Perception is Reality - Thoughts on Fez

Fez is a delight. It’s clever, imaginative, and super cute. It’s quite obviously a labour of love, and at 800 Microsoft space bucks its an easy recommendation. But something about it leaves me a little cold, and I just don’t love Fez as much as I hoped I would.

Now that I’ve completed the game - completed completed, with all 64 cubes, all the hearts and the artefacts and the achievements and the rooms - I think I’ve figured out why it doesn’t quite fit together.

Fez’s theme is perception. You see that in the way you can stitch together objects that are far apart in 3D just by lining them up in 2D. You see that in the way some of the mashmallow characters discount the idea of a third dimension, and the way one villager says - a little too on the nose, perhaps - that “perception is reality”. 

Heck, even the title screen is an optical illusion, that can be perceived from two different directions.

Which is all very cool. It’s an interesting theme, and one that games are almost uniquelly eqipped to explore. The way you can play with space and dimensions and geometry is in the exclusive domain of video games - outside of M.C. Escher paintings.

But the problem is that Fez only scratches the surface of this theme in its actual gameplay. The idea of switching between 3D and 2D, and making a new reality out of perception is only tentatively approached, and very rarely embraced. 

Many of the puzzles can be solved by simply jamming on the right or left trigger a couple of times until the platforms line up and the solution or pathway presents itself. In fact, this side of the game only offers up a handful of real, bonafide puzzles (you can find them in areas where you can manually spin bits of scenery with big, lurching pivot points).

Other than these few and fleeting examples, Fez is just so rarely surprising or inventive. I can’t remember a single instance where I felt like a genius for figuring out the solution (the mark of a well constructed puzzle, in my opinion), and I found myself plodding through my first runthrough with ease.

We know that this gameplay mechanic can do more. The escher-esque PSP brain-stumper Echochrome has a similar idea, and managed to be both super smart and maddeningly difficult. Also on PSP, the painfully underappreciated Crush will often leave you spinning the world around for 20 minutes while you coax out a solution. Super Paper Mario was a let down, but had plenty of clever ideas, regardless.

Instead, Fez’s real focus is on cryptic puzzles and other goofy nonsense. QR codes, alternative alphabets, clocks that chime in time with your Xbox, codes delivered through rumbles in your controller, secret button combinations, a code you had to translate into binary and ASCII. Ciphers, codes, combinations, and impossible secrets.

Some of this stuff is great fun. Fez features the first ever QR code that I managed to scan without hating myself. I have reams of notes where I jotted down shapes and patterns and symbols and pictures. This, it turns out, is where the real creativity lies. This is where you feel like a genius when you figure it out, and feel like a failure when you have to beg Twitter to dole out a clue.

But that’s not really the point of the game, is it? This stuff feels like hidden bonus content, designed to excite and enamour the sorts of people who are on the frontline of figuring out ARGs and secret ciphers. Gamers who get off on codes, while us Neanderthals stare at a page of symbols for five minutes before giving up and heading to GameFAQs. 

Don’t get me wrong, I think some of this stuff is fascinating. Read Sinan Kubba and Kyle Orland’s article on the intrepid band of code-crackers who figured out Fez’s “final” puzzle. It’s a thrilling read, as these smart-alecs figure out that a hard-to-find book must be read in three dimensions, as sentences snake through adjacent pages. Whoever figured that out must have felt amazing.

But, that wasn’t the experience for most of us. For most of us, it was slack-jawed, gooey-brained bemusement. 

Only, those cryptic puzzles represent the very core of Fez. Ignore those - ignore most of the anti-cubes and give up on owls, numbers, symbols, Tetris icons, bells, telescopes and tuning forks - and you end up with a very basic, very rudimentary puzzle platformer.

Like, imagine if Braid’s time-travelling mechanic never evolved past the first level. It never got more sophisticated or ingenious, and you never got the ring or the shadowy doppleganger. Instead, you plodded through the game using the same basic idea over and over again, and the real thought was put into the super secret stars.

No. Braid is almost the opposite of Fez. Jon Blow concentrated on the thing that all players were going to experience, and the thing that tied in to the game’s overarching theme: time. He spun this idea a thousand different ways, to make puzzles about time travel, and the speed of motion, and turning back the clock. The stars? Just a added bonus, for intrepid puzzle solvers.

