Difficulty as an Artform is Dead

You know the problem with the kids these days? They don't know what difficult is! Back when I was a kid playing videogames, and some of you were probably teenagers playing videogames, probably some of you were even 20-somethings playing videogames (what the hell was wrong with you back then?), good god is this sentence long enough for you yet? Anyway, back when I was a kid playing videogames, we had games that were insanely difficult yet somehow still incredibly fun. Some of the best examples are games like Ghosts'n'Goblins, Battletoads, Contra, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ninja Gaiden, Metroid, and of course one of my all-time favorites...Mega Man!

Back in July of 2008 I was practically floored by the announcement that Capcom was putting out a new Mega Man game, most importantly that they were calling it Mega Man 9 and it was going to use the same graphics as the original NES games. I was really excited by the prospect of a new retro-Mega Man game that would perfectly recreate the feelings I had when I was younger but with totally new content. The game was released in September 2008 as a download for the Wii, X-Box 360, and the PS3 and has since gotten numerous excellent reviews and been nominated for several awards including 'Best WiiWare Game' and 'Best Platforming Game'. I think all of that is complete, and utter, bull shit.

Admittedly I did not play Mega Man 9 for very long, the first level alone was enough to make me want to kill babies. I read some reviews that praised its retro look and claimed it was every bit as difficult as the original games, these are damned lies. The game may be "as difficult" as the old games, but it's not the right kind of difficulty. I'm sure some of you are thinking it, and believe me I cringed at the very hint of it, that I have simply gotten rusty and that this game was punishing me like a pimply freshman in gym class. Nay, I say to you, that is not the case.

My wife, angelic messenger that she is, has purchased for me a great number of gaming fineries in our time together. Possibly the best of which was the port of Mega Man X (the first one for the Super Nintendo) for the PSP, titled Maverick Hunter X, which is almost an exact recreation of the SNES game. Let me tell you, I may have been able to play the guitar or the recorder in middle school at some point but those skills might as well be gone to some cave in north korea, however when I found myself at the helm of the blue bomber on the PSP, the muscle-memory had only been sharpened with age like the razor sharp edge of an sharp executioner's sharp axe. Possibly even as much so as a picture of said witty executioner printed from a Sharp printer, covered in vicious razor blades!

Suffice to say, my skills had not dulled, so something had to be wrong with the game. What I ended up pondering was the difference between a game that's artfully difficult and a game that is simply painfully difficult. An excellent example of artful difficulty is the classic disappearing block timing puzzles that appeared predominately in the first two Mega Man games. When you entered the room you were initially shocked by seemingly random blocks appearing and disappearing in mid-air with some super sweet sound effects accompanying them, but after a few moments you began to notice the pattern of jumping that the blocks were spelling out to you. As you progressed, you no doubt fell a couple of times, but you knew the secret to the puzzle and with a little bit of time and determination you could get passed it relatively easily.

In contrast, an example of painful difficulty is when something is just plain hard and there is no real secret to figuring it out. You can spend five minutes trying it or three hours and it's still just as hard. Mega Man 9 is pretty much infected with this kind of difficulty, right from the very beginning you can see a certain lack of polish that the other games had is missing from this one. I even played the game a couple of times, spread out over a few months each time, to see if my opinion changed and it hasn't so far. I'll probably go back and try to play it again, this time trying really hard to not suck and die a thousand times over.

I actually feel that many of the classic NES games I listed above dance precariously close to the edge between these two types of difficulty. Contra, BattleToads, TMNT, and Ghosts'n'Goblins in particular are all exceedingly hard and can pretty quickly become less fun than they are painful. Ninja Gaiden, Metroid, and Mega Man all top my list as well balanced games that provide challenge while still remaining quite fun. Then again, I could just be a pansy...

How A Game About Flowers Almost Made Me Soil Myself

I'd been waiting for some time for Flower to be released, and yesterday I finally got to download it. I will admit that my masculine side looked funny at me when it found out and possibly wrote nasty friends-only posts about me on its livejournal for doing so, but the rest of me was looking at the screenshots and going holy crap this game is gorgeous. It is, too. Every blade of grass is rendered individually, and since this game is about you being the wind, they all move accordingly when you blow on them.

