61 Frames Per Second : yakuza 2

In Defense of the QTE: Ninja Blade

John Constantine — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Now that the man’s winding down his career, let us honor Yu Suzuki for his most important contribution to game design: the QTE. Hey now. I can hear you rolling your eyes. We might be sick of pressing the X button every single time Crystal Dynamics wants Lara Croft to kick a tiger with style, but the quick time event provides us with some of videogames’ most satisfying thrills. They aren’t inherently bad. They’re just implemented very, very poorly. This week, you’ll be able to walk out into the world and pick up a copy of From Software’s Ninja Blade. Hell, you can go home right now and download a demo of Ninja Blade just to have a taste. One level is all you need to exemplify just how good quick time events can be in a game.

Here’s why.

First, a definition. In God of War’s wake, “quick time event” has transformed from a noun into a sort of critics’ short hand. It’s a blanket term to describe when, in a game where you have direct control of a character, the normal control is taken away and you watch a unique or atypical animation. While the animation plays, you must press a specific button as prompted on the screen. If you don’t, you’ll have to replay the sequence. Now, there are many parts of modern games that can be described this way and not all of them are quick time events. For example, in action games like MadWorld and Yakuza 2, you’re prompted with special inputs — press X next to a car, swing the Wiimote down — to finish off enemies. The most colorful finishing moves have you stringing these inputs together. These are not quick time events. They’re contextual actions. A quick time event is a choreographed, dramatic sequence where prompts imitate an action that you do not have direct control over. Resident Evil 4 has some classic examples. You, the player, steer Leon to the top of a hill and move forward. The game then shifts the camera to a group of enemies on a cliff above you. They push a boulder off said cliff that chases you and to escape you repeatedly press a button, which keeps Leon running. That button has nothing to do with movement during regular play. If you don’t press it here, the game ends. That’s a quick time event. They can, and have, enrich games with emotionally charged moments the game wouldn’t have otherwise.

The chief argument against quick time events is that they pull you out of a game by stripping away control, if only partially. They’re gaudy cheats to mask the passive storytelling devices of film instead of relying on a game’s interactivity to inform its drama and incident. It’s a valid argument against bad quick time events. The most recent games starring the aforementioned Lara Croft, particularly Tomb Raider Legend, have terrible quick time events made up of sixty second cinematics halved by a single, easy to miss button press. When implemented well, though, a quick time event is anything but a mask for inactive game sequences, as in Quantic Dream’s Indigo Prophecy. The game allows you limited sequences of full character control, relying on quick time events with inputs that imply the action to make up most of the play. Lucas Kane is running from police officers and needs to dodge left so you’re prompted to press both analog sticks in that direction. You aren’t moving Lucas, but the movement of both sticks translates as urgency, and agency, for you. These QTEs are fast to match the pace of the game and end up making for affecting play because of their speed and mimicry of the action. That’s the key to QTE success; tying your input as close to possible to dramatic actions that are impossible to depict, or make interactive, in the game itself.

Ninja Blade’s first level is about half quick time events and they are incredible spectacles. The level ends with a fight against a giant, grotesque spider on top of a skyscraper. The first part of the fight is familiar three-dimensional action; you move around with the level analog stick and press X, Y, and B buttons on the Xbox 360 controller to slice and stab with a sword. The second part, after whittling down the spider’s defenses, has you riding the spider up a skyscraper before riding a wrecking ball across the night sky, and then crushing the spider with it. There isn’t a way in games to make this one-hundred percent interactive and retain its presentation. Not yet at least. So sequence is a quick time event, and through a mixture of rumble in the control, speed of button prompts, and inputs that approximate other actions in the normal game, it’s completely engaging.

Like I said, QTEs don’t damn a game. They’re just another tool. Quality depends on the craftsmen.

Related links:

Love-Hate: In Defense of the Cutscene
Overpowering the Flavor: Cooking Mama World Kitchen and Cutscene Clutter
Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
Sonic Unleased: Worse Than Syphilis
Sega's Yu Suzuki Steps Down
Where is Yu Suzuki?

