Particularly amidst my age group, I’m in a minority that has long seen Michael Jackson not as a joke or a freak, but simply as a very long, sad, lonely story. To me he’s one part musical king of pop and one part Boo Radley, sneaking out from his self-imposed isolation to record voice on the Simpsons (and I love the rumor that he secretly, against his contract, recorded himself singing “Happy Birthday Lisa” to replace the voice-alike), or to appear, even more randomly, in classic rhythm game Space Channel 5 as “Space Michael”. The sense I continuously get is of this isolated, fragile, gentle thing, terrified of what he was in the public eye, unable to cope with most of reality because he simply never had to face it. In the end, I feel like what was there was a hollowed-out shell, a dessicated husk of a person who had been squeezed dry by a public and all the money-seeking leeches that will follow somebody that successful.
But here’s a neat bit from Gizmodo: a story about a bit of mechanical ingenuity allowed one of MJ’s most signature dance moves, that crazy forward lean. To me, it’s a reminder that this was, in fact, the King of Pop, and that unlike a lot of modern acts, his success wasn’t just something engineered by record companies and ambitious agents - this guy was a genius showman with incredible talent. It’s maddening how, so very often, that kind of talent is so very Faustian - unblocking that section of the “right” brain where all that creativity lies also releases the demons that will go on to feast on the artist his whole life. Somewhere, in understanding that, there perhaps lies some way of unlocking human potential. Or at least a pretty good story.
I worked in To Kill a Mockingbird and Faust references to a post about Michael Jackson (and very nearly Of Mice and Men, but that didn’t make the cut, partially because I tend to forget which one is George and which is Lenny and didn’t want to make a really confusing assertion). So I’m feeling pretty freakin’ academic. Here’s another tidbit that I swore to research a few days ago:
I was wondering who Occam’s Razor was named after. Wikipedia says it’s apocryphally attributed to a Franciscan Friar from the 14th century, one William of Ockham. According to the (huge) article, likely the principle was named after him not because he invented it (elements existed before his time in the like of Thomas Aquinas and, arguably, Aristotle), but just because he used it a lot. And in case you wondered:
The version of the Razor most often found in Ockham’s work is Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate [Plurality ought never be posited without necessity.]
I’ve known gaming addiction before. At the point when I was late for class in college because of “one more turn” syndrome in Civ 2… yeah, that’s addiction. I understand that.
But I’m a bit mystified by how gripped I’ve become by Popcap’s latest tiny tweak/innovation, Bejeweled Blitz!, the Facebook App. It’s just Bejeweled, as I’ve played it (relentlessly) everywhere else.. online, via Steam, as an iPhone app, within World of Warcraft… heck, eventually any surface you’ll look at will turn into falling bricks you have to match in groups of three.
OH WAIT… that’s already true for my poor jewel-addled head.
Anyway, the formula change is very simple: you only get to play for a minute. Instead of point multipliers as you progress in level (measured in number of gems destroyed), you get these little mutliplier gems that fall when you break 12 gems in one move. And with that change, the game becomes this combination of pachinko machine (since an awful lot of the result is completely luck of the draw) and that Set card game where you’re scanning a field looking for patterns as fast as possible. It’s a brain mode that my brain desperately wants to be in, that it obsessively stays in, and that it yearns for once I go away.
No game has hit me this hard with the addiction hammer, has been this hard to set aside. It’s incredible. And dangerous as hell.
Well, I’ve been playing more of Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidhou Kuzanawa vs. King Abaddon, and now that I’m a good 30+ hours in, I guess I feel comfortable saying that it gets a great big “Meh”.
