Dragon Age II Review: Get a Grip, Folks!

(This article contains mild Dragon Age II spoilers. Such as: There are dragons!)

Since I raved so enthusiastically in this space about Dragon Age: Origins (and Bioware games in general), I suppose I really should say something about Dragon Age II as well. This one is a bit trickier.

It's impossible to discuss Dragon Age II without a bit of criticism, which makes me sad. A lot of skilled people worked really hard over an overly-short period of time to make this game, and I strongly suspect that most of its problems were out of their control, due to directives from above. As somone who writes games myself, I truly sympathize. The inevitable result has been a game that's caused quite a bit of controversy over its quality.

The best place to see this confusion is over on Metacritic. As of this writing, reviewers have given the game an entirely respectable score of 82 (out of 100). Players, on the other hand, have given Dragon Age II a dismal 4.3 out of 10. That is a huge gap!

But it makes a lot of sense. Reviewers have to review the actual game as it exists, not their fantasies about what it might be. Dragon Age II is a flawed but basically competent and enjoyable action-RPG. 82 out of 100 is a B-, and Dragon Age II is a pretty solid B- of a game.

In fact, suppose it didn't have Dragon Age in the title at all. Suppose it was called, say, "Bioware Presents: A Dude Named Hawke Buys a Big House and Has Wacky Adventures." Suppose further that EA had given Bioware the bit of extra time and budget necessary to fix the game's most notable flaws. (Dungeon layouts reused to an egregious extent. A bizarre combat system where reinforcements pop in from out of nowhere. Extreme bugginess, especially in the late game.) If this was the case, I honestly believe the result would be considered a lesser but worthy member of the Bioware canon, something pleasing to pass the time while waiting for Dragon Age II.

But that's not what happened. Dragon Age II is ... well, it has "Dragon Age" in the name. It's the sequel to one of the best-written, epic, envelope-pushing RPGs pretty much ever. I game I truly loved. (If you haven't played it, why are you wasting your time reading this junk? Go get it! Go!) And there's no suger-coating the basic fact of the thing. If you got Dragon Age II expecting something more like Dragon Age: Origins, you are going to face a period of harsh disappointment.

But I'm going to have to defend Dragon Age II here for a bit. There's a lot of really good stuff here, and some of the design choices are really interesting. Other people have dumped on this game enough. Let's take a moment to look at the nice things.

Great Writing

Nobody puts great writing in games like Bioware. Dragon Age II didn't contain as much of that Dragon Age Magic (tm) as I might have hoped for, but it was a beautifully written game. The characters didn't grab me instantly in the way they did in the previous game, but they really grew on me, especially Varric. When my companions talked to each other, I always stopped whatever I was doing to listen.

Considering how crappy most video game writing is, I really think we shouldn't take Bioware for granted!

Also, this game had the most insane, over the top, out of nowhere plot development I've ever seen in an RPG. (Which part? One word ... Mom.) Dang it, it deserves props for that!

Cool Character Development

I loved the skill trees. The mix of abilities, constant effects, and passive bonuses, combined with being able to decide between getting new abilities and making old ones better, made training very interesting. I retrained my characters several times and found that it was possible to customize my characters for a number of different play styles, which is always good.

The combat did involve a lot of button mashing, but the abilities were varied and dramatic enough that I was rarely bored.

Some Really Good Ideas For Combat

Battles in Dragon Age II are almost always against waves of foes, generally starting easy and getting harder. You need to conserve your powers, using them when they are most needed.

The way the game throws reinforcements into the battlefield deserves some mockery. They are scattered in at random, sometimes literally dropping from the sky before your eyes. If they had entered the fray in a less immersion-breaking way (say, running from deeper in the dungeon), it would have worked better. However, this basic idea of how to structure combat shows a lot of potential, and I hope other games explore it. (Which is my way of saying:  I really should steal that idea.)

The Theme Still Works

His writing is as impenetrable as ever, but Tycho over at Penny Arcade does a great job of breaking down what Dragon Age is really about and how cool it is. These games aren't about fighting Big Fantasy Nasties. Sure, they have fights and monsters, but that is not what they are Capital-A About. They are about politics and power structures and compromises and how actions and decisions can shift history. It's a very cool and ambitious territory to explore, and Bioware has close to a monopoly on it.

Dragon Age II doesn't operate on the same scale as the previous game in any way, and yet it covers much the same ground. It focuses on one city instead of a whole nation and a handful of political squabbles instead of one great crisis, but their hearts are in the same place. And, frankly, this design concept deserves a lot more exploration.

In Closing

Dragon Age II is a flawed product that is still more interesting than a more polished mediocrity. Starting it is a very jarring experience for anyone with fresh memories of the first classic, but, if you walk away, take a breath, and resolve to meet it partially on its own terms, it's worth the sixty bucks.

A lot of people hate it, but hey, the Internet exists to help people hate things in a purer, more intense fashion. And, hey, if you hate Dragon Age II, that's your right.

But I think it's important for fans to not price themselves out of the market here. Bioware is still making good role-playing games, a genre that has been painfully neglected in the past. It's fun to indulge in a nice hate-frenzy from time to time, but let's try to keep on talking terms with reality here. They're still one of The Good Ones.

Review: Minecraft

Since I like to write about Indie game design, it is inevitable that, at some point, I must discuss Minecraft. Written by this Swedish guy commonly known as Notch, it emerged overnight to take over the world and sell meeelions of copies. It has had a level of success my games can never ever hope to match, and it's kind of earned it.

Of course, I could go on, as many others have, about the soul-crushing lack of anything in the game to help anyone actually understand it. Of course, officially, it's still a beta, but it's still super harsh in the early going. Don't try to play it without reading this Newbie FAQ and bookmarking the recipe list, unless you enjoy suffering.

For the few people who haven't played it yet, Minecraft is usually described as a Lego video game. You start out a guy on a deserted island. You can gather cubes of dirt and wood and stone and use them to build, well, whatever you want. Houses. Castles. Roller coasters. There's no plot, per se. It's a creativity tool and an incredibly addictive one. The game system is very simple, allowing for hilarious mishaps, outlandish creations, and manifestations of mental illness.

I made a nice two bedroom house for a family of four. There's a wall around it. It's nice.

But for a no-budget Indie game to sell north of 1.5 million copies? In beta? There is something crazy insane going on here, some sort of true genius. This guy captured lightning in a bottle, with a fairly crude-looking game with no tutorial and a punishingly difficult first ten minutes. I honestly wouldn't have thought it possible. Anyone who cares about game design should look closer and see what this guy did right...

You Have To Earn What You Get

If you want to make a house out of 500 blocks of stone, you first have to dig them up. But then you just have an empty house. If you want something nice, like a clock or a golden pillar or a roller coaster, you have to search more and dig deeper. One of the key elements of Minecraft is the personal satisfaction you get from looking at what you built, which comes in part from knowing that you had to spend your time to earn it. And people do spend the time, because ...

