What I’d Like to See From Nintendo at E3 2013

By now, it’s well-known that Nintendo has decided to forgo a traditional E3 presser this year in favour of a Nintendo Direct livestream. I had initially wanted to write a few words on that particular decision (basically, I think it’s a dumb one; the Nintendo Direct should’ve been used to support the E3 presser, just like last year), but time flew by and now that we’re on the eve of E3, it’s kind of a moot point.

I probably won’t write articles like this for Sony and Microsoft. I’ve always been a Nintendo fanboy, although as I’ve grown older, I’ve gotten better at recognizing how alienating and puzzling the company’s business practices can be at times. I desperately want the company to turn around its recent slump because I know that at some point I must buy a Wii U, but the pragmatic person in me knows that buying one now, when the price is high, the memory is low, and the game library is meager, wouldn’t be in my best interests. Nintendo’s games have always been my favourite of any developer, so I really don’t care if the Wii U remains devoid of third-party support; I fully intend to buy it as nothing more than a box that will allow me to play Mario and Zelda games.

Here are a few things that I’d like to see Nintendo do at E3 2013:

1. Adjust Wii U price/SKU – The white 8GB Basic model is Basically useless (ha). A tiny little bit of memory (much of which is taken up by the OS) and no pack-in game. Apparently it’s not selling so hot (and despite Nintendo’s claims that the Basic stock is only being “rebalanced,” rumours continue to fly that it’ll stop being sold at retailers after E3), so what Nintendo should do is pull the plug on the Basic model and cut the Premium model’s price by $50 (so it’s the same price as the $300 Basic set). This seems like a likely scenario, but in my fantasy land, the Premium slips to $250 and the new Premium (with 100GB+ memory) retails for $300.  I doubt this will ever happen, but then again, I didn’t see the 3DS receiving a $70 price cut after 6 months either. In the increasingly digital world we live in, 32GB is still next to nothing in terms of memory, and really, screw USB sticks and SD cards. HDD Memory is cheap; add some more!

2. Phase out DS and Wii games – I know this one is probably a given, but we got new Pokemon DS games a year and a half into the 3DS’ lifespan, so who knows. Still, everything’s gotta be 3DS and Wii focused at this point. Let the old, inferior systems wither away and die. The 3DS is a bonafide success now, and with enough attention, the Wii U can be, too.

3. All the games – In light of Microsoft’s and Sony’s current DRM/online debacle, this is Nintendo’s big chance to regain some lost ground. Right now, there is little reason to be excited for any of the three next gen consoles. However, Nintendo’s console has a head start, supports used games, and isn’t always online, so if they give gamers a reason to want to buy their console for its software selection (rather than just to circumvent ridiculous DRM), they’ll really have a chance to begin driving the nail deep here. Everyone thought Wii U was dead in the water after a tumultuous first 3 months at retail, but it’s received a second chance with the increasingly messy reveals of the PS4 and Xbox One. So crank out Wind Waker HD as fast as you can, but get either the new 3D Mario or Super Smash Bros. out by Christmas, too. If it’s 2014 before the Wii U has a killer app (sorry, but Pikmin 3, Wind Waker HD, and Mario Kart don’t count), then the battle will be all but lost at that point. A year and a half of no killer apps will be too long of a drought for most fans to endure.

4. Pipe dream games – I’m just gonna lay out my personal wishlist here, as unlikely as some of these games may seem. Firstly, I hope they don’t fuck up the new Smash Bros. somehow by either a) turning it into a traditional 2D fighter or b) introducing a new gimmick, like tag-team a la Mario Kart: Double Dash. Just give me new characters and I’ll be fine. Secondly, I’d like to see more of the Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem crossover from Atlus, as well as Monolithsoft’s new X game. Finally, I’d like to see the Golden Sun series concluded with a fourth installment. The third game had a weird (and quite frankly, bad) story which started off being about a certain plot point only to completely abandon it two hours in, then picked up said plot point again in the dying seconds of the game. That ain’t no way to end a series. Still, Camelot’s working on Mario Golf right now, and I think Golden Sun: Dark Dawn ended up receiving middling reviews and sales, so it’s entirely likely the series is dead. Sad face.

With Nintendo’s E3 Direct scheduled to be only an hour long, I have a feeling the focus is going to be on the games rather than the hardware. And really, this is the way it should be. Pack the Nintendo Direct full of crazy game announcements, then relegate the price changes to a press release. Hopefully this is what will happen, but of course, their track record indicates that Tuesday’s stream will potentially be a mishmash of Wii U features we already know about, a series of “classic” games coming to the eShop that most people pirated years ago, and a showcase of recently-released 3DS games, all sandwiched between shots of Satoru Iwata staring at fruit.

Mother’s Day Special

My mother reads my blog. I’m sure your mother does too, even if you think she doesn’t. You probably mentioned it to her once offhand, she laughed and told you what a clever name you picked, she secretly Googled the name after you left, she proceeded to read every article in your archive, she blushed at the language, and now she’s eagerly awaiting your next post. Despite your paranoia, she’s probably not doing it to keep tabs on your cyber-life; more likely, she has always thought you were a great writer, and she just wants to read some more of her beloved child’s creative output.

