Smartbomb

Yesterday on TRAIN WEEK we looked at games that played off the restrictive nature of travelling on rails. Today we’re going to make a short detour through a siding to consider games in which trains symbolise technological development. Obviously trains aren’t the most amazingly futuristic devices in the world, but – perhaps influenced by the current state of our technological development – trains often represent technology which is both high in standard and widely available.

Typically one of the first technologies discovered in a game of Civilization is The Wheel, which unlocks the ‘road’ tile improvement. Roads generally provide two benefits: a movement bonus for units, and a trade bonus for cities. Generally speaking, players primarily use roads to connect their cities (to make use of the movement bonus), and then fill in the spaces around cities with networks of roads that go nowhere (to maximise the trade bonus). Quite late in the game – around the late industrial period – players can research the Railroad technology, which allows them to upgrade their roads, improving the movement and trade bonuses. The process repeats – major city links are upgraded, then minor cities, then bored Worker units cover the countryside in steel rails.

The result is that, at the end of a long game of Civilization, the world map resembles an endless spaghetti junction of twisting railways. It looks ridiculous – as with many other aspects of Civilization‘s design, railways aren’t supposed to appear realistic but instead just represent a certain tile upgrade concept. What’s notable is that rail is presented as a straight upgrade over road, and the huge time gap between discovering The Wheel and discovering Railroad puts it in a very privileged position in the player’s mind – perhaps even more so when you consider that this is generally the only situation in which a tile upgrade can itself be upgraded!

Sim City on the SNES tells a similar story. From the start of the game players have access to both road ($10 per tile) and rail ($20 per tile). Both tiles function in exactly the same way, except road tiles generate traffic and pollution, while rail tiles generate none. There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to build road instead of rail, except to save $10 per tile, which isn’t really a worthwhile saving once you have to start paying out more to deal with the consequences of having a city clogged with traffic – in practice, players will find themselves scanning the city data maps for heavy traffic, deleting those sections of road, and replacing them with rail – at a total cost of at least $31 per tile!

This is one of many examples of Sim City‘s political bias – in this case, the idea that public transport (in the form of a light rail service) is a desirable replacement for roads and private cars. Speaking as someone who used to live in Gothenberg, it doesn’t sound so crazy to me! But regardless of how you feel about the statement, it is relevant to us as another example of trains being presented by the game rules as an aspirational technology – the pinnacle towards which players (and by extension, real-world city planners) should work.

The above scene from Secret of Mana is one of those moments where everything you thought you knew is turned on its head. The game is a fantasy RPG not unlike Zelda – there are swords, there is magic, there be dragons. Aside from a couple of lines in the prologue about an extinct civilisation there are very few hints as to what lies in wait towards the end of the game, but the player receives a strong clue deep beneath the legandary sunken continent. Now resembling a coral reef, players can only access this area through the temple of Dryad – the only building not to have been swallowed up by the sea when the island sank in ancient times. To begin with it looks more or less the same as any other temple in the world of Mana – the same tilesets, but with different colours and tints to reflect the patron spirit – but as the lower levels of the temple open out into an underground city, players begin to notice unusual new background graphics and objects creeping into the game. And then they board a subway train.

The change in environment comes as a real shock! It’s as if you’ve fallen out of Shadows Over Mystara and landed in Final Fight. The use of a subway train in this manner informs the player that the ancient civilization that built the city were technologically advanced, and had all kinds of junk which has since been lost to the world (later you will wonder whether the zombies on the subway are supposed to represent dead commuters who have been riding the rails since their civilisation fell to disaster). The everyday nature of subway trains makes this location instantly recognisable despite being so unexpected, and begins the set-up for some of the big twists going into the final chapter of the game; obviously the train is a much more advanced technology than has been seen previously in the game, but I think what really makes this scene work is that it’s presented in such an unassuming manner. It carries a deeper implication – not just that this kind of technology existed in the past, but that it was just a normal part of everyday life.

The other notable feature of this subway train fight is that the players have to deal with the shape of the carriage. There are many smaller areas in the game, but few with such an awkward shape  – zombies often wander off between seats, forcing the player to join them in these enclosed spaces as demonstrated in the above screenshot. Tomorrow we will look at this aspect of the train experience in more depth – the sense of binding, the claustrophobia, and the intimacy of travelling within a small, locked box.

TRAIN WEEK
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Previously on TRAIN WEEK we saw that trains often symbolise transportation between distant environments – not just geographical, but sometimes metaphorical. It’s important to remember that this transportation takes place in a very fixed manner – the player must follow certain routes through the rail network, and cannot simply transport themselves to any point in the game. Today we will focus on this element of the train experience: not the train itself, but the rails upon which it rides.

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks is a lovely little DS game that supports my claim that the best Zelda games are the weird little ‘side-story’ ones that fall outside the usual format. I think the inspiration for the train gameplay comes from The Phantom Hourglass (the previous DS Zelda game), which allowed the player to sail freely on the open seas (as in Wind Waker) but used a strange interface that forced the player to set their course on the map whenever they wanted to go anywhere. I suppose this was a way to compensate the player for losing the fine analogue control on the DS that they had on the GameCube, and obviously the context for the change is that you’re piloting a steamship instead of a sailboat – it’s far less reactive, you don’t have to work with the changing winds. Clearly it was a short jump from setting a course in Phantom Hourglass to plotting a route through Spirit Tracks‘ rail network.

