61 Frames Per Second : fable

Whatcha Playing: Persona, Fallout, and the Trans-Pacific RPG Ideal

John Constantine — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Somewhere, probably not too far from Hawaii, the perfect role-playing game is waiting to be discovered. A volatile, volcanic outcropping boiling over with an expert blend of relatable, colorful characters, deep, directed narrative, and open, exploration-rich adventuring, alongside intimidatingly deep avatar customization. Its game world is both fantastic and hyper-real, vast yet structured enough to inexplicitly guide the player along scaling challenges.

Alright, I’m kidding. I know this game isn’t real. Of course it isn’t. But after the past couple of weeks, I sincerely wish it was.

It’s been a very long time since I last took a two week vacation, and even longer since I took one where I played so few games. It was strange that I spent so few hours with a controller in hand, especially considering what I was playing when I fired up one of the boxes. Coupling Persona 4 and Fallout 3 as your outlets for digital shenanigans might seem like a recipe for life-threatening anti-social tendencies, but I managed to keep things in check, a couple of hours here and there for each game. But now that my vacation’s over and I’ve barely dented either, I almost wish they could be a single game. I wish they could be that mythical mid-Pacific island I just described.

This is the first time I’ve ever played a Japanese RPG and a Western, D&D-style RPG simultaneously. Detailing the differences between the two styles of game is a like pointing at the moon. They’re flat-out different genres. Heather Campbell of Play said it best: JRPGs are a story that’s told to you, whereas WRPGs are a world that you investigate. But why is it that, with East and West borrowing and imitating one another so frequently in the past decade of game design, no game has successfully made an RPG that marries the best bits of both into a single game? Why can’t I have the freedom of Fallout 3 but also the cast of characters with rich personalities and stories of their own that I get in Persona?

There are great games that have come very close to pulling this off. Bioware RPGs, particularly Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, effectively marry the directed narrative of JRPGs with the customizability and freedom of your average Elder Scrolls adventure, but even those suffer from extreme linearity. You can choose whatever you want to do next, but eventually you have to go to the one planet/town to go any further, and there’s no masking the inevitability of that choice. (The same can be said of Peter Molynuex’s Fable and its sequel, but those games are concerned with their own sort of freedom and narrative.)

Strangely enough, I think the makings of a model blend of Eastern-aesthetic and Western-mechanic can be found in Quest for Glory II and III. Those games are less classic adventure than they are role-playing games, asking you to constantly solve moral quandaries that will affect a plethora of very well-defined characters in unreal yet familiar landscapes. Maybe some development team will look at those games again and see an opportunity to offer RPG fans something altogether new. In the meantime, I’m off for some more post-apocalyptic roaming and high school classes. See y’all in a couple of months when I re-emerge.

Related links:

Whatcha Not Playing: Persona 4
Persona 4: Harrowing, True Pre-Order Tales! With Prizes, Prizes, Priz-izes!
Too Soon? No Nukes for Japanese Fallout 3
For Love of the Game: Quest for Glory II
Screen Test: Fallout 3

Populous: Text Based Tutorials Need to Die In A Fire

John Constantine — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Like every other Peter Molyneux game outside of Fable and its sequel, Populous escaped my attention the first time around. I remember sitting in my buddy Mike McBride’s house in the early ‘90s watching his brother play the game for hours and thinking, “I have absolutely no freaking idea what is going on! Why is nothing jumping or shooting?” XSEED, being the swell cats they are, sent us a copy of the new DS version of Molyneux’s classic, so I’m finally spending some time with the man’s much loved debut.

I have absolutely no freaking idea what is going on.

This is because Populous DS is frontloaded with that most dreaded of barriers between player and actual play: the text-based tutorial. Over the course of thirty minutes, you are given a text passage explaining the game’s basic rules and then asked to perform them individually, pretty much guaranteeing that you will retain none of the information you were just force-fed incrementally. Would it be so hard to have text pop-ups explaining the mechanics while you actually play the game instead of separating them? Is that really too much to ask in this magical day and age of narrative-integrated, in-play, and skippable tutorials?

You make it hard to love you, Populous DS. Dag nab it.

Editor’s Note: Text adventures are allowed to have text tutorials. I guess.

Related links:

Molyneux's Redemption?
Impressions: Fable 2
Screen Test: Fable 2
This Week in Shrieking Annoyances

Molyneux's Redemption?