You Get Stuff Fairly Quickly

The guiding principle behind Minecraft seems to be that you have to earn everything you get (by spending time), but practically everything comes cheaply. The stone to make a fortress can be dug up fairly quickly. The key insight here is that, to give a player self-satisfaction, you do need to charge a price (again, paid in your time), but that price can be very small. As long as there is any price at all, even a low one, the player can feel pride in his or her creation.

There Is Danger

On normal difficulty or higher, monsters can spawn anywhere where it is dark. And these aren't candyass, meaningless trash monsters, either. They are skeleton archers that can kill you dead before you even figure out where they are and exploding ambulatory suicide cacti that spend one second hissing in warning before they pop, killing you and destroying everything nearby.

Minecraft was never meant to be a shooter. You can make weapons and armor, but they're tough to make and wear out quickly. The vast majority of foes should simply be avoided. The point of the game is not kicking ass but achieving safety.

Now, to be clear, the danger element is not necessary. Plenty of players switch the game to Peaceful difficulty and never face a worse threat than falling into lava. But for players like me, who need some sort of story element or immediate goal to get into a game, the pressing need to make a Safe Place is a perfect way to feel involved. And, once the game gets you actually playing, it becomes much easier to answer the most difficulty question any creativity toy poses: "I can make anything I want, but what do I want to make?"

But Not Too Much

Minecraft is dangerous, but not too dangerous. Torches are easy to make, they never go out (for now, see below), and monsters never spawn in lit areas. It is easy to make an enclosed place where monsters will never jump you. And yet, if you ever walk outside or if you accidentally leave a dark spot in your house, the danger comes pouring back in.

And, much in the same way that only a tiny amount of effort gives a player pride of ownership, the mere awareness of danger is enough to keep things interesting. Once, when I was modifying my house, I forgot to place a torch in one of the rooms. It gets dark, I go to bed, a zombie spawns in that room, and, when I wake up, it's eating my face.

No matter how safe you make things, a moment of complacency can always kill you. The constant presence of danger can make anything more interesting, even stacking little cubes.

The Game Model Is Incredibly Forgiving

Game designers frequently want to make things too hard for players. There is a constant fear that someone, somewhere, is getting away with something. For example, it must have been very tempting to have Minecraft have a real physics model. Make your wood building too big or unbalanced, and watch as it crumbles before your eyes. Hah! Take that, you dumb gamer!

Minecraft isn't like that. It's a creativity tool. It strongly resists the desire to be hardass about what you can build and gets out of the way as much as possible. Want your giant stone castle to hang in midair? Sure! The game's job is simply to let you create.

With one limitation. Fire is merciless. Try to burn up the patches of brush in front of hour house and I promise, within five minutes, your happy green island will look like Mordor.

And the Developer Is Very Generous

For the amount of entertainment the game can provide, it's amazingly cheap. Around twenty bucks for the beta, and that comes with all future patches. No DRM. No recurring fees. One account serves as many machines as you want to use it on. And once, when their ordering servers were down, Notch simply made the game free.

This is just one example of someone becoming very successful by making something really cheap. See also: Humble Indie Bundle.

But We're Just At the Beginning

One of my favorite things about Minecraft is that it's a work in progress. We can watch the developer's tightrope act in real time, and they might still screw everything up!

For example, they have been flirting for a while with making torches go out. You would have to spend time running around with flint and steel relighting torches, or areas will go dark and "Oh God! Zombies! My face! Aaaahhhh!" This would be a huge change in the nature of the game, introducing a new activity that would pull lots of time away from the core activity: gathering materials and doing stuff with them. This change has been put off for a while, though, so they may have had the wisdom to rethink it.

(In fact, watch for any change that will heavily alter the proportion of time the player spends on various activities - digging, building, etc. These are the changes that will muck up the game.)

They are also considering adding Hardcore mode, where if you die your world is gone for good. I suppose this is a good change, since it is optional and some people love pain.

But I suspect that their design instincts are pretty good. Instead of making torches go out, they are adding cute wolf pets. Genius. My daughters will die of happiness.

So Try It

If you love Indie games, try this one. It takes some work to get into it, but it is a worthwhile exercise just too see how much innovation small developers are capable of. I am on the record as saying that small Indies aren't as innovative as people give them credit for. This is one case when I've been very happy to be proved wrong.

My Very Brief Review of Halo: Reach.

Every game should have jetpacks.

(Actually, maybe a little explanation. My wife and I play every Halo and Gears of War game together in co-op. It's happy-close-couple-relationship-time.)

(Sadly, the single-player components of Halo games have gotten painfully phoned in. The kick-ass set pieces of Halo 3 have degenerated into long, tedious sequences of interchangeable roads and warehouses.)

(But Halo: Reach has JETPACKS. And that is AWESOME. For the three minutes it lets you play with them.)

(Every mission in Halo: Reach should give you jetpacks. You should be able to boing-boing-boing all over the dang place.)

(Actually, what's more, every game should have jetpacks. Dragon Age. Minecraft. Farmville. Rock Band. EVERY game.)

(Tetris should have jetpacks.)

(Jetpacks.)

December Odds, Ends, and Rock Band 3.

A few mixed things for the month ...

Hear Me Talk About ME!

There is a nice interview of me up in Inside Mac Games. I got to say a lot of things about the game industry, Macs, DRM, and our upcoming game, Avadon: The Black Fortress. I haven't gotten lots of e-mails yet about how wrong and dumb I am, so the interview was probably a failure. But you might find it interesting.


Die, Bunny! Die!

One thing I forgot to mention about Red Dead: Redemption. I spent a lot of time hunting animals, for money, for cheevos, and to break the monotony of long horsey rides.

At one point, I shot a rabbit but only grazed it. It started flailing around on the ground in tormented agony.

Animating characters is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. And yet, someone at Rockstar took the time to animate a crippled bunny. This is the sort of excessive, terrifying craftsmanship that keeps me coming back to their games.

Pity that you don't have a radio, ala Grand Theft Auto. It wouldn't be historically accurate, but I would have loved to borrow 99 Luftballoons from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to keep my energy levels up during long rides across Mexico.

Last Thoughts About Red Dead: Redemption

I finished Red Dead: Redemption, and I enjoyed that game as much as any I've played in a long time. The last time I wrote about it, I heard from some people who were infuriated by the awkwardness going through doors. I suppose the doors could be better, but you really spend very little of the game in places that even have doors.

(Minor spoilers ahead.)

One thing I really loved about the game: The storyline in the last ten missions or so. You see, in most games, after you kill the Head Bad Guy, that's it. You're done. Cutscene, credits, and out. But in this game, after the bad guy is gone, you then have a bunch of missions at your home. You meet your family, try to relate to your son, and work to rebuild your farm.