The bulk of Spirit Tracks is spent travelling around the kingdom and restoring the eponymous long-lost magical rails to their former glory. In game design terms, it’s a literal form of railroading the player so they can only access certain areas of the game. I think players are much more accepting of this idea that trains can only run on rails than they are of more common restrictive devices. Consider this: how many times have you stood next to a locked wooden door with a rocket launcher in your hands, only to be told you need to find a tiny key to proceed?

Unlike Phantom Hourglass, the player isn’t limited to travelling the route they drew on the map, but can use controls like track switches to control their movements on-the-fly. One of the main reasons to do this is because of the strange ‘train combat’ system – there are EVIL TRAINS rolling around the network which the player must avoid. They can be incapacitated by cannon shots but (as far as I know) cannot be destroyed. Racing an enemy train towards a junction so that you can turn off and prevent a head-on collision is a defining Trains In Games experience! These moments of tension, and the exhilaration of success, only come about because the player must abide by the logic of rail travel; as is the case with all games, the fun comes from submitting to the pleasurable bondage of rules and restrictions.

It’s worth adding that the train gameplay Spirit Tracks isn’t limited to being a means of transportation for the player. Later in the game, the player unlocks passenger and cargo carriages, and can pick up NPCs and goods from some of the stops on the network and transport them to their desired destinations. What I love about this mode of play is that the player must not only pick a route through the rail network, and also avoid the evil enemy trains, but also obey any trackside signs telling them what speed to travel at or when to toot the train’s whistle! If you fail to obey these instructions – taking a tight corner too quickly, or entering a cave without signalling – you will upset your passengers and risk them jumping off your train in a rage. This moves the game into genuine train driving territory, like a primary-coloured Densha De Go! for children.

Many people are familiar with the Advance Wars series, although few are aware that its lineage stretches back to Famicom Wars, released way back in 1988. ALL of the Famicom Wars games have interesting little distinct features and are worth playing If You Like This Sort Of Thing – they’re entirely in Japanese, but series regulars should figure out the controls easily enough – and one such innovation in Super Famicom Wars (pictured) was the introduction of trains.

Certain maps include predefined railway lines, as shown, which usually connect strategic outposts in the same way as roads. Their function is to bear train units, which are built at special railyard buildings. Sadly there’s only one train unit in the game, but it’s multifunctional – it can transport up to two infantary units at once, it’s armed with a large artillery-style cannon, and it’s FAST! The downside is, of course, that it can only move along the railway lines, so their range and effectiveness are greatly defined by the map designer. It’s also pretty expensive, but you can’t put a price on cool.

Fans of the later games may recognise some of these traits from the Piperunners introduced in Advance Wars: Dual Strike. I think of the Piperunners are a kind of weird, long-forgotten cousin of the other Advance Wars units. They have a clear strategic position within your army – unlike Medium Tanks for example, which occupy a pretty worthless area between Light Tanks and Neotanks on the cost/effectiveness scale – and I think they demonstrate the value that rail units can add to the gameplay. I’d like to see railways brought back to the series, with dedicated ‘transport’ and ‘artillery’ units available – dare I suggest some kind of engine/carriage arrangement?!

Sticking with the subject of strategy games, one of my favourite levels in StarCraft II was this train robbery mission. Similar to the Star Fox 64 level we looked at on Monday, the player is dropped into an enemy base to destroy supply trains and disrupt their war effort. Its purpose in the campaign arc is to introduce the player to the Diamondback unit, an armoured hovercraft that can fire its laser cannon while moving – a vital tool against these unstoppable moving targets!

For me this level plays out like a tower defence map but – unlike most tower defence games – the route your enemies follow changes with each wave. You can strategise around the layout of the rails on the ground (eg. setting up choke points at junctions, where more trains are likely to pass) but you can’t deploy your units with confidence until the next route flashes up on your mini-map. While our last two examples used rail lines to restrict how the player achieves her objectives, StarCraft II uses them to define the objective itself.

Age of Empires III is set during the colonial period in North America. My favourite thing about this game is the concept of persistent ‘home cities’ that develop and grow with every completed battle, and the customisable deck of reinforcement cards that you can draw upon, but sadly none of that is relevant to TRAIN WEEK.

What is relevant is the appearance of steam trains, as seen in the above picture. Most maps include long, snaking trade routes, served by an endless flow of travelling NPCs. Players can capture trading posts at key locations on the route, and from these posts can upgrade the trade route – from carts to stagecoaches, and then to trains. As the route is upgraded, players earn more money whenever an NPC passes a trading post.

Similar to StarCraft II, the trading routes define fixed strategic lines across the map, in contrast to strategic points (such as resource mines or tribal settlements). Sadly there’s no way to attack or hijack the train, but it impacts on gameplay in that any player who holds a trading post can see the line of sight around the train’s position. Players who are performing any kind of strategic actions near a trade route must be mindful of the train’s location, or else risk giving their movents away to any other players in possession of a trading post.

