Console Wars: 1st Year

I'm having issues finding solid data and numbers for the first year of video game console sales.  Most of the searches I come across are all along the same ridiculous lines: "Company X is DOOMED!", "Video games are DOOMED!", or "The economy is DOOMED!"  I find this hilarious because as far as I can remember (and this is where I wish I had more solid data), very few consoles do well in their first year.  I know the 3DS, DS, PS3, and now the Wii U all had pretty miserable first years.  In all cases, it was a severe lack of games because developers were trying to figure out how to develop for these systems.

The PS3 had its own super complicated tech to figure out, but if the developers could, it was super powerful.  The DS was the first touch based gaming system with a few other bells and whistles that developers seemed to feel needed to all be utilized in every game (I'm so glad I don't have to blow out fires by blowing into the mic or talk at my DS anymore...).  The 3DS was mostly the same except for the whole 3D factor.  The Wii U has a completely separate screen that game designers need to figure out how to use.  Most of those systems were also supposedly overpriced, but I feel like if a game system doesn't have enough games that you like on them, it really doesn't matter what price the system is for.  Take for example the OUYA.  It's only $100, the price of most collector edition games.  All games on the system are "free" as well.  However, I have zero interest in the system because not a single game I've heard about on the system sounds appealing to me.

It's especially entertaining to see people say Nintendo as a company is doomed because of lackluster Wii U sales (which is understandable since they only just now started releasing their big slew of games) when there are articles like this that are clearly indicating that the 3DS doing amazing well after a similarly terrible first year.  Personally, I'm hoping the Wii U does well enough to get more than the Nintendo loyalists (like myself) to buy it because of all three new systems for the next generation of gaming, I feel like the Wii U has the most potential for new and different gaming experiences.  Nintendo just needs to start making more asymmetric multiplayer games like the three minigames in Nintendo Land to show the other developers how it's done.

Compulsion Review System

Back in the early 2000's, there was a game review website Old Man Murray that was all about snarky reviews on games that got strong reviews elsewhere - sort of like Zero Punctuation.  One of the very novel things that came out of it was the Crate Review System, where a game would be judged by how long it took to get to the first crate because after that point, "the designer has run out of ideas" according to the article.  This review system is a joke (but still something interesting to think about when playing games), but I've just developed my own review system that works along similar lines.  I'm now going to start judging games based on how long I play until my need to finish a game overrides my need to do everything in a game.  I call it, the Compulsion Review System.

In a perfectly designed game, I should still be having fun when I finish completing all the side quests/gathering all the collectibles so that I can finish the game and have both compulsions happy at the end.  When doing all the side things in a games starts being work and stops being fun or when parts of the game start frustrating me enough that my need to finish the game gets stronger, the game has over stayed its welcome.  Now, my need to gotta catch 'em all is pretty darn strong, so I don't know the conversion rate between happy Erics and happy *insert name here*s.  Meaning, this review system doesn't work that well for me to tell other people how good a game is.  That is, unless the game is so bad that the compulsion is overridden near the beginning of the game.  That means that the collecting is so boring, the mechanics are so broken, or the difficulty level is so high that I just don't care anymore.

It's also possible for the need to finish the game compulsion to get ignored, but that takes a truly terrible game.  Either that or I just got distracted by a game I had been looking forward to for a long time.  But even then, the game will be sitting on my shelf mocking me for having not beaten it, so that's an extremely rare thing.  And this is how you use your own personal crazy to work for you instead of against you.  The more you know....

Teaching Your Players: Common Mistakes

Educating your players to play your game can be very different between video games and board games, but there are a few areas where I've seen the same mistakes from both places: consistency and easy access to information.

Consistency

These problems tend to fall in the "don't make the player feel stupid" category.  Whenever you teach a player a new ability or rule, you have to be consistent about its use.  Never make the player only use an ability one time in a game.  At the same time, make sure if the ability isn't necessary often, that you make them use it frequently enough that they remember it's there.  My least favorite puzzle in God of War was one where you have to push a box against a treadmill that has a giant spike wheel at the end.  If you stop pushing the box, it will get eaten by the treadmill.  Oh, and enemies attack you while you're doing this, which interrupts your box pushing.  The part I had a problem with is that after I struggled through and finally got the box to the end and made it, I remembered that I had the ability to kick boxes a large distance at a time.  I didn't remember this at the time because I never had to do that a single time after being taught I could do that.  So the puzzle itself wasn't a problem, but the fact that I had forgotten about the ability was.

