Review: BIT.TRIP RUNNER (Mac)

Prerequisite: check out this video of an individual demonstrating their mastery of the game/toy Bop It.  It's best if you watch the whole thing, but I understand if you become impatient and bail early. BIT.TRIP RUNNER is a video game version of Bop It.  No, it's not an official tie-in, but the mechanics are transferred nearly verbatim.  In RUNNER you control a character who must dodge obstacles as the environment force-scrolls past.  Directional buttons trigger block, kick, slide, and vault actions while the spacebar executes a jump.  These moves are sort-of tied in to the accompanying music score, but mostly you rely on visual discernment to time and select your actions.  Like Bop It, one false move while playing will stop you in your tracks and force you to try again from the beginning.  Also like Bop It, you can beat and master RUNNER, but doing so is like learning to play a song that no one wants to listen to on an instrument that doesn't really exist.

When it came time for me to decide what I wanted to play in my grade school band, I chose percussion.  Drumming seemed more fun than brass or woodwinds, but I was also more confident in my ability to keep a beat over maintaining melody.  My sister took piano lessons, which I was encouraged to take as well, but never did.  We got a programmable electric piano at home eventually, and rather than actually play conventional music, I'd setup the percussion kit that assigned individual drums and cymbals to specific keys and make all sorts of noise.  There was also a neat trick you could do by pressing two low-octave "square lead" keys at the same time, producing some pretty satisfying bass rumbles.  I own a MPC drum machine, though it's been sorely underused.  I adore Rez and was a die-hard DDR player for several years.  In short, though I would not call myself a musician of any kind, I know my way around button/key-based beat making.  On its surface, I should love BIT.TRIP RUNNER.

Unfortunately for me, RUNNER plays how I always feared piano lessons would go: demanding, unforgiving, and with a slavish dedication to someone else's creativity rather than my own. In RUNNER, you can't study notes on a page to prepare, you must react in real time and memorize the level's patterns through failure.  At most, you have a full second to recognize what object is heading your way and tap the appropriate key to evade or deflect.  Each time you screw up, it's like the piano instructor wraps your knuckles with a ruler and points to the first note on the sheet.  If you play a piano piece correctly, you enjoy the satisfaction of hard-earned accomplishment along with the joy of hearing a song that you presumably like.  In RUNNER, you just earn arbitrary points and the music you've produced only occasionally sounds like a song.  There is no level editor or any way of really getting hands-on with the mechanics beyond the prescribed courses.

People have compared RUNNER to mobile games like Canabalt and Temple Run for their similar, forced running perspectives.  Both Canabalt and Temple Run use randomized obstacles and challenge players to get farther than their previous attempt, but as far as I'm aware, neither has endpoints.  RUNNER is broken up into 36 preset levels, and withholds progression until you complete the stage prior.  The big difference between RUNNER and something like Canabalt is how you feel after triggering a fail state.  With Canabalt it feels like the game playfully dares you to try it again.  You know losing is inevitable, but it's fun to try and get farther than last time.  In fact, "losing" isn't really "losing," it's just the end of the round.  Retries in RUNNER are instantaneous.  If you forget to kick a box on cue, the game zips you back to the start of the stage, and after a brief moment you're back on your way again.  I applaud Gaijin Games for making the process so snappy, but subsequent runs feel more like a matter of survival than heartfelt attempts on the part of the player. You're trapped in the gameplay loop until you either win or cry "uncle" and quit.

There are collectable gold bars throughout RUNNER that encourage a more daring style of play, but the game doesn't offer rewards that merit the effort required to snatch them all.  If you do collect every gold bar in a level you can play a bonus Pitfall-styled area, which is neat a couple times, but not 30+.  You only get one try at the bonus levels per completion of a regular stage, which means you may have spent a half hour trying to get a perfect run, only for your "prize" to last a fleeting handful of seconds.  The numerous retries on regular levels pushed me to ignore the gold bars as much as I could, eliminating several tricky maneuvers from my regimen, but also rendering the music more spartan, lacking the distinctive chimes emitted by grabbing the bars.  You could interpret the game as an incisive metaphor for the daily, 9-5 grind perpetuated by an uncompromising capitalist economy, but that's an unearned credit.  Instead, playing BIT.TRIP RUNNER feels like a really difficult motor skills exam – something for the sport stacking set.

I'm being pretty hard on RUNNER, but it does have its merits.  Visually, the game renders Atari 2600 graphics as 3D cubic blocks to grinning, stylistic effect.  If you collect enough point multipliers in a level, an old-school Activision rainbow will tail behind the titular runner as it goes – RUNNER's incentivization at its most effective.  Mechanically, the game is as sharp as it gets.  Though it asks for tight precision, failure is never the result of ambiguous design.  I could knock the effectiveness of RUNNER's musical implementation, but having listened to the soundtrack outside of the game, their track selection is appropriate and catchy.  Lastly, I began this review by comparing RUNNER to Bop It, but I should point out that I actually like Bop It.  It's a party icebreaker game that asks players to focus their attention, likely in a social situation that requires otherwise – a humorous juxtaposition.  As an unfortunate point of contrast, there just isn't much to laugh about in RUNNER.

Still, there are clearly a lot of people who dig what BIT.TRIP RUNNER brings to the table, and far be it from me to say not to like something people seem to enjoy, but the game feels masochistic for nostalgia's sake.  There's no denying its style, but you'd be hard pressed to locate any real substance here.  And if you choose to play BIT.TRIP RUNNER, make no mistake, you will be pressed...hard.

Review: Rayman Origins (Wii)

Let's get the critical evaluation out of the way: Rayman Origins is a fun, smartly-designed 2-D platformer that strikes a balance between the charm and detail of Kirby's Epic Yarn with the trial and error, twitch challenge of Super Meat Boy.  Sounds pretty good, right?  For the most part, it is.  Game reviewers have heaped near-universal praise upon the title using phrases like "wonderfully crafted," "gorgeous," and "controls perfectly."  I agree with all of these, and yet, Rayman Origins still comes off a bit empty.  The only reason I can think of for this disparity was the difficulty I had empathizing with the ragtag group of bohemian shit disturbers that serve as the game's protagonists.  This disconnect effectively eliminated my attachment to the characters' motivations and relegated the game to a product of craft rather than a work of art.

I do fear that this opinion could brand me as some kind of humorless square, but characters who have been created solely for mischief usually rub me the wrong way.  I have always been pretty straight-laced, staying organized and avoiding trouble whenever possible.  In elementary school, I observed conflicts and elicit conversations from a safe distance, honing my "excellent listener" skills overhearing discussions of cigarettes and R-rated movies.  I hated Michelangelo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because he was the idiot who always dragged the others into avoidable hostile situations.  So, when Rayman Origins opened with the full cast of layabouts harmonizing beatnik music via chewing and snoring noises that essentially annoyed the neighbors into retaliation, I felt less like exacting revenge and more thankful that somebody said something.