These missions are quiet, simple, and really quite affecting. It helps a lot that the relationships between John Marston and his wife and son are very nicely done. I really felt for them as characters and it made the last chunk of the game much more engaging. Which might make it a little bit relevant to that whole, tedious "Are games art?" argument that keeps resurfacing, no matter how much we might wish it'd stop.

Rock Band 3 Reviewish Thing

I've never hidden my huge love of Rock Band, and I've written about the series on several occasions. However, I can't work up the energy to write a Rock Band 3 review. It's got a lot of awesome songs, fantastic interface improvements, some nicely done Pro Modes that only 1% of the players will care about, and a keyboard.

But music games are a fad that is slowly choking on its own blood. Don't believe me? Look at it this way. When your development house releases its classic for the ages, and, a couple of weeks later, your owner puts you up for sale, well, not so good.

And, while the keyboard is a nice little bit of variety, it's just more of the same simple "Hit the green button. Now hit the yellow button." gameplay that most people have gotten totally tired of by now. It won't save the genre, and, considering that my half-assed efforts easily put me high up on the leaderboards, not many people are playing.

But hey, I'm a dead-ender. You'll have to pry my fakey drumsticks from my cold dead fingers. And I just dropped twenty bucks for the new Billy Joel pack. I will keep enjoying this niche genre for a while longer. But it will never again be anything but a niche genre.

Review - Super Meat Boy

I recently played Super Meat Boy on XBox Live. It is a really fun game, and it manages innovation in a genre that I would have thought had passed innovation by decades ago.  It's an impressive feat, and very much worth some attention.

Super Meat Boy is a 2-D platformer. Like all other successful indie games. Ninety percent of all indie games have to be 2-D platformers now, by federal law. Penalties for violation start at being forced to watch all of the Wandering Around In the Forest Being Emo scenes from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and rapidly get worse from there.

The plot is simple, elemental, and timeless. You play Meat Boy, a small, sentient wad of bloody meat. Your girlfriend, Bandage Girl, has been kidnapped by the evil Dr. Fetus. You have to rescue her. You do so by moving left and right and jumping, hopefully evading all obstacles on your way to get to Bandage Girl. That's it. That's the game. It's a bloodier (MUCH bloodier) version of Donkey Kong, which itself came out about the time Napoleon was getting bogged down in Russia.

And yet, it is insanely fun and amazingly innovative. And the innovation comes from the developers' attempt to answer this simple question:

How do you make a computer game that is extremely hardcore and difficult but, at the same time, light and fun and not frustrating?

Tough problem. And they come up with a great solution. Super Meat Boy has two innovations that make it unique:

1. Short, short levels. No death penalty.

Super Meat Boy is a tough platformer, one of the toughest you will ever play. However, the levels are short. Very short. A lot of them can be completed in less than five seconds. Practically all of them can be done in less than thirty. For all regular gameplay, you don't have "lives". There is no long, annoying death animation. When you die, you are instantly back at the start of the level and able to play again. In other words, you come back to life so fast you will be playing again before you fully realize that you died.

Super Meat Boy requires amazingly difficult jumps, dodges, maneuvers, etc. It can easily take fifty tries to finish a level. And yet, you will often have all of those deaths less than five seconds into a level. So fifty deaths sounds like a lot, but they take place in less that 250 seconds (four minutes or so), which is an entirely reasonable amount of time to spend completing a level.

And when, by some unholy combination of skill and luck, you reach that fifth minute and maneuver through a tough level, you feel like a gaming god.

2. The Awesome Replays

When you finish a level, you see a replay of your attempts. Sounds dull, yes? The difference here is that you see a replay of ALL your attempts, shown at once. You die fifty times before you win? Then the replay shows fifty-one Meat Boys running through the level simultaneously. Fifty of them die in explosions of gore, and one of them gets through. It looks really cool and funny, and you can save the replays and show them to your friends.

The really amazing thing about this feature is subtle but powerful. What the all-attempts replays mean is that every time you die you didn't just waste your time. You added one more Meat Boy to the final replay, making it look cooler. Die fifty times? Then the replay looks spectacular. You aren't just failing. You're creating a bit of video game art. This feature sometimes made me keep trying a level again and again even after my sore fingers begged me to stop, just because I knew that, when I won, the replay would be awesome.

Video game death as personal expression. How cool is that?

There's More

There's many levels in the game. Finish a level quickly enough and it unlocks a much more difficult "dark world" version of the level. Plus there are boss fights. Hidden characters. Secret bonus levels. It's one of the best examples I've ever seen of obsessed developers going the extra mile to add craftsmanship and polish to their labor of love. The controls are really tight. The cutscenes are hilarious. Seriously, play this game.

I am on the record as saying that indie game development is overrated from the perspective of innovation. There are plenty of indie developers making hackwork, genre pieces, and clones of more successful games, and EA has published plenty of innovative titles over the last few years. But this is definitely one game that argues for the specialness of indies, and it's definitely worth checking out.

Review - Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty

This is pretty late, but I've taken some time off from writing my games to produce a quick review of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. I'm only reviewing the single-player portion, as playing the game on multiplayer for more than 15 seconds makes me feel like I'm going to have a stroke. I'm still trying to remember which button makes me build a barracks, and when fifty laser ninjas are crashing through my perimeter. It makes me hate myself.

TL;DR Summary: Really fun game. Really dopey story, but it doesn't matter, because in games like this all the story has to be is a placeholder, a floppy useless thing that hangs off the side and is ignored by everyone. Also, computer games can be art, but, secretly, nobody really wants them to be.


So. The Starcraft 2 campaign. Very interesting stuff. There's really two parts of it. The story and the missions.

1. The Story

But, you might ask, why bother to review a story in a game like this? I mean, sure, games like this and Halo and Gears of War have goofy storylines. Everyone knows they're goofy. They will always be goofy. So why bother saying it?

Well, to answer your hypothetical question, imaginary reader, whenever a game makes you spend time experiencing something, it is fair to evaluate that experience. If you take my time up with something, it's worthwhile to ask whether said time was worth spending. Also, Blizzard spent a ton of money making that story, with the cutscenes and the voice acting and whatnot, so it's fun to ask whether they got their money's worth. A few comments are entirely justified.

The story to Starcraft 2 is what you would get if the stories of Firefly and Gears of War had a drunken hookup. I swear, the writers of Starcraft 2 wanted to be making a lost episode of Firefly so bad that it was almost poignant. The western theme, the mood, the accents, the train-robbery mission, even the dang music cues.

But the story itself is pretty painful. Cheesy dialogue. Bland characters. Aimless storytelling where very little interesting happens. And, considering that this is the story of how an endless horde of bug-creatures eats nine-tenths of humanity, making it kind of dull is a real achievement.

There are two things I would do to fix a storyline like this. If one real game writer working for a real company reads what I write and thinks, "Hmmm. He might have a point," I can die happily knowing I made the world a better place.

War Is Interesting. Don't Neglect the War.

