I'm a swinger: Pandemic, FEAR 2 Demo, Left 4 Dead MP, Bejeweled 2

I've had a chance to do a bunch of "brief" gaming over the past couple of days. There were highs and lows and in-betweens. I dealt with my biggest "low" in a previous post re: Sonic Chronicles (the DS game by Bioware).

Some of the highs and interestings:

Pandemic is a great co-op board game. There are many things that this game does well, but I think that the key things it executes on are: 

• Vicissitude: The game plays like one imagines a real pandemic might play out -- lots of ups and downs, some randomness that never seems arbitrary or unfair, and a constant feeling of tension.
• Flow: Unlike many competitive turn based board games, the fact that players are constantly engaged and working together means that you're always "in the game".
• Accessibility: I can't remember a board game that had such instant appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike. I still remember the first night of game play (over New Years) when I was listening to people play (a mix of gamers and non-gamers). The non-gamers were the first to chime in with "Can we play again?" after they'd watched the world succumb to pandemic.

The FEAR 2 demo had its ups and downs. On the plus side, I love the IP and the feel of the world. 

• The initial experience was very well polished: Creepy, engaging, and it taught me the game play basics in an engaging and entertaining way.
  
• Controls seemed a little overly complex. But I'd recently been playing Fallout 3 (as a small arms gunner) and Left 4 Dead, so I did expect a learning (and unlearning) curve.
• I also appreciated their Game Shell UI: It had a nice flow that only a few other games have used. First it helped me calibrate my display screen (it's a dark game, so it needs to be optimized based on display device -- CRT, Projector, LCD, TV, etc). Second, it had helpful descriptive labels for difficulty settings (self-reported behavior) to help players get into the right experience.
• My main dislike is that I don't like the way my character moves. I can't remember if there was the sense of gravity and inertia in the original (I played it a bit on the PC). But it's distracting and even slightly nauseating to me -- and I can't turn it off or reduce it. I like a little bit of loping/head bobbing (I think Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay got it right) or using some gravitational force/drag when my character is injured, but I think it was ratcheted up a little too high for default running around. Felt almost like Conker when he woke up hungover and unable to move. Frustrating.
• I'm torn re: health packs. I thought I never wanted to see them again after playing a bit of Call of Duty 3 (rest and recover model) and then trying Resistance: Fall of Man (old school med kits). However, games like Left 4 Dead remind me that health packs can add to the experience.

I then jumped into Left 4 Dead to play some MP. Basically I wanted to find out what it was like to play as a zombie. True to most Valve games, there was a ton of depth and a myriad of cool things to explore from the zombie side of things. The stats were detailed so as to make the scoring system transparent -- although I still never really grasped how team points really worked. 

One of the coolest parts of playing as a zombie (other than vomiting, strangling, and otherwise tormenting survivors) is that you get to see the game through several different sets of fresh eyes:

• As director: You get a glimpse of the "set" from behind the scenes. You see the "actors" (the survivors) doing their thing and fade more into the background. It's really quite surreal and often it is quite fun to just watch the action unfold while waiting to respawn.
• As a study in AI: You have goals (kill survivors, score points, retribution) and abilities (climbing, moving, attack, special). The level is seeded with various grippy UI (where undead can climb and go); closed doors are marked as "breakable"; and you can see silhouttes of your various conspirators and the survivors. I couldn't help but try to deconstruct how AI bots must "see" the level and pursue their "goals" because many of the in-game UI elements seemed like debug tools (albeit with a fine sheen of visual polish) to study and optimize AI behavior.

I kind of wish I could play as the zombies against an entire AI party of survivors. maybe the survivor AI hasn't been optimized for "leaderless" level progression, but still it would be cool to see (although I concede it may not be fun to play).

I finished the night off with some XBLA Bejeweled 2. I've written about my love-hate relationship with Bejeweled Blitz (Facebook) elsewhere, but I basically just wanted to check out the mechanics on the Xbox controller and see if I couldn't learn some more strategies by being able to take turns > 1 minute in length.

