This current blogging drought was brought on by a busy period at work:  these past two months have been the culmination of two years of work, and just last week we finally shipped the product that I have been working on since it’s inception to our first customer.  In the final few months before this go live date I have been working – voluntarily – through my lunches in order to spend more time perfecting the final product.  Since lunch time is when I have traditionally taken a break to blog, something had to give, and my sense of professional pride demanded that work come first in this instance.

When I resume regular blogging is anyone’s guess – I don’t even know myself.  It could be tomorrow, next month, next year, or even never.  Through the magic of RSS I hope that you’ll stay subscribed to my little corner of the Internet – I’m still gaming, reading about politics and science, and thinking about all sorts of interesting things that I won’t be able to keep to myself forever.  If you’ve stuck with me this long – thanks – I appreciate that you’re still here.

Nier puts you in the shoes of a father trying to cure his daughter of a fatal disease known as the Black Scrawl, and then later rescue her when a being known only as “the Shadowlord” kidnaps her from the lazy country town that they live in.  Along the way, you meet up with a cast of quirky characters: a talking book (Grimoire Weiss), a magical child (Emil), and a foul-mouthed lingerie-clad woman (Kainé).  All have major problems, but as a team they meld together wonderfully and play off of each other in a manner similar to Dragon Age‘s varied personalities.

Before I gush over the game any further, it would be remiss of me not to discuss Nier’s many flaws.  Taken simply as a video game in the mechanical sense, Nier is at best an average action RPG hack and slash adventure.

Combat is relatively basic:  you can choose to equip one of three different weapon types, a light sword, a heavy sword, or a spear, and then chain attacks together by mashing a single button.  Each weapon also has a secondary attack assigned to a different button, however these attacks break the normal flow of combat, and subsequently get used sparingly.  In addition to physical attacks, your character acquires magical abilities as the game progresses, but only two can be equipped at once and really only a handful are useful on a regular basis.  Magic is much more powerful than slashing with a weapon, however it consumes (auto-recharging) mana.  There is not a wide variety of enemies to kill, and most can be dispatched using one of two methods:  get close and hack until you break their guard, or stand extremely far away and fling dark lance magic at them.

The next big flaw is that Nier lacks many unique environments.  The first half of the game opens up five towns and three dungeons connected to your characters’ village, and then the remainder of the game requires you to constantly revisit those locations over and over again as the plot progresses.  Two of the dungeons are used at least four of five times each, with very little change to their layout or encounters each time.  The game world is far too small for the 25 hour plot.

The final major design mishap in the game is the structure of the optional side quests.  Simply put, quests in Nier are uninspiring MMO-style drivel.  The side quests consist primarily of fetch quests, kill quests, and random drop quests with very few unique tasks to spice things up and keep the game interesting.  After grinding out a few of the early quests, I began only completing quests that I fulfilled the requirements for in the natural course of playing through the plot.  If I were a completionist I would have hated every minute of Nier’s quest system.  Thankfully, neither side quests nor grinding kills are required to level up enough to finish the game.

So with all of these seemingly huge flaws, what made Nier such a compelling game that I played it through not just once, but twice?  Simple:  the world, the characters, and the story are utterly enthralling.

Nier starts out in the near future, with your character struggling to keep his daughter Yonah safe in a world that is obviously crumbling around him.  It is the dead of winter, there is little food, and faceless enemies are attacking.  After a huge battle the timeline fast forwards 1,312 years and you find yourself in a fantasy setting controlling a very similar-looking character and looking for a cure for your daughter, again named Yonah.  As you start to explore the world you find hints of the long-forgotten technological society that you left behind – derelict buildings, shattered bridges, and long-forgotten factories – and encounter puzzling enemies, the shades, that resemble bipedal digitized packets of data.  What caused humanity to regress to medieval conditions? What is the Black Scrawl that is infecting Yonah?  What are the shades?  All of these questions are intriguing and not standard video game fare.

Where Nier really shines is the plot, which tackles mature themes head on:  responsibility, sacrifice, parenthood, and empathy to name a few.  Told through a mixture of text dialog, voice acted dialog, and cut scenes, the writing is multifaceted in a way that few games can manage.  The main arc of the plot is dark and brooding, however humor is laced through the character’s back-and-forth conversations as you’re exploring the environment to lighten the mood.  It is not an exaggeration to say that on multiple occasions I was moved nearly to tears by some of the tragic situations that the characters found themselves in; Nier is rarely a happy game, which makes the moments of pure joy all the better when they do occur.  When I finished the game, especially the second time, all I could do was sit back, mouth agape, and contemplate how everything turned out.

And if you play Nier, you really do need to play it twice.  After beating the original twenty-five hour campaign you can start again from the midpoint of the story retaining all of your levels, weapons, and items.  During your second playthrough, which only takes another five or six hours, not only are you exquisitely aware of the answer to all of the big questions that the game presents, but you (the player, not your character) are also able to understand what the shades are saying.  Extra cut scenes are added to give context to some of the game’s main events, and this new angle changes everything and pulls at the heartstrings in entirely different ways.  It is a genius bit of storytelling.

