't need to know much more than that.

My opinion is that there's enough high quality new material in Brawl that it makes a solid successor to Super Smash Brothers Melee. Differences are always going to put some people off but I am enjoying the larger scope of the new game.

So there's a lot of new fighters in the games and inevitably this leads to fights over "Who sucks more!" Inevitably when I see someone claim that a particular character in a fighting game "sucks" I soon encounter someone who has developed their skills with that character to such a point that they can take on all comers. So all I can do is rate my preferences:

Pokémon Trainer - He's got everything you need in one package. The quick Squirtle, the flying smasher Charizard, and even the more balanced Ivysaur for those times when you need all the angles covered. He's a swiss army knife that can be tough to prepare for. The only two downsides are that you have to master three characters to use him well and that final smash is just a simple beam which can be easily avoided.

Olimar - I wasn't expecting to like the little man from Pikman so much but he's a sneaky one. You can take down the bulk of your opponent's life in moments without them realizing it with his Pikman throwing ability (the little things stick to players and weaken them). When you're followed by a full set to back up your regular attacks they can pile on the damage. He's reasonably quick and his small size gives him an avoidance advantage. On top of all that his Final Smash hits everyone automatically for major smashing damage. I'm not fond of his chain whip attack and his lack of a down special (it simply calls the Pikmen back) doesn't help but this guy can surprise you.

Snake - The best thing about Snake? When the crowd chants his name they do the "Snake? Snake! SNAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!" that accompanies the game over screen to all of the Metal Gear Solid games. Even if I wasn't that easily amused he's got a really strong reach with explosive attacks. His mortar regular attack is particularly effective and his recovery move is easy to use. He's also got one of the greatest final smashes in the game as the game switches to the view of him sniping the characters as they fight. My only two problems are that he's on the slow side (I like my characters faster than this), and his forward special is a very slow rocket launcher which holds you in the attack pose until the rocket is gone. If you miss and it goes off the screen you could be stuck for several seconds.

Zero Suit Samus - Samus becomes the token "Sleezy, hyper sexualized, whip bearing female" for Brawl in this special mode that is only accessable through regular Samus performing a final smash or holding down a button while loading the match. She gets a radically different set of moves like that way which turn her into a speedy melee'er with a good reach on the special attacks.

King Dedede - The massive fighters aren't my favorites but I kind of like Dedede's craziness. He's got a massive reach with his hammer, a few good areal attacks and a fun final smash. I just wish that people couldn't dance around him so easily.

Pit - For a character that flies I was expecting him to be a bit more effective in the air. As it stands he's not a bad fighter with a good variety of moves, but I found his flight to be more of a gimmick than a useful ability. The archery also seemed to take too much time and not be particularly effective.

Metaknight - The first time I played him I was sure he'd be my favorite. His torpedo forward special is great, his counter attack is actually somewhat effective, his swooping up attack works great, and his regular sword swipes are fast. Then as I played with him more the flaws started coming out: the loss of movement when attacking in the air, the fact that all of his attacks are incredibly weak, and his slow walk speed compared to the fast attacks. I still like to use him but I wound up feeling like a wanted a bit more oomph out of him.

Wario - The first time I used Wario I couldn't stand him but he quickly grew on me. His motorcycle attack is a lot more controllable than Yoshi's similar egg roll, and Wario is more maneuverable than he looks. I doubt Wario will ever be my first pick for a character to play but he's fun.

Diddy Kong - I love his speed, I love his standard attacks, but his special attacks redefine the term useless. Both weak in damage and unhelpful in effect the only thing that's even usable in there is throwing banana peals. His pop gun and his rockets require charge time to approach effective and you could spend that same time doing something that is more helpful with his regular attacks.

Lucas - A copy of Ness but the variations in his PK moves give him a slightly different feel. In particular his explosion freezes which can be very effective.