In the end, I wish Phil Fish spent more time on the actual 2D/3D, perception-led puzzle platforming. That’s what the game was marketed as, that’s what the free Trial sells you on, that’s what the narrative theme is all about. But that never gets any smarter, and never gets any deeper. Obviously, most of that five year development process was spent on QR codes, clocks, codes and ciphers.

Climbing games - Assassin’s Creed: Revelation’s Hagia Sophia

A series about history, architecture, climbing and movement

In the fourth Assassin’s Creed game, Ubisoft wanted to mash together the stories of Altair - the stoic third Crusade neck-stabber - and Ezio - the affable Renaissance-era neck-stabber - into one intersecting tale.

So what better place to forge that connection than the crossroads of the world: Constantinople? A place that straddles Europe and Asia, connects East to West and has been home to Christians and Muslims throughout its turbulent history. The symbolism is so obvious it almost drips from your television.

No building quite characterises Constantinople’s stormy history and cross-cultural shift like the crown of the city, the Hagia Sophia. This extravagant domed basilica replaced two earlier churches, got hit by its fair share of earthquakes and hopped from Christian church to Islamic mosque. It’s like Constantinople in microcosm.

The building was originally a Byzantine (the Eastern half of the massive Roman Empire) church, and built by the decree of Roman Emperor Justinian I. But despite it being one of the most ambitious projects around - a dome-upon-dome construction, with a massive central apex that wouldn’t be bested for almost 1,000 years - it was completed in just five years.

In 537, half a decade after construction started, the Hagia Sophia was built. But despite some marvellous Roman engineering, that rushed job would prove to be the Sophia’s downfall. Literally. Huge chunks of the building fell off in proceeding earthquakes forcing bits to be rebuilt every few hundred years. Eventually, four large buttresses had to be added for stability.

In 1453, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople put an end to the Byzantine empire and Mehmet the Conqueror turned the magnificent crown of the city into an Islamic mosque. 60-odd years later and here we are - in 1511 as aging (and bearded) assassin Ezio Auditore. And in true Assassin’s Creed style, it would be wrong not to have a scramble around its architecture and to scale that prized dome.

It’s not the most satisfying climb in the Ezio trilogy, I have to admit. That’s mostly because despite the dome’s magnificence — rising 210 feet above the floor, and with a monstrous diameter of 110 feet — it’s still rather squat and surrounded by a messy jumble of tiny roofs at different heights and a handful of poky mini-domes.

It’s tall enough to give a panoramic view of the entire city and the Sea of Marmara (which splits modern-day Turkey between Europe and Asia) and it might be the largest cathedral in the world when Ezio visits, but it’s more about complicated architecture and the load-bearing engineering than soaring view points. It takes less than half a minute for Ezio to reach the absolute peak of its spire.

If you want a taller view you’ll have to scale the four minarets that flank the mosque. These are tall, free-standing spires with onion-shaped crowns, representing a trademark of Islamic architecture.

They give you a nice view of the Hagia Sophia. The ones in tight orbit around the mosque give you a birds-eye view of the interesting roof-top architecture. The two further away give you a complete front profile of the building, unobstructed by buildings.

Anachronistically, in 1511 there would only be two towers by Sophia. The other two date from the Murad III period of the 1600s - over a hundred years after Ezio’s adventure. The towers are also subtly asymmetrical (having being built in different eras), but Creed’s quartet of spires are identical. Well, other than the fact that two have an Animus shard at the top, and another is a map-synchronising lookout point.

Ubisoft script writer Darvy McDevitt admits that the Assassin’s Creed team tweaks history at times. “We put four because we thought that this was the iconic image of the Hagia Sophia,” he said in an interview. However, they didn’t leap forward 100 years and add the neighboring Blue Mosque. A crumbling Roman hippodrome still lives near the Sophia’s base.

While you can quickly scale the Sophia’s dome and perch Ezio atop its crescent moon spire, you’ll still need to be a master of Assassin’s Creed’s platforming tricks and Revelation’s unique hook blade to earn the achievement (or trophy) “Spider Assassin”. This is awarded for climbing from the ground to the pinnacle in less than 25 seconds.

