I don't like to post very much about my personal life; this isn't a personal blog and I'm not really a fan of putting personal information on the internet. But on the other hand, I suppose that my thoughts might be more interesting to read if I talk a little more about myself. Plus, I have an opportunity to promote some of my day-job work and I'm not going to miss it. For the past year or so I've been working on a project called Lively by Google, which was just released today. I left the game industry last year and joined Google after my previous employer shuttered the office that I was working in. I'm pretty passionate about video game development (if you couldn't tell from this blog), so some of my friends were a bit shocked to see me leave the industry and get a "regular" software engineering job. But what they didn't know is that I was secretly working on something that, while not exactly a game, is pretty darn close. Lively is a free 3D virtual world for hanging out and chatting with friends. It's about as far away as one can get from horror games, but I've really enjoyed working on it and am looking forward to seeing how it is received. If you have a Windows computer and are interested in browser-based 3D chatting and room creation, check it out.

I've had many, many requests for a walkthrough for Dark Messiah, aka Hellnight, a fantastic first-person horror game for PS1. I recently posted a review of this great game and as a result received even more requests for a walkthrough. Well, in response to that post, one dedicated reader named Rob decided to actually sit down and write a complete guide to beating the game with Naomi. On top of the walkthrough text himself, Rob also produced a complete set of annotated maps for the game, which is extremely helpful for a game like this.

Read the walkthrough here! Also, if you have no idea what this Hellnight stuff is about, here's a pretty good write-up about the game.

Aha! I've found the script! I finished Obscure 2 last night. It was not good. You should not play this game. I wrote a review with details if you are interested. OK, ok, I'll provide a little more context. Obscure 2 is a game that cuts its own throat with a terrible plot and asinine characters. It's got the right elements to make a good game, but in the end it was really quite bad. It's too bad because I enjoyed the first game more than I expected to.