The final triumph for Nier is the gorgeous soundtrack, composed by Keiichi Okabe.  Every track – from those that play while you are exploring the world, to the battle tunes, to the cut scene pieces – fits perfectly in the context that it is used, and heightens the emotional impact of the game.  It is no accident either, the music was developed independently of the game, and when the time came to merge the two, if a change needed to be made the game was modified to fit the music, not the other way around.  The vocals – used heavily – are stunning; Emi Evans was given the leeway to create a unique languages for her singing, which were modeled on many different modern dialects.  During the days between playing the game I often found the songs and their nonsense words rolling through my skull, a true testament to the power the music had over me. Upon completing the game I purchased the soundtrack so that I didn’t need to lose those beautiful pieces.

As much as Nier is a broken video game, it is also a work of art; a brilliant novel, a soulful album, and a tragic screen play all wrapped up in an interactive bundle.  Many players will not be able to get past the games many mechanical flaws, but if you are the sort of person who enjoys a good story more than anything then Nier will be a deeply rewarding and enriching experience.  Few games have moved me as deeply as this one did, and it is not without sadness that I removed the disc from my console and placed it back on my shelf.  From the time that it sucked me in at the very beginning, I didn’t want Nier to end, and what better statement of a game’s worth is there than that?

Speaking about the global protests, the Times writes:

[F]rom South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.

They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box.

“Our parents are grateful because they’re voting,” said Marta Solanas, 27, referring to older Spaniards’ decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. “We’re the first generation to say that voting is worthless.”

Voting is worthless. I have certainly felt that way for a couple of years. It seems that no matter who we elect to government, and no matter what level of government, the politicians seems more concerned about catering to corporations and special interest groups, building their own power networks, and finding a way to screw the other guy than actually responding to the needs and desires of the citizens who elected them in the first place.  Citizens, if they are thought of at all, are merely means to an end and pesky ones at that.

The Times continues:

Increasingly, citizens of all ages, but particularly the young, are rejecting conventional structures like parties and trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.

In that sense, the protest movements in democracies are not altogether unlike those that have rocked authoritarian governments this year, toppling longtime leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Protesters have created their own political space online that is chilly, sometimes openly hostile, toward traditional institutions of the elite.

The critical mass of wiki and mapping tools, video and social networking sites, the communal news wire of Twitter and the ease of donations afforded by sites like PayPal makes coalitions of like-minded individuals instantly viable.

“You’re looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing,” said Yochai Benkler, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren’t anymore.”

How novel is that? As Dan Carlin discusses in his show, could it be that we’re rapidly approaching a point where the concept of a representative democracy is too archaic for society, and some form of radical upheaval is required to refresh and renew countries and to once again empower citizens?

It is certainly a possibility, and as more and more protests seem to break out around the developed world, it will be interesting to watch how the political landscape reacts.

Radiant Historia is a fantasy-based time travel RPG that harkens back to Chrono Trigger but is so much better than the old classic. In the game’s opening minutes the main character receives a magic book, the White Chronicle, that allows him to travel forwards and backwards through two divergent time streams and tasks him with a quest to stop the creeping desertification that is slowly leeching life from the world.

In a refreshing break from the typical JRPG story tropes, the characters are nearly all mature adults and thus the teenage angst that infects many titles in the genre is all but eliminated.  In fact, Radiant Historia tells a mature and deep tale of political intrigue, treachery, and teamwork that appealed far more than most game plots.

Graphically the game looks fine, and the music is top notch.  I usually play handheld games with the sound completely off, but I found myself compelled to keep the volume cranked while spending time with this one.  To be honest, I wouldn’t have ever noticed the soundtrack if not for the music CD that comes bundled with the game; it certainly piqued my interest.

The crown jewel of Radiant Historia is the battle system.  As you wander around the game environments you will come across enemies that will try to bump into you to initiate a battle.  You can choose to engage them, avoid them entirely, or else swing your sword to stun them.  Stunning an enemy allows your party extra attacks when the fight breaks out, however if the enemy catches you while you are in the process of trying to stun it then the enemy group will begin the battle with bonus attacks.  It’s a risk/reward gamble with your reflexes.

Once a battle begins your party of three adventurers lines up on one side of the screen, and the enemy party deploys on a three-by-three grid across the field.  Enemies can occupy between one and nine tiles, although a typical random monster will not exceed two tiles in size.  The size and position of the enemy party is of crucial importance to how the battle will play out.

When it is one of your characters’ turns to attack you can choose one of the following options: a normal attack, a damaging special attack, a special attack that moves an enemy around on the grid, an item use, or swapping turns with another friend or foe.  If you have multiple characters ready to act in a row, then all of their actions are queued up and executed at once.

