But now I partially rescind that conclusion. I now think that fun was never the point of Ico and that condemning it because of its lack of fun is folly. I think the point of Ico was to show the world that a game could elicit a powerful emotional response from a gamer. And, of course, there were other concomitant goals, like: create a sublime, castle environment; make a(nother) game comprised of thought-provoking, brain-working-outing puzzles; throw in monotonous shadow monster battles in order to remind you not to stray too far from your mate; and that's it I think.
Ico reminds me of Ian Bogost's Procedural Rhetoric. Ico makes you suffer Ico's world, and you get cutscene rewards. Seeing all the stuff you do culminate into a non-procedural-rhetorikee cutscene of desperate loyalty and love, seeing what Ico is willing to suffer so a girl can have a chance at life, and seeing the final, beautiful ending sequence that is so incredibly touching that I'm not going to write it, is very much the point of this game.
And being fun is also not the point of Braid either. The point of Braid is to give you an excuse to drink wine while wearing a fez while playing a video game, in front of anti-video game wanks, just to show 'em. Braid's pretentious story-telling and 4th dimension puzzle-solving tools and pretty backgrounds and soothing music are ... nice? Yes! That's the word. They are nice. Except for the pretentious, unaffecting story-telling. (Insert Jonathan Blow sex joke)
One of my legs still stands by my Ico review though. Do NOT play Ico or Braid for enjoyment UNLESS you enjoy puzzles. You don't need to play Ico to see how a video game can make an emotional spark. VIDEO GAMES CAN MAKE YOU CRY (and now you know). Braid has a brilliant ending sequence that is half play, half rewind (essentially a cutscene) that makes you think about good, evil, and desire. But hell. Why care? I certainly didn't go to sleep thinking about it, and you probably didn't either.
So yes, those two are good games.
Posts
11 comments:
I think a game can be clever or groundbreaking or emotionally meaningful without being enjoyable. The problem is simply that very few people will get to the good part, because a game needs to be fun for people to want to play it. It's not like a movie, which only takes two hours or so of passive involvement, and can accordingly have a slow start or not much of anything happening throughout. If a game doesn't grab the attention right off the bat and then keep it, people can simply put it down and move on to something else. A truly good game manages to slip the emotional content in during the enjoyable gameplay.
Or maybe I just don't like puzzle games.
On a somewhat related note, have you guys played Indigo Prophecy? It would be interesting to see what y'all thought about that one, with its storytelling as its main selling point.
I haven't played Indigo Prophecy. Do you think it's worth playing?
First off a couple of things:
1. Only play Indigo Prophecy to the halfway mark. It seems like halfway through development the designers had a movie night where they watched The Matrix three times in a row followed by about four or five really crappy direct to video movies. Seriously, despite what some people say, the story turns to shit in the second act.
2. Paul what do you have against drinking wine and wearing a fez when gaming? A man who can't drink and wear silly hats while he games is a man who hates happiness.
Now I can't make any assumptions about Ico because I've only played the first ten minutes of the game. However, I must strongly disagree with you on Braid. I take offense to your assumptions that puzzle games are a lower form of entertainment, and that you shouldn't play them unless you really like them. Deny it all you want, but Portal is essentially a first-person puzzle game. Should people not play an incredible game like Portal if they don't like puzzle games? Disregard the story lines of Braid and Portal and what you actually have are games that present a new way of experiencing a platformer and FPS respectively.
Telling people to not be open to new experiences makes them ignorant of what innovations are out there. It's shit like that that keeps people clamoring for crap like Halo while games that push the medium die at the side of the road.
Having not played Braid extensively, I can only really comment on the Portal part of your comment, but here's what I think. I liked Portal in spite of its essential puzzle-game nature because of GLaDOS. If they took out that element, Portal would have been a boring game, at least to someone who doesn't like puzzle games (i.e. me). Does Braid have something like GLaDOS? If it does, perhaps I'll play it. For the few seconds I watched others playing it, it did not seem to be the case.
On the other hand, I agree with Satch on Indigo Prophecy entirely. The plot looks like it's going to do something interesting, then utterly fails to twist where you would want it to. Then: arbitrary romance between characters who've know each other for a matter of hours and have every reason to hate each other. The reason I thought the game would be interesting to you is that it divorces gameplay from storytelling almost entirely. All of the parts in which you "play" the game, rather than walk characters around and make them converse with one another, are handled in sort of abstract quick-time minigames that have no real correlation to what's happening on the screen. Maybe a worthwhile experience if you're sitting on $10 and haven't exercised Steam's online store recently.
Hey Satch. First, lemme say this: I have nothing against wine and fez. In the right situations (AKA Braid) they are semi-perfect.
Phew.
Now that that's done. Portal!
