Linkout (15/11/09)
November 15th, 2009
Link Out: My attempt at a monthly collection of recommended readings from around the interwebs
Thank you for your patience over this past week as I’ve been rounding out my last major university assignment (ever!). Fortunately, I’ve got no exams so I’m basically free for a week until I start my 4 week long TESOL course which’ll likely continue the disrupted flow of new posts leading into Christmas. *sigh* I have plenty to write, but little time to apply myself, so we’ll see how this next week fairs.
As tradition would have it, it’s been a long time between links (ZING!), so I’d like fix that for now:
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Movie Trailer
Finally we get to see how the Prince of Persia movie is shaping up, and as the trailer clearly showcases it looks fairly promising. As another Hollywood blockbuster, that is, but for the same reasons I criticized the Sands of Time game, it looks like the movie will be another western parade though a superficial interpretation of the Middle East. Yay!
Otherwise, the film appears to draw most of its influence from The Two Thrones, things could be worse I suppose.
Forums – To Read, or Not To Read – Too Much Imagination
In keeping with the Prince of Persia theme, the following post is taken from the blog of Ben Mattes who you might know from his role as a producer on the later Prince of Persia games. His post, primarily regarding community forums, shares some interesting insight into the mindset of developers towards the enthusiast community.
I really wish there was greater interaction between the two parties as the analysis here and elsewhere around the interwebs is basically the type of well thought out feedback from concentrated play testing that most companies would pay money for. They can get it for free from us! Furthermore, considering the effort that some of us put into our writing, I think that most enthusiast writers (along this vein) would be profoundly motivated by any engagement with developers. I know that some of the people from Sony Bend have read my articles on Syphon Filter, which makes my heart skip a beat. Although, I’ll admit, I was considerably less enthusiastic about PopCap’s response. Still, any interaction is likely to have a positive effect.
I’m guilty of throwing Eurogamer a few too many links in this segment, but with such well articulated analysis and opinions (Simon Parkin’s powerful review of Modern Warfare 2 is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read all year) it’s difficult not to be enthused. The above video chronicles the rise of the website from humble beginnings to it’s current state. The multiplatform, Australian equivalents such as PALGN will have to grow some serious editorial balls before they can attempt to contend with the likes of Eurogamer.
COLUMN: Battle Klaxon: The People Power of Valkyria Chronicles – GSW
Battle Klaxon is my favourite new column over at GameSetWatch. Quintin Smith, who incidentally also works for Eurogamer, covers niche gems neglected by the mainstream games press, describing what made them so special for the people who played them. Valkyria Chronicles is an ideal choice for the column, I’ve played a bit of this Fire-Emblem-meets-Final-Fantasy-Tactics-SRPG-hybrid, but am yet to make enough headway to make any qualitative observations. What I can say though is that I’m an ardent, SRPG purist who adores both of the two previously mentioned titles, so Valkyria Chronicles will probably come to sit in the middle of those two titles. Almost every blog in my feed reader is now centred around retro and/or niche titles, so Battle Klaxon is a welcomed addition to the diet…
Metal Gear – MSX and NES Comparison – Hardcore Gaming101
…as is Hardcore Gaming 101. Yes, this site is not new to me, I’ve been reading them for years, and yes I’ve known about their new blog since it had launched. For some unfathomable reason though I forgot to subscribe to the site the first time round back in July/August and it flew off my radar. Thankfully I spent a few hours whoring out the backlog recently and have left suitably impressed. I chose the above, Metal Gear article as my favourite post on the site so far as it reflects the exhaustive dedication that Kurt Kulata and his crew of contributors put into their work. Mega effort, well done folks. Kurt was also recently interviewed on the first episode of the Racketboy podcast, props to those guys too.
I’ve kind of strayed off the path myself when it comes to reading the Brainy Gamer blog, simply because my tastes have adjusted to more analysis/criticism-heavy reading, rather than Michael’s handful of general commentaries (great stuff, naturally, but very general, lacks explanation and example). With that said though, Michael is very good at summarising community consensus. His article reflects on his personal response to the mainstream rollercoaster of game release. Rather than playing the latest AAA blockbuster on the scene, Michael is finding that he prefers the smaller, older and perhaps even neglected titles of the industry. I can definitely sympathize with his feelings here. I stopped trying to chase the mainstream rat race years ago and it’s been wonderful because I save money and get to blaze my own path of writing, rather than bucking to popular trends. This is a superbly written post which intersects with the ethos of the site, so do take a read.
The Monthly Grind: Final Thoughts on Demon’s Souls – The Grind
Considering it’s niche appeal, Demon’s Souls has been receiving a great deal of coverage from blogs and the enthusiast outlets. I’ve been following the conversations myself and I think Kat Bailey is the furthest ahead of the curve on her analysis of the title. In concluding on her one month play through of Demon’s Souls she draws on her analysis and discussions with others to explicate on the different viewpoints regarding the title—the split being that players find it either unrelenting in difficulty or a supremely rewarding experience—she backs the latter and uses her deconstruction of both perspectives to persuasively argue in favour of the title. It’s clear that much consideration has been put into dissecting the different interpretations and to this end I’m very impressed. The Mt. Fuji anecdote and bad Thai food metaphor (gosh, so true) are expertly handled and make the article personal and therefore meaningful. This is a good article to highlight the strengths of the medium.