Intelligently using all of these abilities is key; Radiant Historia is not a JRPG that allows you to mash the “attack” button and cruise through battles.  The two main techniques that are important are stacking enemies and creating large combos.

Enemies can be stacked up by utilizing special attacks that move them around the battlefield – they can be pushed back, pulled up, shifted left or right, or thrown into the air.  Moving an enemy onto another enemy allows subsequent attacks on either of the targets to damage both.  The catch is that enemies do not remain stacked once all friendly characters have acted and it is their turn to move, so building a long combo becomes important to dealing with large groups.

Since your characters act with roughly the same frequency as your enemies, combos must be constructed by swapping around the turn order.  If you want more attacks in a row then it is necessary to swap turns with the enemies, allowing them to have a chance to deal damage first.  The catch is that a character who has swapped turns with another has its defense lowered until it takes its next action, so there is some risk involved.

Swapping turn order is not only beneficial for moving groups of enemies around, it allows you to build up combo points, which act as a damage multiplier.  As your characters repeatedly attack the same foe, combo points are accrued.  One combo point is awarded for each attack after the first, and an additional combo point is rewarded if the attack differs in nature (magic versus physical) from the attack before it.  Furthermore, some skills deal low damage, but hit many times and increase the combo meter by one per hit.  Thus, it is advantageous to arrange your attacks in a manner that combo points are maximized through diverse skill use, which allows your damage output to skyrocket.

Radiant Historia sucked me in with an engaging premise, and then hooked me with a unique and deep battle system.  This is a game that isn’t afraid to take chances and make the player think, and it never got old at any point in the 40+ hour story.  Definitely check it out if you have a soft spot for JRPGs.

When chicken hatchlings are born, large commercial hatcheries usually set about dividing them into males and females, and the practice of distinguishing gender is known as chick sexing. Sexing is necessary because the two genders receive different feeding programs: one for the females, which will eventually produce eggs, and another for the males, which are typically destined to be disposed of because of their uselessness in the commerce of producing eggs; only a few males are kept and fattened for meat. So the job of the chick sexer is to pick up each hatchling and quickly determine its sex in order to choose the correct bin to put it in. The problem is that the task is famously difficult: male and female chicks look exactly alike.

Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks known as vent sexing, by which experts could rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s, poultry breeders from around the world traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan to learn the technique.

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not say what those cues were. They would look at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in.

And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The student would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain was trained to a masterful—albeit unconscious—level.

This seems very much akin to athletes being able to instinctively execute split second plays without completely understanding the mechanics of what they are accomplishing, only slightly more voodoo.  A similar technique was used during World War 2 by British plane spotters:

During World War II, under constant threat of bombings, the British had a great need to distinguish incoming aircraft quickly and accurately. Which aircraft were British planes coming home and which were German planes coming to bomb? Several airplane enthusiasts had proved to be excellent “spotters,” so the military eagerly employed their services. These spotters were so valuable that the government quickly tried to enlist more spotters—but they turned out to be rare and difficult to find. The government therefore tasked the spotters with training others.

It was a grim attempt. The spotters tried to explain their strategies but failed. No one got it, not even the spotters themselves. Like the chicken sexers, the spotters had little idea how they did what they did—they simply saw the right answer.

With a little ingenuity, the British finally figured out how to successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess and an expert would say yes or no. Eventually the novices became, like their mentors, vessels of the mysterious, ineffable expertise.

The fact that our unconscious minds can learn how to perform tasks that our conscious minds have no ability to grasp is equal parts fascinating and creepy.

Although we couldn’t afford any games aside from Super Mario Land, Baseball, Tetris, and Motorcross Maniacs, it was still a lot of fun and a much different experience than sitting in front of the C64 or NES to play games.  Many an hour was wasted swapping the Game Boy around to top each others’ Tetris score on the couch, and even my mother – who does not game – got in on the action.  She was wickedly good at Tetris too.

Super Mario Land was (and is) a great little platformer and as much as I thought I was skilled for beating it, I was in awe when my youngest brother- only three years old at the time – managed to work his way through the game entirely unassisted.  Neither Motorcross Maniacs or BAseball hold up particularly well, but for the first generation of portable consoles they were more than enough.

The Game Boy still works to this day… though blowing the cartridge slot out periodically is the key to a smooth experience.

tinyBuild Games has found success in uploading its new game, No Time To Explain, to the Pirate’s Bay. [...] The game has a unique feature that the full-fledged normal version does not: all of its characters wear pirate hats in-game, along with an ever-present pirate theme.

[...]

“You can’t really stop piracy, all you can do is make it work for you and/or provide something that people actually want to pay for. For us this is humor, we like making people laugh,” Alex added.

The PR stunt also helped with sales:

“We saw very positive WTF REALLY feedback from users, and saw reactions that people bought it simply because they liked the joke. So we don’t see it hurting sales in any way,” [company co-founder Alex Nichiporchik] said.

