But it is a rather funny shopped image. Nice job Pete359.

 

Electronic Arts, Harmonix, and Energizer have all teamed up to give me one hell of a headache. The past month my girlfriend gave me Rock Band 2 Special Edition (you know the one with a bunch of fake instruments) as a present and since then I have drained the batteries that were included with my guitar controller and the drum pads. Being the thrifty gamer I am I decided it was time to invest in some rechargeable batteries. Not familiar with the inherent pitfalls of different battery types I went ahead and purchased some relatively cheap NiMH batteries which I discovered after charging them that they did not fit the inside the guitar controller. Like any man should do in the first place when faced with an unknown I went to the instruction manual that came with the controller and found this: "Use only fresh AA standard alkaline batteries." OK fine that's great, I'm sure there is some sort of design advantage to using 3 standard alkaline batteries. Then I remembered seeing this offer in the store when I was looking at rechargeable AAs. A four pack of Energizer AA batteries with a special offer for a free Rock Band 2 downloadable track. There was only one problem, the batteries were not alkaline but lithium and anything but alkaline are FORBIDDEN making the promotion pointless because the batteries would void my warranty if I used them in the controllers. I'm no battery expert and I'm definitely not familiar with the inner workings of Harmonix or Energizer but you'd think someone at one of those companies would read their own freaking instruction manuals. After a long search through both Harmonix's Rock Band forums and support and EA's support search engine I came up with a single thread with a voice of reason and he is known as Thorr69. So what's the deal you three? I'm not saying you guys need to own up to your mistakes, Thorr69 has taught me better, but why are the forums my last hope to obtain information about your products? Also why do I have to register with your website to email you a question? I guess that's another rant for another time.

Last night off XBLA I downloaded the demo to Penny Arcade Expo’s PAX 10 Audience Choice Award winner (and Independent Games Festival 2009 finalist), The Maw.  Twisted Pixel's 3D light-puzzler/platformer is a cute little thing.  But Audrey II started off all adorable in the Little Shop of Horrors, too.

Frank the blue alien (that’s you) is strong-armed into some spaceship’s science lab holding cell.  An immediate bond formulates between Frank and the Maw who’s also in a heavily-watched cell.  Alarms inexplicably go off and rumbling tosses everything about.  Frank awakens at the crash site.  The translucent purple Maw and Frank, quickly reunited, are fast friends.  Frank groans with a headache from the impact.  The Maw’s excitement is tongue-wagging.

A couple hexic-uniformed guards also regain their senses, beat back the zealous but still miniscule Maw—whose panic attack goes off with Kill Bill-like sirens—before a drop ship swoops in and lassoes its guards aboard and away.  The Maw’s unbridled enthusiasm is immediately infectious.  I walk across the blocky crash site, find and then fearlessly don a wrist-mounted electronic leash that tethers me to the Maw.   The Maw doesn’t seem to mind at all.  The soundtrack kicks in with chewy, beatbox-infused jungle rhythms....

We emerge from a narrow, chocolaty canyon and into a glen populated by round, bouncy, inarguably adorable creatures.  To my horror—and then to my amusement—The Maw swallows one of the bouncy creatures whole.  Unleashing the Maw, it bumbles about the glen but can’t catch up to the bouncy creatures.  I call him back with some alien “suwee!” and it leashes up to me again.  I lead him around, and without warning, run him in a circle, letting him chomp down a diet of bouncy creature thingies.  If I unleash him, he pretty much stays, licking his lips (and his cyclopean eye) at the prospect of his next meal.

At a boulder-blocked portion of the trail, I learn that the leash can also tether to inanimate objects.  The boulder, many times my size and weight (Frank’s, that is), pulls along nicely with the leash.

We arrive at an even larger glen, this one populated by an even greater varieties of swaying, bulbous plant life, with yellow question marks (a recognizable enough trope in videogames nowadays) floating above the heads of some plants that look like a giant crossbreed of Venus Flytrap and Velociraptor.  I approach, the Maw safely in tow.

The Veloci-Flytraps panic, the Maw panics, I don’t see what the big deal is, and the glen is now jumping with more snack-sized bouncy thingies.  The Maw sets about its single-minded task of devouring anything even remotely appearing on a carnivorous menu—and it grows yet again.  While only waist high five minutes ago, the Maw is now looking over my head, and he thinks (with a bubble cloud) about his next meal…which is decidedly a much larger, four-legged Spore-like creature it spied earlier on the other side of the glen.