At least in Mario games Nintendo fabricates a premise of "rescue" for your quest.  You might not desperately need to save the princess, but you assume Mario probably does, so you oblige.  The "white knight" stereotype isn't what makes the character interesting or believable – on its own the characterization is quite shallow.  It does set a stage for you to quickly get behind the protagonist's motivation though.  This works for morally ambiguous protagonists too, just using different criteria to match the context.  In contrast Rayman and his friends are a bunch of hedonists, apathetic to current affairs except when their collective buzz is at stake.  It's like playing a game where a small party of stoners embark on a quest to find the nearest convenience store and eat day-old taquitos.  Actually, nevermind, I'd totally give that game a shot too.

The fluidity of Rayman Origins' level design and platforming controls largely make up for the shortcomings in plot establishment, but only to the extant that great mechanics can reach on their own. The moment-to-moment satisfaction in Rayman Origins is quite high.  Levels are designed for smooth runs if played precisely.  If the sensation of speed was faster you might think you were playing the Sonic the Hedgehog sequel that never was.  Better yet, you never feel like the characters are out of your control.  If you screw up, there's always something you could have done better.  After all your hard work, finally you reach the end of the level and the camera zooms in to show Rayman thrusting his limbless torso around, mouth agape.  This guy again.  In the scene that follows, one of Rayman's big-nosed pals straddles an incredibly phallic test tube as it fills up with all of the Lums (yellow, glowing collectables) you found in the level.  When other reviewers talk about this game being "unmistakably French," this is what they're actually referring to.

So what am I left with in Rayman Origins but an excellent product of gameplay craft, shouldering an otherwise driveless game.  It's a shame because so many pieces are in place for Rayman Origins to be a certifiable work of art, but it falls short on a holistic level.  The mechanics that are present are rich, but they're not deep.  The game doesn't invite immersion – I got burned out after few levels each time I came back to it.  It's great that Ubisoft recently published a strikingly similar game for mobile devices, since Rayman Origins' structure is better tuned to short gameplay bursts over long-form, sit-down experiences.  If a game/painting/song doesn't ultimately provoke questions or reflection or welcome a more intimate play of engagement, then it's just serving a specifically crafted entertainment experience.  Sometimes that's exactly what I want, but I had higher hopes for Rayman Origins.

We can talk "art v craft" inconclusively for longer than it takes to play Rayman Origins, so let's just consider the established critical baselines as laid out by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.  To state it plainly, Kant divided art objects into "fine art," "agreeable art," and "craft."  A great deal of intricacy goes into these categorical assignments, but the easiest way to distinguish them from one another is by the purpose of the object in question.  Craft objects serve direct practical purposes: cups are vessels for water.  Agreeable art serves to entertain: a well-written joke incites laughter.  Fine art seeks to act as, well, art: a video installation provokes a play with ideas.  Many individuals hold fast against Kant's distinctions between art, craft, and entertainment, but institutions of the art world (museums, galleries, and art schools) still hang on to them as guideposts for taste.

Games, and obviously video games, weren't a part of this discussion in the 18th century, but Rayman Origins was clearly built for entertainment.  That said, entertainment itself could be interpreted as a practical purpose too, thus placing the game into the "craft" category as well.  You could argue that even if I absolutely adored Rayman and his buds, the game would still be "agreeable," not "fine," art.  Who knows whether that would actually be true though?  If art was just a matter of pushing sliders more to the left or right, then the answers to these questions would be obvious.  But I digress.  My point isn't to trudge around in semantic minutiae, but simply to concretize why my time with Rayman Origins left me lukewarm when most signs within and around the game seemed to be pointing in a more prestigious direction.

I want games that match the mechanical challenge they're so clearly capable of with intellectual challenge, or at least stimulation. I'd love to see developers use the gameplay systems from Rayman Origins as building blocks.  The side-scrolling action/platformer can be considered perfected at this point.  That's a milestone achievement, and deserving of serious praise, along with the economical UBIart framework used to create Rayman Origins' visual assets.  But what of it?  I've spent years playing games where I move a character to the right, so here's hoping that the next Rayman game will return the favor and actually move me.

Gold Skulltulla on Medium Difficulty

Hey there.  I wrote a review of Xenoblade Chronicles for Wii, and the folks over at gaming blog Medium Difficulty were kind enough to publish it.  Here it is!  In the review I examine the role that extensive game length has in terms of interactive storytelling.  Hope you like it, and thanks for reading.

Review: Digital: A Love Story (Mac)

It's often taken for granted that people who play a lot of video games know a lot about technology.  I'll attest that there is generally aptitude in these circles beyond that of the non-gamer crowd, but it's not something that comes entirely natural.  Maybe I'm just being defensive because I was always late to the party on so many aspects of new and emerging technological trends in the past 3 decades.  I didn't send an email or use AIM until I started college in 2002.  Same goes for having a cell phone for more than emergency calls.  I would have needed to be unrealistically aware of the personal computer scene at a very early age to feel nostalgic about the interface of the Amie Workbench, an Amiga analogue, and Bulletin Board System (BBS) communications represented in the game, Digital: A Love Story.  Since I wasn't, few of the game's techie in-jokes and references stick.  However, since Digital places you in a sort of 1988 simulation mode, the unfamiliarity lent itself to a more personally authentic experience.

You begin Digital as a someone who's using, for all intents and purposes, the Internet for the first time, but through the very limited lens of the Amie Workbench.  Visually, the game is the computer screen: everything fits the blue/white/orange color scheme, the monitor has heavy scanlines, and the cursor is a big, fat, red arrow.  You receive a message from a friend of your dad that tells you what to do to get on BBSes and chatting with folks.  Where instructions in a game can often remove you from the experience, here everything is presented in proper context and actually reads like messages real people would send.  Because the connection between using a computer to play and the game virtualizing a specific operating system is so direct, very little suspension of disbelief is needed to jump into the narrative.

As the title suggests, Digital is a love story, but it's also a mystery.  You're introduced to the "love interest" character, *Emilia, early on, and when she disappears, it's up to you to figure out what happened.  The narrative convention, which is also the primary game mechanic, is the exchange of BBS posts and private messages.  Everyone you interact with has a unique voice and motivation, creating conversations that reach far beyond typical NPC fare.  You never actually type any messages, instead simply hitting reply and reading contacts' responses.  This string of communication works best when you're in "conversation" with one or two other people and the back and forth is readily apparent.  At other times you'll just callously reply or send PMs to everyone on your list, making sure you're doing everything necessary to trigger the text that will allow you to progress further in the story.  The introduction to *Emilia follows the better of those two paths, and though it's clear that I was just messaging a fictional character as part of an interactive short story, I did develop an attachment to that character; enough of an attachment to drive the mystery plot forward with a degree of urgency.

The writing in Digital is very consistent, believable, and emotionally affecting.   Digital's designer and author, Christine Love, bills herself as a writer first, and it shows.  That's meant as a compliment to her writing skills, not a knock on her game design abilities.  Truly well written games are few and far between, but even fewer are as dependent on quality writing as Digital.  Characters' messages vary in articulation and sophistication, as you'd expect from a bunch of random people on the Internet.  I'm reminded of Gus Van Sant's teenager-starring Paranoid Park for how real its characters felt despite, or perhaps because of, the amateur statuses of its actors.  Love is likewise able to find a tone that is reflective of the production process, and somehow more authentic in doing so. 