Good for tinyBuild Games – realistic-minded, humorous, and inventive all at once.

Right from the start, Centennial Ridges lets you know that it means business; the path is laced with rocks and tree roots, is uneven much of the time, and is full of steep climbs up and down.  This is not a nature walk for the uninitiated and you have to be in decent shape to tackle it.  The first weekend of September was an ideal time to take the hike since the weather was relatively cool and overcast and the bugs were mostly absent.

Below are some pictures from our walk.  Click any of them to see a hi res version.

A splash of red in the midst of green

Wong Tse and I admiring the view

A hilltop lake

Lake beneath a ridge

Beaver lodge

A pine tree barely tops this ridge

Let me start by saying that all of my prior criticisms of the game are still completely valid:  puzzles are obtuse, the user interface design is outdated, the tip system is horrendous, and puzzle solutions often feel far too based on random chance than actual logic.  Machinarium is a game that doesn’t even bother heeding the lessons of the ancient Monkey Island games – it just blunders ahead with its too-tricky puzzles and refuses to give players any information to work with unless they ask for a hint, at which point the entire solution is vomited onto the screen.

The thing is, once you get past the first three puzzles – those included in the demo for the game – these shortcomings fade into the background as the whimsical cartoon world opens up and takes hold.  The demo includes the very worst of the levels that Machinarium has to offer – once you’re clear of that segment, the levels become far larger, more full of character, and utterly charming.  The strange little robot that you control manages to be so emotive that you actually feel for the little guy, and want him to reach the end of his quest.  The characters he meets and the conversations that he has – all told using line-drawn animations in cartoon-style word bubbles – are charming in a way that is tough to frame with words; they just work brilliantly.

As the environments get bigger the puzzles get harder; the finale spans something like fifteen screens and requires multiple hours to solve, even with occasional use of the hint feature to get unstuck.  A nice addition to the pixel-hunting and random item combining that the demo highlighted are the logic puzzles that would not be out of place in a Professor Layton game.  For the first time in a long time I was forced to make notes as I played (shown above) to try to solve the different challenges that the game through at me. How often do you have to really think when playing a video game?

As much as I despise the archaic and confusing aspects of Machinarium, I am glad that I was given a chance to play it to completion.  The world and characters made the game enjoyable, even during its most frustrating moments.  I’d love to see Amanita Design take another stab at the point and click adventure genre, but perhaps adopt some of the more modern mechanics that have been developed.

Would I rather buy one $59 game or 20 mobile games? With almost no exceptions, I’d rather have a mobile games. They fit into my 10-minute lifestyle really well, and I can start them up in 5 seconds.

I was slow to jump on this train, but Chris Kohler was right: this is absolutely the elephant in the room for Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Sorry, the market just isn’t going to support $60 games anymore. Well, that’s not quite true–there are a handful the market will support, but it’s only a handful, and it’s not enough for these companies to preserve the price structure.

My tolerance for the cost of games has long been lower than the $60 average price tag that a big budget title carries, but with the advent of cheap indie games on digital distribution platforms like Steam and smartphone marketplaces, many more gamers are joining this camp.  Why pay $60 for a game that offers 10 hours of enjoyment when you can pay $1 for a game that supplies double that, with the only tradeoff being a loss of production value?  It is getting to be a hard sell for the big publishers, and they are clearly struggling to adapt.

Further complicating the situation is that the average age of a gamer has crept up to ~36 – way higher than it used to be.  The market is not teeming with kids loaded with disposable income and infinite time any more – bite-sized experiences are far easier for a gamer on the go to pick up and play than anything that an AAA title can offer.  Most of the time I don’t have an hour or two to sit down and fire up a game – my typical play session tends to be thirty minutes or less in duration.

Frankly I’m okay with all of these changes in the industry.  Some of my favorite games this year have been bite-sized indie gems that I picked up for five dollars or less, and this has led to me playing more games over all, not less.  The AAA titles that I do purchase are generally a couple years old and highly discounted – it’s tough to justify sixty dollars for a game these days.

Donut-driven development is a simple concept:  if a developer’s code submission causes one of the team’s automated check-in or nightly builds to fail, then that developer has to go to Tim Hortons and buy a dozen donuts for the team to share or risk facing hungry cajoling from teammates.

Adhering to this system has two main effects.  Firstly, individual developers are less likely to carelessly submit patches because they know that there is a penalty – albeit a tasty one – associated with sloppy performance.  Secondly, the entire team’s waistlines grow in tandem as frosted goodness is spread around the office.

In all seriousness, institution some form of light slap on the wrist for broken builds is good policy.  Frequent broken builds lead to less productivity, lower code quality, and enhanced team frustration.

Many teams resort to shaming build breakers with a trophy or banner that they have to keep in their office until someone else breaks the build, however this can degrade developer morale over time.  While it is not professional to submit sloppy work, it is less professional to force someone to wear a dunce cap because of a mistake.

