30 Days of Gaming: Day 23: Best Graphics or Art Style

Day 23: Best Graphics or Art Style

Okami



To this point, I've picked games that I've played all the way through for everything, but I have to make an exception here, because even though I've only played a little bit of Okami, I'm not sure I can come up with a better answer. Other games have used a similar cel-shading sort of technique, but no other game has used it to such great effect and used it to make a truly unique game world. Creating a game where all your abilities stem from drawing brushstrokes on the screen is novel in itself, and complementing that idea by creating a whole world that looks like it exists within a giant ukio-e painting brings it to an entirely different level. As impressive as the realism is in some of them, it gets kind of annoying seeing the vast wasteland of washed-out gunmetal gray that pervades most of the first-person shooters nowadays. Okami is the direct antithesis of this, a visually enthralling world where the colors are as alive as the characters that inhabit it.

Day 24: Favorite Classic Game
Not really sure what defines "classic" game, but I think I have some ideas to write about that will definitely qualify.

30 Days of Gaming: Day 22: Most Disappointing Game Sequel

Day 22: Most Disappointing Game Sequel
Final Fantasy XII



I guess I'm going counter to at least what the gaming press said on this (Famitsu really gave it a 40/40??), but I know there are some people out there who are with me on this. It's not really a bad game at all--it's every bit as well produced as any other FF game--but it's a game that I really haven't had any desire to play a second time through since first playing it right at its release in 2007. To me, this is pretty significant, because everyone in a while the thought will pop up in my head that, "Hey, maybe I should go back and replay Final Fantasy VIII," and that was a game with a Junction system that pretty much broke the game, and a major plot point that involved all of the main characters remembering that they all came from the same orphanage which they'd all forgotten before because the summons that they use cause memory loss for some reason. It was a gorgeous game to look at, and I can't say that I didn't get some enjoyment out of exploring some of the environments, but the experience as a whole just didn't leave me with the same satisfaction that I've come to expect from the series.

I'm a big believer in the manta of "if it ain't broke don't fix it." Obviously, you can overdo this. I actually enjoy the Dynasty Warriors series, but I don't think there really needs to be 37 different games that all basically amount to "hit square a lot to cleave this mob of mostly motionless people with your halberd." But when I heard that FF XII was doing away with the series's turn-based battle system in favor of a more MMO style, I was apprehensive about it. At some point I read something--I wanna say it was on Penny Arcade--that kind of talked me off the ledge a bit, making the point that look, you can still pause the game and input commands like you used to, it's just that, for inconsequential battles, the game will just start killin' stuff for you and you don't have to sit there with the X button held down. That actually made a lot of sense. As much as I'm completely willing to put an ungodly number of hours into playing an RPG, I'm hardly adverse to streamlining the more tedious parts of it. Here's the thing, though: the game is still really, really tedious anyway.

The game felt a lot like an MMO, except without any other actual humans around you. The rate at which you got XP was unprecedentedly slow, and so despite the battles all taking less time, you had to fight far, far, more of them to level up. The game had a lot of vast, wide-open areas, which were impressive and all on PS2 hardware, but often took forever to get through, and the game had a lot of extended point A to point B travel in it. Really, the game overall just felt like a completely slog in a way that no previous FFs have, even FF IV with it's battle-every-three-steps encounter rate. The hunting board sidequests sometimes broke of the monotony of the game, but some of them also got annoying as hell, as finding the monster you had to kill meant being in the right area under certain circumstances like, "it has to be raining, you have to come in from the left side of the screen, it has to be a Tuesday when you're playing, and your memory card has to have exactly 3217K of space left." Okay, I made some of that up. But basically, the game felt like much more of a chore than it in any way needed to be.

Even in spite of this, the game would still be a fun experience if the game's pretty graphics were complimented by a memorable story. I can only speak for myself, but I remember absolutely nothing from the story. I'm not really kidding when I say that. It's been a while since I've played, but the cutscene in the above video, for example is completely foreign to me. While I Youtube, I watched the video of the last boss fight as well, and I have some very vague memories of the fight, but I wouldn't have remembered his name was Vayne beforehand, and I remember pretty much nothing about who he was or what his motivations were. The playable characters have perhaps a little bit more staying power for me, but not much. Ashe never had a moment like, say, the Sending that Yuna had and seemed to spend most of the game really confused. Balthier, for his occasional rapier wit, was less interesting than Locke in FF6, who was a 2D sprite. Fran had a cool accent, but again, I remember very little about what she did. I think the biggest problem was that, for the first time, they tried to seep the dialogue in this sort of Tolkein-esque poeticness, except that they completely overdid it, and you don't (or I didn't at least) end up really retaining the crux of the scene. I don't profess to have the biggest vocabulary in the world, (I know for a fact that I recycle a lot of the same words over and over again on this blog), but I don't think I'm an idiot, and I there were a lot of exchanges between characters that were fairly bewildering to me just because of how much fluff was in the dialogue. There was a lot of royal court political drama sort of stuff throughout the story, and the way the script was written made it extremely difficult to follow it all.

The battle system ended up being mostly okay, and having your characters actually actively move around the environment during a fight and having true area of effect spells added an interesting dynamic to the game. The boss fights were usually decently fun to play. My biggest complaint with the gameplay was the confounding license board system, which was a similar concept to FF X's sphere grid, except instead of just giving you stat boosts and new abilities, it included "licenses" for all types of equipment in the game. As VG cats lampooned at the time, FF XII was a game where you had to learn how to wear a hat. The system basically made it so all of your characters kind of wound up the same in the end, which was a problem the sphere grid had too, except that it seemed to happen faster with XII's.

As I said, FF XII is still a very well-made game and I can understand why some people would find enjoyment in it. The world of Ivalice is a pretty cool place, and the fact that they were able to put as much detail into it as they did on PS2 hardware is quite a feat. I just wish it was a bit faster to get around in Ivalice and that I found the people who inhabited it a bit more interesting.

Next: Day 23 -- Game you think had the best graphics or art style.
Best graphics and best art style kind of seem like separate questions to me. I'm going to focus more on art style, I think.

30 Days of Gaming: Day 21: Best Story

Day 21: Best Story

There's a lot of stuff that, from what I've been told, would be a contender for this category that I haven't played. The first one that comes to mind is the highly-praised, but once notoriously hard to find Xenogears. It's on Playstation Network now, so maybe I can change that in the future, but for now I've gotta work with what I've played. A couple of games I've already talked about are strong contenders. The Metal Gear Solid series has really pushed the envelope more than any other in terms of what sort of story a game can tell. Chrono Trigger, as my friend at He Been Weatherbeaten went with, had an ambitious story that had you traveling throughout past, present, and future. Final Fantasy VI had maybe the best cast of characters put together in a game, all of whom had their own subplots that developed over the game. But I'm going to go with a game that I've already blogged about here before a couple of years ago when I was replaying it again:

Final Fantasy VII



(spoilers)

"Speak with the planet? What does the planet say?"

I know FF VII gets an eye-roll from some people who aren't that crazy about the massive shadow it casts over other games that are about as good but which for one reason or another didn't have the massive mainstream success that FF VII did. It's true that it's not a perfect game, and I'm not going to argue that it is, but to me it's story is the most memorable out of any game I've played. Like a lot of games, it ultimately boils down to your basic "good defeats evil" story, but it's "good defeats evil" done especially well. It had a great setting, some memorable characters--even if somewhere a bit rough around the edges, perhaps, memorable villains, and Square used the newfound power of the Playstation and it's ability to play full-motion video to weave a fantastic story together.

