I just started playing Ys Seven for PSP. It's simplistic, but fun. I read that it gets deeper as the game goes on, but for now it's pretty much a basic button-mashing action RPG that looks pretty nice. One thing that bugged me about it though was the game's obsession with teaching you how to play.

See, I understand that games these days are more complex, but the PSP has less buttons than the PS2 (or even PS1) did. We as gamers know that we play games with buttons, and that those buttons do things, so what is so hard about letting a gamer figure out how to play the game on his/her own? When Ys Seven puts green text on the screen telling me to "press Triangle to bring up the inventory menu..." I feel like this game is talking down to me like some kind of moron. I figured out that Triangle brings up the inventory just by...wait for it...hitting triangle as soon as I was in control of my character.

I remember when I first played the Legend of Zelda on NES, which was the first game I ever conquered in my life. You know how I figured out how to bomb walls? I used a bomb, I was near a wall, and a hole appeared. How did I figure out that the boomerang stunned enemies? I threw it at them. How did I beat Ganon? A whole lot of trial and error, swinging my sword at the air until I found him, then trying every item in my inventory until it crossed my mind that when he turns brown I should hit him with the arrow I found inside the level since nothing else was working. I was eight years old at the time.

Why are game developers so afraid to let gamers figure out things for themselves these days? I mean, yeah, some games are extremely complicated. Resonance of Fate comes to mind. Maybe that game needs a tutorial. But guess what...that tutorial is optional. You don't have to go to the arena and take lessons (for the record, I chose to only after I got owned by the first mobs I ever fought in the game). You don't have to watch a five minute video the first time you pop the game into your disc the way Wii Sports Resort makes you do it. You very well could figure things out on your own, and it would be more satisfying to do so.

You know how it used to be? Games always had tutorials and ways to teach gamers how to play. They weren't called tutorials back then though. They were called the first level and they were cleverly designed to teach you the fundamentals of the game. In Super Mario Bros, the first thing you see in the game is a Goomba walking toward you, and a set of blocks. If you decide to walk into the Goomba, you die. Then you learned not to do that, so you press the jump button and you go over the Goomba. The curious player might wonder what happens when you jump and land on the Goomba's head. You kill it. "Bam, so that's how I fight enemies in this game! I learned something!" And the gamer wants to keep going to keep learning new things, like learning that the "?" blocks pop things out when hit from below, not from above, or that Koopa Troopas bounce against whatever solid surface they hit when sliding around (with no accounting for friction). Then comes the interesting choices. Should you step on that Goomba or let it go? Should you go down the pipe to shortcut through the levels or keep going topside? Eventually you get to areas where several enemies are there at once. You can look at the Spinys and know that it's not a good idea to jump on them. When your fireballs don't affect the Buzzy Beetles, you know you can't kill them the way you kill other enemies. You didn't get warning labels or close-up camera pans on certain kinds of enemies, with the view lingering on their weak spot.

Games used to make us smarter, more observant. Now I feel like many of them are dumbing us down.

You didn't have to stop playing while a message appears and says "You should explore carefully to find secrets on the level. Sometimes Mario can enter pipes. Press down on top of a pipe to try." That's what Ys Seven does, even though the gameplay is simplistic. Just by pressing buttons on your own, you learn that X attacks, Square dodges/rolls and Circle switches characters. Yeah, I accidentally wasted one of my healing potions when my character's life was full, but that's part of learning. The game gives you visual cues to let you know when attacks aren't working (it literally shows the words "Bad Attack"), yet earlier you get a tutorial that explains in lengthy detail that some enemies are vulnerable to slashes while others are vulnerable to punches, so switch characters as needed, followed by a fight that makes you try out what you learned. The game teaches you how to do special moves even though you can clearly see in your inventory screen that you can assign special attacks to "R X", "R Square", "R Triangle" and "R Circle". R does nothing on its own, so a player of moderate intelligence is bound to see what happens if he hits R and X at the same time.