Digital plops you into the world of BBSes, stranger-in-a-strange-land style.  Yes, there's a missing person mystery to solve, but navigating the uncharted online world is a mysterious voyage in its own right.  Imagine a game that has a clear story objective, but in order to proceed you need to drive a tractor, and before you can drive the it you have to figure out how it works.  Do you need keys to start it?  Where are the keys?  Which lever is for reverse?  Oh wait, does this run on gas?!  BBSes are just as foreign to me as tractors, and I appreciated how Digital didn't assume any prior knowledge.  If there's a tendency nowadays to forget just how open the Internet is, typing in phone numbers in hopes of connecting to a heretofore unseen places is a healthy reminder.  No one even dials numbers to place phone calls anymore, further distancing us from the real technological processes happening in the background.  If you did hand-dial phone numbers, you might mess up and call a random bystander by mistake.  In Digital, instead of hanging up and correcting the error, every number has an unknown on the other end; there's a sense of discovery.

The feeling of openness makes for an ideal learning space, which goes as much for the in-game world as the one outside of it.  Digital teaches you about BBSes and early Internet history through message texts, but in allowing you to actually dial the numbers and direct message other users, you learn by doing.  The mystery/love story paces you through the learning process, heightening the meaning behind your actions.  Later on, the Internet "history lesson" takes some sensationalist turns, but it makes for a great moment of culmination when you finally gain access to the fabled University BBS where they don't just have direct messages, they have email!  A story that's willing to go a little over the top is helpful to make up for the potential dryness of a game centered around an archaic computer interface. The online communications depicted in Digital remain the foundation that our modern Internet is built upon, reminding us of the vast expanses available to users at increasing speeds and densities.  It's up to us to make the stories real.

Digital: A Love Story is available to download for free here.

Recap: Bennett Foddy at NYU Game Center

Last night at NYU Game Center, indie developer and ex-Cut Copy bassist Bennett Foddy gave a presentation wherein he detailed several core principles he strives for when creating games.  If somehow you've never played any of Foddy's games, do yourself a favor and head over to his website where you can play them all for free.  Foddy is most known for QWOP, the game where you use four keyboard buttons in rhythm to propel an Oympic runner 100 meters.  Or at least that's the premise.  You'll probably spend most of your time banging the runner's head against the ground trying to take your first step.  The results are quite hilarious as limbs fly all over the place, but there's always a modicum of understanding that you're figuring out how the system works and could maybe, actually get the runner to, well, run.

QWOP has gained a high enough profile to be visible in mainstream pop culture (making a cameo in this year's season premiere of NBC's The Office, for one), but Foddy's other games operate in similar fashion, enlightening players of the physical actions needed to control the characters in the games.  The immediacy of these games, one of the subjects Foddy's lecture focused on, allows for even a simple button press to result in a satisfying in-game consequence.  In CLOP, a QWOP-like game with a unicorn, each of the four control buttons kicks out one of the unicorn's corresponding four legs.  The animation of even one leg kicking out is so unlike anything that a real horse would do that I can't help but crack up at the mere sight of it, not to mention once you really get the beast "going."  I found it interesting that Foddy didn't directly mention humor in his discussion, since I find it to be part of the prominent appeal of his titles.

Foddy's outlook on game design shares much in common with contemporary art practice, conjuring the notion that there is a rich middleground between the two that takes into account player interactivity and artistic practice in corollary measure.  In games, designers have to choose their controller/platform.  In art, artists select their medium, which for the past half century could acceptably be pretty much anything.  Only recently have game designers been fiddling with new ways of using traditional and standardized controllers in new and exciting ways (see Johan Sebastian Joust).  Yet, art has often struggled to stretch out of the austere, institutional art/viewer relationship by limiting patrons to actions like "standing," "looking," and "walking around,"  A game/artwork that bridges the gap between the two would likely also confront these issues from both sides.  Foddy seems to be on this track as he's been hanging out with some of the JS Joust creators, developing some kind of trampoline-powered Move controller game.

The principles Foddy presented weren't without their own self-conflict though, making them more aspirations than hard and fast rules. For example, if a designer is creating a game that asks players to hold DualShock controllers backwards, a prompt to inform them of how this is supposed to work might be needed, but that would sacrifice some degree of immediacy.  A minor criticism of Journey was that an outline of a controller with some arrows is displayed at the beginning of the game to let players know that they can tilt the controller to rotate the camera.  The necessity of these sorts of prompts is debatable; the point being that there is no one correct solution.  However, I think Foddy would argue that it's best to attempt the game that adheres to principles of immediacy and fully-integrated worlds, and only make concessions when there don't seem to be any better options.

Foddy came off as a game designer on the bleeding edge of the medium, in terms of his games as well as his production practice.  He said that he hopes to show the trampoline game at Indiecade, so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime you can always try and get to the top of this wall.  Um, good luck?

Photo by Finn Taylor for Wired

Recap: Soundplay Game Jam

Last night at the New Museum, Pitchfork and Kill Screen teamed up to offer an evening of free drinks, video games, and music.  The main impetus for the get together was an extension of the Soundplay project that commissions indie game talent to craft interactive experiences based on songs from indie musicians.  Yes, the whole thing was pretty "indie," but that's not a bad thing.  This particular event was structured around a game jam that happened over the two days prior.  Four teams had 48 hours to produce games based off of music from the band Passion Pit's new album Gossamer.  The night of the party was a chance for attendees to play all of the Soundplay titles, including the ones made during the jam, while also taking in a live performance by Chromatics and a DJ set by Oneohtrix Point Never.  Since you're the sort of person who would read a blog entry like this, that billing should all sound pretty great.

Neon sign at the entrance was a nice touch.

 I sat down to play all of the game jam titles, and though all four mostly matched the upbeat, candy-colored vibe of the band, each took markedly different gameplay approaches to the source material.  In the first one I played, you control some Katamari-looking dudes and press the spacebar to juggle approaching objects.  Higher scores are awarded for the more objects you keep off the ground until certain checkpoints in the song.  The next game had a flowery, psychedelic setting with a figure on a tightrope that walks towards you as you toggle the "left" and "right" keys for balance.  If you fall off, the song stops and you must start over.  Beside that game was one that told the story of a sad bunny that you cover with candy to make happy again.  Shelves of sweets are on both sides of the stationary rabbit, and you drag and drop them into place.  The candy blocks have physics programmed into them, so making a perfect stack that doesn't tip over was quite the challenge.  Music played in the background, but at climax points of the song, a quake strikes and probably undoes all your hard work.  Lastly, the fourth game was a forced-scrolling don't-hit-the-walls navigation exercise that seemed like it was supposed to be incorporating video from the computer's webcam in the background, but it wasn't working when I played it.

Attendees getting their hands on the Jam games, plus previous Soundplay entries.