As it turns out, Bejeweled isn't very fun to play with the Xbox controller. It's hard to quickly move your selector to a place of interest and there are aiming issues (I often moved a gem the wrong direction by mistake) which makes the game very different, strategically speaking, from the tightly time-constrained FB version. 

I also think that playing on my projector made the game harder to play because I had to physically turn my head to see parts of the board instead of being able to take the whole board in at a glance on the PC monitor-sized version.

That said, it was still a relaxing game to play. I had fun trying to cheese out some Achievements even though I didn't really learn any new strats.

Quick Diversion: Sonic Chronicles

I'm not a big DS RPG player -- and I don't think that Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood is going to make a convert out of me.

The biggest problem so far (the first 10 minutes) is that there is no flow. The UI is cryptic and hard to manage, there's far too much reading (for my liking), and far too much flipping between the dual screens to make it easy to follow along with the story. Moreover, control is constantly being ripped from the player's hands by "cut scenes" that introduce too many characters and concepts at once.

The core mechanic should be fun enough to just "play with" in some sort of sand box mode until the player is ready to layer on some additional features and concepts. Ideally the first few few minutes will proceed more at the player's pace as he or she figures out the basic mechanics and controls. 

The other thing I noticed right away: I couldn't figure out which buttons to press to have Sonic move and jump. I soon realized that this was because the game is intended to be played button-free. Just the stylus. Now, I love me a good pixel hunter game and am generally a fan of the stylus input. But if I have an avatar in a 3-d isometric world and there are rings for me to pick up and ledges for me to jump up to, then I really (REALLY) want to use the Dpad and face buttons to interact with the world. 

If it looks like a platformer, it should play like a platformer. Sure, you can add RPG elements (maybe more story; maybe some skill advancement like in Ratchet & Clank). But the core mechanic of world exploration, jumping, and ring-picking-up needs to be more satisfying than pressing the stylus on the screen.

The problem gets worse when it comes to the "chase" minigame. What might normally be a fun challenge (running a course where you need to dodge obstacles and hit power ups) becomes tedious and boring. 

If there was a cool and inviting flow, I could probably look past some of the glaring usability issues that confuse and annoy me. But there wasn't, so I couldn't.

• The chase sequence seemed optimized for right handed pen users. My stylus hand blocked the screen when I tried to tap Sonic to make him jump. 
• Moreover, during the chase sequence I couldn't figure out whether or not I was making progress, whether Sonic had to beat his pink sidekick to win a race, or even who I was racing against in the end.
• The UI screens require far too much text explanation -- and similar to other Bioware games, the first time players visit a new UI screen they are blasted with a wall of explanatory text that has no context and is skipped or forgotten immediately.
• Dialog trees were hard to figure out and difficult to navigate.

Interestingly, combat was one area that I thought was kind of fun. Mainly this was because it was a familiar turn-based format that is typical of many jRPGs, with an improved selection model (target an enemy with the stylus instead of toggling through them with the Dpad).

Although use of the stylus should have made spell casting/special moves even more fun to execute, the stylus UI indicators were hard to parse and the initial "spell" that Sonic was equipped with was too difficult to execute properly.  The game would have benefitted immensely by starting players off with simpler spells that recharged quickly (instead of a hard to execute spell that takes forever to recharge).

I'll keep the game in my backpack for now. I figure I need to spend at least another hour or so in order to pass final judgment. 

That said, it's hard for me to imagine whether the story behind Sonic will be enough to keep me interested in what is, after all, a DS platformer.

Guitar Hero: World Tour and Left 4 Dead

It was a weekend of high profile titles: One new IP (Left 4 Dead) and one sequel (GH: 4).

Left 4 Dead is an example of a game that is built for co-operative play from the ground up. Notice even that the top option on the Start Menu is to play the co-op campaign. Second option: MP. Third option: Single Player game.

I haven't played with strangers yet (or MP variants), but so far the game has been a blast. Nail biting suspense, tactical depth that makes the game challenging and fun, and decent bots to substitute for when you don't have enough friends online and don't want to play with strangers.