Donut-driven development has been a hit with the teams that have used it at my company.  We have relatively few broken builds, and everyone enjoys the social aspect of having a snack in the rare case that something does go wrong.

“This isn’t a Dungeon Siege game – it’s more like Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance!” the complaints went.  That got my attention.  My wife and I have been searching for a console-based action RPG for years with very limited success, and we loved BG: DA.  After playing the demo, Dungeon Siege III became a day one purchase for us.

Graphically, Dungeon Siege III is an extremely good looking game that runs smooth as silk on the Playstation 3. The game’s diverse environments – from the dark forests, to the bustling towns, to the oppressive dungeons – look and sound great.  The character models are well done, although some corners were obviously cut along the way – for example, facial animations are largely absent since you usually see the back of your characters (if anything) while they are speaking.  Combat is colourful, with player and enemy special attacks lighting up the screen frequently, and often spectacularly.

As a story, Dungeon Siege III was interesting enough to hold our attention, but ultimately was nothing special and did tend towards some of the standard tropes of the fantasy genre.  The game’s plot is mainly delivered though character dialog, with a small amount of narration thrown in to tie the different scenes together.  The world’s backstory is delivered through purely optional books and papers, which are scattered throughout the towns and dungeons.  Voice acting is a mixed bag – most of the NPCs are well done, however the two main characters that we used – Anjali and Reinhart – are absolutely awful in delivering their lines.

Speaking of the plot, like many modern roleplaying games, Dungeon Siege III allows the player(s) to make dialog-driven moral choices at key points during the game.  Since I’ve only played the game once I’m not sure how much consequence is afforded to your decisions, however early in the game there is the option to kill or release a fallen enemy, and she played a key role in quite a number of plot points throughout our story.  I’d be interested to see what happened if we had chosen to kill her.

Character progression choices in the game are fairly minimal, but do manage to force you to make some impactful decisions.  During the course of the game each character is guaranteed to obtain all nine of their skills, however those skills can be specialized using skill points that are earned with each level up and there are not enough skill points to max out more than a couple skills.  In addition to skill modifications, characters earn customization points that can be invested in the twelve specializations, which are different for each character.  Each specialization can be boosted by up to five points, and again there are not enough points to max out very many of these options. The equipment system is reminiscent of the Diablo experience; most of the loot is randomly generated, however there are a few unique (and powerful) pieces to collect along the way.

Combat forms the core of Dungeon Siege III’s gameplay, and it does not disappoint.  One button on your controller is mapped to a basic attack, which the other three trigger special attacks that consume mana.  Mana is restored by damaging enemies and collecting blue mana orbs (which drop frequently), which means that it pays to constantly launch special attacks and not just mash the basic attack button.  Holding one of the bumper triggers puts your character into defensive stance, and then pressing in any direction after that triggers a dodge move (which, for both Anjali and Reinhart is a teleport).  Blocking and dodging are essential to surviving not only the boss battles, but also the normal encounters; it pays to be mobile.  Finally, all characters have two combat stances – loosely mapped to hand-to-hand and ranged – and offensive skills are automatically mapped to one of these two stances.  To get the most out of your character you need to switch stances fairly frequently.  All of this leads to very active and technical gameplay – you do not have a hope of succeeding on normal difficulty if all you do is stand still and mash attack.  The game’s combat system feels very rewarding.

Boss battles in Dungeon Siege III deserve special mention, as these are the moments when the game ratchets up the difficulty and really challenges the players to step up their game.  Far from being raw slugfests, fighting a boss requires observation of attack patterns, aggro management, quick reflexes to evade area attacks, and quite frequently trash mob management.  When playing co-op, being vocal really paid off as my wife and I had to quickly communicate situational changes and let each other know what we were doing.  The bosses in Dungeon Siege III reminded me like all the best parts of an MMO raid encounter without having to deal with organizing dozens of players, slapping around AFKers, or handling whiny loot whores after the fact.

Although reviews have been mixed, as a couch co-op game Dungeon Siege III is a spectacular success.  It channels all of the best aspects of older games like Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, while updating the mechanics and graphics to work on newer systems for modern gamers.  I almost never replay a game, but both my wife and I have discussed the possibility of trying the campaign again with different characters, and making different choices along the way to see how the story plays out.  With nothing like this on the horizon any time soon, it may just be our best option.

OnLive and Square Enix announced yesterday that as an extra incentive for gamers who couldn’t quite bring themselves to pull the trigger on the new Deus Ex release, all boxed copies of the game will include a coupon for a free copy from cloud gaming company OnLive. I don’t really see it as a “seal the deal” offer but it might come in handy someday and hey, free stuff is free stuff, right?

