MASSIVE DAMAGE

Originally posted on insert credit, I literally cannot stop watching this video every few hours or so the past couple days because it brings me that much joy. What is it? Well, judging by the author's tags and what we see, it's a guy playing Galaga in New Jersey in an arcade with his shirt off...and really getting into it:



There are so many minute happenings in this glorious 0:26 second clip, but let's start at the beginning. 0:01 in, where is that left leg going? It looks like the machine's pushing him away or he is a runner ready to bolt at the start of a race. How this helps him or is natural at all to anyone playing games baffles me. 0:03 in, there it goes again, but this time it looks like he's playing Twister and he just got left foot yellow and the only yellow dot left is somewhere in the back. He then plays pretty intently for about 9 more seconds when at 0:12 he does some sort of swatting motion with his right arm, which could possibly be construed as a fist pump. It's hard to say. He resumes playing and whoever keeps pulling the rope on his left leg tugs it just a little, and then again at 0:20. But then something changes, and he closes the gap between himself and the machine. Knees bent, torso mostly parallel to the arcade cabinet's upright position, he begins to rock and thrust his pelvis toward the coin slots, 3 pumps perfectly synchronized with the 'wahs' coming from the game. Soon after, the 26 seconds of pure voyeuristic pleasure ends. Great stuff. (Also worth mentioning is his presumably sweaty tee hanging over the Pac-Man machine.)

Labels: arcades, crazy legs, galaga, helmholz, no shirt

Does anyone remember the days when a little money could go a long way if you were careful and considerate? I sure as hell don't, but some people do, if the many hours spent accompanying the elderly down Memory Lane (or perhaps Dementia Boulevard) are any indication. In the modern world of entertainment, people are somehow managing to warm up to the idea of spending more and more of their (sometimes) hard-earned money to get less and less of the actual entertainment. Video games are a perfect example, with 60 dollars or more rarely earning more than 15 hours of gameplay. That's 4 dollars per hour of fun. Would you pay 4 dollars for an hour of fun? If so, you probably won't really appreciate what I'm about to tell you.

Just three days ago, I spent 15 dollars on a somewhat esoteric side-scrolling action title for Xbox Live Arcade called Castle Crashers. The next day, I started said game with my friends and ended up playing a total of about 12 hours over the duration of the weekend.

Let's see... that's 12 hours of fun for a 15-dollar game, and the fun is only just beginning.

I think we have a winner.

To put it simply, Castle Crashers is a masterpiece of the modern gaming age. Deceptively simple and elegant, it slid its way onto the online stage and quickly took the spotlight as one of the best selling XBLA games ever, if not the best. Full of wit and nonstop hack-and-slash action, the game's controls never get in the way of a good time, and the difficulty is enough to make you pay attention, but not so challenging as to marginalize that always-feared "casual gamer." The designers know their sidescrollers, and used their knowledge well to keep the fast-paced game varied enough to avoid it growing stale or repetitive. Possessing a myriad of unlockables, tunes any Newgrounds fan should recognize, and a general air of out-of-this-world enjoyment, Castle Crashers has impressed me more than at least 90% of the 60 dollar games I've paid for in the past few years. I recommend it without qualification, although the game becomes leagues more enjoyable with friends to play with you.

After a weekend of this refreshing game, one can only hope that projects from these kinds of developers continues to flourish, and that the consumer may finally decide that big price tags don't always equate to big fun.

Best 15 dollars I've ever spent.

Labels: Castle Crashers

In storytelling, there is a pattern where suspense is built, then released. Once established, the degree of suspense built can be increased with every iteration of the cycle, until the storyteller reaches the climax of the story and the plot is resolved. Alternatively, he or she, after having established the pattern, can deny the release until the pressure has built to a fever pitch, making the release that much more intense whenever it comes.

Normally I'd be talking about a movie, not a game in this respect (just a personal peeve, each seems too disparate a medium to be trying to compare directly), but in this I think that this principle can be applied very well to the flow of modern games. I'll use Assassin's Creed as an example (it's been a while so bear with any inconsistencies): Going into the scenes where you actually slay your marks, everything is calm and quiet (though it is possible to bust in the front door most of the time, it isn't the most successful strategy and not the one I'll use for an example here). Tension builds as you near the target (and you're forced into seeing an example of the exact kind of villany the mark is about to die for). The release comes when you drop in on your target and deliver the neck stabbin', while the chase afterward (however tense) is, in fact, the falling action.

Now, that's the cycle for the actual assassinations. After each one, however, the overall stakes are raised: The player's equipment gets upgraded or he learns a new attack, and the guards in the game become just a little more aware of Altair's appearance. In this, the tension of the entire game is raised, and a release from this is also required for the cycle to be complete.

I'd argue that being booted out of the memory after a successful execution provides that release for the overall tension being built by playing through them. Some called it an interruption; I call it an intermission. When I was playing through, I found myself actually looking forward to these sequences (not just for the curiously faithful representation of the deliciously demure Kristen Bell). Maybe it was only for the bits and pieces of story it meted out at a very deliberate pace or the light adventure game elements it put before me, but whatever it was, I think the entire game might have been a little bit flatter without them.

The most important thing a review can give me is an idea of what I’m going to be doing while I’m playing the game. If it’s Metal Gear Solid 4, I don’t need to know how ridiculous the story is going to be. I need to know if it has multiple axis inversion options, if the control scheme is conducive to the activities I’ll be doing through the course of the game and if not, if the control scheme is at all customizable. If it’s SoulCalibur IV, I don’t need to know that the story mode can be finished in fifteen minutes with a scrub character like Yoda, I need to know that the online is riddled with lag, the options for customizing a character have actually been scaled back from the previous installment, and that game balance in general will need some severe tweaking before the game can even be taken seriously. And for Burnout Paradise, I don’t need to know how immersive DJ Atomica’s blurbs help make the game, I need to know whether I can silence him if I find him annoying without changing the volume of my vehicle’s engine, if I can retry events I just failed, or if I can even cancel events I’m currently participating in that I already know I’m going to fail (for the record, you can’t do any of these things–but you could in previous Burnout games. Progress?).

It’s all about what I’ll be doing and how I’ll be doing it, what impedance I’ll face from bad design decisions, poor programming, or what have you. These are the things that make my controller fly, as opposed to anything having to do with story, setting, themes, graphics, etc. In a well-written review, those kinds of things can have a place, but for what I play games for and what I get out of games, these things are completely tertiary to me, as is an arbitrary number with no meaning or value to me placed on the sum total worth of the game.

That said, I haven’t been reading reviews much anymore. If I do, I’m looking at them after I’ve played a game to see what the person writing the review got out of the game compared to what I did. As for choosing what I spend my time with, I play demos, I rent, and I talk to people whose opinions I understand. I know my own tastes and what I want from a game well enough that trusting someone else’s opinion I’ve never met and never will meet or understand (however valid it may be by being published or on a website) is both counterproductive and a waste of time. I think I remember an ad from a gaming era past, and it’s still a valid quote: “Trust no one. Play it for yourself.” Really, if we aren’t playing for ourselves anyway, who are we playing for?