The whole game is basically about a war between people and bug creatures. War is one of the most fascinating things you can tell a story about. The cunning generals. The terrified soldiers. The major battles. The tactics and turnabouts. There is limitless drama in the story of a war.

But, in the story of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, the war itself is usually only seen in cutscenes or on the news show you can watch on the TV in the bar. Most of the stuff you do in the game has nothing to do with the war. You're learning about some Protoss prophecy. You're gathering parts of some crystal artifacts. You are gathering supplies for some crazy guy so he can do some thing. You don't engage the bug creatures in a big, meaningful way until like 90% of the way into the game.

It's like if I was telling the story of World War 2 and never mentioned anything about D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge. Instead, it's the story of how a bunch of guys went to Madagascar to find the three parts of a magic laser that would win the war by killing Hitler. I'm sorry, but this is not the best use of your dramatic material.

Make What You Do Have a Point

So this is what happened. In the story, some crazy guy has me spend two missions gathering materials for some super space gun or something. Then a pretty space girl with psychic space powers comes to me and tells me I need to kill him. I choose to believe her, so I spend a whole mission laboriously destroying the supplies I spend the earlier missions gathering.

So that was four whole missions (two to gather supplies, two potential missions for what happens to them), a whole seventh of the game, getting stuff and then destroying it, achieving exactly nothing. What a waste of precious storytelling space.

One of the best things to do with the story in a video game is to make the player feel all badass. Killing fifty space mans with your space gun is already awesome. Knowing you are doing this to save the space princess from the space bugs gives the power fantasy a nice little kick. Players like knowing that their actions are making a difference. Maybe completing the mission has a good effect. Maybe a bad effect. But you should make sure that the mission the player just spent time and effort completing makes a difference. Doing otherwise is unwise. Never invite the player to think his or her actions in the game are meaningless.

2. The Level Design

There was some angst online when it was announced that the storyline for Starcraft 2 was going to be split into three full games, of which Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty was the first. Understandably, there were complaints about having to pay for three games instead of one for the same story. Now that I've played the first game, I can say this. If the superb level design of the first game continues through the next two, splitting the thing into three games is great news. The story is a bit blah, but the game itself is a huge amount of fun.

First off, the designers saw that the core gameplay of Starcraft 2 is really fun. You build a base, make it stronger, make badass troops, and send them out to kill things. So that is the main structure of most of the missions, but with the added kindness of usually making sure the core elements of your base have been built, to save you the tedium of mining a bunch of unobtanium and building a barracks for the eighty thousandth time.

However, while the spine of the gameplay is the same, every mission is different, with the variety coming in what you fight or what your goals are. One mission requires you to blow up trains as they speed quickly across the level. Another mission takes place on a planet being scoured by fire, so you need to quickly leapfrog your base to the right, fighting foes as you go.

There are several defense missions and a handful of "Tiny number of units sneaking through a big fort" missions, enough to add variety but not enough to distract from the main mode gameplay. Also, there are a million different units you can build, most of which you will forget and never use again. However, each unit has one mission designed to use its particular strengths, so all of that work making new graphics models won't go to waste.

So, yeah, once I figured out that the Escape key would bump me past most of the plot, I had lots and lots of fun playing Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.

So What Does This Mean?

That all the time they spent making the story and all of the time I spent writing about it and all of the time you spent reading it was kind of a waste. The story didn't matter. The game was a lot of fun, and it would have been even if all of the cutscenes depicted my protagonist sitting on the couch or yelling at space elves.

Games in stories are usually a vestigial limb. Every once in a while, I play a game that is improved by its story. (Most of these titles are by Bioware.) A story can provide excellent context. On the other hand, who cares about context? Most of the time, people just want to melt faces. While it can be nice to know whose faces they are and for what reason said melting is occurring, it's not necessary.

While I do believe that games can sometimes be art, they really, really don't need to be. It gives me a lot of sympathy for the people who say they can't be art. The "artistic content" part usually has nothing to do with the "fun" part, and the "fun" part was really all I cared about. Zap! Zap! Pew! Pew!

It's like I've said for quite a while, "Players will forgive you for making a good story, as long as you allow them to ignore it." It's a weird thing for someone like me to say, since the stories in my games are one of the main selling points. But, at some point, I can't ignore what people actually go out and play. Myself included.

Quick Late Review: Bioshock 2

(I'm going away on vacation, so I wanted to dump everything in my brain while it's still there. I have to stop writing games sometimes. Working on Avadon is making my brain melt.)

Looking at video games from an artistic viewpoint, Bioshock 2 might be the most unnecessary game ever made. Bioshock was an incredibly satisfying self-contained experience, and there's just no way to have a sequel make sense. How long can a city at the bottom of the ocean be run exclusively by insane, drug-addicted zombies before a poorly maintained pipe breaks and the whole place floods?

And yet, I can totally understand why Bioshock 2 exists. Someone said, "Hey! There's a really cool shooter at the core of Bioshock, and people would probably like to play more of it. Also, we like money."

So my review of Bioshock 2 is this: You can get the magical ability to make swarms of bees, and they fly around killing your enemies, and when they kill someone the body is infected with bees, and when a different enemy gets close to the corpse it explodes and makes more bees.

How can you not want to play that game?

Also, early on, you can get the ability to freeze the enemy you're fighting. Once you have it, all boss fights become completely trivial for the rest of the game. Once, when I was younger, I would have seen this as a flaw. Now I am old and slow and I think games just get too darn hard, so the ability to instantly freeze and obliterate everyone is awesome. In my fantasy world, I don't want to be a loser who is incapable of ever succeeding.

Quick Late Review: Mass Effect 2.

(I'm going away on vacation, so I wanted to dump everything in my brain while it's still there. I have to stop writing games sometimes. Working on Avadon is making my brain melt.)

I played Mass Effect 2, of course. Bioware. Have to play. And I really, really liked Mass Effect, warts and all.

Mass Effect 2 is a lot of fun. The new action-based combat model is simple and fast-paced, so the action, while a little repetitive, is always fun. And the game conclusively shows that there is no problem that can't be solved by going from one end of a corridor full of crates to the other. The player characters are a little dull for a Bioware game, but they're fine. (Morden and Garrus are cool.) I suspect that there's just too many of them, so the interestingness got spread a little thin. I missed Morrigan.

But, as much as I enjoyed it, there was one thing that really bugged me. Bioware has said that Mass Effect 3 will be a bit lighter in the subject matter, and thank God.

So there's a woman in your party named Subject Zero. She is harsh and obnoxious and crazy and I wished I could throw her out of the airlock while covered in hurting fire. Like all of the other allies, there's an quest you can do to win her loyalty.

So I accept it, and we go to this abandoned research base. It turns out, Subject Zero was, while a child, subjected to horrible experiments to give her psychic powers. You learn, in blucky detail, how many other children were taken there and killed in other experiments that seem deliberately reminiscent of the work of Josef Mengele.

You also learn that this base was built by Cerberus, a pro-human organization that you work for.