While tonally these games kept in line with the vibe of Passion Pit music, they seemed more inclined to simply take inspiration from the music than to really incorporate it as a part of the mechanics.  The notion of games as promotional material for music in the vein of music videos is a concept in its early stages.  Should these games be "music games" as we understand them?  They could take inspiration from the likes of Guitar Hero and Rock Band and challenge players to replicate the songs they hear.  They could draw from Dance Dance Revolution and Dance Central and co-opt body movements that correspond to beats.  Recently, Soundshapes has further evolved concepts born out of games like Rez where playing a more traditional genre game, such as a platformer or shooter, generates music just by going about as usual.  But we're talking about game jam games here, and design docs that can be written and delivered quickly and completely are paramount.  I did really like it when the music triggered screen-shake in the rabbit game though.

Chromatics performing live

Nothing against the games, but I got the feeling from the crowd that the Chromatics performance was probably the main draw for most.  I can't really ague with that sentiment either since Johnny Jewel et al put on a moody, energetic show.  Readers of this blog can look forward to me gushing about Kill For Love come year-end list time as it's definitely one of the best albums of 2012.  I didn't stay for too much of Oneohtrix Point Never's set up on the gorgeous 7th floor sky view terrace, but stuck around long enough to hear "Ghost City" mixed into some hardcore Goa trance, which was pretty amazing.  The only thing that would have made the event better would have been the New Museum opening access to its Ghosts in the Machine exhibition, which would have been a nice pairing with all the games and electronic music happenings.

I'm told the game jam games will be available to play online hopefully by the end of the month along with a short documentary about their development process.  I'll be writing an in-depth piece on the existing Soundplay games in the near future.

:images 1 & 2 taken by me; Chromatics pic by Eriz Avissar for Pitchfork:

Review: Limbo (Mac)

The most common understanding of afterlife pit-stop, Limbo, is one that blends in with Purgatory, both associated with wavering, in-between states.  In 2007 the Catholic Church released a document stating their thoughts on the eternal fates of infants who die without being baptized, concurrently addressing the validity of Limbo.  Even though their proclamation did not directly disqualify the existence of Limbo, they didn't take credit for the idea either.  Officially speaking, Limbo is only perpetuated by individuals, not the church, and was (and still is) more recognizable through the lens of pop culture than religious mandate.  While the 2007 document put the malleability of church doctrine into sharp relief, Danish video game developer, Playdead, was already hard at work on their debut title, Limbo: a game centered around the titular mystical locale.

Much the same way that the Catholic Church has decided to allow its members to believe in Limbo if they so choose, Playdead's Limbo (released in 2010) doesn't tell you what to believe about its world.  The developer has left scant details as to what is really happening in the game aside from the premise that a boy (the playable character) is looking for his sister.  The setting begins in a woodland area, transitions into an urbanized setting, and ends in a cavernous factory where gravity itself is in flux.  Does the boy find his sister in the end?  Maybe??  Even that is debatable.  Some narratives encourage participants to fill in the gaps with their mind.  Limbo is more like a figurative painting: you know what you're looking at, but it's up to you to decipher meaning enough to make the piece matter.

Limbo is a side-scrolling puzzle/platformer that has earned its cred by doing a lot with very little.  Visually the world is shown in black and white with characters as silhouettes.  The tone of the game is grim and spooky, furthered by the notion that most everything is hiding in the shadows.  Controls allow you to move left and right, jump, and grab things like ropes and push/pull boxes among other items.  There are enemies, but no weapons, making Limbo more akin to traditional survival horror than even the Resident Evil series has become.  The length of a full Limbo playthrough is also slim, ringing in at about a handful of hours.  The short runtime and abrupt ending come off as anti-climactic, but also as if Playdead is pushing you to open-interpretation rather than slow the show down so they can tie everything in a neat little bow for you.

More interesting than the inessential "story" is the way Limbo creates a mood of tension and dread.  The game begins with your character awaking in the forest, with no direction offered.  Right away there's no impression given that the game is holding your hand; you're on your own, all alone.  Props to the sound designers of Limbo for bringing the stark, colorless world to life with crisp sound effects as you dash through grassy patches, skid down dirt hills, and engage in any number of subtle activities that have been lusciously enriched by their audibility (headphones recommended).  The fact that these noises are often the sorts of things that are drowned out by the rest of life, but can be heard so crisply, makes you feel even more alone than visuals by themselves would be capable of.  So, the mood is set, but the tension springs from the fact that you'll be killed in Limbo early and often.

Death is always right around the bend, and the kills themselves are quite grisly.  The boy can be drowned, beheaded, impaled, or blown to bits, and blood, in silhouette of course, spurts out like the scene from Kill Bill where Uma Thurman fights the Crazy 88s.  Checkpoints in Limbo are generous, so after a death you're placed right before the scene where you bit the dust and can take proper precautions so as not to die by the same hand twice.  As an unexpected result, the death mechanic feels like an especially gory take on Looney Tunes.  The animations are so over the top that you can't help but laugh at them after the initial cringe.  Plus, unless you're going for a "perfect run," death is of little consequence, the way Wile E. Coyote is right back to normal after a quick fade out/fade in.

The cartoonish violence serves to make the character seem more boyish in a world of boyish imagination.  Limbo is filled with giant spiders, mind-controlling worms, and other marauding lads right out of Lord of the Flies.  Filmmaker Wes Anderson uses violence in a similar fashion in his movie, to achieve similar weight.  One thing Anderson does to keep his characters grounded in a realm of real-world consequences is for someone to get physically hurt and bleed.  When we see the young scout troop in Moonrise Kingdom fight amongst themselves with arrows and knives, it's silly, but the conflict ends with visible injuries including a dead dog; everyone leaves the battleground bloodied.  Like Limbo, Anderson's worlds play by their own fantastical rules, but are kept relatable with their human suffering and perseverance.  Limbo uses violence to strike a similar balance, but comes from the other end, starting self-serious, but ultimately finding a suitable middleground.

It's unfortunate that so much of Limbo's great mood and tension fades away as you venture further in.  The opening trek through the dim forest is Limbo at its best: ominous with a real sense of danger.  As you progress further into the city, the giant bugs and lost boys appear less frequently until the back half of the game where they don't appear at all.  At this point the game becomes less about survival and more about solving puzzle boxes with increasingly complex physics.  Removed of tension, Limbo also looses its distinct appeal, so much so that when the finale kicks in, it ends the game at a low point.  The final third of the game incorporates switches that can reverse gravity, literalizing the notion of "limbo" as objects in range of the beam suspend between floor and ceiling with careful triggering.  Symbolically, this is an inventive culmination to reach, but the game doesn't bring enough of the full-fledged panache from its opening to make it feel like more than a contemplative, symbolic move.

There was nothing else quite like it upon release, and Limbo's impact on the game industry can be seen in a great number of titles that have co-opted its visual style.  Limbo has become one of the titles that popularly define what an indie game looks and feels like.  Hopefully it's reassuring for Playdead that even though Limbo only takes a brief evening to complete, it's a game that has a positive legacy within the indie games space that will help it stick in players' minds for years to come.

