Q.U.B.E.

So I beat Q.U.B.E. today.

It was fine.

...

Right, so that's not enough for a whole post.

QUBE (forget the periods) is a Portal-like puzzle game, but instead of portals you get to move little cubes around with magic gloves. The different cubes do different things, like throw you across a room or raise to different heights. It's an alright puzzle game, with some pretty neat arrangements of ideas.

It's also Portal-like in that you start in a mostly white clinical setting, and halfway through the game everything falls apart to reveal the machinery behind it all. Except QUBE is not nearly as clever as Portal.

I've been pondering why it's not nearly as clever, and it's hard to get at. All the pieces are there: interesting physical puzzles, mysterious setting, cubes. But it feels very contrived in a way that Portal did not.

Here's my theory: Portal is a naturally subversive game, whereas QUBE is not.

Portal hands you a gun that links two spaces in a physically impossible yet completely intuitive way. It's something that you could take into the real world and cause havoc with. It's a subversion of the way we think about physical space.

QUBE gives you gloves that move designated cubes in designated ways. QUBE gloves in the real world do nothing, because there is no real world analogy.

On top of that, Portal places you into a game within a game. GLADOS is playing with you, and you are engaging her directly by moving through the world. It's the relationship of player and designer made transparent. When the scenery falls away in Portal, the game within a game falls away as well. Now you're defying GLADOS, which feels like you're defying the designer (you're actually not, but we all know that. Just roll with it). It subverts the player/designer relationship.

The design in these latter stages of Portal reflect this by dropping all the obvious signs pointing you towards a solution. Now you are exploiting the environment rather than going through GLADOS' prescribed steps. It's a revelation that brings the portal gun one step closer to being real in your mind.

When the scenery in QUBE falls away, nothing changes. The puzzles are still obviously designed (with loving care) by a person. They have obviously prescribed solutions with very clean and precise steps.

So why even make the scenery change if it has no impact thematically or mechanically?

Because Portal did it.

It's frustrating that QUBE, a game that could stand on its own, chose to take so directly from Portal. It could have had its own strong themes, or its own subversions, or it could have just stood as a strong puzzle game. But the comparisons are so direct and obvious, that QUBE looks like a weak imitator of Portal.

There is a Director's cut edition of QUBE that adds a bunch of narration. I listened to a bit of this and, and it's about two people telling you conflicting things about what you're doing and why. One of them is a liar, one of them is telling the truth. Everything else appears to be the same. Again, this feels like a reflection of Portal, but not nearly as substantial and divorced from the game itself.

So that's QUBE. The puzzles are clever, the game is short (this is a good thing), and it reminds me of Portal too much to be enjoyable.

Talion is a paper doll without any changes of outfit

Talion is the main character in Shadow of Mordor. Here is a list of Talion's qualities:

• Grumpy
• Good at sword
• Angry
• Good at jump
• Clothes (one set)
• Likes to murder orcs
• Good at murder orcs
• Gruff
• Beard
• Good at stealthing

Celebrimbor is the secondary character. Here is a list of Celebrimbor's qualities:

• Grumpy
• Good at bow
• Intellectual
• Good at blacksmith
• Clothes (none he's a ghost)
• Likes to enslave orcs
• Good at enslave orcs
• Gruff
• No beard
• Good at ghosting

They both have a wife and a kid. Here are their qualities:

• Dead

Truly this is an outstanding achievement in character.

Memory and Games

Some rambling things I was thinking about, specifically related to memory and 999.

I think I'll remember 999 very well, despite the vaguely generic Anime Murder plot and stylings. Part of the reason I'll remember it is that I ended up doing a lot of math. I'll always remember that Lotus is 8 and Clover is 4, and those hooks help me to remember their personalities, traits, and eventual fates as well. This is very interesting to me - why would doing a bunch of math help me to remember that Snake lost his arm in a car accident and is a great detective?

I think that memory is very strange.  Long-term memories slowly get eroded, but at different rates depending on a number of factors. The feeling for me is this: short term memory is is like a scaffold for a building. The more detailed and engaging the memory, the better the construction will be. As time passes, the scaffold is taken down, and long term memory is the building itself. What remains can be shoddy (my memory of work yesterday) or very strong (memories of my wedding day).

I think this varies from person to person, but my "scaffolds" are made stronger with a few things. A strong emotional reaction, be it good or bad, definitely makes the scaffold stronger. A highly detailed experienced also makes the scaffold stronger, so doing a lot of math combined with detective work (999) will create a very strong memory. Repetition also helps - another strength to 999.

I think it takes more than one of those factors, though, to make a long-lasting memory. I played a lot of Farmville when it was popular, but I don't remember anything about it, so repetition alone doesn't work. Minecraft, on the other hand, is very repetitive but also creates in me a deep feeling of satisfaction and peace, so I remember many more of the things that I've done in that game.

