Bad Bosses and difficulty spikes

Since I've started writing this blog I can find myself thinking up how I'm going to write an article before I've finished the game. Take Ninja Blade for example, another of my recent GAME sale purchases. When I first heard of it years ago I thought "cheap Ninja Gaiden rip-off" and when I finally picked it up and noticed that it was by From Software my expectation changed to "rock hard Ninja Gaiden rip-off". The fact that my initial difficulty options were normal and hard only added to my concern. But when I actually got down to playing it, the story and style of it reminded me more of the crazy scenarios of the Devil May Cry series and the combat felt like more simple action-adventures like God of War than the more... technical(?) feel of the modern Ninja Gaiden series. It felt like quite an enjoyable blast for a Saturday afternoon and I was all ready to give it a glowing review as a hidden gem, well worth the £3 I paid for it if not more.

That is until I reached the Carrion Claw boss. Up until this point I think I'd only died a couple of times from stupid mistakes but I stopped counting my deaths before I'd beaten this one. I think the main problem with it was the lack of a clear method to beating it, I usually expect a boss to be a way of forcing you to prove that you have mastered a particular technique or skill that you have recently been taught, or at least have a set way of beating it. In fact, this boss looks like it should have a specific method as you see that your heavy sword can break through the armour on its main claws and allow you to use faster attacks on the exposed flesh underneath. This eventually causes the giant enemy crab to fall to the ground, exposing its weak point for massive damage - err, well no actually it doesn't.

I initially thought that when the crab gets knocked down you could damage it until its health bar reached a certain point and it would get back up again but I gradually realised that it only falls down for a set amount of time. You would occasionally hardly damage it at all before it would regrow its legs, then its armour and you're back to square one. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't so hard to damage those legs in the first place - as my fire shuriken ninjutsu didn't appear to have any effect on it, the only available option was to get in close and hack away at it. Avoiding damage here was damn near impossible as the main claws seemed to attack at random, with no predictable wind up animation or sound cues that I could determine. Its attacks could knock you off your feet at a moments notice or hit you with electricity that forced you to wobble the analog stick for all it's worth, lest you get stuck in a loop of electrocution or hit by more dangerous attacks. Beating it seemed like it would purely be a war of attrition, where I would finally get one lucky attempt and do more damage to it than it did to myself.

After the nth failure I was about ready to give up and decided to consult the internet, lo and behold I found others who had struggled with it and plenty of varying approaches to beating it. The accepted answer there didn't seem to work for me, as I said the fire shuriken didn't seem to do much damage and I couldn't really find a good spot to charge it up without getting hit by something. Obviously the destruction of armour wasn't working for me (though I was unaware that 'Ninja Vision' also slowed down the rest of the game, allowing you to get a few more hits in) so I tried the last answer of reflecting the irritating electric balls back at the boss. I'd found out earlier that the quick swords allowed you to pretty much mash attack and guarantee reflection, whereas the standard sword requires careful timing. So even with the camera positioning making it very hard to judge the balls positions I still managed to start hitting them back. I was very surprised to see the amount of health this approach took off and I think I then managed to beat it in a few minutes, never once taking out its armour or knocking it down.

So even though I eventually beat the boss very easily, the time taken to do so had really coloured my opinion of the whole game. The next few bosses started to feel similar, in that they didn't have a set way to beat them, just take whatever damage you can and be prepared to take a few knocks along the way. I always prefer bosses that you can look at and know they can be defeated perfectly if you have enough practice. I also find it boring having no option but to run away and hide from a bosses predictable deadly attack, it just makes it feel like a time sponge. One of the things I absolutely loved about the original Devil May Cry was that despite your close range sword attacks being the most effective, there was almost never a case where you had to stop attacking. Your handguns were always available to keep chipping away at enemies health bars, occasionally even providing you with a way of staying off the ground to avoid wave style attacks through their gravity defying recoil.