Their other notable contribution to the game is to be a symbol of the industrial age; a visual reminder that times are changing and technology is improving. The representation of trains as high technology is more common than you’d think – arguably it can be applied to every case we have looked at so far – and will be the focus of tomorrow’s article!

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Yesterday I wrote about games that start with a train journey, how they signify the player-character arriving in a strange new place full of mysteries to uncover. The implication is that they have travelled from another, more familiar place, but the train journey has transported the character – and the player – out of their normal world. The act of transportation is a common element of Trains In Games, and today I’d like to focus on games that play on this concept.

While Animal Crossing portrays rail travel with quaint realism, Final Fantasy VI pushes it to a metaphysical extreme. Taking the idea of transportation to its limit, the world of FF6 includes a phantom train that transports the souls of the dead to the afterlife. This steam-driven psychopomp is the setting for a short chapter of the game, but also serves as a boss fight – another boss so large that it becomes the environment. I probably wouldn’t care so much about this scene, except for the fact that players can command the hunky wrestling prince Sabin to LIFT THE TRAIN OF THE DAMNED OFF ITS TRACKS AND SUPLEX IT INTO THE GROUND. This is not just a great example of Trains In Games; it is not just a great moment in videogame wrestling; it is one of my favourite moments in the whole of videogame history.

Going off on a slight tangent, this talk of death and the afterlife reminds me of a level of The Addams Family on the SNES, in which the player has to ride a toy train through a room lined with hazards. This is an unusual example in that the player is standing on top of the train instead of inside a carriage, serving as a boundary case with more conventional moving platforms in games (which observe many of the same principles of fixed routes and restricted movement, of course). What separates it from the other examples in this group is that the others all use train journeys as shorthand for ‘transportation’ – the player usually jumps on, watches a cutscene, and jumps off in a strange new place – but The Addams Family draws your attention to the journey itself. Here you experience the train as a mobile sanctuary, safely bearing you through a dangerous environment, but forcing you to witness your passage and appreciate the train for the assistance it offers.

You didn’t really expect me to write a week’s worth of posts without mentioning Pokémon, did you?

One of the most mind-blowing moments in Pokémon Gold/Silver occurs after the player has ostensibly finished the game. After defeating the Elite Four, the player unlocks a ferry route across the country, taking them back to the region where the earlier Pokémon Red/Blue games took place. Little has changed since the events of the first game, but one new addition is the high-tech Magnet Train that runs between the two distant regions. Repairing the malfunctioning Magnet Train is an optional quest, but doing so allows the player to move between Kanto and Johto instantly, at any time. It serves as a means of transportation between not just the two regions, but also the two generations of games. It also makes a comment about the train as a technological advancement – until the train is restored, the player’s only means of travelling between regions is to either walk on foot through a dangerous mountain cave, or wait for the twice-a-week ferry service to ship them across. The Magnet Train is by far the fastest and most convenient option.

The thing I find most interesting about the Magnet Train quest is that the final challenge is to obtain a rail pass from a young girl whose family were displaced by the new station. She lost her favourite stuffed toy during the move, and the player is sent out to search for it! It’s a story that catches my attention because it takes an unexpectedly negative view of the train – Pokémon games always carry a vehemently eco-friendly message, and it’s really quite striking when an otherwise normal NPC questions the growth of green technology. It’s a very rare occurance!

Finally we have Shadowrun on the SNES, an outstanding example of a contemporary urban RPG. Players tramp burnt-out hacker Jake Armitage around the decaying futuristic streets of Seattle, fighting off hitmen and scrimping together cash to pay for back-alley cybernetic implants. Given its urban setting, it’s only natural that the player should make use of the city’s subway system to travel between different areas; what makes it relevant to this article is that, at the start of the game, the local subway station is closed.

Everything I’ve said about how trains represent transportation? Flip that round. For the opening chapter of the game, this subway station represents an outside world that you cannot access. It taunts and teases you by showing trains rumbling past the background while denying you access. It’s a big fat cork that keeps you trapped in a bottle. It tells you that, for the time being, you need to turn around, go back down the street, and continue your investigation!

Tomorrow I will make a slightly clumsy logical leap into talking about the nature of trains being tied to fixed routes.

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Hopefully you won’t be surprised when I say that many games start with the player-character arriving somewhere. It’s a plot device that marks the player as an ‘outsider’, dropping them into an alien environment that they must explore, and gives some context as to why they have no established relationships with the characters they meet. Notable exceptions such as Shenmue can seem a bit strange sometimes – it doesn’t make sense for a local boy like Ryo to get lost around Yokosuka, yet when I’m playing it happens all the time!

The mode of transportation can vary wildly – a broken mast in A Link to the Past, a chartered helicopter in Dead Rising, the dreams of an extinct civilisation in Final Fantasy X – and of course some proportion of games begin with a train journey. What might surprise you is that the games that begin with a train journey are usually totally excellent. I wouldn’t say that starting a game with a train journey makes the game good in itself, but I might suggest that people who make good games understand that trains are excellent. We will begin by looking at a game series that is all about railroading: Half-Life.