In the last post I talked about how game reviewers often approach their reviews of games as if the games are consumer products. They evaluate each feature in isolation from the others, and at the end assign a score based on some attempt to objectively determine the "quality" of the game. This is in stark contrast to reviews of other media, such as books and film and music, which are reviewed based on the reviewer's subjective opinion of the work. Actually, it's not just reviewers that assume this attitude. Just look at the back of the box of any game: the game is invariably described in terms of the features that it contains. Consider the "Product Features" section from Amazon.com's page on Resident Evil 4 for the Wii: Advanced AI makes enemies smarter than ever and use their cunning in deadly attacks Use the Action button for better player control New 'Aim and Shoot' targeting for zeroing in on enemies with your weapons Behind the camera view for intuitive movement Conversations and monologues can be heard in real time Now, in addition to being pretty poor English, this list of "features" fails really dramatically to effectively describe Resident Evil 4. They are similar to the back of the box (though the box at least contains a few plot details). Now compare that list of features with the product descriptions of the first Resident Evil film (a synopsis of the plot is given), the Resident Evil soundtrack CD (samples can be listened to), and even this Resident Evil book (the first page can be read). All of these other forms of entertainment give some sort of information about the content of the work, not just a sterile description of "features." The game page is much more similar to the page for the Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Controller, which is a consumer product and, as such, contains a list of product features. So the games-as-products mindset doesn't begin and end with reviewers. Games are advertised this way, and marketing makes a big deal out of the special features that each game contains (consider the common tactic of releasing a "game play video" to show off some unique mechanic; Alone in the Dark 5 is a recent example). Reviewers are not solely to blame for this product-oriented approach (and actually, I think that many reviewers try very hard to give readers good information without realizing that their style of writing is vasty different than other forms of media). The real question is, why does this discrepancy exist? Why are games treated differently than other types of products? Maybe it has to do with the persistent association with toys. The Nintendo Entertainment System's primary competitor in 1985 was Teddy Ruxpin, and to this day many people consider video games a branch of children's toys rather than a medium (which is also the cause of a lot of controversy surrounding video game violence, I think). Or it might have something to do with video games being interactive: perhaps by enumerating features that are related to how the game is played, marketing is attempting to show how playing this game will be better than playing anything that you've ever played before (which, if you think about it, makes game reviewer's tendency to compare games to other titles make more sense). Or maybe it is because games are sold with PCs and game consoles (which are certainly consumer products), and the product-ness of these host platforms "rubs off" on the media as a whole. Those aren't bad explanations, and they probably are at least partially true, but I think that there's a more important reason that trumps them all: the price point. Games cost too much, both to develop and for the consumer. High development costs push the street price up, and the street price is extremely high compared to other media. Here in California, it costs $10 to go to a movie in a theater. Renting a movie is around $3.00. Buying a DVD is usually around $15. A new novel costs between $8 and $30 (hardbacks are more expensive, but paperbacks are always available eventually). CDs cost $15, and though that form of media is on the way out, it is being replaced by digital distribution models like iTunes that work out to just slightly less. But a new game for your Xbox360 Most PS2 games didn't review well. or PS3 is $59.99. A game for the Wii is probably $49.99. Though budget titles do exist, they are the exception rather than the rule (and usually hover between $20 and $30). That means a new game can cost four times the cost of a new DVD! Now, some might make an argument here about the length of a given game vs a movie or book. But I think that "length" is just another technical detail, not a real metric of quality. If you read the reviews of The Orange Box, you might have noticed reviewer after reviewer harping on the amazing "value" that the set provides (several high-quality games for the price of one). But no reviewer rewards a long book for having "value" because it takes you longer to read it; in fact, excessive length is often considered a negative when books and films are reviewed. And other media isn't priced based on its length; Neal Stephenson's excellent Cryptonomicon only costs $8.99 despite its lengthy 1168 pages. His interesting In the Beginning... There Was the Command Line is a thin volume (160 pages), and it still costs about the same. No, the "duration of entertainment" isn't a factor in pricing other types of media, and I don't see why it should be for games either (and, as an aside, 100-hour RPGs don't cost more than 5 hour adventure games, so even within the game market length doesn't seem to be a factor). The problem with expensive games is that a lot of games are actually pretty bad, and the consumer can't tell which are good and which are bad by looking at the box. When I did research for my article on sales vs game scores, I found that, across all PS2 games, the majority of titles got a rating lower than 80%. About 20% of all PS2 games got "good" reviews and the rest got mediocre to poor. That's in keeping with Sturgeon's Law, which stipulates that most things are really crap, which I think applies to movies and books as well. The difference, of course, is that for $8 - $20, the amount of risk that the consumer assumes when buying a book or movie that they know nothing about is very small. $50 - $60 is a much larger investment, and therefore the consumer is likely to be much more careful about what he buys. My theory is that the high price point of games moves them out of the "disposable media" category and into the "product investment" category in the consumer's mind. In that context, the consumer needs to know if his purchase is really going to be worth the money. And as I mentioned in the last post, things like plot are subjective and are not guaranteed to be liked by everyone, so marketing, reviewers, and in turn, consumers, fall back on objective facts about the game in an attempt to define where that $59.99 is going. You can see this mindset everywhere in the game industry if you look for it; consider, for example, the customers who got angry that Halo 3 only supports "640p", as if 80 pixels of screen real estate have any tangible effect on the quality of the game. You can see this mentality in the way that games and game hardware is marketed: the PS3 had better be able to make games that we've never seen before; otherwise what's the point of spending all that money for it? And I think that endless flame wars amongst fanboys usually boil down to insecurity about a purchasing decision; once a fan has made up his mind to drop his cash on a specific game or system, it's common to really want to believe that the decision was correct and the money not wasted. The price point for games, and, to a lesser extent, game systems, changes the tone and context within which games are perceived in the market. If all games cost $15 new, I don't think we'd have very many discussions about quality in terms of feature sets; at a lower price, the risk of failure is lower and people will be more willing to try new things, and I think the conversation would shift to being about the content rather than being about the technology. Alas, until games can reach a much larger market, or until they can break out of the never-ending technical arms race, there's not much hope that the street price of video games will fall any time soon. You can see, though, that some companies are trying; Nintendo's strategy of cheaper hardware, cheaper games, and a wider target audience is definitely designed with these goals in mind. The jury is still out on whether or not they'll actually be able to make a long-term difference, though some people think that the evidence is already clear.