A big challenge in any game, but particularly in a role playing game that expects you to play for dozens and dozens of hours, is having a central gameplay mechanic and combat system that scales in interesting ways. Battle at level 40 shouldn’t just be battle at level 4 with bigger numbers… there needs to be some extra layer of strategy, some new dynamic… something. I don’t really feel like DS2 gives that. The challenge often comes from the limitations of the interface (a fixed-perspective camera that means that often you can’t see yourself and have no idea whether you’re running away from enemies or just mashing into them). Where DS2 has secrets, it either holds them too close to the chest or… well, or sometimes they just aren’t very interesting. The plot’s a mangled mess of what I’ll generously call the results of putting Isabel Allende, Agent Mulder, the Seven Samurai, and… um… the Power Rangers into a blender and poured the resulting smoothie through a mediocre translation, the characters just don’t have enough character, the locations all have a tiresome sameness to them.
It’s still a grind-levels RPG, which is an inherently addictive format. I may continue… like many of the SMT games, it’s difficult, and a challenge can be fun, particularly in the dark days of summer when games don’t come out.
At its core, I suppose you’d just say it’s a big collection of very simple rhythm mini-games on the Nintendo DS, controlled by a very small number of stylus gestures - tapping the screen, tap-and-hold (and sometimes a timed release), and the “flick”… kind of like the motion you make when you finish drawing an exaggerated checkmark. Each game takes place in some bizarre context, some of which make sense for rhythm (such as, say, a ping-pong match or a rock concert) and some extremely not (say, a radish farmer harvesting his crop). Music plays and you have to do the right combination of gestures at the exact right time to accomplish your goal… tapping and holding for four beats exactly to fuel up a robot, say, or using the flick as a guitar strum to imitate the patterns of another guitarist.
It’s wacky as hell. You’ve got birds in basic training being commanded by a hardcore veteran duck, you’ve got a rock band of ghosts who only play the endings of songs, you’ve got a large fan club for a pop idol… but all the fans are monkeys. And it goes on. And on. And on. Wild conceit after wild conceit, each simply playing out in taps and flicks.
Of course, since it’s a rhythm game, I’m drawn to it. The weirdness doesn’t put me off, though neither is it a big draw… it’s bewildering more than amusing, I guess.
What it -is-, though, is pretty demanding and hard. The timing isn’t always exactly calibrated where I would put it, and later in the game some of the sequences of taps are hard to keep up with.
The game shines at its best every five stages, where you get a special “remix” stage that, early on, integrates all the elements of the past four stages into one mosaic of game mechanics. Later remixes freely draw from a wider set of games, often forcing you to react, in a split second, to the cues of a game you didn’t expect to show up. It’s brain-stretching, often frustrating (number of thrown DS’s so far: 1… but it was into a pillow), and that’s why it’s addictive. Osu! Tatake! Ouendan! and its successors similarly got incredibly difficult to master at high difficulty, but good rhythm games are all about practice and iteration, and Rhythm Heaven has a lot of reward systems in place to make that feel worthwhile.
So all in all.. really a pretty fun game, and a nice different-feeling take on the rhythm genre. Good times.
How does one sum up a game like the Sims? The series has been around for quite some time, and every iteration gets a little more charming. Sims are the virtual residents of the even longer-running series “SimCity”, Will Wright’s civic planning simulator that (maybe apocryphally) can rate among its achievements the fact that it directly inspired Rudy Giuliani’s approach to cleaning up crime in New York.
Focusing in on the Sims themselves has always been something that Wright himself (now departed from Maxis’s studios to do new projects) hesitates to call a “game” so much as a “toy”. Customizing your Sim (or family of them) and designing and furnishing their house (probably on the cheap at first) is a lot of the charm. Of course a lot more of the fun comes up once time starts up and the world starts running. Sims 3 changes notably from before in that, instead of having sliders for “traits” that let you assign a certain number of points to make your sims neater, more energetic, friendlier, more fun-loving, etc., they now just get individual attributes that affect what they like and dislike and what they can do. Adults have five traits, picked from a palette of thirtyish, and these can range from “Couch Potato” to “Kleptomaniac” to “Green Thumb” to “Hates the Outdoors”. My first Sim, for instance, was, uh… Vegetarian, Virtuoso, Good Sense of Humor, Natural Cook, and Computer Whiz. These traits fuel a lot of your sim’s immediate wishes - their spur-of-the-moment desires that make them happy if you fulfill them. For instance, an “Evil” sim probably wishes to scare somebody or smash garden ornaments, while a “Natural chef” wishes to go buy the ingredients for cookies. The game thus gives you a lot of reason to play your Sim according to their nature.