Final Fantasy VII's intro is still one of the coolest sequences put together, in any medium, really. It foreshadows the story, with Aries appearing in a field of stars, it sets up the massive size of the truly impressive dieselpunk (seems like that's the term that fits best) creation that is Midgar, and gets you pumped up for starting the game proper, which begins as soon as you step off the train. Even with the break-neck opening, though, a big part of the genius of FF7's story is that it's true scale is hidden from you for the whole first act of the game. While you're in Midgar, it seems like the basic premise of the game is that the main antagonists are the head honchos at Shina Corp., and the goal of the game is to ecoterrorist your way around the city until you force a final confrontation, take out President Shinra, and liberate the city from the corporatocracy. If the game was merely that, it would still be pretty awesome, because as I said, Midgar is a pretty awesome creation, and it actually would've been cool to see even more of the city than what you did over the course of the game.

Maybe five or so hours in, though, (depending on how fast you're going, of course) the game completely pulls the rug out from under you when President Shinra dies, but not by your hand. You then set out from Midgar and get ready to explore the rest of the world, and Cloud tells you in flashback about Sephiroth and you realize, if you managed to avoid spoilers by the time you'd played the game, that the first act of the game was a bit of sleight-of-hand and that the stakes are way higher than just the fate of the city. If you were someone who had played Final Fantasy games before FF VII, you likely figured the world map was going to show up sooner or later, but I could easily see someone who wasn't familiar with the series and its conventions being rather taken aback by the game completely opening up the way it does. What's cool, though, is that when you replay the game from the beginning again, you can catch little hints pop up here and there, like the guy in slums with the number tattoo who's mysteriously sick.

As I said in my best villain post, Sephiroth's backstory is kind of muddled a bit, and you really have to watch all of the optional cut-scenes concerning Jenova and Professor Hojo and Profressor Gast's experiments to really get the complete picture. Sephiroth nevertheless has a plethora of iconic moments, first and foremost being the scene where he razes Nibelheim to the ground and you watch him walking away through the flames. The game does a great job building up the legend of him before you really directly confront him. You don't run into him during the Shinra headquarters sequence, but you find his giant masamune run clean through the Shinra President's body. Later, as you're tracking across the marsh, you see the giant cobra that murders you if you run into it (if you're not over-leveled, that is) impaled on a giant pole. By the time he kills operatically descends, seemingly from the heavens, to kill Aries, (hey, I said spoilers, and seriously, you knew that at this point, didn't you?) he's already obtained a God-like omnipresence over the game long before he literally becomes God-like at it's conclusion.

The game's supporting cast, while perhaps not as diverse and as colorful as FF6's, is great in its own right, and each character is utilized well as a piece in the larger picture of the puzzle. Barrett has been criticized, not unjustly, as basically being a Mr. T clone and perhaps not the most progressive portrayal of a character who happens to be a large black man in history, but in between his "You better watch yo' spikey headed ass!" comments he shows real humanity, and another layer is added to his character when you reach Corel and play through the subplot with Dyne. Aries is great as the girl whose existence seems oxymoronic, an eternally sunny-eyed optimist who grows flowers all day in the middle of a giant, run-down cesspool. Cid is kind of a comic-relief character for a while ("Sit down and drink your goddamned tea!"), but has a genuinely emotional moment at the climax of his part of the story, when you complete his lifelong dream and launch the Shinra rocket into space and he presses his face right up against the porthole to take in the fullest possible view of the stars. Yuffie will piss you right the hell off when she steals your materia but is funny as hell.

A lot of people are irked by Cloud starting Square's emotionally-detached loner protagonist phase that increased ten-fold with Squall in VIII, and yeah, maybe there's one to many "Cloud: ......." dialogue boxes in the game, but I think his descent into madness over the first half of the game is done really well. It's a great tease when you first see him go into one of his fits trying to plant a bomb in the Mako reactor and you see the ominous text from a nameless voice: "This is more than just a reactor." And the scene at the start of disc 2, when Cloud has completely succumbed to the idea that he's not human but rather a failed Sephiroth clone ("I wasn't chasing Sephiroth, I was being summoned by Sephiroth!") is a great and unexpected twist. The game had already killed off a playable character at the end of disc 1, which at the time really feels like it's going to be the low-point before the heroes start building up some momentum again towards the climax. But with that scene, where Cloud is seemingly lost for good, combined with the next scene where Tifa wakes up aboard the Highwind, and Barrett opens the shudders to reveal the big-ass ball of fire slowly falling to earth is a tremendously effective "how are they gonna get out of this one?" moments. The scene later in disc 2 where Tifa is roaming around in Cloud's head is maybe a little cheesy, but you can't help but smile during the big reveal in Cloud's real memory of Nibelheim when the Main Theme music builds up and Cloud comes rushing in to save Tifa. The game ends as you expect it would, with Sephiroth being defeated, although before Advent Children was made and set two years later (which I thought was decidedly "meh"), it had the added wrinkle of the last scene where Red XIII is taking his children to go see the ruins of Midgar and it's not really immediately clear that humans were actually deemed worthy to survive when Holy came to cleanse Meteor.

Put together, Final Fantasy VII's story is a great ride. It combines the high adventure of the old medieval FF games with a cool, dystopian future setting that was foreign to the series at the time. It used the new technology of the Playstation to make the story more up close and more personal than it had been and used full-motion video to make it bigger and more operatic. Plus, it had a cat yelling into a megaphone riding a giant moogle.

Serendipitously, Roger Ebert tweeted a link to someone's blog post, written as a open letter to him, while I was writing this one, and he mentions Final Fantasy VII.

Next: Day 22 -- A game sequel which disappointed you
And it's gonna be from this series...

30 Days of Gaming: Day 20: Favorite Genre

Day 20: Favorite Genre

For the record, I don't really think there's an incorrect answer to this question. I play a ton of sports games, some first person shooters, some tournament fighters--even though I tend to be bad at them. I have a guitar hero controller in my closet, though don't find much time to play music games. Point is though, I play a lot of different stuff. But you're not reading this to hear me answer "everything," so let's go with...

Role Playing Games




The thing about RPGs, is that there are a lot of different varieties of them. A western action RPG, the games in Bioware's library for instance, will have a much different feel than a turn-based JRPG like a Final Fantasy. An RPG might be very on-rails and focus on a detailed, set storyline, or it might be completely open and encourage as much explanation as possible. It might give you a lot of control over customizing your characters, or it might challenge you to make the best possible usage out of a stable of fixed characters. It might have strategy game elements, card game elements, or some other stuff that's completely out of left field. Thing is, all of these things, when done well, can be fun for their own reasons. Playing Oblivion and waiting till sundown so I could pick the lock of every house in the Imperial City and rob it blind (what, that's not what you did the whole game?) and playing Chrono Trigger and saving the world from a giant-ass shell that fires lasers are both entertaining as hell for me for different reasons. Really, the key to a good RPG is depth, and that can mean different things for different games. It can either mean telling a complex and emotional story, or giving you endless permutations of how you can level up and improve your character, or both. And that's the key to RPGs: the best ones are epic enough in scope to awe you the first time you play, and with good enough and deep enough gameplay to make you want to play again.

Next: Day 21 - Game with the best story. Gonna mull this over, but might be some redundancy here again.