As for Ninja Blade I think I will probably finish it eventually but I didn't feel like I needed to see much more to write this - even if there was the remote possibility that it could redeem itself before the end, I'm not a professional reviewer after all. I found myself thinking of this Edge Article from last week, which suggests that you shouldn't feel guilty about those unfinished games on your shelf. Even though I managed to fight through that difficulty spike with some help from gamefaqs, that feeling of wanting to give up still lingers. Aspects that might have initially seemed interesting have also started to get annoying, like its Quick Time Events that have a rhythm action style grading for how well timed your button presses are. Though this seems better than having to press them as quick as possible I've still screwed a fair amount of these up by pressing the wrong button - especially when the game starts screwing with you and putting 'attack' or 'jump' commands onto the analog stick instead of the face buttons. The analog stick symbol was hard to read at the best of times so when it popped up in these cases you had almost no chance of getting it right first time. Rewinding the cut-scene when this happens only aggravates you more by highlighting the sections you managed, which you then have to repeat.

All of this adds up to leave me unsurprised that I found it in the pre-owned section after all. I read this Gamasutra article about an interview with David Braben, suggesting that used games are killing off single player games - whether or not you agree, I think that for purely single player games, your only weapon against being traded in early on is how inviting it is to play the whole thing again. You can't really do much about people who will always trade in games as early as possible to get the maximum trade value - even if they will pick up a pre-owned copy to replay it down the line. But I know that I'm usually a little more more hesitant to trade in unless I reach the end and think "yeah, I never want to play that again". I doubt that playing Ninja Blade over again with an increased chance of death would appeal to anyone but the most hardened achievement chasers.

Questionable Games

In yet another case of me finally getting around to playing an old game, I blasted through Limbo via that triple pack I bought from GAME the other day. I knew it was a short game but I wasn't exactly expecting to finish it in one sitting - I wouldn't say I was disappointed with its length though. It didn't overstay its welcome and I can imagine it would be hard to keep up the pace and oppressive feel for much longer. It comes to a pretty ambiguous end and I feel a little disappointed at my lack of self control in terms of going looking for explanations of it straight away, rather than thinking on it a while longer to come to my own conclusions. Trying to recall what I initially thought, I had forgotten about the tiny bit of exposition that suggested he was looking for his sister, which is probably why it made very little sense. The cyclical nature of it and just the general vibe left me with no doubt that it wasn't supposed to be a happy ending.

No matter what the rest of the game represented, I never felt that any of it had as much of an impact as the opening section in the forest. I think it has to be the grimmest locale I have ever traversed in a video game, while at the same time being pretty scary as you are wondering if the spider will turn up again. It was also really the only part of the game that made me question what I was doing, whether it was leading others into the same traps that had killed you multiple times or how you finally deal with the spider. For some it might seem that you just had to do everything in your power to stay alive, others might have had difficulty in even thinking up some of the solutions. I felt like I was somewhere in the middle, in that I would think of the solutions quite quickly but then feel slightly guilty at the fact that my brain went there and wonder if there was another way around it.

I find games where you are forced to do things that make you feel uncomfortable to progress more disturbing in a way than those that feel like a free for all. For example, something that generated plenty of tabloid headlines at the time, being able to murder prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto to get your money back. I could always look at that and think that it might not have been intentional, you could have one guy coding the interactions with prostitutes and another who made any character drop all of their money on their death. To me the fault lies with the person who realised you could do this in the first place because hey - you can do the same thing in real life but that doesn't mean that you should. So when a game forces you to do something you are uncomfortable with, I don't go into full on 'ban this sick filth' mode but it's definitely interesting to think about.

Another game that had this kind of effect on me was Shadow of the Colossus. As that game progressed I certainly found myself questioning whether I was doing the right thing and I felt pretty bad at having to kill some of the more placid creatures but you carry on regardless because the game tells you to. That kind of turned out to be the point after all I think, that this character was blind to or ignoring any negative aspects to his objective. I wanted to bring this around to the question of "are Games art?", as although there are many different ways that you can define art (which is probably what causes so much conflict between different groups) one viewpoint is whether every part of it works towards the same goal or theme. This is difficult to achieve in games simply because they are usually primarily about entertainment, so the actual gameplay is likely to distract from the overall message the game might be trying to get across. I think that by forcing you down a specific path that you might not always feel comfortable with, games can get closer to that goal of keeping you focused on the theme and not just enjoy what you are doing.