Skills got an overhaul too. In earlier games they largely played a part in being prerequisites for success at work. Now they all affect everyday life quite a bit - logical sims can enter chess tournaments or solve math problems online, the gardening skill gets you better and better veggies for your cooking, mechanics can tinker with their home appliances and plumbing to make it better, and so on.
In some ways, the level of detail in each individual is so high that it feels a little less fun to control multiple sims. It’s awkward swapping around to see who has a new fleeting wish, and monitoring people as they conduct their activities on opposite ends of the city feels incredibly disjointed (in comparison, in earlier games, if you took a Sim out shopping, the home would be in “stasis” while you were out). The sims do autonomously do their own thing with no commands (as I discovered last night when I left the game running, thinking I had paused it, and thus missed out on the entire course of a pregnancy, the game paused and stopped on the pop-up question box to name the new very healthy baby boy. Actually seems like I played that part right), so it may be that you simply need to focus where you want to and let the game play the rest. In general, I’m sure the game will get less overwhelming with time.
Of course, it’s The Sims, so inevitably there will be a half-dozen expansion packs for the game, expanding on various areas, giving more career choices, skills, traits, city locations, and even neighborhoods to play in. The way the game’s set up seems to encourage the idea of not getting super-attached to one particular Sim but rather playing generations of a family or just starting new stories often, so the replayability should be high, especially as understanding the mechanics leads to much more effectively navigating through the gameplay.
The humor and animations and sheer personality of the little virtual people is still top-rate, and the amount of thoughtfulness and funny little touches thrown in really shine. There’s a little bug that drops the game to desktop occasionally, but a habit of frequent saving helps make that less of a nightmare.
Once upon a time, there was a guy named Tim Schaeffer.
He was responsible for a lot of great games, most recently the critically beloved cult hit “Psychonauts”. A game that got discussed on N-freakin’-PR, which is a good nod to the fact that it was an incredibly well written smart funny game. The reason it stayed as a “cult hit” instead of a blockbuster was mostly that he had trouble getting a publisher for the game, with Majesco finally agreeing to publish it but not putting any marketing into the process at all.
Flash forward a few years. Schaeffer’s development studio, Double Fine Productions, has been making Brutal Legend, a rock mythology game starring the voice of Jack Black. Vivendi agrees to publish it… a nice step up from Majesco, as a major publishing house with some pretty amazing resources (seeing as they also include Blizzard, maker of cash tsunami World of Warcraft). All is happy.
Then Vivendi merges with Activision to form Activision-Blizzard (the Blizzard name being, frankly, worth a lot more than the Vivendi name). Activision releases a list of the games it’s going to publish from Vivendi’s collection, and while “50 Cent: Blood on the Sand” makes the cut, Brutal Legend conspicuously does not. Everybody sheds a tear for poor mis-fated Schaeffer, who vows that he’ll find a new publisher.
This year, at the Game Developers’ Convention, Electronic Arts (no small publisher itself) made the announcement that, fear not, they would release it this fall. Some early playable bits get shown, and everybody’s happy again.
Today, Activision announced that it is suing Double Fine to prevent the publishing of Brutal Legend by Electornic Arts.
What?
They claim they never actually relinquished the right to publish, which sounds like a lot of sour grapes. In any case, naturally the gaming community is aghast… this really can’t come across as anything but an amazingly cynical decision to try to use legal bullshit to hurt a competitor, not really caring at the collateral damage.