There’s a rhythm to Creed’s movement. Just like how registering the flow of a battle and pressing attack in time with Ezio’s swordplay will unlock combos, you need to get a feel for the rhythm and flow of his movements when scampering up a wall or bounding across rooftops to move most quickly.

Take climbing upwards. Ezio gets a hook blade in this game which lets him reach out and grasp out-of-reach handholds - a slight tweak on the grasp system from earlier games. He can use this to leap up a vertical wall, and if you tap the leap button the moment he secures a grasp you can fire Ezio up again towards the next handhold.

Get the timing wrong and Ezio will put his hook away and grab on with both hands, slowing you down. Get it right, though, and he can dart from outcropping to outcropping like a gorilla in a tree, literally jumping up entire buildings in seconds - and easily grabbing the Hagia Sophia’s achievement.

Just like fighting, feeling the flow is often more about audio than visual signals. You’ll do much better if you listen for that telltale noise of metal hook striking stone, and tapping the button in time. A perfect climb will sound like a perfect drum beat.

The hook blade comes in handy for horizontal jumps, too. If your jump is too short and you’re about to fall, hitting B can make Ezio lunge out and save his life with a last-minute grap. But don’t become over-reliant on it: if Ezio was able to make a clean jump, hitting B will instead make him grab onto the side, forcing you to lose valuable seconds as he pulls himself up. It’s all about risk and reward.

Making good use of the hook blade requires you to learn the intricacies of Ezio’s movements, and get a grasp on the exact abilities of this Renaissance assassin. Knowing how far he can jump and when best to use the hook will give you the edge in rooftop chases, and earn you this tough achievement.

You can go inside the Hagia Sophia, allowing you to see the holy props and intricate mosaics, and how that magnificent dome looks from the inside. But you’ll need to find a whole bunch of collectible objects to get the key - so a blog for another day, perhaps?

You can also purchase it for a whopping 60,000 Akçe. But this blog series is about climbing great buildings, certainly not buying them.

L.A. Noire - Can I do some detective work now, please?

Unlike Rockstar’s previous period-perfect epics - Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption - Aussie dev Team Bondi wants to feel like a real person. With a real personality, and not just a psychopath. And, more importantly, with a real job, and not just “psychopath”.

They turn you into LAPD detective Cole Phelps, a war hero with a sharp suit, a fedora and a stick up his arse. And to make you feel like a detective you spend more time fingering matchstick cases and bellowing at dirty rotten liars than you do shooting guys. Though you do shoot a lot of guys.

L.A. Noire certainly makes you feel like an interrogator. The game’s biggest draw, the reason for its half-decade development period and the biggest god-damn bulletpoint on the box is the fact that you grill witnesses, suspects, leads and random neighbours with a truth-seeking line of questions that’d make Phoenix Wright blush.

But Noire never made me feel like a detective. The critical other side of the coin that gives you the ammunition - talking point evidence and lie-debunking proof - for your interrogations. I felt more like an overzealous lackey who’d follow in Phelps’ literal footsteps, bagging up his evidence and polishing his shoes, but never doing the police work I so wanted to do.

Phelps would always be the one to dispense advice on the case at hand. “We should check out the husband,” he might declare, before the husband is added to my list of suspects. He’d read a matchbook and say “24 Sunset Blvd, we should visit them”, before the address automatically got added to my list of locations, and a dot magically appeared on the city map.

I very rarely got to make any substantial decisions in the actual gumshoe investigation work. I’d parade around the crime scene until I stumbled over an object that made the controller vibrate.  Cole would then say out loud whether or not the item is useful. If it was, it was added to my list of clues, formed a question for a specific witness or a location was added my map.

The only time you’d really have to engage your brain and think like a detective (outside of the excellent interrogation scenes) is when you’re greeted with a ledger or a list of names or a list of addresses, and you have to guide Phelp’s hovering finger to the right place. Take too long, and Cole will just tell you the answer anyway.

But how can a game make you feel like a real detective - who does proper investigative work and follows leads - without making the game impossibly difficult or too open for interpretation? Enter: The Shivah.