Not if you bought it from GameStop. Shortly after it went on sale, buyers began reporting to GameSpy that their supposedly brand-new copies had been opened and that the OnLive coupon was missing. Dodgy, yes, but things didn’t get full-on greasy until an anonymous source provided the site with a photo of an email, allegedly from GameStop management, telling employees to pull the coupons and throw them away. “Our desire is to not have this coupon go to any customers after this announcement,” the memo said.

That’s right – GameStop employees were instructed to steal and destroy  pack-in content from a newly released game.  It makes you wonder what other casual theft that GameStop has been instructing its staff to perform in the name of hindering its competition.  Buy your games anywhere else other than GameStop – they don’t deserve your money after this underhanded stunt.

There are three main game elements that the demo does not touch on:  a scoring system, collectible weapons, accessories, and powers, and a variety of mini games.

Bayonetta is broken down into levels, each of which is further subdivided into “Verses”, some of which are optional.  Each verse is scored based on time, combo points, damage taken, item use, and deaths and at the end of a verse the player is awarded a trophy based on their performance.  There are six different trophies, which range from stone to pure platinum and earning the higher quality trophies deliver higher in game currency rewards.  At the end of each level players each an overall trophy that takes into account their performance  throughout all of the verses (including penalties for optional verses that were missed).  The best I ever managed to achieve for a full level was a Silver trophy – I’m not exactly adept at this sort of game.  Levels can be repeated at will, and the game keeps track of your best scores.  Perfectionists should have a field day with this feature.

Throughout the action, Bayonetta will be constantly picking up items and currency (halos) from defeated enemies and smashed scenery.  This booty can be spent mid-level at the shop (if you find it), or else between levels.  Shop items range from lollipops that heal you, to a variety of buffing candies, to a potent syringe that will revive you when you die.  In addition to consumables, there are weapons to buy (I almost exclusively used the swords once I unlocked them), trinkets that grant extra powers, or new moves to purchase that expand Bayonetta’s repertoire.  Unless you’re replaying a lot of levels you will have to be choosey in the shop – items are expensive, and you will not find enough halos to buy even a quarter of the total items in a single play through.

The final elements in the main game that were not present in the demo are the mini games that are used as a sort of palette cleanser to break up the levels a little bit.  Between each level is a carnival-style shooting game (Angel Attack!), however some of the verses within the levels deviate wildly from the core beat ‘em up action as well.  One of the best examples is a shmup sequence late in the game in which Bayonetta is riding on the back of a missile hurtling towards an enemy stronghold.  The action is reminiscent of the SNES classic Star Fox, with loads of shooting, dodging, and twirling through hordes of airborne enemies and the occasional big boss.  Other mid-level mini games include motorcycle racing, surfing, and some strange platforming.

As a player who does not generally enjoy beat ‘em up action games, I can truly say that Bayonetta was far more fun that it had any right to be.  The entire game was a candy-coated joyride from the start to the beginning, with forgiving enough mechanics and game play that anyone who can hold a controller should be able to button-mash their way through the main plot on normal difficulty.  Fans of the genre should be pleased with the amount of depth and finesse there is with the myriad of combos and the different items and weapons that can be brought to bear on their angelic foes.  If you see a copy of Bayonetta for $15 – like I did – be sure to grab it, it is well worth your time.

You may think you’re defending your favorite platform because it’s just that good. But, according to a recently published study out of the University of Illinois, you may instead be defending yourself because you view criticisms of your favorite brand as a threat to your self image. The study, which will be published in the next issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, examines the strength of consumer-brand relationships, concluding that those who have more knowledge of and experience with a brand are more personally impacted by incidents of brand “failure.”

The researchers performed two experiments, one on a group of 30 women and another on 170 undergraduate students, in order to see whether the subjects’ self esteem was tied to the general ratings of various brands. Those who had high self-brand connections (SBC)—that is, those who follow, research, or simply like a certain brand—were the ones whose self esteem suffered the most when their brands didn’t do well or were criticized. Those with low SBC remained virtually unaffected on a personal level.

The residual effect of this is that those with high SBCs tend to discount negative news about their favorite brands, and sometimes even ignore it altogether in favor of happier thoughts.

[...]

“Because the brand is seen as a part of the self by virtue of being intimately tied to the self, failure on the part of the brand is experienced as a personal failure,” reads the paper. “Therefore, in an effort to maintain a positive self-view, high SBC individuals react defensively to brand failure by evaluating the brand favorably despite its poor performance.

I wonder where that leaves me. I tend to attack brands or ideas that I dislike, even if I don’t have any good alternative in mind, or preconceived loyalties.

These deficiencies led me to go phone shopping with the following criteria:

• I’d like a keyboard – either slide out or on the face of the device. I dislike virtual keyboards immensely.
• I’d like to be able to view photos that people send me without them looking like line sketches, as well as play videos.
• I would like the phone to have a decent camera.

And of course, I don’t want a bloody smartphone.

