Hunie Pop: so bad yet so brilliant

I've played my fair share of the dating sims when I was a teenager. They were all roughly the same, but hey - boobs! And to be fair, some of them had really decent writing or even more interesting settings than "you're a transfer student, now go and hump everything that moves". When I was browsing the most recent Steam sale list, I came across Hunie Pop. Was only around 3 Euro and to be honest, looked pretty lame. What caught my eye was the "Overwhelmingly Positive" in user reviews. Could it be that the genre that used to be a one-trick-pony has something new to offer? Could it be that jRPG and Iron Maiden are the only ones still stuck in the 80's and the visual dating novel has left them behind?

Yeah, I bought it and I was astonished how bad it was. I mean... The assumption that if I'm playing it I must be a loser that could never get a girl was both funny and embarrassing. The dialog choices were always between "my nose is bleeding" and "my tongue is stuck between my teeth". The occasional "Hey, I'm not a total moron" options were always greeted with a "yeah, right... get real" kind of reply. Of course, not 30 minutes later, I'm a regular playboy that can ask any girl out and aks every chick their cup size and - what's even weirder - age and get a reply. With no magic involved, but just because the game wanted it that way.

The writing is so terrible that it walks this fine line between so bad I want to quit and so bad it's funny. Luckily, the Voice Acting is even worse, which pushes the whole thing to the definitely funny zone. The uninspired one-liners of stereotypical teachers, schoolgirls and gym bunnies are met with performances so dull that Siri sounds like a sex line operator in comparison. 

Yet... the game is actually the best dating sim I've ever played. Before you ask the girls on dates, you get to ask the girls questions and buy them presents. At first it feels like mindless collectible unlocking. Soon enough though, between some relationship questions where you need to simply tell the girl what she wants to hear, she will check whether you've been paying attention and ask you what her weight or favourite color is. But that's just child's play. Where it gets really good is the dates themselves.

It's the first dating sim I've seen that actually uses its mechanics as a metaphor of dating instead of making me read through pages of dialogue and descriptions to chose an option every 15 minutes. Instead, it's a logical match 3 type of game. A surprisingly deep one with a decent amount of strategy in it. Additionally, every color you're matching corresponds with an emotion or a conversational topic. Every girl prefers certain topics, so you have to navigate through the board to focus on sexuality or flirtation, but it's not always possible, when all that's on the table is talent and romance. Every now and then you accidentally trigger a bad topic and the whole carefully built up mood goes to shit. And sometimes, when you are out of your game and the colors just don't seem to match, the date ends without really moving the relationship forward, leaving you both in that "meh" zone. 

That's a pretty damn accurate mechanic to mimic the intricacy of dating. But wait, it gets better! When you finally manage to get into a girl's pants, the rules of the match 3 change. The board is now filled with easy matches. You're both in the mood. All you need to do is not to fuck it up now. You need to fill the rapidly depleting mood bar. At first, used to thinking things through, you're searching for good, strategic matches. You get some points, then a combo comes crashing down. You're already doing great. The bra is gone, but you have to act quick before the mood drops. You start getting a bit nervous. You just match whatever you find first. You're getting sloppy. You know you could probably be doing so much better, yet you keep plowing through and even though sometimes you ruin the mood a bit with your tempo, you finally get there, feeling like you've actually accomplished something. However silly that sounds. 

I don't know about you guys, but I'd take this kind of experience over an overly long sexual act description. And while it might all sound really silly and while Hunie Pop might have an awfully candyish, dumb, primitive, sometimes straightforward racist and stereotypical skin, its gameplay is solid and an incredible example of using just the right mechanics to let the player experience the complexity of the dating game. In that regard, Hunie Pop is a game that beats all entries of The Witcher, Mass Effect and Persona series all together.

Legacy of the Void - the worst Zelda game ever

Before we start, I'm a huge StarCraft fan. It was one of my first PC games. The franchise has been with me for over half of my life and what might be weird, I loved the game mostly for the story. Sure it wasn't the greatest thing ever written, but the execution was just so much better than all the mission briefings we were used to at that time in RTS. Jim was a cocky bastard, Mengsk was a major asshole and Fenix sacrificing himself was one of the most meaningful game deaths for me. And the soundtrack... Hell, I'm gonna listen to it while I'm writing this. Hey! You can listen to it while you read this, too! It'll be the soundtrack for this post, why not.

When Wings of Liberty came out, I played the crap out of it. Got all the achievements in the story mode. Even the Lost Viking ones, because I just wanted to show my respect to the guys at Blizzard that made it so beautiful. So what all characters had depth of a puddle, at least they were diverse and worked well together. The missions were diverse, the goal clear and Raynor relatable. It's been 5 years and I can still remember some of the maps.

Then Heart of the Swarm came, with its in-your-face romance and pink Kerrigan. Up until the end of Wings of Liberty, the word "love" has never appeared. The relationship between Jim and Sarah was hinted, but never explicitly shown or confirmed. The beginning of Heart of the Swarm could have easily featured them as good buddies, with Jim having hots for the HotS (sorry for the terrible pun, couldn't resist) and Kerrigan not really being that interested. Still it wasn't so bad after all. Seemingly faceless Zerg got amazing new representation in Zagara and Abathur. However, it's probably not the best thing that I don't know what the end goal was.

HEAVY SPOILERS FROM NOW ON - YOU'VE BEEN WARNED

Legacy of the Void has been so much worse though. The whole thing is a MacGuffin fest. Starting with the introduction of a "bad god" very originally named Amon. Although, if main characters have the most popular American names, Jim and Sarah, it's probably fitting that the bad god has the name out of top three popular god names. What's worse, is that the only purpose this Amon serves is for us to know what we want to hit in the face in the finale. The coolest Protoss alive, Zeratul, gets sacrificed to free the most boring of them, Artanis. "Screw Zeratul, I want to play as Artanis in the last part of StarCraft" said no one ever. It's as if the creative director played Metal Gear Solid 2 and thought "hey, this Raiden guy was so cool!" or something equally ridiculous.