Working on spreadsheets for my job is highly detailed but very forgettable. Making a game is also highly detailed, but very much a labor of love, so I remember the games I made pretty well.

The only exception is a strong emotional reactions. I remember those for a long time, without anything else.

I'm very invested in memory because mine is very bad at times. The period of my life between the ages of 11 and 18 is a huge blur for me, and some days I feel a profound sense of loss. I don't want that to happen again.

DISTRAINT (SB Crosspost)

I've recently started posting a lot on the selectbutton.net forums, and some of these are long-form posts about games. I wanted to save them somewhere accessible. The original post can be found here.

WARNING: I'm spoiling this entire game, also a CW for self harm/suicide

DISTRAINT is one of the least effective horror games I've ever played. It is neither scary in a visceral way, nor does it dive deeply into some sort of psychological horror. Its premises are stated very plainly about 15 minutes into the game and the plot is simple enough to be predicted basically from the outset. Its method of foreshadowing is to simply tell you what is going to happen in a few minutes. Plus it's really ugly.

The premise of the game is that the main character works in a vaguely debt collecting related job, and his job is to seize people's property from them. Just a few minutes into the game he starts hallucinating things like blood on the walls, and zombie elephants. Maybe 20 minutes his dead parents show up to tell him that greed is bad and that's basically the moral of the story.

Oh, and the elephant is literally referred to as the "elephant in the room" and is later explicitly defined as his subconscious guilt given physical form. It's so bad.

The main character ends up seizing 3 homes, then deciding he's going to quit even if it means living in a dumpy, leaky apartment forever. At the last minute he changes his mind because he's made Partner in whatever this vaguely debt-related firm is. Then it cuts to 10 years later and he lost his job because his guilt elephant made him mentally unstable and now he is being evicted.

Then he kills himself.

Oh and also an old lady who died earlier in the game gets to meet her husband in heaven as the credits roll.

THE END

...As much as I'm giving this game shit, I actually didn't hate it. It's sort of charmingly bad and is so blunt with its message that I almost (almost (almost)) like it for being so naive and sincere. I could go into some giant speech about how criticizing the lowest members on the capitalist food chain for not wanting to live in a dumpy leaky apartment is totally missing the point, but...I don't think it really matters.

But it is interesting how not horror-like this game is! Everything is super concrete and obvious, so even jumpscares aren't scary because there's no atmosphere. The puzzles can be a bit trippy (the last house involves taking psychedelic drugs to go through doors that are locked in real life) but for the most part they are very straightforward.

There are a couple of moments where it tries to go for a "horrific absurdity amongst mundanity" feeling. The one I liked was the nursing home where a janitor is cheerily grinding up a body, and you have to take a chunk of it to the Cook because he wants to make meat. The main character is just sort of like "Well, this is gross but whatever" and it's kind of funny/scary. But then it's undermined again by how straightforward and back-tracking everything else is.

So I guess what I'm getting at here is that even things in this game that are actually scary:

Your dead parents chopping up mystery meat in the middle of the night

are undermined by the lack of atmosphere and lack of vagueness:

They immediately tell you they're going to feed you the elephant of your guilt and they want you to quit your job

I know it's obvious to say that "good horror has both atmosphere and scares" but it's amazing how completely gutted horror is by missing one entirely.

Friday the 13th wouldn't be scary if everything was well lit and we all knew that it was Jason's mother in a burlap mask the entire time. It would be funny, but not scary.

Halloween wouldn't be scary if it was set in a bright, crowded wal-mart, and Mike Meyers wore a mask that said "I LIKE TO KILL PEOPLE" on it.

Anyway I'm rambling at this point. Don't play DISTRAINT.

999 - Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

Holy crap there are some SPOILERS below for 999 - Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. It's a good game, so it might be nice to play it first, but hey, read on if you want to.

I just wanted to write something briefly about 999. Released on the Nintendo DS in 2009, it's a very serious and very funny visual novel. The main plot is about being trapped on a boat with a bunch of people, playing a deadly game involving the number 9 in a bunch of ways. It reminds me most of Death Note, in that its setting is very rule-based. Many of the plot twists are about people bending the rules to suit their needs, or about new rules coming to light suddenly.

The story of 999 is also very entwined with the actual structure of a visual novel, which impressed me very much. Visual novels are similar to Choose Your Own Adventure books, in that they typically focus on breadth rather than depth. So instead of a book where a single chain of events happens, they usually branch out into many different chains of events with significantly different results. The game-ness of a visual novel is found in exploring all of these different endings. Getting the "true" ending usually involves using knowledge gained from prior play-throughs...something that the characters themselves would not have access to.