My mom would probably read my blog regardless of what I wrote about. It could be a blog dedicated to my favourite serial killers and she’d still come back for each new top ten list. However, because I write about video games, there’s a personal connection there for her. In addition to dabbling with Pac-Man and Pong during her university years, she’s been playing video games with and without me fairly regularly over the past few years. It’s given us a neat hobby that we can enjoy together, one that a lot of mothers and sons probably don’t share simply because there’s a generation gap there: we grew up in a time when games were incredibly popular and complex and they didn’t.

I think the very first time I watched her play a game was when I let her play the fishing minigame in Twilight Princess. It was calm, inoffensive, satisfying, and fairly easy to control, making it a good introduction to gaming for a non-gamer like herself. When she expressed desire for a deeper fishing experience, I went out and bought Hudson’s Fishing Master, which had the advantage of being a dedicated fishing game with more advanced controls and a wider variety of fish to catch (over 100 fish compared to Twilight Princess‘s 6 or so). If I remember correctly, it had a multiplayer fishing derby mode too. We played the crap out of it for a good while.

I think the first game that we played actual co-op together was Super Smash Bros. Brawl, of all things. We played through the entire story mode a few summers ago, which was pretty fun. I would take the lead while she provided support, running along behind me and beating the crap out of anything that crept up on me. Even without enemies, just making it through the treacherous platforming sections of the labyrinthine and treacherous Subspace Emissary levels was a challenge in itself, and the game provided a helpful “cheater button” that would instantly warp her back to my side if she found herself stuck in a wall or falling into a bottomless pit. Although she liked Meta Knight and Pit because their multiple jumps reduced the chances that she’d land in one of said bottomless pits, Captain Falcon was her all-time favourite mainly because of his raw power.

Since she likes to exercise, I bought her Wii Fit as a Mother’s Day gift a few years back. Although we do the yoga and the strength exercises and enjoy them enough, she likes the balance board minigames a lot too. While I was at university one winter, she spent a good amount of time practicing the snowball fight minigame to the point where she owned the entire board of high scores, and even though I tried my hardest, I could not crack any of her scores. She is actually the best Wii Fit snowball fighter I have ever seen. To see her play this game is to suddenly feel great shame re: your own sluggish reflexes.

When I first started using Steam regularly, one of the first games I bought was Plants vs. Zombies. I showed it to my mom because I thought she’d find the character designs cute, and I forget exactly what happened next, but it ultimately ended up with her playing the heck out of the thing while I twiddled my thumbs and waited patiently for her to return my computer. I bought her a copy for herself, then another copy for the DS she would eventually inherit from me, then a third copy for the iPhone she would buy the next year. She still plays the game regularly, but I mean, the thing isn’t even a challenge for her anymore. She never loses. Her in-game wallet has long since stopped counting her money (it maxes out at $999,900, in case you were wondering). When I told her Plants vs. Zombies 2: It’s About Time was finally coming out in July, she was overjoyed, and she jokingly inquired about midnight launches in our area. At least, I’m assuming it was a joke.

It was in early 2011 that she began to show interest in Animal Crossing, so I gave her my DS Lite and treated myself to a 3DS preorder. I bought two copies of Wild World and told her that she could live in one town, I’d live in the other, and we could visit each other whenever we liked. Well, she got pretty good at making money pretty fast, and by the time she finally became debt-free, I was still paying off my second expansion. The thing is, she actually knows stuff about interior design, so her mansion actually looks like a coherent, smartly furnished work of art, whereas my shit shack is a glutted mess of indoor barbecues, lava lamps, and electric guitars. I’m finally on my last mortgage payment right now thanks in no small part to the fact that she likes dropping bags of money around my town, but boy, has she made me work for those Bells (she likes hiding them behind buildings, which, thanks to the game’s lone camera angle, means they’re virtually impossible to see). She once dug a ring of holes around a bag of Bells and then planted pitfall seeds in each one, creating an effective booby trap. I once visited her town only to find nearly every square inch of the place covered in Bells, almost as if she had paved the streets with her wealth in an egregious display of opulence.

Right now, we’ve got a few games on the go. She still plays Plants vs. Zombies often enough, but we also started Telltale’s The Walking Dead a few weeks back. She’s a big fan of the show and she already understands the lore, so this one was a no-brainer. Being an adventure game, the emphasis on story and dialogue means that we have fewer pointless action sequences to trudge through. We’ve also been playing Kirby’s Return to Dreamland, which I told her had the same basic gameplay as Brawl‘s Subspace Emissary. She’s become something of a boss-killer as Meta Knight; whenever a difficult fight comes up, I unchain her and she becomes a whirling dervish of barely contained fury while I just kind of whistle in the corner.

I’m glad that my mom has taken an interest in something that I’m deeply invested in. She sometimes worries that she’s a bad co-op partner or that she’s holding me back by dying too much, but of course that’s not what I care about. The important thing to me is that we’re spending time together, and although we have many other hobbies that we frequently enjoy together (gardening, for example), gaming always felt like one of the few things I could teach her about, rather than the other way around. I’m very grateful that she’s had the patience to play with me for these last few years, because games these days often have a high barrier of entry if you’re not already familiar with the medium. Even if, some day, we stop playing some of these games together, I can always go back and look at the perceptible marks she’s left on many of them: her high scores in Wii Fit Plus, her nametag in Smash Bros., her profile in Fishing Master (complete with dog custom-named “Hercules”). And if I want to look at something she personally did for me in a video game, I can read any of the dozens of loving, thoughtful letters she’s mailed to me in Animal Crossing, the kind that only a mother can write. I’ve saved every single one.