You do learn, for what it's worth, that after Cerberus built the base they went a little rogue before all of the child-murdering started. As if that makes it better. Which, no. When you find out that your bosses helped start the Holocaust, it doesn't matter if they're a little bugged by what happened later. It's still, you know, bad.

I had a lot of fun playing the game. The zappy zappy was good. But that quest really put a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the game, and this isn't like God of War, where the story is only a vague backdrop for the hacking. Bioware is known for story, and they took a seriously wrong step here. If you want to cover this sort of material, fine. But treat it with respect, don't just make it a little side quest meant to make things all edgy, and certainly don't expect the player to continue to support the organization that created the horrors in the first place. As someone who sometimes takes games seriously as an art form, it's embarrassing.

Also, if you are forced to have these yahoos on your ship, "helping you", asking for favors, and bugging you with their issues, you should always have the option of feeding them into the mass-energy reactor. Hey, your ship has to be fueled somehow.

(And hey, Bioware, still love you, right? Let's not let this little tiff interfere with our deep and lasting relationship, OK?)

Another Nerd Sounds Off About Avatar!

(This article contains some spoilers about Avatar. And, since you've already seen it, it doesn't matter.)

A week after everyone else on the planet, I finally managed to take some time off from writing games to see Avatar (original name: Jake Sully Versus the Hippies From Space). I saw it projected on a flat surface, as opposed to in 3-D, because I am very old.

I agree with the conventional wisdom: The movie is super pretty. The plot and writing are a bit dopey, and the characters are cardboard. But, ooh! Shiny! It's fun enough to be worth seeing.

But whenever anything is seen by that many people and worms its way into the culture, it's fun and worthwhile to get all nitpicky and start digging into it ...

1. This io9 article, about how movies like Avatar are big First Worlder White Guy Wish-Fulfillment Fantasies, it perfectly designed to make the Internets explode with rage. The article is also kind of on target.

Look. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that surviving in a jungle wilderness, full of hostile creatures and food you have to hunt down yourself, is tricky. This is true whether you're in the Amazon or on Pandora. And I don't think I or anyone reading this could master the environment and learn everything you need to know AND learn the language AND master a whole new BODY in 30 days. Or 30 years. The life of a tribesman is hard, yo. Saying otherwise is clueless and condescending.

I, personally, would be too busy being eaten by a snake.

You can call me politically correct for saying this if you want. I will comfort myself with the fact that I am completely and obviously right.

But that's not to say that I think Avatar is all right-wing. Exactly the opposite ...

2. The Onion AV Club had an awesome article about how, no matter what you think of the plot or CGI, the movie Avatar pulls its weight by being so awesomely politically subversive.

Make no mistake. Those bloodthirsty marines (well, ex-marine corporate mercenaries, not that any of those exist in real life) and soulless corporate drones we're rooting against are there to represent us. They're out there shooting the natives and doing anything it takes to bring back the Whateverium, and the people back home couldn't give less of a crap. The movie gets us to cheer while they (we) are killed or kicked off in chains. It gets us to see ourselves as the bad guys. It's amazing what you can get away with when you're James Cameron.

I think the most fascinating thing about Avatar is the way it gets us to realize, in our bones, that the Na'vi will never, ever want to be us. They will never buy all that we're selling. I mean, they'd like some schools, and yeah, the medicine is nice, but we will never remake them in our own image. No price is high enough for them to let us have their Plotpointium.

It's a subtle point, and I doubt it will register much with many people. (Ooh! Shiny!) But it did make me think. I love our country, and our culture, and the Constitution and the principles we try to live by, even if we sometimes do our best to ignore them. And yes, it's OK for us to try to sell our ideas to other people. The whole story of human progress is the story of competing ideas.

But pick a country, say, Afghanistan. They have their own cultures and traditions and ideas, millenia old. And a lot of people there would rather die (or kill) than give up their idea set, no matter how tempting elements of ours might be. Avatar provides a nice reminder that some (probably most) people will never want to be us, no matter how much we offer in return. Of course, the movie really stacks the deck by making Pandora this hippie paradise with floating mountains and glowy flowers and crap like that, instead of an endless expanse of desert or rocky, inhospitable crags, but this actually kind of doesn't change anything. Living in a cruddy place doesn't make you any less attached to your fundamental worldview.

Not that the other cultures wouldn't like our goods and services, I'm sure. Medicine would be nice, thanks.

3. So the hot blue CGI boy and the hot blue CGI girl went and did it under the big, magical soul tree. OK, fine. But where were the other couples who went there to make out? Was that a privilege reserved for the chief's daughter? That's a pity, because that scene would have been a thousand times better for me if we were also hearing dozens of blue couples having rough, wild, noisy, awesome jungle sex in the background.

4. Actually, rooting against the marines did creep me out a little bit. I just finished watching the truly awesome Iraq war miniseries Generation Kill. I didn't always like the marines in that, but I sure was rooting for all of them to live.

5. I'm not sure what will happen in the years after the movie ends, but I strongly suspect that the words "orbital bombardment" will be involved.

6. Science fiction wanker note. If you want to see how similar storytelling ground was covered in a superior way over thirty years ago, track down a copy of The Word For World Is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin. Damn fine book.

There. More words written about Avatar. Obama saw it, so it must be worth the effort.

MiniReview - Dragon Age: Origins

I really did want to go on a bit about Dragon Age: Origins. Over the years, I've found that I've gotten pretty tired of computer RPGs. The single-player ones only rarely have any surprises, and MMORPGs only want to eat my life. And yet, I found Dragon Age to be entirely enchanting. Bioware is very, very good at what they do.

The plot, at its best, has this epic Lord of the Ringsy feel, in a good way. The voice acting and the writing are marvelous, and the game is frequently hilarious. The side chatter from your group when you take all of the evil characters out with you is worth the price of admission.

But the thing that struck me most is the role-playing aspect. (I'll have some very gentle spoilers in this bit.)

Attempts at having role-playing in computer games are frequently and justifiably mocked for giving facile choices between "Angelically Good" and "Absolutely Evil". When you find a hungry puppy, you can either crush it with a cinderblock or buy it a house of its own. There is no middle ground. And yes, Dragon Age has some of that.

But what impressed me is the number of situations where there are a lot of options, none of them are very good, and you just have to muddle through. For example, in one part of Dragon Age, a young, magically skilled boy has been taken over by a demon. He's been merrily trashing the countryside. It's a crappy situation, and you have to help them out of it. You can off the boy. Or let the mother sacrifice herself to enable you to challenge the demon. Or travel to the wizards' tower to maybe get a way to expel the demon, losing valuable time. And, should you challenge the demon, you can kill it or, in return for one of several lavish rewards, let it stay in the kid, hidden.

When I reached this point, I didn't see a perfect option. I had my own, "OhgodohgodwhatdoIdo?" moment. And my choice was, in retrospect, not a great one. But there is little I love more in an RPG then when I'm forced to stop, gobsmacked, and go, "Wow. I'm really on my own here. I'd better think about this ..."