30 Days of Gaming Day 19: Picture of a game setting you wish you lived in

Day 19: Picture of a game setting you wish you lived in

Lindblum (Final Fantasy IX)

(image source)

Final Fantasy IX's greatest strength was how memorable its environments were. With two Playstation 1 FF games already under its belt, Square perfected the illustrated backgrounds it used in that era, and was able to add more actually rendered parts of the scenery than in VII or VIII. There were a bunch of cool places in IX. There was Burmecia, "The Realm of Endless Rain," Clerya, the city within a cyclone, and Treno, the city where it's always night for some reason. I think my favorite though was Lindblum, which combined the traditional RPG city built outward from a castle with some elements of steampunk thrown in. It's got good public transportation, it's accessible by airship, and has a theater district to boot. Sure it gets leveled pretty good by Queen Brahne's army at one point, but getting blown up from time to time is actually pretty much par for the course for an FF city.

30 Days of Gaming Day 18: Favorite Protagonist

Day 18: Favorite Protagonist

Ezio Auditore (Assassin's Creed 2)



A game where you parkour your way around 15th century Italy stabbin' unsuspecting mopes and occasionally hanging out with Leonardo DaVinci is cool enough on it's own, but Assassin's Creed II actually tells a really good story, centered around it's tragic hero (maybe anti-hero?) Ezio. Within the first few minutes of the game, Ezio's father and brother are framed and hanged in the public square. The game follows Ezio for the next two decades of his life as he tries to uncover the plot the conspiracy that brought his family down. Whoever his voice actor is does an excellent job giving the character a distinctive sound while putting genuine emotion into the lines and making the Italian sound authentic. It's great seeing the character transition from loudmouth street rat to methodical assassin, though they never take all of the humanity out of the character either. They could have easily just make him like Frank Miller's (recent) Batman and ad him go around saying "ARRGH! MUST BREAK SPINES" the entire time, but he has a lot of humor throughout, not to mention bro hugs. Even before the character reappeared in the sequel Brotherhood, (which I haven't played yet) there was a ton of Ezio fanart and cosplay floating around the internet. You can put him on a pretty short list of characters that have reached that sort of universal recognition of badassery so quickly.

Next: Day 19: A picture of a game setting in which you'd like to live
gotta deliberate that one a bit

Month of Video Games Day 17: Favorite Antagonist

(Firstly, this whole meme--and I can't for the life of me figure out where it started--is apparently referred to most often as "30 Days of Gaming" not "Month of Video Games" so... yeah, I pretty much just wanted to write the phrase 30 Days of Gaming to get more hits.)

My friend over at He Been Weatherbeaten predicted that we'd have the same answer for this one and, yeah, he was right. By their nature, video games are usually a classic good vs. evil story, and there are a lot of memorable villains out there, but one stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Day 17: Favorite Antagonist
Kefka (Final Fantasy VI)

(spoilers)

"Life... dreams... hope... Where'd they come from? And where are they headed? These things... I am going to destroy!"



He's got the most maniacal laugh that a 16-bit system can pump out, he's dressed up like a clown, he's completely bat-shit crazy, and his goal is to destroy everything. Some people might be tempted to answer Sephiroth from the next game in the series, and there's certainly a level of badassery in Sephiroth, though also some of that Tetsuya Nomura bishieness. But in FF VII, the whole deal with what the hell Jenova is and what the hell Sephiroth is doing with it gets a bit muddled. Kefka's motives and aspirations are elegant in their simplicity.

As someone with a border-lined unhealthy fixation of all things Batman, The Joker will always be first in the category of insane, murderous clowns for me, but Kefka is pretty damn close. The Joker certainly can't claim the successes that Kefka can. Part of what makes Kefka's character so great is the misdirection of it. For starters, he's dressed like a jester, and at the beginning of the game he seems like a bit of a bumbling idiot. In a brief flashback, we see him menacingly lording over a mind-controlled Terra, watching her murder the Empire's own soldiers, just because. The first time we seem him in the game proper, though, he's bitching about having to go out into the desert and that there's sand in his shoes. When he reaches Castle Figaro and Edgar quickly rebukes his demand that Terra be handed over to them, Kefka quickly retreats, except then he sets the entire castle on fire in the middle of the night. Later, when the Empire is laying siege to Doma, Cyan's homeland, Kefka poisons the water supply, killing everybody inside indiscriminately. And look how much fun he has killing Espers. Dude just does not give a fuck. Even still, for the first half of the game he seems to mostly be a lackly under Emperor Gestahl. Gestahl is just kind of power hungry, and is trying to obtain the power contained within Espers by converting to Magicite. This isn't ambitious enough for Kefka, who decides to straight-up murder him and then mess around with the statues that keep the world in balance, thus pretty much breaking the world. FF VI's cast of colorful rogues, of course, defeats Kefka in the end, but not before he has some time to rule over a broken and hopeless world from atop his giant ass tower. Oh yeah, he also turns into a God, and a cooler looking one that Sephiroth with his one big-ass wing sitting atop his cloud:



Next: Day 18 -- Best Protagonist. Seeing as this is basically what my day 2 post was, let's call this "best protagonist not previously mentioned"

Month of Video Games Day 16: Game with the Best Cutscenes

I heaped a lot of praise on the Metal Gear Solid series for my Best Character post, and I do think that the series is pretty genius and that, at its core, it has things to say that are important and universal. What does it mean to be a patriot? Where are technology and the information age taking us? Why is nuclear proliferation so dangerous? I also don't deny for a second that surrounding these core themes is a vastly complicated and meandering plot that is oft-times completely, off-the-wall insane. There aren't many games with a higher story-to-gameplay ratio than the Metal Gear Solid series, and if the story wasn't presented in a way that didn't at least kind of keep you clued in on what was going on, while keeping the forward momentum of the games going, they would be complete train wrecks. The last game in the series is the culmination of everything that had led up to it, and Hideo Kojima and the rest of the creators were at their best in terms of storytelling.

Day 16: Game with the Best Cutscenes
Metal Gear Solid 4

(gonna be spoilers)



Metal Gear Solid 4 had a pretty colossal task ahead of it. It had to put a wrap on the story that had it's roots in an NES game from 1987, continued in a sequel that initially was only released the MSX computer system in Japan and therefore almost nobody played, and then ballooned into something much, much bigger with the three Solid games. MGS2, the previous game in terms of the chronology of events, ended, uh... let's say less than totally clearly. So the challenge was giving the whole opus a satisfying conclusion (note: I have not played Peace Walker on PSP which was released later, and I don't know how much it's story tie into the broader story of the Solid games) over the course of one more game. The game is the densest in a series of very dense games, and the cutscenes are long and numerous. At times, even for someone like me who loves the series, the cutscenes come dangerously close to completely overshadowing the playable part of the game, though to be fair, the flow of gameplay isn't broken up to as much as it was in MGS2 (enter door... cover conversation! walk 10 feet... codec conversation!). Most of the exposition is concentrated in the start of each of the game's five acts.

Getting through all the exposition would be brutal if it wasn't made interesting, but it is. David Hayter adds a sort of sorrow and world-weariness to Snake's gravelly, 17-packs-a-day voice, and Snake is developed more and able to have a say in things more instead of just repeating the last word in a codec conversation ("A Hind-D?!") Improving on the hilarious awkwardness of the first MGS, ("Snake, do you believe that love can bloom, even on the battlefield?") Kojima actually writes a human-sounding love subplot with Otacon and Naiomi. And for good measure, there's also some straight-up preposterous but awesome fight scenes like this to break up the talkiness. There are some long, long, monologues that are all over the place in scope and draw upon information from the previous games in the series, but they're made much easier to stay engaged in by some cool visuals. Look at the last half of this cutscence. The game shows you faces of the relevant characters to help explain what the hell is going on, but it doesn't just show you a bunch of faces, it turns the cutscene into it's own little mini-story. When the Boss is brought up, her image is overlayed in a flower pedal pattern, invoking the final fight in MGS3 where you fight her in a field of white flowers and have to reluctantly kill her. Each big exposition scene like this has its own sort of design motif going on.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is the best produced, best acted, and best written game in the series. I actually don't think it has the most entertaining gameplay. It's more constrained than the open jungle setting of Metal Gear Solid 3 and because of that it wasn't quite as fun for me. The cutscenes then, a bigger part of the total game than any game in a series that was already notoriously cut-scene heavy, had to be damn good. They were, and MGS4 ended up being an excellent capstone to a series that represents maybe the most ambitious undertaking in the medium of video games.