What follows is resurrecting the one character that should have stayed heroically dead - Fenix. What's worse, he's resurrected, but not quite. He's now having existential problems and becomes a plot device in a story that keeps getting worse with every passing mission. Way to dig out a corpse of a beloved character and spit on it. Accompanying the bland Artanis are also a green-eyed female, a blue-eyed female that occasionally turns red, the only protoss with a beard and a red-eyed bad protoss that for a completely unexplainable reason manifests free will. Yes, I just finished the game yesterday and already cannot remember the names. The only good moments in the campaign cutscenes are when Kerrigan, Raynor and Swann appear. The rest is just one still face babbling to another still face.

Back to MacGuffins - almost every mission goes like this: "Hey, Artanis, I've discovered the xhtehyean... ah screw it, I discovered these magical thingies that you need to collect or destroy so you can advance." At some point you find yourself chasing 3 pieces of Triforce to be able to collect 5 gems to free 6 sages to find 7 crystals. Unfortunately, Artanis doesn't have a fun green hat and what's worst, he talks. Makes me wonder whether all the level designers were reassigned to Heroes of the Storm and Legacy of the Void was left with just a team of juniors.

The pinnacle of this is the final mission of the epilogue, where instead of an epic bossfight or commanding a massive final battle, you get to... You guessed it! Destroy 7 floating crystals! And as a reward, you get to see burning Kerrigan using a laser pointer attack on the forehead of Cthulu Amon. And don't even get me started on Kerrigan trying to rival Dragon Ball Z characters in the amount of transformations and how cliché her final form is.

When I finished the game yesterday I immediately googled whether they changed the person responsible for the story, but no. It's been Chris Metzen all this time, but apparently struck by some midlife dementia. You thought the ending of Mass Effect 3 was bad? Well, it must be some space opera curse, because Legacy of the Void manages to deliver an even worse ending to a much better franchise. After it's all over, you end up feeling like Blizzard has just taken a long, boring piss on your favourite characters.

A few words on recycling in games

Me and my girl recently finished Child of Light (maxed it out actually, which is super easy when someone is sitting next to you and bugs you every time you go past a wall that you haven't licked yet). It got me thinking about recycling in games and how it works. It's been done for years now and the whole idea is pretty obvious, but I'll describe it a bit anyway.

Now the whole principle is... Making games is expensive. It's a lot of work too. And there's so many games that did things right. So many elements that would fit your game so well that you would just want to take these parts and put them in your game without really changing anything. Now imagine the situation where you actually own these elements, because the studio you work for owns them.

The "recycling" can be done in a number of ways, as you can recycle pretty much everything from music through art assets to the technology. Recycling is basically the whole idea behind dedicated engines. The engine From Software uses is one of the best examples - they are repeatedly making new souls games using huge chunks of code from the previous installments. Of course they have to adjust quite a lot here and there, but they do have a solid base. Another good example is the id tech engine, that keeps us entertained since the first Doom and now, guess what - the newest Doom will be using its sixth version. I'm sure they had to rewrite the whole engine at least once on the way, but they reused it more than once too. The first one alone was a base for somewhere around a dozen of games. Look at me, basically expaining what an engine is... Moving on!

There's this general bias towards games that recycle assets, especially the graphical ones. A lot of people complained about Dragon Age 2 and BioShock 2. However, games recycling assets can be great. They just need special care. Portal is probably the best example. The core mechanic itself wouldn't be enough to make it a cult classic. They also had to execute it well, with decent puzzle design and brilliant tutorial and narrative.

Now this has little to do with the article,
but damn, what a cool idea!

Smart management of assets lets the company give us more games more easily. Look at WB Games. They released Injustice: Gods Among Us almost simultaneously on both mobile and "big consoles". The models were super easy to transition, as both games used Unreal Engine 3 and it only required remembering to prepare lower LOD's (from "level of details", versions of the model with less polygons used for optimization, like viewing from afar). They obviously used a lot of tech from Mortal Kombat 9 for the console version, but had to redesign and redevelop the combat mechanics for the touch screen. When releasing MKX however, I'm sure they didn't even have that problem - they already had all the components. That's what smart asset management gives you.

Child of Light is another example of great asset management. A quite heavily "recycled" title that got nice reception. Let's face it, Ubisoft does have a whole stable of titles, bits, assets and features. They not only used the UbiArt Framework engine, but the whole game plays pretty much like the mosquito levels of Rayman Legends. The light dots fly around with a copy-pasted code of Rayman's lums and the bossfight camera zoom-ins probably didn't get a second look at either. The combat mechanics look way too close to those from South Park: The Stick of Truth that Ubisoft was helping Obsidian to close around the time of Child of Light's development. The circular menu and the two switchable characters system might not have been copy-pasted from one game engine to the other, but I'm willing to bet these fighting systems share their origin. And now, the new South Park game's been announced. With it being developed without Obsidian, there's a decent chance the new Cartman and friends game will be done using UbiArt Framework, that, thanks to Child of Light, now has turn-based battle mechanics!

If you look at it like that, Child of Light becomes a milestone in the development of the UbiArt Framework engine between Rayman and South Park. And how cool is it that this milestone also gives us a game! One with straightforward awful rhyming, but still a really decent game. That's what good planning gives you. And without it, I'm pretty sure a game like Child of Light would never see the... erm... light. Its costs would probably be way too high for Ubisoft to risk it.

How Blizzard tries to solve MOBA problems

I really didn't want to start playing Heroes of the Storm. For two reasons. One - I never had enough time to really enjoy playing any MOBA on a decent skill level. Two - whenever Blizzard releases a game there is a high chance it will be the only game I'll be playing for the next few months. I logged into the beta maybe a week ago and I'm amazed at what I've seen so far in terms of design.

