It Takes Two

by C.T. Hutt

I spent a good portion of this last weekend wandering the dry and desolate plains of Borderlands. Borderlands, like so many other first person shooters, presents gamers with a sea of repetitious enemies, inane quests, and a paper thin storyline set in an all too familiar landscape. To Gearbox Software’s credit, the game does employ an interesting A Scanner Darkly-esque visual style, but Borderlands brings little else to the oversaturated FPS market. Why then was I so content to spend hours this weekend parked on my keister whittling away at my meager quotient of free time? The answer is quite simple: I was playing with a friend.

While Daniel has had the opportunity to play the Xbox Live version of Borderlands with some complete strangers (an experience he affectionately refers to as “Bro”derlands) we are both agreed that the best way to enjoy this game is in off-line co-op mode. Sure, the screen is split which creates some visual challenges, but so what? Exploring Pandora and searching for the next great gun or level up is simply more fun with a buddy.

Even the most mundane mission can be entertaining with some company. Case in point: Your objective is to follow a green dot and pick up a cog so that we can re-start the town’s snow cone maker (I don’t know what we were restarting, I never read the quest descriptions). This quest would be completely boring if it weren’t for my crippling incompetence behind the wheel. When I take a wrong turn and crash our vehicle into an explosive pit filled with monstrous ant spiders, things become more exciting. A one man army firefight is pretty interesting, but we see that in pretty much every FPS. Toss in the dynamics of having to rescue your partner or work together to bring down a colossal foe and the experience becomes much more engaging. Co-operative play makes humdrum games like Borderlands pretty fun and it makes solid games, like the new demo for Left 4 Dead 2, a complete blast.

The NES, Sega, and other Bronze Age consoles bear little in common with the sleek machines which now dominate the market. However, in their enduring wisdom the founding developers made sure that early consoles came with two controller ports. Single player games were fine, but if you ever wanted to get the most out of your system you would need to acquire one thing that not even the most skilled manufacturer can build for you: a companion.

I think this was a very forward-looking move on the part of developers. The best things in life are the ones we share with other people. If video games were ever to attain widespread popularity they would have to evolve to be more inclusive. Challenges abound as, unfortunately, one of the dangers of the video game medium is isolation. On top of the limitations of a split screen, many game genres don’t readily lend themselves to co-operative play. Static storyline RPGs, for example, are almost exclusively a single player affair. Fighting and sports games are, by their definition, a contest rather than a shared effort. Many puzzle games, tower defenders, and even platformers which practically beg for a cooperative element, simply do not have room for more than one gamer at a time.

Fortunately, as the medium matures so has its ability to bring more and more people into the mix. The curious platformer/puzzle game LittleBigPlanet is a fine illustration of how co-operative play has come along; you couldn’t pull moves like that in Super Mario Brothers, no sir.

While I have plenty of gripes about trends in the video game industry (see paragraph 1), I am encouraged to see more high quality games which have a co-operative element. I wish that Borderlands and many games like it would provide a better single player experience but, barring that, I will settle for a well polished cooperative element. Online play with friends is fun too, but it will never replace a timely high-five after you and your friend beat the big boss together.

Fool Me Twice

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

I've been suckered into buying copious amounts of downloadable content for long enough. I purchased Fallout 3 when it first came out (the ridiculously expensive edition that comes with a broken clock), and dutifully bought each additional adventure as it was released. I'd already completed the main storyline, so I waited until all the packs were out to actually play through them. I don't have any problem with the content itself: I think the various additional adventures were well done, and particularly enjoyed the variety they presented in play style, atmosphere and setting. That being said, I felt a bit of a fool when they announced the "Game of the Year" edition of Fallout 3, with all the additional content at the same price point as the original game. I got a lot of enjoyment out of my time with the game, but waiting clearly would have served me better.

I didn't buy LittleBigPlanet when it first came out because I didn't have a Playstation 3. Now I do, and I was lucky enough to get onboard with the "Game of the Year" edition of that game, which comes with a pile of downloadable content already on the game disc. This feels like a small personal success. It's clear that this is becoming the new model for video games with extensive downloadable content plans. Release the game, release the add-ons over a few months, then re-release the game with all the add-ons.

So here comes Dragon Age: Origins, a game that seems specifically designed to empty my wallet. A spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate 2, you say? A dark, epic fantasy inspired by Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire? Be still my heart. The only reason I don't own the super fancy mega edition is because I barely resisted purchasing a brand new computer this month to play the thing. I know I want to play it, my soul cries out for me to play it, but I also know that it will be best on the PC. That's how I experienced the Baldur's Gate games, and that's how I want to experience Dragon Age. Even so, it's hard to resist its siren song.

But there's something soothing my hungry soul. The game has only just released, and there's already paid downloadable content out for it, with a plan for a lot more. To me, this says that one day in the not too distant future, there will be some sort of complete edition, perhaps another "Game of the Year" if it wins any such awards, and by then a computer to run it will be considerably less expensive. I may miss out on the experience for now, but I'll comfort myself with the fact that I wasn't suckered into a long, drawn-out scheme to part me from my money. And when I finally play the game, all those additional quests and dungeons will already be there, rife with possibilities, treasure, and intricate plotlines. There might even be a few dragons left.

