Save the Robot - Chris Dahlen

So last night, I’m playing Grand Theft Auto IV and I get a call from Elizabeta. She’s in a screaming match with my buddy Little Jacob over some missing coke, and can’t understand his thick Rasta accent. (Neither can I - lucky I get subtitles.) She tells me to come over and straighten him out pronto.

So I do. But not right away. First, I finish driving down to Battery Park (or whatever the game calls it) to meet up with a new contact, who sends me on a mission on the Upper East Side. After that, I take my tenth run at a mission that calls for me to gun down three sleezeballs in a strip club - and yet again, I blow it and get shot in the head, sending me to the hospital, where hours later I step out again into the street, jack a new car, and finally get over to Elizabeta’s place, where she’s still standing there having it out with Little Jacob.

I’m sensitive about time. When I have to be somewhere, I’m rarely late. I get anxious about missing things. So I have a giant pet peeve with games that can’t consistently handle a perception of time - when they act like the clock’s ticking, but it ain’t.

This bugged me in the 24 game, where we’re supposed to think that we’re running out of time on every single mission - but in fact, you can spin around doing wheelies or running around at the back of the level for as long as you like, and the timer only started when you were in the final stretch of your objective and the game decided it was time to apply some pressure.

But it bothered me more in Baldur’s Gate II. Early on in that game, your half-sister Imoen is captured by the main villain in the game. You know she’s in prison, probably being tortured, maybe close to death; you feel like you should rush over to where she’s being held and rescue her. But in fact, this is the part of the game where you should be building up strength, gaining experience, chasing down every little side quest to get as buffed up as possible for the chapters to come. There is no ticking clock, and no sword hanging over Imoen’s head. You can lounge around and get old, and it doesn’t matter to her, or the villain, or anybody at all.

Usually, a game will explicitly tell you if you have a time limit. So much is going on in modern games that if a given mission needs a timer, you’ll see it flashing right there on the screen, usually with some helpful voiceover prompts (”You’re almost out of time! Step on it!”). But it bothers me that this doesn’t always jibe with the storytelling.

Every medium has to struggle with this - I’m still confused about the section of the recent Casino Royale, where James Bond seems to leave the Caribbean, fly to Miami, go to an art opening, and have a giant shoot out on on an airport runway during a night that by my back-of-the-napkin estimate must have lasted at least 20 hours. But with games, it matters a little more because you’re not dealing with the audience’s feeling that something’s wrong; you’re misrepresenting the pressure the player should be under. Because if I’d been too smart for my own good, let Elizabeta stew for a couple of days, and shown up only to find her and Little Jacob dead of mutual gunshots? Boy, would I feel stupid.

My eyes are dry and my head is bleary from spending all week totally consumed with work, especially my late-night Grand Theft Auto IV sessions which started a little later than I had hoped because I just couldn’t put The World Ends With You down. I’m filing a review of GTA IV for Paste, and thinking of which tact to take. I agree with N’Gai Croal critique that too many mainstream reviewers spend their time talking about the particular wild experiences they’ve had with the game. On the other hand, it’s hard to resist. The story is fine and the gameplay is - well, it has its pros and its cons, but the game’s real staying power is the way that every simple mission can lead you to stumble across bizarre experiences. Like getting a cab ride home and listening to the driver harangue you the whole way there about banging tourists that he picks up at the airport. Or last night, when a high-speed chase grew comical as the police cruiser I had stolen got more and more banged up and my siren started to degenerate and give off weird, pathetic squawking noises. Who thinks to add all this stuff?

Most game companies, and software companies, hell, most human beings play off an 80/20 rule where your users will spend 80% of their time on 20% of your features, so you should put all your money in there. But with GTA IV, they seem to have spent 80% of their time on stuff that you have a 20% chance of ever seeing. It’s like if the team behind Microsoft Word spent half their schedule on stuff like the word count feature or thinking of funny words that should pass the spellcheck.

At the same time, the game has changed my perception of sandbox games. I used to think of a sandbox as a place where anything can happen, a la SimCity; GTA was a game where you could go off and do whatever you felt like, then come back to the story and the missions at your leisure. In GTA IV, the content is very directed. I’ve felt no urge to veer off the story or just troll around town unprompted: I want to follow the missions, and explore the story and the characters. And yet, as you go about your business, new things just keep happening to you and taking you by surprise. This doesn’t make the game feel open-ended; it makes it feel magical.

Okay. So, I do have some new links this week.

- My new GameSetWatch column talks about pastiche and random stylistic mish-mashes, in the context of Noiku Love 2 and one of my college faves, composer/skronker John Zorn.

- My latest BSG write-up, for “The Road Less Traveled,” was the longest yet - and the grade was the lowest.