Shivah is a painfully short but exceptionally well made point and click from indie dev Wadjet Eye Games. You play Russell Stone - a dejected Rabbi who’s wracked with guilt when he finds out that a member of his old congregation, who he shunned years ago, has been murdered. To ease his remorse he decides to play at being a copper, and see if he can’t figure out the case himself.

The game treats you like an intelligent human being, and also treats you like a wannabe cop. There’s no in-game journal where Rabbi Stone automatically jots down pertinent information: you have to play the game with a paper and pen (or an iPad jotter app called Penultimate) in front of you to decide what’s worth remembering, all by yourself. Like a big boy.

So first of all, I need to find out where this murdered dude lived. I dust off my computer and use the search. To stop your searches for “Jack Lauder” sprawling off into millions of useless results (about 4,380,000 of them, says Google), the game invents a smaller, closed network for the local Jewish community called Ravnet. I plug in Lauder’s name, and his contact details appear. It puts his apartment on my map.

Later, after questioning his widowed wife, I end up at his old workplace. I work my way into his computer by guessing his password (I picked it up from his wife - her mother’s maiden name - and wrote it down because I thought it might be important). I go through his emails, sort through spam and start looking for interesting conversations. I spot a suspicious email but it doesn’t - thankfully enough - throw a pop-up message on the screen that says PERSON OF INTEREST ADDED: ETHAN G. So I write it down.

Ethan G. Hm, in another email, Jack’s wife talks about meeting the Goldwaters. I try “Ethan Goldwater” in the Ravnet search. Zilch. Later, I see a picture of some old buddies of Jack, and it mentions an E. Goldberg. I plug Ethan Goldberg into Ravnet. Bingo. I find out that he’s been killed too, and it gives me more questions, leads and opportunities. It mentions a bar, and its added to my map.

Obviously, the game has to automatically put new locations on my map. I wish I could have an entire city, and actually ride the subway or take a cab to investigate possible locations of interest, just like I’ve been investigating potentially interesting names and events. Like a real cop. But that’s impossible - the rag tag bunch of indie game makers at Wadjet Eye have neither the budget nor time to render an entire New York city map for me to visit.

Rockstar does, of course. It has, like five times (two Liberty Cities, Vice City, San Andreas and Los Angeles). It seemed perfect - a dream game was forming in my mind. At the time, I said to my friend Phil in an instant message (good old Gmail, saving years-old chat logs):

• me: so you’ll be reading people’s letters and jotting down names [to investigate later]
• i actually wish it had more than that
• like, addresses
• when you find an address, you actually gotta figure out how to get there
• heck, just make it in Liberty City
• that would be the most insane game ever
• if you’re like a noir detective dude in a twilight liberty city
• taking the subway
• anyway
• Phil: yeha
• me: lets talk about games that exist outside of my mind

Putting aside my crazy prophetic visions of a detective-style GTA game, I feel like L.A. Noire’s beautiful post-war Los Angeles is hazardously wasted. Like Mafia II’s cardboard cut-out Empire City, Rockstar’s take on LA is a pointless landscape that acts like a time-filling buffer to spread apart the crime scenes and suspects. As the game wraps up, you can just press a button to skip car journeys altogether.

It would be been incredible to spot an address on the back of a matchbook cover, and then pull out the map (since when did Rockstar games stop coming with physical maps in the box? Those were great), find the streets and then drive there. Literally drive there, and chat to the patrons. Ambitious, but possible.

I wish L.A. Noire was more like The Shivah. Obviously, computers weren’t around in 1940s, but being able to loot hall of records for names, or use microfiche news archives to investigate older events would have made me feel more like the gumshoe I was expecting to be.

There are, admittedly, some small bits of bonafide detective work in L.A. Noire. Following a killer’s cryptic clues around LA was a highlight. Plus, sometimes you got to decide which location to go to first - and you might completely bypass an entire area.

They were memorable moments, and that was when the game felt like I was actually an active participant, outside of a gun battle or a witness grilling. Otherwise, there’s no real need to pay attention to the clues and follow the leads in front of you. Most of the time, I’d idly follow the paper trail without taking it in at all, because it was so effortless to do so, and then quickly do my homework on the case before an interrogation.