Another issue with consistency is if you do make the player do something a few times and then suddenly make them do that again in a completely different situation.  For example, in Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, you were required to stop something rushing at you in its tracks (first goats, then boulders).  Every time you did this, you were in your human form and it was made fairly obvious that the boulders had to be stopped the same way as the goats (when you were taught about this ability).  The problem came at the very end of the game when I'm fighting Ganon.  He comes barreling at me as a giant boar much like the goats and boulders.  So I strap on my Iron Boots and repeatedly try to stop him, but it's just not working.  After 30 minutes of this, I get frustrated and look up what to do.  It turns out that somehow I'm supposed to know that my wolf form can ALSO do this stopping maneuver even though it doesn't have any hands to stop things with.  It also is apparently stronger than me in my human form with Iron Boots on?  Not once was I ever given any indication that my wolf form had the same abilities as my human form.  Probably because except for that one case, they didn't ever have the same abilities.

In board games, I come upon this more when designing the board game or finding special cases that aren't defined in the rule book of a game.  Whenever you find you have to make your own rule, the key is to figure out what is most consistent with the other rules of the game, the theme and spirit of the game, and doesn't give a ridiculously unfair advantage.

Ease of Access

Ideally, your game is either simple enough or well explained enough that players don't have to look up any information on how to play once they have learned the first time.  However, this doesn't mean you should assume the player has figured out something the first time or that they will remember everything when they stop playing for a few months and come back to the game later.  This is why players should always have easy access to information about how to play the game.  In video games, this usually takes the form of Help menus or Move Lists.  In board games, this just re-iterates the idea that the information in the rule book needs to be well separated and laid out.  If the player needs to find out what to do when they die in a game, they should be able to find that information quickly and easily.  There's nothing more boring/frustrating to other players than waiting on a player looking up something in the rule book.  So make sure that when this does happen, the amount of time they spend looking is as little as possible.

Are there other common areas where lack of information or misinformation has ruined a game for you?

Happy Characters

Maybe it's because I've noticed that Joss Whedon seems to hate happy characters, but I've noticed a trend that in most TV series, characters aren't allowed to be happy for more than an episode.  I know there has to be some drama to inspire conflict because otherwise the show would be very boring.  What I mean is almost any time two characters start a romantic relationship in a show, they have roughly 2-3 episodes before something happens and they break up.  Even the shows I can think of with exceptions only have one long lasting couple.  Scrubs had Turk and Carla.  How I Met Your Mother has Lily and Marshal.  The Office has Jim and Pam.  Friends (eventually) had Monica and Chandler.  Lost had Sun and Jin.  But none of the other characters seem to be able to maintain a consistent relationship for very long.

This pattern makes it hard for me to ever really care at all about whoever the other main characters are dating, especially if it's not a main character.  But I guess in most cases it just fizzles with no or very little repercussions.  When Joss Whedon takes out a happy couple, things get really really ugly.  I'd put links to various examples, but I don't want to spoil anything in case you haven't watched Buffy, Firefly/Serenity, Angel, Dollhouse, or Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog.  And if you haven't watched any/all of those, go do it!  Do it now!

I don't know why I love Joss Whedon making me so sad...but I do...

Character Movement

Moving your character around is essential to any first or third person video game, so much so that most modern games insist on teaching you how to move within the first few minutes of the game.  In some games, it's very methodical.  For example, Robotron, players move from one space on a grid to another in one of 8 directions.  In Super Mario Bros., players move left or right with the ability to jump up and "gravity" pulls them down.

Most of the time while playing a game, I don't really think much about character movement, but every once in awhile, a game will make some poor decisions in regards to player movement.  I have classified three consistent design flaws that can happen with movement - backtracking, slowing a character down, and speeding a character up.

Backtracking

Backtracking is when a player is forced to walk through an area they have already been through before.  In most single player games, once a player has gone through an area, there won't be any more events in there and they have already seen the location, so walking back through it is incredibly boring.

Event/Enemy Respawns

One solution to this is to have enemies respawn in an area once the player has left.  Dead Island does this throughout the game - even though there are no people left to zombify, zombies keep reappearing after you clear an area out.  Although this does make backtracking more eventful, it also makes it even more tedious since not only is the player not experiencing anything new, but they're being forced to experience something they have already experienced before.  Traveling to the same village/hub again and again also adds additional design flaws such as the repetitive NPC who is spouting out some dialogue to try to make the world feel alive, but when he says the same thing for the hundredth time you passed him while revisiting the town, it gets a little ridiculous.