What if you opened up the paper one day and read a review for a new book that went like this: "This book was printed on the new XBS series of printers, and you can really see the improvement in quality of the words on the page. The font is crisp and easy-to-read, and the page numbers are all carefully arranged at the upper corners of each page. One thing that's not so hot is the texture of the front and back covers--it's just seems a little too flat and smooth. We would have preferred a little more variety. Overall, a solid book. 4/5 Stars." Maybe on the next page there might be a movie review: "The explosion effects in particular look really nice, which is not a surprise since this film was shot on the latest high-end digital cameras and composited using a $200,000 editing system. We did notice some aliasing when in the blood particles when two of the characters get into a fight, but it wasn't enough to ruin the experience. The water scenes, unfortunately, look really bad; I don't know if the camera crew just picked the wrong day for shooting or what, but the dialog scene in front of the lake looks really unrealistic. The alien ship looks all right, but it's just not as impressive this time around as it was in the original film. 60%." What would a review of a new album look like in this fictional paper? "While it's impressive that the four man set can create such a diverse sound, you can tell that they had to cut some corners in order to accommodate their restricted resources. The high-hat, for example, seems totally underused; we only counted three instances in the first track where it is audible. Maybe if the band upgraded to Gibson guitars they'd be able to achieve real brilliance, but as it is we only see a glimmer. And the vocals are pretty old-school; it's hard to go back to just one person singing now that the industry norm has progressed to 2- and 3-man vocal teams. I say give this one a rental." If you read these reviews in your local paper, you'd probably be pretty annoyed. I mean, the reviews don't tell you anything substantive about the works that they are critiquing; the focus is entirely on details of the production, not the content itself. Who cares if the words on the page are extra crisp? What you want to know is if the book is interesting or not! This is how game journalists, for the most part, review games. There are a couple of noteworthy exceptions out there, but the majority of critics review games like consumer products rather than like other entertainment media. I mean, if you're going to buy a new camera or something, you probably want to know what version of USB it supports and how many megapixels it shoots, and if you are a little more hardcore then maybe you care about how the white balance can be adjusted. Critical reviews of such consumer products are focused on the feature set of each product. Games are often reviewed the same way: as an enumeration and consideration of the list of features the game offers (quality of graphics, number of levels, improvement over another game, etc). But reviews of most non-game media are focused on critiquing whether the work is worth your time or not. Don't get me wrong, technical details still have a place in such reviews (it's normal for critics to point out bad performances by actors, etc), but the main message of most book, film, and music reviews are "was this thing interesting or funny or enjoyable?" And "interesting, fun, and enjoyable" are all things that have very little to do with technical details. Is Phoenix Wright a technically complex game? No. Is it a lot of fun? Yeah, it is. But it gets scores lower than it deserves because it's built on simple 2D graphics and text. I want you to consider this excellent review of the movie The Italian Job by film critic David Edelstein. Go on, read it--I'll wait. Edelstein opens the review by enumerating all of the reasons that The Italian Job is a bad film: it's a remake, it's an advertising vehicle for the MINI Cooper, and it's just one cliche after another. Then he spends the rest of the article describing why, despite all these technical flaws, he loved the film so much. Edelstein understands that what makes a film good is not its special effects, or even its script or its editing or the performances of its actors; good films are those that make the viewer feel something. The Italian Job was an exciting film for Edelstein, and his review is consequently glowing. Part of the problem with game reviews, I think, is that game journalists often try to offer objective analysis of the games that they review. It's easier to be objective about something if you just stick to the obvious facts, which is maybe why games get treated like products rather than works of art. But in reviews of other media, there's no attempt to be objective; enjoyment is intrinsically subjective anyway, so why bother? The reviewers don't all have to agree, and all you have to do to get quality reviews is find a critic with whom your tastes are aligned. Like every other form of media, games are more than the sum of their parts; the only real metric by which we should be judging games is "is it fun." In the next post on this subject, I'll discuss my theory on why the industry works this way.

Every six months or so another tiny morsel of information about open world zombie-in-the-tropics game Dead Island shows up. It's been about six month since the last drop, so here's some new screen shots.

I have to admit that the first information I heard about Square's new handheld DS game, ナナシノゲエム ("Nanashi no Geemu," lit. "Nameless Game" or "Game with No Name"), left me intrigued but skeptical. Now that the official trailer has been posted, I'm in all out excitement mode.

The concept is simple, and quite Japanese: you're playing a game, a NES-era RPG by the look of it, that seems to be affecting, or perhaps reflecting, your real life. What makes this so great to me is the attention to detail that they've put into it: if you watch the shots of the RPG mode closely, you can see garbage tiles flickering around the screen as the player moves, which is a classic side-effect of mismanaged tile memory on NES games. The title screen for the game is all garbled is well (which is why it has no name, I assume), and the garbling looks like the kind of errors you get when on NES games that are corrupted, buggy, incomplete, or even dirty.

The idea is very similar to the mechanic of curse-laden objects that often appears in Japanese horror films. The idea is that a person's emotions may be so dramatic that they can persist after death within an object (this concept is called onnen), and in the post-Ring world of Japanese horror, such possessed objects are often portrayed as slightly broken bits of technology. Instead of a blurry video tape, an untrustworthy TV or phone, or a mysterious message on your pager, Nanashi No Geemu is giving you a corrupted video game that you can actually play. And when the 3D mode shows up, I'm sure the first order of business will be to find out exactly what that corruption is.