I almost almost completely agree with Sam on Portal. I thought about Portal a bunch while playing Braid and thinking about Ico - all at the same time (I'm awesome) - and Portal has significant one-up'ems over those games:
1. A lot of Portal requires players to think quickly or die. (Yes, Portal is sooo first-person shooter.) Braid almost never provides this tension o' death - the left shoulder button almost always precludes that tension, as death in Braid doesn't punish you the way you like it. And Ico has the same problem; most puzzles won't harm you. (And I don't consider "not being able to see the end of the game" fun-inducing punishment in Braid and Ico because the story-telling and character development aren't strong enough to make healthy humans care until late in those games; if ever in Braid's case.)
2. The puzzles in Portal that don't punish slow thinkers with death end up providing better pacing to the game as a whole. To compose a game entirely of think-quick-or-die puzzles would make a monotonous game. Even God of War's developers, despite their awesome fighting system, realized that a challenging puzzle and movie and slideshow here and there were well-suited to prevent player-burnout.
3. Portal has brilliant writing. Braid doesn't.
But lemme stop with the numbers, for the point is people who play games strictly for fun should play Portal because Portal is fun. People who play games to learn about what games are capable of should play all three. But Portal offers both. Braid and ICO don't.
This all is my way of saying that although puzzle games can be great fun, a puzzle, in itself, is not designed to make fun.
I feel this paragraph is a good space to remind readers that, to a certain extent, most computer games are puzzle games without being labeled as such. In StarCraft or Battlefield 2 or Civilization IV or KOTOR or others, you have to analyze situations, make hypotheses, test the hypotheses, and see the results. The difference between those games and literal puzzle games - games comprised primarily of puzzling - like Braid and Ico, is that the consequences of your actions feel way greater.
Going over my last comment, I said, "To compose a game entirely of think-quick-or-die puzzles would make a monotonous game."
A developer can always make his or her think-quick-or-die puzzle harder as the player progresses and develops skill and the concept of Flow and yadda yadda yadda. But developers who rely only on Flow put themselves at a disadvantage when competing against the developers who understand good pacing and, well, everything else.
I better stop commenting here. My next comment will seem so obvious. I just know it.
Now let me provide a counter-argument for each of your arguments:
1. You're completely missing the point of Braid on this one. Braid's entertainment has nothing to do with this so called tension of death. I don't even know why you're using that tension as a denotation of what a fun game is. Games don't have to be death a minute to be enjoyable. What Braid does is make death an easy obstacle to overcome so players don't get discouraged. It encourages players to stop for a moment and think things through before they blindly jump in the middle of chaos. Which leads me to your next argument
2. Did you even play Braid? The game has no think quick or you die puzzles. There are a few instances where you might have to rewind time a great deal, but there's no act now or die puzzles. As my previous statement said, Braid actually encourages players to stop and think about what they're doing before they do it. I had absolutely no problems with the pace of this game.
3. Portal's story was quite literal. It was an enclosed story that fit for the world with little room for interpretation. Braid, however is open to interpretation. Taken literally, Braid might be the story of a faltering relationship. Another way to look at Braid is that it's essentially an extended metaphor for the creation of the atomic bomb. You don't see stories in video games that have multiple interpretations often. I think the last time I saw something like that was in Silent Hill 2. The point is Braid plays with narrative structure in a way you don't see often and I for one appreciate seeing that in a video game. It's certainly better than Call of Duty 4's overly simple WAR IS BAD message.
Really what I think this come downs to is you don't like puzzle games. You'll tolerate them if there's some type of combat element to it, or there's a passive-aggressive AI talking to you throughout the game, but remove any of those elements and you won't touch them. I enjoy a good puzzle every now and then, and I thoroughly enjoyed Braid. I think because you're a more action oriented gamer you failed to see what made Braid interesting and didn't have fun with it. Or perhaps you saw what made Braid interesting for other people, but couldn't understand why people thought that was interesting.
Ok I'm done. Feel free to verbally berate me, call me nasty names and invalidate my arguments! I can take it! :D
Paul-- The everyman gamer, an armchair philosopher who nevertheless cares more about whether his games are viscerally stimulating than in any way original. Tracks titles and developers like lesser men track baseball players and leagues.
Satch-- The intellectual and cultural snob, interested in "indie" games on principle and perfectly willing to suffer through a boring game if it is Significant or Deep. Disguises World of Warcraft addiction as "research."
...I'm starting to really enjoy this blog.
ARGUMENT INVALIDATING TIME WOOO!!!
1st off, I will refute Satchamabob's accusation that I did not play Braid:
Ahem - I played Braid. You can check my gamertag (which is "Horsefondler69") for cyberproof.
2nd off, Braid SO DOES have think-quick-or-die puzzles man-friend! The boss battles, for example, require you to quickly make effective plans and skillfully follow those plans, or die of flaming rock. And the final sequence of Braid, in which you must navigate the obstacle quickly enough or die, requires you to quickly analyze each obstacle, plot a course quickly, and skillfully (AKA quickly) follow said course. These provide tension, unlike almost every other puzzle in Braid.