When you get to spend 3 years loving, crafting, and building a game that -- at its core -- is based on an extremely fun premise (co-op survival horror vs. zombies) and you are committed to iterative design, you have an opportunity to deliver a powerful and polished experience. Valve has done just that.

Guitar Hero: World Tour is a game I'd been meaning to pick up for a while. I've written about the "flow" that I've experienced on a couple of occasions while playing Rock Band with friends and I wanted to study that a bit more. The initial experience was daunting and not really optimized for a more "newb" like myself... But once I got going I definitely got sucked in and I can't wait to play some more.

I'll have more specific comments and updates as I dive deeper into both of these games. I also have 2 DS games on the way (I'll be traveling a bunch, so I figured I should): 

• Sonic Chronicles (the Bioware RPG starring Sonic)
• Nancy Drew: Mystery of the Clue Bender Society (I want to see how these games translate to other platforms)

Some gaming updates: Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, Conan, Bejeweled Blitz

First things, first.

I finally cracked 100,000 points on the Facebook app Bejeweled Blitz. I've been struggling for over a month to do so while some of my "less serious gamer" friends reached this mark with little or no struggle at all. 

I've been trying to figure out "what gives?" Many folks tell me "it's all luck". But I guarantee that I've played more rounds of BB than these friends, so that kind of rules chance out. What I'm left to believe that I was systematically pursuing strategies that were leading me to perform worse than chance.

As someone who spends his professional career breaking down core game play mechanics, this has been a very humbling experience. Now I need to see if I can replicate my success (as my other friends have done) and then analyze what I'm doing now that I wasn't doing before.

On another note, I just received a copy of Conan. I don't know much about the game, except that it's from THQ and I know one of the design leads who provided a lot of combat mechanics, balance, and pacing feedback to the development team. He wrote an article about it in Game Developer that was quite instructive. I'm curious to see how the "learn as you play" was structured and how the challenge ramp was built with the goal of applying some of those findings to other games I am working on.

And, just to take a completely different tangent, I also fired up Guitar Hero: World Tour and watched Liza play some Wii Fit. GH:WT has some interesting usability challenges associated with it. I only spent a few minutes with it, so haven't formed any complete impressions. It looks like the kind of game where the design intentions were noble (Quick Play mode; Tutorials; customer generated content sharing; "Beginner" difficulty level) but somehow along the way it crossed the fine line of "you're killing me with all this help". It's already a game about sensory overload (especially when you add band mates and beers), so the question becomes: How do you please everybody (and this is a game with a mass following of diverse gamers) without failing certain basic use cases (like easy to jump into party mode; co-op tutorial sessions; etc).

More thoughts to come.

The night ended with Liza demonstrating some of her new Wii Fit accomplishments and having a quick 27 minute workout. It's amazing how all of the sudden it hits you that you've done almost a half an hour of exercise. Yeah, there are problems with the trainers (they're creepy) and the challenge ramp (it seems like there should be at least one more step between Basic and Advanced for some exercises), this is one of those games that could probably change someone's life around. I'm excited about doing some of the stretching and balance exercises -- they'll be really helpful for hockey. And some of the strength exercises also look pretty darn useful.

Tweaks to the blog...

I've been spending a bunch of time over the past few days twiddling with this site. Mostly I've been fiddling with widgets and trying to integrate my Twitter feed.

I decided to try a new name for now, as well. I like "Think - Play - Write" for its directness. "Jackalshorns" keeps it fun (and ties it into my online gaming presences)

For fun I looked up some possible latin translations (a sort of equivalent to the classic "veni, vidi, vici" or "cogito ergo sum"). I made some fairly entertaining discoveries regarding the word "play".

Some translations: 

• Ludo - "To Play" (the most literal translation)
• Desipio -- "To Act Foolishly / To Play the Fool / To Make an Ass of One's Self" (this could easily describe some of my gaming experiences)
• Ineptio -- "To Play the Fool / To Trifle" (kind of interesting and funny at the same time)
• Lascivio -- "To Run Riot, Play, Be Wanton" (oh, yeah!)

I almost went with Desipio - Cogito - Perscribo as it works on multiple levels, but thought it might be too meta.