John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Character

John Constantine — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:45:00 GMT

Next time you start telling somebody about a game you were playing — not a puzzle game or anything equally abstract — pay attention to how you refer to what you were doing in the game. Are you saying, “Then I jumped on the goomba!” or are you saying, “Then my guy jumped on the goomba!” Is it you finding the boomerang or is it Link? Are you driving the car, making the basket, managing the farm? Or is it your proxy, that little character walking about when you push a button to the right, that window meant to be a human being’s field of vision? As much as I thought about open worlds in 2008, I spent just as much time wondering what role character plays in great game design. A great game character doesn’t need to be one specific thing. It can be you, a literal representation of how you see yourself physically and even spiritually. It can also be a suit for you to put on, a fiction that you can inhabit, a doorway into story that isn’t just different from your daily life, but quite literally impossible. There was no shortage of astounding games in 2008, but there were a handful that, for me, were wholly defined by how they let you inhabit their characters, and characters made both for and by the player.

In my first look back at ’08, I mentioned how it was character that ultimately kept me from getting the most out of Grand Theft Auto IV. There was just too much dissonance in how Niko Bellic was represented. There were three Nikos. There was the Niko you see speaking in cutscenes, a haunted, practical man of honor, making a new life for himself in a new country by hunting down the demons of his past. There was the Niko you guided through the game’s structured missions, a ruthless, opportunistic murderer who would destroy anything and anyone for a buck. And, finally, the Niko that you played, the blank slate who could do anything in Liberty City, whether it was enjoying a nice walk on the beach or assaulting an international airport with nothing more than a motorcycle and a baseball bat. At no point in GTAIV did these three Nikos meld into a single character, and the constant contradictions between them made it impossible for me to enjoy the game after a certain point.

Metal Gear Solid 4 and Yakuza 2 (my absolute favorite game of 2008) were two of last year’s greatest achievements precisely because they didn’t fall prey to GTAIV’s representational failures. Both games are concerned with narrative — unchangeable, locked, and passively engaged narrative in both cases — but when you, as the player, take control of Old Snake and Kazuma Kiriyu, the actual play is designed to reinforce and serve those characters. The game is literally about them and thusly, depending on what type of player you are, they are about you. It impressed me to no end that, in both games, this was sufficient incentive to keep playing; I always wanted to know what was going to happen to Kiriyu and Snake. It’s convenient, then, that the play in both games was every bit as good as their mutual cutscenes were long. MGS4’s stealth and action finally felt organic after a decade of refinement and, of the hundreds of things you can do in Yakuza 2, even the most mundane were entertaining. (Selecting booze from an in-game menu and then reading about how it tastes? Awesome.)

The World Ends With You (my second favorite game of the year) utilized character just as effectively as Yakuza and Metal Gear, but in a much different way. TWEWY is an expertly designed game, flush with color and mechanical delights. No other game released in 2008, not Fallout 3, not anything, gave you as many options for customization as TWEWY did. You can, at any point, fundamentally change the flow of the game by altering its settings and your characters' attacks/apparel. What impresses me most about TWEWY, and what’s made the most lasting impression, is that the game doesn’t hook you into its story or battles through a single lead character or even an ever expanding cast of usable characters, as is the norm for role-playing games. TWEWY grabs you by framing every action in the game and story around a principal character’s relationship with their second. Not only does Neku grow as a person through his relationships with his partners, but the game layers complexity and nuance into its actual activities as a result of personal growth. Your role in the game isn’t Neku, his friends, or even a sort narrator (another RPG commonality.) You play the bond between characters. There’s nothing else like it.

Had I played and finished Fallout 3 before 2008 ended, it would most likely be included here at the end alongside Fable II and Soulcalibur IV, games that put the burden of character directly on you. But I didn’t, so more kudos to Fable and Soulcalibur. These two couldn’t be more different, but they share one distinct strength: they both allow you to mold character to an absurd degree. Soulcalibur IV is the best version of one of the best fighting games made, and its core character design, as is the case with fighting games in general, is half of its appeal. Its character creation mode, however, is the star of the show. Point me to a single other game that’s as versatile and accessible in letting you make a body to inhabit a game and have fun with. I’ll wait. Some people called Soulcalibur IV a let down. They are wrong. Fable II, on the other hand, doesn’t give you a whole lot to play with when it comes to making your character look how you want them to. There are far fewer costumes, hair styles, and other variables than there were in its predecessor. But Peter Molyneux finally delivered a game that allowed you to be a person of complex morality. Fable isn’t an unmitigated success. Its illusion of simulated society is often crippled by familiar boundaries (you can’t bring x person to x locale, etc.) and it’s far too easy to manipulate the NPC masses through simple actions. Despite its imperfections, the game does break the dualism that has dominated moral-choice-as-mechanic in games previously. You can be good but corrupt, bad but pure. The game fails because your character’s nature isn’t always reflected in the world around them, but it’s a monumentally important step forward and deserving of both praise and canonization.