3rd off, I agree that Braid's writing is intellectually stimulating, especially compared to games like Duke Nukem 3D ("Life is like a box of ammo") and Big Mutha Truckers 2. I just wish to point out how unaffecting Braid's writing is. Aristotle may have believed that mastering metaphor was the equivalent of mastering poetry. But really? REALLY? Uh, no.
Braid's writing isn't BAD. It just isn't great. It's not something of which I would say to a friend, "Read this, and fall in love with the English language." I prefer the rewind sequence during Braid's climax over Blow's prose.
4rth off, Call of Duty 4's message isn't as simple as "War bad!" A more accurate summary of CoD 4's message is that war is a horror that must be dealt with until it is made obsolete by the destruction of man.
5th off, my cat went missing last month (or maybe last last month), so everything I say on this blog is divine truth.
6th off, I now wish to fight the accusation that "[Paul] don't like dem puzzle games":
Ahem ... Puzzle games are gay.
7th off, I enjoy more than just games that involve combat or passive-aggressive AI. I also have fun with games that make me care about characters who happen to be dangling above shar-NO! I mean deep characters and story = good. I also derive orgasms from games where there is some sort of semi-healthy competition that does not necessarily involve combat. Oh wait. I just looked up the word "combat" and I realized that "non-violent conflict or opposition" is an optional definition. Welp, in that case Satch, you've got me there.
And for the record, I did not play Big Mutha Truckers 2 :P
MY TURN! :D
Sam said:
"Satch-- The intellectual and cultural snob, interested in "indie" games on principle and perfectly willing to suffer through a boring game if it is Significant or Deep. Disguises World of Warcraft addiction as 'research.'"
I am not an indie game snob. I may be a hippy "games are art" fagmosexual, but I am not an indie game snob. I have been playing the shit out of Plants vs. Zombies lately. If I can still enjoy Popcap games, I'm not a pretentious indie game snob (I also recommend 'Splosion Man which is quite the fun silly game).
Also, Double check my articles. WoW is not my research. My research is examining the use of cutscenes in video games. The WoW articles will be about things I find interesting about the game. ZOMG GET IT RIGHT ASSHOLE!!! >:(
Paul said:
"Braid SO DOES have think-quick-or-die puzzles man-friend! The boss battles, for example, require you to quickly make effective plans and skillfully follow those plans, or die of flaming rock. And the final sequence of Braid, in which you must navigate the obstacle quickly enough or die, requires you to quickly analyze each obstacle, plot a course quickly, and skillfully (AKA quickly) follow said course."
You really thought the boss battle was think quick or die? YOU DROP A FREAKING CHANDELIER ON HIM THEN REPEAT 3 MORE TIMES! His attacks are incredibly easy to dodge too! How can you call that fast thinking? Same thing goes with the ending. There's very little trial and error in either segment to warrant such description.
Paul Also Said:
"I just wish to point out how unaffecting Braid's writing is. Aristotle may have believed that mastering metaphor was the equivalent of mastering poetry. But really? REALLY? Uh, no."
Honestly I thought the writing did a decent job of making a character out of Tim while simultaneously building tension of what the mistake he made was until it was revealed in the ending chapter. I agree it's not the best written thing evar!, but I still see some merit in it.
Paul Then Said:
"A more accurate summary of CoD 4's message is that war is a horror that must be dealt with until it is made obsolete by the destruction of man."
I think that just says "War Bad" in much more words.
Paul Exclaimed:
"my cat went missing last month (or maybe last last month), so everything I say on this blog is divine truth. "
Yeah well my cat died in January so everything I say on this blog is an even diviner truth. Don't make me turn this into Calvinball!
"I also derive orgasms from games where there is some sort of semi-healthy competition that does not necessarily involve combat," Paul ejaculated.
...eww.
Paul finished with a sincere declaration:
"Turns out Satch was totally right about Braid, and I should beg for mercy at his feet. ALL HAIL SATCHAMOBOB OUR LORD AND MASTER!"
Finally we agree on something!
I want to start this comment with sorrow for our dead cats.
(moment of sorrow)
Now that that's done.
Plants Vs. Zombies is awesome! The only thing I don't like about it so far (I'm still in adventure mode, 4-1) is that it's easy. I haven't lost!
Going back to Braid: It's true that the boss battles and the jungle gym climax are easy, but those sequences still impose limited-time-for-thinking on players via the Tim-killing things that, when not respected, results in Tim-killing. Therefore, they be still think-quick-or-die puzzle sequences.
On discussing Call of Duty 4's message on war, I don't think what I wrote as an interpretation of COD4's message can be simplified to "war bad." To assume that the destruction of man is "bad" is an opinion that cannot be validated with evidence. (To consider war bad is something we must do, with proof or not.)
I am also of the opinion that there is nothing unsavory about my orgasiming. I also like Calvin and Hobbes.
And...erm...That's about it.
I am interested, by the way, in what you learn about WoW and cutscene use, Satch. (Especially WoW. WoW's a time investment I won't play unless I'm paid a lot to do so.)
Post a Comment