Bob Mackey — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:00:00 GMT

If you asked me a few years ago, I never would've believed Fable 2 would be so highly-reviewed--or that I'd be having so much fun playing it. Even the ruthless gang over at 1UP Yours likes Fable 2; in their latest podcast, they go so far as to recommend that you play it before the highly-anticipated Fallout 3--and that's saying something. So, after a series of disappointments this decade, is Molyneux finally back in our good graces?

Maybe; it's possible that he never left them. Games like the original Black and White may be mocked and derided in the Disappointment Hall of Fame, but, if you do a simple Metacritic search, you'll notice that nearly all of Molyneux's 21st century games were highly regarded upon their release. Hell, as of this writing, Fable 2 is pulling in the same Metacritic score as Black and White. Metacritic isn't the best tool for judging the quality of a game, but something fishy's going on here.

Will there eventually be a Fable 2 backlash? I think it's inevitable. While I'll agree it's a quality product, Molyneux's game is one that's made to be broken--even though in this case, "breaking" the game means having a blast exploiting the social interactions and economy of Fable 2's world. It's a messy sandbox, but a fun one nonetheless--and Fable 2's land of Albion is much more immersive than the over-hyped and sterile Grand Theft Auto 4. Still, I believe disappointment is a Molyneux meme that isn't going to disappear soon; and, by early next year, I'm sure we'll hear rumblings about how much Fable 2 sucked. But bookmark this post, friends--as of October 27, 2008, Fable 2 is officially awesome.

I promise to not eat my words on this one.

Related Links:

Impressions: Fable 2
Screen Test: Fable 2
Non-Gamers Reviewing Games: Wait, What?

Impressions: Fable 2

Bob Mackey — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:15:00 GMT

So far, I've managed to avoid riding Peter Molyneux's 21st century disappointment train, as popular opinion alone has kept me away from his post-Bullfrog work. I was a big fan of his PC games throughout the 90s--and I'm still hoping for some sort of Dungeon Keeper revival--but his self-aggrandizing nature and the vicarious pain of others didn't exactly motivate me to check out anything from Lionhead Studios. But I'm a weak man, and the years of hype for Fable 2 eventually got to me; would it be a good game? Would Molyneux actually be able to live up to his promises?

Color me surprised, because Fable 2 actually held my attention for nearly four hours last night--and my busy life makes it hard to fit in long periods of prolonged motionlessness. Fable 2 may not be quite as stellar as Peter Molyneux would have you think, but it is a surprising mix of Zelda and The Sims. You heard right.

Of course, the beginning of the game might lead you to believe otherwise; initially, Fable 2 makes you play a portion of your character's childhood, which eventually sets up the story for the rest of the game. It's meant to be a tutorial, but it honestly doesn't teach you about much, aside from the morality system--and like the shmuck I always am, I made all of the "good" choices based on my lousy moral reflex. These choices eventually affect the development of your neighborhood some ten years later (3-4 hours into the game); on returning to my town as an adult, I saw that cooperating with the introductory fetch quests made everything much more pleasant, and even gave me a significant discount in some of the shops. Note: karma only exists in the world of video games.

It isn't until you become an adult that the game actually becomes fun, and sadly, Fable 2 waits just a little too long to throw you into combat--which is one of the best parts of the game. Three of the face buttons on the 360 controller represent strength, skill, and will--Fable 2's main set of traits--which allows the relatively simple combat to expand as you put more experience points into developing these three areas. The X button starts out as only being used for simple sword strikes, but upon building up your character's "strength" skill, it can also be held in to block attacks. So far, it's an interesting and intuitive system that I'm looking forward to exploring--which won't be a chore, because I love the combat so much.

Of course, the most exciting thing about Fable 2 are the Sims-ish interactions you can have with your fellow CPU citizens. I've heard some amazing stories from various message borads, but I'm a little too early in the game to fully explore the limits of character interaction--which has mainly consisted of me dancing and farting in large groups to become the dancingest, fartingest adventurer in all of Fable. Oh, and flirting with barmaids, then having no idea where to take them for some sweet lovin'. Rest assured that I am responsible and have purchased numerous virtual condoms, just to be safe. I doubt the downstairs hygiene is up to snuff in Albion.

So far, the game has my attention, and the minor annoyances, like the lack of any useful maps, are somewhat easy to ignore after seeing only a little of what the game has to offer. I'm also pretty enchanted by Fable 2's world; European high-fantasy is one of my least-favorite settings, but Fable 2 actually has a sense of humor, along with some authentic whimsy. Any game where you can shit your pants on purpose is one I'm going to stick around for.