The opening scene of Half-Life made waves at the time by establishing Valve’s now-standard practice of forgoing cut-scenes and always giving the player full control of their character. In practice during this tram ride, the player only has control over what they are looking at – something I’ve written a lot about in the past – but it demonstrates four common thematic elements of Trains In Games that I’ll be coming back to over the next few days.

1) Trains transport people

Gordon Freeman’s first-day-at-work tram ride into Black Mesa is a psychological voyage into another world. The player is treated to a slideshow of what is to come – the office space with vending machines and mysterious men in suits, the helicopter in the canyon, the robot working in a pit of luminous green liquid – and comes to a rest in a mysterious dark chamber far removed from the outside world. The distance travelled, the advanced technology on display and the heavy security systems that are in place all signify to the player that they have left normality behind.

2) Trains travel along fixed routes

This is great news for game designers because it gives them a lot of authorial control over when and how the player experiences game content. Even in an open world game like Grand Theft Auto, as soon as the player steps onto a train they can control where the player will go and how they will get there – the principle seems to be that, if you want to benefit from the speed and convenience of a train, you must sacrifice control over your journey. This is important for the Half-Life intro because it forces the player to witness each of these scene-setting vignettes in order – hoping that, amongst other things, they notice the mysterious G-Man appearing repeatedly.

3) Trains represent technology

This might seem like an odd claim to make in a game about warp research and alien invasion, but I think it holds up in the sense that the tram system – particularly with regard to the huge blast doors that help to buffer loading times between areas – is ridiculous. This is a standard of light transport system that is the traditional reserve of rich megalomaniacs with secret lairs hidden inside volcanoes. It impresses upon you that Black Mesa is a sprawling, well-funded facility where Serious Business takes place. Throughout the examples I use this week, you may notice that trains are often used in this way, to signify the level of technology available to the society in which they are produced.

4) Trains are restrictive spaces

While train networks represent freedom of movement between distant locations, trains themselves are very close environments. Carriages – which are already quite thin – are usually crammed full of seats, tables, private rooms, or cargo, leaving very little room to maneuver, and their linear topography means that players generally only have a choice between moving in two directions: forward or back. Similar to the earlier point about fixed routes, this factors into the tram scene in that the player can’t really go anywhere or do anything EXCEPT look at the curious activity taking place around the tram.

The tram ride scene was so effective, so memorable, that Valve gave it a callback in Half-Life 2. Play begins with Gordon arriving by train at the oppressive urban occupied zone of City 17, stepping out into a cavernous Soviet-era railway station which has been retrofitted with a maze of wire fences and alien surveillance equipment. This train ride is a lot shorter than in the previous game – most of the scene-setting takes place as you walk through the station’s ‘security’ processes, experiencing the powerlessness of living in a police state – but it takes on the character of a poisoned arrow being shot into the heart of a brutal regime. Its deadly payload of hope and rebellion are spread by the player throughout the city, causing Dr. Breen’s administration to wither and die.

Similar things can be said about the opening scene of Final Fantasy VII, in which a terrorist group known as Avalanche infiltrate the elitist city-state of Midgar by riding a train up from the slums below, and launch a devastating attack on one of the city’s power plants. Again trains represent a mode of transport, between the impoverished slums and the high-tech metropolis overhead; again they reflect this society’s technological achievements, as characters use computer terminals to view 3D maps of the line; again they play on the sensations of claustrophobia and loss of control, as the group trigger a security alarm and can only evade capture by running back through the train carriages.

There are a number of other notable train scenes throughout the game. Immediately after the bombing mission, Avalanche regroup on a train going back to the slums (and intimidate the poor commuters with their guns and bad attitudes). The party’s first visit to the Gold Saucer theme park builds to a romantic cable-car ride around the park, which puts another spin on the close environment of a train car – the intimacy of sharing your personal space. Later, the tension of the North Corel train chase hangs on the fact that the player is locked on a collision course with a small town, and cannot divert the speeding locomotive. In fact, probably the most interesting train reference in the game is metaphorical – as the adventure grows more and more hazardous, the party keep urging each other forward with the (rather ironic) phrase “There ain’t no getting offa this train we’re on!”

Moving away from this theme of trains delivering revolutionary agents into oppressive societies – or not, depending on your point of view – the original Animal Crossing begins with the player having a chance encounter with a friendly dog while travelling to their new forest home. This scene is a rare example of a chance encounter with a fellow passenger – Rover the dog, in this instance – which is a feature of public transport little explored in games, other than to drop a MacGuffin in the player’s lap. Animal Crossing does this too, of course – following your conversation, Rover introduces you to Tom Nook, who immediately press-gangs you into the life of indentured serfdom that provides much of the impetus of the game.

The other great use of the train in Animal Crossing was as the means of transport between different players’ towns. Players began the game by loaded their own town from memory card slot A, visited the train station, and went on a magical journey to the town in memory card slot B. Chance encounters continue with each journey, as the player meets elusive characters such as Rover, and Blanca the faceless cat, whose conversations help to mask the loading process of the destination town. But the focus here – the symbolism of the train – is the idea of trains as a means of transportation, the sole link between these otherwise-inaccessible locales. Speaking as someone from a rural town with a good train station, it is something I can relate to.

