Any review of No More Heroes 2 is probably best started with the caveat that if you didn’t play the first one, the sequel is a solid investment. To a person unfamiliar with Grasshopper Manufacture or Suda 51 games, the game will be an explosion of new ideas in an accessible design that’s engaging all the way to the end. The problem with No More Heroes 2 is that for all the fans who plowed through Killer 7 and No More Heroes for the sake of insane cutscenes, bizarre game design, and dark humor you’re going to find a lot of those things missing. If No More Heroes was the equivalent of a live punk concert, No More Heroes 2 is the I-pod friendly studio album.

Everything that was supposedly broken about the old game has been removed and everything that was praised has been enhanced. The wonky physics and tedious driving in the first game have been replaced with a handy menu system that lets you travel to all relevant destinations instantly. Travis now has access to four different beam weapons that offer different fighting styles along with sections where you play as two other characters with their own unique moves. No more just bashing A and wildly swinging the remote while heads explode. The generic repetitive bad guys of the first game have been replaced with a diversity of fighters who make the much shorter levels quick and always a reasonable length. The awkward side jobs have been replaced with well designed 8-bit mini-games. The assassination missions that would challenge you to kill a hundred people in a minute are gone. No more chopping off 8 people’s heads at once, no more running over every single street light in Santa Destroy, or trying to to do donuts on your enormous motorcycle.

—L.B. Jeffries

Easily the biggest revolution in video games this past decade was the explosion of casual games. Between the success of the Wii, Rock Band, and cross-over titles like Puzzle Quest, two once distinct genres and communities are now beginning to find commonality. Jesper Juul’s latest book, The Casual Revolution, outlines the basic design principles of these games, corrects misconceptions about how they work, and makes the argument for designers to break out of their own perspectives. The last third of the book features interviews with casual game fans and the creative directors of some of the most successful games in the field.

Juul outlines two basic categories for a casual game: mimetic interfaces and downloadable casual games. In a mimetic interface, “the physical activity that the player performs mimics the game activity on the screen.” Bowling on the Wii or using a Guitar Hero controller are the prime example because the average person can look at the game and immediately grasp what they’re supposed to do. The other category is a “downloadable casual game”, which “are purchased online, can be played in short time bursts, and generally do not require an intimate knowledge of video game history in order to play” (5). A game like Bejeweled or Zuma can be understood quickly, unlike a lot of console titles which consistently presume that the player understands tenets of video game logic like “Go towards the shiny object” or “All bad guys drop ammo.” Common assumptions about the casual genre such as all gameplay must be short or that casual players don’t like challenge are untrue. Rather, it’s just that a casual game is very flexible about time commitments and difficulty. Juul writes, “a casual game is sufficiently flexible to be played with a hardcore time commitment, but a hardcore game is too inflexible to be played with a casual time commitment” (10). He uses the example of a game like Scramble, a coin-op game from the 80s. It’s an old game, but the simplicity of the design makes illustrating his point easier. You fly a ship around while bombing enemies, collecting fuel tanks, and seeing how far you can progress. The goals are explicit and only a narrow range of play styles (blow crap up, dodge bullets) will allow you to continue playing. Juul explains, “The problem with goals is that they may force us to optimize our strategy in order to win rather than do something else that we would prefer . . . games without goals or with optional goals are more flexible: they accommodate more playing styles and player types, in effect letting you choose what kind of game you want to play” (138). Examples of this principle in casual games would be Rock Band’s no-fail mode or Bejeweled’s untimed mode for those who just like to play without feeling pressured.

—L.B. Jeffries

The roguelike is a genre that is about developing skills to compete with randomness. While a basic core set of rules make-up the gameplay, the things that you will be encountering will always be presented randomly. There will be a different set of items for you to find, a different way that you’ll progress through the world, and the player must rely on their judgment and skill to progress. For many players in competitive games, the goal is to find as many ways as possible to reduce the effects of randomness so that they can always win. Greg Costikyan notes in an excellent post about randomness in games that “if we feel that we just got lucky—or, worse, that someone else won even though we were obviously the smarter player, because they just got lucky—we’re likely to think less of the game”. Yet creating a balanced game design where the randomness keeps players on their toes without seeming unfair is hard to do. One of the best examples of balanced randomness is the indie classic Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space. Playing like a cross between Solitaire and Star Control 2, it offers an interesting take on games that randomly create their worlds because many sessions do boil down to pure luck. It still stays engaging precisely because the strategy of the game is learning to work with what you’ve got.