I take him to dine on small, bouncy creatures and the Maw chomps down gladly, always chomping, but the four-legged creatures it was thinking about eating have torch-lit tails.  The Maw chomps one, spits it out, lets out another alarmed yell, then bounds off to the base of a waterfall and starts swallowing gobs of water.

Distressed, I unleash the Maw in the running stream.  I run to the firebrand creatures, lasso an unwilling one, then drag it back to the stream.  Tssss, the torchy creature loses its fire, I re-leash the Maw, the Maw swallows the formerly-firey creature in an enthusiastic gulp, then the Maw itself turns into an orange, blistered, charcoal-smoked, fire-breathing version of the Maw.  It starts gushing flames out at anything moving in a relatively bouncy fashion around it, burning an orange radius around itself.  I run the Maw straight at the Veloci-Flytraps that frightened the Maw off before, and the Maw belches fire all over them in an unhesitant stream.  Me and the Maw press on to the next corridor, and the demo draws to a close.

So, what have we learned?  The Maw joyously devours anything and everything (except Frank the blue alien for no other reason than we need two living components to this boy-and-his-dog tale), while the Maw grows and morphs into different manifestations of whatever it snacked on.  Don’t try to eat anything you can’t swallow whole.  Don’t eat anything that’s currently on fire.  And witness “You are what you eat” taking on literal proportions.  Sure, it's cute, but I won't be going back for seconds right away.

Despite Gravity Bone's blocky facade, this (short, thrilling) game of spy vs. spy won't be confused with the LEGO series.  Keeping itself focused, the action gets quickly rolling as you descend in an elevator to some millionaire's Frank-Lloyd-Wright-styled club in the hills.  The blockheaded crowds are already parsed off into gabby circles, black masks marking this as a stiff-necked masquerade, while busboys swiftly balance platters of wine flutes through the crowds of privileged wealth.

 There's a flashcard-sized piece of paper in your hand with simple, typewritten instructions:  "THE SATURDAY CLUB.  Business initiative.  Wetworks.  Go to the FURNACE ROOM."

Assuming you accept your mission, you're in for a brilliantly-paced 20 minutes-or-so rendering of a contract killer's 9 to 5.  There's more than just a hint of Portal in how the game directs you across the levels and in how it congratulates you for a job well done.  All of which is an entirely welcome homage.

Download Gravity Bone from Blendo Games.

From time to time when you agree to review a game, the PR firm slips another game in the envelope with the one you're reviewing. They usually do this to get a game that hasn't gotten a lot of notice in front of a few more people. And they don't even ask you to review it. They're just hoping you'll give it a look and if you like it, you'll mention it on the site. I know this is part of the "inside baseball" some readers don't care about. But every once in a while the game they slip in the envelope is better than the one you actually agree to review. For some in the gaming public, NPPL: Championship Paintball 2009 would be one of those games. 

NPPL 2009 is a product of FUN Labs and Activision. It is to paintball what all the WWE games are to wrestling, giving the player the opportunity to take the place of his or her favorite professional paintballer, and compete in tournaments across the globe. While paintball doesn't have anywhere near the following that wrestling does, it's a decent first person shooter, at least in short bursts.

This game has a lot going for it. You can play in exhibition mode where you're just joining a team and going out to shoot the crap out of your opponent, against the AI. You can do the same against human opponents in online games over Xbox Live. When you are playing in career mode, you take over the management of a team, and aside from running around shooting up opponents, you're also responsible for picking your teammates, setting active lineups, and purchasing equipment upgrades for your team paid for by winning tournaments.

This isnt to say the game is all-together perfect. For one thing, it's a single player game locally. Games like this are a lot more fun in a multiplayer format, and while Xbox Live works for this, I've found short team matches are better for local multiplayer. That's the other major flaw I've found so far. Many of the individual matches are over in like a minute or two tops. The battles are occasionally intense, but they are incredibly short. While the matches are fun while they last, a full tournament takes only a few minutes to complete.

