It’s an appropriate day to be playing Sonic, this fifth day of Christmas, but instead I’m recapping my week. I chat about Mario & Lugi: Dream Team, Halo: Spartan Assault, Skylanders: Swap Force, Lego Star Wars, Despicable Me Minion Rush, environmental design, Jared Diamond’s criticism of video games, game conventions, and complain about Halo 4… again.
In Mario & Luigi: Dream Team I’m approaching the 40 hour mark. I’m high up on the snow and ice covered summit of Mt. Pajama. A new Luiginary Work has emerged that changes the screen from summer to winter, allowing platforms to rise under the pressure of water for summer and freeze in place for winter. The Massif Bros. are funny with their meat infused language using “beef” to descibe their muscles and calling M & L “cutlets”. I’ll never tire of this game until it is finished.
I thought Halo: Spartan Assault was coming to Xbox 360 on Tuesday the 24th but it was just the Xbox One version, the 360 version coming in January. There’s nothing else coming out for me in January, so I guess that’s ok. In the meantime, I thought I’d go back to Halo 4 and finish it. More of that below.
Fluffy Unicorn
During Christmas, I watched my niece and nephew play Skylanders: Swap Force, Lego Star Wars the Complete Saga on iPhone, and Despicable Me Minion Rush on iPad. My nephew got many Skylanders figures for gifts and I questioned him on which ones were swappable, giants or just normal Skylanders. I love the design of the figures. They’re full of expression and very colorful. I found the presentation of the game very much like a Dreamworks or Pixar film. This game is clearly aimed at kids. My nephew got really excited when his character gained new abilities. So did I in fact. Then I watched him playing Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga on his iPhone on the couch. I helped him through one area because I know every level of that game. It looks and plays exactly like the Xbox 360 version, the only difference being the controls. Then my niece came over to the couch with her iPad and soon both of them were playing Despicable Me Minion Rush on both iPad and iPhone. I was in the middle trying to look at both screens. The game is like a lot of iOS running games. You’re on a multi-laned track and you swipe the screen with your finger to make your character jump obstacles or switch lanes. You play for score and then unlock new abilities with your winnings. I love the minions from Despicable Me and so enjoyed watching them play it. They both got really excited over unlocking things like The Fluffy Unicorn and Mega Minion. One of these days I’ll have an iPad. It’s a great device for gaming.
Assassin's Creed III
I’ve being reading Eric Rutkow’s American Canopy: Trees, Forests and the Making of a Nation and I keep wanting to see what America looked like before the first colonies. I wish I was doing environmental art for games because I want to do a East Coast of the U.S. with the forest that existed in the 16th century. There was an aneqdote given in the book saying that a squirel could have traveled from Georgia to New England, moving over the canopy of Chestnut trees without ever once touching the ground. That in itself is something I would love to animate. Imagine a game where you travel long distances over the canopy of the trees, interacting with the birds and butterflies that live up there. What an interesting landscape that would be! I tried to think of a game that had something similar and the only one I could think of was maybe Assassin’s Creed III. It takes place in the 18th century, so it’s not settlement day-one, but it’s before the intensive logging that took place in the 19th century. I’m excited to play that game now to see how they rendered the environment.