David Cage and Mature Games

Last weekend, David Cage debuted 35 minutes of Beyond: Two Souls gameplay at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was the second time a game had been shown at De Niro’s big ooh-la-la event after L.A. Noire was shown in 2011. Both games have been roundly criticized for being little more than interactive movies (and Beyond isn’t even out yet), which I’m assuming is why Tribeca thought it would be appropriate to “screen” video games at an event dedicated to passive media.

Cage has been in the media spotlight an awful lot this year for his outspoken thoughts on what video game designers can do to elevate their medium. His interviews make it clear what his stance is: truly artful games should be able to induce some kind of strong emotion in the player. Okay, you think, that makes sense. Quantic Dream’s portfolio, however, shows that Cage thinks he can only get this kind of reaction by shocking the player until they feel something, anything (usually horror or revulsion). Cage’s latest talks seem to reinforce this misguided sense of emotional engagement, as he has criticized the industry for shying away from the supposedly “mature” content that he loves to sprinkle around his own games.

To Cage, games can’t be emotionally engaging pieces of art unless they’re willing to explore “mature themes.” He has repeatedly challenged the game industry to move beyond the barriers of what’s politically correct and start representing stuff that has, for whatever reason, traditionally been considered too “taboo” for a mainstream audience. This means stuff that would earn a film a solid “R” rating, and stuff that admittedly very few video games have even bothered to look at in an artistic capacity because the medium is still perceived by the mainstream media to be some kind of Satanic murder-addiction simulator. So there’s one hurdle right there, but even if that was no longer an issue, I still don’t find the material in Quantic Dream’s games to be overly representative of this much-vaunted “mature content” that is supposedly going to fuel the emotional drive of games.

I look at Beyond and I don’t see a “mature” game. I see a developer ticking off every gritty, edgy shock factor on his checklist: homelessness, suicide, sexual harassment, prostitution, random acts of violence, domestic abuse, and, er, the graphic chaos of childbirth. Look at Heavy Rain‘s rap sheet: drug addiction, sexual assault, violent serial homicides, nudity, plain ol’ sex, being forced to cut off your own finger, frequent profanity. It’s the same style of design that made me roll my eyes when Hideo Kojima wondered aloud to a reporter whether Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes would be too “taboo” to release. There is nothing inherently wrong with depicting this sort of content in a video game or any other piece of creative media; there is certainly a place in the world for gritty realism and the uncensored ugliness of humanity. But Cage is using it as a shortcut to emotion because he knows it’s provocative and he knows that the player can’t help but feel a surge of something when he or she plays through these scenes. Whatever it is, it’s not the rich flavour of emotion that’s going to supposedly elevate our medium to Ebert’s notice, God rest his soul; no, it’s the cheap stuff, the drama equivalent of a Michael Bay movie.

We all know that Cage wishes he was making movies. Beyond is a game that plays like an interactive movie, uses cinematography common in today’s blockbusters, uses famous actors and actresses for voiceovers, and gives said actors top billing on the game’s cover art, just like a movie poster. He’s now attempting to play catch-up with the film industry, but rather than emulating the best, most meaningful material, he’s sticking with the stuff that’s firmly B-grade. I suspect that’s more a limitation caused by the quality of his writing than anything, but with Beyond, it feels like he’s aiming for something highbrow and thought-provoking and merely ending up with a collection of tropes centred around sex, violence, and poverty.

I’m not sure that true maturity is so easily achieved by slapping a pile of send-the-kids-to-bed content on your game. The concept is as hard to define in games as it is in real life (How can you tell when someone is a mature adult? At what age do they become mature, or, if it’s not a question of age, then what changes in their personality/behaviour/lifestyle identify them as “mature?”) For me, I think the best kind of maturity just kind of comes naturally to some games, as if they’re not even concerned with being taken seriously by that horribly self-conscious 18-25 year-old demographic. I’m in my twenties, and I just finished Super Mario 64 for the first time; to me, it’s an incredibly mature game. It’s unconcerned with pandering to an adult audience, yet it’s not entirely designed with children in mind (googly-eyed enemy designs aside). Several Power Stars are deviously hidden, with little to no clues as to where they might be sealed away; I’m not sure my six-year-old self could’ve found some of these Stars without outside help. Then there’s the controls and the camera, which provide a mechanical entry barrier as well. Mario 64 also exploited physics in ways that few games before it did; I wonder how many younger brothers and sisters were first introduced to ballistic trajectories via suicide-by-Bob-Omb-Cannon? The fact that many adult reviewers still consider Mario 64 to be one of the best games of all time is telling; it’s truly a game that can be appreciated by anyone, regardless of demographic. That, to me, is the true “mature game”: no pretensions, no cheap shots, just great gameplay that pretty much anyone can enjoy. If anything, I think a game that outrageously fetishizes sex and violence is just as juvenile as a cutesy, simplistic platformer designed only for five-year-olds; neither aspires to the naturally-acquired maturity of Super Mario 64.