For the first couple levels, I was happy as a clam -- a clam set free riding a warm breeze in the spring! I'd seen this sort of gameplay before. It wasn't rocket science. You activate things by running over them, they activate, and something happens (usually involving some sort of land-rejuvenation like dead grass turning green). It's not a real complex puzzle game at all. But you don't play Flower because you want challenging gameplay. You play Flower because you want to go WHEEEEEE I CAN FLY WHEEE GRASS ON A SUNNY DAY WHEEEEEEEE. I'm recall thinking that the first couple levels of this game are the cure for Seasonal Affective Disorder, and that I would play this game every time I get stressed out. It was like being four years old again, and running through a field full of rolling hills and dandelions. It felt great.

After that, things changed.

The nighttime level started off much as the daytime ones, except the grass that the wind touched glowed, and would power these little lightposts everywhere. It was quiet, and pretty, and tranquil. Kind of like a dream, which was not a big surprise since I'd heard the developer referred to each level as a "dream". What the bastards forgot to tell us is that they also included nightmares.

After clearing part of the level and lighting something up, all of a sudden the soothing music darkens noticeably and the camera pans over to a dark place on the horizon. Something cracks and pops, and small dark red lights hang menacingly from powerlines I can't see. Oh, and darkness started creeping over the ground, seemingly led by some malevolent force. And that's where I have to go next. No problem, I think, I'd find some flowers and light that shit right up. But as I go deeper into the darkness, there's no flowers. Matter of fact, I can barely see where I'm going aside from those red lights. And it's getting narrower. And those lights look like they're watching me. And I'm going so fast, I can't stop, everything's in the way. Is it reaching for me? I'm going to trip and something's going to get me! My pulse quickens and my breath is gone. I almost want to cry a little.

Then, as quickly as it started, it's over. I'd cleared the level somehow. The previous levels had some goal, like revitalizing a tree or activating a bunch of windmills, and you got a nice little set of cutscenes at the end where you could just watch and relax. This dumped me out to the stage selection menu, sitting on the couch trying to catch my breath, wondering what the hell had just happened.

Then it hit me. This was completely intentional, and brilliant. The reason I was so scared is they managed to activate my inner 4 year old, and keep me in that mindset for awhile, and then throw in exactly what scares the crap out of him. And when I'd have a nightmare as a kid, it almost always was me doing something fun, and then something changes subtly, and then I'm running for my life from something, and I don't know what it is but it's scary, and things are going way too fast for me to process and I'd want to cry and then suddenly I'm awake and everything is OK again but I don't know how I got here or if any of this is real and I'm still scared out of my mind. (I briefly considered phoning my parents to see if they'd let me sleep in their bed that night, but I think Efreak might have objected.)

Imagine if you could harness that kind of fear in your campaign. While I struggle to think of ways to do it as effectively in D&D as it's done in Flower, the idea of something dark, malevolent, and most importantly nameless seems like a very good place to start. If you plop an enemy down and the players sort of know its stats and you announce all its abilities (with stats) as they happen, it breaks the spell. Now, granted, you can't really get around that in D&D -- when they take damage, you have to tell the players what happened to them in a way that they can record on their character sheet. But that doesn't mean you have to say "the wight uses its Drain Level ability on the farmer". You could, instead, talk about the NPC farmer suddenly being grabbed by a clawed hand from the shadows, his face suddenly growing gaunter and paler. Make sure to mention his attempts to cry for aid instead producing a dry rattle. You don't have to tell the PC's everything all the time!

.......OK, I admit it. I wrote that last part about D&D because I wanted to distract everyone from the fact that a game about flowers scared the hell out of me. It's not the first time flowers have scared me so. There was also that time when I was 3 that my older brother told me there was a new kind of killer bee that looked just like floating dandelion seeds......

Does video game facilitated roleplaying actually exist?

I've had a precious few extended jags in World of Warcraft over the past few weeks as we prepare for our move, and as I played the game by myself I found that it was pretty easy to engage in the storyline. A few times, in fact, I actually felt invested that my character would want to actually help the world and it mattered.

Then I got the opportunity to run through an instance of Ragefire Chasm with some more experienced players. I understand that each person plays the game in their own way, and often the raids are about efficiency. My experience of actually engaging in the storyline was pretty well shattered by "talk to this guy, get this quest, then get back down there and more killing."