But the way developers treat gamers like idiots these days, maybe not. Maybe we need to be told that the analog stick makes the character move, even though that's how it works in most of today's games. Maybe we need to be told that Start accesses the subscreen and we need to go to "Equip" to equip our characters or "Files" to save our game as if we can't read. I mean, I don't get it. It's not like gamers will complain about a game that they teach themselves how to play. They won't cry or whine about a game being too complex if it's fun and well designed. They'll want to learn all the game's secrets on their own.

I've been gaming since I was a really little kid, and I didn't need tutorials or even the instructional manual to learn how to play games. 99% of games I've played and beaten in my life as a young gamer were games borrowed from friends or bought used; I never had the boxes let alone the manuals. Older games were designed well enough that the game itself taught you how to play within its gameplay. Reviewers complain about trial and error gameplay like it's a bad thing. How else are we supposed to learn? Cheats/secrets are one thing, but if we need to go to GameFAQs.com to learn how a game should be played, or if tutorials need to pop up on the screen and interrupt the gameplay every five minutes, that's a problem that developers need to address.

Man, I haven't written a blog in a really long time...

So I played Shank last night. As cool as it looks, I did find it to be a little too button-mash-heavy. For $10, it would have been a good deal. At $15, I just don't see myself getting it, same as Rocket Knight, which I wanted, but not at the price they're asking. I mean, sure, that's still way cheaper than a full-fledged PS3 (or even Wii) game release, but it's too steep when I consider that I bought Mega Man Maverick Hunter X for PSP, a much deeper game in the same spirit as the aforementioned two, for $8.

People who create these "new old-school" type games forget the fundamental thing that made these games infinitely replayable, and that's gameplay options. In Shank, you travel through these platforming stages and you then have to fight goons. You have no option to bypass goons. It's a brawler, so that kind of makes sense, but it also makes the action repetitive because the gameplay never changes if you decide to play it again after beating it. You have the same set of moves every time. The gameplay wouldn't be bad at all if it offered some other kind of options. I said this on a message board; the game needed to have three playable characters (or more) like Streets of Rage or Final Fight. Somewhere, somehow, the player needs to have interesting choices to make. Otherwise, you're just playing follow the leader and doing exactly what the developers want you to do, in other words, control (choice) has been taken away from the player.

Mega Man games feature gameplay options. Do you use your special weapons, or stick to your buster? Do you fight or flee? Do you explore to find the secret areas in the stages or do you just rush to the boss?

I'm using games like Shank and Rocket Knight (recently-released 2D games) as case studies to see what NOT to do when I develop my own games. The developer must consider the interesting choices the player will make. If they can't come up with any, then the game concept has a fundamental flaw.

Most games considered great have provided interesting choices, from way back to the NES. Super Mario Bros. had the fight or flight mechanism as well as different routes through the levels, warp zones, optional power ups, etc. In Final Fantasy games, you always have choices as to which spells you want to attack with (though there are times when it just makes sense to stick to certain types, e.g., fire spells in an ice area). In fact, the very first Final Fantasy game let you decide what kinds of characters you'd have in your party from the beginning, which is a rarity even in today's RPGs. A SHMUP like Gradius lets you decide how you want to power up your ship. These are games that go WAY back. There are no interesting choices in Shank, and that's what kills it, the same problem that kills too many games.

This is true to me for a number of reasons, but the first and foremost reason the game cut me deep as a long time FF fan is because the game is lacking two things: Prelude and Victory Fanfare.

EDIT: I tried to be clever and hot-link the MIDI files from www.vgmusic.com but it doesn't seem to work for most people, so just go to this page http://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/snes/index-af.html and search/scroll down to "Final Fantasy"to look up tracks named "Prelude" and "Fanfare" if you want.

FFXIII is a fine game. Pretty. Plays well. Interesting story. But without those two elements, it just isn't the same. It just isn't Final Fantasy.

I've been relatively quiet around these parts lately, and I just wanted to let anyone who cares know that the reason for that is because I'm heavily into school for the time being. Taking a "Digital Storytelling" class at the moment. and I've got some more in-depth courses next semester. Things aren't showing any signs of letting up, so I'm knuckling down and getting more focused on my education and less on gaming itself, so the quiet spell is going to go on for a while.