If you want something a little more adult-oriented, something with a little more substance, then take a look at Half-Life 2. Yes, there’s a bit of horror arguably thrown in there for shock value, but I feel Ravenholm was intended to change up the gameplay style more than anything else (ie. a tense, survival-horror zombie level before zombie levels were cool). Other than that, we get a pretty good sci-fi story that deals with Cage’s “mature” tropes in far less heavy-handed ways. I would say Portal‘s probably an even better example, but that game is more of a living subversion of standard game tropes than anything else, whereas Half-Life 2 is the traditional, unironic, straightforward video game. Portal‘s slightly-edgy-but-never-truly-offensive humour combined with its self-awareness make it a game whose narrative could probably only be truly appreciated by adults. That being said, a pubescent could probably still complete all the puzzles in a few hours and, despite not fully absorbing the dialogue and its underlying implications, still feel like they accomplished a feat. These games, too, have a sort of all-ages appeal to them (albeit Portal moreso than Half-Life).

Perhaps I’m just sick of people like Cage assuming that gritty, hard-hitting tropes are cruise control for art. It’s not that easy, and even those Cage thinks he’s the only one doing it, other types of media are flooded with this sort of material. Every once in a while I do find it makes for a compelling narrative or provides a relevant backdrop, but more often than not, I just feel like I’m adrift in a sea of edgy content designed to make me uncomfortable on some level. It gets tiresome after a while, and in the worst cases, I actually resent the fact that these films/music/games/books think they can get a cheap rise out of me so easily.

Honestly, if we accept that David Cage’s writing and storytelling (which is really all we can judge his games on, since they contain little actual gameplay of note) are going to suddenly catapult games into the realm of serious business, then we’re giving him way too much credit. He named his homeless main character Jodie Holmes. Aiden is the mysterious entity who’s aidin’ her. Yes, Cage is a master of depth and subtlety. Seriously though, watch the Tribeca gameplay. Have you ever seen a more on-the-nose collection of homeless people?

Do We Need a “Roger Ebert” of Video Games?

When Roger Ebert died a few weeks back, one particular tweet stood out among all the condolences in my Twitter feed. I think it was Bitmob’s Dan “Shoe” Hsu who said it, but I can’t remember for sure; at any rate, the tweet lamented the fact that the world of gaming criticism lacks its own Roger Ebert, and it suggested that perhaps this is truly why video games are still not considered “art.” I’ve been wrestling with this argument for a while, and I still can’t definitively say whether I agree with it or not. But hey, I can still talk a bit about what points I’ve been considering.

I’ve always liked to imagine that great art is great art; it can stand on its own, regardless of criticism, and remain “art.” The ideal piece of art would be immune to subjective deconstruction; everyone in their right mind would be able to look at the thing and recognize it as a work of art. Citizen Kane and the Mona Lisa, for example. Of course, the reality is that remaining purely objective is impossible for any human being, and in the end, we’re still the ones bestowing the titles of “art” upon thing we’ve deemed worthy, according to our own rules and biases. It was around this time I was forced to acknowledge that, unfortunately, “art” is far more subjective than I would have ideally admitted, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

I began to lend a bit more credence to Shoe’s (?) argument. Say that, as gamers, we’re suddenly vastly interested in whether our industry is taken seriously as an art form. Will we have to ultimately depend on another human being to tell us that this is so? Do we need our own Roger Ebert mega-critic to act as the arbiter of all that is Artful in games? It’s entirely possible this will be the case. Like it or not, something can only achieve “art” status if enough people deem it so, and equal weight is not given to everyone’s opinion. People respected Ebert more than most critics because he was smart, prolific, fastidious in his research, and all above all, he was incredibly persuasive and convincing. I’m not a movie guy by any stretch, but I do have a strong opinion of every movie I’ve seen; I sometimes read reviews (including Ebert’s) to see whether the opinions of the connoisseurs jive with my own. Even if Ebert disagreed with me, I rarely became angry while reading his reviews; if anything, they sometimes forced me to rethink my position entirely. No one likes to admit that their opinions are so malleable, but I respect anyone who can convince me that I could, in fact, be very wrong. For me, it has more to do with the words on the page than the name behind them, but I recognize that for many people, the two are inextricably linked and together can exert a profound influence on people’s supposedly “independent” opinions.

The thing that kills me about the video game world is that there are legions of reviewers but no true critics. I’ve seen very few writers demonstrate the ability to critique a game in the measured, intelligent, and thoughtful way Ebert so often did. Tom Bissell has probably come the closest out of anyone I’ve read, which is a shame, because he’s not even a full-time games writer. I think about the handful of games journalists whose writing I consistently enjoy– Brian Crecente (Polygon), Ben Kuchera (Penny Arcade Report), Owen Good (Kotaku), and John Walker (Rock Paper Shotgun)– and I’m still forced to recognize that not one of them could ever do for the game world what Ebert did for film. That role will have to fall to a better writer and thinker than these four blokes, as decent as they may be.

