Russell Brock linked to me and, by tradition or by obsessive compulsion, I always read the sites that link to me. I really enjoyed his post on his favorite achievements. This is because I, like Brock, think achievements are one of the best features of the Xbox 360. The snooty scoff off achievements derisively as “nerd points” and the greedy claim “you don’t get free stuff for getting points, so why bother?” Both clearly miss the point. Achievements are like Cub Scout merit badges. They don’t do anything, but you think kids would learn how to tie knots if they didn’t have something to point to to say “Hey, I did something different”? I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some achievements that have actually made me play a game in a different way or explore areas that I would have missed the first time around. This, to me, is the primary value of achievements - to extend or enhance the enjoyment of gameplay.

Here is my short list of favorite achievements that I have earned:

	“The One Free Bullet” from Half Life 2: Episode One So here is an achievement that would have been frustratingly stupid in most other games. This one falls under the category of “Hamstrung” achievements where you ask the player to play the game without the aid of some crucial element. In this case, they want you to play through without using any bullet-firing guns. But you can use the gravity gun and that’s where this Achievement really adds fun. The first time I played through Episode One, I did the normal run and gun through, ignoring most of the interactive objects. When I was trying for this achievement, my eyes were open for every cinder block, radiator and saw blade. I made great pains to retrieve the precious saw blades. The game took on a challenge that was missing in playing normally. I had a lot more fun playing through the second time for this achievement than I did on my first playthrough. By the end, using only the gravity gun was second nature and I was seeing the levels as I imagine the designers intended - being mindful of the items strewn about City 17 and surrounding areas. If I had the “Little Rocket Man” achievement, I imagine it would be on the list as well, but for a different reason.
	“Skater of the Year” from skate. I wrote off skate before it came out as another one of those “extreme” sports games where I’d have to fight with the controls and do repetitive tasks until my eyes bled. When the demo hit, I found myself lost in the game until the timer expired. When I got a hold of the retail game, I found it to be both captivating and frustrating. When I finally (after months) unlocked the Skater of the Year achievement, I felt like I had really earned it. Some of those challenges were damn near impossible, yet I persevered and had some genuine jump-off-the-couch-in-celebration moments. If this achievement was a merit badge, I’d be sure to sew it onto the most visible part of my uniform.
	“Irony” from Bioshock I find secret achievements interesting. On one hand, they aren’t revealed in the normal achievement list, so you don’t have any incentive to do them. But on the other hand, they can provide pleasant surprises that would be defused if they were on the normal achievement list. Such is the case of the “Irony” achievement from Bioshock. In one stage, you do a psychopath’s bidding by eliminating his enemies and then taking pictures of said enemies corpses to adorn a macabre art piece. When you complete it, you get to confront the psychopath. As a gamer, I instantly shot him in the face a hundred times before he could draw on me (leaving the other secret achievement regarding entering his secret room unachievable until the second playthrough). When he was dead, I thought it would be poetic to take his picture, like I did for his foes that I had offed. When I did, I got the satisfying “Achievement Unlocked” popup noise and smiled in satisfaction.
	“Costume Party” from Dead Rising Dead Rising combined two of my favorite things in video games: sandboxes with plenty to do and zombies. There were dozens of ways to interact with your foes in the game and most were ridiculous. Yet I never would have thought that I could put masks on the zombies if not for this achievement. Thus, it serves its purpose of letting you know about a feature that you may not have discovered on your own. I kind of wish there had been a few more because I know I must have missed some clever features (Frying a zombie’s face with a hot skillet was a fun discovery), but this achievement made me think about each item I picked up and what its purpose was.
	“Worst Cliché Ever” from The Simpsons The Simpsons game was quite funny. I was tempted to put the “Press START to Play” achievement here as it gave me a good laugh, but since it was essentially automatically given, it really wasn’t a good achievement besides providing said laugh. This one, however, prompted me to find all of the clichés in the game, some of which were quite hilarious including the “Collecting Every Collectible” cliché, which is personally one of my most notoriously hated game design decisions.
	“Don of NYC” from The Godfather There really isn’t much of a story behind this one as it is your standard transcompletion achievement. However, when I was done with it, I really felt like the city was mine and that I controlled every mobster in my reach. I suppose that is more of the game itself succeeding than the achievement, but it was a nice stopping point when the achievement was awarded.

From Gamasutra:

Asked if he plans to do any Xbox Live Arcade games, Schafer said, “We talk about making Xbox Live Arcade games all the time. Who doesn’t want to make Xbox Live Arcade games? It’s like when you see a Great Dane taking a giant shit and then you see a poodle taking a little Tootsie Roll shit. The poodle is so cute, but at the end of the day you’re still picking up shit. Seriously though, we’d love to make Xbox Live Arcade games, but we’re really busy now.”