L.A. Noire does a lot right. It has a gripping storyline, incredible (incredible!) technology and  meticulous attention to detail. Plus, putting conversations before gunfights is incredibly daring, and should be massively applauded. (Although, under Rockstar’s remit as the multi-million selling industry innovator, it’s about damn time).

But it also has its flaws. The story was hammy and hamfisted, the riveting plotlines had disappointing ends and the interrogation scenes would sometimes be way too ambiguous.

But, beyond all that - L.A. Noire had the potential to be one of those “dream games”, that sort of incredible idea for a game that you’ve been dreaming of since you were a kid (A GTA game where you can go in every single building! An earthquake survival game! A safari game!).

I’ve been wishing for a real open world detective adventure where you have to actually solve clues, follow leads and interrogate witnesses since I was a kid. When I played The Shivah, and realised it could actually be done in a believable and interactive manner, it just made me even more hopeful for a big budget, open world edition.

It seems my dream hasn’t been fulfilled just yet.

Investigated: Are ‘fangames’ legal?

Imagine that you’ve just spent the last eight years of your life toiling away at a tribute to your favourite game series. You’ve fashioned an exhaustive and comprehensive remake of your most loved game, drawing and coding its 20 characters and 100 stages from scratch.

And then, imagine just days after your labour of love hits the internet, packaged as a free PC download for other like-minded fans to enjoy, the owner of the original game serves you with a cease and desist letter, telling you in no uncertain terms, to pull your decade-long magnum opus from the web, or face the consequences.

That was the crushing story for Spanish coder “Bomber Link”, whose Herculean tribute to Streets of Rage got shut down by Sega’s legal team in April, just days after the eight-year project hit BitTorrent and Rapidshare. But it’s a familiar story to many fans who have had their tributes, remakes and unofficial sequels quashed by game publishers.

Read more at Wired UK

Snuggle Truck iOS game ditches immigrant characters for fluffy animals

In the summer of last year, a clan of Boston-based game makers got together to talk about immigration.

It was the latest Boston Game Jam — ongoing marathon coding weekends where creative types get together and churn out games against the clock. Since the Jam’s debut in 2007, the themes have ranged from the moon to HTML5. This year’s big topic though was immigration, emigration and cultural clashes.

“The idea was to rally support for our friend who was having major issues while trying to immigrate to the United States to come and develop games,” explains Alex Schwartz, “Chief Scientist” at Owlchemy Labs, and co-host of that weekend’s Game Jam. “He had spent over a year trying to find a simple and legal method to come to the US but found no visas that would support his endeavours.”

Most of the games created at the Jam, including Cultural Exchange, Immcognitio and Super Mega Immigration Office 2000, were serious or tactful in nature. Office 2000 is like the world’s most boring adventure game, where logic puzzles are replaced with green cards, questions and mountains of paperwork.

Schwartz had a different take. “We felt that if we could do something that would spark some attention, we could do a better job of getting people to talk about the shoddy systems in place for legal immigration,” he says.

His game, made alongside Yilmaz Kiymaz and a handful of artists and musicians, was Smuggle Truck: Operation Immigration…

Read more at Wired UK

Test Drive Unlimited 2 review written 100% by me, Mark Brown

We’ve seen other endeavours to make bigger the perspectives of the online racing pastime: Forza Motorsport’s vigorous souk of customisation and warm-lap war, Gran Turismo 5’s stumbling stab at a more discreet autoaficionado’s alliance, and Criterion publicly networking its way around the online/offline split in Requirement for Haste: Scorching Chase.

Each has delivered ingredients of Experiment Steer Limitless’ audacious pledge: a booming, linked hamlet of gas-skulls; a larger-than-life bodily struggle between bloke, apparatus and boulevard; a free-roaming sovereignty of swiftness. They’ve done it with more buff and flamboyance, better pictures, more tinged and rewarding knobing, more steadiness and, most vitally maybe, additional dramatis personae.

But they don’t have its myogenic muscular organ, and they don’t have its gulp of air taking horizons. On the cosmic Hawaiian land mass of Oahu, Eden dared to hallucinate an online racing dreamland that was set in something dreadfully to the highest degree similar to the bona fide earth (1500 four-sided figure kilometres of it). Bumpy and organized as it was, that nightmare wasn’t given and taken for anything; Analysis Manoeuvre Boundless remains the final worship correspondence to the open dual carriageway in diversion.

