Games of 2013: Part Three

[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three] [Part Four]

Dark Souls (From Software)

I first played Dark Souls in 2012, but I never got far. After much grinding, I reached the gargoyles on the church roof, decided I ‘got it’, and put it aside. But I continued to hear stories. Whispered rumours of forests and tombs and painted worlds and an ancient city and demonic ruins. I read “The Hollowed Killer of Lordran” and was captivated by the mention of these names and places that were uttered, like foreign countries on continents I had never heard of. My Twitter feed was still a crossfire of characters and spells and tactics and other words that I didn’t even know what they signified. Eventually, it felt like I had read the opening chapter of The Lord of the Rings but never left The Shire. I needed to know what everyone else was talking about. I needed to see what else was out there.

So I returned. This time, I was willing to use guides and walkthroughs all the way through. I was less concerned with ‘beating’ the game than ‘getting through it’ just to see what was there. I started a new character, a pyromancer on Twitter’s recommendation, and went on my way. What took me about twelve hours on my previous game took me about two. A few hours later and with a bit of help I beat the gargoyles and rang the first bell. I ventured into Blighttown and Queelag’s Lair by myself to ring the second bell. With a guide’s help, I defeated the Iron Golem of Sen’s Fortress and took photos of my television screen as I set foot in Anor Londo. With the help of human strangers I defeated both the painted world, and Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough. I didn’t finish the game—at least, not yet—but I got that bit further. There’s still more to see, but I feel like I understand and appreciate Dark Souls and its world that bit more.

Most satisfying of all was that feeling of camaraderie with other players past and present. Anyone who has played Dark Souls is more than happy to help a newcomer. I felt this bug myself when I saw people start the game after me; so eager I was to jump in and give them tips. It’s because people who have played the game understand the joy of Dark Souls is not in overcoming the game by yourself, as ostensibly single-player as the game might be, but in the sense of solidarity with other players. The joy of the game is in overcoming this cruel game together: in being helped by those that come before you, and helping those that come after you. It’s players versus game both inside the game and outside of it. The world feels so hostile to make friendship feel so warm. 

So when I decided I would use guides and walkthroughs to see the world at any cost, I was accidentally approaching the game how the game should be approached: defeated at any cost. When I put aside my stubborn sense of ‘fair play’ and ‘doing it myself’, I realised that there is no ‘fair play’ where Dark Souls is concerned. It refused to treat the player fairly, so why should the player treat the game fairly? Swallowing my pride and using guides just to get through the game didn’t weaken my experience in the game, but made my antagonistic relationship with it all the more vivid.

Vagrant Story (Square)

I didn’t return to Dark Souls the moment I thought about doing so. I spent several months hesitating beforehand. I felt the desire to play it again, but not the confidence. So, instead, I returned to Square’s very odd and fascinating Playstation title Vagrant Story. It had been years since I last played Vagrant Story, but my memory of it gave it a kind of Dark Souls vibe. Not necessarily in mechanics, but in atmosphere: the solitary character in a quiet and dead city full of monsters. Just without the finger acrobatics demanded of Dark Souls.

So, on my Vita, I started a new game of Vagrant Story. I found Yasumi Matsuno’s game fascinating for the ways it mutated and mashed together both traditional JRPG and action RPG elements, combining command menus with semi-real-time combat. 

I enjoyed its systems, as dense as they are deep. There is the peculiar mechanic that the more you use a weapon on a type of enemy, the stronger that weapon becomes against that type of enemy (and the weaker it becomes against an opposite enemy type). This requires both grinding and planning. Attacking every enemy with the same sword will get you nowhere. Instead, you must use this sword for beasts, that hammer for zombies, that crossbow for humans, etc. Where it breaks down, however, is when you come across a boss that is a type that you have rarely confronted before. So, to be sure, it is not a balanced game.

Having to constantly change weapons has the potential to be terrible, especially in a game that predates the normalisation of hotkeys on console games. Every time you want to change weapons, you must open your menu system, open the equipment menu, scroll to your weapon, open the menu of all your weapons, find the right weapon, equip it, and press cancel about five times to climb up out of the menu pit. This can get pretty infuriating, especially as you want to be changing weapons every third or fourth enemy. Indeed, I remember it infuriating me last time I played the game.  What got me through this time, though, was a desire to play the game ‘slow’. I wasn’t rushing; I didn’t need to get anywhere quickly. I would play the game at its own pace, and Vagrant Story’s pace is slow. The minimal background music and the environmental stillness makes Vagrant Story’s world feels timeless much as Dark Souls’s world feels timeless. It wants you to take your time, so I took my time. When I did this, constant burrowing through menus felt a bit more tolerable.