- If you pick up the new Paste, I have the back-of-the-book humor piece, an article that combines two noxious trends into one short satire. The article’s not online yet, but this video plays a part in it:

Awwwwwwww! So cute.

We all get that making a game for a good cause doesn’t mean you’re making a good game. Yet I’m still surprised at how awful some of the most prominent games for change have been, and how much press they get anyway. The wave of buzz and coverage that went to Fatworld dried up the day the game - which was a clear-cut flop - was actually released: everyone raved about the idea, but nobody followed up on the execution. And now we have PosOrNot, a new game funded by mtvU, the Kaiser Family Foundation & Poz Magazine to dispel stereotypes about victims of HIV.

The game is based on the site HotOrNot: you see a photo and a few facts about somebody, and then vote whether you think they have HIV. Unlike HotOrNot, you can’t give a score on how positive they seem; you just vote one way or the other, pos or not. (To quote Cartman: “I’m not just sure. I’m HIV-positive.”)

Every profile tries to bait your assumptions about whether the subject is likely to engage in risky sex or needle-sharing, and based on those assumptions, you cast your vote. If they live in San Francisco and work in theater, you may decide to follow the stereotype and guess “pos.” More often than not, you’ll be wrong, because the message of the game is that you can’t judge someone by their lifestyle: the people you think are the safest may have HIV, and the ones you’d expect to contract it may be cautious, safe and tested.

The message is the whole problem with the game. You’re supposed to look at pictures and descriptions of people, think to yourself, “They’re really high-risk,” and then find out - surprise! They’re negative. Or vice versa: someone who looks like a Sunday School teacher turns out to have AIDS thanks to a one-night stand. This isn’t really a “game” - any more than say, playing heads or tails with a coin.

But there’s something more insidious going on. A lot of the photos are really dorky. You go through and think to yourself, “Okay, this guy looks kind of … well, I don’t want to be un-PC, but I’m guessing he’s possibly, I don’t know, gay.”

And then the next photo’s even dorkier. And then in no time, you’re just ripping on people. Like, Brock, who tested positive for Jack Johnson CDs:

Or Mihaela. Wake up girl! You’ve got HIV!

This one writes itself.

And I don’t know what’s up with this guy. Except that he’s HIV-Positive.

Did this game make me aware? No. It make me turn into a dick. After all, the whole point of HotOrNot was to let people laugh at other people’s awful snapshots. By replicating that mechanic, PosOrNot simply gives people a chance to laugh at dying people’s awful snapshots. Nice work, mtvU.

Jetpack Comics is the best comic store in seacoast New Hampshire - actually one of the best I’ve ever been to. It may not have the indie focus of Million Year Picnic, but it’s central to the geek community. Local artists can see their work showcased, and Star Wars PocketModel players can sign up for game nights. A few nights before Christmas I went there to grab some Fables trades and overhear the local kids cook up their hopes and dreams for ditching their parents and getting a place and watching b-horror films for the rest of their lives. It’s the kind of place you immediately feel at home.

Yesterday was Free Comic Book Day, the day that the industry tries to rebuild its audience by handing out free books. And in Rochester, they did it up right. Jetpack not only organized a big event at its store: they set up a city-wide scavenger hunt. You would show up at the comic store, get a card and a map, and go to a dozen local businesses - from a bike store to a furniture store to the Rochester Opera House - to pick up more comics and get the card stamped. Hit every place on the hunt and you were entered for a drawing of some kind; I didn’t investigate, ’cause I was trekking around with a three-year-old and knew we weren’t going to see everything.

But we did hit the comic store, which was packed, and the neighboring tents that they set up in the lot beside the store, where you could get prints, autographs and custom drawings by Rich Woodall of Johnny Raygun, Fatsquad, the crew at Severed Head Comics, and Marvel’s Ed McGuinness. We got a McGuinness print, a piece of original artwork from Green Arrow #51 that the illustrator was just giving away, free HeroClix Iron Man and Batman figures, and a bunch of free books. A little girl at the Rochester Opera House also gave us an original Crayon drawing, but did not sign it.

I brought my kid, who was mainly interested in seeing Jabba the Hutt at the Rochester Opera House. Not that he knew who Jabba was: we haven’t seen the movies, so basically I spent the whole day explaining the character and getting him wound up, so by the time we got there and saw the giant life-size foam puppet on the stage - which looked awesome, by the way; the New Hampshire Star Wars fan club does not screw around - he was totally pumped and a little scared. A girl whose name I didn’t catch operated the Jabba puppet and made it wave its hands and stick out its tongue. She also got it to lick its own eyes, which was hilarious. My kid was so excited that he actually looked around for other people to show this to: “Look!” he told a thirteen-year-old standing at the back of the stage, “Look! He stuck his tongue up his nose!”