Related Links:

Non-Gamers Reviewing Games: Wait, What?
Screen Test: Fable 2
Gears of LittleBig Fable Music: Considering the First-Party Blitz

Gears of LittleBig Fable Music: Considering the First-Party Blitz

John Constantine — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

October brought its true fury and grandeur to New York today. It took three days, but the nattering leftovers of summer finally drifted out to sea like so many dead leaves and left behind the lowlight and intent wind so particular to the month. Walking down the street, I could smell it, looming like bonfire smoke and Halloween parades: game season.

I hold no love for the business structure that sees some ninety-percent of the year’s most ballyhooed games releasing all within a tight ten week window. It leads to sensory overload and, for the devoted gamer, it adds to already-big backlogs. But I’d be lying if I said it isn’t always exciting. All of the hype, all of the previews, leaked screens, developer showcases, and high, high hopes all lead here and it always begins in October. Holiday 2008, as it were, is going to be a particularly interesting season considering that it is gaming’s first to witness true third-party agnosticism. Nigh on every publisher from East and West is releasing their biggest games on any and all platforms available. (There are rare exceptions. See Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles, Valve’s Left4Dead, and a number of Wii titles.) This brings even closer scrutiny to the console holders' offerings; more than ever, first-party games need to be system sellers. They have to act as ambassadors, convincing casual and hardcore gamers alike that if they put money into such and such a system, there will be more where that came from.

I’m fascinated by what the Big Three are bringing to the table and how those games reflect their mutual identities. Nintendo is Nintendo, releasing just two Wii games, with the new god of the Touch Generation, Wii Music, and its long tail economics prophet, Animal Crossing: City Folk. I have no idea how people will receive Wii Music giving Guitar Hero’s ubiquity. If everyone with a Wii is already used to one type of music game, one that requires you to actually, you know, play, will they actually want to pay fifty dollars for a gimped version that offers none of the manufactured exhibitionism?

Microsoft has got the quantity and the most traditional variety. Between Fable 2, Gears of War 2, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, and (possibly) Halo Wars, they’ve constructed a blanket of sequels covering the genres of old so thoroughly, it’s a wonder most players don’t curl up inside and take a nap. Microsoft is also taking two more stabs at currying casual favor with You’re in the Movies and Lips. Gears will do spectacularly (though not Halo spectacular), Fable will do well, and provided it actually comes out, Halo Wars will sell on its name alone, but it remains to be seen if Microsoft can finally, after so many attempts, steal a slice of Nintendo’s pie. Kids don’t know who Banjo is and it’s not clear that the young adults who do still care, You’re in the Movies doesn’t seem like an obvious draw, and Lips has Singstar to deal with in Europe and America’s apparent ambivalence towards purely karaoke games. Low, low price or not, the Xbox 360 still looks to be the gamers game box during the blitz.

And then there’s Sony. Two of Sony’s four games are pure Playstation standards, totems of a threadbare empire: the basketball game and the racing game. NBA ’09: The Inside and Motorstorm: Pacific Rift should do respectably, catering to the audience they’ve always had on Sony’s boxes (though Motorstorm is filling in for Gran Turismo and Namco’s seemingly adrift Ridge Racer series.) Though, admittedly, that audience is not quite so big as it once was. Insomniac’s Resistance 2 is also interesting, the sort of first-person shooter heavy on single-player, narrative thrills and massive multiplayer variety that gamers were desperate for in 2007, before Halo 3 came out. Given the success of the original, though, and Insomniac’s pedigree, Resistance 2 could be a break out moment for Sony when it goes head to head with Gears 2.

Sony’s fourth game, due in just two weeks, is this fall’s true wild card. I have absolutely no idea what LittleBigPlanet is going to do when it finally comes out, whether the massive marketing push Sony’s put behind it has impregnated the world’s mind with that game’s intimidating possibilities and inviting façade. It’s impossible to say that LBP will draw in a traditional audience. As much as it’s a platformer, the fact of the matter is that the game can be anything you damn well want to be. It could change everything, a game that fundamentally alters the mainstream’s perception of what a game can be, or it can shrivel and die on the vine, a fondly remembered ambition years ahead of its time. I honestly have no idea what to expect from LittleBigPlanet and that’s exciting in and of itself.

Game season’s started. You can feel it, taste it, and see it all around. Get ready, dear reader. We’re going to have some very tired thumbs by the time 2009 comes knocking.