I frequently check back here and look at everyone's blogs though, and if I have something worthwhile to say, I will, but don't expect much from my own blog for a while.

That's all. Peace. :)

http://www.pcworld.com/article/189442/can_the_iphone_handle_street_fighter_iv.html

Apparently the iPhone is good enough for a port of SFIV, but the Wii isn't. I don't know how many iPhones are out there in consumers' hands (I don't have one, for the record), but I can't imagine there are more people who own iPhones who want to play Street Fighter IV than Wii owners, or even PSP owners, who'd like to play Street Fighter IV.

A sin and a shame.

I played the Heavy Rain demo over the weekend and my lingering thought is...meh.

While the game looks good, I'm not impressed by realistic graphics or cinematics. I rarely care about the depth of a story in a video game. So for me, it's all about how the game feels to play, and Heavy Rain feels irritating to play. First of all, I think they could have chosen something more interesting than the very Arkham Asylum-like scanning of the crime scene as one of the chapters of the demo. But that's subjective...I suppose it's nice to showcase the game's varied features. However, I felt the controls were needlessly complicated. Making a character do something as simple as walk is clunky for no reason. Hold R2 and tap the direction you walk with the left stick. Why couldn't you just hold the left stick in a given direction? And then it was the little things. The fat detective guy has asthma, so he stops and pulls out the inhaler, you have to shake the sixaxis to shake it up and then press a button to make him actually use it. And then there's all the Skate-like right stick movements all over the place for various actions like opening a car door, pulling out glasses, etc. I get that they wanted to make it feel immersive, but adding complication is not the way to do that; simplifying things is the way. Why not just give me an action button? I'm not even going to get into the chore that it was making a guy climb a hill. It was like playing Twister with my fingers on the controller.

Obviously there wasn't much explained story-wise in the demo, but it sounds pretty much like the same kind of thing I've seen in crime thriller movies already. Serial killer, whodunit and the like. Sure, it's nice that this is an underexplored genre in a game, but I'm not sure games need to explore it.

Heavy Rain looks good. Those who like cinematic games will certainly be in heaven with this title. But the voice acting kills the immersion because it sounds so stiff, especially the prostitute that the detective talks with. The only really good part of the whole demo was the fight scene, though it was pretty much all QTE.

Some might think that I just don't 'get it' when it comes to Heavy Rain. I get it. It's certainly a unique interactive experience. But I don't believe it's an entertaining experience, based solely on the demo, and a game's purpose is to entertain. However, I will rent it anyway. I'm withholding judgment until I see more, but I feel comfortable in saying that if Heavy Rain is what it means for games to "grow up", then I think I'll stay in gaming childhood. At least there's fun to be had there.

Looks like the classic and brutal Blaster Master is getting a WiiWare update.

http://www.sunsoftgames.com/news/2010-02-06%20BlasterMasterOverdrive.php

I loved the original on NES. It was one of the most innovative games of its time, using the structure of interlocking areas accessible with upgrades before most games did (excluding the original Metroid.)But the original Blaster Master was damn hard, even if you knew the trick to beating some of the bosses with a single grenade.

I'm looking forward to playing this new version. Apparently it's going to be available today on WiiWare.

--

In other news, the brutal blizzard that hit the East Coast kept me grounded all weekend (not that I do a lot of travel or anything anyway) which gave me time to finish off No More Heroes 2. It was a fun ride. Combat became 100x more fun once I got my hands on the dual beam katanas and maxed out the muscle and stamina stats. I rarely go through a game more than once but I've already started my "New Game +" on the next difficulty level with all upgrades intact.

Sadly, I still have yet to beat Bayonetta. But that's only because I just don't get to play my PS3 as much these days. I have no idea what I was thinking, getting that Netflix disc for the PS3. Now my wife is on it constantly, watching movies and TV shows every free moment of the day. She went through Gray's Anatomy and Lost, then she jumped to Desperate Housewives, and now she's on Friday Night Lights. And if I do play a game she asks me how long I plan to play because she has shows to watch...as if the PS3's primary purpose is to show movies. I got to play Dragon Age for about an hour on Saturday before the complaints started rolling in.