I’ll be wrapping up 2008 once and for all in a couple of days. In the meantime, if you haven’t played any of these, what the hell are you waiting for?

Games of 2008: Yakuza 2, Metal Gear Solid 4, The World Ends With You, Fable II, Soulcalibur IV

Related links:

John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Open World
10 Games Nadia Played in 2008 Instead of Working
Joe’s Top Ten Games of 2008
My Top 10 of 2008 in No Particular Order
Derrick's Top 13 Games of 2008

Joe’s Top Ten Games of 2008 – Special Jury Prizes

Joe Keiser — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The official mandate has come down from the top, as you have seen—that it is December, and we all write about games, so we all have to pick some arbitrary number of them that we enjoyed above all others this year. This is an arduous task that we have all figured out ways to cheat at, and I am no different. Though I will pick ten games, exactly, and present them in order from #10 to the best game of the year, I will not be starting that list today. Instead, here are my special jury prizes for the year. These games would have made it into my top twenty. They all did one or two things pretty well, and many deserve more recognition than they ended up getting.

Best Games to get Your Girlfriend to Play Games – Wii Fit and Echochrome: A tie here, for two otherwise incomparable games. Wii Fit is an obvious one, as it has been specifically targeted at women and is barely a game at all—it’s really just a charmingly presented tool. Echochrome is much more interesting, because it’s a gamer’s game through and through. Despite being maybe the most abstract game released this year, it’s actually surprisingly easy to get the layperson to understand it—“the M.C. Escher game” is a fully illuminating description that almost anyone is at least intrigued by. That both of these games were technically ambitious (Wii Fit in hardware, Echochrome in software) is not a coincidence, as this is the kind of lateral thinking that grows the scope of the medium.

Best Storytelling Game – Yakuza 2: Yakuza 2 is a technically dated, kind of clunky PS2 brawler/RPG hybrid thing that uses cutscenes to tell the majority of its story. It breaks just about every rule that Half-Life laid down about what a storytelling game should be. So why is it so gripping? Because it gets the fundamentals of storytelling right. The writing is tight, the saga epic and complex, and all of it is complemented by strong environments and plenty of incidental detail. In an age of high-definition and super-slick shooters, this was a reminder of why the PS2 and its plethora of Japan-developed games had such a long run at the top.

Best Transition from Console to Handheld – Warriors Orochi for PSP: The Warriors series gets a bad rap because it fails to add value from release to release. But the core of the game is and will always be viscerally entertaining, because who doesn’t want to obliterate men by the thousands with just the few swings of a sword? Previous attempts at bringing this series portable resulted in crippling gameplay compromises. This year Warriors Orochi for the PSP finally brought the full-fat franchise experience to the mass transit systems of the world, which is absolutely the best place for this kind of repetitive but satisfying gameplay. Having such a game on the go is actually hugely valuable, which makes it a shame that this one came and went with zero recognition.

Best…Hmm, Why am I Still Playing This: Viking: Battle for Asgard – Viking is a game where you play as a lumbering, shirtless piece of man-meat who has to save hundreds of other lumbering, shirtless pieces of man-meat from some horrible woman on a mountain. I probably don’t have to tell you that I played the whole thing.

Other Bests of 2008:

Derrick's Top 13 Games of 2008 - Part 1, Part 2
Bob’s Top 10 of 2008 in No Particular Order - Audiosurf, Braid
10 Games Nadia Played In 2008 Instead Of Working: Super Smash Bros Brawl

Overworld: Yakuza

Joe Keiser — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place.

I’ve never been to Japan. But having played the Yakuza franchise, I can say that…I still have no semblance of what it’s like to be in Japan. But I do have a strong sense of a picture of an urban Japan, of what the leaders at Amusement Vision feel the cities must be like for a haunted, violent criminal. It’s an affecting place, one the hangs an ever-present melancholy over the game.