Aside from possessing a sharp wit and an immense amount of comparative games knowledge, the “Roger Ebert of Games” will also have to be as visible as his namesake. I’m sure there’s some brilliant writer slaving away in the bowels of WordPress and writing incredibly nuanced critiques of Bioshock for ten pageviews a day, but if no one reads his work, does it have the same impact? In this context, of course not. Everyone knew who Ebert was, and most people generally respected his opinion. When he decided to declare that such-and-such-thing is/isn’t art, the world took note. The “Roger Ebert of Video Games” will have to achieve a certain level of fame (hopefully through viral recommendation fed by immense respect) so that his or her pronouncements on “art” can achieve a degree of penetration in mainstream culture. In this day and age, I find it unlikely that any critic of any medium will ever reach the levels of fame Ebert attained, but even a moderate amount of celebrity would probably do. As it stands, do you think any content curators at the New York Times have heard of Leigh Alexander or Jeff Gerstmann? And yet these people are famous in our industry.

I suppose I still haven’t answered the main question here: “Do video games need their own Ebert?” “Can’t we just enjoy great games without having to worry about whether haughty critics consider them art?” Sure we can, but I’d like to see them receive more mainstream recognition as well as some serious critical attention. Perhaps I’m blinded by my love of the medium and the industry that supports it, but I think games are certainly worthy of serious criticism, and I want to make sure the rest of the world knows it, too. Personally, I do wish there was an “Ebert of Video Games,” if only because it would mean that the average person would finally pay some goddamn attention to us (by us, I mean the games bloggers/aspiring games journalists I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with for the past few months). And I’d get to read great, thoughtful articles from said Games-Ebert, too, which I guess is really my ultimate goal: to get smart people to write about video games for my own benefit.

The “Always Online” Debacle

If you’re a dedicated gamer and you have a Twitter account, chances are you’ve heard about the Adam Orth controversy. For those of you just joining us now, Kotaku posted an inflammatory article about Microsoft’s plans to have their next Xbox require a constant Internet connection in order to play games (yes, even single-player ones). Given the article’s total lack of credible (or even named) sources, it seemed like the usual Gawker clickbait, but then Orth, a creative director at Microsoft, weighed in on the controversy with some inflammatory commentary of his own. He claimed he wished every device was “always on,” then told people complaining of unreliable Internet connections to “deal with it” while offering two of the most puzzling analogies I’ve ever heard. If my cell phone has a spotty connection, I don’t not buy a cell phone; I switch providers so I get the service I want. Are you picking up on that analogy, Orth?

I was actually browsing Orth’s tweets the minute his account was locked; one minute, I’m seeing misguided aggression toward a consumer base, and the next, a corporate muzzling. Sure, you’ve got guys like Cliff Bleszinski (who has a natural talent for missing the point of every major video game controversy) suggesting that Orth was a pussy for protecting his profile, but I think there’s very little doubt that one of Orth’s bosses at Microsoft told Orth, in no uncertain terms, to shut the hell up. Bleszinski has also been defending Orth by asking detractors, “Have you never said anything stupid on Twitter?” Well, sure I have, but I’m not a creative director at Microsoft spewing aggressive rhetoric regarding potential company secrets in a highly public forum. Context is everything, Cliffy B.

The last two blow-ups over always-online DRM were the Diablo III and SimCity incidents. I have to admit that at the time, I found the public outcry more amusing than anything else; neither game was really on my radar at launch, and to this day, I still don’t own either of them. I felt kind of bad for the fans who had bought these games out of loyalty or interest and were punished at launch because of an uncompromising authentication requirement and a melted server, but the sheer ridiculousness of the situation still tickled me. But even as I thought that the lengths to which a company would go to protect their sales were kind of hilarious, I could still recognize that, some day, this kind of draconian DRM could infect a game I’m actually interested in, especially given that all that hate over the DRM did little to slow sales. Imagine my surprise when it was suggested that Microsoft was planning to do this to an entire console that I was interested in.

Like pretty much everyone on the planet, I am vigorously opposed to an always-online console. I live in Canada, where our Internet is apparently both expensive and slow compared to the rest of the world. The way my living arrangements are set up, my bedroom (where my 360 is currently located) does not get Wi-Fi, and there is no ethernet port within range of the Xbox. Because of this, I’m pretty much forced to stay offline (no great sacrifice, since I don’t have Live Gold and I’m not a big fan of online multiplayer games). However, if I want to download some DLC, I have to physically move my Xbox and my bulky TV (always a two-person operation) into the basement so I can get a wireless connection. Keeping my setup in the basement for extended periods of time is not an option, so I have to move everything back upstairs if I actually want to play said DLC.

Before you ask, yes, my computer is continuously connected. But it’s in my den, where there is still no Wi-Fi, and my only Internet option is a single ethernet port. So the “you’re always online with your computer, so you can be always online with your console” argument is neither applicable nor feasible. And even though I’m supposed to have a “constant” Internet connection, it drops out periodically, even via ethernet. Have you ever seen me sign in and out on Steam a bunch of times in a row? Really annoying, right? That’s my Internet cutting out. And if you want a really good picture of how terrible Canadian Internet is, I’ve been getting 70 kbps download speeds lately via ethernet on the fastest available network. We’ve had countless service technicians come and go, all of them puzzled at how none of their quick fixes ever seem to patch our Internet. So I’ve done my part to fix my terrible Internet, but ultimately, I’m at the mercy of the service providers. An environment like this is not conducive to having an always-online console. Adam Orth’s suggestion of “move to the city” doesn’t fly, since I live in the damn city.