Bear in mind that this article's purpose is to analyze how Blizzard has approached many problems that can be seen within MOBA games, especially on the entry level. For obvious reasons, I will be comparing it to the most popular two - LoL and DotA 2.

If MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch was still on,
I'm sure they would feature Drow Ranger vs. Ashe at some point.

Problem #1: Copying

The situation of the most popular MOBAs on the market is pretty ridiculous. Everything started with a Warcraft III mod, then LoL pretty much copied it, then Valve copied it (or "further developed"), and now the company that did the base for original, but not the original stepped into the picture. 

Battles between LoL and DotA 2 fans are almost equally amusing as the console fanboys throwing shit at each other while the "PC Master Race" is defending their 10% market share (mostly thanks to MOBAs). The differences between the two titles are cosmetic at best and are mostly on the visual side. Sure, the balancing is different, the difficulty is different, monetization is different, but the whole core design stayed untouched since what, 2003, when the first version of DotA saw the light?

Blizzard had to differentiate. Not only because the formula deserved a bit of a change, but mostly because with established fan bases of the 2 biggest titles, not even the legions of Blizzard fans would be interested in a third game that's exactly the same. What did they do?

They took the most static element of the puzzle - the map - and made a few variants of it, making the players not only push lanes and jungle, but also fight for the overpowered power-ups that can be complete game changers. From resurrecting bone golems through collecting doublons for a pirate to bomb enemy forts to letting players turn into a dragon. On top of that, the lanes are no longer defended by towers you can just walk by. They are fortified, with walls and gates. And lastly, the mobs in the jungle, instead of being just a source of experience, cash or buffs, became mercenaries that you can recruit once every 3 minutes if you defeat them first. This way, the map design alone is a very distinctive game changer. 

Like with almost everything done by Blizzard - not really a revolution, but evolution comparable to dogs growing wings overnight.

Problem #2: Accessibility

I couldn't really get into DotA 2. The item icons were so small I could barely see anything, The AI of towers was just confusing in the first few matches and the overall difficulty at the lowest levels, the confusing plethora of characters to choose from... Lost two games, won three games, changed the character, lost again and that was more or less it.

LoL is correcting quite a lot of these. The free champion rotation is obviously there as a part of the more aggressive monetization plan, but it also narrows the initial choice of characters down, which is a very good thing for beginners. The item icons are bigger and the player can actually see what they depicts. The suggested items for each character are also a great idea for those who just want to try and play without reading through a number of guides first. On the other hand, the multitude of items later on did force you to put hours into investigating every single champion or at least copy-pasting a working build from some website. Not even then you have a chance for a relatively even fight, as LoL has a system of runes and sigils and whatnot that literally lets the higher level players who farmed more (or paid more) get significant bonuses that help them dominate lower level players. Mixed with uneven matching alghoritms it's far from a noob-friendly environment. 

Heroes of the Storm eases us into it. There is only 5 heroes in the rotation at first and that's more than enough for new players. As you gain player levels, you unlock slots that give you some more heroes in the free rotation, but that happens after you are already familiar with the basics and are unlikely to get overwhelmed. The player level gives you no advantage in a single match. Learning your hero is also much more user-friendly. There's no items you have to worry about in the middle of the battle and all three basic skills are unlocked from the start. The only thing you have to manage is traits that you get every few levels. Traits give you additional skills or improve the existing ones. At level 10 you get the ultimate skill (R). Simple? Wait, it's been made even simpler! When you are starting with a new hero, you have only half of its traits unlocked, so you only have to choose between two each time something pops up. When you finish your match, your hero gets experience and levels up, which unlocks additional traits and an alternative ultimate skill. Sounds limiting at first, but as soon as you learn that in no more than 5 battles your hero gets all its traits unlocked, the limitation becomes nothing more than just a smoothened learning curve. Especially with dynamically adjusted difficulty level that seems to base on your player level. 

What's also interesting is that for every hero you take to level 5, you get some ingame currency to buy new heroes, so it encourages you to try new heroes instead of sticking to one or two you know.

Some might argue that the trait system is an insufficient replacement for the skill upgrading and item buying system of DotA 2 and LoL, but nobody in their right mind can claim it's less user-friendly. And again, it helps HotS differentiate itself from the two.

These guys are actually behaving better than DotA and LoL fanboys.
They only attack the opposite "team".

Problem #3: Community

It's no secret that the current MOBA communities (especially LoL) is full of harassment and misbehavior. Riot even introduced the Tribunal system to fight the offenders, but all this reporting and reviewing cases feels more like pitting the players against each other more than really solving the problem. 

Blizzard tries to root out the causes of the problems. I'm sure they won't be able to succeed completely, but there are some ideas that certainly help fight some of the aggression.

First one they decided to tackle was the competition within the team. There is no such thing as individual hero level in a match. The whole team gets a level. You can't steal a kill, as everyone that does damage gets the kill and the experience goes to the mutual pool anyway. There's no coins to buy items, so players don't have to compete over that too. Still, there are statistics that show who did more siege damage or who participated in more takedowns, but nobody gets ahead of the team with the level and nobody lags behind. You'd be amazed how much it cuts down the shit flying on the allied chat. 

Another common cause of rage is players quitting mid-game. LoL community even wrote an open letter to parents about that recently. Players quit, the rest of the team is doomed. How do you counteract that? It looks like there is a number of ways. First - if a player quits or has connection problems, the hero doesn't idle. Heroes of the Storm switches to a bot as a backup. When the player reconnects, he regains control of the hero. Sure, the bot might not be as good as the player, but at least is isn't just standing in the base. Second idea is the very length of the match. Many co-op vs. AI matches last between 10 and 15 minutes. PvP matches last around 30 minutes. That's approximately 50% of a standard LoL / DotA 2 match time. On top of that all, the matching system seems to be much more effective here than the team setups in LoL that can take half an hour.