Review: Fotonica (Mac)

Running is not fun.  I remember being forced to run cross-country as a requirement for the basketball team in middle school and hating every minute of it.  I was able to get out of it one year, which was indeed glorious.  Despite this, 12 years later I trained for and raced in the 2010 Chicago half-marathon.  One could look at this act as masochistic (excuses aside, perhaps it was), but in reality I just wasn't very creative with my choice of exercise.  Afterwards I concluded that 13 miles is as far as humans are meant to go and vowed never to attempt to run beyond that distance.  Sure I was getting solid exercise and felt healthy, but the act of running remained as much of a drag as it ever was.

The vast majority of people in the world know how to run, itself being an iteration on one of the early milestones of an individual's existence: the first step.  In contrast, the core physical action needed to play video games is the button push, though the actual sophistication of a full control scheme often requires coordination of multiple button presses with complex timing.  This dynamic is not that far removed from the stepping/running analogy in that it takes behavioral reinforcement and muscle memory to be able to graduate from one action to the other.  The difficulty in achieving this proficiency should take partial credit for the reactionary influx of motion games: attempts at more closely tying core physical actions to those already known and understood by individuals, thus decreasing the learning curve.

On a mechanical level, the game Fotonica brings the systemic understanding of simple body motions into the realm of video games.  If you can press a computer keyboard button, any button, you can play Fotonica.  In the game you control a runner from first-person point of view by holding down a button to run, and releasing it to jump.  The goal is to vault from platform to platform, collecting pink orbs until leaping off a final plank into a glowing void.  Scores are tabulated based on how fast you ran and how many orbs you grabbed.  Fotonica seeks to replace "step" with "button press" in my analogy, but it's not a perfect substitution since the action of running remains at the same complexity as the button press; the relationship between the two is consequential.  A more accurate equation for Fotonica's architecture would be "button press = run."

Santa Ragione, the developers of Fotonica, have put quite a pretty wrapper on their title's minimal core mechanic.  Not to be too reductive, but to say the game looks like a mash-up of Mirror's Edge and Rez simply hits the nail on the head too accurately to ignore.  The world consists of hollow, white wireframe structures floating in black space.  A flurry of abstract shapes zoom past as you progress forth.  As you run, wireframe hands alternatively jut in and out of frame, increasing in frequency along with your running speed.  When landing a jump, green and purple color separation vibrates out from everything to heighten the sensation of impact.  An options menu allows you to turn off the hands, flat-shade everything, and turn your path into a simple tiled line, eliminating distractions and becoming ever more focused on depressing and letting off your button of choice.

Sometimes while playing Fotonica, it felt and looked like I was operating a training simulator for some other game, something more complicated.  This brings back the issue of whether or not the game has made virtual running any more fun than actual running.  The two are difficult to directly compare, but I do know that I enjoyed Metal Gear Solid substantially more than MGS: VR Missions, even if they did let you play as the cyborg ninja in the latter.  Fotonica can feel very treadmill-like, but without the benefits of actual exercise; sort of like I'm working out my MacBook's CPU.  In the game's defense, the sensation of speed exceeds simulation velocities, allowing you to perform actions beyond human capabilities, which does carry a satisfying edge.  The visual style, coupled with the ambient electronic soundtrack creates a cool, other-worldly atmosphere that remains a pleasure to exist in, even if your ability to explore it is quite limited.

When I go for a run outside, I like to listen to music or podcasts as a bit of a distraction, but in Fotonica, I found that I play better when I simplify the visual design as much as possible.  With the complex graphic style turned on, you'll encounter parts of levels where you run through pipes, which are pretty psychedelic to behold, but very difficult to find your bearings within.  Toggling on the "Pure" visual style makes those tubes appear as two layers of platforms, one "in" the pipe, and one "on top."  So, to play Fotonica well is to be closely in tune with the mechanics, and to play it better, you need to eliminate obstacles.  The minimal design approach compliments this zen sensibility.  Become one with the spacebar.

On the subject of PC game controls, I appreciate the idea of a one-button game.  Growing up on video game consoles, not only am I used to holding a controller in my hands for gaming, but have been privy to incremental adjustments to the evolving layouts of peripherals through decades of hardware generations.  Never being much of a PC gamer, the idea of using a mouse and keyboard for action games might as well be the control panel of a jet plane.  It's not immediately apparent to me how to get everything to work, and I haven't put in the practice hours to refine my abilities.  So, I see the prospect of someone saying "forget all that, just use this one button" as having certain surface appeal.

On one hand, Fotonica is a triumph of accessible game design, but on the other, it's a button-pressing exam.  It's a game that upon objective reflection of what I've physically spent my time doing (pressing and releasing a button over and over), leads me to label Fotonica as more of a "in-between" game, than one to sit down and really concentrate on.  This makes sense as so many touchscreen and mobile games offer similarly approachable control schemes, and are ideally played while waiting for something else in our lives to occur.  In these situations, people without games impatiently tap their toes or wrap their fingertips to bide their time, but the game-inclined among us can not only play games to occupy that space, but continue to utilize those same physical actions for something else.  Fotonica never set out to make running fun, but it does a lot to improve what it means to press a button.

Recap: Games For Change Festival 2012

The video game industry catches flak from individuals claiming that games are a waste of time, or worse, a detriment to the socio-intellectual functioning of those who play them.  It's assuring to know that there is some semblance of luminaries in the field with researched findings to the contrary.  Many of these people convene annually for the Games For Change Festival, now in it's 9th year.  My attendance at the event (my first time) has come and gone, but what have developers, educators, and gamers taken from the discussions, forums, and demos?  I can only speak for myself, so allow me to recount the conference in daily breakdowns.  I'm not going to cover every single event that took place, and instead focus on the ones that left the greatest impression on me.  The events during the festival-proper on Tuesday and Wednesday were all livestreamed, so you can view archived video of most all of the major presentations given on those days.

Monday
The first day was really more of a "Day 0" since it was billed as a pre-festival summit.  Two groups sponsored simultaneous dockets spanning the entire day, each with specific focuses.  The Federal Games Working Group (FGWG) focused on intersections between the gaming industry and the government.  For what it's worth in the interest of disclosure, I am a member of this group through my Smithsonian affiliation.  However, I spent the majority of the summit day at the AMD Foundation's sessions on teaching game design to youth, which are more immediately relevant to my job as an educator.

The AMD session began with a tepid panel discussion featuring the day's lineup of presenters.  There was too much surface-deep talk about why games are great for education, and how that relates to their specific organization.  It was as if the introduction was the panel, which I understand the purpose of in concept, but it didn't lead anywhere interesting except for a couple decent audience questions that pointed to case study experiences.  Based on the crowd of attendees, I think it was safe to assume that everyone was already on board for using games in education, yet the panel was keen on reiterating this inherent understanding.  Perhaps this was information that one could take back to their traditionally entrenched institutions in hopes of better conveying more progressive stances on games in education.  Perhaps.

Next up was a walkthrough of Gamestar Mechanic, a game design learning tool that removes coding and focuses purely on the design process.  It's meant as a low-barrier introduction to these basics, targeted at the middle-school set.  The audience was prompted to play through a "level" for teachers that acted as a tutorial.  I found the tools pretty impressive in terms of making a side-scrolling or top-down game.  The tools for feedback and iteration were the most impressive aspect.  Classmates can play one another's games and leave comments on notes in-game ala Dark Souls.  When you  switch between play and edit modes on the fly, you can act on feedback notes immediately rather than having to switch to a disconnected editor.

