Saturday, February 19, 2011

Demo vs Demo

Remember when I was almost posting regularly for a semi-lengthy period of time? My engine was revving up and a soft purr of posts were whirring out on the production line at what, for me, was a respectable pace. Then winter happened. Winter kills my motivation as surely as the cold will siphon the life out a lost chickadee, left behind by its flock.

Ahem.

So I played a few demos recently. Demos are something that I can't come to a decision about. Are they a good tool that allows us budget-wary gamers to test a game before we spring for the $69.99 price tag, or are they a lie, just like watching a 3-minute action packed trailer about a movie that ends up having that 3 minutes of action spread thin across 2 hours of badly acted drama?

The two demos that I played recently were the ones for the upcoming over-the-top shooter Bulletstorm and the anticipated sequel to the PS3 sci-fi shooter, Killzone 3. One of these demos won my money and its full-version will be purchased as soon as I can afford to do so. The other demo took the fledgling hope I had for the game and smashed its supple skull against the side of a moving vehicle. Then it urinated on it.

One thing that excited me about Killzone 3 was that it might be the first game to make proper use of my dust-collecting set of Move controllers and accompanying navigation units. I made sure the controllers hadn't lost their charge in their 2 months of disuse and started up the demo. After a quick calibration for the Move controller, the game started. My initial reaction was one of happiness that my crosshairs were moving about on the screen pretty accurately. My first attempt at a shooter with the Move controller was the Time Crisis demo, which yielded disastrous results that made me delete the game in a huff. Gladly, this seems to have been the fault of the game developers and not the technology itself. The initial happiness that surged in me quickly petered out as I realized that the demo was starting as a rail shooter. As my flying-ship-thing dragged me around a confusing display of explosions and ice, I shook my head several times at the numbingly bland military speak that spewed from the character's mouths. Alpha delta to foxtrot whiskey tangos cracked out of character's mouths and into my unwilling ears as I quickly became bored of my point-and-shoot start to the demo.

I never played a Killzone game before, so I wasn't sure If I was supposed to recognize and instantly feel attached to these characters or not, but the weak crutch of confusing military-speak writing and the somewhat off face designs of the characters already biased me fairly heavily towards any interest I might have in the story that the full-game might promise. Oh well, demos aren't about story, I told myself. They're about gameplay. My ship crashes and my character stands up, the camera simultaneously swinging inside his head in a familiar first-person shooter manner. I take a step forward and pick up a gun, then run towards where the action seems to be. Then I fall down a hole, instant death, game over. Ok, so that was my fault, I reason. Let's go again. This time I walk strategically around the hole and begin to shoot at some enemy soldiers. I ran up to some debris from my crashed ship to take cover and expected the game to prompt me on how to duck. No such prompt appeared, so I awkwardly mashed at the unfamiliar button layout of the Move controller and Nav unit. I changed weapons, reloaded, zoomed my screen in and threw a grenade, but failed to take cover and got shot to death. Ok, start over. I wasn't familiar enough with the Move controller yet, so my fault again. Unfortunately, my false starts were similar to how the demo proceeded. My unfamiliarity with the Move controller, paired with the game's refusal to give me some sort of tutorial on which button does what, resulted in death after frustrating death. The only prompt that I can remember getting was a Move controller with an arrow spinning around it to show me how to reload. This usually resulted in my gun bouncing about, taking the camera along with it and resulting in yet another fun-killing death.

Finally, I got to the part of the demo that featured the jetpack, a feature that the developers were excited to show off. It was the least disastrous part of my experience with the game, but I still managed to jet myself into a wall, groups of enemies or icey-watery death a handful more times. It was around this time that I decided that I was wasting my time and thanked the demo kindly for saving me $69.99. I will not be buying Killzone 3.

Like I said, the other demo I played was for Bulletstorm. The demo opens with a little story context and has the main character of the game narrating what the world is about, along with what the gameplay's goal is, which is to "kill with skill". An entertaining video quickly demonstrates what the game means by this as it shows the main character killing an enemy, rewinding, killing him differently, rewinding, killing him differently and so on. The objective of the game is instantly clear and the player is allowed to take control. Kill the enemies as creatively as you can manage. Go. A clear goal, free of boring, meaningless conversation between characters. Perfect for a demo. I hop into the game and kill the first few enemies as creatively as I can and in the process of getting caught up in how to kill the next few, I die. No problem, the demo restarts quickly and I get another chance to kill the first few enemies, which I do in a different way, giving me a chance to experiment with what might give me more points. It's just as fun as doing it the first time, since I still had various ways of experimenting with killing these enemies. The rest of the demo proceeded similarly, with me gallivanting through groups of enemies, killing them in fun and colorful variations. The demo wrapped up quickly and left me wanting more. Good job Bulletstorm demo, you just sold me a game.

So here's my dilemna when it comes to demos. What if I got it wrong? What if Bulletstorm shined as a demo since it gave me a confined arena to practice a few different ways of killing enemies, but then the full game ends up being a huge world with just as few ways of killing enemies. I hope, and certainly suspect, that the full game has many new ways to kill enemies, but what if that wasn't the case?

What about Killzone 3? Killzone 2 was favorably reviewed with a 91 on Metacritic and Killzone 3 thus far has an 85 on the same site. Perhaps the demo was a section of the game that was cut and pasted and is actually a lot more fun once in context of the full game. Maybe once I go through some beginning levels and get used to the controls then the part of the game I just played through would be much easier and more enjoyable.