Runner-up: Final Fantasy VII



The CG is dated now, but man, that intro is still awesome.

Next: Day 17 -- Favorite antagonist

Month of Video Games Day 15: Post a screenshot from the game you're playing now

Day 15: Post a screenshot from the game you're playing now

Marvel vs. Capcom 3

(found via: http://thegeekrebellion.com/)














Staying true to his comic-book self, Deadpool does a lot of breaking the 4th wall in MvC. His taunt is just him saying "Taunt button!" out loud, he has a special move where he grabs the health and hyper bars off the screen and beats the other player with them, and yes, he taunts you, the player. What a dick. The game is a lot of fun. It's a little disappointing that they cut down the size of roster somewhat--the perfectly reasonable explanation for this is that it's a lot harder to create 3D models for every character than just sprites--but the game is still every bit as fun as it's predecessor, if not moreso.

Next: Day 16 - Game with the best cut scenes.

Think we may be revisiting a game already covered for this one...

Month of Video Games Day 14: Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper

Day 14: Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper

So here's the issue with this one: my laptop died a while back and I don't have any of my old wallpapers on this computer. Anyway, even though I really play games more than I watch anime, I oft times go for an anime-themed wallpaper for some reason. So basically I'm making this topic "go find a video game wallpaper that's cool." Done.

The FF7 cast, after Aries uh... has to go away.












via: http://www.desktopwallpaperhd.com/

Month of Video Games Day 13: A game you've played more than five times.

Day 13: A game you've played more than 5 times
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3

(for purposes of this, I'm counting playing through all levels with 5 skaters as playing the game more than 5 times. If you don't think that counts... I dunno, you're weird)



I've never ridden a skateboard in my life. I don't really know anything about actual skateboarding. Luckily, that doesn't really matter to enjoy the Tony Hawk games (the early ones at least), which are really more about what skating would be like in a world where the laws of gravity were much more tenuous, falling about six stories onto concrete is mostly a minor inconvenience, and Wolverine occasionally shows up. Like actual skateboarding, (hey, I know at least this much) a big part of the appeal is kind new, cool lines to try out, it's just that here your lines might include jumping out of the window of a building, grinding the baggage claim at an airport, or ollieing into a haunted house. The game is kind of like Super Metroid in that it has an easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master thing going on. Completing enough goals to work your way through the ten or levels in the game is pretty simple, but being good enough to do ridiculousness like this is another matter. It's hard to really get sick of the game, because there's really not much of an upper bound as to how good you can be. If you pull off a million point combo, there's always a way to get to a million and a half by tacking on a few more moves.

The gameplay in Tony Hawk games is truly pretty unique. I guess when it comes down to it, it's mostly about timing and hitting the right button at the right time like anything else, but I in THPS you have the quick switching between the balance of holding a grind and the quick twitch of getting the best possible rotation on a vert move. I guess there have been other "extreme sports" type games out there, but none that I've played have the polish and intuitiveness that the Tony Hawk games have. All of the early games are fantastic, but I singled out 3 because I think it represents when they'd installed pretty much all of the major gameplay elements, but before it started to devolve into sillyness. THPS2 added manualing, where you could tap up and down and balance off the back of your board on flat ground as part of a combo. THPS3 took that one step further and added the revert, where you could tap a shoulder button (R2, if I recall?) at the right time, and go into a manual right from a vert move so you could mosey of the halfpipe or whatever you were in and find a rail to keep your combo going. After THPS3, the stuff they added just seemed superfluous and dumb, like special moves you could do on flat ground that you could do in succession in between spinning your board such that you could literally get hundreds of thousands of points by pretty much staying in one spot. Which really isn't in the spirit of the game at all, I don't think. And after the third game, they ditched the 2:00 time limit and opened the game up more, giving you goals through MMO sort of quests. One would think that this would make the game more interesting, but it actually kind of just made it more tedious, especially when they added a bunch of quests that have nothing to do with skating and have you riding a leaf blower around (seriously, I distinctly remember that being a quest). Really, the 2:00 time limit never bothered me much, because doing 2:00 runs never really got old.

There were at least a dozen skaters in THPS3, each with different move sets, and it was fun playing through the game with all of them. Each time, you'd end up achieving something through a little bit different means, grabbing one extra goal in a run, and generally just doing more impressive things than before. I have a lot of good memories passing the controller between friends running through the game with absolutely every character. One of the more replayable games out there.

Might combine these next 2 since they're easy and I've skipped a few days along the way:

Day 14 - Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper.
Day 15 - Post a screenshot from the game you’re playing right now.

Month of Video Games Day 12: A game everyone should play

Gonna be lazy today and take advantage of the fact that I've already written about video games here some. What's a game everyone should play? Batman: Arkham Asylum. Why should you play it? 'Cause this. If there's anything right with the world, Batman has pretty much universe appeal, and the game should have just the right difficulty curse that it shouldn't frustrate too many people. It has some elements of a stealth game and some of a beat-em-up and should appeal to both. For everything else you wanna know, see my original post.

Next: Day 13 -- A game you've played five times or more. Promise that will be less lazy.

Month of Video Games Day 11: Gaming System of Choice

Day 11: Gaming System of Choice
Playstation 3

This is going to be a short one because I've never been one to really feel the need for console tribalism. Not so much anymore, but back in the day, I frequented the message boards on IGN.com a lot, and was always rather flabbergasted by the flame wars that would arise over which console was better, and the fighting over which console had the better E3 show that would ensue while E3 was still going on. I don't think Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo could pay PR people to shill for their system with quite the same tenacity that some random people on the internet do for free.

That said, I'm gonna answer the question, and I'm going to say Playstation 3. I really couldn't say if Playstation 3 itself has the best offering of the current generation as I don't own an X-Box 360 or a Wii and I think I've played enough of their libraries, but the thing about Playstation 3 is that it gives you two generations worth of backwards compatability (if you bought a version that offered backwards compatability). Nintendo 64 had some amazing games, but you can't stick an N64 cartrige in a Wii, you have to work with their online offerings. It's backwards compatible with Gamecube discs, but it it doesn't seem like the amount of Gamecube games that have stood the test of time is that huge. You've got your Smash Bros. Melee, your Zelda, your Eternal Darkness... I dunno, I think it starts getting thin pretty quickly from there. There are good exclusives on all systems, but I always thought that Sony gave you the most diverse range of options. It always had a lot of JRPG stuff, tournament fighter stuff, and just generally more offbeat stuff that didn't seem as represented on other systems. I've also found the Playstation style controllers, especially on the PS3 where they've extended out the L2 and R2 triggers a bit to be the most comfortable fit. Some of that might just be because I'm the most familiar, I dunno. Like I said, not a console purist. Play what you want.

Next up: Day 12 -- A game everyone should play
A couple of the games I've already mentioned would fall into that category, but I'll try and switch it up and come up with a new game to write about.