When I was a kid, the idea that you’d need a Free Comic Book Day to remind people to buy comics would seem totally alien. Same for Record Store Day a few weeks ago. I just don’t understand an era where “comics” and “records” are not synonymous with fun. When my kid is a teenager, am I going to have to talk him into having sex?

But giving a place like Jetpack a chance to throw an event like this is worth the whole thing. They didn’t just throw an event for the geeks; they tied together the entire town, led people to businesses they might not know about, and got someone like myself who never hangs out in Rochester to wander around and really check the place out.

I can’t wait to see what they do next year.

… be sure it’s Leigh Alexander’s write-up of actual New Yorkers anticipating the launch of the game.

The staff supervisor at the Spanish Harlem Game Express goes by the alias “Dragon,” and he says he’s the go-to guy within his broad network of friends for news on the latest games. For the past several weeks though, he says, his friends, neighbors and customers have only been interested in one title.

“Everywhere I go, people want to know about GTA and what they can do in the game,” Dragon says. In his store, he’s taped several signs in every line of sight that point out GTA IV’s release date, so that people will stop coming in and asking him. Dragon also showed us “sold out” signs he made in advance, just to be prepared.

He says his customers are especially excited to play GTA in light of the Sean Bell verdict — the judge’s vote in favor of the police has not found much support in Spanish Harlem, to say the least. “GTA lets them do the stuff they can’t do in real life,” Dragon says. “Like, ‘this one’s for Sean Bell,’” he adds, imitating a beat-down in mid-air.

Bet the NYT is kicking itself for not thinking of this angle.

I only started playing last night. I’m still buried in The World Ends With You, which is actually a surprisingly good handheld complement …

Quick post to link to my new review of Noitu Love 2: Devolution at the AV Club. Partly thanks to the drought of games leading up to Grand Theft Auto IV’s launch, we’ve been covering a ton of indie titles over at the Onion. Nothing new - we’ve been doing this for a couple years, covering titles like Eets or DEFCON or IGF winners like Darwinia - but we’re covering this space more frequently now, and some of the reader feedback has been positive; if nothing else, the indie games usually get more and better comments. For example, just this spring we’ve had ForumWarz, Urban Dead, AudioSurf, and ROM CHECK FAIL.

My next step is to actually go around and start telling people about us. And if you’ve made, played, or dreamt about a great indie game? Let us know!

To browse our coverage, go here.

(By the way - I will be out of town for the next few days - apologies in advance if I don’t respond to y’all.)

Jonathan Blow’s Braid has gotten under my skin. I received a promo of the PC version and I’m about halfway through it, and the fact that I haven’t beaten the rest of it keeps me coming back for more. When Blow sent me an updated patch, I paid him a kind of left-handed compliment by telling him it’s stretched my mind more than anything since Calculus class. I meant this as a good thing, but it doesn’t sound like a selling point.

In case you don’t know the title: Braid is a platformer that uses time in novel ways. The first thing you notice is the ability to rewind time. Say you make a false move and run into a violent critter that kills you: instead of starting over or losing a life or suffering any of the usual penalties of games since the co-op days, Braid lets you undo your mistake. You simply hit the “Shift” key and rewind the game back to a point where you can try again..

This is a neat trick, but it’s only the first way that the game plays with time. Some levels allow you to rewind time while affecting some objects (say, a door) but not others (say, the key to the door), or they give you a ring that can slow time to a crawl within a certain area, or they tie all the movement on the entire board to your footsteps: move a step to the right, and everything moves forward; step to the left, and everything moves back. The game teaches you to grasp, fiddle around with, and finally master each of these techniques.

It’s been said that all games are educational: if nothing else, they teach you how to play them. In Pong, you have to learn how the ball will bounce off different spots on your paddle. In Super Mario Bros., you have to figure out how to handle each enemy, where to find bonus items, and a bunch of other tricks that were either necessary or optional to finishing the game. I liked flOw because the instruction was completely intuitive: you barely get any instructions, and have to just fiddle around with the game to figure out what you’re “supposed” to do and the “best” way to play the game. In that sense, a game is like a joke: you feel a jolt of pleasure the minute you “get” it, and if someone has to explain it to you, they’re probably doing it wrong.

Braid works in the same vein: it walks you through each of the new tricks, but there’s much more showing than telling. To really get how each map works, you have to play around with it. But the difference is that Braid can get really hard.