Similarly, late in the game, the country is without a leader and you have to figure out who will end up king (or queen). This leads to a brief, marvelous series of conversations, full of power politics, ugly compromises, and the constant awareness that there is no "right" choice. That you can maneuver things so that you end up on the throne only adds to the awesomeness.

And, just before the endgame, when it seems that horrible sacrifices will happen, one of the characters approaches you and makes an offer that ... well ... I wish I had the audacity to put something so spectacularly bizarre and twisted into one of my games. (I really don't want to spoil it. And yes, I did take her offer.)

I tried to play the game as a goody-two-shoes. But Dragon Age has a way of making sure no good deed goes unpunished. By the end of the game, I was acting a whole lot more evil. Sometimes, evil just works better. And I think, more than anything, the way the game got me to smoothly and naturally make a shift like that says a lot about how subtle the "good" and "evil" choices within can be.

So I recommend it very strongly to anyone who likes computer RPGs. Just one warning. Normal difficulty can be pretty darn tricky, especially on a console. I love my XBox, but it's not really made for precisely controlling a group of four characters.

Review: Brutal Legend

I just finished playing Brutal Legend, and I wanted to hold forth on it. (The 'u' in Brutal is supposed to have an umlaut, but I'm too lazy to figure out how to type that. Sue me.) I was pretty much destined to play the game once I found out that Tim Schafer designed it. He did Psychonauts, which is one of the best video games ever. So he's earned some trust.

I really, really enjoyed the game. It's one of the very few games I've ever played where, at the end, I wished it had gone on longer. (Though, admittedly, this might mean it's too short). The main storyline is a mix of mindless battle, driving, and strategy game, and they all totally worked for me. It was also balanced to be, on Normal difficulty, pretty easy, which I appreciated. The storyline is pleasant, the writing is truly funny, and the voice acting is top notch.

And yet, the game has been lambasted by some sources I really thought would appreciate it, like Penny Arcade and Zero Punctuation. For exactly the reasons I liked it. Which bothers me in several ways.

(Well, Yahtzee, the guy who does Zero Punctuation, should be expected to hate it. That's just what he does. I have actually seen people consider Zero Punctuation to provide a serious and worthwhile critical judgment. Do Not Do This. Yahtzee makes his living saying bad things about games. That's his right. That also means he has a strong financial motive to not like games. Yahtzee is either a person who pretends to hate games to provide material for his videos or a guy who really does hate all games but still feels compelled to play them. Let us all hope, for his sake, that it is the former.)

The main source of contention is the strategy missions of the game. In these, you are still a warrior on the ground, doing battle and kicking ass. But the game then sucks in elements of real-time strategy games so that you can summon units to fight alongside you. What's more, you can combine with the units you make to use special badass attacks. For example, you can make tanks to fight beside you, but you can also jump in those tanks, drive them around, and shoot stuff. Or summon your armored car and screech around the battlefield and run people over. Or dive into the middle of attacking hordes and lay waste. Or just fly high up in the sky and pretend you're playing Starcraft. It's very open-ended.

I love this, because it means that the boss fights aren't all just tedious hackfests where you have to find out the enemy's oh-so-clever weak point. They are epic battles, and they should be. And it feels unique to me and (well, here comes the word) innovative.

But that's the problem.

People say they want innovation. But actually give them something different that they have to adjust to and they get all angry and full of nerdrage.

And, since he made something that plays in a new and different way and this threw some people off, Tim Schafer wrote a public letter giving some strategy advice. He received some mockery for this, but he is in the right. If unfamiliar gameplay makes some people freak out, some gentle tips for how to get back on the right track are all to the good. And he isn't at fault here, because the game has excellent tutorials and tips for how to play. And the thing really is balanced to be easy. And there is a huge amount of freedom in how you play the boss battles. You can try a lot of different things and win. You just have to, you know, try.

Now, the game isn't perfect. I think that the main quest is still a bit underfed to justify a full $60 price tag. I rented it. Though I've heard the online multiplayer is pretty good, which would goose the value a bit. But, in terms of fun, Brutal Legend is aces with me.

Now back to Dragon Age and Torchlight. My world is full of stat-building, horrifying brutality, and trying to unlock the lesbian sex scene.

Reviews - The Beatles: Rock Band and Guitar Hero 5.

I've written a lot about music games. How saying people should learn an instrument instead of playing them is dumb. How I think the genre is kind of doomed. But I'll love them while they last.

I've spent a lot of time lately with The Beatles: Rock Band and Guitar Hero 5. I am not proud of it, but it keeps me from playing with my children, so it's time well spent.

REVIEW OF THE BEATLES: ROCK BAND!

It's like a Rock Band game, but it's all Beatles songs. Therefore, it is awesome.

(That's pretty much it. But there is one interesting thing. Rock Band has totally changed the way I listened to music. Instead of hearing the song with all the instruments mushed together, I find I now often listen to individual tracks. I'll listen to the bass for a while, then the drums, and so on. It's a side-effect of listening to the songs and paying attention to individual notes, and it's pretty cool.

Thanks to the game, I find that my Beatles albums sound fresh and different. And, considering that I've heard these songs so many times they're part of my DNA, that alone makes the game worth my sixty bucks.)

REVIEW OF GUITAR HERO 5

I've always had the subtle feeling that Guitar Hero games hate me. Guitar Hero 5 is a huge step forward. It hates me, but only a little bit.

It has a million songs. Two of them I was desperate to have in a music game. (Smells Like Teen Spirit. Bullet With Butterfly Wings. Both awesome.) And 999,998 that make me go, "Whuh? Who?" 29 of the games 85 tracks are from the last three years, and none of them make me feel that there is any point in humanity producing more music from this point on.

The party modes are totally excellent. Anyone can play any instrument. The harsh tyranny of ever having the "Who's gonna' have to play bass?" conversation is gone forever. The campaign is really relaxed ... you can play each song on any instrument at any difficulty. The individual songs in the campaign mode each have a special challenge attached to them (hit all the notes in a certain section, play a bass song with only upstrums, etc), and these are surprisingly fun. Everything is much more polished.

Also, you can play as Kurt Cobain. My current basic line-up is my XBox Live avatar and three Kurt Cobains. This is just as awesome and appalling as it sounds. Especially when I play Jessie's Girl. Which is daily.

Also, the ability to play Cobain or Johnny Cash keeps you from having to look at the default musician models, which are just as unpleasant as ever.

But then, there is the hate. The guitar songs always seems to be a little bit unnecessarily complicated and overcharted, as if the designers wanted to make my hand hurt. The Guitar Hero people also haven't picked up Rock Band's knack of only picking songs that are fun on all instruments. Sure, having Sympathy For the Devil on your music game sounds awesome. Then you realize that the song is basically piano and conga drums. It's as awful to play as it sounds.