Rolling with this theme, tomorrow’s article will look at other notable instances of trains being used as a means of metaphorical transportation. I bet you can’t wait!

TRAIN WEEK
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Dear reader, let me tell you a little-known fact: I like trains.

I’m not an expert on trains by any stretch of the imagination, and I’ve never gone out of my way to look at or ride a particular train (with the exception of the miniature train loop at Newby Hall), but I have a real fondness for rail travel that could explain why I didn’t learn to drive until I was 24. My grandad was a tank engine driver and my dad is a trainspotter, so you could say that trains run in my blood. Not literally, of course – that would be horrifying! And probably not in any kind of biological sense, because I don’t think that kind of higher-order knowledge can be passed down genetically. I think it’s fair to say, however, that trains feature heavily in my family’s cultural heritage.

When I was young I was taught about Stephenson’s Rocket, and the other innovations in steam engineering that were made in the proud North East. I used to watch Thomas the Tank Engine religiously and give myself small electric shocks while playing clumsily with my dad’s model trains. When I left high school I bought railcards instead of driving lessons, and spent around eight years exploring the UK in these snaking steel chariots. I once even paid Amtrak £300 for an all-access ticket to ride around the US for a month, and rode from New York to Seattle via Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco (NB. For some reason they charged me an additional fee when travelling from San Francisco to Seattle, and even the ticketmistriss at the Amtrak station said it was diabolical and advised me to never travel with Amtrak again). I could talk about regional differences in train culture across Europe and the US, but this blog is not the place for that! Suffice to say: I like trains.

Recently a reader commented that they were surprised to learn that anyone enjoyed Star Fox 64 (I don’t usually call it Lylat Wars since usually only Europeans understand what that is). In writing my response, I started thinking about my favourite moments in the game, and I found myself drawn back to one level in particular: Macbeth! In this mission, the bold captain Fox McCloud drops down into the heart of a Venomian military base inside a small tank, and shoots seven bells out of a massive supply train carrying ordinance and prototype weapons. It was awesome. The train is one of the largest enemies in the game, and provides the same sense of focused, systematic demolition as level 3 of R-Type. I love levels like that, where the boss is so large that they are the environment and you must crawl around like an insect and take them apart piece by piece – it’s a kind of narrative that’s popular in Western culture, that David and Goliath tale of the righteous underdog defeating an overwhelming enemy.

Inspired by this, I’d like to dedicate this week to writing about my favourite instances of Trains In Games, focusing on a different aspect of their portrayal each day. Come back tomorrow, when we will begin at the beginning!

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Seen this?

“An art installation plus social experiment, PAINTING WITH PIXELS is a tribute to the perseverance of the pixel through several decades of gaming culture. Despite polygons prevailing in this modern area, the geometric prowess of the pixel is still one of intrigue and luster. Each conference attendee was gifted a single pixel (exactly 2×2 inches) to contrinute to a 20-by-8-foot pop portrait by famed designer Jude Buffum (judebuffum.com). Through the course of the convention’s week long run, the large-scale image revealed itself (all 5,760 pixels of it), illustrating the true power of collaboration.”

‘Power of collaboration’ my entire arse.

Every GDC attendee was given a 2″ square piece of coloured card with scrap of velcro fixed to the back, and instructions to stick it on a wall marked with a grid of letters. Each letter corresponded to a particular colour, making the whole thing a painting-by-numbers exercise. They call that collaboration? I call it obedience.

I’m particularly surprised that they would try to get away with this kind of bullshit at GDC, which is a global gathering point for people whose jobs deal with concepts like collaboration and creativity on a daily basis. Absolutely everyone I spoke to about this agreed that the whole concept was a complete misfire. Some wags deliberately placed their pixels in the wrong place, or wrote messages on their pixels, in an attempt to rectify the situation.

But no, the best part was that, towards the end of the week, I noticed people coming forward with handfuls of pixels and slapping a few dozen down across the board. When they were done, they walked across the hall and sat down at… the Painting by Pixels table. To make up for the fact that not enough people could be bothered to take part, the artists were coming out every few hours and expanding the picture a little. I think they even removed a lot of the misplaced pixels, to protect the planned image.

Needless to say it was finished on time during the final day and looked just as it did in Jude Buffam’s sketchbook. So there you have it: The true power of collaboration is doing what you’re told while the empowered elite lie to you. Hand me my bongos.

Today I will break up my usual walls of text with videos of my favourite things to come out of E3. I may or may not update the list once I uncover more niche excellence.

Dragon’s Crown looks like it could be excellent fun. I doubt it will be as good as Shadows Over Mystara, but I certainly think it’ll be better than D&D: Daggerdale was. I love scrolling beat-em-ups, I love the character designs, and I’ve heard lots of good things about Muramasa, which was developed by the same team.

I’m pretty sure everyone must have seen Battlefield 3 by now, but I can’t really leave it off the list. I’ve played a few Battlefield games before, and I’ve never really enjoyed any of them, but this is one of the rare occasions where I might buy a game purely because of the graphics. I want to see what my PC is capable of!