I think that this is where the later half of Limbo falls down, as though you might not call it fun exactly, you can get more drawn into the puzzles and figuring out how to use the gravity devices to get through them. Some of the earlier sections as well as being disturbing are almost sadomasochistic, with the designer of the game setting up these harsh traps and you the player having a pretty good idea of what's likely to happen but still walking headlong into them. I'm sure I must have had a red mark on my forehead from the amount of times I had slapped it by the end. Seeing it through to the end felt more like a compulsion than an enjoyable experience. It's also an experience that I would imagine most will only take once or at least take a long break between playthroughs, unless you are in the mindset to find all of the secret achievements and complete the game without dying more than five times (good luck with that). If I never play it again I'm sure that it will always be filed away in my brain somewhere, to come back to think about now and again.

Post-scavenging guilt

As many of you probably know, the future UK video game store GAME is looking very shaky at the moment. I'm sadly writing this and wondering if I'll actually finish it before they go into administration. After hearing that they were doing a huge sale on their pre-owned games I made sure to get down and see what was available. In the Newcastle area it's possible to visit a total of six shops in the GAME group without really trying and I'd been hearing of some great titles available for under a fiver. These included Bayonetta and Vanquish, which I already owned but I was hopeful there would be some gems that I didn't. Overall it was a mixture of reasonable deals, stuff that I was just about willing to take a chance on and stuff that still seemed surprisingly overpriced. Sadly I was probably a little bit late to the party but I don't think that it was much different from the selection that they would normally have.

I felt kinda guilty at taking advantage of their tough situation and at the same time paying so little when none of it goes to the game creators. This was especially true of the XBLA triple pack as I was interested in all of them and I could probably have picked them up in online sales for a similar combined price. It feels worse to potentially be taking money away from an indie developer than a major publisher, though I don't know what kind of deal they would all have got from being part of this pack in the first place.

The Force Unleashed 2 was right on the edge of my impulse buy zone and on reflection I could have probably found a cheaper copy online brand new but there you go. I've heard that it's not that great and pretty short but I kinda liked the first one and I'd like to see what they do with the story, despite the fact that the first one didn't really need a sequel to link into the original films. There were others that seemed a little too pricey even if I would have been interested in them - BlazBlue and Dark Souls were both around £30, which was for the special editions but I think I've had enough of oversized cardboard boxes and art books. I also wouldn't know anyone that would want to pay the extortionate amount of ten pounds for this...

The regular staff seemed pretty pleasant all things considered, I chatted briefly with the guy on the till when I was buying the XBLA triple pack; The pot luck nature of where it would have been stored in the alphabet, whether I'd played any of them before now and that it worked out as quite a good deal considering their regular online prices. He completely forgot to ask me whether I had a reward card so I didn't feel like asking to redeem all of my points at that point, it would have just felt like I was rubbing the situation in. However the managers on tills still seemed to stick to their approved scripts, seemingly oblivious to the current circumstances. I mean I suppose you could say that one of them was only doing the same thing as the other guy and attempting to chat to me about one of my purchases (Force Unleashed 2) but he launched into a sales pitch for the new Star Wars branded Xbox. When I said I already had a slim with Kinect he suggested I trade that in so that the Star Wars Xbox would only cost me £150 when it's released in May! He also made a point of ordering me a new loyalty card as it had a slight crack in it so I felt no guilt then in asking to use up my accrued credit.

That experience seemed to sum up the Game situation as a whole; staff at the lower end of the chain who are still interested in games and can have real conversations with people and out of touch managers trying to upsell or get pre-orders. And sadly it'll probably be the managers and those responsible for the sorry state the chain is in who come out of the whole predicament the best. I've sadly experienced being made redundant twice in my life already and if I was in the shoes of the staff there I would be actively searching for my next job. I don't think I would have any loyalty left, even if there is the remote possibility that a buyout could turn things around. With GameStop touted as the most likely buyer, I don't think they would actually change much about the stores as they have a pretty similar model in the US and have just been lucky to still survive. They have become a shop that I will only buy from out of convenience, when I absolutely have to have something new to play that day. Outside of the biggest selling games they've not been a shop I could rely on to pick up new stuff for a long time - even on the release date, which was the case with Okamiden a little while back. I can't think of much more to say, other than to wish their hard working staff the best over the coming weeks.