I'm still playing my way through, and I'm hoping the courses get more complex and the battles longer, but right now it seems like a fun game that might be good for paintball players looking for a way to play when there's two feet of snow outside, or FPS junkies looking for a fix when they don't have long to play.

It's not always easy to stretch out our legs as gamers.  I'll raise my hand on that one.  I'm guilty.  In the past year there was more than one game I picked up that was suffixed with a Roman (or Arabic) numeral II, III, or IV.  But, in contrast to the times where it can be hard to stretch our legs, at times it's even harder to sit.  And be still.  Criminally few games bestow you with that simple pleasure.  There have been many times with many games that I've marveled at screenshots, or paused a pixelated video, all in the name of soaking in more details than could ever be possible caught midswing in whatever momentous direction I'm barreling towards, whatever endorphin-soaked booster shot a game has injected into my backside. 

But The Graveyard isn't that kind of game, if the ever-inadequate term "game" can even be used with a straight face in this instance.  In this case, we can don a polite countence and use the even more nebulous term "experience," were we so inclined.

Developed by the independent Belgian studio Tale of Tales and launched in Spring of last year (I only caught wind of this game when I saw the nominees for the 2009 Independent Games Festival), The Graveyard posits itself as the antithesis to what is conventionally perceived as a videogame.  And as with many things, some of the greatest depths can be plumbed from the simplest premises.  

You're an old woman clad in the vestements of old age, a cane gripped in your left hand to help along the hobble.  You're at the entrance of a graveyard.  And you make your way into the graveyard.  I make no apologies for that, because the brilliance is in the details, and The Graveyard has the ability--if you're of the disposition; perhaps the planets simply aligned for me just right this evening--to make you contemplate the fragility of the human experience.  (I will also, strange as this sounds, recommend that you play the demo through to completion, and then play the full game.  The full game will stir you and capture you unawares in what was seemingly a finite, understood, and unsurprising moment.)

As I traversed the graveyard, the gameworld slowly uncurled its fingers, one detail at a time.  In no particular order, my senses unerringly began to take in the sights and sounds of the graveyard.  Pigeons cooing, followed by a rustle of feathers.  Cicadas buzzing in the monochromatic warmth.  Clouds in relentless pursuit of one another, their shadows in pursuit of them.  The uneven crunch of gravel underfoot.  The distant barking of a dog.  Etched stone versus engraved skin.

I'm not going to give you the pleasure of hearing some caveat that goes "This game isn't for everybody!"  Because, to preempt the question as to whether you are or whether you aren't the type of person this game is meant for, you already know.

That was the question Sean and I were asking each other when we showed up at the Innovelis booth this morning to take a look at their BudFits and CordFits products.  I have no idea what happened to the folks or their products (but you can speculate all you want considering we are in Vegas), but the picture below is what we showed up to…and promptly left from…

 

 

I am an unabashed "fan" of the US Civil War. Fan is the wrong word, but I have never figured out what the right word is for being fond of a particular war. To be a fan of war in general is really just wrong, and that's not me. But I figure being interested in one war is ok. So what does that make me? A civil war afficianado? A civil war devotee? It's not so much the history of the war as much as the underlying mentality that would allow two halves of the same country to go after each other like pitbulls in Michael Vicks back yard. Anywho, back to the game I'm supposed to be talking about here. Civil War: Secret Missions is a History Channel game developed by Cauldron and released by Activision. Ok, that is WAY too much bold for one sentence. Now that I've gotten the part that studies have shown 97.24% of readers don't care about out of the way, I can get into my early impressions.

Civil War: Secret Missions is kinda like a trip to your local museum of science and industry; It's mostly about boring old stuff, but they manage to make it fun by turning it into games and experiments. In CW: SM, you play the role of a solider (for the north or south, depending on the mission), working with a small unit of AI soldiers causing mayhem behind enemy lines. The learning part of the game comes in the form of animations and text describing real Civil War battles, and the actions of the soldiers and commanders who carry out the exact raids you'll be mimicing in the game. Many of the missions revolve around technologies that were developed during the war, such as the Gattling gun, and the technologies are often required to finish the missions.

