Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Smoke & Mirrors: How BioShock Infinite Tricks You Into Liking Elizabeth

AI sidekicks in video games are pretty uniformly terrible. They get in your way, they're incredibly stupid, and they rarely add anything meaningful to the story. That's why escort missions in games are among the most hated, and why I wouldn't begrudge a player for assuming that BioShock Infinite would be little more than a ten-hour game about babysitting Elizabeth and making sure she doesn't run into any sharp corners.

I beat the game a couple days ago, and I'm happy to say that I never needed to babysit her or worry about her during combat. She's a wonderfully written character whose interaction with protagonist Booker DeWitt forms the core of BioShock Infinite's tale and is all the better for it. She's easy to care about and hard to forget. As far as AI partners in games go, Elizabeth is probably the best.

But the developers cheated to achieve that.

Friday, February 8, 2013

Everything Wrong With Dead Space 3's Opening Hours



I just got to Chapter 4 in Dead Space 3, and I've got to tell you, even as someone who played through the first two games multiple times, played all the spin-off games, and watched both of the animated movies, some things just don't make sense to me. Let's start from the top.

And yes, there will be spoilers.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

How Jetpack Joyride Applies A Decade's Worth Of Game Psychology To Keep You Hooked



Here was my to-do list when I woke up today:

  1. Swim some laps at the gym.
  2. Take out the garbage and the recycling.
  3. Cut my hair, trim my beard.
  4. Take a shower.
  5. Shop for groceries.
  6. Go to work.

I have done exactly none of those things. Mind you, I'm not going to work because the community college I work for decided to close for snow today (it's not even snowing) but I don't have a good excuse for the other ones. I've just been playing too much Jetpack Joyride.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

This Is Also Far Cry 3's Co-op



        

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

This Is Far Cry 3's Co-op



        

Sunday, January 13, 2013

The Later Levels In Rayman Origins Are Too Hard And It's Breaking My Heart



Playing Rayman Origins is sublime. It's so full of joy and whimsy that it's tough not to be seduced by its charm. There's some "pure glee" part of my brain that its able to tap into effortlessly every time I play. It's just fun.

But goddamn, the last stretch of levels is way too hard.

Rayman is all about precision platforming. Did you tap X to jump or did you hold it? How long did you hold it? Were you holding the run button? Letting off a hair too soon or too late can mean having to restart an entire level. The level design often asks you to take literal leaps of faith that the designers have mapped out a safe route through hell so that all you have to do is keep running to the right and jumping when needed, knowing there will be something there for you to land on.

When you pull it off, it's exhilarating. If feels like you can out-jump and out-pace anything the game throws at you, like nothing can touch you, like you're invincible. But one wrong move, one little slip, one zig when you meant to zag, and it's back to the start. And it is so easy to slip up.

It's not a huge problem in the early levels that strike a good balance between wanting you to move forward quickly and demanding perfection, but in these last few levels I've been playing, right near the end of the game, it's getting maddening, and believe me when I tell you: Rayman's whimsy is not nearly as charming the 30th time through the same level.

The demands are getting less forgiving, and it's getting less fun as a result.

The boss fights are worse because there's not even the thrill of sprinting at full speed through an entire level. They're single-screen, contained fights all about memorization and pattern recognition. It's trial-and-error design in the worst way; I get a little bit further each time, learning the next phase of the fight before inevitably dying and retrying. Again and again.

Listen, I like a good challenge. I've beaten Dark Souls four times now, and that's a game all about fiercely punishing you for making a single error, forcing you to memorize every inch of its world and its inhabitants.

But Rayman Origins is not Dark Souls. So far, I've loved Rayman because it's so colorful and cheerful and fun. I've had a blast with it until now, and I don't want it to end on a sour note because it randomly decided to ramp up the difficulty like crazy and now I have to play each level over and over until I stop wanting to play at all.

        

Thursday, January 10, 2013

what is delicious is six years old today, and that's pretty rad.

I've had this site for six years now. Man, that feels like a long time. Just look at this thing. It's gone through so many iterations and weird changes as I find new ways to refine the look and feel of the site and my writing that make me embarrassed for what came before. It's a totally different site than it used to be.

I mean, honestly, just look at the original layout template I built the site from. The whole site used to look like that. You can still see those foundations, but I've been slowly replacing almost every single piece of that template with something new of my own. That template was made for a different era of Internet, and it's absolutely insane how far the web in general has come in six short years. When I look at sites like Polygon, Kotaku, and Giant Bomb now, it's hard not to feel like a dinosaur with my classic two-column blog. I have some cool features here and there, but ultimately, I'm not a web developer. I dabble, I mess, I make due.

So my writing is where some of my biggest changes have come. I started out really sloppy, and I still feel that way sometimes when I read the work of more talented writers like Kirk Hamilton or Mark Serrels, but I'm still proud of everything I write. For instance, my review of Dark Souls is probably the best review I've ever written, and people really responded to it. Same with my examination of how broken Xbox Live Indie Games is, where I interviewed the games who made Super Meat Boy, the guys running the Summer Uprising community promotion, and a couple other developers.

I wouldn't have written anything nearly that good when this blog started.

So I don't know where this all goes from here. I never really know what the next change is for the site; it just kind of happens. There are some things I'd like to do, like put in real pages for each category instead of just having it display all reviews in descending chronological like it does right now, but it's the kind of non-essential feature that I'll just have to get to when I get to. I'm not getting paid for this. I don't have ads on the site and I never will.

But it'll be cool to revisit the site a year from now and see what it looks like, see where I am. That's why I used to like doing these yearly check-ins. They're self-indulgent to be sure, but they're fun to look back on.