I think Star Fox 64 is one of the N64′s most under-rated games, and that’s taking into account that everyone loves it already. I’m not sure whether I’d buy this or not – I’ve played the original quite a lot already – but there’s lots to like about it. One little touch I am excited about is the little video portraits used in multiplayer – reminds me of Mario Kart GP.

Metal Gear Solid HD Collection is a combo of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 and also Peace Walker! It will be released on the 360 and PS3! I don’t understand why it doesn’t include Metal Gear Solid but frankly I don’t mind! With Peace Walker‘s inclusion, that gives me one less reason to buy a PSP.

Speaking of reasons to buy a PS3/former reasons to buy a PSP, I’ve been playing a lot of Monster Hunter Tri on my Wii recently, and Monster Hunter Portable 3rd: HD Version looks like an excellent upgrade! I’m not sure if I’ll really want more Monster Hunter by the time my team and I finish the game, but IF I DO…

The Elder Scrolls is another one of those game series that I’ve never really taken the time to get into. I bought a copy of Morrowind, but I’ve never been able to play it for more than an hour before I get confused and feel lost. But Skyrim‘s icy northern setting and mess of giant monsters to slay (again with the Monster Hunter obsession), I might get on the bus this time and join all the other people tediously discussing it on forums.

I hope XCOM includes all the ‘business’ side of the earlier games – building a base, researching alien tech, developing new equipment, etc. Obviously it’s a bit different if it’s set in the 50′s rather than SPACE YEAR 20XX, but the principle still stands.

Mass Effect 3 looks pretty much exactly the same as Mass Effect 2 and I am fine with that. I know they aren’t the most challenging or original games in the world, but I enjoy them! They’re comfort games! Anyway, forget the Reapers: after getting passed over in ME2, all I want is a satisfying conclusion to my enduring space-romance with Ashley.

I thought Twilight Princess looked kinda boring, and it was. I think Skyward Sword here looks lovely, and hopefully it will be. It feels like a long time since Nintendo made a truly satisfying Zelda game!

Also!

Aside from games, there are some other good videos to watch.

Here’s Geoff Keighley from GameTrailers.com asking Reggie some good questions about the Wii U. I don’t think anyone outside of Nintendo is in a good position to talk about the Wii U’s final specs or details, but everything I have seen suggests it’ll have all the same problems as the Wii, and Nintendo have yet to say anything to suggest otherwise.

After making loads of silly predictions on the DarkZero podcast over the last few weeks, I almost forgot to blog about it. I’d like to keep this brief, so I’ll just skim over some general prediction/wish list/wild speculation stuff. UPDATE: Now that E3 is over, I’ll also go through my points and comment on what ACTUALLY happened.

Nintendo

• There are a lot of rumours flying around that Project Café will include large screens on its controllers. If that’s true, I would suggest that it might not rely on a TV at all – possibly, the handset will offer an individual screen to each player, with the base unit doing all the processing work.
  CORRECT! I am feeling pretty smug about getting this right, although in hindsight it seems obvious. Did nobody else see it coming? Really?
• I still stand by my 2007 prediction that it will launch SOMEWHERE this year!
  INCORRECT! Nintendo have really committed themselves to a 2012 launch, making me look like a chump.
• Skyward Sword will not be a dual-platform release as per Twilight Princess
  SEEMS CORRECT! I certainly haven’t heard anything about a dual release, and – unlike the Wii U – it’s due out before Christmas, so unless they’re planning to launch a flagship game for one console and then release a surprise upgraded version just a few months later, I’d say this is a done deal.
• Animal Crossing 3DS will convince me to buy a 3DS
  UNCLEAR! All they showed was the Animal Crossing logo, and I’m still put off by the current lack of games, but it was basically enough to put me off the PS Vita at least.
• Most/all of the Pokémon news will relate to spin-off games – we’ll see some stuff about the 3DS generation next year
  CORRECT! The only time Pokémon came up in the press conference was in relation to the new 3DS Pokédex.
• They’ll say that the Wii’s not dead yet, claiming that the recent price reductions and a new Zelda mean sales will give it a strong boost during its ‘autumn year’; they’re probably wrong, and they probably know that.
  CORRECT! See below.
• Similarly they’ll continue to talk up the DS, since it’s still way more popular than the 3DS. Their heart isn’t really in it though – remember that talk about how the DS was going to be a ‘third pillar’ next to the GameCube and GBA? Look how that turned out.
  CORRECT! They didn’t use quite those words, but they’ve definitely been pushing the idea that the Wii, Wii U, DS and 3DS are all going concerns right now, which is ridiculous. Nobody can spread resources adequately across two pairs of directly competing formats, but I guess they need to keep ‘supporting’ their older systems until enough consumers are ready to upgrade.
• All Kid Icarus games announced will look utter forgettable, as ever
  CORRECT! So correct.
• They’ll make a point of showcasing a lot of big third party games like Call of Duty, to show that their new console is more mainstream.
  CORRECT! They probably did a good job of getting the message out to the mainstream media, although a lot of games journalists have been focusing on the quality of these ports. Nintendo have been VERY cagey about the hardware specs of the Wii U, and won’t be drawn on much other than the fact that it supports 1080p. Suspicion abounds that the Wii U versions of these big-name games will be in a similar vein to the Wii versions of Call of Duty, Dead Rising, etc… 

  For a good ‘gamer’s eye’ perspective on the Nintendo conference, check out Geoff Keighley’s interview with Reggie Fils-Aime on GameTrailers.com.