Outcomes that seem possible:
- Charges are dismissed if it can be shown Activision has no footing for the claim; even if this happens, probably a stay is put on release until things are sorted out, forcing the game to be delayed.
- Or maybe Electronic Arts or Double Fine has to pay some stupid sum of money to Activision.
- Or maybe Activision is decided to truly have rights to publish… at which point EA can countersue for the value of what THEY’VE put into promoting the game and completing development… at which point very likely it becomes legally impossible to release the game because it’s caught in a forever-cycle of court stays against its release and cannot be released until the two big companies cooperate… something they are chemically incapable of.
Doomsday isn’t the most likely endpoint, but I give extremely low chances of this game not getting delayed.
From the Big Three conferences (Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo) there wasn’t much that was either super-surprising or super-exciting. MS and Sony had great press conferences, and a lot of the games do look great… just they were games I knew were great, or that I don’t care about. Racing games? Please. Just another genre I’m bad at.
The PSP Go was officially announced, but had been leaked. The surprise there was the price tag… at $249 it costs as much as a Wii, so this is pretty premium gaming gear. Still, with the game lineup coming to the platform (which will, maybe most importantly, include Persona 1 remade), this is looking more and more like a purchase for me. The PSP has pretty full music capabilities too, which means I may end up pocketing this device for the commute (though I bet it’s more of a pain for handling podcasts, which is most of what I listen to). With that imperfection in one hand, and a probably expensive big Zune HD in the other, there’s at least an even chance that I’ll just stick with the current Zune as my commuting podcast platform anyway.
Beyond that, various games are looking great (though, again, mostly ones that I was totally into anyway). Brutal Legend? Yup, I’ll get that on October 13. The Beatles: Rock Band? Done. September 9. Dragon Age? That’s a funny one, because BioWare’s trailers continuously do everything they can to try to make the game look like something I wouldn’t like as much, but I know the company too well… they’re not advertising it towards me because they know I’m already on the hook… no amount of “look how much gore and violence and sex we have, mainstream!” set to no less than Marilyn Manson’s song “This is the New Shit” will drive me away. That’s pedigree. The BioWare brand was on brilliant display with three big trailers, in fact. Mass Effect 2 isn’t due until next year but is looking great, and the same can be said of The Old Republic, BioWare’s Star Wars-based MMORPG that has all of us nerds quivering in anticipation. I’ve been very easily drawn to every new flavor of the month MMO, so I’m a little wary of the same thing happening again… but despite myself… this is easily the one I have the highest hopes for.
Has Sony yet made the case for why I should upgrade my PS2 to a 3? Not yet. The persistent rumors of a redesigned system, made slim and maybe cheaper, make me wait. They announced nothing along those lines, but the conventional wisdom is that of course they didn’t… they want people to buy the current inventory. So I’ll wait. I’ll have so much gaming to do without the thing, and there’s no dealbreaker exclusive game yet. Should Atlus announce Persona 5 for the PS3 (an announcement that would come, at soonest, later this summer at the Tokyo Game Show… and many speculate they’ll stick with the PS2 for the next iteration of Persona), then that would change the calculus quite a bit, but even then… no need to get the console until the game comes out, and even if P5 comes out this fall in Japan, it ain’t getting stateside for some time.
One pleasant little surprise (not all that surprising, but nice to see) is that Professor Layden’s second adventure is finally coming stateside this fall for the Nintendo DS.
(on edit: ok, if a game shown this year would do it, it may be The Last Guardian, the latest from cult fave developer Team Ico. Team Ico has two other titles to its name: ICO, and Shadow of the Colossus, and those are the sorts of titles that gamers drop the names of to try to sound sophisticated and hip… less-known games that are incredibly unique experiences in the world of gaming. Last Guardian looks… amazing.. and we’ll see what it’s like as a game. Still, I don’t think that’s due any time very soon, so I can still wait on a PS3.)