Next step in MOBAs?

Since I've never played any of the titles on more professional level, it's hard for me to assess how much the simplification of gear/skill systems will affect the depth of gameplay, The matches do seem more varied when it comes to level-related tactics and it could actually be enough to make up for possible lacks in the character development depth. Not to mention the fact that number of systems or items doesn't necessarily increase depth.

From what I've seen so far, HotS is a much smoother experience for a starting player. Shorter matches, shorter setup times, more incentive to learn new heroes and much friendlier learning curve combined with more map variety can all be great attractors. It definitely does a great job standing out as a title without abandoning the 10-players-3-lanes core of the genre.

How successful will it prove to be? Time will tell. Right now, top 2 spots on Twitch don't seem to budge, but who knows? Maybe it's because more people are actually able to play HotS on a satisfactory level that they don't have to watch it.

Narrowing your audience: Zelda vs. Ni no Kuni

Yeah, I know these two games don't have much in common at first glance, but bear with me, as these titles are excellent edge examples of a lot of elements can make or break the game for audiences. Especially for the kids.

Ni no Kuni is just beautiful. The world is perfectly crafted. The locations are breathtaking. The characters... well, all Ghibli characters look the same and Olivier (main character) is just a generic Ghibli boy, but that doesn't bother me. I just won't say they are as awesome as the rest of the world. The story, when you follow it, is also very nice. So what it's basically a Japanese version of Harry Potter. The world you get to explore is original, interesting and full of life.

Zelda, on the other hand, recycles the same story for the… I think it’s 17th time or so. The whole environment is built with repetitive assets that look like stock mobile game models you can buy in packs for 5 bucks. To make sure that the player notices that, everything is placed on a square grid, because gods forbid any of these destructible jars was standing out of line. But all that is perfectly fine, because the grid-based world works perfectly for the gameplay. And in the end, the story is mostly about you figuring out how to use new tools to beat the new dungeons, not about Link rescuing Zelda for the hundredth time.

Both games theoretically have a huge potential to be titles for everyone. Not only graphics, but also themes are quite children-friendly. At the same time, there's enough depth to keep older audiences interested. And both titles had a great chance to reach a very wide demographic. Now let’s see how various tiny things drove the games apart in that regard.

Intros

What makes or breaks these two games is how they are introduced to the player. In Ni no Kuni you start by watching a cutscene that is followed by a cutscene, that's followed by a dialogue, after which you get another dialogue and then you get to run down the street to watch another cutscene. In Zelda, Link wakes up and you're free to run around. Sure, you have to run to a few places close by, but by the time Olivier manages to get out of his house, Link already has a sword and is cutting grass and breaking jars! In the first moments of the game one of the games has already managed to filter out the short-tempered gamers from their audience.

Tutorials and Pacing

Three minutes into A Link Between Worlds I knew all the controls I needed, I had no problems going through the consecutive sections of the game. Whenever a new mechanic or new item was introduced, there was a whole dungeon designed to let me use it and learn all the possibilities that came with my new tool. Each of these items comes with an extremely short description. Bow: "Arrows fly straight to take down enemies! You can also move while aiming!" All I need to know in two sentences, followed by a dungeon letting me figure out all I can do with this bow. Six hours into the game and I still get new mechanics, still have fun experimenting with new things and haven't been confused or bored for a second. On my way to new dungeons I found mini-games, a collectable quest and a bunch of secret areas to keep my explorer and achiever sides happy. Every half an hour or so I feel rewarded with something: a piece of heart, a new secret, a new dungeon, a new quest item, a new mechanic...

Even though Zelda series are famous for their nagging navi, Ni no Kuni has somehow
managed to make its sidekick, Drippy, even more annoying.

Three hours into Ni no Kuni and I still felt I am in the tutorial. Still felt I didn't really know anything about this game. My weird sidekick still kept bugging me with long and overstylized dialogues explaining new mechanics, menus, options, equipment, spells. I have been fed at least a dozen tutorials and I have still been waiting to actually do something cool. Trying out new things limited itself to the sidekick telling you "Now, select the new spell you acquired". You then had to  select it (and most of the time it is the only spell you can use anyway) and the game progressed to another dialogue. Sure, I levelled up a few times, I bought a sword for my Pokemon, err... Familiar and I met some fat cat, but somehow, three hours into it, I still felt like I haven't accomplished anything in this game.

Narrative and language

Writers in Ni no Kuni had a lot of work. Dialogues are chasing dialogues, characters are very diverse and each has their own little way of speaking. We have a classic purry cat, we have an owl that’s having a hoot, our sidekick, our main hero, everyone is speaking just a little bit different. And they are all talking a lot. This attention to diversity and details is very pleasing to all the dialogue-driven game nerds (myself included), but what does that mean for the accessibility? The complexity of the dialogues makes them unsuitable for youngest children. Also, since the game only comes in Japanese and English, non-natives without at least upper intermediate knowledge of one of these languages, will have little idea what is going on in the game.

Zelda doesn’t bother much with the story. There’s a world, there’s another world, we play as Link and he’s the link between these worlds… Link is the link, get it? And there’s Zelda and she’s obviously to be rescued and there’s Ganon that’s obviously to be defeated. And there’s a Triforce and Seven Sages and all that stuff that we’ve seen already so many times. Dialogues and descriptions are short, simple and to the point and even without reading them we can figure out how to progress somehow. I am fairly certain I would have been able to beat the game if it was in some language that’s exotic for me. Swahili… or even worse, Hungarian ;) A Link Between Worlds manages to remain accessible to pretty much anyone with opposing thumbs, but of course, there’s a cost – it won’t really satisfy those in need of a deep, dialogue-driven story.

Gameplay

The type of gameplay is very different in both games and the only comparable thing is the amount of pure gameplay. Ni no Kuni is much more dialogue-driven while Zelda is almost purely gameplay-driven. Obviously it’s a matter of preference here, so the gameplay section of this article is here mostly to tell the nitpickers I didn’t forget about it :)

Who are these games for?