It’s not so much a visual thing, though the graphics do combine technology-limited photorealism with broad splashes of the anime aesthetic for a look that is recognizably Japanese. It’s also not just about the meaningless street violence, of which there is plenty—that exists more for the sake of story progression, though it naturally colors the experience of the environment as well.

But it’s more about the little things, what Yakuza will and will not let you do as you interact with the world, that gives its urban Japan its lonely, oppressive feel. Let’s look at what you can do: you can eat, partially to heal up, but mostly for the experience of eating while facing an empty chair. You can drink, for seemingly no reason, again with experience (and a chatty bartender) being the sole incentive. You can play video games, in an arcade, alone. You can watch videos, some of them dirty, in a small room alone. You can pay a young lady to be your friend. You can be paid to be somebody else’s friend.

Now let’s look at what you pointedly can’t do: talk to most of the people on the streets. Of the ones that will talk to you, most will fight you; there’s no avoiding this, other than to avoid these people entirely.

The flow of the city matters. Crowded byways of faceless strangers give way to empty alleys that flash with violence. Eating quickly makes the pain subside, but then it’s back outdoors, shoving through the crowd to the next bloody exchange.

The Yakuza games are about the Japanese criminal underworld, but they’re also about loneliness—we’re talking about a series where the protagonist is an orphan, who continues to watch the people he loves die, who starts the second game in the series by leaving his adopted daughter behind, alone, as he goes off to bust some skulls. The Japan that was built to highlight this loneliness is a masterwork of isolation—it’s a densely populated world where friendly conversation costs cold cash, where drunken stumbling is noticed only by opportunistic vagrants. The fact that many of the places are real world locations and chains, and that the meaningless material comforts like liquor are likewise licensed, make this sad city almost real. Which makes it even more unsettling when you, as Kazuma Kiryu, lash out against it.

More Overworld:

Friday the 13th
Marble Madness

Related Links:

Surprise of the Week: Sega Releases a Good Game
Trailer Review: Yakuza 3
Bringing Sexy Back: Toshihiro Nagoshi

Trailer Review: Yakuza 3

John Constantine — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Kazuma Kiryu and I are going to hang out. We’ll go out and he’ll show me the sights, take me to a hostess club, and we will laugh and laugh. Chances are, some dudes in puffy winter jackets will start some shit. I will hold their leader in a headlock and Kaz will drop kick that mofo so hard that Canadian children will say, “Ow” in their living rooms, thousands and thousands of miles away. We’ll high five each other then, before listening to a hardboiled detective tell us of intriguing and nefarious dealings in the Tokyo underworld. It’ll be sweet when the jazz rock starts playing. That heady day will only end when I’m woken up in my study, a firm bionic hand on my shoulder and a disapproving voice asking if I’m “dreaming of that Celestial roustabout” again. I will lie, of course. A white lie to soothe my beloved Commando’s nerves. But I will treasure that dream all the same.

Yakuza 3, as you can see from this trailer, looks totally frigging rad. As to what’s happening here, I have no clue. Kazuma Kiryu is hanging out with some kids, which I assume are from the orphanage he patronizes in Yakuza 2, on a beach, there’s a protest of some kind, some political intrigue, the flashy graphics are shown off, and many familiar faces appear, much to my delight. At one point, it looks like Kiryu’s beating the crap out of Albert Wesker from Resident Evil. I want this to be the case very badly. If you have yet to try either of the Yakuza games on PS2, this might look like a boring cutscene fest. Let me assure you, there is a monumental amount of game in the Yakuza series. There are many lengthy cutscenes, but Yakuza is one of those very rare instances when they’re actually a treat. The stories, while more than a little melodramatic and overblown, are well written and exciting, provided crime drama is something you enjoy.

Sega, please bring this here. Please.

(Link: Siliconera)

Previous Trailer Reviews:

Dragon Quest IX
TGS Trailer Time: Resident Evil 5
Retro Game Challenge
Golden Axe: Beast Rider
House of the Dead: Overkill
Riz-Zoawd
Idolm@ster PSP
The Last Guy
Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff
Captain Rainbow
The Past and Future With Mega Man 9 and Chrono Trigger DS
Densetsu no Stafi 5
Sonic Unleashed
Infinite Undiscovery
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Street Fighter 4
The Conduit
Mirror’s Edge

Bringing Sexy Back: Toshihiro Nagoshi

John Constantine — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I mentioned it earlier today, but Sega’s been making me feel all tingly on the inside lately. It’s been a goodly while since Sega made my heart flutter, but they just keep making all the right moves. More than anything else from the publisher, Yakuza 2 has been the real inspiration behind all the tinglyness. No bones about it, I freaking love that game. It is awesome. But I got to thinking today, to whom do I owe my thanks for all the warmth inside? Well, certainly crime novelist Hase Seishu. His careful pen is responsible for Yakuza’s ongoing and thoroughly entertaining story. But producer Toshihiro Nagoshi certainly deserves a heaping spoonful of thanks as well. And you know what else? He is sexy as hell.