Month of Video Games Day 10: Best Gameplay

Nicely, this matches up with the runner-up from yesterday.

Day 10: Best Gameplay
Super Metroid



Admittedly, there are some notable ones that I haven't played through, but for my money, Super Metroid is the best side-scroller ever made. I've never played another game that so completely immerses you in the world it creates even though it lacks a third dimension. Some of the Castlevania's come close, but I don't quite think they match it. There aren't many 2D environments as fully realized as Zebes is. The attention to deal is amazing. In the opening area, before you get the morphing ball and the planet seems to "wake up," you walk through the ruins of the Mother Brain machine from the original NES game. How many games of Super Metriod's era had callbacks like that? Lights glow rhythmically in the background, old ruins will look eroded, insects will be crawling along a wall and then dart away: all of these details give the world an sense of plausibility even though it's completely flat. Aiding this is the cool as hell, ethereal soundtrack that oft times seems less like actual instruments and more like rhythmic noises coming from some deep nether-regions, like the drums in the Mines of Moria scene of Fellowship of the Ring or something. Every area has so much character, from the Wrecked Ship, still haunted by the ghosts of its crew, to the abyssal depths of Marida, to the Dante's Inferno-esque Norfair. The bosses are some of the most creative you'll see in any game as well. Kraid, who was in the first game, but here takes up two screens worth of space, which was pretty unheard of at the time. There's also Phantoon, a flying one-eyed squid that lets out a very human-like shriek when you hit it that's pretty much nightmare fuel. Speaking of nightmare fuel, there's the Crocomire, which you kill by pushing into molton lava and then manages to come back and try and kill you one more time after that only to have all it's skin burned off. And of course, Mother Brain comes back, except this time sprouts gets out of nowhere when you think you've killed it.

This is best gameplay, though, and none of the above would matter if the game wasn't also fun to play. It is. First of all, when you're playing the game for the first time or two and you're not familiar with it, the path to take is not at all obvious. You have to bounce between areas a lot and do a lot of backtracking. The game manages to do this without frustrating you though. You never feel like it's making you backtrack just to be a dick, and when you eventually progress, the new area is always a cool experience to make the effort seem worth it. Then of course you want to play the game again knowing what you learned the first time and shave time off your playthrough. Missile and bomb upgrades are scattered all throughout the world in unlikely places that, (if you're not using a FAQ) are not at all trivial to find. The game is the perfect example of "easy to learn, difficult to master." Not only does knowing where you're going help, but there are various tricks, like wall jumping (and some glitches) that open up shortcuts for you that aren't at all obvious when you're just trudging through the first time. Amongst games that are single-player only and don't have a lot of customizable elements, there aren't many with the sort of playability that Super Metroid has.

The way you can upgrade Samus throughout the game is fantastic, not just the amount of upgrades, but the diversity of them. There's no "your level 2 gun is now a level 3 gun!" Every item is unique in what it does and can be anything from the iconic morphing ball, where you literally roll up like a pillbug (I had to Google that), to a weapon that freezes enemies in place, to the Space Jump, which creates some sort of cyclone thing that lets you jump indefinitely. All of these work like they're supposed to, with fluid and intuitive controls. You can scroll through your missle and bomb weapons with one button, and other than that, you don't have to go through menus to "activate" anything (you can turn abilities off it you want to), it's all built into the existing controls. There are some exploitable glitches, but none that you really run into on accident. It's a very polished game, and a very, very fun one. One of my all time favorites (gonna have to way until day 30 to see if it is my all-time favorite)

Next: Day 11 -- Game system of choice

Month of Video Games Day 9: Saddest Game Scene

Like the music post from yesterday, there are a lot of different directions you could go with this. My friend went for (SPOILER)

Tidus disappearing at the end of Final Fantasy X, which is a pretty good choice.

But like the music post I'm going to shun the more modern Final Fantasies and give Final Fantasy VI some love on back-to-back days....

(SPOILERS)

Day 9: Saddest Game Scene
Celes Tries to Kill Herself



Final Fantasy VI was pretty hardcore for a video game in 1994. There was the part where Cyan's wife and child are poisoned as part of Kefka's siege of Doma and he first has to walk in on their dead bodies, his son still in bed, and then later has to watch them board the train that shuttles people to the afterlife. There was also the whole thing where the protagonist is revealed to be the product of a human/extra-dimensional furry affair. There's not anything in the game quite as straight-up gut-wrenching, though, as the scene right after Kefka throws the world out of balance and Cid and Celes are alone on an island. Cid nurses Celes back to health but then gets sick himself and lies on his deathbed. Believing herself to be the only person left, Celes attempts to kill herself by jumping off of a cliff. It's only after she happens to not die and see a seagull with Locke's bandanna while sprawled out on the beach that she decides to go on living. There are a lot of games, RPGs especially, where things get pretty messed up. Chrono Trigger had you travel to the time period after Lavos had struck and the remains of humanity are living in squalor with no food. FF7 had a meteor almost destroy the world and before they made Advent Children it was kind of ambiguous as to whether any humans survived. But I'm not sure there's anything as straight-up brutal though, as the simplicity of someone believing themselves to be alone in a ruined world and deciding to just end it quickly. It's like Cormac McCarthy decided to help out on making a video game for a spell.

Runner-up: Super Metroid -- Mother Brain kills the metroid hatching

(2:00 in)



Because just... awwwww... whyyyyyy?

Up next: Best gameplay.

Month of Video Games Day 8: Best Soundtrack

Day 8: Best Soundtrack

So for a lot of these, I'd really had to struggle coming up with an answer. The challenge of this one is going to be picking one answer. Music in video games is territory that I've already covered here some. It's something that I've always loved. When it's well done it can bring the immersion that a game creates to a completely different level, and going back and hearing music from an old game you really love will give you an immediate rush of nostalgia, even if you're not actually playing the game. I love that there's kind of a secret handshake sort of quality to video game music. Anyone else who's played a lot of video games will know what you're talking about if you reference, but it's kind of an afterthought for people who don't really play video games. Nobody really has any idea who Nobuo Uematsu is the way everyone knows who John Williams is, even if they don't really watch a lot of movies. Really, I could spend about 6 hours just linking video game music. I'll try and keep it a little bit less ridiculous than that, but seriously, where to start?

Maybe I could start with the springy hip-hop in Jet Set Radio, or the haunting themes from the Metal Gear Solid games (or the delightfully absurd Bond opening parody that is Snake Eater). I could go with the cool ambiance of Super Metroid's soundtrack, or the gothic styling of Symphony of the Night. But really, eventually, if we're going to talk about some of the most well crafted and most memorable game music, we're gonna have to get into RPGs. I'm tempted to say either Chrono Trigger or Chrono Cross. Yasunori Mitsuda's brilliance is apparent in both games. In Chrono Trigger, he created a diverse and atmospheric soundtrack on primative hardware that's still good enough to listen to on it's own. There's the somber overworld themes of Peaceful Days, and Wind Scene, the fun-as-hell Frog's Theme, the etherial Shala's Theme, and the stone cold badassery of the Lavos battle music. Years later, Mitsuda came back to compose Chrono Cross with better the sound hardware provided by Playstation and created the gorgeous Scars of Time, and a bunch more amazing tracks to go along with it.