At this point I think I’m already able to answer that somewhat accurately. With Zelda: A Link Between Worlds I have no problems stating that the game can be for anyone that likes good gameplay and isn't repelled by cute, cartoony and well, straightforward childish graphics. The depth of mechanics paired with excellent tutorials make the game extremely easy to get a hang on and entertaining and engaging enough to stick with it till the end. Story geeks that are not Zelda fans will definitely not be satisfied here though.

Ni no Kuni has much more restrictions. People who didn’t accept Zelda for art direction, most probably won’t like Ni no Kuni either. Long and boring tutorials are definitely not suitable for anyone with short attention span. Sparsely distributed save points make it a game difficult to play when you might be yelled at by your parents to stop playing already. Tons of dialogues, written in a very stylized way, will make it hard to understand the game for children who are not Japanese or native English speakers. The topics in the story place the game in a very good position. There's both lots of joy and depth and even though it reeks of a Japanese Harry Potter, it is quite bearable even for adults. Unfortunately, with the dialogue chains going on and on with little interactive elements in between and then long dungeons with repetitive fights, the game feels very, very tedious pretty much all the time. So if we put together all these elements, we see that Ni no Kuni is actually suitable for a very narrow group of cartoony graphics-loving, native-speaker level people that have a lot of patience to go through a ridiculously boring tutorial and then several dozens of hours of similarly boring gameplay just to read/hear more of the story. But… Wouldn’t any Studio Ghibli anime be a more engaging pick for them?

Catching up: Catherine - the nerdy guide to relationships?

It is very rare for me to find a game that I will have such mixed feelings towards. In case of Catherine, these feelings are also incredibly polarized. What you are about to witness is as much of a love song as it is a hate rant. The text contains some spoilers - you've been warned.

Let's start with the good sides. The gameplay is simply delicious! I only play puzzle games on my phone and if I were to choose a game type for one of my main gaming platforms, puzzler would be one of the last choices. Still, the way Catherine handles its puzzles is exceptional. Fast-paced, highly competitive, diverse climbing mechanics with variety of block types provides a very entertaining challenge. And when I write challenge, I mean I have platinum trophies in both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls and I still wouldn't dare to play Catherine on hard difficulty. There's 28 stages in the main game, 64 stages in Rapunzel retro mini-game with same mechanics, just a bit different rules + Babel + Colosseum, a local competitive multiplayer. That's a lot for a simple small game Catherine seems to be. 

Level design itself is impressive. If someone told me to design a level for platformer or a shooter, I would at least have a faint idea where to start. With Catherine, I would pass right away. Respect to all these guys who fried their brains with maths of this block-building. Even bigger respect to designers that came up with all these cool techniques that NPC's in the game teach you (I would have never invented half of them on my own).

The narrative of the gameplay shines as well. Whenever gameplay tells us the story, it just can't get get better. Climbing a tower, pushing blocks like a slave in Ancient Egypt, avoiding traps and falls, dealing with various environment elements and being constantly aware of your surroundings - and all of that as a metaphor of being in a relationship! Cherries on top are these small moments where designers use clever tricks to let you feel the social aspects of the games theme. For example you can only check out a dirty picture on your phone when on a toilet, which makes you feel like a sneaky bastard :) A nice touch is also the online feature showing statistics, how other players answered the questions.

Then comes the story itself. The main theme of the game is relationships, fidelity and growing up. Pretty unusual for a video game, huh? Unfortunately, as much as I was excited to find out how they approached it, I got solely disappointed. There's just so many sins Catherine's storytelling commits, it's almost unbelievable.

First of all, the setup. We have a classic shōnen manga situation - a guy who seems average in every possible way, yet somehow two girls want to be with him so badly that he can't decide which one to choose. It reminds me of an old Jim Carrey stand-up:

Start at 2:38 :)

This might work for teenagers that feel like most average of the average and dream of girls being interested in them. When used as an assembly for a mature analysis of cheating in a relationship, it falls flat very quickly. To top that off, none of these girls is really to die for. From the very start Katherine is depicted as an annoying control freak that most of the guys would dump after a few months, a year tops if sex was good. Bimboey Catherine on the other side very quickly shows she's nuts and I myself would be running from a girl like her faster than from a rhino. After first few nights, I just wanted to have an option to get as far away from both of them as possible. But no - no matter what you do, Vincent (the main character) behaves like an indecisive teenager, but without the charm of Keichii Morisato or Tenchi Masaki. But wait, it gets worse.

In the center of the story there's this meter that shows where your actions and choices take you on a good - bad scale. Seriously, every single dilemma in the game is judged as simply right or wrong. All the subtleties and complexities of human relationships got downgraded to just "good" or "bad". If I wanted a bite of such oversimplification I'd just go to church instead of playing a game. 

After most of the stages you get to answer questions that are supposed to judge your attitude towards relationships. Of course, they are also judged in this ridiculous right and wrong scale which leads to all sorts of even more absurd revelations. To give you a taste:

Q: Do you prefer an older or younger partner? - selecting "younger" automatically drives you towards the "bad cheater" scenario. WTF?

Q: Have you been told your romantic standards were too high? - according to the game designers, affirmative answer doesn't mean you will die alone looking for "the one". It means you are a good, faithful partner.

Q: Are you more of a Sadist or a Masochist? - apparently, cutting yourself means you are a reliable, stable lover. Sharpen your razor blades, guys!

Seriously, if someone ever got the crazy idea of getting dating advice from this game, he would end up as a repressed weirdo who, if lucky enough to get a woman by sheer luck, would be unable to communicate with her, building up his and her sexual frustration. There's just one conclusion I am able to draw here. When I was teaching teenagers creative writing, one of the first advices was "don't touch topics you have no idea about - it will show in what you write". Dear Atlus writers - it really shows you have no clue about men-women relationships. Actually, there is barely a moment in the game that could show you know how an average 32 year old man behaves. 