Along with Dementium, Mitewa Ikenai, and Touch the Dead, the DS is starting to be a viable platform for horror-themed games! This one is by far the most interesting to me.

I need a smaller screenshot of this game. I'm pretty excited about the next version of the Fatal Frame series, especially since it's headed for the Wii and involves Suda51 somehow. So it was cool to see scans from Famitsu about the game, but even better news is that the game will be released at the end of July in Japan. Between this game, Silent Hill 5, Alone in the Dark 5, and the already-out Condemned 2: Bloodshot, 2008 is looking like a really good year for horror gamers.

I picked up Obscure 2 for the Wii a while back and am just now getting around to playing it. I enjoyed the first Obscure, mostly because playing with another person made the otherwise mediocre horror game a lot more fun. This time around I'm playing on my own (so far--maybe I can convince my friend to reprise his role as my backup monster smasher), and so far I am enjoying the experience a whole lot less. I've only played for an hour or so, and it's far too early to pass judgement on the game at this point, but I thought I'd post a few of my thoughts anyway. The graphics and art style in Obscure 2 is pretty nice. Ok, I should qualify that statement; the cutscenes look terrible, but the actual in-game graphics are very good (I dig the slightly-cartoonish art style too). The monsters are sort of your run-of-the-mill fleshbags and zombie velociraptors, but they look alright. The actual character design for the protagonists seems a bit naff (they're all cliched stereotypes), but the models are well done and the animation is fine. The background art in particular is very good; I've only witnessed a few scenes so far, but the environments are really solid. There seem to be some odd control choices, though. First of all, the camera is controllable with the Wii pointer (you point at the edge of the screen to rotate the view in that direction), which has so far been really disorienting to me (the camera spends a lot of time spinning in place). There have been a couple of nice fixed cameras (good composition, too), but I'm not used to the pointer-based method at all yet. The character control itself is alright (though movement is aggravated by the camera), but shooting monsters seems incredibly complicated. To shoot a monster you must go into aim mode (button #1), point at the monster, lock on to the monster (button #2), and then finally shoot (button #3). I'm getting used to this but it's taking a long time. The melee attacks are done using Wii remote gestures, which seem to work ok. The dialog in Obscure 2 is terrible. The characters are paper-thin, and their jokes and one-liners have already gotten super old. The game has a lot of dialog about the environment, which is good (it makes it feel like these characters are actually experiencing the events portrayed by the game), but sometimes the delivery of the lines is so stoic that it renders them useless ("there's blood on the floor" isn't a tension-inducing line when it's performed in the same tone as one might describe a planned trip to the laundry mat). So far, the characters and their asinine dialog is by far the worst part of the game for me. I want to talk about an early puzzle, so if you want to avoid minor SPOILERS, skip this paragraph. The puzzles seem to be either really easy or really obtuse. So far most of the puzzles have involved collecting items or just moving boxes around. The one sort of terrible one so far was the first hacking puzzle, in which you must input the name of a "famous person, like an artist" given a limited set of letters in order to unlock a door. Now, right next to this door is a statue by an artist whose name we can learn by examining it. And this artist's last name is in all caps, and the letters necessary to spell that name are available in the hacking puzzle. So, I thought, no-brainer; they want me to use the name that I found on that statue as password key. But no, entering that name does nothing. I tried different combinations but eventually had to resort to a faq. What do you know, the password is "mozart." What the hell, game designers? I hope that the rest of the game isn't like this. SPOILERS END HERE. So far Obscure 2 seems pretty mediocre. Maybe the addition of another player would help, I'm not sure (sadly there is no online option--this game is a perfect fit for two player online co-op, but on the other hand, finding another person who has this game might be a challenge). I'll post a full review when I've completed the game.

Nightmare material Having a baby has really changed my gaming habits, but this week I managed to finish two different games. The first is Hellnight, a phenomenal (and pretty obscure) PS1 horror game. I've posted a review, but the short version is that Hellnight absolutely rocks, it's pretty damn scary, and it succeeds despite PS1 graphics and an extremely simple game interface. This is a game that anybody who thinks next gen is required to make new experiences should play. The second game isn't a horror game, but since I've discussed Suda51's games before, I thought I'd give a little shout out to No More Heros. Grasshopper's latest is as self-referential and post modern as it is hilarious and fun. With constant references to video games as a medium, No More Heros is a game clearly made by gamers for gamers. At the same time it experiments with "breaking the fourth wall" all the time; the characters are often speaking to you the player rather than to other characters in the game world. Other than the Metal Gear Solid series, this is pretty much unprecedented in medium, and I really enjoyed it. Oh, and the combat system is pretty hot too.