GameSalad tools

The Activate! presentation in the afternoon similarly demoed a game design platform for classroom implementation, but this time it was GameSalad.  This was the presentation I was most excited for during the summits because I'm developing a workshop framework that uses that very program.  I first learned about GameSalad when it was mentioned in coverage of various game jams as a tool that anyone could learn to use.  Objectively speaking, the Activate! presentation may have leaned too heavily on GameSalad how-tos, but from my point of reference, it was exactly the sort of information I was looking for.  GameSalad definitely feels like a step up from Gamestar in terms of complexity, but even though it gets into code writing, you never have to actually "write" code, just use the drag/drop interface to place pre-programmed commands where you want them and adjust sliders accordingly.  Using some ready-made assets, audience members created a functional versions of Breakout in a mere half hour.  GameSalad seems like a powerful and empowering tool for high school students or even adults looking to dip their toes in the game design pool.

I jumped back over to the other summit at this point to catch up with some colleagues and shuttle off to attend a FGWG meet n' greet with some game designers who would be speaking during the festival the following two days.  I was pleased with my summit choices, but couldn't help wondering if I'd have enjoyed some of the FGWG talks more.  I read live tweets as they popped up during concurrent sessions, which seemed intriguing, though I appreciated how grounded and direct the AMD presentations were.  Having attended Digital Media Learning Conference (DML) earlier this year, I grew a little tired of the "big philosophical monologue then narrow case study" dynamic.  I looked back at the end of those days at DML with little to bring home and implement.  After the AMD summit, I definitely had pathways.

Tuesday
As festival Day 1 began, everyone filtered into an auditorium-style theater, tailor-made for presentations instead of the banquet halls and side rooms of the summits.  TED Talk alumnus Jane McGonigal held the opening keynote position and delivered an engaging presentation the covered self-help, design theory, neuroscience, and personal struggle.  The easiest reference for Jane McGonigal's game design work is Halo 2's I Love Bees alternate reality game/marketing campaign, where she was the community lead.  The driving focus of her speech was in alignment with the philosophy behind her latest game: SuperBetter, which supports players as they build real-world resilience.  McGonigal spoke of an incident where she suffered severe head trauma and was faced with a situation that seemed to present her with "no reason to live."  In order to help her get through day-to-day existence, she began to gamify her life.  She would set challenges for herself that would take concentrated effort, but could realistically be achieved, and used this tactic as a significant contribution to her recovery.  McGonigal wants SuperBetter to be a game where players can improve themselves in similar ways, but without having to undergo trauma.  I don't know all of the technical details about how you're supposed to "play" the game, but the design philosophy was touching and impactful, leaving me with a desire to explore SuperBetter further at some point.

Before lunch, Cow Clicker creator Ian Bogost took the stage to discuss games as tools for journalism.  "Newsgames," as he dubbed them, are games that can be played to consume news stories in a different way than other forms of media.  Bogost detailed the history of the relationship between traditional news media and games, and particularly how the downfall of newspapers and emergence of Internet and TV news has squandered the most all intersections of games and news.  Bogost is part of a team creating a newsgame tool called Game-O-Matic that allows users to almost instantly create a game based around a news story.  The instantaneous element is important since game design normally takes the effort of a small team and multiple hours, and news obviously changes much more quickly.  Newsgames need to be more akin to photojournalism in their accessibility and promptness.

The Game-O-Matic presents you with a blank slate where you can make a word-web of nouns and attach them together with verb-laden arrows.  The tool only provides a preset list of verbs, but through a little interpretive reasoning, you should be able to find something that will generate the desired behavior.  Once this is setup, you simply click a big red "create" button and poof, your newsgame has a ruleset and is ready to go.  Sample games were generated using Mayor Michael Bloomberg, soda, and obesity as the elements, to amusing results.  By default the insta-games just use colored dots with text labels, but you can sub in icons as you wish.  Gameplay options appeared simple, consisting of mechanics that have been around  for a long time like "collect all of something," or "exit the screen to the right," but there could be obstacles depending on how complex you make the relationships between objects.  Does this lend Game-O-Matic particularly well to handling dourly serious news content?  Probably not, but it seems adept at just about any subject you can shake an editorial cartoon at.

Sweatshop screenshot

A round of game design case studies was offered in the afternoon, highlighting titles that deliberately seek to be agents of change, each in their own way.  The two that stuck out the most to me were both British in origin: Sweatshop and The End.  Sweatshop is a tower defense-style game where you have to put together consumer products on an assembly line.  The game gets increasingly complex as different workers specialize in different steps of the process and you must keep them hydrated and productive, taking on the role of floor manager.  The End is a puzzle platformer that borrows symbolism from various religious traditions in an effort to inform the player about these belief systems.  As the name implies, there's a particular focus on the afterlife, and the game has gridded out some historical figures so that depending on how you answer certain questions posed by "boss" characters, you are shown to be leaning closer to, say, Churchill or Einstein.

Having played, but not completed either of these games, I can't say anything with absolute conclusion, but they both do an excellent job of showing effective socially conscious game design, and also bringing to light where these kinds of games can fall short.  Sweatshop is stylish, witty, and quite fun to play, but I could see the name and subject matter putting people off outright.  The End provides an interesting service in its alignment of like-minded historical figures, but I found the platforming gamelplay to be rather rote, even if it did look pretty.  Both games also pop up with blocks of text after completing levels that inform you of certain real-world implications or examples of how the game reflects things outside of itself.  I imagine the vast majority of players just skip these over, seeing as their tone seems to be coming from outside the game, even if they put it in a word bubble of a recognizable character.  I'd be interested to read about the measurable results of these games since they seem both difficult to quantify and boldly ambitious with their goals.

After a day-closing keynote from Nolan Bushnell, everyone sauntered over to a nearby bar for the opening night party featuring free PBRs and a few Kinect games (nothing I hadn't seen before: Dance Central, Sesame Street, and Happy Action Theater).  The casual atmosphere and light socializing was a pleasant cap on a full day of sitting in an auditorium listening to people talk while furiously rapping on my iPad with my fingertips.

Wednesday
ASU professor James Paul Gee kicked off the final festival day with a charge for the development of what he termed "Big 'G' Games."  This charge calls for the creation of games that truly foster learning by both existing as pieces of software, but also connecting players with real-world people and spaces.  Gee claims that to have a good Game, you'll need to provide or facilitate an affinity space (somewhere for people to commune, discuss, problem solve, and innovate) and also follow about 20 or so principles that he went on to detail with the rest of his talk.  One of the big points was to focus on not just cognitive intelligence, but also emotional and social intelligences.  This was a rallying point for Gee against traditional education systems, which he sees as offering excruciatingly narrow pathways for growth, and I believe he'd argue that growth to be unsupportive of all three realms of intelligence.