Well, it didn’t take long for me to figure out that a basic phone meeting my three simple requirements does not exist.  Basic feature phones don’t have keyboards, and feature phones that do have keyboards are optimized for online interaction, boasting (unwanted) features like Facebook and Twitter integration, web browsing, and so on.  Even more damning, these feature phones are not all that far from having the capabilities of low end smartphones so they seem like purposefully gimped offerings to sell to suckers.

The sales people that I spoke to at phone kiosks were no help – when they weren’t busy trying to convince me that I wanted to buy their latest and greatest smartphone offering, they were looking at me like I had sprouted an additional arm because they simply could not grok the concept of someone wanting a plain old disconnected dumb phone.

After too many failed visits to wireless stores and a bit of soul searching, I’ve come to accept that I need to compromise a little bit:

In the next month or so I’ll be springing for a Blackberry Bold 9900.  Technically it is considered a smartphone, however it is more of a tool than a toy, unlike both iPhones or Androids.   A Blackberry has way more features than I need (or want), but the compulsion to pull it out and play with it incessantly (like most smartphone users that I know) should be lessened or, with luck, eliminated altogether.  I chose this model over top of a basic web-enabled feature phone because it seemed like a waste not to – I can buy an unlocked Blackberry for a good price due to my contacts and don’t need to bind myself to an inflated long term contract from any of the sleazy Canadian wireless providers.

The expressions of disbelief and snorts of derision from my co-workers when I told them my plan only confirm that I’ve picked the right phone for me.

Red Faction: Armageddon

The most recent installation of the moderately successful Red Faction series, Armageddon, is sadly also the last.  It’s a damning indictment of the mentality of the huge AAA publishers that a series that sells decently is not considered profitable enough to continue.  You sell a gazillion titles, or you get canned – there is rarely any middle ground.

As a third person shooter, Armageddon is a solid effort with enough unique flavor to set it apart from the me-too military games that see the most success amongst the unwashed masses.   If the demo is any indication, the arsenal that you command in the game is as outlandish as that found in a Ratchet & Clank title; aside from the boring assault rifle, Red Faction hands you a magnet gun, a charge launcher, and a singularity gun almost right out of the gates.  All of the weapons cause an incredible amount of damage, tearing apart enemies and the fully destructible terrain with equal ease.  It is completely possible to blow apart nearly everything in the game, including elements that are required to progress the plot.  Fear not, your character also comes with a nifty nano device (which I dubbed the Hand of God) that repairs all structural damage with a simple wave of your arm.  All of this combines in Red Faction: Armageddon to make the player feel like a total badass, and that’s always satisfying.

Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls

Many of the early roleplaying games that came out for home computers were turn-based first person dungeon crawls.  I didn’t like that style of game then and, as it so happens, I discovered that I still don’t liked them.

Labyrinth of the Lost Souls is unforgivingly old school: at the start of the game you manually create a party of six adventurers, selecting the name, sex, class, race, and stats for each character before being dumped out into a menu-based town filled with menu-based buildings to “explore”.  You can’t afford anything except perhaps a torch and a map to start, but eventually you’ll stumble into an NPC who will assign you a quest to dive into one of the game’s dungeons and…… kill ten rats.  (Okay, kill six goblins; close enough.)  Exploring the dungeon is tedious – you can only move in the four cardinal directions, and as far as I could tell you need to manually map out your surroundings if you don’t want to get lost.  Combat is vicious – the starting enemies hit hard, and since your characters are gimpy to start, death will occur.  After a half an hour I’d had more than my fill of the Wizardry demo – in this case 1980′s game design should have stayed in the 1980′s.

Eat them!

Back in 1986 Midway released an arcade game named Rampage that put players in control of movie monsters and set them lose to destroy a fictional cityscape.  Eat Them! is 2011′s version of Rampage, and it’s filled with just as much stupid fun.

Rocking a slick comic book vibe, Eat Them! takes the basic formula of rampant destruction and adds in a simple story mode and some cool monster creation facilities.  As you play through the game’s challenge levels you earn body parts that can be mixed and matched to design the monster of your dreams (or nightmares); completing a level allows you to progress the plot, but achieving various milestones (usually score-based) earns you the body parts.  This mechanic by itself adds a depth to the game which would not otherwise exist:  it’s not only important to cause destruction – you must cause destruction efficiently in order to get everything out of the levels.  Game play itself is what you expect:  you can punch, kick, and shoot buildings, monuments, and vehicles to rack up points while fending off the police force and military that are trying to take you down.  If you suffer enough damage, simply scoop up a handful of citizens and wolf them down to recover your health.  Eat Them! is silly, silly fun.

No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise

No More Heroes is, in a word, in-fucking-sane.