But yeah - you guessed it. It gets even worse! The narrator in the game, together with sms-based tutorials tell you at least three times how the choices you make in the game matter. How the answers to the questions change your good vs. evil meter and how it affects the story. Well - bullshit! No matter what you do and what messages you write, the plot stays the same for the whole game up until the ending that has a number of different versions. Due to the first 95% of the story remaining untouched, half of these endings doesn't even make sense. You can be leeching dirty pictures from the bimbo Catherine and send the worst possible messages to the bitchy Katherine. Either way, Vincent will suddenly (really, he does that out of the blue) realize Katherine is the love of his life and he wants to save his relationship. I played the game twice because I thought the choices I make will really make some difference in the story but my advice to you guys - unless you want to check out other difficulties, just watch the other endings on YouTube.

Does it still get any worse? YES! The game is rated M and obviously trying to market itself to the young adult audiences. It also clearly tries to touch the topic in a more dramatic, mature way. One could think that they believe in the cognitive abilities of the players who finish the game. Unfortunately, right at the end, a busty red-afro-head appears, like she did in the start, and trying to imitate Elvira, she... explains everything! She tells the player what climbing the towers was a metaphor for! Treating the player like a complete idiot, she explains something that was obvious by the third night at latest.

The developers delivered an immaturely told story of 30+ people acting like characters from High School Musical. Simplified relationships to a flat right-wrong scale. Showed how they didn't care about your choices and just force-fed you the same story no matter what you do. And after that, they still dared to lecture you on one of the most obvious metaphors of the decade. That... was weak.

No, it doesn't get worse than that anymore, luckily. The story is a complete waste of a good theme and instead of letting the player explore the various aspects of relationships and fidelity, it takes you back to the third grade and simplifies the whole message to:

Managing Expectations

Two weeks ago I borrowed two games from work - yes, having a game library is one of the perks in most gamedev studios. One was Lollipop Chainsaw, the other Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It got me thinking about things we expect from games and how much these expectations affect our reception of a game.

There are generally two reactions to Lollipop Chainsaw: "Another game about boobs? Grow up." and "A busty blonde cheerleader killing zombies with a chainsaw? Count me in!". It doesn't matter which category you are in, you don't expect a compelling story. You don't expect characters you will be identifying yourself with. You don't expect any breakthrough in mechanics or gameplay. All you want is to have fun whacking hordes of zombies. Comments like "Killing people is fun when they are Zombies" only confirm that the game doesn't want to lie what it delivers.

Therefore, when you reach moments where you run zombies over with a combine harvester, when you get inside oldschool arcade games, when you get to ride the chainsaw to collect bonuses on your way, you just get an unexpected, nice bonus. When I heard Children of Bodom in the soundtrack instead of Californian punk, I immediately gave the game +1 on my personal scale. What's more, when you start the game, your mind is already ready to accept an extremely abstract world, where Juliette's boyfriend is just a head dangling next to her skirt. Finding giant lollipops or giant coin medals is not an immersion breaker. You just take it as a part of this irrational world design. 

Deus Ex comes with it's 90 metascore, with well-written cyberpunk world, a whole episode of Extra Credits where they sing the song of glory for the game. It resurrects a respected franchise. It brings Adam, a bastard child of Batman and Neo, who can be augmented in so many cool ways. It lets you decide how you want to play through your game - you can sneak around, hack, persuade or just blow things up. You get loads of various quests, deal with the main intrigue as much as interact with the futuristic city. You can acquire access to thousands of e-mails and palmtops that tell you the stories of pretty much every person in the building you are in. Impressive, huh?

Then how come it's so boring!? Why does searching someone's desk always mean hacking into his computer? Why does sneaking mean spending so much time in identical vent shafts? Why is it nearly impossible for 5 guys to kill you if you hide behind a desk - you just take them out like ducks on a shooting range. The world is incredibly detailed and well-thought. Level design shines and the plot throws you in the middle of a mature game that's supposed to be making you wonder what humanity is. Problem is... you get thrown out of it all the time. You find some dirt on a corrupted cop, you confront him and he sings like a bird... with a civilian standing maybe a meter from him. You can see her in the background all the time so clearly that you don't care what he says, you just keep facepalming at how irrational the situation is. Just behind him sits another guy that you have to talk to for at least 5 minutes, but instead of hearing his story, you just keep wondering whether it's hair or maybe brain growing out of his skull. Seriously, hair looked better in games made 7 years before DE: HR.

Hello, Jensen, would you like to touch my hairbrain?

If you reached so far in my post you are probably asking yourself "Is this noob trying to say that Lollipop Chainsaw is a better game than Deus Ex: Human Revolution?" No, it's not about being a better game here. Yes, I had a lot more fun with Lollipop Chainsaw and yes, the new Deus Ex did let me down. Can I objectively say Lollipop is a better game? Probably not. That brings us to the very topic of this post.

Before we even play a game, we are attacked by opinions, by the hype surrounding the bigger titles. We are biased by our own sentiments to the franchise or by some vague imaginary values we associate with ones we heard about but never actually tried. If you didn't play any of these 2 games and read my post, you will probably expect much more from LC than I did and you might be disappointed. You might expect much less from DE: HR and have loads of fun. My post will be the element that affected your expectations.

A great part of the game-related PR is expectations management. Obviously, everyone wants to sell their product, so they will always be exposing the elements and features strongest in their game. One of the biggest tasks in selling Lollipop Chainsaw was making a cosplay contest to choose the right girl to promote the game on conventions. In Deus Ex, it was hyping up the audience about the world you can explore, the relevant choices that you are going to make and the variety of mechanics that will let you play the game exactly the way you want to.