I don’t know if he was just trying to make a joke, but there’s some great sentiment about modern games there.

I was reading this article about Rock Band and I had an “Oh, snap” moment at a little shiv from Harmonix to Neversoft:

We definitely encourage people to be playing music. We want people to be living that vibe that we are all about because otherwise we’d kind of just be fakers. Obviously we are making video games and that’s what we’re about, but we are also musicians, and it’s the combination of us being musicians and videogame makers that really makes us have that special quality. It’s kind of pervasive throughout the entire company. We wouldn’t bother trying to make skateboarding games.

Bad blood?

A short review.

MLB Power Pros is exactly what hardcore sports people think is approachable, but isn’t.

It is essentially a hardcore baseball sim with a coat of kid-friendly nuance on top. The game is still chock full of abbreviations that no one with a passing level of baseball knowledge could be expected to know and no one beside the game designers and rabid fans could understand how it affects gameplay. The controls are of the same complexity as I experienced playing The Show and MVP NCAA Baseball. There’s nothing more approachable here. You either can modify the settings to make it stupidly easy or the computer can act with artificial precision and you will get blown out. I imagine if I spent a lot of time with it, I could get a competitive game out of it like I can now do with NCAA Football, but I honestly don’t want to make that investment. I want something fun and approachable without turning it into a fantasy or having a Wii-Sports level of hand holding.

One noteworthy feature is the game allows you to automate almost any element of gameplay that you don’t want to do. I immediately automated base-running as I’ve always found that to be a chore. However, I’ve found that I should probably just as well automate everything as the CPU seems to be able to do things that I cannot - namely, hit sacrifice flys and successfully hit farther than an infield fly without using the “power” option. There’s nothing here besides MVP/MLB with a Japanese twist. It’s a hardcore game for hardcore baseball fan parents to give to their kids to hope that they too turn into hardcore baseball people.

Miscellaneous notes:

1. Dear 2k Sports: Perhaps you did not know, but PNC Park is in Pittsburgh, not New York City. Please update your maps. I understand that people from Pittsburgh may not realize they have a major league ball club there, but there’s no reason that you shouldn’t know

2. Dear Take Two: When did PS2 packaging change to eschew the memory card holder? This is definitely a game you would want to port your created players/teams/etc. around. Why would you leave out the memory card holder? I ended up swapping my packaging with my Sly 2 packaging so I could have a memory card holder.

Found this article on Rock Paper Shotgun on why Quick Time Events are balls.

I can’t say I completely agree, but their reasoning is sound. The fact is that QTEs are a design/implementation cop-out. BUT, and this is what the aforelinked article misses, if the result of putting in a QTE is sufficiently noteworthy, it can be worth it. For instance, in God of War, it would be silly to have the player master a new set of controls for the brutal boss finishes. The fact that they were so climactic made the QTE okay. I didn’t enjoy them on the normal baddies - killing the cyclopes, for one. Repetitive for the reasons mentioned in the article.

But here is another realm where they can be okay: sports games. In actually playing a sport, one has control over their limbs and head and possibly some extension of those (hockey sticks, golf clubs, etc.) To have a QTE for breaking a tackle or doing something where the player would need some incredibly fine granularity of control over the avatar’s motor functions, I believe this could be advisable. The key to this is whether you are taking control away from the player in order to extend their move set or giving the player more control while extending their move set. God of War’s cyclopes are the former - there are many other ways in the normal control scheme to off them. A broken tackle in a football game is the latter as long as there aren’t other more direct ways to initiate the action.

Where I think the linked article fails is using the “it takes me out of the game” excuse. Yes, it is certainly true, but we put up with a lot of elements that take us out of the game: UI, button memorization, repeated dialogue, loading screens, achievements, save states. Indeed some of these things we find vital to a gaming experience. So the point of the analysis should be if reminding a player that he is in a game and taking control away is worth it in that situation. Saying QTEs are evil is as silly as saying button combos are evil.

So someone agrees with what I said about pandering to the hardcore, only this is in regards to Guitar Hero instead of sports games.

And I guess I am also not the only one who thought “Battle Mode” was a terrible idea from a design standpoint (you can’t add randomness to a game that is about skill mastery) and not the only one who found the game to be as surprisingly chauvinistic.

Other notes from the weekend: How do you review the Simpsons game? This shows the inherent flaw in the numerical ratings system and it shows in the reviews. The camera is broken, the controls are terrible, the graphics show numerous errors during cutscenes and there are some absolutely stupefying general and level design decisions (no co-op in-between missions?). Yet the game is fun. Why? Because the writing is clever, irreverent and different from what we normally see in games. And that is enough to push you forward. So do you rate a game for its execution of technical aspects or do you rate the game for how enjoyable it is? It’s fairly obvious that game reveiwers don’t know the answer so they aim somewhere in the middle and assign a random “average” number.