Oh well. It's my own fault. Maybe I'll get an Xbox 360...

I don't feel like writing a proper review right now, but I spent a good amount of time playing No More Heroes 2 over the weekend, so I know enough about it to give some detailed impressions.

Visually, the game is definitely improved over its predecessor. It takes the original game's art direction and amplifies the quality of the textures, shading and lighting effects to make everything look a bit better than before. I imagine this is due to them removing the open world of the original game, which I admit I kind of miss. I liked driving around on Travis' huge bike, randomly running people over, turbo-boosting for no good reason and power sliding turns. Plus exploring the city to find hidden items and money was fun.

The game definitely feels more streamlined, but I'm not sure this is for the better. In the process, the game wears much more of its meta-this-is-a-video-game feel on its sleeve, which makes it a lot more difficult to get immersed in the "NMH" world than it was the first one. Almost half of the game is 8-bit homage, with 2D pixel graphics everywhere. The minigames are fun though. I actually miss having to do odd jobs in order to make enough money to enter the ranking battles, because I liked the various diversions.

On to combat: it pretty much feels the same as before, but even though I'm playing on the 'Sweet' setting (lowest difficulty) and have upgraded my muscle rating as high as I could for the time being, and purchased the latest of Naomi's weapon upgrades, it STILL feels like it takes forever for me to kill the most basic foes. It seems there are less enemies overall, but they take more punishment. The variety seems better...there are fat guys with axes and chainsaws and generic dudes with guns or bare hands and more. One thing that I noticed was that when you execute a finishing blow, the animation is MUCH slower and drawn out than it was before. It seems to take a full five seconds for Travis to complete the move that decapitates a foe or splits them twain.

And now for the most important part of the game: the bosses. The guys in NMH2 absolutely pale in comparison to the originals (from what I've seen so far). I have completed three ranking battles so far (as well as a ranking challenge) and none of them are particularly memorable. The only fight that I can call interesting is the giant robot fight, which, in retrospect, just felt kind of stupid. It took very little strategy and felt like it was more for show than a legitimate boss battle. Plus they're not announced the way the bosses used to be. In NMH1, when you went to a ranking battle stage, you got this dramatic announcement in a creepy voice speaking the name and then the boss him/herself says a catch phrase. That little element really boosted the feel of going after a dangerous rival. In the new game, they're literally just stage bosses. Yeah, they're strange, like the Scottish hip-hop lover who throws his afro-sporting harem girls at you before the fight begins and the flamethrower-toting ghost, but they're not interesting personalities. Even the way the bosses die is lame compared to the original.

But while it may seem that I've been bashing the game thus far, the fact is NMH2 is still quite fun to play. The 8-bit minigames are enjoyable ways to make money on the side (and they cut down on loading time too). Combat is still almost as fun as it was before...not sure why they felt the need to slow things down. One thing I loved about the original game was being in intense battle against what felt like dozens of goons at once and slashing them two or three times before beheading them, not 8-10 times the way it is now. Still, combat works. If anything, it makes the player think more.

In a nutshell, No More Heroes 2 is good. Great even. Just not as good as the original. But then, what sequel ever is?

For once, this won't be a massive wall of text. I just wanted to say that the next time people play Bayonetta on PS3, there will be an update. This update allows you to install data to the PS3's hard drive, which greatly reduces the loading times. I don't know if it's quite on par with the 360 version (as I don't have one), but I do know that it makes a WORLD of difference. The game is much smoother now.

If fears about the PS3's loading times were holding you back from picking up the PS3 version of Bayonetta, fear no longer. The problem's been addressed.

Still haven't seen that framerate issue some folks rave about.

Go get it.

Seriously, what exactly is this "hardcore" gamer that the industry simply must appeal to?

I'm not getting into the actual act of gaming. Anyone could say that "hardcore" and "casual" can (and should) relate to one's gaming habits. Someone who spends a lot of time and money on gaming can be defined as hardcore, and one who doesn't is generally casual. Yet, Nintendo's products make more money than anyone else in the game industry. By that very definition, there must be quite a few people who consider themselves hardcore Wii gamers, because a lot of money, and presumably, time, is being spent on Nintendo's games and systems. Sounds like an oxymoron to some folks, doesn't it? That's because many people ignorantly relate "hardcore" and "casual" to what people play, rather than how they play.