Just showing off the cool stuff sounds like an easy job? Not really. It is easy with titles like Lollipop Chainsaw or Dead or Alive. Boobs are boobs. Round, come in pairs, defy gravity. DOA5 confused their audience for a moment with some babbling about advanced boob physics, but luckily for them, the pictures were still pretty self-explanatory. Let's analyze the message examples I glued to Deus Ex however. World exploration strongly implies a sandboxy open-world while it might mean "only" the ability to find a lot of hidden passages and lots of notes to get to know the world better. Relevant choices can imply that you will be strongly changing the world and story around you while it might mean "only" the possibility to freely customise your character's development, affecting your future gameplay. Variety of mechanics implies you will be overwhelmed with your options, but it can just mean you can either shoot or hide with nothing exciting about any of the options. Even if you were telling the truth the whole time, some people will feel lied to anyway.

I guess that after so many paragraphs you expect me to somehow sum up this fun rant, so I will invent a proverb. You can then judge by yourself if it did or didn't meet your expectations. So here goes:

Success lies within mixing the right amount of depth and boobs. :)

Evoland - the study of game design evolution

When it comes to this game, I am probably in the most biased group that exists. I am completely aware that it is made exactly for people like me. The ones that can't decide whether they liked Final Fantasy VII or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time more. I am pretty sure the guys responsible for Evoland are sitting on the same fence and hell, we are all feeling quite cosy here. 

Evoland is a game about games. To be more specific, it is a game about evolution of two brilliant series of jRPG - Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda. It borrows almost everything from these games and as a huge fan, I was enjoying every tiniest bit of it. Every gag, every little mechanic, every little reference made me smile or straight out laugh and run to my wife to first explain the background to her, then tell her the joke and then get angry that she doesn't get it.

Guys from Shiro Games came up with a really cool mechanic: opening chests rewards you with new game features! You start in black and white 2D world where you can only go right and evolve it into a 3D world that gets textures, prerendered backgrounds, higher resolution, better music. But the evolution isn't limited only to graphics or music quality. You get awarded such things as enemies, inventory, health bars, breakable pots and pushable crates or random encounters and turn-based battle! You get all kinds of game elements that upgrade your experience from earliest 80's to the first decade of the current century.

Almost all the mechanics that you can uncover are taken straight from either FF or TLOZ, and later a bit from Diablo. Since it is a game about game evolution, it wouldn't make sense to add some new revolutionary mechanics that didn't exist before. The designers decided that there's no use hiding their fascination with the two titles. They even went a step further. Everything in Evoland reminds us of two studied series: names of characters, shape of an airship, sword design, mood of a town, battle menu layout and color... All these are an honest tribute to the two great series.

Putting aside my undying sentiment to last century RPGs, Evoland does one thing that I am not sure it intended to do, but it does it extremely well. It actually teaches the player a lot about game design. Every new element that you discover in Evoland gives you new ways to interact with the environment. When someone plays a regular game, he is given a series of mechanics that are usually complimenting each other in a fluent way. He rarely analyzes how they affect the general gameplay and interact with each other. In Evoland you never get two new mechanics at once, letting you focus on one element at a time. And it shows you, how this element changes the game. How adding NPC's adds a dialogue option. How placing a key in a chest forces level designers to place an unlockable door somewhere and how it affects the level design options.

One other aspect that is just exemplary in Evoland is the learning curve. It introduces every single element separately, starting from scratch - moving right. Every time a new gameplay bit appears, you get to use it right away. You get a key - you open a door. You get a bomb - you blow up a wall. You never have to wonder what, when and how to do. And you are never attacked by tutorials or popping up hot tips.

The game is short - only a few hours of gameplay. But also, it's €10 worth of a game design analysis of two greatest jRPG series. There's no denying Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda series, at least in the last century, were all very good games. Seeing them broken down to single pieces introduced one by one is of indisputable value for every designer. I would be in a pickle if I were to choose between spending $10 on a book about game design or on Evoland.

Catching up: Valkyria Chronicles

Valkyria Chronicles was recommended to me when I talked to one of my colleagues about jRPG's. Although not strictly an RPG itself, VC was supposed to get me on my knees to praise SEGA. And well, one of my knees certainly did bend, almost touching the floor. However, I find many elements of the game disputable, and that's why I would recommend it the most, but more on that later.

The game uses very stylised, anime graphics. Which is a huge plus in my opinion. Seeing the same gameplay with generic photorealistic approach would take the majority of the charm away. Also, it did let the developers focus a bit more on the gameplay and the story. On the other hand, the decission to invest less in graphical assets shows very clearly in dialogues. Imagine a static image of a location, pretty much a wallpaper. On this wallpaper a window with a face pops up. It says something. The other window pops up and says something else. Sometimes these kind of dialogues can last up to three minutes. All the time you have to press a button to hear/read the next line. It's hard to imagine a more oldschool way to present dialogues. It reminds me of all these generic hentai games, there's just less boobs. 

Cutscenes tell a story. A pretty damn good one for game standards, really. Good enough to make anime TV series and three manga adaptations out ot it. The characters are well built, some are a little cliche, but to the extent that makes them easier to understand, but not boringly predictable. Every single one of your soldiers (there's dozens of them) has different personality. You get lots of dialogues, that help you get to know the main characters, learn more about the plot, about the military situation on the front - everything. Some dialogues make you laugh, others make you cry and surprisingly few annoy you with being naive or generic. Again, there is a downside. Since the game is so story-heavy, you get tons of cutscenes and dialogues before you can get into another fight. After initial excitement with the story, you are left with 19 chapters of the game where for every battle you get at least six cutscenes or dialogues. Mostly dialogues. Cutscenes you can just view, but the dialogues mentioned above you have to click through. That really gets tedious.