"Passion" was a topic that recurringly surfaced during Gee's talk as well.  For a game to be a Game, it, like all good art, should inspire passion within those who choose to engage with it.  He cited modding communities as people who've developed passion for a game and seek to change it for the better in some way.  This behavior is not by coincidence, but rather the tools have been laid out by designers for willing individuals to pick them up and use them.  In cases like this, the original designers' influence over the game will at some point become obsolete, and the collective intelligence of players will push the game into new territories.  As designers, the proposition of relinquishing so much control over your creation may be scary, but crafting a Game that encourages this to happen actually presents much bolder and more dynamic learning opportunities for players.

Way screenshot

One of the talks that I was most looking forward to was Chris Bell's, who has gained a great deal attention for his work on Journey, and whose previous game, Way, was nominated for a number of awards at Games For Change this year and ended up taking GOTY honors.  I hadn't seen Bell's GDC speech, which this one supposedly borrowed from quite a bit, so I was going in fresh.  His talk was about friendship, and how games can seek to bring people together as successfully as they can incite competition (I don't think he'd want to imply that the two are opposites though).  Bell recounted a touching story that he claims inspired him not just to create innovative game mechanics, but also think differently about basic communication systems that humans use to interact with one another.  In brief, he found himself very lost in a gigantic fish market in Japan and in need of returning back to his bus in 5 minutes.  He had no map, no phone service, and no conversational command of the Japanese language.  Bell did have a photo of the shrine where the bus was supposed to be and knew how to say "excuse me," but that was it.  An older woman heard him, recognized his look of panic, took his hand and ran with him to the shrine where the bus was, arriving just in time for Bell to board.

Bell spoke of how this incident stuck with him, and the influence of that day in the fish market is explicitly evident in both Way and Journey.  More features doesn't necessarily equal better features.  This isn't an argument about prioritizing resources, though that one could be made, but rather that meta-game and communication mechanics are often taken for granted, as if there's one path that can be taken towards optimal systems.  With this standard in place, it's easy to judge your feature set's range and project resources accordingly, but you'd also be failing to acknowledge all of the options.  Both Journey and Way use what have been deemed "limited" communication systems for player interaction, but Bell argues that this actually provides a more stable groundwork for potential friendships to blossom with strangers than the ways online games primarily use headsets and implement player-to-player dialogue.  I was able to interpret a lot of these intentions on the part of Bell by simply playing the games he's worked on, but it was that story of the older Japanese woman in the fish market that really surprised me and made me hopeful for the future of the medium, hearing that leading game designers are taking inspiration from those kinds of experiences.

Having gone to school for art, I kind of relish opportunities to participate in formal critique sessions.  While I didn't get to go on stage or anything, I did get to witness a Demo Spotlight (not archived) wherein four developers put themselves up on the chopping block in front of an auditorium filled with onlookers, while the likes of Kellee Santiago, Dan White, and the Executive Director of Zynga's philanthropic arm, asked questions, offered advice, and handed out critique.  It seemed kind of scary for some of the developers whose projects were either not that far along or required some convincing to get the panel on board.  One game was Zombie Yoga for Kinect, which just by the title is a "strike 3, you're out" kind of situation for me.  It seemed like the Zombie Yoga team's main goal was to make a game that adds visuals to illustrate what the body/mind is doing with different yoga poses.  I don't know anything about yoga, and I don't want to, but the game showed in a way that made even that baseline concept come off as a target that was not exactly being hit.  I imagine the Demo Spotlight was more helpful for those teams than ones that have their packages nearly together.  An iPad game called Popchilla's World, a digital learning tool for autistic children, seemed like a solid, well-conceived package.  Though, since special needs learning is such a specific realm of education, it seemed difficult for the panel to conjure questions of real critique.  I get a bit of a nostalgic trip out of seeing those kinds of honest discussions happen though, so I was pleasantly surprised by their inclusion in the festival.

By Tuesday evening, I'd seen dozens of lectures, played a handful of unique indie games, and gotten to hang out with some pretty smart people.  I love to hear about how the world of video games is expanding beyond the basic confines of human-computer interfaces, and in particular those efforts that are seeking to improve the world we have.  We know that making successful games is difficult, and that making games that instigate social change is equally, if not more difficult, so imagine how tough it is to make one that does both.  It's a daunting task to consider, but conferences like Games For Change do their part to retain a sense of optimism that such goals are achievable.

Review: Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)

We've been told that space is the final frontier, but in the US we're witnessing the retiring of our nation's fleet of space shuttles due to scaled back government funding for manned outer space exploration.  Sure, private enterprises like SpaceX (with tremendous help from NASA) will continue the bold pursuit into the unknown, but the initiative's removal from the national docket leaves it to capture the attention of those who seek it out rather than the hearts of potentially any forward-thinking citizen with an inkling for discovery.  Human outer space exploration certainly inspired its fair share of scientific research and, perhaps in equal measure, the imaginations of thousands of artists, writers, and creative thinkers.  I have a feeling legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto always wanted his Mario character to explore space too.  In 2007's Super Mario Galaxy (SMG), Nintendo did just that, constructing an interplanetary mash-up of the Mushroom Kingdom and the Milky Way that serves as the perfect playground for another Mario adventure.  SMG may not capitalize on the full potential of its unique gravity-defying setting, but its desire to introduce players to a kind of world they've never quite come across is clear from the outset.

Mario games have always had inexplicably floating platforms, but in SMG those platforms usually come with their own gravitational pull, meaning you can run around a spherical "planet" without fear of falling off.  The general feel and aesthetic of this brand of platforming draws less from Hubble telescope images, and more from the likes of a giant mobile come to life.  Think Le Petit Prince multiplied by the moon-rolling credit sequence from Katamari Damacy and you're getting there. The outcome is not that you feel as if you're traversing across vast expanses, but rather that someone dumped out a toy chest in orbit of a small satellite and asked you to make sense of it.  SMG is still a platformer at heart, and to that end it is more about Mario's relationship with various floating objects than it is the zero-gravity environment that exists outside of objects' miniature atmospheres.

Given the space backdrop and the exploratory inclinations of previous polygonal Marios, I was surprised by how narrow SMG's critical path is.  Game structure and mechanics in SMG are not dissimilar from 64 or Sunshine (3D platforming with a hub world containing levels with multiple individual challenges), but a much larger quantity of the levels here push you along one specific route with little-to-no room for deviation.  For some games, this might be less of an issue, but 3D Mario games have a staunch precedent for collectible hunting and expansive levels with hidden nooks, making the lack thereof quite noticeable.

Let's not rag on SMG for tweaking the formula, but instead for the way it misapplies a swath of classic Mario tropes.  Take coins for example.  Coins in previous titles were a valued collectible item, earning you extra lives or potentially stars (symbolizing completion of a task), while also refilling lost health points.  In SMG coins only exist to revitalize health and for tallying a non-rewardable high score on a per-level basis.  A coin can help out in a pinch, but there's nothing to gain by "collecting" them.  Or how about the "lives" system in general?  Extra lives are worthless here since there's barely any reason you'll need more than the handful you begin with, plus the 5 Toad provides you every time you boot up the game.  As a final deflating action, when you quit out of the game, your lives count is returned to the default quantity.  Thus the idea of taking a chance on a risky jump to acquire a green 1-up mushroom always comes off as a poor value proposition.  With no rare grabs to incentivize more skillful platforming I found myself hanging close to the middle of the road, which remains a perfectly engaging ride on its own, but leaves a substantial amount of underused content around the fringes.