Most of all, though, I enjoyed the game overarching aesthetic, both in the world and in the menus. In menus, the audio and visual design is satisfying. Every menu dongs like a grandfather clock as you enter it, and swipes away with a ‘swoosh’ as you go back up a level. There are vast swathes of information about every piece of equipment, but it is all relatively easy to parse. In the world itself, however, the game’s visual style really shines. Vagrant Story is one of the few games I have played that takes the graphical look imposed on so many Playstation-era games (chunky with low-res textures) and turns it into a style. Rooms, enemies, and characters are all modelled in very intentful and particular ways. These are not just low-polygon, chunky humans, but stylisied humans that fit the game’s technological constraints majestically. Often I would enter first-person (which would have the surreal effect of pausing game time, but not character animations, so enemy skeletons would just sway and breathe contently in front of you) to look around the wonderful buildings and at the phenomenally detailed character models. Indeed, so much detail is only visible from that first-person perspective. Make no mistake: Vagrant Story is a beautiful game.

Ultimately, it was the outdated save system that defeated me. I encountered a difficult boss a significant distance from the closest save point and felt my enthusiasm be sapped from my body. So I never finished Vagrant Story, but I’m incredibly glad I returned to it.

Earth Defense Force 2017 (Sandlot)

Earth Defense Force 2017 (EDF) is one of those Japanese games people like to point at and laugh about being “So bad it’s good” when, really, what they mean is “that game is incredibly good despite being made on a tight budget”. “So bad it’s good” claims, especially when applied to Japanese games, usually just refers to an imagined level of graphical fidelity not reached, of a certain sincerity to its ‘wackiness’, of a jangliness and a clunkiness. Binary Domain and Deadly Premonition are examples of sincerely good games that are sidelined under the “so bad it’s good” label when, really, they are only bad if you use the wrong measuring stick.

EDF places you in the role of a single soldier alongside many others, defending Tokyo from giant bugs and aliens. Though, I get less of a sense of the bugs as ‘giant’ and more of a sense that I, in fact, am really small. I feel like a toy soldier in a Tokyo diorama put too close to an anthill. Regardless, the sense of drama and scale are the same. The visuals are lo-fi and the animations are jangly, but none of this detracts from the breathtaking spectacle that is watching a wave of giant ants pour over skyscrapers towards you. The b-grade horror music looping in the background only adds to the atmosphere.

This is a game with no pretension, a game that does so well exactly what it is trying to do. Yes, it is ‘rough’ and low budget, but time and labour have clearly been dedicated to the places it needs to be dedicated for the game to achieve what it wants to achieve. The sense of scale, in both quantity and sheer size, in EDF is unmatched by any other game I can recall playing, with the possible exception of Shadow of the Colossus.

Doom 3 (Id Software)

Doom turned twenty years old this year. That feels like a big deal, and I’ve been enjoying the various retrospectives  coming out that are trying to appreciate just why it was so special (none more than Liz Ryerson’s excellent video series). Doom 3, however, seems to be often dismissed for not reaching some ideal, nostalgia of the original games. For not ‘being Doom’. At the same time, though, it also seemed to fail at being what, on the surface, it looked like it wanted to be: namely, a survival horror game. It seemed torn between wanting to be a run’n’gun game and a survival horror game. Playing it directly after a replay of the first Doom, though, I found it incredibly enjoyable. I approached it like Doom, running and gunning through its corridors. This gave me, through the jump scares, a constant sense of paranoia. Playing it ‘like Doom’ drastically changed my experience of the game, for the better.

I’ve already written quite extensively about Doom 3 in a Notes posts so I won’t repeat myself here.

Spider (Vector Park)

This guy.

Amazing animation and a simple idea incredibly executed.

[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three] [Part Four]

February Writing

A quick summary of the writing I did in February. As previously mentioned, I'll be writing less this year than I was last year. This is partly because I want to commit more time this year to my academic writing (both getting my PhD properly underway and hopefully getting some journal articles out the door) and also because I simply wasn't happy with the quality of my stuff when I was writing weekly pieces at multiple outlets. But even though I am writing less, I'm happier with the quality of the stuff I'm writing now, so that is good, and I have some ideas for some features I want to write in the coming months that I'm really excited about.