Unfortunately, that's where the wheels come off the cart a bit. Because these missions are designed to be somewhat historically based, the missions are fairly structured and have some tight limitations on where you can go. Especially in missions that occur on woodland trails it feels very much "on rails". That being said, the action in these scenes is fun. The combat feels probably somewhat like it did back then. Weapons have severe limitations and are inaccurate. The AI isn't particularly smart, and opposition actions are predictable. You can often time when the enemy will pop up next from behind an obstacle. But combat is rewarding and even fairly difficult at times, even on just a moderate difficulty.

I've only gotten through the first couple of missions, and haven't even been able to work for the eventual winning side in the conflict yet. The missions are longish, even without a failure the first one took me about half an hour. There does seem to be a lot of gameplay for the money on this title.

New Year's Eve 2008.  My wife Grace and I paid fellow GamingNexus writer Sean Nack and his wife Stephanie an overnight visit.  We brought over Monopoly, but we weren't feeling very cutthroat.  We brought over Balderdash, but weren't feeling definitive.  Nothing at the theater piqued our attention.  And so my mind wandered back over the year, as minds are wont to do when another 365 days have come and gone.  And I'd resolved to pay more attention to indie developers for the upcoming year, 2009--but it didn't feel like it was too early to start.

Jonathan Blow's Braid was a game that I'd continually skipped past.  My Xbox 360 red ringed a week before it hit XBLA.  By the time my 360 came back, Spore hit.  Then Warhammer Online hit.  Then Civilization IV: Colonization hit.  Then Fracture (wince).  Then Dead Space.  Fable II, Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, Need For Speed Undercover (wince again), Prince of Persia...then a revisit to Pirates of the Burning Sea and the new-to-me Europa Universalis III.

And through it all Braid has been taunting me, calling me a spineless, lilly-livered coward for (predominantly) sticking with this holiday season's no-brainers.  Jonathan Blow is a man that, as far as I can tell from photographs and videos, has never smiled in his life; and he wasn't smiling at me now either. So it was time to take my cowardice and crutch myself on Sean Nack and his wife.  One hour before an incredibly slow-moving ball was to drop in Times Square, I convinced everyone to participate in what's been heralded in certain circles as the Most Pretentious Moment in Gaming for 2008:  Braid.  Plus it's been showing up--rather conspicuously--as the media darling on more than one Top 10 of 2008 list.

All four of us took up strategic positions on the couch, and it took all four of our minds put together to make it through the infernally-puzzling Braid.  We played, we laughed, we scoffed, we scolded, we shook our heads in defeat, we threw our heads back in victory, we pumped our fists with elation then alternately wished we could punch Jonathan Blow in the face.  It'd been several years since I'd been on a roller coaster ride, but traversing Braid certainly counted.  And just because we made it through doesn't mean the entire journey made complete sense.  Here's what Braid's aftertaste fet like to Sean and I--this is copied and pasted from a back-and-forth email between the two of us--plus Sean divulges his sentiments on the endings of Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 as well.

* * * * * SPOILER ALERT * * * * *

[And if you haven't played Braid, then none of this will make sense out of context anyway.]

Randy on Braid:

Grace and I were in deep discussion about Braid during the three-hour drive home last night.  We were rather...dismayed by the insistence of it being a metaphor for atomic bomb construction.  We felt the story, in and of itself, was strong.  The character development, the human but individually tragic relationships, the open-ended sense of loss--despite "closure" being achieved, which I felt was never truly achieved--was stellar.

Ultimately, the story is awesome...until one tries to break it down into an overwrought metphor regarding the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer ["the father of the atomic bomb"].  Then?  It fails.  My Dad has given me plenty of advice over the years, but rarely is it eloquent.  He's a practical guy.  But one time he said something that stuck with me ever since.  "Just because no one understands it doesn't make it 'art'."  Besides that shocking-but-true point, Grace and I are fairly literate individuals.  We all have different things that we fixate on, and Grace and I are the type of people that fixate incessantly on plots and subplots, themes, motifs, symbols, texts and subtexts.  We're decently versed in those types of machinations.  (That's not bragging in the least.  There have been plenty of times where I'd trade that fixation for the ability to change the oil in my vehicle.  It'd be far more useful.)  So if Grace and I don't 'get it,' (if anybody doesn't get Braid) that's not a failing on the person playing it.  That's a failing on the part of the creator.  The moment you have to over-explain your wonderful metaphor, that's the moment that it crashes to the ground.