Let me start with the graphical style:  the game is rendered intentionally jagged despite being on a system that can output crisp perfect visuals.  All of the icons, GUI elements, and interface sound effects are torn right out of the 8-bit era, with oversized pixels standing out like eyesores.  Then there’s the plot:  you play an assassin currently ranked 13th in the world, and your job is to kill off all of the other assassins in front of you and become the best assassin in the world…. even if you don’t really want to.  Game play is mostly arena-based brawling, in which you use your lightsaber-like weapon to beat on your adversaries until a QTE prompt appears, at which point you dispatch them with excessive gore if you press the correct buttons.  I’m not sure who No More Heroes is designed for; while it is undeniably unique, it is definitely not for me.

Limbo

A critical darling ever since it was first released for the Xbox 360, Limbo has finally come to the PSN (and Steam) so that all serious gamers can enjoy it.

Limbo is a puzzle-platformer that is drawn completely in silhouette, to amazing effect.  I would have never believed that a mostly silent game drawn with grayscale art could be so gorgeous, evocative, and emotional.  In Limbo you play as a young boy trying to rescue his sister from a dark and dangerous forest.  As you explore your environment you will invariably stumble into a trap and die, often gruesomely.  In the demo I managed to fall into a pit of spikes, drown, get caught in a huge beartrap, get impaled by a giant spider, and fall to my death.  Dying only sets you back a few seconds, as you are reset to just before the area that killed you; this design decision allows death to be used as a learning tool, and not a frustrating impediment to progress.  Between the minimalist design, the dark and brooding atmosphere, and the great puzzles, Limbo is guaranteed to find its way into my library in short order.

Slow sales of their latest handheld are the stated reason for the unprecedented and aggressive price action by the normally-stoic gaming giant – less than a million units have moved in the United States since its launch.  To say that they are panicking would be an understatement.  Anticipating nerd rage from their core fanbase, Nintendo has offered up twenty games – ten NES classics and ten GBA ports – to be made available for download at a later date.  To me that feels like over-compensation, but I’m not about to complain.

What concerns me, as aptly pointed out by Chris Kohler in a recent article on Wired’s Game|Life, is that this price cut might not be enough.

On the one hand, the drastic nature of the cut, unprecedented in the company’s long history, puts Nintendo 3DS in a totally new pricing bracket. As Stephen Totilo pointed out on Kotaku, it is “no longer more expensive than an Xbox 360; it’s now cheaper than an iPod Touch.”

Except it’s not really cheaper than an iPod Touch. Sure, the price of entry is lower now, but what happens after that? New 3DS games cost $40 each. There are no demos, and third-party publishers seem to be taking active steps to make used games less appealing.

$40 is a not a price point at which you say, “Oh, hell, I’ll just try it.” When you’re a kid, $40 means you get new games on your birthday, at Christmas and maybe after getting a root canal if you cry enough. Meanwhile, you could just ask for an iPod Touch and stalk the Free Game of the Day websites, loading up your system with games while spending nothing.

The smart phone industry has been racing relentlessly to the bottom of the barrel in terms of pricing for games, and they have been slowly brainwashing consumers into believing that the proper price point for electronic entertainment is not $60 or $40 – hell, it’s not even $20 like I’ve long argued – it’s $0.99 per game, or $1.99 if the title is really good.

The problem with this mentality is that, except for a few outliers, smart phone games are primitive, simplistic, and cheaply made.  Huge megahits like Angry Birds are essentially knockoffs of free Flash browser games, and only the most complex offerings exceed the depth of the roleplaying games and strategy titles found on zero dollar services like Kongregate.

Full length games filled with expensive graphic and musical assets, complex mechanics, lengthy campaigns, and real depth cannot be produced for $0.99 per download unless they become wildly popular, and yet it is exactly these games – which will populate the Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita’s catalogs – that are being compared to Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope, or any other cheap smartphone diversion.

Young consumers are being trained to value all mobile gaming experiences the same, and are starting to believe that $5.00 is an exorbitant price to pay for a video game.  This isn’t healthy for the mobile industry, as these kids make up a huge portion of their business model.  There is certainly a place for disposable budget titles, however full length experiences should not be allowed to wither and die.

A 3DS price cut is not going to change many minds.  Nintendo needs to start by reducing the base cost of a 3DS game to $20, and then move to educate consumers of the increased value that these titles (and their gaming system) provide over and above the typical smartphone tripe.

It’s little insights like this that make artificial life systems like ECHO so intellectually engaging – I didn’t codify any of these behaviours, they manifest on their own as a side effect of some extremely simple rules.

Even though I have the basic model up and running and a big backlog of work to do, I find myself tempted to rewrite the core Web Critters engine in F#, a functional programming language.  Functional languages are much better suited to the type of processing that I’m doing down in the guts of the application, and lend themselves more easily to massive parallelization.  I’ve had an F# book sitting on my desk for months because I like to try to learn new programming languages every so often (it helps me keep sharp), but of course that means that I’d take a long time to reimplement what I have because I’d be taking my first steps with the language on a non-trivial application.

I’ll have to make a decision soon, but at least I’m back to thinking about Web Critters – it’s been neglected for too long.