At the start of each session, you’re asked if you want to operate as a scientist, pirate, or military vessel. Ship type will decide which scoring system will apply to that session: military awards points for signing treaties and defeating enemies while science awards points for collecting artifacts and animals.  The size of the galaxy that you’re in adjusts how long the play session will be, enemy strength can be adjusted for those wanting to rev up the combat, and nebula mass can be changed to make navigating the map more difficult. Less nebulae means that the galaxy can be travelled around much faster. Playing as the science vessel is a fairly calm experience, you don’t have enough weapons to do much combat. You move around the galaxy collecting artifacts and trying to find ways to get various aliens to talk to you. The military version, on the other hand, is a tough grind as you search for stronger weapons then start taking on anyone that you think you’ve got an edge on. Piracy is a bit more random as you snatch anything that you can find. The scientist mission usually ends peacefully because you never bother with fighting while military missions typically end violently with you biting off more than you can chew.

—L.B. Jeffries

This Gaming Life

Jim Rossignol

 Amazon

Jim Rossignol’s This Gaming Life is a casual discourse on the growing culture of multiplayer gaming. It isn’t so much an exercise in New Game Journalism as it is a look at the way that players are beginning to reflect their gaming lifestyles in the real world. From the celebrity culture of South Korea to Iceland’s bold experiment in EVE Online, all are explored as Rossignol argues the merits of online games as an after the fact situation. They are here to stay and are only getting more popular.

Rossignol describes his interest in games as casual until he took up a boring job and a copy of Quake III. He writes, “Cold mornings, adolescent disinterest, and a nagging hip injury had meant that I was banished from the sports field for many years” (7). A lot of the opening pages are spent justifying this decision, beginning with the point that, like any amusement, it’s the user who makes such decisions into something positive or negative. He points out that the art conversation hasn’t been relevant since DuChamp put a urinal on a wall and writes, “The reason for arguing that games—at least some games—deserve to be classified as art is that it offers gamers a more positive, culturally sanctioned way to describe what they do. It suggests that games are not mere trivia” (18). Borrowing from Ian Bogost’s Procedural Rhetoric, Rossignol explains that the focus of a game is complex experimentation. The plot of Super Mario Brothers is not really the point of the game, it’s about “learning how to run, jump, and open treasure chests” (20). Rather than try to make some bold argument for education or deep human experiences, Rossignol dismisses most of these claims in favor of championing what games already do quite well: fix boredom. He cites a text by Lars Svendsen that points out that boredom is in reality a very real problem today. It was not even in the English language in 1760, being coined to describe “the feeling that there’s nothing worth doing”. It’s not a matter of sitting on your ass; it’s finding nothing meaningful in your life that you want to work for. Rossignol writes, “The bored are not necessarily unhappy with life; they are simply unfulfilled by circumstances, activities, and the things around them” (31). Games are valid then to him because they help to solve this.

—L.B. Jeffries

One of the most popular styles of 2009 has been cel-shading, which is in stark contrast to the influx of hyper-realistic games that marked 2007 and 2008 when people wanted to show off their console’s hardware. There are a lot of reasons to opt for cel-shading. Since games are so often populated with freakish monsters and giant super soldiers, depicting them in realistic graphics can be a bit awkward. You just end up having a bunch of sticky looking critters with muddy, grey skin. Another problem is that the fantasy elements of most games automatically seem unrealistic. Take the cast of Gears of War 2, their enormous size and armor just seem out of place once you slap a realistic head onto them. Supernatural powers that many characters use are also visually out of place once the visuals approach a realistic range. Finally, all of those hyper-realistic games are extremely expensive to make. Cel-shading does come with its own pros & cons, however, precisely because of its retreat back of its stylized nature.