Taking Sega’s lumbering play model from Shenmue and turning it into a focused crime RPG like Yakuza is sexy. Creating a game like Super Monkey Ball, a game in which monkeys go into balls, roll around, and make funny noises, is also sexy. But even beyond that, look at the man! A few years back, he looked like this:

Then he started making games about badasses like Kiryu Kazuma and ball-monkeys and he transformed into this guy:

I wish I was the one giving him flowers.

Previously on Bringing Sexy Back:

Street Fighter Dress-Up Party!
Susan O’Connor
John Carmack
Retro Controllers of the Future
Yoji Shinkawa

Watcha Playing: The Palette Cleanser

John Constantine — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:45:00 GMT

The past six weeks have been teeming with meaty, action games. I’ve been working through them slowly but surely, like an elegant seven course meal. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was thick, hot comfort fare, a brief appetizer of sloppy design coated in delicious Stormtrooper and rancor killing action. The game’s a buggy mess, really, the gaming equivalent of empty calories, but definitely satisfying. Then there was the dynamic horror duo of Dead Space and Silent Hill: Homecoming, a soup and salad combo built to terrify. They didn’t really scare, but instead delivered visceral body simulations. Both games succeeded by making you constantly aware of your avatar’s physical presence and the heft of their actions, and they achieved this through a careful synergy between atmosphere and play. Yakuza 2 was truly the main course, a game I had no expectations for whatsoever that turned into an all time favorite. Its broad adventure, pulp tale of cops and crooks, and simple but ceaselessly engaging fisticuffs were nourishing, more substantial than anything released on current gen consoles. For dessert, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Another bonafide surprise, Ecclesia turned out to not be another retread through Igarashi’s decade-old formula, but a challenging successor to Castlevania 2 with fierce action whose variety and elegance was exceeded only by the game’s environments. Yes, it’s been a great month of big games, but it’s been the small things I’ve played in between them, games I’ve played for no more than a handful of minutes here and there, that have given the most *ahem* food for thought.

The palette cleansers, as it were, aren’t what you might expect either. These quick play sessions, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, haven’t been with simplistic small titles. Far from it actually. The ones I keep returning to are Wipeout HD, Mega Man 9, the original Katamari Damacy, and Castle Crashers, all games that sport demanding mechanics, all games that get very stressful very quickly. Hairpin turns at high speed in Wipeout and precision jumps toward clandestine robot master confrontations don’t exactly seem like the ingredients for refreshment, but they’ve been restorative between the larger games. What makes these games perfect palette cleansers isn’t their immediacy, nor is it their lack of an expansive narrative. The key characteristic is that they don’t demand a serious investment in their world before and after. You don’t have to remember what you were on your way to do before your last save, what sidequests you’ve half completed. You simply need to know how to control them, and all of them take practice to control well.

Strange as it is to say, after recently starting a game of Fable 2, I immediately thought that it would make for an excellent palette cleanser. The game may be huge in scope and have a sweeping story to tell, but its play and guiding hand towards objectives don’t ask much of you beyond an understanding of the world’s rules. Molyneux’s made a sprawling RPG that’s less of a filet mignon and more of a small dish of sherbert. I’m wondering what other fall blockbusters may hide the same quality.

What are some of your favorite palette cleansers, everyone?

Related links:

The 61FPS Review: Dead Space
Katamari in the Classroom, Part 1
Style Over Substance: Why I'm In Love With WiiWare's "Art Style"
Screen Test: Star Wars – The Force Unleashed
Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
Surprise of the Week: Sega Releases a Good Game
Impressions: Fable 2
Gears of LittleBig Fable Music: Considering the First-Party Blitz
New Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia Pics
Suffering Castlevania Fatigue