One-Way Levels

Another solution is to make levels one-way so there is no chance of backtracking a la Mass Effect 3.  This can be a major problem for the Collection gamer because if he thinks he missed something, he won't be able to go back to it later and it will be a constant irritation that will affect his outlook on the game. If this happens enough times, the player may stop playing altogether.  The player should always be able to backtrack if they choose to do so.  If it's the player's choice to backtrack, then they cannot (or at least should not) blame the game.

Fast Travel Maps

My personal favorite solution is the fast travel map like in Skyrim.  Once you have visited an important location, it appears on a map and at any time you can select that location an instantly travel there via Load Screen rather than walking.  This is the closest solution I've seen to eliminating backtracking, but what happens if you want to go somewhere that doesn't have a quick travel point?  When I played Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, I hated the sailing.  I would point my ship to the next destination, set the wind to take me there faster, and then just get up and do something else.  There was at least one time I had enough time to go to the bathroom and make myself a sandwich before I reached my destination.  At one point you get a song that lets you teleport to specific quadrants on the map.  At that point, I thought, "Finally!  Now I can enjoy this game!"  Much to my dismay, I discovered it only took you to certain arbitrary quadrants on the map, not any of them.  What's the point of quick travel if it doesn't take me where I want to go?

Slow Down

Generally, the player speed is calculated out so the player can reach their goal in a good amount of time, but not so fast that they miss the view on the way.  Generally, players are pretty impatient if they feel like they have nothing to do where they are and want to move the game along (or maybe that's just me).  So when a character is forcibly slowed down, it is incredibly frustrating.  In both Uncharted 3 and Mass Effect 3, there were sequences where the player was chasing something and was either badly hurt or had been drugged, so they understandably walked slower.  That part makes sense to me.  What doesn't make sense to me is why these parts are interactive.  The character is moving slow (not fun) and there is nowhere to go but forward (no hidden goodies around).  The end result is that the player is just holding the joystick forward during what essentially is a cutscene.  So why not just make this a cutscene?

I stopped playing Red Dead Redemption for this very reason.  Every mission started the same way: meet a character in a town and hold A to follow him on a horse while you two talk.  You know what'd be more fun than sitting there holding the A button?  Making it a cutscene or locking my movement to auto-follow him unless I press a button so that I can put the controller down and enjoy the dialogue someone worked hard on writing and voicing.

Now if slowing the character down was caused by some action the player took and gives them some risk/reward situations (doing a power move, which uses up all my stamina, which causes me to move slower while the fight is still happening), then that is fine.  But even then, the slow down should only last a few seconds at the longest.

Speed up

Eric, I thought you said gamers (or just you) are impatient!  Why would speeding the character up be bad?  That's a good question!  This is only a problem if you ever expect your player to replay your game from the beginning.  Once they get used to moving quickly, starting over and moving at the original speed is going to feel like the character is walking through molasses.  So really, this is the same problem as the previous one, but indirectly.  I generally don't play games more than once (at least not since high school), so usually this is not a problem for me.  It has become a problem for me with Star Wars: The Old Republic.  In that game, there are 8 different classes, each with their own story.  Since it is from Bioware, I know I will enjoy the stories, so I want to experience them all.  At level 14, you get an ability called Sprint that lets you run faster when not in combat (you can turn it off, but why in the world would you want to do that since it costs nothing to have active?).  Then at level 25, you get the ability to ride a personal speeder around in most open areas.  However, once you have a character that far, if you start a new character, guess what?  It feels like torture getting around for those first 25 levels!  What's the harm in eliminating Sprint and making that the default run speed and letting players have speeders from the beginning of the game?

Review: Hunger Games

The Hunger Games movie was adequate at what it does. It got across the main points of the Hunger Games story without really messing anything up. However, I think the only reason the movie was good at all was because the Hunger Games book was so fantastic.

For me, until the Hunger Games started, the movie was incredibly boring and I don't remember the book being that way. I think a lot of that is that the book can and does devote time to explain and detail the history of this world they've set up and the backstory of some of the characters, so you get a better feel for the characters' motivations and struggles. In the movie, you get a wall of blah text at the beginning, you see Katniss go under a fence with a sign you briefly see that says "Do Not Enter" or something, but you have no idea why she can't enter that or that hunting is forbidden. The movie just doesn't have time to go in to the whys of the world so when Katniss and Gale are in the forest and a ship drops down on them, you don't know why they run and hide from it.