Final Fantasy, for me, is paramount, though, when it comes to RPGs, though, and Nobuo Uemastu's music throughout the series has always resonated with me. Again, how the hell do I pick a favorite? X had the somber reflection of To Zanarkand and maybe the best love theme in Suteki Da Ne. VIII, despite being uh... not as good of a game, had the blood-pumping Man with the Machine Gun. Then there's Final Fantasy VII, with the iconic, cataclysmic One-Winged Angel, the Main Theme, which is almost its own little story in how it progresses, the punch-you-in-the-gut sadness of Aerith's Theme, and the intro, which did so much to get you excited and draw you into the world of the game immediately. It was very, very tempting to settle on VII, but no, I'm going to go back one game prior...

Final Fantasy VI

Like what Mitsuda did on Chrono Cross, I think a of credit is deserved for the range and diversity that Uematsu was able to achieve on a little old 16-bit system that's now 20 years old. One of the seasons I'm settling on VI rather than VII is the more-with-less quality of it. But more than that, there's just really not a bad track on the entire soundtrack. All of the character themes are as lovable as the characters and seem to be instantly evocative of them. Even being comprised of simple synthetic instruments, Uematsu is able to create music that's genuinely emotional enough to match the emotional complexity of the game which, by the standards of 1994, was pretty much unmatched. And oh yeah, the game has an entire fucking opera in it.

Omen

The opening is a sufficiently operatic overture for the epic scale of the game, and has a great sinister and mysterious quality to it. You have to love the bellowing chimes going along with the strings. They sound positively apocalyptic. At the end, it introduces the somber Terra's Theme, which may be the single coolest theme in any game.

Locke's Theme

Breaks you out of your initial depression a bit after Terra's Theme. The perfect light-hearted, dashing rogue sort of theme.

The Decisive Battle

Best Final Fantasy boss battle music? Yeah, I think so.

Kefka's Theme

There are a lot of mentally unstable villains out there in video games, movies, and all of fiction, but there's nothing quite like an insane man dressed as a clown who takes over an Empire so he can throw the order of things out of balance and rule over a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's kind of hard to capture that in a piece of music, but Kefka's Theme does a pretty good job. If you've played the game before, you can hear his fantastic 16-bit maniacal laugh as you listen to this. I guarantee you can.

Shadow's Theme

The ultimate shadowy anti-hero gets a cool Good, the Bad, and the Ugly-sounding theme.

The Veldt

I think this might be one of the most sampled video game tracks out there, leading to awesome stuff like Overclocked Remix's Kefka Goes West. Cool as hell.

Forever Rachel

A lot like what Uemastu did with Arieth's Theme a game later. A great, sad piece, although maybe not even the best one, with the solumn guitar strings of Epitaph coming later.

Overture / Aria di Mezzo Caratte / Wedding Waltz / Grand Finale

Have I mentioned yet that the game has an opera in it? I didn't play Final Fantasy VI when it came out in 1994, but I think I can safely say that there had been nothing whatsoever like that in a video game before at the time and, really, I'm not really sure how many scenes like it have been made since. It was a pretty storytelling device, although if it didn't sound like a legit opera it wouldn't have worked nearly as well. Uemastu nailed it.

Relm's Theme

"Uncle Ulty! I'm going to paint you a portrait!!"

Esper World

Fantastically foreboding.

Battle to the Death

Sufficiently epic for a fight with Atma Weapon

Dark World

With the game at its absolute darkest point, Uemastu pulls out some of the most morose organ music you'll ever hear.

Dancing Mad

The culmination of everything.

There you have it. Final Fantasy VI was a game with one of the best cast of characters ever assembled. Every FF game has memorable characters, but VI's batch was a particularly great ensemble, and went to great lengths to develop all of them and tell the story of what had come before in each of their lives. Nobuo Uemastu's soundtrack perfectly complements this at any step of the way. You can't see a screenshot of Final Fantasy and not hear the accompanying music, nor hear a track from the OST and not see the scene. I'm a huge fan of Roger Ebert, and reading his reviews is a big reason why I started writing a blog that is oft-times about movies. Ebert, though, has developed this weird, wrong-headed idea that video games can't be art and has gone to great lengths to defend his position. As far as I'm concerned, though, Final Fantasy VI and it's score disproves his position, and this was a game made 17 years ago.

Month of Video Games Day 7: Best Game Couple

Day 7: Best Game Couple

I imagine most people here would go for like a Zidane-Dagger or Tidus-Yuna, but I'm going to do for an unconventional answer....

Dynasty Warriors: Meg Huo and Zhu Rong



That is a giant man with giant bear claws. And his lovely wife that he carries around. Like most Dynasty Warriors characters, Meng Huo and Zhu Rong come from the kind-of-but-not-really historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I have no idea how they're portrayed in that work, but the Japanese people who made Dynasty Warriors, or at least the people translating the games into English, see fit to have Zhu Rong talk like she's white trash and Meng Huo like he's straight up crazy. Zhu Rong will say stuff like "That outta learn ya!" and "Get off our property!" whereas Meng Huo, after defeating an officer, instead of saying "Enemy officer defeated" like most characters, will say "Enemy officer devoured!" It is implied that he's eating people. Why does any of this make them the best couple? ...Honestly I really have no idea. They just amuse me with their weird mannerisms and obnoxious and most certainly ahistorical tribal getup. The extent of Dynasty Warriors gameplay is basically "hit square a lot until your special attack gague button fills up, then hit circle, then start hitting square a lot again," so the charm of the game is all about the characters, and they were always two of my favorites.

Month of Video Games Day 6: Most Annoying Character

Hey, so how's that Zelda dungeon goin'? Having fun? Enjoying it? How'd you like to see the entrance of it again.

Day 6: Most Annoying Character
Floormasters -- Zelda

I'm assuming "most annoying character" can include enemies, and few enemies will piss you off more than floormasters in Zelda. Aside from the fact that they'll just kind of scare the crap out of you when you're not expecting them, they'll don't just do damage to you, but rather transport you all the way back to the start of the dungeon. How does that work anyway? Apparently they can maintain an iron tight grip on you and move you anywhere. Why not drop you in a pit? Do they just have a fixation on inconveniencing whatever adventurers might come their way? Or do they just want you to leave? Maybe I've been looking at this all wrong. Maybe floormasters are trying like a non-violent resistance type of thing and just trying to politely get you to leave instead of just straight up murdering you like most Zelda denizens.

I guess that's all I've got for this, so since this was a short one, here's some runners-up I was considering for this:

Zelda - Like-Likes: Similar idea in that they're annoying because they engulf you, steal your shit (oft-times your shield) and then spit you back out. Another enemy based around horribly inconveniencing you.

Zelda -- Princess Ruto: Actually mentioned yesterday, she's the annoying Zora girl who wants you to lead her through Jabu-Jabu's belly, she just doesn't want to walk around or do anything herself whatsoever.

Final Fantasy VII -- Ghost Ship: Annoying for the very specific reason that the enemy shows up as a possible 8th round encounter and has the ability to knock you off the screen, and so thus if it gets a turn it has a chance to instantly undo everything you've done to that point. Seriously, what the hell?

Super Mario World 2 --Baby Mario: Pretty awesome game, but seriously, that crying will gradually drive you insane.

Street Fighter 4 -- Seth: Capcom decided it would be an awesome idea for a final boss to take Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, stick a rotating marble in his abdomen, and give him a moveset that's basically a combination of the most annoying moves in the game: projectiles, Dhalsim's stretchy arms move, and a special where he basically sucks you into himself that you can't really do a whole lot about. Dumbest final boss ever.