Lucario - Okay, I've got nothing against Lucario it's just that... well... I've used him in matches, I've played through classic mode with him, finished all star mode with him, and I can't remember a thing about the character. He's bland, run of the mill, standard. I won't be shocked if quite a few people find him usable but he's just Mr. Average to me with nothing to make him stand out.

Sonic - He sets a new standard for tough to control characters and his attacks are tricky to follow even when you're the one controlling him. I'll give him some time to grow on me but unless a miracle happens I don't expect my opinion to improve.

R.O.B. - Including the Robotic Operating Buddy as a fighter? Genius! Making him slow, unmanueverable, with a tiny reach, having the few attacks that can go a distance ineffective, and a pointless final smash (he continually emits a small cone of weak damage in front of him for about ten seconds)? Confusing. The best thing about him for me is his ability to fly long distances.

Wolf - They took the time to eliminate almost all of the clone characters with Brawl or change up a few of them to give them an extra special something and then made a clone of a character who already had a clone. On top of that the only thing that makes Fox worthwhile, his speed, is completely removed with Wolf. Wolf is in my bottom tier of characters that I want to use.

Toon Link - He's a fine character, he's just down here because he's presented as a "new character" and it's just "Young Link" all over again. So he's not just a clone, he's a clone we've already had. That pretty much places him at the bottom of any list of "new characters".

Why Phoenix Wright is the Greatest Fictional Attorney Ever

I can already here the groans from people who know the greatness of Perry Mason or even like Ben Matlock but in playing Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations lately (I can't Super Smash Brothers Brawl on the road) I have been reminded why Wright is undoubtably the greatest lawyer ever.

Other great fictional lawyers overcome incredible odds, unravel plotting and trickery and even occasionally deal with a corrupt judge or prosecutor. They have it easy compared to Wright who has the entire legal system of his fictional world stacked against him. It makes the system in Kafka's The Trial look downright fair. And Phoenix Wright regularly beats it. No other fictional lawyer comes close to that.

The makers of the game try to justify it by saying the games are set slightly in the future, the country is unspecified and there is a disclaimer that the legal system in the games do not represent any real world law (that's putting it very mildly). So it's not real, but here's a short list of the nightmarish aspects of jurisprudence people face in Phoenix Wright's world:

• First people are not just guilty until proven innocent, they're guilty until the defense proves someone else is guilty! It's not enough in the games to provide a massive pile of evidence that Phoenix's client did not commit the crime you have to conclusively prove that someone else did it (usually by having them break down and confess on the witness stand). One someone is on trial for a crime they will be convicted for it unless the state has someone else to throw into prison.
• That would be bad enough but the police apparently don't do anything beyond the most basic investigation of the crime. They arrest the first person they can directly connect with the crime regardless of if the evidence is only loosely circumstantial, obviously contradictory, or incomplete. And once that person is arrested they don't bother trying to form a complete picture of the crime.
• Which is complicated by the fact that the prosecutors regularly engage in witness tampering and suppress evidence. They hide anything that clearly exonerates the defendant and order witnesses not to talk to the defense attorneys. Not only is this done, it's well known that it is done and is tacitly approved up by the judges presiding over the trials.
• Those judges can render verdicts based on circumstantial evidence before the defense even gets to rebut any of it or present their own witnesses.
• Witnesses perjure themselves often with no consequences. Even after they admit to their perjury on the stand they can change their statement and still have it accepted as evidence.
• As for evidence, there is no chain of custody or mutual discovery for any of it. Most pieces just show up during the trial without being examined or authenticated beforehand. Anyone who can get access to an area is allowed to take anything as evidence and present it, no search warrant required!

It's a scary justice system they have in the world of Phoenix Wright and yet his can consistently beat it. Let's see Perry Mason beat that.

I'm Gonna Be a Webcomic Millionaire!

It has come to my attention that any idiot with an emulator and MS Paint can become popular on the Internet by "creating" "comics" using old video game sprites. So now here is my very timely introduction to my own series about the wacky adventures of a giant space fly, a square, and Mr. T:



I'll start printing the shirts.