Tutorials

I recently purchased and finished The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition and loved the game.  The entire thing was just a masterpiece in my mind.  Yes, the graphics were not PC quality, but I just feel like the game, and even it's predecessor, were designed to be played using a controller.  There were some menu sorting things that were unnecessarily hard with a controller, but that's nothing that ruins a game.  The one thing that made me balk at the title right from the beginning was the tutorial, and that's what I want to address today.

I can barely recall when this was complex.

Remember back in the NES era?  To learn how to play the game, your only resource was the manual or a friend.  Going into a game like Final Fantasy I without reading the manual was basically video game suicide.  You'd spend quite a lot of time trying to figure it out, and even then you'd oftentimes be stuck at certain points in the game.  Nowadays we don't have problems with games like this, but back in the days without Internet and with the video game industry really starting to get back on it's feet after the crash this game would have seemed entirely new and different.  A tutorial would have been helpful for those gamers new to the market and to RPGs.

This was such a brilliant game.

Advancing forward a few years to the SNES, game developers must have realized the need for tutorials as games became more and more complex.  Two of the tutorials that stuck with me, as the games are both two of my favorites from that system, are from Super Mario RPG and Final Fantasy III.  In the former, the tutorial tries to integrate itself into the story as Toad tries to run ahead of Mario to the Mushroom Kingdom and ends up walking into some enemies that he needs help with.  The game essentially uses this as an excuse to have Toad explain to Mario how to attack and use items.  It seems primitive, but it works.  For Final Fantasy III, the developers left the entire tutorial as optional.  In the first town, Narshe, you can enter the house at the very entrance and talk to a bunch of wizened old men who tell you how to play.  The idea is that it's a learning center of sorts and there are some items and experience to be had inside.  If you don't enter the building you aren't penalized in any way and can just move on with the game.  I like that setup since the developers really tried to integrate the tutorial into the game, not slap it on like some post-it note afterthought or with a window that just says, "DO THIS."

Love the game, not the tutorial.

So finally, let's end with a much more recently developed game: The Witcher 2.  As I said, I didn't like the tutorial.  My biggest problem with the tutorial is that it makes you feel like you're going somewhere with the game, like it's the start, and then it just abruptly cuts out after you finish it.  You save some guy with a potion and fight in an arena, all the while thinking that you get all of the abilities you have and keep the items you earned, but that's just wishful thinking.  I don't like this style of tutorial.  I need the tutorial to do one of two things, either be seamless to the story, as in FFIII, or be part of thes story with pop-up windows if need be, like in Kingdoms of Amalur.

I didn't know that I was going to be awarding a winner at the end of this, but I decided that it sounded like a good idea.  I'm giving the Tutorial Award to FFIII.  It's seamlessly integrated into the game, gives you items and experience, and even allows you to skip it entirely without painstakingly forcing you to play along.  That's the best kind of tutorial.  Now only if developers could remember how to do things like that...

Retro Game of the Week: Ghostbusters

The ghost look so surprised.

I am a huge fan of simulation games.  When it comes right down to it, I could play Sim City for a few hours a day and really enjoy myself.  Unfortunately there are some simulation games that are boring, too complex, or just downright annoying.  Ghostbusters for the NES falls into all three categories.  I do have to go on record, again, and say that I fucking love Ghostbusters, but this game is just the shits.  It's a great idea, but poorly executed and on a system that just cannot handle what the game could have, and should have, been.  Let's start with the box on the left.  If you were to pick up this game back in 1988, there's little to no indication that you may not be getting what you want.  All you know is that you're getting Ghostbusters the video game and you're shitting your pants because you're just that damn excited.  Well, when you get home, change pants, and put that game in your Nintendo all your excitement is going to fall right out your ass.

Bustin' ghosts.