If my Internet cuts out (which it surely will from time to time), I’m suddenly unable to play my Durango games, even the single-player ones. If I lose the Internet and want to play a single-player game on Steam, I simply start it in offline mode and it works like a charm (those who put forth the incorrect notion that even Steam has always-on DRM seem to conveniently forget this little fact). But what happens when my Internet is fine and dandy, and it’s the Xbox Live servers that go down? Come on, it’s not like this has never happened before. If the authentication servers crash, no one will be able to play any of their Durango games. That would be a public relations disaster of the highest caliber. And the best Internet connection in the world couldn’t save you from this travesty, since the issue is on Microsoft’s end.

As someone rightly pointed out on Twitter, we should be asking why Microsoft wants us to be continuously connected to the Internet. They can hide behind fluffy smoke and mirrors like cloud computing (???), helpful push notifications, and silent, automatic updates, but I don’t think there’s a person alive that doesn’t believe this is really about DRM and putting the kibosh on the hordes of modded, pirate-commandeered consoles out there. If your console is not online and connected to Microsoft’s official servers, your game will not be authenticated, and you will be unable to play it. Gamers were already vehemently opposed to DRM even before 2012, but Diablo III and SimCity have whipped them into a frenzy. I’m not at all shocked that Twitter blew up the way it did in the wake of the Kotaku article; a decision like this, if it turns out to be true, could easily be a console-killer. I think it’s even worse than the Diablo and SimCity situations because it affects every single game released on the console, not just a select few titles (read: Ubisoft games in previous years) that can be safely ignored if you don’t want to deal with the DRM. If you want to buy any game for Durango, you will have to deal with its always-online DRM every single time. Historically, many games released on Microsoft’s consoles have also been ported to Sony’s; I can imagine tons of people picking up the PS4 version instead of the Durango version simply because it means no wacky DRM.

I’m not a boycott kind of guy, mainly because I know that I’ll eventually cave and buy something if I want it enough, despite the fact that some things about it might piss me off. However, if Microsoft goes through with this always-online plan for Durango, I will not buy it. I can’t! With my Internet environment, it would be like buying a $400 brick that sits on my bedroom counter, taunting me with error codes about not being able to find a Wi-Fi signal. I was already thinking about the PS4 after the fantastic specs dropped, but now I’m strongly considering making the switch next generation.

Hideo Kojima’s Wacky Marketing

Now that all of the shine and sparkle of PAX East has given way to the stateliness of the Game Developers Conference, the gaming world’s next big announcement will likely occur on March 27, 2013, the date of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima’s GDC keynote address. GDC isn’t typically the go-to event for big game announcements (and neither is PAX, for that matter), but the last few years have seen the conference slowly evolving into a mini-E3, largely thanks to the fact that up-to-the-minute reporting has become so fastidious that even a relatively low-key, peer-to-peer event like GDC gets tons of media scrutiny. Some devs have chosen to take advantage of GDC’s growing exposure to do some promotion that borders on the level of E3 overtures, and it appears that Kojima, Fox Engine in hand, is the latest to pick up on this trend.

When the teaser trailer for Moby Dick Studios’ The Phantom Pain was revealed at the Spike VGAs, I was initially apathetic. The protagonist was silent and almost completely obscured by bandages, preventing any kind of immediate human connection with the viewer. The major action of the trailer involved said protagonist crawling around a hospital while faceless soldiers gunned down the rest of the patients, a scene that I’m sure was intended to be brutal but just came across as heavy-handed. The dramatic text that interrupted the FMV every few seconds seemed to indicate that the game’s writer was in dire need of either an editor or a translator. And then the final few seconds of the trailer promptly nosedived into weird horror/psychological thriller territory. The game was off my radar just as quickly as it had appeared.

However, within hours of the game’s announcement, those intrepid Internet sleuths over at NeoGAF had cracked the code: The Phantom Pain could very likely be a facade for a new Metal Gear Solid game. There was a mountain of evidence: a fiery silhouette appeared to be MGS3‘s Colonel Volgin, while a shadowy silhouette appeared to be MGS1‘s Psycho Mantis; the badly bandaged protagonist possessed the trademark beard of series mainstays Big Boss and Solid Snake; the soldiers wore identical garb to the XOF troops of the upcoming Ground Zeroes; the doctor who awakens the protagonist from his coma is a dead-ringer for Metal Gear 2‘s Dr. Kio Marv; the game’s logo appeared to be hiding the words “METAL GEAR SOLID V” in its negative space. On the business side of things, there was absolutely no record of Swedish Moby Dick CEO “Joakim Mogren” before the Phantom Pain reveal (“Joakim,” of course, is an anagram for “Kojima”), despite his claim that he had worked for a large American developer before starting up Moby Dick. The game’s website didn’t list a publisher either; how likely could it be that a Swedish start-up with no established pedigree and no publisher managed to snag an expensive promotional slot during the VGAs, an event that showcased trailers from heavyweight publishers like Epic, Namco Bandai, 2K Games, and THQ (God rest their souls)? If The Phantom Pain was truly a Metal Gear Solid game, it would be published by Konami, and sure enough, Konami personnel were caught wearing The Phantom Pain t-shirts at a VGAs afterparty. Given Kojima’s history of being something of a bizarre marketer, it all seemed just crazy enough to make sense.