Anyway. Things I wrote. At Unwinnable I only have one piece this month. I wanted to look at this interesting thing that happens when I play games like Antichamber and Where Is My Heart?. Namely, I get really, really exhausted just from thinking. So I wrote about that.

At Games On Net I have two "You Know What I Love?" columns this month. The first one is about the Borderlands 2 enemy type, the Goliath, which I think is a really interesting enemy. The second one is about grinding as I've enjoyed it in several games I've been playing recently.

Also at Games On Net this month, I had the opportunity to head to Sydney for a Bioshock: Infinite press event. So I wrote a preview of that, which I'm fairly happy of (as far as previews go), and I also interviewed the game's Director of Design, Bill Gardner.

In February I decided to go back and give Dark Souls a second chance after failing miserably at it when it first came out. Subsequently, I've played the game for about fifty hours in a rather short period of time. I had lots of thoughts about how the game in general and the level design specifically communicate the world to the player as hostile and stand-off-ish. I put together these thoughts for my first even piece at Bit Creature, which is exciting.

Last month I had a "Places" piece in Edge about Skyrim's The Reach. It was republished online this month.

Earlier in the month I gave a very casual lecture about the term 'nongame' and why it is terrible and discriminatory. I wrote about it briefly here, and provided a link to the (not very good quality) recording of the (not very good quality) talk.

And that is all for this month. The only other news is that Killing is Harmless is now available on Kindle. You can purchase it from Gumroad to get the Kindle version along with the pdf and epub formats, or you can now also buy it for Kindle alone directly through Amazon.

My Top Twenty Games of 2011: Part Two

So continues my countdown of my personal top twenty games of 2011. This is the second post in the series, leading on from Part One.

16. Dark Souls (From Software)

Objectively, Dark Souls is a great game. Subjectively, Dark Souls is not at all my kind of game. The latter is why it is so far down my list; the former is why it is on my list at all.

Dark Souls is an incredibly difficult action RPG. Well, then again, ‘difficult’ is perhaps the wrong word. Perhaps ‘demanding’ is more accurate. Dark Souls demands you figure things out for yourself and will punish you every time you don’t, every time you decide you can do something solely because you are the player and you want to. It’s like the school master with a cane whipping kids who don’t learn their times tables. It teaches its lessons by punishing you and making you do it again.

More important than training your character in Dark Souls is training yourself. You must figure out when to parry, when to counter, when to wait, when to pounce. There is a fluid link between controller and character that leaves you feeling in control of your character’s movements like few other games do. Consequentially, when you fail you only have yourself to blame, and when you succeed, the glory and the praise is all your own. You fight and bleed for each pixel gained in Dark Souls and the smallest progressing feels like the ultimate accomplishment. When I completed the game’s very first boss, less than an hour into the game, I gleefully and earnestly tweeted my feat in full caps, I was so excited.
Level design, too, deserves to be applauded. What originally seems like a linear experience opens up and links back together as you progress and open the world up. The way a drawbridge opens or a ladder extends or a door unlocks to place you two steps from somewhere that was previously two hours away shows incredible foresight in design.

What is perhaps most interesting about Dark Souls is that it proves that not every game has to be for everyone in order to be commercially viable. Unfortunately, however, the flipside of this is many people making the absurd claim that Dark Souls proves that “hardcore” games are better and “they just don’t make them like they used to.” I hate this way of thinking, the idea that most of today’s games are bad solely because they can be played by more people. But still, I am glad that games like Dark Souls are still able to exist.

Perhaps the most nuanced and articulated discussion of Dark Soul's unique difficulty that successfully goes beyond a simplistic "hard equals good" came out just today in Chris Dahlen's detailed analysis of Sen's Fortress, a part of the world I never got to. I wrote an article for Gameranx about how Dark Souls’s audiovisual and thematic design justify its mechanical design of essentially grinding. I was really happy with how this article turned out. Still, not long after I wrote it, after about twenty hours of playing, I decided it was time to give up—Dark Souls had beaten me. But just last week I read Simon Parkin’s absolutely excellent retrospective on the game at Eurogamer, and now I can feel myself being tempted back to it…


15. Whale Trail (ustwo)

Yet another Canabaltesque for iOS. I was ready to dismiss Whale Trail as an inverted Tiny Wings try-hard. The cuteness seemed forced and superficial and it undoubtedly lacks the focus and soul of Tiny Wings. But beneath the dumb cuteness is a very tight mechanical experience. After spending a bit of time with it, I came to love Whale Trail as its own unique Canabaltesque game with its own challenges and innovations.