I finished reading Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies and, among many other interesting ideas, noticed that he was fairly critical of video games in modern society suggesting that they keep kids indoors and sedentary and limit their creativity. He says kids in traditional societies, who spend nearly all their time outdoors and have to make their own toys if they want them, are more creative as a result. I think some of this criticism is unfair and the result of a man who is in his 70’s and unfamiliar with actually playing of video games (he claims in the book once that he has to ask his son to explain to him how to use the remote for his TV. That doesn't sound like someone who has any experience with video games). Some video games can be very linear and simple and allow for no creativity, but others offer wide open experiences where you can invent your own stories as in sandbox games like GTA and Elder Scrolls and others even allow for making new visuals or gameplay with creation tools like Little Big Planet and Halo's Forge. And heck, modding tools for PC games can get you employed as a designer. The possibilities for creativity with games are endless. Of course, you could just sit on your couch and perform endless QTE’s and basically do little more than watch TV, but it’s your choice. Being too sedentary is a valid criticism of games, but you don’t have to play twelve hours a day. I’m outside nearly all the time and sometimes am playing my 3DS in the park between walks. Sometimes I play inside all day long, but I usually get up and walk down the street for some grub sometime in the middle of that and it's usually just once a week. I would add that making your own games from sticks or whatnot is interesting and requires a lot of ingenuity, but it is quite limited compared to rending an entire world on a computer. I would challenge his assertion that tradition society kids are more creative than modern kids. Just look at what they do in Minecraft. Amazing!
I got my 2014 calendar this week and started thinking about important things to write on it. I got curious about gaming conventions and found a really long list of them on the wiki page for “list of gaming conventions”. I couldn’t help but put every one of them on my calendar, even the ones I have no hope of visiting because they’re in other countries. Really, the only ones I should put on my list are the biggest ones like E3, GDC, IGF, GamesCon, Quakecon, PAX Prime and the ones I could actually get to such as: PAX East [Boston], Dragon Con [Georgia], MAGfest [Maryland], and the one that's practically in my back yard, Too Many Games [Pennsylvania]. I like thinking about ALL the cons though and will look up their web sites the weeks they happen and report on some of it here in my blog.
Halo 4
I got some console gaming in at my friend’s place on Saturday and finished the campaign of Halo 4. I really dislike the story in this game. Master Chief says at one point that he is supposed to protect Cortana and that he won’t let her sacrifice herself, but I recall that he was ordered by Capt. Keyes in the first game to keep her out of the hands of the Covenant, not to “protect” her exactly. Also, Master Chief’s refusal to follow Del Rio’s order to retreat from the Didact and Commander Laskey’s aid just rubs me the wrong way. A Spartan’s first priority would be to follow orders. Yes they’re trained to think for themselves in the field and adapt to new situations but orders are orders. You could say MC has added authority as the savior of Earth and thus feels he can make his own orders, but Del Rio doesn’t treat him with any respect unlike in Halo 3 where MC had almost equal authority to the UNSC commanders. Del Rio calls him an “aging” Spartan with a rampant AI. Dude. I saved frickin' Earth. Give some respect. Everything about this game seems to suggest an attempt to retire MC and turn the focus on more “human” characters like Commander Laskey and Spartan IV Sarah Palmer. Seriously, I’m really miffed at these attempts to remove MC and Cortana. There’s no reason for it. Did Indiana Jones remove Indy? Did Star Wars remove Vader? Halo IS MC, without him it’s just another space opera. You don’t need to age him or keep any kind of rational timeline. It’s just a story. It can go anywhere. No one really cares about continuity or realism. Keep the central characters. It’s what makes it Halo.
Oh yea, and why is Cortana so realistically naked? It's titilating at first but after a while it gets really annoying and just seems gratuitous and strange. AIs in the Halo universe can choose their own holographic image. Why does Cortana choose a naked female? Others have chosen a cowboy, a woman in Grecian robes, or even a black box. Why a naked female with no anatomical details covered in electronic energy? I don't get it. Emotional vulnerability? The need to keep MC interested so he continues to protect her? What? It's never explained. I just feel exploited by this visual choice that has little to do with the story. Enough all ready!
Oh yea, and reloads. WAY TOO MANY! Is this a run-and-gun game or a cover-based game like COD? I think 343 is trying to make it more like COD. Lead the way, don’t follow. That’s what Bungie did. Halo’s gunplay has gone totally to precision headshot fest instead of the bullet hell style it always was. Me don’t like! Wah!
Finally I got The Wolf Among Us Episode One for free on Xbox Live’s week of Christmas sale on Saturday. Maybe I’ll play it sometime.
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