So I ask you, loyal readers... has anyone had a satisfactory roleplay experience using a packaged video game (such as WoW, Neverwinter, etc) as a medium? Granted, we weren't trying to replicate D&D style roleplay in our World of Warcraft efforts, but it was a bit amazing how quickly things devolved into hack and slash, efficiency gaming once a group came into the mix.

So let's hear it from you... does video game facilitated roleplay actually exist? Can it be done?

Fun-Eating Zombies

As I mentioned a couple days ago, Team Stupid Ranger has started playing World of Warcraft. I've been fairly pleased with the game so far. It's a bit heavy on the kill <number> of <creature> and bring me its <body part>, but overall I've been having fun exploring new places and doing things as a group.

However, as part of the launch of their new Wrath of the Lich King expansion, zombies have started to appear everywhere in the game (especially near major population centers). And, like most zombies, they kill people, who in turn also become zombies. Sort of. When a player gets turned into a zombie, they can still control their character, and they can't use their old skills but they get a new set of skills revolving around the eating of brains and infecting others. Sometimes you get infected but you haven't turned yet, and it's a race against time to find someone who can cure disease.

It's a very cool idea, and a great thing to do during their Hallow's End celebration. It's a lot of fun for everyone -- well, except low-level players like myself. You see, the problem is that when a level 70 player gets turned into a zombie, he's still strong enough to kill my poor little level 24 shaman in one hit. Sometimes I turn into a zombie, other times I just die outright. Now imagine being me, just trying to turn in some quests so I can keep levelling for the first time. I go into any major city, and a group of at least 10 level 70 zombies is waiting for me. After dying/getting zombified 5 times trying to get away I try to escape this madness by questing in the Barrens, which is basically a field that contains nothing but grass and deadly velociraptors, and there are frickin' zombies roaming around killing low level characters.

I'm really not enjoying this. This makes levelling insanely hard (which makes me even angrier since I am on a limited-time Refer-A-Friend, and I want to try to get a couple characters to lvl 60 before it ends). I'd really be mad if I wasn't playing on a PvP server, those poor bastards on PvE and RP servers are getting PvP they didn't sign up for.

You'd think Blizzard would have learned from what happened in the Corrupted Blood incident a couple years ago that it's a giant pain in the ass when all your major cities are infected and the vast majority of the NPCs you need to talk to are dead (or trying to eat your brains). But that was a little different. That was a bug that people exploited and it spiraled out of control. This is Blizzard basically giving the greenlight for mass griefing. When you get zombified, you're really not able to do much aside from walking around, infecting others, or killing others. So we've got hundreds of players who are basically now bored and have one option available to them. Oh yeah, plus this is an MMO so the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is in full effect, so not only are they going to kill everybody they see, they're going to stand around with 50 of their friends and camp your corpse too. If the zombies couldn't all one-shot-kill me, it would help. And I can't play the game I wanted to play, and most of the time I can't play with the zombies infecting others because I'm either dead or one of the level 60 guards kills my weak little level 24 zombie ass (in one shot). I can walk back to my corpse. Over and over again. Which, frankly, is not worth $15/month. What I wish they'd do is make all the zombies weak and slow. You know, like zombies. God knows there are enough of them, and you could even spawn more that weren't players to make it feel like a real live zombie invasion.

Making this worse for me is that the roleplayer in me finds this whole zombie scenario completely amazing. If I didn't have to level and I had to help defend the last bastion of civilization from wave after wave of the undead, trying desperately not to join their ranks, this would be AMAZING. But the execution leaves something to be desired. And by that, I mean if the zombies are here to stay, I'm going to cancel my account. Especially since Blizzard appears to be trying to get more new players and for existing players to make new characters with their triple XP referral program, this is a completely terrible idea. This thought keeps me thinking this is temporary and for effect, so that you take the Lich King seriously as a world-threatening villain. But if they really expect brand new players to hang in there not having fun and never getting anything done for a month while they're ruthlessly repeatedly murdered by members of their own faction "having fun", I hope it comes back to bite them in the ass. Turning it, obviously, into an ass-zombie.