Establishing what exactly cel-shading is helps here. While a game like Crackdown’s thick lines and textures are gorgeous, it is not cel-shading. All art directors take into account how they want an engine to draw a line wherever an object’s borders detect an edge in the game. A very thick line like in Crackdown makes the avatar bolder. Your eyes follow its movement more than you do in a game like GTA IV where the line is very thin. Inside those lines though, the rendering is still rich and textured. The mark of cel shading is to simplify the textures of the object. Wikipedia explains this key element about the aesthetic, “Where cel-shading differs from conventional rendering is in its use of non-photorealistic lighting. Conventional (smooth) lighting values are calculated for each pixel and then mapped to a small number of discrete shades to create the characteristic flat look—where the shadows and highlights appear more like blocks of color rather than mixed in a smooth way.” A post over at Lost Garden calls this visual effect a “neo-retro art” which favors symbolism, efficiency, and style over realism. A good example would be Mario’s avatar in Super Mario Galaxy, which is built out of solid colors and round shapes to create a cartoon effect. With the increased processing power in consoles other then the Wii, this effect becomes even more pronounced by creating blended hues. A comparison between the new Prince of Persia and the classic FPS XIII by Daniel Primed shows the difference once more, processing power is leveraged for the style. Solid, single color shadows and tones like in XIII or Super Mario Galaxy give way to blurred hues to create a water color effect.

The question that this raises is what effect does this aesthetic have on the overall game experience? Unlike a cartoon or comic book, there is no set camera angle in a video game. There is no set perspective. A player might be approaching a doorway from the center or the far right while they’re looking the other direction, etc. With this in mind, the principles of architecture are more useful than just looking at cinematography or story-boards. A book on the basics of how we perceive buildings, Experiencing Architecture by Steen Eiler Rasmussen, offers some insights. Building materials look heavy to us based on their appearance. Put another way, you don’t have to pick up a brick to understand that it’s heavy. Think about the difference between a rough concrete slab and one made out of wood. The concrete is grainier, rougher on the edges, and a dull grey color that all give it a heavy appearance. The wood looks lighter because of its coloring and the smooth grains on the face of the board. Look around the room that you’re in right now. Look at the walls. Part of the reason that you wallpaper or paint over a wall is to lighten the atmosphere by changing the color of the building material. How heavy something looks in a game is defined in part by how we feel when looking at it.

The consequence of cel shading then is that it gives everything an airy, physically light feeling because there is generally a more smooth texture and lighting in the game. Multiple light sources are often present and there are rarely absolute dark tones in the scenery. Going back to Gears of War 2 for a moment, you can see this in action when you ask someone which character looks heavier: the Prince or Marcus? It’s an important distinction to make when seeing what art style a game is choosing because cel shading shouldn’t be an aesthetic choice a game uses arbitrarily. It makes sense for Prince of Persia or Super Mario Galaxy to use it because it fits the theme of jumping on walls and doing wild acrobatics by making everything feel lighter. A game about shooting and combat might want to opt for a grittier look. A game like Borderlands obviously proves a shooter can be fun with cel shading, but then again, the tone of the game is mostly light hearted. There’s also Killer 7, which uses cel shading to create a great sense of stylized violence and darkness. Some games will even combine the two visual aesthetics, like Uncharted 2 when it moves between platforming and combat. The platform heavy sections will usually work around one or two very complex, richly textured centerpieces that you focus and move around on while having much lighter colored and simplified textures for walls and embankments. The characters like Chloe or Drake are all richly textured in the face and animation (along with those creepy eyes), but their clothing has a single-hue and is often brightly lit whenever you’re making a jump. The purpose remains the same: the avatar has to look like it can make the leap.

—L.B. Jeffries

There’s a funny quirk to digital distribution that people are starting to pick up on: you make a lot of money by lowering the price of a game for a short period of time. The idea of a temporary sale is called price discrimination, where you take a calculated loss in order to attract a customer who would otherwise never buy a product. An essay on Black Friday Sales by Arnold Kling explains, “If you need something now, you have to buy it whether or not it is ‘on sale.’ But if the purchase is discretionary, you may only buy it ‘on sale.’ The store keeps its prices high ordinarily, in order to pick up profits from the price-insensitive shoppers. The store puts items ‘on sale’ on rare occasions, hoping to pick up profits from price-sensitive shoppers.” Temporarily dropping the price means that you can leverage a lot of product at people who would normally denounce it as too expensive, and you can pull those prices back up to make sure that you don’t lose money to people who would’ve paid full price anyways.