People say the Wii is a "casual" gamer's console. It sells like crazy as we all know, and the excuse the "hardcores" tend to give is that it's not for "hardcores", it's for "casuals". These so-called "hardcores" carry about like they're some sort of upper crust of gaming. The Wii is the lower-class console so it's for gamers of "lower birth", while gamers of greater nobility cater to the more refined designs of the HD consoles. I've noticed that it fits very well in context (at least on the internet) to replace the word "hardcore" with the word "noble" and the word "casual" with the word "peasant". "The Wii is a peasant gamer's console. Noble gamers play 360 or PS3." But is that really true? Do these so-called hardcores think they're a "better" class of gamer than the so-called casuals? And if that's the case, what's the criteria?

Is it that hardcores only play M-rated games? I guess that means Uncharted 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum are casual games, since they're both rated T for Teen.

Is it that "hardcores" only play games that take significant amounts of time and skill to complete? So Super Mario Galaxy is a short, easy, casual game? Twilight Princess? I don't think there's a gamer out there that honestly thinks Super Mario 64 is "casual".

Is it that "casuals" only play games like Puzzle Quest and Bejeweled...both of which are available on PSN (and I'd imagine XBLA)? Sony also has games like Singstar and Buzz. Hardcore?

Is it that "hardcores" only play first person shooters? So that excludes a significant chunk of games from every console's library, including Gears of War, which happens to be a third-person shooter.

Is it that "hardcores" only own and regularly play PS3 or 360? Because I own PS3, and Wii, and I've got several games for both. I play Puzzle Quest on my PS3 just as often as I play Bayonetta. I play Wii Sports Resort on my Wii as much as I play No More Heroes. What does that make me, a "hardcore" or a "casual"? (The answer is it just makes me a gamer.)

Is it that "hardcores" only play "gritty", serious/realistic games like Gears of War? So the cartoonish SFIV with its fireball-throwing martial artists must not be "hardcore" then. Neither must be a seriously challenging yet cartoonish and hilarious strategy game like Disgaea. Nope, clearly those are games tailored for "casuals".

And the crazy thing is, there will be self-professed "hardcores" who agree with some of those statements, and other "hardcores" who don't. Why? Because, at least in the context it's so often presented on the internet, "hardcore" has no definition. It's an individual label used by people who don't want to do too much thinking. It's easy to call oneself a "hardcore" gamer because you find others to identify with; other "noble" gamers such as yourself. As if that makes you a "better" gamer or even a more important gamer than someone who loves their Wii to death and plays nothing but Wii and possibly PC games (believe me, they're out there). Some will even tell you that they're a hardcore Wii owner.

I know this has been discussed before. But it's getting old, and I really feel like a lot of naive people have brainwashed themselves into believing that there is a clear distinct definition--and some kind of honor--to being a "hardcore" gamer that has anything to do with the games you play.It almost makes me sad. By calling yourself a "hardcore" in that context, you're defining yourself by a term that has no clear definition. If you have an idea as to what it means to you, that's fine...but since it would naturally differ for everyone, it would be impossible for any game or game developer to appeal to a single type of gamer, wouldn't it?

There are as many different types of "hardcores" as there are other types of gamers. Heck, I play plenty of adult games. I loved Saints Row 2 and Prototype, Fallout 3 and Oblivion. At the same time, I couldn't stand GTA IV, MGS4 or Uncharted 2. Does that make me hardcore, or not? The answer is neither. There ARE no "types" of gamers, just different people with different gaming tastes. The industry needs to stop thinking in terms of demographics, trying to appeal to "hardcores", "casuals", "guys", "women", "soccer moms" and whatever other kinds of "groups" they think exist and just work on developing diverse,engaging interactive experiences. And gamers from all walks of life should be fine allowing themselves to enjoy as many different kinds of games as are out there, even if someone else thinks you're touching some yucky "peasant's" game like Wii Fit.

Why can't we just live with that?