Now that we’ve finally met the amusingly bandaged “Joakim Mogren” via interview with Geoff Keighley (who is, apparently, the only member of the media in on the joke), and now that Mogren has promised that “all your questions will be answered” at GDC (after he “accidentally” revealed that The Phantom Pain runs on Kojima’s Fox Engine), all we can do is wait until tomorrow. While we’re waiting, let’s reflect on how great Kojima is at promoting his games. Whether you love Metal Gear Solid or hate it, the reality is that the series has a rabid fanbase, sells by the truckload, and is a darling of the critics. Kojima has surely realized that he can actually do whatever the hell he wants when promoting a new MGS game, since Konami appears to have given him full creative control of the series (likely due to all of the Kojima-directed MGS titles being bestsellers), and no matter what he says or does, the game’s gonna sell like naked hotcakes anyway. He can play with the fans’ emotions; he can be whimsically cryptic; he can outright lie to his audience and they’ll gobble it up wholesale, and they’ll even thank him for the ride when he finally drops the curtain.

Kojima is, of course, no stranger to sly marketing methods. His original plan for MGS2 was to name it MGS3 and have it consist of the “Plant” portion; as the player proceeded through the game as Raiden, he would undoubtedly be wondering what the hell happened to MGS2 and, by extension, Snake. Then boom, you beat Solidus, the credits roll, and all of a sudden the Tanker portion (starring Snake, titled “MGS2,” and chronologically a prequel to the Plant segment) is unlocked. Ultimately, the Tanker portion was unlocked first so as not to confuse the slower gamers among us, and both segments were collectively titled “MGS2,” but vestiges of Kojima’s original plan can be seen in the awkward placement of the game’s tutorial (Tanker, which comes first in the final build but was planned to be second, has no tutorial; several hours of gameplay later, players are finally treated to a long-past-overdue tutorial at the beginning of Plant, since it was originally supposed to be the game’s first segment). However, all of MGS2‘s promotional material indicated that Snake would be the game’s main character, and fans naturally assumed that MGS2 was a continuation of Snake’s story; upon learning that Snake was permanently replaced with sissy-boy Raiden about 1/5th of the way through the game, the fans were furious. Thank God the Internet circa 2001 wasn’t the acidic fanboy-filled cesspool that it is today. The MGS2 bait-and-switch remains of the greatest non-malicious, developer-controlled deceptions in video game history.

Then there’s MGS4‘s infamous gameplay trailer which strongly suggested that the game was a military-style first-person shooter, a genre that was just entering the height of its popularity when the trailer was released in 2005. I can only imagine how many faces paled upon seeing two minutes of yawn-worthy stop-and-cover action from behind the stock of an assault rifle. Of course, the twist was that the FPS camera was simply a random grunt’s point of view, which we realize when Snake suddenly appears within the soldier’s field of vision and stealthily kills him. The rest of the gameplay shown is standard MGS “tactical espionage action” in third-person, and its seven long minutes likely gave attendees ample opportunity to breathe several sighs of relief. Kojima had harmlessly screwed with everyone once again. He correctly guessed it was okay to mislead everyone and make them mad at first, because he knew that he would quickly win them back after the twist was revealed.

I’ve watched the reactions to The Phantom Pain over the past few months and found them increasingly intriguing. First nobody cared about the game, because it quite honestly looked boring as hell. Then when people discovered the MGS connection, everyone smiled knowingly and proclaimed Kojima to be a clever, crazy sonofagun. Of course, there were plenty of contrarian coolsters who said that The Phantom Pain looked cool until it turned out to be an MGS game, that Kojima’s schtick is getting old, that misleading your audience is a cardinal sin, that whole thing was dumb, and so on. Fun police, indeed. People continued to talk passionately about the game for a few weeks, then interest died down when it became clear Kojima wasn’t ready to pull back the curtain just yet (even though the whole Internet now knows that The Phantom Pain is somehow related to MGS). The game has only recently started to receive an enormous amount of attention again in the wake of Mogren’s interview and his promises of a full reveal at GDC (and a cryptic tweet from Kojima that revealed he was working on a GDC trailer with the filename “TPP”). Again, Kojima’s marketing at its finest. The game’s hype level is at a fever pitch as we enter GDC.