In case you were wondering, this is a parody of The Examiner’s David Garfield, who unceremoniously plagiarised Eurogamer’s review, and changed a few words in the hopes of getting away with it. The scamp. Read all the gory details here.

2x Combo: Bulletstorm and Vanquish

It’s time to pucker your butthole, rev-up your machine gun and, please, draw the curtains for god’s sake. Someone might see you. This week, EA farted the demo for Bulletstorm onto Xbox Live and PSN. Or Gunwank or Rocketshit or whatever it’s called. Yes, this is the same year that the gaming gods are bestowing upon us such creatively named products as Bodycount and Max Anarchy.

From the endless trailers, press sheets and painfully named “skillisodes”, People Can Fly’s Bulletstorm is evidently a game designed and marketed exclusively towards 16 year olds, or any other feckless moron who thinks “fail” is an adjective and believes a t-shirt design has the capacity to be “epic”.

The game uses phrases like “dick tits” and “poop passage” that are embarrassing enough to make you cringe yourself inside out. In fact, Bulletstorm is so astoundingly puerile and idiotic that I’m still not entirely sure if the game is a scathing satire of alarmingly stupid action games, or the new reigning monarch of them.

Then again, any interview with the game’s developer plants this sucker directly in the latter. Take the wonderful anecdote where a female team member had to talk the creative director down from giving the token chick character a pair of leviathan double-d tits. “She’s so hot, she needs to have a giant rack,” slobbered Adrian Chmielarz. “I love chicks in video games that have giant boobs,” he grunted.

It’s pretty annoying, then, that Bulletstorm is actually quite good. It certainly makes it more difficult to actively despise and boycott the game when the PlayStation Network demo is so much fun. Cut away the language, generic character design and middle school humour, and Bulletstorm is electric entertainment, combining combo-kills with a reliable control set that makes replaying levels and gunning for high scores aggressively irresistible. Flashing up a leaderboard of your buddies’ best scores directly after play just makes it all that more enticing to go again.

Still, I’d rather crinkle my sphincter for the next 12 months than play through the actual game. I’m 21, for christ’s sake, I shouldn’t be saying “I’m too old for this shit” after every line of dialogue, should I? It might get a sly rental, but I’ll maintain my stance that starting puberty instantly makes you too mature for Bulletstorm.

The fabled point-based shooter has been tried millions of times before, from The Club to 50 Cent to Rage on the iPhone, but no one has ever quite perfected it. Platinum Games’ Vanquish, a fine-tuned shooter whose default mode seems to be “speed run„ is another valiant effort, but doesn’t quite nail it in the same just-one-more-go attitude as Bulletstorm.

Vanquish, which I’ve been playing this weekend, definitely shares Storm’s heavily cliched, B-movie bullshit though, with constantly swearing characters so grizzled and raspy that you’ll swear this planet’s currency, food source and chief import are all nicotine.

The game’s dialogue never gets much better than the pithy, perfectly spoken and oh-so true “fucking robots”, and the sexual tension between the two male heroes is so thick you could cut it with a knife. A big gay knife. If they don’t go Brokeback Spaceship by the end of the game, I might just have to pen a curse-word filled fanfic to fill in the gap.

But while any game with a dedicated “slide on your knees like a kid presented with freshly waxed linoleum” button deserves to be played, the Japanese’s lagging uptake on social gaming definitely hurts the 15-minute long Vanquish. Right in its metal-plated, DARPA-developed dick.

A single, pathetic leaderboard for each level in the game? For a game so passionately entangled with points, times and grades, Vanquish barely acknowledges the fact that I might want to compare my progress with a pal, rather than myself.I want to challenge my buddies to speedruns, I want to be told at the end of each level that my buddy Phil was more accurate than me.

Social gaming is a hugely important new element of modern games, but few titles can really take care of business. If I’m having to burrow deep into a sub-menu to find a leaderboard, you’re doing it wrong. If I’m not told in a snarky pop-up menu that my best score has just been nuked by a buddy, you’re doing it wrong.