The fact is that I have no way of knowing if the demo was an accurate snapshot of the full game that it is demoing. It's a view of the game that is extremely cut down and tailored by the developers and could very easily be painting a beautiful picture of a bad game, or a sloppy version of a pretty solid game. However, they are a bit of a necessary evil. Gamers need all of the tools they can get when investing in such an expensive hobby. Even if sites like Metacritic can include biased and purchased reviews and demos can be skewed versions of the full version, they are angles that help gamers take a look at a game and decide if it is worth spending their hard-earned money.

From what I've seen, game trials provide a more accurate image of a game than demos. Give the player a 1-hour romp through the full game. If a game takes more than an hour to get a player hooked, then there's a good chance there's something wrong with the game, and that it isn't worth your time and cash. There are no modified versions of the game and no potential for sloppy cut and pasted demos. I'd really like to see more games, particularly downloadable games that allow you to easily pay to unlock the full game and continue your save file, take this approach to demos rather than the movie-trailer lie that we often see now.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Bad Gameplay

We often look forward to specific parts of games when we replay them. Parts of the game that were particularly well designed or implemented that are just a joy to play. World 4 in Super Mario Bros 3 was such a moment for me. The novelty of the giant goombas, pipes and blocks and the ability to switch between tiny and large enemies in one particular stage was too much fun to play with. There is something more satisfying about jumping on a Koopa's head when he's 5 times your size. For a more recent example, Old Haven in Borderlands is another such delightful area for me. Every time I replay that game, I look forward to battling through the streets of Old Haven. It's a well designed stage and the first time you encounter the sinister Lance soldiers. Covering yourself from fire seems to work better here, with plenty of buildings and rubble to hide behind, but the challenge is also greater since the Lance have shields and turets they can employ, forcing you to take full advantage of your contours.

 Sometimes these moments are in RPGs when a certain song is played, or a line is delivered just right (Celes trying to commit suicide in Final Fantasy 6 chokes me up every time, or when Crono sacrifices himself to defend his friends in Chrono Trigger). Playing through the game, these moments, stages and areas are in the back of our heads as we excitedly edge near them.

There are also moments in games that elicit the complete opposite response. The dreaded water temples, sewers, dark caves, areas with high encounter rates, or the place with the annoying bird enemy that is impossible to hit. They are a counterbalance to the excitement we have at the golden areas that excite us so. My question is, why are these areas here at all?

(The following paragraph has some very mild spoiler-y information about Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Read at your own risk!)

I can forgive older games since budgets weren't quite as high as they are now and mechanics and genres had not been standardized yet. Video games were still new and developers didn't have a full understanding of what exactly "fun" meant. But within newer games I am often baffled as I frustratingly struggle through an area that forces me to move more slowly than the rest of the game (underwater in Zelda games or Metroid games), or when the game forces me to walk slowly (slow walking bothers me, can you tell?) because I have to transport heavy or wiggling objects (Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has one situation where Ezio has to carry a wriggling woman to a jail cell. It's an area that causes much a lot of grief, to say the least. The desire to slip her a taste of the hidden blade was tantalizing). Do developers and game testers not play their own games and encounter these frustrating areas of their games? I very much doubt that whoever is responsible for the hostage situation in AC:B played through that part all the while patting himself on the back for such a brilliantly built area and mechanic. Why not remove it? Or fine tune it to make it at least bearable, if not the best part of the game?

I sometimes write fiction in my free time and have encountered similar problems. Parts of the stories that I'm telling that are excruciating to read, either because of bad language or a boring situation that I've placed my characters in. When I read over a finished text and see these parts, I know that they must go. They have to die so that the rest of the text may live on and be something half-decent. But it's hard. You wrote it there for a reason and it either serves as a transitional part of your story or reveals something you believe to be terrifically important to the rest of the story.

       "Even if it's boring," I reason with myself, "it's crucial for readers to get through so that the rest of the story works as a whole." But no. No matter how convinced you are of the importance of this passage, it absolutely has to be deleted or drastically rewritten to be made interesting. Perhaps game developers experience something along these lines when they create a part of their game that is significantly worse than the whole. But, maybe it is also significantly more difficult to press the delete key on an entire section of a video game than it is for a sentence or two in a word processor. The work that went into that scene was not only the writing, but the design of the area, the voice acting, the graphics, the way objects interact with one another and so on. Because the work that went into this part of the game was several-fold more than the work it takes to write one sentence, maybe that justifying voice in their heads is similarly amplified.

    "No, we can't take this part out. It moves the story forward and we've already put a lot of money and man power into it. Players will just have to understand its importance and force their way through to reap the rewards at the end."

I want to make one distinction between frustrating gameplay elements and just plain bad ones. The water areas in Metroid games are very frustrating since you move slow, jump slow and are just a big glob of slow. But, once you get the gravity suit, suddenly all of these water areas are just lovely, since now you can leap about freely no longer hindered by the sludgey under-water game mechanic. This, to be contrasted with the end all of bad water areas, The Water Temple from Ocarina of Time. Even if they eventually give you the long shot to float about a little easier, it's still a supremely frustrating area that is confusing and hard to navigate. Sometimes an annoying area is presented for contrast to a better area to come soon, but sometimes it's just plain bad.

If there is one important lesson that I've been taught as a writer, it's that if you are bored while you are creating your piece, how can you expect your audience to be intrigued or suffer through that boredom? They owe you nothing. It is you who owes them for purchasing your future product, so the least you could do is take out the god forsaken Water Temple, couldn't you?