999 plays with this idea of character/player split at the very end of the "true" route. The player and the character simultaneously discover that someone has been guiding them to this end using knowledge gained from the other failed endings. It's as if someone was playing a visual novel, but in the universe of the visual novel itself! It's very interesting, and it brings the player closer to being part of the universe than just a mere observer.

It reminds me of Deadly Premonition in a way. The main character in that game talks to his "alternate personality" a lot. But the alternate personality is really a stand-in for the player, allowing the main character to address the player directly, and for the player to control the main character's actions with an in-universe explanation. It gives the player a direct and very real role in the fictional universe of the game.

The idea of bringing players into the "magic circle" of the game isn't a new one, but I rarely see it performed effectively. Deadly Premonition, 999, imscared, Baten Kaitos...these are the only examples I can think of off the top of my head, and they happen to be some of my favorite games.

One last thought: 999 is a great example of why visual novels are more than simple books, or just games with a lot of words. They can give an experience that a book can't by allowing the player to assume a role in a universe and affect it in unique ways. But their high text-to-game ratio allows a lot more character analysis than a typical game could. Playing 999 is the closest I've felt to being a detective; I was analyzing people's motives, reactions, and abilities so I could make good decisions.

I highly recommend the game, but for your own sake, play it on an emulator. The text scrolls way too slowly and I ended up playing most of the game at 2x speed. I don't think I would have finished it otherwise.

Nintendo Land and hindsight

I picked up Nintendo Land for $10 the other day, and I've played a bit of it with my wife and on my own. It's a fun game with a lot of neat gimmicks that have longer lifespans than I would expect from a bunch of mini-games. It's definitely a mini-game collection, but it feels meatier than most games I would describe like that.

When Nintendo Land first came out it was seen as a showcase of all the neat things you could do with the Wii U's gamepad. This turned out to be terribly true: it's just about all the neat things you could do with the gamepad.

The Wii U is dying at this point, and I think most of us can agree that the gamepad is pretty much a bad gimmick. I can't think of much that it could do that wasn't done on the DS or the Wii better, except for maybe Mario Maker. Even that game is something you could accomplish on a tablet - the TV display is just a nice bonus. Looking down at the gamepad while playing a game is a really awful experience, and the best thing about it is that I can play games with the TV off. But even then I just want a nice, powerful portable machine, not something locked to my living room

I loved the Wii, and I loved the DS. But combining the two was doomed from the beginning. Nintendo Land was supposed to be a shining light towards all of the new things you could do on the Wii U. Instead, it ended up showcasing almost everything interesting the Wii U could do, and with the benefit of hindsight we can see how limited the console truly is.

Terraria, Disgaea, and my stupid brain

I've been playing a lot of Terraria this week, in lieu of doing things that are actually productive. Terraria is a fantastic game, but I've already played 280+ hours of it according to Steam. And the new patch didn't necessarily add anything that interesting. So why am I starting a new character yet again?

I've also been playing a lot of the PSP version of Disgaea, which I already completed on the DS. Disgaea is, again, a fantastic game, but I've already finished it and even did some power leveling back on the DS. So why is it that I feel compelled to dive into the item world yet again?

I think there's something in common here. This past week has been stressful to me for various reasons, and I feel like I don't have control over my life in some ways. I also feel overwhelmed by the amount of things bouncing around in my head, which is distracting me from the things I need to get done. All in all, it's been kind of crappy. So why those two games?

Terraria and Disgaea could not be farther apart in how they play, but the way that they feel in my brain is very similar. Both games occupy my brain almost completely. My spacial reasoning is occupied by digging or trying to find Geo chains. My forward thinking is occupied by planning the best builds to fight the next boss, or by planning on which items I will level up first. My senses are occupied by constant input, either from massive particle effects and lighting changes, or by amazing combat animations. I'm usually doing math in my head at the same time, either counting the blocks I need to build a cool house, or the damage I'm doing to enemies and how many attacks I need to do to finish them off.

That said, neither game is that hard. The parts of my brain being occupied are challenged, but not that much. It's relaxing in a way that only video games seem to be, at least to me. I've got constantly shifting, realizable small goals, along with overarching large goals that I am always making progress towards. 

I have a few "stress relief," or more accurately "problem avoidance," games. Terraria, Minecraft, Disgaea, Dragon Quest, Peggle. They are pretty different on the surface, but in the end they all occupy multiple parts of my brain so that I'm not really thinking about anything else.

I don't think this is always healthy behavior. It can be very toxic, in fact. But it is something I do, and I think it's something that can be done healthily as long as I'm aware that I'm avoiding shit, and what kind of effect these games have on me.