Lay Waste to the Wasteland

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been playing a lot of Borderlands and Brütal Legend. I’ve been having a blast with both, though they represent entirely different schools of game design. The difference lies in the ambitions of each product. Brütal Legend tries to do a lot with mixed results, while Borderlands is more focused and, as a result, better executed.

Borderlands only sets out to do a few things: it wants to be a good first-person shooter, it wants to provide a fun co-operative experience, and it wants to inspire a Diablo-esque fixation with collecting better loot and leveling up. It does all that, and looks great besides, with a visual style torn straight out of a comic book. My expectations were met almost perfectly. Even the story, what little there is of it, seems to fit the mood of the game: your character is a vault hunter, seeking lost riches and artifacts on an alien world, and you spend most of your time in the game gathering riches, weapons, and other treasures. You’re looking for treasure so you can find more treasure. That’s the game in a nutshell. The game becomes repetitive, but no more so than Diablo and its sequel. It’s a winning formula.

Brütal Legend has no such focus; it wants to do everything. Set in the ancient, mythical land of heavy metal, it starts as an action game, with an axe for melee attacks and a guitar calling down lightning and pyrotechnics on enemies. Combos are learned, weapon upgrades are purchased. Only then it’s a driving and shooting game, complete with speed boosts, ramps and on-board machine guns. This transitions into an open world exploration game, with plenty of collectibles to find. Sometimes it’s a rhythm game, where a quick Guitar Hero-style solo can be used to raise an ancient relic from the ground or literally melt the faces of your enemies. Then come the strategy elements, which range from ordering a few minions around on a mission to full-blown real-time strategy mayhem, complete with troop upgrades and resource management. These are called stage battles, and your resources are your fans, which rise up from the ground when they hear the presence of heavy metal.

It’s a very creative game, and it overflows with incredible moments. I discovered a guitar solo, for example, which summons a flaming zeppelin from the sky to crash and explode wherever you’re standing. That’s just as awesome as it sounds. The environments are as face-melting as the solos, from walls of amps set into craggy cliff faces to mountains of bone and ice, with trees made of hot rod tailpipes. And the writing is fantastic in its variety as well: the game is inspiring, sad, dramatic and hilarious, all in turn or occasionally at once.

In playing both Brütal Legend and Borderlands, I found myself wondering which school of thought resulted in a better game. Borderlands is a much more polished experience, to be sure, and some of the different gameplay modes in Brütal Legend fell a little flat, though I enjoyed the real-time strategy elements more than I expected to. Borderlands, however, offers very little in the way of variety. The game is played the same way throughout, there are only a few types of enemies, and the majority of the game takes place in cracked desert wastelands. Borderlands is a very satisfying game, but in many ways Brütal Legend is a more exciting one. The game is laced with madness, humor, and drama, and there are new and exciting ideas around every (flaming, metallic) corner. It may not succeed at everything it tries, but it does so many different things that it hardly matters. I’ve really been enjoying Borderlands, but I think that Brütal Legend has a lot more to offer. Borderlands will feel familiar, while Brütal Legend will surprise you. And looking back on the games I’ve loved, it’s those memorable, surprising moments that withstand the test of time.

Play by the Sword

By C.T. Hutt

When I was about five years old, my grandmother read me Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in its entirety. That very year, my older brother loaned me J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series when he was finished with them. I was hooked: as long as there was a chance of high adventure and sword play, I was willing to stick my nose into almost any book. My enthusiasm for swords and sword fighting was not limited to the literary world. Growing up on a farm, kids have to make their own fun and my brother and I did so in fine style. We spent entire summers hammering crude cross handles and makeshift shields out of scrap wood scavenged from the workshops and barns in the area. Our weapons made, we would battle for hours, smashing away at each other’s faux weapons until they broke or we were called in for dinner. We must have put my mother through no shortage of worry, but it was fun, some of the best fun I’ve ever had.

It is no surprise that video games were quick to tap into young peoples’ interest in medieval armaments and fantasy. The Legend of Zelda was a huge success, and with good cause. In its time, it had awesome graphics and brilliant game play. These qualities where all but lost to me at the time as I was much more concerned with the sheer awesomeness of not only getting to see a dragon on my TV screen, but getting to slay it with my own hands. Other titles like Ninja Gaiden and the first couple of Final Fantasy games also grabbed my attention early on. They were, after all, adventure stories involving swords, and that was enough for me. The 1987 release of Sid Meier’s Pirates! Included not only a sword fight mini-game but scurvy buccaneers as well; you better believe I played that game through a couple hundred times on my parents’ old Mac.

Flash forward to the late nineties, my cup runneth over. Innumerable RPGs littered the medium; the Samurai Showdown and Last Blade series made a splash in the fighting game scene, and strategy games like Warcraft put entire armies of blade-wielding minions at my disposal. Weapons were upgradable; some of them glowed with magical power, and some of the best RPG’s like Bioware’s Baldur's Gate even allowed you to build a character from the ground up to specialize in almost any conceivable armament. It was a golden age of the controller and the sword, yet still, I was not satisfied. I wanted more from the experience.