   

Microsoft

• Apparently Microsoft have been sending out early development hardware out for a ‘new’ Xbox to certain developers. I don’t expect to see it mentioned this year. Possibly these rumours are an ‘official’ leak – their way of announcing it without having to show the finished product.
  CORRECT! Well, correct in the sense that they didn’t reveal any new hardware, at least. I think there’s a good chance they’ll be announcing their new console next year – perhaps to scupper the Wii U’s launch? – but we’ll see. WE’LL SEE.
• IF I WERE MICROSOFT I would make an effort to show Kinect being used in some traditional games, to show core gamers why they should go out and buy it. I think I said this last year though, and they didn’t really show anything like that, so I am keeping my expectations low.
  CORRECT! Mass Effect 3, Fable: The Journey and others will all be using Kinect functionality. Oh, and a word on Mass Effect 3: A lot of people (myself included) have been asking whether they could use Xbox Live headsets to give voice commands and stuff, but APPARENTLY it only works with Kinect because it uses the Kinect hardware to process the speech recognition, so it doesn’t affect the Xbox system resources.
• Would a joke about the PSN outage be in too bad taste? You know if they said “At least Live is secure!” they would immediately be targeted by Anon teens.
  PROBABLY! I certainly didn’t notice any references to the PSN outage in their press conference.
• Kudo Tsunoda’s very presence will continue to infuriate me
  CORRECT!
• Is GTA5 is out this year? I would expect MS to pursue another timed exclusivity deal, like with GTA4‘s DLC. Sony couldn’t afford to bid for something like that right now, surely??
  INCORRECT! There has been real news about the next GTA from anyone, as far as I can see.
• Here is a thing: Most of the big-name game series you associate with the Xbox/360 (Halo, Fable, Gears of War, Mass Effect, etc) are trilogies, and most of them have either already finished or are close to the end. What comes next? I’d be surprised if any of these franchises were laid to rest - Halo has already had a spin-off, a prequel and an RTS midprequel.
  CORRECT! Fable: The Journey and a new Halo trilogy (!!!) look set to keep Microsoft’s press conferences looking near-identical for the next few years. What are the bets that E3 2013 includes a PC/Xbox exclusive Mass Effect deathmatch game?
• On that note, I have no idea what Lionhead are currently working on, but I think we’ll see Molyneux show off something interesting that is neither Fable nor Milo. Whatever it is, it will probably come out in 2014 and look nothing like it does now.
  INCORRECT! I really was not expecting another Fable-brand game so soon, but there you go. All I can say in my defence is that it looks like a totally different kind of game that just happens to have the Fable name slapped on it – I’m taking it as a moral victory, although I shouldn’t have explicitly ruled out a franchise tie-in!

Sony

• It is difficult to predict what Sony will do with a 5-hour presentation!
  INCORRECT! This whole business of a 5-hour presentation turned out to be nonsense, and really threw my predictions off this year – I’m beginning to wonder where that rumour started?!
• At least two hours will be spent talking about the NGP  – or the PSVita, as they’re supposedly calling it now.
  MIXED! Look: proportionally speaking they did devote about 2/5ths of the presentation to it, which is the important point.
• I am expecting them to talk about the PSN outage and explain why it’s all the fault of filthy hackers, but I guess the PR men might think it better to not mention it at all, considering how embarrassing it’s been.
  TERRIBLY UNCLEAR PREDICTION! Repeated apologies from multiple speakers. They were some sorry puppies this year.
• Lots of HD remakes for the PS3 – hopefully they’ll give a cast-iron date for Shadow of the Colossus HD
  CORRECT! If Shadow of the Colossus is the first game I would buy for the PS3, I think remakes of the PSP Metal Gear Solid games would come immediately after that. Conversely, I now have no reason to buy a PSP.

Other Things I Want To See

• Street Fighter 3 HD for XBLA/PSN
  SUCCESS! Although now I’ve seen the trailer, I’m starting to wonder whether it’s really worth competing with Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs Capcom 3, etc. The only people who are going to really get into it are the kind of hardcore players who I will never beat!
• Some good 3DS games (that aren’t just remakes)
  Uh-oh!
• A sequel to Daggerdale
  Nothing yet! Although Dragon’s Crown looks like it could be the kind of fantasy beat-em-up I’m looking for. I am LOVING the beefcake Amazon.
  
• Does anyone really think Square-Enix are desperate enough to remake FFVII now? They must be getting pretty nervous after FFXIV‘s massive flop, but I would think even a remake would take them at least 4 years to make. Unless they’ve been secretly working on it since the PS3′s launch, it won’t be coming any time soon.
  No news! I think they really would make a lot of money from a high quality re-release, but it would be terrible news from anyone who wants them to make new games. What would be next? FFVIII?

In a word: REMAKES! Also: REBOOTS!