I may be an anti-social, misanthropic jackass, but even I like to feel socially connected when gaming. If developers aren’t looking closely at Geometry Wars 2, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and, please forgive me, Farmville, then they need a check up from the neck up.

Astroman

Astroman is retro-inspired, but not actively old school. Sharp pixel-art graphics are replaced by splodgy, hand drawn cartoons, and while the background tunes share similar beats and styles to prehistoric game music, they doesn’t use the same synthetic, chip-tune instruments.

But its nostalgic naivety lends more than just a faux-ancient presentation. Unlike many of the po-faced, arty indies of today, Astroman has no intention of instilling emotions any deeper than rugged enjoyment. It carries no pretentious pretense, no big idea or poetic verse. Astroman is, to its absolute credit, unapologetically artless, aspiring to no greater challenge than to make a pitch perfect platformer that transports you - Ratatouille style - back to the 90s and the era’s brief dalliance with brilliant 16bit metroidvanias and pudgy Amiga classics.

It’s gameplay isn’t quite as sharp as Metroid and its level design is smart, but can’t hold a meat-hiding candle to Castlevania. But it works well enough, giving you springy, free-form leaps, a limp, spluttering laser pistol and nine or so great little levels filled with puzzling shortcuts and hidden areas, unique ideas and, again, that retro-era feeling of a small grid-locked tileset applied judiciously for surprising new rooms and areas.

There’s a clear dissonance in your toolkit - frequent upgrades to your space boots turn your hops into triple-jumping, springy leaps with a splutter of jet-pack expulsion on top, but your suppressed laser gun never upgrades - which lets you know that Astroman is more about jumping than blasting. And thankfully so.

Astroman - Xbox Indies

Biomotor Unitron on the Neo Geo Pocket

“It would be near impossible for Wikipedia to be a complete and thorough repository of gaming history, with Deus Ex or The Legend of Zelda sharing the same word count as something obscure like Biomotor Unitron on the Neo Geo Pocket”

Whenever I need a random, obscure or funny video game name, I automatically go for Biomotor Unitron on the Neo Geo Pocket. Not just Biomotor Unitron, but the whole shebang: Biomotor Unitron on the Neo Geo Pocket.

I just love the way that it absolutely doesn’t roll off the tongue, it’s such a convoluted mouthful that you sooner slur it than say it. And it’s so quintessentially gamey, an ultra nerdy phrase that sounds like indecipherable techno babble or some poorly translated Japanese RPG.

Yesterday I gave Biomotor its most high profile mention yet, with a name drop in a Wired UK piece. The site has been celebrating Wikipedia’s 10 year anniversary this week, so I contributed with a piece about the online encyclopedia’s ability, and limitations, as a resting place for gaming’s heritage. And I dropped Unitron as my example of an obscure gaming artefact.

But, as I admitted to my friend Phil, despite my constant references I’ve never really played the game. I’ve owned the title for years, after getting it in a trade for some TurboGrafx-16 game, but I’m ashamed to admit that I never ventured past the first few screens.

Well, that is until yesterday, when I finally slammed the cartridge in my silver Neo Geo Pocket Colour (and found the power lead and swapped out the dead memory battery) and actually played the damn thing.

Biomotor Unitron on the Neo Geo Pocket is a pretty obvious attempt to grab some of that Pokemoney, and give the fledgling SNK handheld it’s own monster hunting RPG. It even lets you trade with buddies over a link cable, if you can manage to find another human being with the rare system in their possession.

As far as I’ve played, the game is pretty simple in its underlying concept. The starting town is home to a Unitron battling arena, with several ranks featuring progressively more difficult opponents. You’ll need to travel around the world and essentially grind to earn enough EXP - and cash - to win the next bout.

There’s also a heavy alchemy focus, as you chuck random bits of metal and electronics together in the hopes that they’ll fuse into some rad new biotic arm for your battling bot. Plus, you can scour the landscape or shops for add-ons and junk like new armour and elemental-specific weapons.

All in all, the game is a competent little RPG with some smart ideas and even some humorous dialogue, but it’s no hidden gem. No memorable relic. Now that I’ve finally sunk my teeth into the game, I feel like hanging up the title as my go-to obscure gaming reference.