Fixing the Star Wars prequels

I've seen a lot of discussion recently about the best order to watch all of the Star Wars films if you've never seen them before. While my personal opinion was initially to watch the originals in order and never bother with the rest, the idea of viewing 4,5,1,2,3 and then 6 seemed to catch on, so that you could view the prequels without spoiling the revelation that Darth Vader is Luke's father (yes, people do still get to watch the originals without knowing this sometimes). Taking this a step further, the 'Machete Order' has also been suggested, which excises The Phantom Menace completely and makes a convincing argument for why nothing in that film matters in the grand scheme of things.

In what seems like taking this a step further again, I read about Topher Grace editing all of the Star Wars prequels into one 85 minute movie. From the summary given, this version uses a very small amount of footage from The Phantom Menace and removes a lot of plot-lines and characters from the others. Supposedly it opens with the climactic battle from TPM between Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan and Darth Maul. This immediately struck me as a great way to open the film and get you involved straight away, rather than spend 20 minutes discussing some trade disputes. The intent of this scene is also changed through a re-written opening crawl, which now states that the Jedi are there attempting to protect Queen Amidala from assassination attempts, which offers an immediate and clear focus to the film. Since this is part of the plot in the second film it seems like this allows quite an easy transition between the two.

There is also no footage used of the young Anakin Skywalker, which again masks the transition between films as you are not questioning how much time has elapsed for him to grow up so much. I also feel that it has always been difficult to reconcile the happy and care free youngster from TPM with the petulant teenager we see in Attack of the Clones. It's very difficult to understand just what has changed him so much, other than being away from his mother and general teenage angst. You can contrast this with the young Tom Riddle from the Harry Potter books for example, where there was always a clear sinister undercurrent to his younger self. Sweeping Jake Lloyd under the carpet is probably the best thing that can be done given the circumstances.

I'm pretty sure that this cut will not fix all of the problems with the prequels, there's only so much that can be saved in editing. I don't think there's any way that a believable love story can be dragged out of what we have already seen, though it apparently also uses a deleted scene where Anakin meets Padme's family. This would have come out of nowhere had it been in the original films but could well work in a single movie. The other area that I think would be hard to improve is Anakin's reasoning for finally giving in to the dark side. One thing that they could change is just to cut the line "what have I done?" just before he agrees to become Darth Vader so that it would look more like he was already a lost cause, and not just flip-flopping between viewpoints. Ending this version on the helmet being lowered onto him for the first time mirrors the dark ending to Empire Strikes Back and more importantly makes sure that we never hear his laughable "Noooooooo!!!!"

I can obviously see why this particular cut will probably not see the light of day, what with a famous and easily identifiable perpetrator to sue. But from the descriptions given and those who did get to see it, I can see someone eventually constructing a similar version that could be 'leaked' more anonymously. It definitely sounds like the best way of fitting the prequels in between Empire and Jedi as suggested, while keeping the pace up and not wandering too far from bringing the original trilogy to a close. I think I'd definitely like to see it if it ever surfaces. At the end of the day though it seems that this really shows that less is more where Star Wars is concerned, so can anything ever be better than having no official version of events before the original trilogy and leaving the clone wars and Anakin's fall to our own imagination?

The Star Wars prequel trilogy is a fairly unique occurrence in terms of being almost universally disliked but at the same time receiving so much attention from fans. I suppose it's hardly surprising as other than the Matrix sequels, I can't think of a single other film event that promised so much and caused so much disappointment. Attempts to 'fix' it have been around since the first film, where The Phantom Edit attempted to trim a lot of the fat from the film to make it into something more watchable. I guess in a sense the saga has always felt like it belonged to the fans after the original trilogy was complete, with so many people keen to write books and other stories in that universe. Lucas clearly no longer thinks that these films belong to us and their intent should be his alone, even trying to convince us that our own memories are incorrect. I suppose it's fitting that he wants to 'fix' his original trilogy, while the fans will probably continue to try and fix everything else...