The Smithsonian Museum of American Art held a large public vote a few months ago to decide which games would be put on display as part of an upcoming exhibit called The Art of Video Games. The final results were announced this week, and are largely unsurprising! Five Mario games (if you count Donkey Kong), five Zelda games, Shadow of the Colossus, Rez, Shenmue, StarCraft, Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy VII, Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid 2… it’s a pretty clichéd list of significant games, but it’s hard to deny that they deserve a place in this exhibit. In any exhibit!

I think it’s more interesting to look at the games that aren’t included. No Street Fighter? No Civlization*? No Wario Ware? No handheld games at all, in fact! The categories they picked – in terms of eras and game genres – sound increasingly bizarre as you draw closer to the present-day. I think part of the problem is that they wanted to name genres that could be applied across all eras – I can accept a link between Space Invaders and Metroid Prime as shooting games, although some of their particular game choices sound bizarre. For example, how can they call Metal Gear Solid an Action game and Metal Gear Solid 2 a Combat/Strategy game? It really breaks down when you consider games like Deus Ex, which don’t fit within normal genre classifications. As per everything I’ve written about genre classification already, the problem is that genre definitions are organic and change with the times – trying to squeeze modern games into the same boxes as games from 30 years ago is bound to give some crazy results.

Still, I suppose they needed some way to break the list down into categories for people to vote for? I didn’t really like the idea of letting the public vote on which games to include, although it made sense to me as a marketing gimmick – it was obvious that games like Ocarina of Time and Starfox would be more popular than Majora’s Mask and Smash TV, even though I would argue that they are much more deserving games. Particularly difficult is the Sophie’s Choice grouping of Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past, and Earthbound! All three games are still great today, despite being almost 20 years old! It’s hard to overstate how far in advance they were of contemporaries like Lagoon or The Story of Thor. Do we really have to only pick one to go in the exhibit? Urgh!

I was converted to the idea of the public vote by the curator’s explanation during the official announcement of results. Somewhere around the Dreamcast era, Chris Melissinos makes the good point that game experiences are co-authored by designers and players – apparently they wanted to reflect this by getting players involved in the curation process. I think that’s a pretty good idea, and not just for the obvious marketing purposes. There’s still a potential problem when it comes to younger gamers voting on games that came out long before they were born – which they’ve almost certainly not played – but without seeing any stats it’s hard to tell how big a problem this might be.

And on that note, I am pleased to see that Attack of the Mutant Camels made the cut.

————

*I like Civ Revolution, but come on – it’s not as significant to the art of videogames as a regular Civ game

Back at the beginning of March I blew a slightly ridiculous proportion of my annual savings on a pair of transatlantic flights, seven nights in a mid-market hotel, and a ticket to GDC. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made and I will do it again next year or die trying.

I still couldn’t afford to get into GDC proper and made do with a Summits and Tutorials pass – for the uninitiated, the first two days of the week are occupied by a load of specialist summits focused on topics like education, marketing, and independent games, with the main conference running from Wednesday through until Friday. I spent most of my time at the Independent Games Festival, made notes on all the sessions, and will be writing it up (eventually!) as part of my coverage for DarkZero. However, the IGF wasn’t even half the story.

By far the best thing about my trip was meeting new people and socialising with my peers! Perhaps this is a bigger deal for me than for most people since I live in the middle of nowhere, work alone, and am generally quite asocial, but to be able to sit round a dinner table and talk about design theory and indie development with like-minded people was a profound experience – I’m not used to the idea of even having peers. Talking to people about their own work, playing each others’ games, bouncing ideas around… it was great! It makes me feel pretty jealous of groups like bitcollective and CB2Indies, who can meet up whenever they want.

That said, I also enjoyed the mystique of being barely known. I think I do a pretty good job of demonstrating I Know What I’m Talking About, and being able to walk into a close-knit group of developers as a complete stranger and hold my own in a discussion felt nice. I had a bunch of business cards printed up listing just my name, website and email addresses, and describing my job as ‘Game Theorist’. I was amazed at how many people asked me to explain this term, but it turned out to be a handy ice-breaker! Recruiters seemed pretty fascinated with my work (that can’t all have been professional diplomacy, right?) but – predictably – they didn’t have many suitable vacancies for me. For the sake of checking, I made a point of asking every big company recruiting on the expo floor whether they have any positions in gameplay theory or research, and they all just looked at me funny.

The one thing I didn’t do enough of was actual game dev stuff. Without having a laptop to work on, I couldn’t really do anything, or show people the unfinished stuff I’ve been working on – the one time any of my games saw any light was when I played a couple of rounds of Turn-Based Pong with Amon26, who seemed to enjoy it! I would have liked to have more stuff like that to drop on people. There was at least one big game jam that I had to miss just because the only tools I had to work with was my copy of Wario DIY. My other big problem was not being able to get in touch with people easily to arrange plans, but after buying a cheap phone/SIM card I’m now fully equipped to leverage future US-based social networking opportunities.

With few exceptions, GDC is probably quite meaningless from a consumer perspective. Speaking as a game theorist and indie designer, it’s pretty much the best week of the year! The feeling that you can just be yourself – a nerd in the heart of a global nerdmoot – is wonderful. In a way, I feel like the other 51 weeks of the year are just preparation time for next year’s GDC.