I went with a friend who hadn't read the books before watching the movie. It apparently was clear enough for him to understand mostly what was going on, but at the end he said, "I need to read the books now." That's probably what the book authors are hoping for, but personally I feel if you haven't watched the movies or read the books, save your money and just read the books. You're just going to get a fuller, richer experience than you do with the movie.

The one thing the movie did wrong in my opinion is a trend among movies nowadays and that's that blasted shaky cam. The first half of the movie when Katniss is in the forest, the camera is shaking like there are earthquakes everywhere. Does this add anything to the movie other than nauseated customers? Whenever there is a fight, just like most movies now, the camera gets right up in the action so you can't actually see what is going at all, you just see lots of movement. I understand that this is supposed to make the fight feel action-packed, but you know what they used to do that worked better? Have fight scenes with good choreography with a camera pulled back so you could actually see what the heck is happening. I don't need to be manipulated to feel action on the screen. In fact, the more I see that, the more I realize I'm being manipulated and immediately get pulled out of the movie and start entering critique mode.

Indiana Jones and the Waggle Staff of Kings

So I just finished Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. Apparently the Staff of Kings is Moses' staff from the Bible. I don't remember it ever being referred to as the staff of kings, but I guess I'm not a big archaelogist buff. This game started off incredibly fun. At first I was thinking all the Wii motion controls made a lot of sense and fit the game really well. You put your Wii-mote at the screen to fire the gun when you're in shooting gallery mode, you put up your dukes with nunchuck and Wii-mote in hand and do jabs, uppercuts, and hooks by doing the appropriate motion. You even fly a plane by holding the Wii-mote like you would an airplane joystick. As is always the case with Wii games (at least the ones I've played so far), it starts off making sense, but then the more you do it, the more you realize just how imprecise it is and just how frustratingly stupid waggle controls are in the heat of combat. At one point I'm surrounded by 8 nazis and was constantly just running around throwing things at them and fighting like a pansy because everytime I tried to stand and fight using my fists or the objects I was throwing at them, Indiana Jones would stand there uselessly while Eric Heine was shaking the circuit boards out of his controllers. Not fun. Another part of the game had the opposite problem, where the controls were too sensitive - the plane. I crashed into more walls because of overcompensating turns than anything else. Not fun. The last motion control problem was when the controls just plain didn't make any sense. The very very very final part of the game has you driving a motorcycle, but instead of driving it Mario Kart style with the Wii-mote sideways and you turn it to turn, you have to hold the Wii-mote AND the nunchuck as if they were one handlebar. How did that ever make sense to anyone? Half the time the bike wasn't turning because I guess I wasn't holding the controllers correctly and the other half was overturning just like the plane. Not fun.

Okay, so enough of my rant. Most of those complaints are from the final level, so if you bought the game and stopped playing right when Indy gets on a zeppelin, I think the game would still be fun. They clearly rushed the last level with no test time or just had very rookie designers and programmers working on them. At least that's how it felt to me.

Okay really. I'll stop complaining now. What's fun about the game is every other level; the exploration, shooting, and level design are all really good. The voice acting is good. It wasn't Harrison, but it was a very good sound-a-like. The music was very Indiana Jonesish. The two reasons I bought the game were co-op mode and the inclusion of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (including voiceovers!). Co-op mode is Indiana and his dad essentially playing a varied amount of mini-games working together with a completely different story than the main story. I haven't beat it yet, but I enjoyed what there was so far. I only started playing through Fate of Atlantis to see what it was like on the Wii (I've beaten it countless times as a child). The version I owned as a kid didn't have voiceovers, so I do look forward to playing through that at some point.

So if you take my advice and stop playing the main story when Indiana jumps onto a zeppelin, then I'd say this game earns 4 fedoras. If you hate yourself enough (or if you're like me and just have to complete things) then it earns 12 poisoned dates. What do those numbers mean? Absolutely nothing. If you remember my original purpose for starting this blog, then you'll remember I hate review numbers because they're meaningless. If you played Uncharted, Prince of Persia (the newer set, not the original), or any game that involves ledge climbing around ancient ruins with (in my opinion) combats that really mar the whole experience and liked them, then you'll like this. If you want a good Indiana Jones experience, this game will fit that well. If you want a really great Indiana Jones experience, get Lego Indiana Jones.