What if someone mistakes my constant mentions for sincere admiration? What if some avid reader assumes that I’m the games biggest fan, and sends me fan art and erotic Unitron fan fiction? I’m not ready for that.

But, more than that, seeing it as an actual game with graphics and mechanics and a story, instead of just some obscure box nestled in my eclectic gaming collection has sort of sullied the magic of the name a little. It doesn’t quite have that some pizazz anymore. It’s no longer that bizarre, or even funny. I think I need a new Biomotor Unitron on the Neo Geo Pocket.

Ludonarrative dissonance

Now there’s a pretentious word. Makes me feel all gross and icky just to type it. But I think it’s an important piece of technobabble for talking about games and writing, so I thought I’d give you an easy to understand refresher course on the whole thing. Ready?

It’s a word used in chin-stroking conversations about video games, and horribly ostentatious blog posts. Uh, like this one. It basically describes a disharmony or imbalance between events that take place during gameplay (the ludo bit) and things that happen in the cutscenes (the narrative bit).

Take pulpy, punchy pow-pow action adventure epic Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.  Drake shrugs off a thousand bullets in combat, repairing vital organs and stemming blood loss just by crouching behind a bit of rock. But as soon as control is taken away, and it moves to cutscene, our intrepid hero is taken out of the action with a single bullet to the belly.

Or how about in The Darkness, where Jacky uses his spooky demon arm-pals to leap across rooftops and swing between balconies in the cutscenes, but once the control is back in your hands he’s as stodgy and immobile as a week old crumpet.

But those are tiny, inconsequential conflicts between mechanics and plot. That’s only scratching the surface of the term. What about games where the entire theme is defied by its mechanics?

Like Uncharted, again. During cutscenes Nathan Drake is affable and charming. Sometimes he’s mouthy and sarcastic, and sometimes he’s a flirtatious scamp. He talks his way out of problems, and goads his enemies with witty remarks and scathing comebacks.

But in the game, Drake is a coldly efficient killing machine, dropping enemies with knowingly placed headshots, barrages of AK-47 fire and fiery grenade blasts. Over the course of two PS3 games he’s racked up a higher kill count than John Rambo and Genghis Khan’s freaky love child, Khanbo, but doesn’t seem to have a slither of remorse or guilt about the whole thing.

In short: In the cutscenes, Nate is a charmer. In the game, Nate is a psychopath.

And, as much as I adore the Uncharted games, that kind of sucks. One of the franchise’s biggest draws is this everyman persona of Drake. He’s not a superhero, a trained soldier or a hardened mercenary. In fact, he’s a bit rubbish: he’s cowardly, he gets out of most situations through pure luck and only one side of his shirt is tucked in, the big scruff. So to suddenly say he’s capable of mascaraing the entire pirate and hired Russian mercenary population without so much as a scratch, sort of wrecks the whole persona that Naughty Dog has built up.

Same goes for other loveable heroes and anti-heroes that the developers try so hard to get us to emphasise with. We’re supposed to root for the regretful Niko Bellic, trying to leave his murderous past back in vaguely-middle-eastern-country. And then Grand Theft Auto IV throws us headfirst into stages where we murder hundreds of police officers, just for some money we don’t really need.

Clint Hocking, the Far Cry 2 designer who, as far as I can tell, coined the hateful term, argues that Bioshock is a particularly egregious example. When you come across the Little Sisters, the themes running beneath the game says we should put aside our greedy, selfish ways and instead be nice and empathic, regardless of the cool shit we’ll miss out on.

Except: you don’t miss out on any cool shit. You’re actually rewarded for being the hero and scolded for being evil. Play through the game both ways, and tally up how much free shit you get, and it works out better to be the happy, cheery, sympathetic hero than the grizzly, greedy, nasty bastard. It sort of shatters the illusion, and is deceitful to the game’s core themes.

It’s something that game developers need to work on, and to stop thinking of story and gameplay as two distinct elements. They need to get together, get married and bump uglies throughout the development cycle, to make sure that the things you do aren’t in direct conflict with the things you say.

One day, I’ll talk about some games that, I think, take this idea on board and make it really work. Where the story and gameplay mechanics lock together like Ikea furniture. Until then.