Related links:

Lowering the Standard: Why Nintendo’s Hardcore vs. Casual Commitments Aren’t the Problem
Christmas in Nintendoland: The Tokyo Conference
Miyamoto Says, "It Would Be Great If Music Education Started With Wii Music."
Five Games That Will Be Awesome to Remake in LittleBigPlanet
E3 Day 4: No Blades, No Bows. Leave Your Weapons Here.
E3 Day Two: Spin, Malaise, Sony’s New Clothes, and Nintendo’s True Disruption

Screen Test: Fable 2

John Constantine — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 23:00:00 GMT

For all of the hate the original Fable got for not living up to Peter Molyneux’s wild claims about how the game’s role-playing would provide a nigh on life changing level of depth and complexity, I adored it. It was a perfectly paced little nugget of fun, about fifteen hours of content, satisfying combat, and some neat (for its time) character customization. Even if it didn’t quite let you live the full hero’s life it originally promised to, it still offered some impressive opportunity for moral choice in a game world, choices whose consequences are far more interesting than the ones found in similar games five years later. I’m still not too sure what to expect from Fable 2. I feel as though its been flying under the press radar since it was announced. Even though its all but done right now, no preview or interview has given a sense of what the full game experience is going to be like. Right now, it just sounds like Fable but bigger. These screens certainly bear that out. As always, Lionhead bangs out some pleasantly exaggerated human caricatures, homey looking fantasy villages and forests, and some nice and spooky enemies. Maybe that’s why Fable 2 is still flying under the radar. Instead of being billed as a paradigm-altering juggernaut, it’s being sold as what it looks like: videogame comfort food.

(Link: Xboxygen via NeoGAF)

Previous Screen Tests:

Final Fantasy Dissidia
Fragile
Final Fantasy Versus XIII
Silent Hill Homecoming
Fallout 3
Alone in the Dark
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 3

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:13:00 GMT

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!

We cite Punch-Out!! here not for starring Mike Tyson (a controversial figure, even before his rape conviction), but for the degree to which it epitomizes a trend that would dominate gaming in the late-'80s and early-'90s: the "beat up stereotypes from around the world" gameplay model. Granted, most of Punch-Out!!'s characters are too ludicrous to really offend; it's hard to imagine Pacific Islanders getting all up in arms about King Hippo being kind of a jackass. That said, the sight of cross-eyed Piston Honda babbling "Sushi, Kamikaze, Fujiyama, Nipponichi!" as a mid-match battle cry is a little unsettling. — PS

Persona 3

I’ve written about Persona 3’s disturbing imagery before: “It’s always strange when games filled with truly troubling imagery go unnoticed by the most vocal anti-game pundits. Persona 3, Atlus’ exceptional RPG in the long running Shin Megami Tensei series, has been released not once but twice in the past twelve months without eliciting even a peep out of Joe Lieberman or Focus on the Family. For those unfamiliar with the game, the reason Persona 3 might ruffle some feathers is its protagonists, a team of troubled high school students who control guardian spirits to battle demons. And oh yeah, they release these spirits by shooting themselves in the head.” Seriously! Teens! Shooting themselves repeatedly in the FACE! No one even said anything about all the teens shooting themselves in the face. — JC

Metroid II: Return of Samus

Metroid II is about xenocide; your goal is to slaughter an entire alien species. Yes, there are many games about destroying evil alien species. Usually, though, said species are attacking the Earth or something. Or they're at least competent to make moral decisions. Metroids are space jellyfish. They're not evil, they're just hungry. And the series storyline establishes pretty clearly that the Space Pirates are breeding the things for their own evil ends. Exterminating the Space Pirates would be one thing, but the Metroids are mere low-functioning animals. As you proceed through the game, you watch a steadily declining count of how many of the poor little bastards you have left to vaporize. Imagine if this thing was set in a nature preserve. — PS

Fable

Peter Molyneux may not have delivered on his promise of creating the greatest role-playing game of all time with Fable but it was still a remarkably forward thinking game. Consider this: Fable was released in the United States on September 14th, 2004, a mere four months after Massachusetts started issuing same-sex marriage licenses and two months before senatorial, congressional, and presidential elections where constitutionally banning same-sex marriage was a tent pole issue. I applaud Molyneux for creating a game where a man can fall in love and marry another man. But I am shocked that Fable didn’t cause videogame content to be another talking point that election season. — JC

Click here for Part 1
Click here for Part 2

Previous Top Tens:
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 2

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:12:00 GMT

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4 is a game obsessed with realism, its depiction of combat situations and the tools of war meticulous to an almost terrifying degree. Early in the game, you are placed in the gunner’s seat of an AC-130 Spectre over a Ukrainian field, the night vision view of an aerial assault looking no different than an Iraq war newscast, the radio confirmation of kills unsettlingly casual; a game so realistic that it mimics a soldier’s detachment from killing. It’s strange then that the game, for all its incessant specificity, sends the player to kill Arab soldiers in “the Middle East”, and not an actual nation. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has sold over seven million copies in a war-weary United States in under a year. Am I the only one who finds this sort of depersonalization unsettling? — JC

Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators

Fast-food promotional games are pretty fucked up, as a whole. Selling this nasty grub to kids via smiling cartoon characters and hop-and-bop platforming — well, it may not cross over into "immoral", but it's certainly sleazy. The 1992 McDonald's promo-piece Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators, however, crosses that line by hopping onto the kid-friendly environmentalism in vogue at the time. (See also Captain Planet, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc.) The problem here is that McDonald's' own environmental record was far from clean; as a massive distributor of factory-farmed beef, the company was (and is) directly responsible for a huge amount of pollution, deforestation and energy wastage. Bastards were cutting down the same sparkling-green rainforests through which their grinning shills were merrily traipsing. — PS

Heavenly Sword

It might seem strange that we’ve chosen to single-out Heavenly Sword as our example of an absurdly over-sexualized female protagonist. Dead or Alive, a series that’s persisted for just over a decade now without causing a kerfuffle despite its bizarre, hyper sexuality, might seem like a more logical target. You might even say that Heavenly Sword’s a poor example considering its emphasis on Nariko’s empowerment in a male dominated fantasy world. But let me ask you, if Nariko is such a great warrior, savior of her people even though they hate her for being a woman, why does she go to war in her underpants? She is fighting people with swords in her underpants. No one thought mention to developer Ninja Theory that underpants are not effective armor? Nariko stands in for the legions of silly, objectified, hyper-sexualized female game protagonists. We’re giving Lara the day off on this one. — JC

Click here for Part 1
Click here for Part 3

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 1

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:11:00 GMT

Games have been raising hackles since their inception. Howell Ivy kick-started gaming and controversy’s relationship when he designed Death Race in 1976, a simple black and white game that was, well, about running people over for points. That was enough to get America riled up, prompting 60 Minutes to run the first of many, many televised news stories about the psychological effects of gaming. But public outrage is unpredictable. Politicians and parent groups have been shocked by d-list titles like Manhunt and Night Trap while more popular, widely played games with far more inflammatory content have passed by unnoted. Today, 61 Frames Per Second presents The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial. A number of these are games that we are surprised did not cause uproar in a number of communities. The rest are games that we ourselves find seriously questionable in content. How do you feel about these videogames? Indifferent? Appalled? Leave a comment and let us know. — John Constantine

NARC

I don't know about you, but I have at least a couple of friends who have occasionally sold drugs. They're pretty lucky they grew up in the relatively permissive '90s, and not in the merciless, Reaganite '80s presented in NARC. Sure, NARC gives you bonus points for arresting dealers instead of killing them, but that's because it's almost impossible to do. Far easier is just perforating them on the spot. As my fellow blogger Cole notes, "I guess dismembering hundreds is okay if they're pushin'." In fact, there was some parental outrage over NARC's unprecedented level of gore, but its moral assumptions went pretty much unchallenged. — Peter Smith

Pokémon

Have you ever noticed that there are no regular, powerless domesticated animals in any of the Pokémon games, cartoons, comics et cetera? Let's say your pre-teen brother/sister/cousin goes out for a walk one day and comes across a pigeon in the street. They then capture this pigeon in a small cage and train it to fight the dogs, lizards and ponies that the other neighborhood kids have captured and trained to fight, as well as stray cats and sewer rats that can then be captured and trained for similar purposes. Yeah, that scenario is a little awesome, but it's also pretty horrifying, right? When Michael Vick is involved in a dogfighting circuit, the media explodes with rage, but when your kids do it in a Nintendo game it gets rated E for Everyone by the ESRB. — Derrick Sanskrit

Final Fantasy Tactics

As much as Final Fantasy Tactics’ tale of political intrigue in the feudal fantasy-scape of Ivalice is concerned with a power struggle between church and state, it’s hard to get past the game’s barely veiled indictment of Christian lore. Tactics' villains are essentially the Catholic Church. Their central figure is Saint Ajora, a 'child of God' with twelve disciples, one of whom betrayed him and sent him to his death. 'Cept it turns out Ajora wasn't really the son of God, but a power-hungry war-mongering mortal who was sneakily made divine through church skulduggery and historical revisionism. Good thing RPGs require so much reading, otherwise there might have been some good ol’ fashioned game burnings back in 1998. — JC

Click here for Part 2
Click here for Part 3