The weird thing about this principle when applied to digital distribution is that a sale will generate enough buzz about a game to make people purchase it even after the sale is over. You effectively create new customers by dropping the price temporarily. Consider the World of Goo experiment where the company announced a “Pay as Much as you Want” sale. A Rock, Paper, Shotgun article by John Walker on the phenomenon noted several interesting behaviors. Minimal cost was $ .01 for the game. You could pay them however much you wanted on top of that. More than twice as many people chose to pay between one and two dollars than those that chose to pay between one cent and one dollar. PR from the sale caused a boost in sales at both STEAM (of 40%) and on WiiWare (of 9%). Both services charged the usual $19.99 for the game and neither offered a physical copy. News websites that noticed the sale reported it as a bargain along with the usual gossip. Profits after one week for an item that had been on the market for a year came in at about $100,000. That’s not even accounting for the numerous benefits of distributing that much product. If World of Goo 2 or a different 2-D Boy project was going to be announced, they would’ve increased potential consumers for that game through simple brand awareness.

A much larger example is Valve’s online service STEAM, which is a digital store, update service, and game client all in one. All STEAM games automatically patch bugs. Once you buy the game, you can download it onto any machine you like and access is controlled through your STEAM account. The process of perpetual value is something that they’ve demonstrated several times over now. A Gamasutra interview with the service’s director Jason Holtman explains, “Traditional retail wisdom says that lower price points are associated with lower perception of value, and price adjustments are only downward over the long term…But in a connected market, you can shift prices up and down, and people don’t care. You can change prices instantaneously. Customers are incredibly sensitive to pricing. You can adjust the price by five dollars, or a dollar, and you can see the demand curve shift.” The interview is about a STEAM sale for Team Fortress 2 which dropped a game normally priced at $19.99 to $ 2.50. Holtman reports that the increase in sales lasted for not only the sale but well into the following weeks. Gamers would buy the product themselves or purchase gift copies to give to their friends, which STEAM allows thanks to its social networking service. He notes that retail sales were generally unaffected. Holtman concludes, “That phenomenon demonstrates a new, somewhat-paradoxical, property of product value in a fully-connected service economy: devoid of the scarcity of goods, a lower-priced product actually increases the overall product’s value, because it increases the size of the community that surrounds that product.”

Making these kinds of sales possible is not just an exercise in putting together an online store and creating fluctuating prices. No one seems to be totally certain how much of the digital distribution market STEAM controls but estimates run from 70% to 40%. Whatever the figure, another Gamasutra article highlights the fact that the second leading competitor to Steam, Impulse, controls about 10% of the market. The competitive spirit came to a head between these companies when Activision announced that one of their most popular FPS titles, Modern Warfare 2, would be wrapped with STEAM. Other distribution channels refused to carry the game. A column by Derek Smart explains their decision better than I could, “Steam wrapped games (with or without third party DRM) can be sold at any ESD (Electronic Software Distribution) site and even on retail discs. What makes this possible is that Valve generates the serial numbers for the product, then gives it to the developer/publisher who then hands it over to the ESD site operator who adds it to their server backend so that each purchase is given a unique key. This is how come you see some Steam wrapped games (e.g. Dawn Of War 2, Fear 2 etc) on Direct2Drive. When the game is installed, the Steam client downloads it and asks for the key. In this case, the authentication is done by Steam servers.” In other words, every single person who buys Modern Warfare 2 for PC has to download STEAM to even turn it on. Faced with the prospect of losing even more customers to the competition, many of these services simply refused to sell the game. Smart concludes his column by pointing out that the decision probably did more damage than good because the game is still just a mouse click away.

What’s wild about these services is the degree to which a company can take an old intellectual property, decrease the cost, and then ride the resulting buzz into a new wave of sales when the game resumes the normal price. It works like a perpetual motion machine. Price decreases all the way to the bottom of the wheel, then gets pulled back up as more consumers take interest in the product. A company like Valve is the most likely to reap the benefits of this because they constantly update their games and can justify charging about the same price for very long periods of time. The quality stays the same, only the numbers change.

—L.B. Jeffries