That brings us to another element - the whole game is in so called "book mode". Since it is so story-heavy, it seriously makes sense. We see 2 pages for every chapter. Very clean and intuitive menu. On every page we have pictures we can choose to see. Every chapter has 6-10 pictures. In vast majority of the chapters, only one of the pictures directs you to the battle. The rest are cutscenes and dialogues. The decission to focus so much on the story leads to a ridiculous result: you actually end up clicking on the pictures to read/listen through the dialogues that, although well-written, are just being fed to you without any relevant action from your side. And the longer I played the more uneasy I was with the "click for a cutscene" approach and on one hand I really wanted to see more of the story, but I wanted it to be told in more interactive way. What we get here is the story almost completely separated from gameplay.

Where the game shines is the battle system. It is a turn-based strategy. You control a variety of unit types. Foot soldiers can be levelled up and equipped with weapons that give different bonuses. The tanks can be upgraded and outfitted with add-ons. Furthermore, every character has up to eight potentials boosting or decreasing his or her battle abilities depending on the situation they are in (type of ground, proximity of other units, amount of health, etc.). Imagine controlling 9 members of your squad in every battle and spice it all up with the parameters like range, accuracy, damage and effectiveness against armor types. What you get is an impressive amount of possibilities and play styles available. To make it even more engaging, you get to actually run with your soldiers instead of pointing them in some direction. Drawback? Of course there is. Every mission just takes soooo much time! If you want to use all your mobility points in the current turn it takes at least 5 minutes to finish your turn and then, when the enemy is moving, you can just go make yourself a coffee. A whole battle can easily last for over an hour. The designers of course tried to remedy that by adding some scripts to the enemy behavior. The result? Either you trigger the enemies, causing them all to move and make you wait until the end of their ridiculously long turn or you trigger just a few, causing them to attack you head on while the whole army of their mates doesn't react to the massacre in front of them.

Don't get me wrong - I really enjoyed the game and I found it greatly entertaining regardless of quite many annoyances. But it's not why I would recommend it. I would mostly encourage you to play this game just to see these tiny defects. I think every designer or designer wannabe should play it to see how much every element affects the whole game like a double-edged sword. How choosing the narrative means affects pacing. How the battle system can be incredibly engaging when we are in control and utterly boring when you are just watching the other side's move. It makes for an excellent case study.

READY PLAYER ONE

DISCLAIMER: when games making noob writes a review, he first focuses on everything that he found ridiculously bad. Then he moves on to weaknesess and for dessert, he leaves the things he liked. Most people never reach these cool things he saves for last.

READY PLAYER ONE is, like most of the modern american literature, in fact an elaborate movie script and has very little in common with an actual novel. Pretty much every scene, every dialogue and every character is prepared for the silver screen. The amount of suspence used on under 400 pages of RPO is probably two times bigger than in whole Dostoyewski's and Hemingway's collection put together.

Characters are more flat than those in Parappa the Rapper - every single one of them can be described with only one dominating and in most cases stereotypical feature: Japanese are honorable, protagonist's crush is sarcastic and his best friend is his cheering bitch. The enemy is as evil as any faceless James Bond's nemesis. Dialogues between them always sound like this:

Protagonist: I am saying a clever, cool line to impress the girl I am in love with.
Japanese 1: Protagonist-san is a honorable man.
Best friend: Lol, protagonist, high five!
Japanese 2: Protagonist's best friend-san is also honorable.
Protagonist's crush: This is a retort shooting down the protagonist, just to act like a bitch.

Luckily, the dialogues between those guys happen really rare. What's also very fortunate, is that the book is written in the first-person perspective, which forces the author to actually make the protagonist more 3-dimensional. Since most of the book is about his solo actions, the flatness of other characters lets us treat them like we would treat any other episodic NPC.

Logic and probability aren't Ernest Cline's best friends either. I would say his relationship with those two virtues has an on-again, off-again character. Everything that happens in the book is really cool and highly implausible. Like a group of teenagers beating the crap out of a horde of "bad guys" that were recruited for analytical thinking, but just all happen to be dumber than a pack of tic-tacs.

One thing that actually seems really cool is the world Cline has described. Every social and economic element of RPO's setting really adds up - both outside the Virtual-Reality-MMO and inside it. On the other hand, I would be really surprised if it didn't. The world outside is a generic cyberpunk setting and the MMO is nothing more than WoW mechanics + Entropia Universe economics + Second Life social functions blown way out of proportions. There's just no way to go wrong there.

Summing up this rant - if you looked at it from the literary side - Ernest Cline's READY PLAYER ONE is really a terrible novel. Which didn't stop me from immensely enjoying every bit of it. Imagine a story about a kid, living in the future, that starts a D&D-style quest. Correction - not a quest. A QUEST. A QUEST that leads him through the whole popculture of 20th century's 80's. Imagine pac-man arcade machine sounds jamming the Van Halen and AC/DC music in the background while the CRT TV plays "War Games" or "Revenge of the nerds".

Now I myslelf, being born in mid-80's, know most of this culture from my parent's records, from TV re-runs of older movies and sitcoms and from digging in the old games libraries. I knew maybe 60% of the references, but it still felt great. If you happened to actually grow up in the 80's, this book will probably make you cry more than once. It's a true tribute to the decade.

Once you realize that what you are reading is not supposed to be Blade Runner or Johnny Mnemonic but rather Goonies or Back to the Future, you stop caring about the logic or how the characters are built. You don't give a shit whether the universe is a total cliché. You just go out on a quest with Parzival. You fall in love with Art3mis and go save the virtual world from Sux0rz. And it's worth every minute spent with the book.

And if you are an aspiring developer, you should read this book for one other reason. Apart from being about the 80's popculture, it is about secrets and Easter Eggs in games. It shows their importance, the fun they bring and how they build a dialogue between the developer and the gamer. It touches the topic of Easter Eggs so much that you can find one in the book itself. People who found it had a chance to win Cline's DeLorean DMC-12. The contest is long gone already and tips how to find the Egg in the book are already googlable, but I encourage you to try and find it yourself, without help. As an excercise in geekiness and perception.