As soon as you start the game you get this voice yelling out Ghostbusters and you immediately get crapped out to the screen on the right.  The player takes control of the Ghostbusters logo.  So your first inclination might be that the game is some sort of Pac-Man clone, but by the time you travel all over the board, you find out that touching the ghosts only freezes them for a short period of time and that some of the buildings flash red.  Well, here's the scoop, those red buildings are haunted by ghosts and you need to bust 'em.  But how?  The game doesn't gives you one fucking clue.  You need a Proton Pack.  Oh, right, duh, there's a freaking shop up there.  Before you can actually go into the shop, you need to drive there.  No, not on the overworld map, but on a different screen.  You drive the damn car avoiding drunk drivers and obstacles or you lose money, and you need money to buy your equipment, which means you really need to be on top of things.  So you go to the shop and buy your pack and a trap and you're all set to go out and bust the hell out of some spirits.

Literally the only picture I could use.

So you head back out onto the overworld and zip on over to a red flashing building.  When you get there and go inside, the game forces you to drive there yet again.  After avoiding the damn obstacles for the second time you finally get to shoot some ghosts, and hell, it sucks too.  Your beam controls are as stiff as a corpse and the ghosts move too high up or too low down to capture almost every single time you get to this screen.  Even if you manage to get a ghost over the trap, it's almost up to pure luck if you capture it or not.  Oh yeah, and don't cross the streams, if you do, you disintegrate.  So if you finally capture a ghost or two you get some money.  Gain enough money and you can buy other worthless shit like Ghost Food, an upgraded Proton Pack, or better gear that has greater defense against ghosts.  So where exactly would you use this Ghost Food or defensive gear?  So far all we've seen are the overworld, driving, and ghost busting scenes and you can't exactly use items there.  In any case, now that you've gotten some ghosts you need to empty your trap and buy a new one.  That's right, you can't use one trap forever, you need to keep buying them.

This is very gray, too gray in fact.

So once you hit the shop again, you need to do the driving scene all over.  Fun.  By now, though, your gas meter is probably pretty low and you don't know why the fuck you have a gas meter anyway.  Well guess what?  You need to get gas for your damn car too.  For now you run out of gas and the sprites get out and push the car to the gas station, which costs more money.  So now you've wasted your precious ghost busting fee on gas and you can't buy that upgraded Proton Pack.  Fucknuts.  Whatever, you buy another trap and go after more ghosts.  After about an hour or so of doing this shit, you're still not any further along.  I had the problem of just spending my fees on new traps, gas, and getting hit in the driving stages.  It's like you were exercising only to go back to McDonalds any time that you made any progress at all, except without the addiction and food.  There's no food in Ghostbusters for NES.

Endgame staircases are harder to climb than any other type of staircase.  This is a fact.

Also after about an hour something flashes across the bottom of the screen.  Every time this happened while I was playing I barely caught the tail end of it.  The message just flies across the bottom of the screen at warp-fucking-speed.  Essentially it's telling you that you can now go into the Zuul building and play the rest of the game.  Finally.  Anyway, what you see next is the screen above.  Here you have to play stairmaster and avoid the ghosts.  This is where the defensive gear comes in handy, cause three hits and you're done, and you need to be almost flawless to beat this fuckfest.  Good luck.

The boss in an NES game is a naked woman-man. Fun.

At the top of the stairs, the next screen greets you and the game actually becomes fun for about five minutes until you beat the everliving shit out of the crazy bitch.  You dodge bullets here and fire back with your proton packs until she's toast.  The game ends and you get a shitty black and white ending screen with misspelled words and horrible grammar.  Yay.

Alright, I'm over it.  Hopefully now you see what I mean.  The game is way too boring.  I mean, how many times do you have to play the same freaking driving scene or the same ghost capturing scene?  Seriously, the only fun part of the game is the end where you're mimicking a 2D vertical shooter.  And talk about complex: why do you need to buy gas?  Getting down into that level of detail is just not needed here, it only creates problems for the gamer and causes them to get too frustrated to enjoy or finish the game.  The annoyance of this game is on full throttle and it shows with all of the same scenes, frustrating gameplay, and lackluster music.  I didn't mention this before, but the music is really annoying.  It's a decent rendition of the Ghostbusters theme, but it never stops.  Ever.  You'll want to cut your own ears off just to stop the noise.