On one level - the one where I’ve made the least progress - you see a kind of branching effect. Say that you run from one end of the platform to the other, but as soon as you get there, you change your mind and rewind back to the start. After you rewind, you’re back at the beginning of the platform - but then a “ghost” version appears and retraces your last footsteps, while the present you can go off and do something else. Metaphorically, it’s like you’re watching two ways that your life could play out. In fact, I guess it’s like Sliding Doors. The hard part is figuring out how to use this new ability to solve a series of jumping/lever/locked door puzzles, and how to picture yourself going in two separate directions at the same time - and that’s where this felt like calculus. Yes, I get the concept of calculating the slope at a specific point on a curve, but when I actually have to use it on a final exam problem, it makes a small spot on the left hemisphere of my brain go “groan.” That same flabby brain slice acts up when I play Braid.

I started fumbling my way through instead of actually understanding the exact solution and executing it flawlessly. I beat the boss at the end of the branching-paths level but I’m still not sure how I did it. This again reminds me of taking a math exam and writing down some random number because I kind of figured that was the answer, but couldn’t crisply explain it. There are plenty of games that you can win just by randomly mashing buttons - say, any number of fighting games - and everyone’s played an adventure game where you combine the plunger with the rubber ducky and the shoelace and somehow manage to fish the key out of the grate, but the only reason you threw all that crap together is that it was the only stuff left in your inventory.

That said, Braid has little tolerance for half-assedry. Sure, I got some easy wins, but I’m also painfully aware of the need to figure out what’s going on in order to finish the game. And while I may have made a little progress by muddling my way through the trickier levels, I’m going to have to sit down and experiment and learn before I get the prize. Which makes me respect the game and its methodology even more.

(And if I’d felt that way in school, who knows where I would’ve ended up!)

Excuse a moment of indie fux0rism: I spent the other night playing two indie games. First, I broke in my new PlayStation 3 by downloading the much-praised title flOw - a game about being an amoeba. It’s possibly the most relaxing game I’ve ever played: hours can slip by as you let yourself float in ever-deeper waters, eating creatures or letting them be, and intuiting your way through the gameplay without feeling much of a rush to reach the end. The ambient electronic music is sublime. The experience was fantastic.

Next up: holy beJeezoid, Noitu Love 2. A breakneck all-action side-scroller filled with a ridiculous pastiche of sci-fi cowboy movies, aliens and cyborgs, tanks and bosses and a giant sign that blares “GO!” every other screen while insane 8-bit music spurs you on. My kind of game. I’m not an action nut, but I’m an activity nut: I like games that come from the school of “It would be so awesome if … ” - and Noitu Love 2 may be my Jets ‘N’ Guns GOLD of 2008.

The two games couldn’t be farther apart in mood, pace or frenzy. But what I realized as I went from one to the other is that these are my most natural settings: too fast, or too slow. Take music. I love glacial, ambient music that murmers and sucks all the sound out of the air. For one example, I love Supersilent. Yet I also love jittery, hyper music - XTC, Dirty Projectors. Guillemots are more moderate, but they’re also over-the-top - the needle goes to the red, and it hits all my buttons. On the other hand, I don’t like music that sticks to the middle. I have trouble truly enjoying soul music, blues, and most mid-tempo pop. The classic pop single usually has no effect on me: a nice catchy song is nice, but if the artists don’t sound like they’re getting totally ahead of themselves, I start to tune out.

I really believe this isn’t a matter of taste or intellectual preference so much as hardwiring. This kind of music just feels best on my nervous system, when I need to clear my head or get over a bad day at work. And in the same way, many games hold my attention, but flOw and Noitu Love 2 had me rivited. That’s just how I’m wired. And my reaction to the games might have had a lot to do with the soundtracks: both titles treat music as their real secret weapon, and its effect on my nerves sealed my engagement.

The AV Club has been running a series called Better Late Than Never, where their top critics admit to missing obvious, canonical stuff like Harold & Maude and then discuss what it’s like to finally experience it years later.

In that vein: I try to act like a tech-savvy, hip blogger guy. But in the past week I caught up with three major web trends, and I thought I’d share some of my deep insights.

I GOT A BLACKBERRY SMART PHONE. First impression: “Wow, I can check my e-mail while I’m walking through a parking lot!”

MY KID GOT A WEBKINZ. First impression: “Wow, the dog on the screen looks just like the dog my kid got. And hey, it waves!”

I FINALLY PICKED UP A PS3. First impression: “Wow, this is setup sucks.” Second impression: “My God, flOw is AWESOME.”

If you haven’t read Drew Taylor’s Jump Button column, you should. Now. Whether you like games or you like pop culture or you like great interviews, Taylor’s weekly thing on GameSetWatch is rather astounding. The blogosphere mysteriously slept on his interview with the creator of Pong, but anyone who recalls, or just dreamt about being old enough to buy an issue of Heavy Metal, should read this pair of columns: an interview with sex goddess Julie Strain, and this interview with Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.2 developer Robert Atkins. And then there’s the one with the guy who collects XBox 360 faceplates. And … see the full rundown here.