It’s not that any of these titles fell short of video game greatness; they just never quite hit swordplay greatness. The player hits a button or clicks a mouse and the avatar swings a sword, damage is then assigned with a numerical representation displayed in a health bar. It just wasn’t enough: guns are a point and click mechanism, hence the enormous successes of ever so many first person shooters, but swords are much more complex. A gun shoots in one direction at a time; the swing of a sword is a much more elegant piece of physics. Its lethality is not only based on where it hits its target, but how fast it is moving, and how much weight you’ve put behind it. I can certainly appreciate the difficulty of putting such considerations into programming language, but without them I feel that the medium hasn’t quite captured the experience yet.

There have been several notable exceptions. Square Soft’s 1998 release of Bushido Blade 2 made a big impression on me. It was not so different from most of the other early 3-D fighting games with two major exceptions: one, your characters were armed. Two, if you managed to score a good hit on the other player with your weapon, they died. Even between two skilled opponents, matches typically lasted less than fifteen seconds. Many people didn’t like this kind of pacing, but I thought it was brilliant. After all, in the real world, if someone slashes you with a katana, it tends to kill you. Also in 1998, the developers at Tantrum Entertainment released Die by the Sword, a platform adventure game where you controlled the actual movement of your avatar’s sword arm, allowing you to thrust, parry, and slice to your heart’s content. This was a brilliant addition to the game, but a difficult dynamic to master. Translating complex swordplay to the keyboard never quite panned out. Both of these titles fell by the wayside of video game deployment, but I felt they had important things to offer the medium.

In 2006, I watched demonstrations of the Nintendo Wii and felt a new glimmer of hope. Here was perhaps the greatest development in gaming since the turn of the millennium. With motion-sensitive controls our avatars now not only responded to the manipulations of buttons and joysticks but the movements of our bodies. A crucial gap between gamers and the worlds they explore had been bridged. Playing the original Wii Sports I couldn’t help but think: if this system lets me toss around a bowling ball, what’s to say it won’t let me swing a sword? The release of Zelda: Twilight Princess got me all aflutter, but the end result was something of a disappointment. Sure, you swing your arm and Link swings his sword, but only in a few different ways. So far, swordplay on the Wii hasn’t really come into its own. Developers haven’t yet put all of the pieces together.

Hope springs eternal. Red Steel 2 for the Nintendo Wii is due for release in the first quarter of 2010 and it promises to utilize the full potential of the Wii MotionPlus, which should help sword play feel more like sword play and less like hitting buttons. Until then I will just have to goad my brother into a stick fight when we get together for Thanksgiving.

When Marketing Ploys Go Bad

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

As a role-playing game fanatic, it is safe to say that Dragon Age is one of my most anticipated games releasing this fall. I've enjoyed every BioWare game that I've played thus far, and been very impressed with their other original properties, Jade Empire and Mass Effect. So naturally, when I saw that they have a free flash-based game, presumably to whet the public's appetite with a taste of the setting and story, I decided I would give it a spin.

The game, Dragon Age: Journeys, is a fairly basic point-and-click affair with a simple turn-based combat system. It's nothing fancy, but one doesn't expect much from a free flash-based game on the internet. But having played the game to its completion, I find myself much more nervous for Dragon Age: Origins than I was before. Previously, I was going to pre-order the game. Now I think I'll wait to read a few reviews.

Why such a sudden change of heart, based solely on flash game? Simply put, the writing and plot are terrible. I understand low production values on a flash game. Things like a simple interface, basic combat, and uninspired gameplay are pretty much par for the course in the realm of free games you can play in your browser, especially games that are meant as promotional tools. But what I really expect from a BioWare game is good writing and an interesting plot, and there's no reason that the flash game could not fulfill the basic function of making the world of Dragon Age seem interesting. Let me give you an example of the dialogue in this game:

Dwarf: "We found only you at the gates of Orzammar, wounded, dazed, and rambling."

PC: "We ran into an emissary. He seemed different. He was... glowing?"

Dwarf: "Glowing you say? I've never heard of such a darkspawn."

GLOWING. That's actual dialogue! This isn't just one tiny example out of the whole game, either. You spend the majority of this game talking to people about how you saw a guy who glowed blue. They don't even try to make it sound more interesting than that. You'll walk up to characters and say things like, "We have to see the king! He needs to hear about this glowing blue darkspawn!"

I'm sure this game wasn't written by the lead writing team of Dragon Age: Origins. In fact, the game may not have even been touched by BioWare, but rather handled entirely by some other branch of Electronic Arts. But what's the point of a flash-based Dragon Age if not to show how interesting the setting and plot will be? We certainly don't come to browser games like these for the incredible 3D graphics and console-like gameplay.

At the end of the game, there was a questionnaire which asked how much I would be willing to pay for the continuation of the game, either online or on the DS or iPhone. I'm not sure I'd play it even if it were as free as the current game. I honestly don't want to know what happens with the sinister blue glowing guy. It's discoloring all my thoughts about a game I'm very excited about.