Kojima’s marketing is a breath of fresh air in this industry. Although it’s currently more transparent than it’s ever been (you can thank Kickstarter rewards and the vast majority of publisher-less indie devs for that), the game development process is still a relative black box to the consumer. We get an announcement and a trailer at a large trade show, then nothing for months, then a new trailer, then nothing for a few more months, then a flurry of screens, trailers, and previews/reviews just before the game’s launched. Total elapsed time, from announcement to launch: usually about six to eight months. That’s a long, boring time to go with only piecemeal scraps of information to build hype, but there’s little that can be done about the length of the development process. To fill those gaps, Kojima has done something substantially more fun than a trailer and a few screens: he’s got everyone spinning crazy conspiracy theories about whether The Phantom Pain, a seemingly run-of-the-mill action-thriller with a confirmed developer in Moby Dick and a lead designer in Mogren, is in fact not what it seems. His experiment was undoubtedly a huge success; everyone’s talking about this damn game, and it seems like everyone’s got some crackpot theory about how The Phantom Pain ties into the MGS canon or who Joakim Mogren is (Cliff Bleszinski? A CG creation of the apparently photorealistic Fox Engine? God, people are funny sometimes). I appreciate the engaging way Kojima has toyed with the community during this whole ordeal, but that being said, I’m not sure if anyone else could pull this off without the industry boiling over in rage. Shigeru Miyamoto is certainly charming enough to put forth a believable effort, but Nintendo subscribes to the industry standard of opting for silence and secrecy over lies and red herrings, and Shiggy’s just too damned sincere to play devil’s advocate the way Kojima does. In a staid, cagey industry like ours, thank God for Hideo Kojima’s particular brand of delightful chaos.

In Defense of Easy Mode

I felt a little uneasy upon slipping Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance into my 360 for the first time. I’m a diehard Metal Gear fan, and my studies of the series’ complicated, nonsensical lore border on an obsession, but this wasn’t the plodding, predictably rhythmic stealth gameplay I was used to; Revengeance is a game for the hair-trigger crowd, a game where the best defense (or only defense, due to the lack of a dedicated “block” button) is an unrelenting offense. I hadn’t played any of Platinum’s previous games, nor any of Revengeance‘s spiritual predecessors like Ninja Gaiden or Heavenly Sword, so I began to feel like I was a little bit out of my depth, this being my first lightning-quick melee action game and all. I had heard prerelease rumours about the game’s difficulty being comparable to Platinum’s previous super-hardcore hit Bayonetta, and a friend of mine (who is much, much more skilled at these kinds of games than I am) confirmed the rumours upon release. I became worried whether I’d even be able to beat the damn thing, and I hadn’t even played it yet.

As I began adjusting my menu options upon starting a new game, I paused at the difficulty select screen. I knew that if I picked “normal,” I would undoubtedly kick the bucket more than a few times, and I really, really wasn’t looking forward to trying to take down those infamous Platinum Games bosses. So I struggled with some shame for a few minutes, then decided I really didn’t give a damn whether anyone knew I played Metal Gear Rising on easy mode, and just went ahead and dialed down the difficulty.  It proved to be the right decision; although the game is laughably easy (not once have I ever been in danger of dying), easy mode has allowed me to just power through the repetitive combat and quickly get from cutscene to cutscene, which is admittedly what I’m really playing the game for. In all honesty, I think I’m also enjoying the combat far more than I would’ve playing on a higher difficulty; the absence of any imminent danger has allowed me to get really creative with my combos, allowing me to go for style pointz rather than fall back on the frantic button-mashing that characterized my early acclimation period.

It’s not often that I play through a game on easy mode (in fact, Metal Gear Rising is the first one I can recall), and it’s possible that’s due to that ugly Internet stigma against games these days being too easy (a thinly veiled “uphill both ways in the snow” argument if there ever was one). If there’s anything that a hardcore gamer is more insecure about (other than fake gamer girls), it’s being perceived as a casual. I’ve never considered a punishing level of difficulty to be  a selling point for me, mainly because I get absolutely no pleasure from a masochistic, frustrating gameplay experience. I don’t find replaying a section of a game over and over again very fun; I enjoy quickly making progress and moving on to see the next piece of new content. There becomes a point where the “challenge” quickly boils over into “apathy,” and I can no longer bring myself to keep banging my head against a wall.

Part of my decision to play MGR on easy mode also had to do with what I personally wanted out of the game. Like all Metal Gear games, I was really just in it for the story, for the melodramatic monologues to the poetic treatises on the nature of war. The story itself , with major conceits centering around the war economy, electrolytes, and orphan brains, is just the kind of psychotic, nonsensical mess I was hoping for. So by allowing myself to just waltz through the combat, I don’t feel like I was sacrificing a major part of the experience; someone who played Ninja Gaiden for the super-difficult combat sequences might, but I didn’t. There are certain difficult games that I’ve indeed mastered in the past (Fire Emblem and Super Meat Boy come to mind), so it’s not like I can’t handle challenging games, but I ain’t always up for it. I play games for pleasure, not to work myself up into a rage.

Having tried easy mode and actually enjoyed it, I think it’s entirely possible that I might make the switch for other games in the future. When I began playing Fire Emblem: Awakening last month, a game in a series that I’ve always played using self-imposed limitations to artificially make the game harder (why I continue to do so is beyond me, but it’s like tradition now, I guess), I considered turning permadeath off and enabling mid-battle saving, which many diehards would claim is blasphemy. I ended up leaving it on, and I suffered many character deaths and forced restarts over the course of the game.  Awakening is one of those rare games that is so damn good I don’t care if I have to replay an hour of gameplay, but I still wonder if I could have saved myself some time by just disabling permadeath and enabling saving. Let the trolls have my supposed “dignity”; in the future, I’ll just enjoy my games on whatever terms I please, thank you very much.