Demonstrably Locked Content

Cody and one of his alternate costumes found on the SFxT disc.
Picture from Shoryuken.com

I felt a certain amount of irony last night, after I finally got around to playing DLC Quest, to then read about Street Fighter X Tekken having 12 downloadable characters on the game disc and that Capcom state it is to ensure compatibility between buyers and non buyers. The first comment on that article authoritively states: "Duh. Anybody that knows a single fucking thing about how games are made knows why DLC is on-disk. Whining babies don't know what the fuck they're talking about."

Okay, so there is a grain of truth in that first comment, DLC for consoles isn't just like modding on a PC or something, where dropping some new files into the correct folder will automatically be picked up by the game engine. With the console expecting all data to come from a disc (or a hard drive seamlessly pretending to be a disc), you have to know in advance how you're going to store extra content on disc and roughly what sort of content you'll be able to add.

This commenter clearly forgets the fact that just last year there was an update to Super Streetfighter 4 though, which added 4 new characters that were not originally on the game disc. To allow compatibility here a free update was made available to all players, which allowed them to play against the new characters but not use them. This all proves that it is possible to add bonus characters that aren't on the disc but that it takes more work to do so. The Arcade Edition update was the best example of a DLC update for a fighting game so far and I hoped that would be the approach taken by most in future. But of course not even Capcom themselves would take a consistent approach internally, with Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 being a brand new game, only available at retail (another game with 2 DLC characters on disc). Why people are willing to jump to Capcom's defense for taking the easy route I can't understand - other than wanting to brag about knowing how to make games.

With this case in particular, these unlockable characters feel like something that you would have previously gained access to by playing the game, in a similar fashion to the additional characters in Street Fighter 4. What I think might be a better approach is to follow the example of free to play mobile games, where everything can be unlocked eventually just by playing the game but you can also pay to unlock features if you are impatient. I'm sure that this would have been a welcome feature in Street Fighter 4, as unlocking all of the additional characters took a considerable amount of time. This was a frustrating task if you took the game around to a friends house or were trying to run a tournament. In those cases you wouldn't feel aggrieved about paying a little extra to unlock characters and those who don't pay would still have the same experience in the end. I'm sure this wouldn't please everyone but I think it would lead to a lot less backlash overall.

I wasn't always so critical towards DLC in general, I guess my initial idea of how it would work relied on 3 assumptions though:

1. It wouldn't be that expensive.
2. New content would be mostly created after the game was released.
3. Err, that you would have to download the content.

Each of these assumptions has proven to be false in a lot of cases and more often than not it feels like content is being held back from you, rather than it being a bonus. I understand that there may be cases where projects overrun and content has to be pulled, so it is a good thing that it can eventually see the light of day via DLC. The same goes for content released the same day as the game, where the development of the DLC starts after the development of the main game is complete, even if this still seems cheap to a lot of people who aren't aware of the different production stages behind the scenes. But when most of the content makes it onto the game disc then that means that it was finished by the time the discs needed to be pressed, probably at least a month in advance and it becomes hard to justify the fact that additional work was done to create an 'unlock code'.

Sadly I feel that I have very little interest in buying this game now, the entire thing has been a clusterfuck of confusing pre-order bonus gems and these locked characters are just the icing on the cake. I may feel especially strongly about this since one of the characters is Cody, a character I play quite a lot. I feel like Capcom have burned a lot of bridges that they have built in bringing people back to fighting games by the approach they have been taking. This constant monetization and new versions of games has shown that they haven't really changed from their approach in the 90's where they ran the Street Fighter series into the ground through a multitude of different versions. I thought better of it as I don't know for sure but I really wanted to reply to that first comment with: "Yeah, I know about making games and I know exactly why this happens - money."

A personal Alien History

When I think back on it, my Dad was always terrible for giving away 'spoilers' for movies. Before I'd ever laid eyes on the first Alien film I'd been told about the disgusting details of the chestburster scene and how he found the scene with the hanging chains and dripping water the most scary part of it. Rather than being annoyed at these revelations, I was totally enthralled by the descriptions and couldn't wait until I could finally see it for myself. I don't think there was too much consideration of whether I was old enough or not, I was probably waiting on it being shown on TV again as we didn't have a VCR at the time. I don't think I was disappointed by the first film but I probably saw the sequel fairly soon afterwards, which I was even more impressed by. To a young boy, the all out action and variation of Aliens was clearly a bigger draw than tense horror and fleeting glimpses of the titular creature.