Then Grace hypothesized something.  Something she doesn't fully buy into, even though she threw it out there during the discussion.  I think it works.  She said that Braid isn't just a metaphor about the atomic bomb.  It is, in fact, three storylines braided together.

I gave that some deep thought.  And I like that theory. 

There's the atomic bomb strand of the braid.  Fine.  Slapping us across the freaking face with a direct-pull quote and a footnote makes that one irrefutable [Oppenheimer's famous "Now we are all sons of bitches" quote].  It was crass and heavy-handed, but it's there, so there's no way to ignore that.

But that doesn't discount the rest of the human instrospection on the level of individual relationships either.  Which, in my humble opinion, stand out stronger on their own merits as opposed to veiled references to "The light would be intense and warm at the beginning, but then flicker down to nothing, taking the castle with it." 

I think the other two strands of the braid deal with the relationship with his mother and the relationship with the woman that ultimately got away:  His soulmate (though I'm reticent to use such a loaded term).

This disucssion between Grace and I went on for a few hours, so this is unfairly boiling down some of our conclusions.  But here's another thing to consider, in case Jonathan Blow might fret that Grace and I are a couple of people that just don't 'get it' when it comes to his story:

Once a piece of artwork (as he clearly feels Braid is) is presented to an audience, the artwork is no longer the sole property of the creator.  There are three areas at work:  There is the artwork itself, then there is the viewer, and then there is the space between.  There is a series of mental and emotional negotiations and compromises that take place between the artwork and the viewer.  Once the connection is made somewhere in that clumsy no-man's-land between the two, then that is what becomes the final standing on the work of art (though "final" can be as temporary as subsequent viewings at any later point; art is 100% capable of evolving).  The art, after this compromise, is no longer the same size and shape as when the artist first conceived it.  There's no way for it to remain the same.  Otherwise--if the artwork was a static structure--it would be more of a math proplem, and less of a piece of art.  If Braid was static--if it was an A+B=C math problem with only that singular solution/interpretation--then it would arguably no longer be art.  That explosive middle ground?  That is where the art truly takes form.

That may sound like a bunch of hoity-toity collegiate Art Interpretation 101 garbage to some, but that's how my mind deals with artwork.  Art is like those particular variety of fruit seeds that have to pass through an animal's digestive system before it can germinate.  Now, in this overbaked metaphor, Braid is the fruit, I am the fruit-consuming animal, and the germinated seed that I poop out is the final manifestation of Braid.  Jonathan Blow?  He was the tree.  He spawned the fruit, but the fruit would only fall to the ground and die without an audience/animal/Randy-Grace-Sean-Stephanie [Sean's wife] to come along, eat it, and poop it out again.

But you know what?  When all's said and done, if I were of a mind to make a Top 10 of 2008 list, then Braid would unquestionably be on that list.  Just because I didn't fully accept some of the conventions Jonathan Blow assembled doesn't mean it wasn't one of the most enjoyably complex tests of mental endurance I'd engaged in this past year.  Braid is brilliant.  The mindful debate that Sean and I put forth shouldn't diminish that in the least.  It was simply time for the dialog on this game to open up.

Sean on Braid:

For me, the bomb thing is fine, it's the specifically Oppenheimer focus of the theory I read that I have trouble with. I'd prefer to think that Tim [Braid's protagonist] is representative of humanity's quest for power, the Princess being the power, the candy store being temptation ("it from bit and ethical calculus"), and the mother being kind of nature or our innate humanity. Something like that. 

I like that Mr. Blow thinks that games should be art, but I think that he's going in an obscure direction that I don't necessarily think fits the medium. Braid works really well as a sort of poetry (kind of...intimately distant, making you feel emotions but at the same time you're not very sure why or more accurately where they're coming from, your motivations are so aloof), and while that's cool, the story is extremely disconnected from the gameplay. It's fantastic as a kind of love letter to a bygone, 2D platforming era, but on top of that already fun concept is foisted this extremely pretentious nuclear cautionary tale? It would've made more sense to me to make it, I don't know, a little J. Robert Oppenheimer in a lab coat and glasses hopping over Nazis and atomic particles, you know what I mean? Significantly less subtle, but significantly more sensical.