And sometimes, the hate is just mischievous. You know. Playful hate. For example, they boldly answered the call of the multitudes and put in a song by 70s rock sensation Peter Frampton. And, of course, the only reasonable option was to go to a live album and pick out a song FIFTEEN MINUTES LONG. Thinking about teenage boys going head to head online and randomly getting this song make's me giggle.

But, overall, it's fun. I've played it a lot, something I can't say for Guitar Hero: World Tour. Plus, buying Guitar Hero V early netted me a free copy of Guitar Hero: Van Halen, which I got in the mail last week. It's an awesome game ... If I place the disc on my new coffee table and then set my drink on it, it does an excellent job of keeping the moisture from damaging the wood.

Review: Secret Of Monkey Island, Special Edition.

I used to, in a prior century, be an absolute fiend for adventure games. I loved Infocom more than anything. I would spend three or four months trying to solve a game like, say, Zork II, going at it again and again, trying absolutely every little thing, so that I could have the joy and satisfaction of solving it without degrading myself by getting a hint. Months.

Wow. I was a dope.

It hurts me deeply to say it. But. Is there a genre of computer game that suffered a faster, harsher, and more deserved downfall than the adventure game, with its obscure, illogical puzzles and its total lack of hesitation about stopping you stone cold because you didn't notice some 2x2 pixel detail on the screen?

I don't want to spend too much time kicking a genre when it's down. It has already been taken to pieces better than I ever could here and here.

But adventure games are not dead. Now the flame is kept alive almost solely by Telltale Games, makers of the Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit, Tales of Monkey Island games, not to mention Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People. Good for them. It's a lonely vigil. (By the way, I've played Seasons One and Two of Sam & Max. Good games. Lots of fun, as long as you grab a hint any time you're stuck for more than fifteen minutes.)

Although my feeble old brain lacks the patience to bang away at adventure games like I used to, I do get the occasional nostalgic urge to play one for old times sake. And since The Secret Of Monkey Island is a classic which I managed to avoid playing, I jumped at the chance to play the Special Edition on XBox Live.

My review: If you hold down the 'X' button for a few seconds, the game gives you a hint. Do this every time you're stuck for more than fifteen minutes, and you'll have a fantastic time.

Longer version: It's extremely funny. It comes with an awesome feature where you can press a button to toggle between the original version of the game and the new spiffy version, which never stops being cool. Some of the puzzles are really ingenious. And, if you go too long without pressing 'X', it will remind you of everything that was horrible about adventure games.

An Example. (Warning! I am about to reveal the answer to a puzzle!)

So there's a fish on a dock. There is a seagull next to it. You need the fish, but you are afraid that, if you reach for it, the seagull will peck you. So you have to scare the seagull away.

This seems like it should be easy. You see, at this point in the game, you are carrying around a shovel and a sword. And I personally may be no pirate hero, but I assure you that I could use either of those items to scare away a seagull. Because, you know. Sword.

But that isn't the answer. You see, the board the seagull is standing on is loose. Note that there is no visual cue that the board is different from any other board. You need to walk around the dock until you hit the sweet spot and lift the board and knock the seagull away. Of course. The puzzle is solved by wandering around randomly. And hoping you step on the correct spot.

Getting stuck and needing to beg for help on something like this makes me feel angry and stupid. In any game, any bottleneck along the lines of "Be clever or be stuck here forever." is iffy design, at best. So now I mainly play games where the puzzle is how to get past the monster at the end of the hall and the only thing I have in my inventory is a big, big gun.

How Smart I Am ...

I needed about six hints to finish the game. Usually the hint just drew my attention to the door or little screen speck I missed. Playing the game in my TV instead of a monitor and moving the cursor around with a joystick instead of the mouse only makes it harder to find that vitally important hotspot that's about the size of an ant's booger. So be warned. You're gonna spend a lot of time staring.

But I shouldn't let this just be some big rant about adventure games. Monkey Island is really funny, most of the puzzles are neat, and it's a chance to sample gaming history.

But if you stop having fun, even for a moment, lean on that 'X' button and don't be ashamed. Every adventure game should have that feature. What do the developers care if I finish the game quickly? They already have my money!

Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers Review

I spent a bunch of time with Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers on XBox Live over the weekend. Perhaps a little obscure for a review. But I thought it, while fun, made a horrible mistake, something other developers can learn from.

Uh, Magic, Wut?

For those who never tried it, Magic: The Gathering is a very ingenious card game that has made about 3 batrillion dollars. You are, like, totally a wizard, and you wield a deck of cards that summon monsters and fire lightning bolts and other awesome stuff. The cool thing about the game is that you buy packs of cards, but the cards you get are random. You then pick the cards you like and build your own custom deck from that. And then you fight other people, who have their own nifty personal decks.

This is really cool because you can make a deck that best represents how you like to play games. You can make a deck with lots of fast nasty creatures and rush the opponent in a banzai rush, or a you can make a slower, more cerebral deck with powerful defensive cards to wear the opponent down before you fire back with one overwhelming blow. This customization aspect is easily the best part of the game.

So How's the Video Game?

Well, it's ten bucks. You play it, and they hand you a premade deck and you play with that. You battle against either AI opponents or other humans online. You do well, and you get a different fixed deck to play with. Some of the premade decks are OK. Others of them will teach you the joy of pure, undiluted frustration.

The game's production values are amazing. The AI is pretty darn good. The rules of Magic have been adapted to make a lively, fast-paced online version. The title is definitely fun enough to be worth ten bucks.

But it doesn't have the deck-building. You can only play with premade decks (which you can modify, but only very slightly, and usually for the worse). Sadly, playing with these decks is a pretty dry experience. If everyone was only able to play with premade decks, Magic: The Gathering would never have been any sort of success in the first place.

And thus, the horrible, horrible error.

Go On.

Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Magic, didn't make this game to get your ten bucks. It was clearly very expensive to develop, and they're never going to earn it from cruddy XBox Live purchases. They made this game to make Magic players, to get you to go to the store (or Magic Online) and plop down folding money to buy the actual cards. My guess is that they left deck-building out because they were, like, "We don't want to give those cheapskates out there the ability to actually play the game for a mere ten dollars? Who do they think they are? Lowly cretins."

That's the only reason I can think of for this decision. Compared to all of the production values they were pumping into the thing, adding deck-building to the game would be no trouble at all.

But, and this is the part all developers can learn from, they forget the first rule of making the demo for a game:

ALWAYS PUT YOUR BEST MATERIAL IN THE DEMO.

You don't want the demo to be fun. You want the demo to make people freaking fall in love with the game. You want to use the demo to fill customers with hot passion for your product. Believe me, if Duels of the Planeswalkers really gets someone interested in Magic, that person won't be sated by the rinky-dink assortment of cards and options available in the video game. They's gonna' go spend money. But, to make Magic into a video game, for whatever reason, they ripped its heart out. What is left might attract some players, but nowhere near as many as it would.