'Gorilla Alien' with grabbing arms
and 'acid' (water) spraying action.

Images from Super Toy Archive

After that I was completely hooked on the whole concept, and while my information sources were limited back then I still wanted to find out more. I remember reading some of the graphic novels that involved Newt's life after Aliens (d'oh) and I also bought a fair amount of the toys made by Kenner.

The Alien Queen was quite impressive
and included the second set of jaws

Yeah, I definitely remember
 Apone's bright yellow T-Shirt...

Despite all of the toys being fairly lame looking back on them, even at the time I clearly realised that the human toys were rubbish (I'm not even sure I ever saw the marines for sale in the shops, I just remember seeing them advertised on the back of packaging) so these were substituted for G.I.Joe figures. I already had a collection of those and they actually seemed a better scale compared to the Aliens. I even went as far as creating a Blue Peter style playset with a papier-mâché hive underneath and cardboard cut-out corridors above. The fact that these toys weren't released until 1992 makes me slightly uncomfortable about the age I must have been while doing this...

'92 also saw the release of Alien 3 but I didn't see it in the cinema so I'm not exactly sure when I first saw it. At the time I don't think I thought it was awful but it didn't grab me as much as the others. I still felt that it was a reasonable way to end the series though and I think there is a good film in there somewhere - sadly neither the original or directors cut are that film. Strangely enough I feel that the alien coming from the dog works the best, partly because the directors cut switching to a cow seeming to come out of nowhere and also just because everyone loves dogs so you feel some sense of loss at its death. It would also need something doing about some shots of the alien too - how they managed to make actual puppets and models look like bad CGI I'll never quite understand...

After Alien 3 I pretty much treated the series as over, bringing back Ripley in Resurrection felt like it cheapened the end of 3, no matter what your feelings are on both films. I think I've watched Resurrection a couple of times and I watched the first AVP film once, which was enough to tell me to leave the sequel well alone. Funnily enough, the best thing to come out of the Aliens Vs. Predator concept has always been the video games. The demo of the first PC game kept me going for a long time, it was absolutely terrifying and I was convinced that the feeling of being in Aliens couldn't be simulated any better. There was a random nature to the aliens that always kept you guessing and I even remember on one occasion being too scared to leave the APC at the start of the level and one of the bastards found its way in and killed me.

To bring all of this back towards some kind of point, all of this has been going through my mind in preparation for Ridley Scott's new film Prometheus. For a long time there was a lot of speculation about whether this was a straight prequel to Alien or exploring similar ideas etc. until the following trailer came out.

Right then I went from a vaguely interested party to a rabid fanboy who had to see the film on day one. By now I've come to appreciate Alien more so the nods and style similarities to the original are great. It just seems to be pitched perfectly to get over the feeling of "don't worry guys, we're not going to screw this up". I reserve the right to still be disappointed by it but that trailer just made me feel so much more comfortable about the concept as a whole. Despite wanting to go into the film fresh, it's been hard to resist following the frame by frame analysis of that trailer and what other possibilities can be drawn from it. There hasn't been much more to go on until this new viral video, which is a really nice touch as it may not even be part of the final film.

I feel like I've reverted back to that childlike state of trying to seek out every bit of information and with the internet it's now actually possible. I've recently been working my my through articles on a blog called Strange Shapes, which has some amazing stories and details about how the films came together. If my younger self could have read it, I'm sure my mind would have been blown completely. It's also very interesting to see that things that you felt were designed so perfectly were really just trial and error when you see some of the abandoned ideas - Maggots inside of the Alien's domed headpiece anyone? There's also a lot of different scenes that were planned for Alien that had to be abandoned either because of not having the time or the alien suit not being as easy to move in as imagined.

Re-watching the originals before the release of Prometheus is clearly on the cards, though I'm currently contemplating whether to upgrade from the DVD boxset to Blu-Ray. This is complicated further by the fact that there now seems to be two versions of the "Quadrilogy" on Blu-Ray and I'm not sure what the difference is if any. Though the DVD version does tend to pause quite badly as it changes between the different scenes used in the two cuts available on each disc, so getting rid of that problem would be a definite plus. Any other arguments I can use to convince myself?