Aside from Braid being merely disjointed, I think that games have a great potential as more of an experiential art medium, like a play or a movie you participate in. The problem with that is that in a lot of cases, in order to have great drama, a game's story requires you to make certain decisions. Not a perfect example because it wouldn't be that great of a game, but imagine a Schindler's List game; if the choices were all completely free, the player could choose not to save the Jews, but then where would the story go? Manufacturing sim? Another great example is something I've been dying to discuss with you: the ending of Far Cry 2.

As you already turned it in, I assume you won't finish it off, so I'll tell you: the Jackal ends up being a guy who's actually trying to stop the war because he's become so disgusted with himself and what he perpetuates, so at the end you can either detonate a bomb to block off a canyon and save the locals from the pursuing warlords that requires your death, or you can have the jackal do that (and die in the process) and you can escort said locals to the border with a bribe, pay off the other nation's guards, and then kill yourself because "you're part of this cancer." Either way you decide you die, and it has somewhat of an emotional impact, but it would've been higher maybe if you felt more about either character, for which I would place the blame on the cracked-out-fast voice acting; good stuff's there, it just goes by so fast (and is so difficult to find; why put the best parts of the story on tapes scattered in random places that you'll very rarely find by any other method than luck?) that it's hard to absorb. It ultimately feels inevitable, but the game's ending is scripted while allowing you free choice in a tactical-gameplay aspect, which is a great experience even if it gives you a total downer ending.

The ending for that one and Fallout 3 are very similar, in that it requires you to either do something that kills you or have another person do it; me, being the Wastland Savior that I am, did it myself, and while it had an emotional impact it was stunted somewhat by the "I can't play this character in the world anymore" sadness. That's fine and it was an in-character decision, but you know, I also have a radiation-immune supermutant right there that I could've sent in; they sacrificed some storytelling common sense for the sake of a heroic ending, which is ok, but for a game that's all about my behavior and what I choose to do, the choices at the end are a little limited. I could go on and on about good versus bad endings, but my point is that this medium is capable of inherently involving choice to a degree that others are not capable of, even if at this point we're somewhat hampered by the fact that it has to...go in a direction, it has to end.

Games all have a story, and this is a story that someone is telling, so even with options you still end up at choice A, B, or C. But i think...fantastical endings are great, but why not have a situation where...I'll use this scenario from the upcoming Heavy Rain as an example (though I'm adding in my own options): you're trapped in a house with a serial killer, and your options are A) jump out the window and run away, him never knowing you were there and he shows up later in the game oblivious to your investigation, B) you hit him and run out, but now he's more weary and harder to catch, or C) kill him and move on to another villain who may behave differently because you now have this reputation. Each one of these actions could have far-ranging consequences about how you and the killer would behave inside the game, have wildly different experiences based on any of these choices (if you hit him and run out, maybe he figures out who you are and he's more of an important villain than he would've been if you had just escaped, or if you killed him the police are suspicious of you and make it harder to perform your investigations), even though the ending would be the same. Games should have crazy reveals inside the narrative, be first and foremost about the journey, not the destination. All throughout Braid we were sitting there saying "wtf?", and at the end we were left saying "WTF?"

If games were novels, I'd prefer they be either fantastically scripted epics, like Call of Duty 4 or Half-Life, or Choose Your Own Adventure books, to a degree that the Fables and Fallouts are just starting to approach, but are still very distant from; heading towards a conclusion, certainly, but a conclusion that is a result of the choices you make. Games are unequivocally art, but Braid? Braid is Salvador Dali; Fantastic, surreal, provocative, but ultimately bizarre and somewhat unfulfilling, even if you can't look away.

* * * * *

[ADDENDUM FROM RANDY:  After poring over the script further, Grace, my frighteningly insightful wife, devised an even more plausible theory:  Braid is made up of not just three but six different strands (correlating with each of the levels/worlds)--not necessarily interlaced with one another--that play out more like the movie Groundhog Day. Tim was capable of fully rewinding time, and he did so on six separate occasions, each time with six relatively different starting points, and six different conclusions, despite his general goal remaining static.  The Oppenheimer connection?  That's a seventh braid introduced very late in the game.  That's why it's so discordant with the other worlds' streams of thought.  But this particular theory would require yet another very lengthy blog...]