Next: Day 7 -- Best Game Couple

Month of Video Games Day 5: Character you are most like (or wish you were)

Day 5 - Game character you feel you are most like (or wish you were)

I'm kind of at a loss on this one. I mean, I could write about how I'm a bit of a loner and kind of emotionally detached and so I'm a lot like Squall from FF8 with his many "..."s, but honestly, nobody wants to read that. So let's stick with the "what character you wish you were more like" option.

Link

Let's say hypothetically that you were to break into someone's house, smash all of their pots, steal all of their precious, precious rupees contained within them, took the bundle of arrows they had in a chest in the back, and then up and left without saying a word. You would likely not be welcome round those parts again. For Link, the pointy eared mute boy that everyone loves, this is completely kosher. At the same time, everywhere you go, you have farm girls, princesses, and odd, naked, fish type creatures, if you're into that, throwing themselves at you, without you saying a word to them. Do a small favor for someone as Link, and they'll suddenly decide to up and give you whatever family heirloom they'd been keeping for their entire lives, which will conveniently also get you into the next dungeon. Start wandering around digging up graves in real life and you probably have an awful stench on your hands as well as a lawsuit from the bereaved. Do this as Link and you end up racing a crazy old dead guy who will then decide to give you his hookshot.

Sure occasionally, you have to go into a temple or inside a giant fish or a big-ass talking tree and bust some heads of the occupying forces within, but it's not like you don't have a veritable army of bows, hammers, explosives, and various magic musical instruments to take along with. You also get a bitchin'-ass horse to ride across Hyrule on that you're perfectly justified in liberating from his farm because his owner is a dick. There are a lot of video games where the protagonist goes awesome places and gets awesome stuff. In the world of Zelda though, Link seems to have a particular ability for said awesome stuff to just kind of fall into his lap with minimal effort on his part.

Next: Day 6 -- Most annoying character

Month of Video Games Day 4: Your guilty pleasure game

A while back when I did my movie review for The Wrestler I admitted straight up that I had a huge pro-wrestling phase in my middle school and early high school years, and at the center of it were Japanese Developer AKI's wrestling games for Nintendo 64 that culminated with...

Day 4: Your Guilty Pleasure Game

WWE: No Mercy



Here's the thing: As a 25 year old man, I'll now admit straight up that pro wrestling is a bizarre and mostly juvenile exercise mostly consisting of people yelling at stereotypes while they actually destroy each other for a fake fight, but I don't regret so ever the hours that I put into this game and it's predecessors (they did 1 other WWF game, 2 WCW games before that, and some other games with no actual wrestling federation licenses that I think were Japan only). The game did a great job of combining a system that was intuitive and fun to play and that actually pretty well resembled the "sport." This nonsense came out just a couple years earlier, and even though they seem to work through a lot of the actual moves in that video, (which are completely random button combinations) you can usually do just fine mashing the punch button. In No Mercy, you had striking moves that you used with B, and then with A you could try and either execute a weak or strong grapple depending on how long you held the button down from which you could do one of 8 other moves from each type by hitting A or B and one direction. The other player can try and time hitting one of the shoulders right to counter either the strike or the grapple. It also just kind of ran smoothly. In a lot of wrestling games of that era, you tended to have little to know idea who you were facing, you'd clip through people a lot, you'd just kind of fall down instead of attacking a guy on the ground... stuff like that. With No Mercy, maybe the animation wasn't all that smooth because of the technology it was made on, but the gameplay usually worked the way it was supposed to.

One of the coolest things about wrestling games is that they usually include a create-a-wrestler, which for some reason tend to be some of the deepest create-a-anythings in console games. In No Mercy the detail you could get into was completely ridiculous. There was only so much you could do in terms of appearance because it was a cartridge game and they'd already somehow squeezed onto it intro music and horrifically compressed intro videos for like 60 wrestlers, but the amount you could customize a character's move set was insane. If you really wanted to set what your character did when he was on a turnbuckle and your opponent was on the apron facing down while it was Tuesday and raining, you could. Say what you will about real life wrestling, the fact that it's insane and tends to kill people before they hit 40, but I defy you to come up with a lot of things more fun as a 14 year old than getting together with a bunch of friends, making create-a-wrestlers, and having them beat each other with trash cans. Ah, memories.

Next: Day 5 - Game character you feel you are most like (or wish you were)

Hmmmm....

Month of Video Games Day 3: An Underrated Game

Day 3: An Underrated Game

Gemcraft

I'm not necessarily that much of a connoisseur of flash games, but out of what I've played, there's not a one I've had more fun with than Gemcraft and it's follow up Gemcraft: Chapter 0. The concept is simple, building off of a whole slew of tower defense games that have come before it, but it has polish and open-endedness that sets it apart from most anything else of its kind. In a world where about 40 bajillion people have downloaded Angry Birds, an equally simple concept that was well executed, I'm actually surprised that the game hasn't found commercial success, in the form of an iPhone or DS port, maybe.

The game is pretty intuitive. It's one of those easy-to-learn-hard-to-master sort of deals. The game has a top-down perspective and a series of waves of insectoid monsters come marching along a set path toward your base. Like all tower defense games, you have to construct towers along the path to kill them before they get there. The difference in Gemcraft is that you arm the towers with increasingly powerful gems. Using the mana you store up, you can create gems of a certain strength of a random color. Each color gives them certain abilities. Using more mana, you can also choose to fuse two gems together to make a stronger one. Fusing a level 1 and a level 2 will make a slightly more fortified level 2, but combining two level 2s will create a new level 3. Fusing two gems of different colors will produce a new hybrid gem with the abilities of both colors, but may not have the total power of a pure gem of the same level. You can upgrade your ability to make pure and multi-colored gems separately, as well as upgrade your total mana pool and how fast it regenerates and a host of other options. How fast you can upgrade depends on your score in each level. You can influence your score by choosing to send waves of enemies early, which you can do by clicking on the bar that runs alongside the left side of the screen. That then, is the real genius of the game. It encourages you to constantly replay levels and try to keep pushing the envelope with how fast you send enemies. And the game is fun enough to play that it's not a chore to do this. Repetition is actually fun.

Gemcraft is an example of a very simple concept very well executed. There are commercial games out there that have been made with a thousand times the resources and that require you go to through about an hour of tutorials for you to learn everything you can do that aren't nearly as fun as playing Gemcraft for hours on end.

A short one today after my long diatribe on Snake. Next: Day 4 -- Your guilty pleasure game

Month of Video Games Day 2: Favorite Character

Day 2: Your Favorite Character

Solid Snake / Big Boss -- Metal Gear Solid

It's possible my answer here would be different were I not currently in the middle of replaying Snake Eater and having just replayed Sons of Liberty, but really, I'm not sure a better answer would come to mind regardless. Sure the longevity of a Mario or a Mega Man has given them a certain iconic staying power, but really, their popularity is mostly because the games are fun and they happen to be the stars of them. Characters like Link and Chrono walk through their games totally mute, just kind of absorbing all the crazyness around them. Other RPGs like Final Fantasy are typified with fun and complex characters, but in any good Final Fantasy, there's a big ensemble of memorable playable characters that all play off of each other. So I submit to you that Solid Snake and Big Boss--and yeah, for purposes of this blog entry I'm going to consider that genetic sameness to be good enough a reason for them to qualify being lumped together for the answer--are the best characters in video games. David Hayter's gravelly Snake voice is instantly recognizable, the bandanna and the mullet are as charming as they are ridiculous looking, and for all the fun of them, they're uniquely tragic figures in the landscape of video games.