Like I was saying at the beginning, I love simulation games, but this is just ass.  There's definitely an issue with the limitations of the NES and if it were on the SNES a few years later, I think that with some alterations, this could have been a good game, like SimCity.  The best change that this game could use though, is a change in location.  It needs to be located right in the fucking toilet.  Just drop that game right in like the shit bomb it is and move on with your life.

Day 11: Mobile Gaming

Simple, yet addictive.

Nintendo's success in the mobile market began with the Game and Watch games, like the one above.  These games are 100% classic, but as game graphics improved on consoles, so too did they improve for gaming on the go.  Never did we think that we could play console quality games while flying, but we've hit that point and much, much more.  With a goal in mind of dominating the mobile gaming market, as neither Sega nor Atari had a piece of the pie at the time, Nintendo continued to develop and experiment until they hit it big with the Game Boy.

Good 'ol Mean Green.

Of course this beast was the next logical step up from the Game and Watch series.  It's not exactly a giant leap for the graphics, but the ability to use interchangeable games was a huge improvement.  When I got my first Game Boy one of my thoughts was, "What the hell just threw up in my game?"  The games are clear enough, but whose idea was it to have the games be in black and greenish-yellow?  I mean, just take a look at the Atari Lynx the visuals alone make the Game Boy look like shit.  Not that the Lynx is perfect either.  The piece of crap drained batteries like nothing else and you need to angle the screen perfectly to see without any type of glare or blurriness.  Some of the same issues plagued the Game Gear and both machines would see a similar failing against the Game Boy's battery life and third party support as many peripherals would make up for it's lack of a backlit screen and other shortcomings.  Nintendo's success should also be partially attributed to their prior mobile device experience from Game and Watch games.

Nintendo keeps the config simple.

After the release of the SNES, Nintendo came out with a unique concept: Super Game Boy.  Essentially the idea was to play your old Game Boy games on a giant TV screen using the Super Nintendo and a special cartridge that you plugged smaller cartridges into.  At the same time, Sega came out with an actual mobile gaming unit known as the Nomad.  The Sega Nomad was essentially your Genesis on the go.  So while Sega tried to redefine the mobile market with a handheld system that played console games, Nintendo seemed to be going in the opposite direction.  That is, of course, until the company once again released a Game Boy.  This time it was in color.  The Game Boy Color had it's own library of games, along with being backwards compatible with your old green and black games.  Even with the Nomad's powerful capabilities, Sega lost out again when the newest Nintendo mobile hit the scene.

Steaming pile.

During this period, all of the remaining gaming companies, Nintendo, Sony, and Sega, were all gearing up for the next generation systems to hit the scene.  To fill the time, Nintendo attempted to release a system that would take advantage of the newer technologies that they were going to implement on their later Nintendo 64 system.  A pseudo-3d effect was added to a pair of goggles thrown together with a batch of shitty games and you got the piece of shit Virtual Boy.  I'm not even going to add a link here it's so bad.  I just want to forget about it.  When I was a kid, this thing looked like the shit, but it turned out to be just shit.  Ugh, let's just skip a few years.


The next gen consoles were released and so was Nintendo's next accomplishment in the handheld world.  The Game Boy Advance took the Game Boy Color and kicked it up a few notches, as it were.  The games got better, the graphics were sharper, and the system was still backwards compatible.  Several adaptations of the Advance would come out, most notably the fold-able SP.  Nintendo was still dominating the handheld market, especially since Sega's bust with their Dreamcast gamble.  Not until the DS and it's successors were released did Sony finally enter the market with the PSP and give Nintendo some competition.  That struggle for market share continues today with no other game companies wanting to step into the ring with the heavyweight champion and the up and comer.