SMG's shortcomings with story, camera, and item implementation are even more of a shame considering how impeccable the universe Nintendo has put together presents itself.  There's inspired visual design for bringing the likes of lava, desert, and ice levels into the realm of fluctuating gravity. Shiny textures like brushed metal and floating troughs of water glisten with a tactile aura that will have your synesthesic senses tingling.  The orchestral score dynamically swells and swoons with an emotional range that an actual Mario plotline could only dream of.  I may have had issues with the controls at times, mainly due to unmanipulable camera angles, but the occasions where you bust out motion-specific commands functioned well and added some welcome variety to the standard run/jump activities.  During normal gameplay scenarios, a swift Wiimote whip will trigger a spin attack for Mario, replacing the somewhat clumsy punching ability from the N64 days.  Say what you will about the pervasiveness of waggle motions on the Wii, but this one doesn't require more than a quick wrist flip and the resulting action makes sense with the motion.  It's like pulling the thread out from a top to get it spinning upright.

I doubt SMG is going to inspire the next generation of astronauts since it has far more in common with the world of Power Stars than real ones.  The game takes an amateur-science approach to astrophysics and runs with it before all the data has been collected.  This can lead to inconsistencies (which objects are "planets," and which are just platforms?) but ultimately it serves to set a tone where it's pertinent to pay attention to the action instead of stopping to contemplate why everything around you is happening and how it's possible.  I mean, how is it that Mario gains the skill of breathing in the vacuum of space, but he can't breathe underwater?  It's not important, and there is no answer anyway.  There's an heir to a shelled dinosaur throne commanding a flying pirate ship shooting fireballs at you.  It's a Mario game, so this is what you signed up for.

Review: Journey (PS3)

I used to persistently need the latest video games simply because I was driven to have the new thing.  Now, I'm content to wait months, even years after a game's release to pick it up, knowing I'll pay significantly less for it.  Despite this, I stay up to the minute on the ongoings of the game industry and see a renewed value in playing games upon release that have significant online integration or a collective sociocultural metagame.  The third-person wandering/jumping simulator, Journey, is one of those critical zeitgeist titles that not only has everyone playing, but also musing about.  In what has become a rare case for me, I actually got to spend a decent amount of time with a truly contemporary game; enough to play it through more than once and watch other people play as well.  It's a special game that strengthens and validates my convictions toward games as an artistic medium.

Journey is thatgamecompany's third PS3 game, and also their best.  You play as a robed figure with a glyph-laden scarf which determines how high you can jump based on its length.  The measure of your scarf can be increased by finding hidden glowy things throughout the world.  Other than that, the basic task is to explore the sand-covered landscape, traversing platforms toward a shining mountain top that seems many miles away.  If online, sometimes another human player will join your game and play along, but you don't have to stay together if you don't want to.  There are a few pitfalls and some light puzzle solving, but the bulk of what makes Journey special is what it does with this seemingly bare-bones design.

The easiest parallel between Journey and works from a different creative medium is film.  I can't think of another title that has executed cinematic gameplay to such a loyal extent as Journey.  Given 2011's proclivity towards silent film, the comparisons are all the easier.  Journey contains no dialogue, just chirp tones that can be used for communicating with an anonymous online partner.  Much like Melie's fantastical works, thatgamecompany created a world of constant visual wonderment: a cinematographer's utopia.  You have control over the camera most of the time, but at key moments the game takes over.  This could be to show a particular action sequence from a flattering angle where the sunlight optimally beams through archways making your sandy path glisten, or to frame the mountain top that serves a your destination in a way that makes it seem ever-distant.  The game's duration is on par with a typical full-length feature, making replays feel like rewatching a beloved film out of your home video collection.  You know how the plot goes, but it's exciting when your favorite scenes pop up again.

The multiplayer component of Journey seems like the kind of mechanic that would be at odds with this cinematic flair, but it actually supports it.  Because players' interactions are so limited, there's no way to grief your partner that will ruin their experience.  You could chirp a lot, which would be strange, but there's even a stage in the game where that ability is all but shuttered.  At worst you could attempt to leave the other player in the dust or simply disable the online feature.  At best you make your way through Journey and complete it as a twosome.  There's something to be said for playing Journey solo.  It's a solemn, contemplative experience: quiet and a little sad.  As a pair, there are plenty of scenarios that, ironically, I can best describe as dialogues:

"Wait up."
"OK, I'll stay here."

"Let's do this."
"I'm ready."

"This is crazy!"
"I know!"

"Where did you go?"
"Over here.  Coast is clear."

"Hello?"
"..."

"There's something down there."
"Follow me."

"Oh man, this is it."
"Let's go together."

The way in which I generated theses words in my mind is akin to writing speaking parts for characters in a painting.  Imagine Seurat's Sunday Afternoon where you get to play as the pet monkey.  If only a phoenix made of ribbons would emerge out of the water.  The point is that Journey stirs your imagination, during play, to fill in the gaps it purposefully creates with its minimalist approach.  I haven't played another game that does that.  You build a relationship with the other character making completion of the game's trails more emotionally resonant than the solo experience.

I've noticed a number of critics not just reviewing the game, but recounting their playthrough(s) of Journey, as if there's significant variation in the stories to tell.  I mean, how different could they be from mine?  It's not like Journey has MMO levels of complexity to its online interactions and player agency, yet people are compelled to spin their personal tales.  I only refrained myself because I've seen so many other writers touch on the subject, and people are saying rather similar things.  Surely this is an intended outcome of the game's design, making the player feel like they've taken on some sort of trek, albeit virtual, that had them invested enough in the game world to empathize and identify with the characters.  Are some players just being sentimental or is Journey designed to evoke sentimentality from those willing to participate in the silent melodrama?  For me, it's the latter.

Part of what makes Journey open to these types of responses is that it limits the number of technical hiccups that could possibly break the mood, shifting the focus on the characters literal forward progress.  The action moves with a serene fluidity, allowing you to build momentum and glide along with an exaggerated tangibility that feels just superhuman enough.  My main gripe with thatgamecompany's previous title, Flower, was how much time I spent missing my targets and having to stop and slowly turn around, with only the Sixaxis controls at my disposal.  With Journey, not only are motion controls optional, but when speeds do ramp up you can simply enjoy engaging with the slope instead of having to meet some objective all the while.  The resulting achievement is that moment-to-moment gameplay in Journey maintains a consistency in your character's relationship to the world and keeps players' attentions focused on those interactions.

At the end of Journey, the game tells you the usernames of the actual humans you played with, which is the right amount of metadata to allow into this game, and presented at the right time.  It's as if the game knows you could be about to disconnect with its world, and pulls you in one last time to say, "Yes, you just finished a video game, but something real happened here."  My reaction to this was to press "start" and do it all again.