And Magic is expensive. They want players to drop a hundred bucks or more. This is a huge hurdle to jump over. You want people to make this sort of commitment? Then your demo has to pull out all of the stops. Not half of them.

When you make your demo, don't be grasping. Approach the player with glad heart and open arms. Show them your best stuff. Addict them. Enthrall them. And then, before they have time to tire of you, cut them off and ask for the money. That's how you do it.

My Personal Experience.

By the way, I was sucked into the Magic thing by the 1997 PC version of the game. It had, as much as possible, the full Magic experience, including deck-building. It was really made with passion for sharing the game. I played it. I saw what the game was really about. Then I went out and, over the next few years, spent tons of money on Magic cards. Just my personal experience, for what it's worth. Using a video game to suck people in to the paper game can work.

Of course, then again, I shouldn't criticize them for doing less to get people addicted to Magic. That's like being angry at dealers for selling less addictive heroin.

Resident Evil 5 and Racism!!!

First off, how's that for a article title? Doesn't that just get the blood flowing? (And also get this article to pop out nicely in a list of blog posts, thus generating more hits.) This is how sausage is made.

I got through about three quarters of Resident Evil 5 before my XBox died. I just got my replacement system, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to work up the energy to finish the game. This is a real disappointment to me.

I was really looking forward to Resident Evil 5, since Resident Evil 4 is one of my favorite shooters, like, ever. It was the first Resident Evil game I'd played, and man, I loved it. It's out for pretty much every system in existence. You really should play it, though the Intellivision and Vectrex ports are, frankly, subpar.

And Resident Evil 5 definitely has it's good points. It's very pretty. The battles are paced nicely. It gives you a period of exploration to catch your breath, and then it hits you with a horde of zombies. I'd prefer the hordes were bigger, but still, it rarely irritates you with enemies constantly coming in dribs and drabs. And the boss fights are very cool. I liked them a lot.

But there are several elements I found super-disappointing.

1. The Plot Is Dull. This simply amazes me. The game is about a zombie outbreak. In Africa. Zombies. In Africa. HOW CAN THAT NOT BE AWESOME!?!? Packed cities. Desperately poor people with automatic weapons. Incompetent and corrupt governments. Plus, you know, the relentless assault of the living dead.

And yet, the plot is just sludge. Most of it involves finding out what happened to the former partners of the two main characters (about which I could not care less) and chasing some terrorist for reasons that are never explained. (We're supposed to hate him as part of some Pavlovian response to him being called a terrorist. Didn't work.) And, while the city settings are cool and creepy, you're soon wandering around solving puzzles in some generic ancient tomb, losing all of the awesomeness of being in Africa.

What a waste.

2. The Inventory System Constantly Spoils Your Fun. Fighting the inventory system is a constant distraction. The inventory system in Resident Evil 4 was cool and realistic, and I actually had fun shifting the items around in my briefcase to solve the puzzle of making things fit. In comparison, the new system is an aggravation and trading gear back and forth with your partner is doubly so.

Now, I know I wrote a few months ago how you shouldn't be afraid to make changes to your game. But that doesn't mean every change is good. You must be merciless about improving the worst elements of your design, but you also should be determined to leave alone the parts that are actually good.

3. About the Racism Thing. I didn't have any problem with this for most of the game. You have to fight zombies somewhere. And, wherever they are, you're gonna' shoot a bunch of former people. Having that take place in Africa is no more racist then setting the action in Dubuque. The early levels, in the city, are very foreign and cool, and I think you'd have to be pretty oversensitive to have a problem with them.

Then you go out into the back hills. You enter villages of straw huts and fight zombies wearing straw skirts and wielding spears. And the bosses are ooga booga witch doctors with big masks.

I'm not going to call this racist. Throwing that accusation around cheapens it. It's not racist. It's just dumb. I may be wrong, but I suspect, if you go to an African village today, the young men won't have grass skirts and spears. They will be wearing ratty t-shirts and wielding AK-47s. And they will mess you up.

This is like setting the game in modern-day Japan and having the villages be full of sumo wrestlers, samurais, and J-pop stars. Although, of course, if this was the case, I would never stop playing that game.

Also, since every pot in the villages was full of either gold coins or bullets, I think they could afford something a little deadlier than spears.

4. Oh. One more race comment. About your hot, sexy, hot girl sidekick. She's an amazing bit of art direction. It's amazing how they were able to make her as white-looking as a human being could possibly be and still be plausibly identified as not white. I'm just sayin'.

This is all not so much a review as a bunch of impressions. And a bit of public mourning. I suppose it was foolish to expect more, but after the pure game goodness of Resident Evil 4, I wish I could say more than, "Meh. It's worth a rental."

Oh, and to pre-empt any criticism. I'm not politically correct. I'm just plain correct.

Thoughts On Plants vs Zombies

I just spent a bunch of time playing almost all of Plants vs Zombies. Then I watched my seven-year old daughter play it. She loves it. A fairly fun game, and, from an Indie gaming perspective, very, very interesting. If you haven't yet, first watch the viral video that's been selling the game like mad. After that, trying the demo (at the very least) is really worthwhile.

Some observations ...

1. You Could Have Written This Game. - Two or three dedicated people, in two years, could make this game. It'd take hard work and skill, of course, but that is always true. Even in the age of the blockbuster, a small, good team can still make a title that gets a lot of attention.

2. You Can Do Something New With An Old Genre. - If someone had e-mailed me a year ago and asked my opinion about whether it would be worthwhile to write a tower defense game, I would have been, like, "Are you crazy? The secret is to find an underserved market you can really rock, not an insanely saturated one." Shows how little I know. If a genre is popular, it's always possible for a really smart designer to find a new angle on it and gain some serious traction.

3. The Game Is EASY. - Wow, is it easy. Tower defense games are general about being ground down by stronger and stronger waves of implacable foes until your inevitable defeat. Not your cheery, casual-friendly sort of thing. Plants vs. Zombies starts easy and stays easy. Anyone with much gamer experience is going to chew it up and spit out the bones. Only the final survival mode levels (which you have to play most of everything to unlock) require any real thought.

This is GENIUS. I think, if the game is a real success, resisting the urge to make it hard will account for most of the victory. It made it a potential buy for a whole new universe of fans, and, to keep the hardcore around, it has a clever strategy ...

4. A Thousand New Things Is a Thousand New Things - There are dozens of plants you can buy and dozens of types of zombies to fend off. Even when the game is so easy as to be a bit tedious (as I found), the new stuff really helps to maintain interest.

The thing is, most of the new stuff is fairly shallow. "Here's a zombie with a special sort of shield." "Here's a plant that can shoot around that shield." Only a few of the plants and zombie types are really unique, but the constant barrage of pretty new stuff is enough to maintain interest.

In sum, interesting stuff. And the game is a bit on the casual side for me, but I did enjoy it. And it helped to pass the time until my XBox gets fixed.