Ugh, just... What the hell?

Now I'm sure you're wondering, "What the hell?  This isn't funny and everything's out of chronological order dumbass."  While that may be true, it all brings me to the shorter topic of the tablet or phone gaming craze.  Yes, the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and other mobile devices that aren't handheld systems may be cool and come with a seemingly limitless supply of "really awesome games," they suck ass as gaming platforms and do not make someone a gamer if used prolifically.  That's right, no matter how many shitty clones of Tetris you have, you still do not equal someone who experienced the original on that black and green screen while using an attached light to see in the dark at 4 AM.  I do have to admit some of the ports, Sim City in particular, do well on the iPad and iPhone, but they are side dishes to my actual gaming activities and systems, not the main course.  You can't have a three course meal with only soup and salad, you'd be perpetually stuck on the first course. 

The reason for all of this?  While driving the other day I passed a car full of teenage/early college-aged kids that had an Angry Birds pillow sitting in the back window for everyone to see.  It's as if the kid that owned the car was explaining that he's the shit because he's a hardcore Angry Birds fan.  The game can be addicting and certainly fun to waste time with, but memorabilia and attitudes like that demean what it means to be a real "gamer."  A gamer dedicates time and effort to a game, not for the satisfaction of being a dick or showing off, but for the rich experience that a good game can bring, the completion of a story, the rewarding ending you worked for, or the defeat of that impossible endgame boss.  Real gamers don't waste their time.

Retro Game of the Week 1: The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang

What the hell is wrong with his face?!

Before I delve into this post I want to say that I fucking LOVE this game, even as ridiculous as it seems.  It implements my favorite action role playing game elements and keeps the story light and fun.  But even so, I have to shout out a huge, "What the fuck?"

It's holding a key.  Cause garlic can do that.

First off, what the fuck is the title all about?  How is it so twisted?  All it is is your typical action RPG where you're a boy vampire prince trying to save your parents and kingdom from evil garlic, cat women, and giant alligator men.  And of course, one of your companions is an Easter Island head stone guy...  Okay, I take that back, the title makes perfect sense; this shit is twisted.  Who in their right mind makes a game like this?  Your health is represented by tomatoes, which I guess makes more sense for a child audience than the blood or hearts of your victims, but what video game have you ever played that had anything remotely close to a tomato life bar?

That's right, they're called Killer Cloves...

So let's talk about how to battle these fiends that have taken over your kingdom.  As a vampire, you'd expect our hero to use super strength, claws, teeth, and his overall dark, vampiric demeanor to kill his enemies, right?  Well, the game comes pretty close to all that as Spike uses his cape.  The cape spin is your main form of attack.  That just doesn't make any sense on a physics level.  Are there fucking blades attached to it or does he just spin so damn fast that the enemies are pummeled by relentless wind bursts?  I'm glad to say that there's an alternate form of attack, but for whatever reason, it's the kid's hat.  If you hold the attack button, Spike's hat lifts off and is tossed in the direction your facing.  Again, how the fuck does this harm your enemies?  It's a fucking hat, not a javelin!

I'm really not sure what's going on here.

The final method of defending yourself from attackers, you're not going to believe this, is a deck of card tricks.  Yeah, like he's a fucking magician.  The cards can turn enemies into animals, turn you invisible, give you unlimited flying hat for a period of time, etc.  So what I've finally decided is that Spike isn't just a vampire, oh no, he's a boy magician vampire extraordinaire!

I mean, what the fuck?  This whole game just boggles my mind.  For some reason though, back in the SNES age, I didn't question anything that went on here.  Apparently at that stage in my life, evil, walking garlic seemed just as normal to me as any house cat.  But, hey, to be fair, if I heard of a boy magician vampire wandering around the world doing card tricks, I would be all over that action.