Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

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.

(UPDATE: My review has run at the Onion AV Club – check it here. And I updated my “more fun than calculus” assessment, so be sure to look for that.)

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!)

UPDATE: With the release coming up, I finally sat down to finish this for my Onion review. No spoilers on the review, but I will say this is easily one of my games of the year.

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.

Not new stuff on the blog, but new stuff I’ve run in other places.

I wrote up the latest Battlestar Galactica and reviewed ForumWarz at the AV Club. The Unintelligenced version of my review is in the comments.

Ran a new column at GameSetWatch on The One Game Diet. Is it better to play one great game for a couple months than to burn through disposable games every week? Every mediocre game I’ve reviewed in this winter found its way into this column.

That photo’s a preview of tomorrow’s Pitchfork review of the Flight of the Conchords LP (now with link).

And last but not least, Michael Abbott at Brainygamer interviewed me for his latest podcast. We talk about why I think the games press falls short, what we love about Planescape: Torment, and what it’s like to get pantsed at a game by your kid. Michael is wicked smaht and I had a lot of fun talking with him, so check out his podcast.

Last night I shlepped down to Boston to see The Kids in the Hall at the Wang Center. In college, I was obsessed with their show, which had just started airing on Comedy Central. We didn’t have a VCR with a timer, so some nights I would make tracks from whatever weird neighborhood we had gone to for burritos to make sure I got back in time for the show. I saw Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet at the Lounge Ax (good show). I even paid money to watch Brain Candy.

On top of being the funniest sketch show ever – yes, ever - I loved the strong characterizations and storytelling in the sketches, as well as the absurdism. I was more of a Bruce McCullough/Mark McKinney fan, even though Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald brought the laughs. And Scott Thompson – well, I never dug the Buddy Cole skits, but I’ll hand it to him that his skit about Jesus being gay brought by far the biggest laughs last night.

Thanks to YouTube (and DVDs), noone ever has to come home early for Kids in the Hall again:

And my all-time favorite:

How do soldiers serving in Iraq get their hands on the latest films and TV? We discussed this last week after Seth posted that he couldn’t get access to the new season of Battlestar Galactica online. Turns out he found a workaround:

The Post Exchange on FOB Warhorse has given up. There’s still a copy of the first season of MacMillan & Wife, for some reason, and a number of copies of Spider-Man 3, but basically the DVD racks are empty — they’ve stopped re-stocking. The reason is obvious — the “hajji shops” right across the way, the quasi-legal bazaar where locals sell pirated DVDs of popular movies as well as complete runs of nearly every worthwhile TV show ever. Spider-Man 3 at those booths may not have the extra features that a legit DVD does, and occasionally the picture wobbles and you see the edges of the screen when the guy in the theatre falls asleep, but fuck, it’s three bucks. You can get the entire run of Seinfeld or The Sopranos for ten.

I’ve tried to stay on the legal, nice-image-quality side of the divide for most of my tenure here in Iraq, ordering frequently from Amazon and occasionally stooping as low as the ESPN show Tilt when there was nothing else available in the P/X. But in the past couple of months I’ve simply given up. Amazon can’t deliver the instant satisfaction that local borrowing and swapping can, and in that milieu the pirated copies are too ubiquitous to be completely avoided. Also, it’s simply impossible to keep up with certain current shows without resorting to piracy. (These recent broadcasts are often some of the best-quality videos, since they’re ripped directly from DVR.)

So I took a couple of DVDs out of the shared platoon binder yesterday, including one of the “8-in-1″ special discs. These are theoretically collections of films on a certain theme; this one was supposed to be “crime” movies, but in fact included the Sandra Bullock wacky-witchcraft picture Practical Magic, so I’m not sure the guys making these discs really give a damn what films end up grouped together.

Read the whole post, including the bit about Jenny McCarthy. I seem to remember her writing a book about childbirth that prominently discussed the “pooping on the delivery table” phenomenon, so I agree with Seth – she’s comfortable with her body.

Wasn’t too happy writing a negative review of Guillemots’ new album, Red, but it’s a bit of a train wreck. Through the Window Pane is still one of my favorite English pop records in years; I was spinning it again this weekend, and I just can’t get sick of it.

One song from the new one:

“Get Over It” (live on Jonathan Ross)

And one from the old:

“Made Up Love Song #43″ (live out on the street somewhere, via La Blogotheque)

How the hell did that guy coming up the stairs not stop and listen?

Two stories this weekend struck the same nerve: first, that Resident Evil 5 trailer, where the white hero guns down a mob of black people, has gotten new play and been accused again of racism; second, the ongoing protests and boycott threats against China continue to plague its role as the host of this year’s Olympics. Both stories are about games, and both stories have attracted a backlash.

Resident Evil 5 fans are ticked about the criticism and hatred that the franchise has drawn; aren’t people – likely liberals and blacks – overreacting to that trailer? Why is gunning down a crowd of black zombies different from slaughtering any other zombies? Why do black critics like N’Gai Croal insist on (as one commenter put it) playing the race card? In other words, why do we have to think about any of this stuff at all? We should just play the damn game.

Same for the Olympics, although the controversy is far more complicated and frankly, far more important. Are the Olympic Games a place where healthy competition can take place between all nations, to vent the steam that would otherwise lead to, well, all the stuff that China is either doing or condoning? Doesn’t it defeat the whole point to politicize the games?

I understand these viewpoints, and hey, I get it. The purpose of a game is to create a safe, orderly and artificial space for competition. It’s not supposed to “matter” – at least unless you’re gambling.

But when is a game ever just a game? We love to watch sports and trounce our friends in Halo because while the game doesn’t matter, the players do. Everyone comes into the match with a story, a history, and something to prove. The Yankees and the Red Sox aren’t just two teams that play some games every year. It may not be fair that the Olympics are colored by politics – but nobody (in the US) had a problem with it when our hockey team crushed the Soviets’ in 1980. You don’t see people bitching (today) about Jesse Owens “playing the race card” at the Hitler Olympics.

In the same way, fears that Resident Evil 5 is either racist, or unfairly accused of racism, all have a place in how we deal with the game. Because whatever’s happening with Resident Evil 5 will just get more common. If every video game were Pong, we wouldn’t have to deal with the representation of human beings in games. But games are only becoming more cinematic. They’re depicting more realistic people who have clearer ethnic identities and worldviews and more dialogue in which to hit more buttons with the ever-growing audience of players. Pretending this stuff shouldn’t matter is naive.

Sports fans already knew this; gamers are still learning. If you judge by the comment threads, even the most ignorant football fan has a more nuanced grasp of race than the average Resident Evil 5 fanboy. They’ve accepted race is a factor. And they realize, if only through their passion for a hometown team, that a game is never just a game.