The Simpsons Game is worth playing, even to just borrow off a friend. To compare it to other games with a similar rating and assume that it provides a similar amount of fun on the little circle of plastic is folly. The linked game is junk and the Simpsons game has redeeming qualities.

EDIT: A related story via Joystiq.

Imagine the following:

Your friend tells you about this movie he is really excited about and he convinces you to buy a ticket and see it with him. The theater is mostly empty when you sit down, except for a few kids in the front row holding those big foam #1 fingers. Before the previews start, your friend tells you it his ninth time seeing the movie. It starts and immediately you find it incomprehensible. There are dozens of characters whose origins and motives aren’t explained, you have a rough understanding of the plot, but the movie seems distracted with minor plot points and half the movie seems to be overwrought establishing shots.

When the credits roll, your friend applauds but you sit there confused. He nudges you and tells you, “Don’t worry. I didn’t start really “getting it” until the fifth time I saw it. Hang in there!” You are a bit dumbstruck: “Five times? I’m not wasting my time and paying to see that mess again!”. Your friend then gets angry with you: “Whatever. You just don’t want to put in the time to struggle for something sophisticated.”

That’s basically the game industry’s sports genre.

This is exactly what I mean. Here you have a prominent blogger (Luke Plunkett) that was sent a copy of NBA 2k8 and found it unplayable because it was too complicated for someone who hasn’t played for(i=2007;i>1996;i–) {NBA i}. (Is it bad that I thought of the string of past ten NBA games in that way?) And I totally agree with Plunkett in this case. You can have a deep experience without requiring a master’s degree in the sport for entry.

Yet what do the fanboys do? They lampoon the original poster for not being 1337 enough to understand the game. Plunkett gave it five days without having any degree of mastery. I’m sure he could pass and shoot and do the basics, but I’m also sure the game requires more.

And this is what modern sports games are reduced to because of the following reasons:

1) Marketing departments read the message boards and assume the lunatic fringe that wants to have to press forty-seven buttons to drive to the hoop because it would be ‘realistic’ and ‘deep’ is a representative sample of the audience. Actually, there is some truth to this, because modern sports games have alienated all but the lunatic fringe, so they really are are representative sample of the audience. But they sure as hell are not a representative sample of the potential audience. How many more people would pick up and play Madden if they didn’t need to know what a formation was?

2) There is self-selection when it comes to sports game designers. There is a push every year to add new features to gameplay, which to most designers means: “Complicate this for reasons of depth”. So the designers that are most fervent and stick with the franchises year after year are the kind that don’t mind that it is ridiculously complicated because a) they designed it and they have ego issues and b) they’ve played this game almost every day for X years so they have forgotten what it is like to be overwhelmed. The designers that care about simplicity and elegance move on because how are you going to have simplicity and elegance when the crowd (other designers and fanboys) are demanding more pre-snap options? How many people out there watch and enjoy football without having a Knute Rockney level of understanding? The answer is: more than the games industry is hitting right now.

3) You can’t capture simplicity and elegance in a screenshot or back-of-the-box bullet point as easily as you can a new extended “depth” feature. Since we are lazy extremely busy trying to cram everything in under a ten month deadline, we take the easy (read: most feasible) route out.

There has to be room for something in between Wii Sports abstraction and Football Manager esotericism. And there is: see NBA Street, NFL Street, The Bigs. But these “action sports” games decide that since they aren’t being “hardcore” that they also cannot be realistic.

A coworker told me that MLB Power Pros is fantastic and has a ton of depth while still being realistic and approachable. I plan on picking it up and seeing. I imagine the lunatics haven’t gotten a hold of it because it looks “kiddy” and anything that isn’t 100% hardcore serious is kryptonite to them. Call me Lex Luthor.

Update for GSW linkers: I picked up Power Pros and it didn’t do it for me.

I’m so mind numbingly sick of this debate. Can we settle this now? Here:

Examples in Novels:
A - Ulysses, 1984, House of Leaves
B - Harlequin Romance, Hardy Boys

Examples in Film:
A - Citizen Kane, Raging Bull, The Godfather, Primer
B - Steven Seagal movies, Transformers, Barbarella

Examples in Games:
A - Ico, Deus Ex, Bioshock (I guess), Braid (perhaps, haven’t played it yet) It is a very short list.
B - Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Serious Sam, Final Fantasy, Gears of War
C - Skate, SimCity, Electroplankton, Line Rider, Spore (probably)
D - Madden, Tetris, Katamari Damacy, Guitar Hero, Nethack