For all the money and effort that's poured into making video games more cinematic, (the voice actors, the music recorded by live orchestras, the motion-captured martial arts, etc.) a lot of the actual stories are still very derivative and very bland. You're the hero, now go kill the villain to save the damsel in distress or the president or whatever. The fact that the villain is voiced by somebody you've seen on TV before only does so much to add any newness to formula. With the Metal Gear Solid series, Hideo Kojima has always pushed the envelope in terms of how much misdirection and moral ambiguity he can add to a medium where, ultimately, as the guy controlling the protagonist, you still have to have some sense of fulfillment and accomplishment at the end. Really, you can say that the conspiracy-laden plotlines of the games, where you're constantly double and triple-crossed and never, ever told the whole story by your superiors, is like a meta-commentary on how video games usually work. Usually you get some objective--in a lot of games it involves you murdering a bunch of people--you complete it, fireworks go off, you put your initials in, you go home. In every Metal Gear Solid game, you always seem relatively sure of what you're doing at the beginning of the game, and by the halfway point you have no idea what you're really accomplishing or who for. (SPOILERS) At the end of the original MGS, you realize that the whole point of you being at Shadow Moses was just to spread the FOXDIE virus and clean up some loose ends for the Pentagon. At the end of Snake Eater, Big Boss has to kill a mother figure in The Boss (it can certainly be inferred that she's in birth mother too, but it doesn't really matter) and finds out that the woman he fell in love with, Eva, was a spy for the Chinese. At the end of MGS4, a withered and scarred Snake, having rid the world of the clandestine organization that had been controlling all world affairs for about a century, feels it's his obligation to kill himself until Big Boss suddenly shows up and urges him to keep living.

What makes Snake great as a character, then, is how much they work serving as the tragic figure in the center of this, and how they're able to develop over time. In the first MGS and in Snake Eater with Big Boss, they're initially pretty much blank slates. Many, including David Hayter himself, have lampooned how completely verbose Snake can be in codec conversations with Roy Campbell or Major Zero or whoever. "Snake, there's a Hind-D landing!" "A Hind-D?" "Snake, you need to find the launch codes!" "Launch codes?" "Snake, this hold is where they keep Metal Gear!" "Metal Gear?!" And it's true, you can't help but laugh at times when you hear some of it, but it underscores that Snake has no real aspirations other than to be a good and loyal soldier. There's a scene at the beginning of Snake Eater where Eva basically undresses in front of Big Boss, prompting pretty much no response, then Eva hands him a pistol and Big Boss immediately launches into a long dialogue about everything there is to know about the gun. It's really funny, and yet it's kind of sad as you realize that, at this point, Big Boss really has no thoughts on anything whatsoever except fighting. The tragedy of the Metal Gear games is that loyalty and patriotism, universally considered good qualities, are never rewarded and always lead to heartbreak and betrayal. The key to the games, and to the characters of Snake and Big Boss, is that they eventually decide to do something about it.

After the Shadow Moses incident in Metal Gear Solid, Snake comes back in MGS2 no longer with the military but working with a non-profit organization (in what other video game does that happen?) dedicated to nuclear non-proliferation. When he meets Raiden, who is under the same puppet-like control of the Patriots in his case, Snake is the one to convince him to live and decide for himself. After Metal Gear Solid 3, Big Boss creates the idea of Outer Heaven, a world where being a soldier still matters and where they're not pawns. Then at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, everything kind of comes full circle with Big Boss coming back to remind Snake of his own advice to Raiden and convince him to not kill himself to get rid of FOXDIE the "meme" of Snake (it would take a much longer post to really explain this whole thing). They change and grow as characters and break out of their assigned roles of super-soldiers who complete the mission but don't ask questions. I think that's very rare for a video game character.

Of course, you can really not think that hard about it, and just think that the idea of a guy who looks like and bears the namesake of Snake Plisskin from Escape from New York, has a bandanna and a mullet, hides in cardboard boxes, and has a voice that is endlessly amusing to say stuff in, is kind of awesome. That's definitely part of the charm as well.



Next: Day 3 - A game that is underrated.

Month of Video Games: Day 1

I'm going to take an idea from the blog of a friend, which he in turn borrowed from someone else, and write a month's worth of quick posts about video games. He's got a six day head start, and so if I have sufficient time and inspiration, I might try and knock off more than one in a day to try and catch up. My goal of this though, is just to do something that should be quick, relatively easy, and fun to try and kickstart this, since this blog has been festering for a while again, something which I seem to be saying at shorter and shorter intervals. Anyway, here we go:

Scheduled:

Day 1 - Very first video game.
Day 2 - Your favorite character.
Day 3 - A game that is underrated.
Day 4 - Your guilty pleasure game.
Day 5 - Game character you feel you are most like (or wish you were).
Day 6 - Most annoying character.
Day 7 - Favorite game couple.
Day 8 - Best soundtrack.
Day 9 - Saddest game scene.
Day 10 - Best gameplay.
Day 11 - Gaming system of choice.
Day 12 - A game everyone should play.
Day 13 - A game you've played more than 5 times
Day 14 - Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper.
Day 15 - Post a screenshot from the game you’re playing right now.
Day 16 - Game with the best cut scenes.
Day 17 - Favorite antagonist.
Day 18 - Favorite protagonist.
Day 19 - Picture of a game setting you wish you lived in.
Day 20 - Favorite genre.
Day 21 - Game with the best story.
Day 22 - A game sequel which disappointed you.
Day 23 - Game you think had the best graphics or art style.
Day 24 - Favorite classic game.
Day 25 - A game you plan on playing.
Day 26 - Best voice acting.
Day 27 - Most epic scene ever.
Day 28 - Favorite game developer.
Day 29 - A game you thought you wouldn’t like, but ended up loving.
Day 30 - Your favorite game of all time

Day 1 - Very first video game(s).

The first games I have real memory of are old DOS and Commodore 64 games. Here's a couple that I can remember relatively clearly and that the internet acknowledges the existence of.

Gorf

As is probably pretty clear, Gorf (I remember one night my golf-obsessed uncle coming over for some sort of family function, saying "Wow, you can play golf on this thing!" and then getting really disappointed when he realized it, in fact, said "Gorf") was kind of a Space Invaders rip-off. Well, I guess, they at least made four levels with slight variations to the basic concept of shooting aliens that repeat themselves perpetually. So basically, they took Space Invaders and crossed it with Donkey Kong. I do love how completely insane the concept of the final "FLAG SHIP" level is. "The humans will never discover our weakness! Why would they think to shoot the part of the ship that has a hole in it? It's just illogical!" The guy doing this playthrough doesn't quite get that far before managing to hit it, but I remember actually spitting the entire ship in two before managing to hit the weak point, and the two pieces of the ship just keep flying in unison with each other. Good times. Anyway, I remember being absolutely amazed by this when I was about six years old, and watching a YouTube of it now... um... yeah. It's a testament to both how easily amused you are as a little kid and how accustomed we are to modern technology.



The Jetsons: By George in Trouble Again

Downloaded a DOS emulator to play this game again, which is now abandonware, and I can confirm that, no, I haven't misremembered from my youth. The game was, in fact, completely off-the-wall-insane. Apparently the good people at Hi-Tech Expressions felt the best way to capture the essence of the Jetsons cartoon in a video game is to take place George in some sort of surrealist nightmare where pipe wrenches and pliers come to life and start trying to murder him and at any moment a conveyor belt might carry him off to some unknown abyss below. As to why there's a conveyor belt leading to certain death in almost every room of Mr. Spacely's plant in the first place, I do not profess to know. Seems like an unsafe work environment.


Next: Day 2 - Your favorite character.