It is not about getting as gar as possible so much as it is about keeping as closely to the path laid out for you as possible. Collecting bubbles give your whale flying fuel (or something) and, more importantly, increase your score’s multiplier, while hitting clouds decreases it. So you want to fly the whale as closely to this path as possible. The opposite of Tiny Wings, not touching the screen will send the whale downwards, while touching will have him fly upwards, and holding for a longer period will have him do a loop-de-loop.

Controls are tight and you have a surprisingly high level of control over the whale’s route. Though, the game does have one major set back in its flawed scoring system. Your multiplier goes up as you collect bubbles and down as you hit clouds, but as bubbles become more sparse and scattered as the game progresses, the possibility of regaining your multiplier after hitting a cloud becomes less and less likely. If you haven’t hit your high score before you hit your first cloud, you might as well quit there and then. A sad oversight in an otherwise great little game.


14. Atom Zombie Smasher (Blendo Games)

There are not too many single-player videogames that you can ‘lose’. You can die in plenty of them, to be sure, but you can’t straight out lose in too many of them. This more than anything else is what makes Atom Zombie Smasher stand out: you can—and probably will—lose many times before you eventually win. But this isn’t a little game like Binding of Isaac where losing a game means you have lost a five or ten minute game. A game of Atom Zombie Smasher could take an hour or more before you finally accept you are going to lose.

This is how Atom Zombie Smasher manages to be one of the most horrifying, desperate, and depressing zombie games I have ever played. This despite the great level of abstraction in the games visuals, with humans represented as yellow dots and zombies as pink dots. The goal is to rescue as many humans as possible from a city slowly but surely being overrun and infested. Those you leave behind will be infected and contribute to the zombie AI team’s score.

Odds become increasingly depressing as the zombies take over more and more territories in greater and greater numbers. Often, you find yourself playing a zero-sum game, willingly destroying many innocent lives just to keep back the zombie tide for another day.

There’s something horrifying about the birds-eye view, too. About that final group of yellow dots swarming around what will surely be the last helicopter out of there as the purple hordes close in. You can imagine the violence and chaos as the last fifty humans try to fit on a helicopter that can only carry twenty. It just goes to show that you don’t need blood and gore for a good zombie tale—your imagine can do just fine by itself.


13. Terraria (Re-Logic)

“2D Minecraft” is an unfair oversimplification of what Terraria is, but it sure is a good way to sell copies. Certainly, Minecraft is Terraria’s obvious main influence, but Terraria takes the base fundamentals in a totally different direction. Where Minecraft is about using a few base instruments and simple resources for whatever you wish, Terraria is about using a vast variety of resources to craft a vast variety of instruments to then find different resources to then craft different instruments. Grappling hooks, health upgrades, harpoons, flying boots, laser guns, etc. Etc. Where Minecraft is less about any kind of progressing and more about existing, Terraria is far more about progressing. The special weapons and areas and occasional boss battles craft a slightly more directed experience than that found in Minecraft.

It’s an interesting formula that says as much about what Minecraft is as what it isn’t, and it led to to crown Terraria as an anti-Minecraft in my review for Kill Screen. Terraria is the first of the inevitably many games that will follow in Minecraft’s wake. It is not a clone, but a contributor to an exciting new genre.


And that's Part Two done. Tomorrow we enter the top ten. Exciting!

Dark Souls: A Time To Grind

I wrote an article for Gameranx about temporality in Dark Souls and how it justifies the centrality of grinding within the game's play. Some disagree with my rather broad definition of "grinding", but I am really happy with the piece, regardless. It is an idea I have been musing on for a few weeks and was planning on just throwing up here on the blog, so I am glad I was able to give it a proper home.

Time and games is fascinating. It is something my Honours supervisor kept returning to this year throughout my thesis, but which ultimately I did not have the time to look at. So many different games deal with time in so many different ways. Lots of people are saying lots of interesting things about how videogames deal with and disrupt space, and I'm looking forward to when time and temporality are given the same appreciation.