Extra Links
A First Look At Two of The PS3’s Newer, Funnier Ads
Proof that Sony have some of the best marketers in the world. ^_^
The last few months of delicious links
Metroid Prime 3: Quarterly Diaries #11
November 8th, 2009
Areas Covered: Landing Site Alpha (Elysia), Research Facility (revisited)
Discussion Points: No map prompt to Elysia!, awesome Spider ball and zipline sequences, Steam Lord side quest, rewarding player curiosity, hazard suit, intents of Metroid Hatcher battle
Landing Site Alpha (Elysia)
So where to now exactly? After taking out Gandrayda, acquiring the Grapple Voltage and circling back to the ship, where are we suppose to go next? The map keeps directing me back to a room we’d previously passed, Craneyard, but the centre of the room is closed off by glass, with a lone spider ball track wrapping around the ceiling into the glassed off exterior. Clearly that’s where we need to go which means that we first need to the spider ball, but where to get it? Every time I loaded my save the map hints would prompt me towards the Craneyard room and to no avail could I find the spider ball there, after all it’s just a small room—so I stopped playing for a week and in the meantime finished Eternal Darkness instead.
After my frustration simmered, I referred to the same IGN guide that I’m pinching all of the screen grabs from and realized that you’re meant to go back to a random, undiscovered point on Elysia. Oh…
If you stop off at Landing A on Elysia you can zipline straight on in to the next point with little backtracking in between. This is the perhaps the 3rd or 4th time now that Sky Town has shed its own skin to accommodate the retreading of old ground.
You’ll cross through Zipline Station Alpha on the way to your destination, but we’ll hold out on any discussion for now.
In the next area you’ll use the grapple beam to launch a gear into the air and then, whilst spinning, shoot with an ice missile to launch it back into place. It’s kind of bizarre, semi-Matrix even, but a neat use of the grapple beam all the same. You’ll be rewarded with the spider ball for your efforts. Take note of the stone Chozo grasping the power-up in his hands, he’s a motif from prior games.
As is the case with all weapon upgrades, the player can only exit the room after demonstrating use of the latest upgrade. This opens up a series of external spider ball tracks, presenting fantastic views from underneath the floating spire. The outer area has been severely damaged and worker drones are busily whizzing around the exterior doing their best to mend the broken track. The damage has resulted in crevices which leak fire, this sets up the premise for the player to practice dropping and jumping along the track to avoid said leaks of fire. Once you’ve made your way underneath the structure, the boost ball will help you on the upwards ascent back to the exit. This small area familiarizes the player with the entire repertoire of techniques available when in the spider ball mode. It’s also perhaps one of the most memorable sequences in the game thus far, a juxtaposition of fear and tranquility is created by the tense mid-air suspension and gorgeously sceneric views.
Equally awe-inspiring are the views along the spider track on the tread back to your ship. The camera work here takes full advantage of the surrounding views, capturing wide angles of the windy track in the foreground and the other spires, the rest of the track and the stunning clouds in the background. The versatility of the track design here pushes the boundaries further than in prior games. It’s much more windy with a greater number of intersecting moments for the player to react rather than just follow the track. The same can be said for the majority of other spider ball sections in Metroid Prime 3 too.
When you arrive back at Junction (room title) you can either go left or right—being a junction and all. Now after all those lovely vistas you’ve probably forgotten your way back to the ship, I know I had to stop and think, fortunately both ways are well accommodated. Going right and morph-balling underneath the rubble will put you on course to return to the ship. Accidentally going left will conclude the Steam Lord sub-plot from our first romp through this area, as well as scoring you another energy cell. That is, instead of being punished for making a wrong turn, you’re rewarded for accidentally diverging off course….or exploration even, whatever you wish to call it.
The side quest, of sorts, wraps back into the arena where you took on the Security Drone, neatly incorporating all of your new weapon upgrades too. The grapple voltage is used to activate a lift and overload some fans while the X-ray visor is used in the Steam Lord battle once he turns invisible. Genuis. Again, old material brought back to life through re-application of tools, plus you’re saved from returning here in a fetch quest later on.
Spider ball in tow we can now head back to the Craneyard and zip our way over that glass wall!
Research Facility (revisited)
If you cheapen out and use the transit trains to shortcut your way to the Craneyard rather than take the longer route, you’ll miss out on a number opportunities to nab yourself some extra missile upgrades by using the spider ball on the areas discussed in the last article. Again, divergent paths and supplementary exploration are accommodated for, but in a way which doesn’t impede on the experience of players taking the shorter course. I wonder if this design works for the entire game, whereby all upgrades can be picked up on a single play through just by straying off the conventional path every time you’re presented with a crossroads. My player percentage is quite high—and I’ve accidentally taken the wrong path a several times already—so it seems quite possible.
Over the glass and through a few tunnels shielded from the rain and you’ll be presented with a boost ball puzzle which requires you to use two spinners to rotate the sides of a wall to form a connected track. You can actually build the track to either end at the left or the right. Building to the right will reward you with another missile upgrade. Building to the left will take you to the hazard suit. There’s that player divergence thing again.
Funnily enough the hazard suit isn’t a new suit per say (there appear to be no new suits in MP3), instead Samus’ shoulder pads are bolstered in size, giving her the same cloak that shields the space pirates from the acid rain. When you’re in the rain your suit will glow a transparent orange, it’s certainly a cool look. The acid rain too is neat, you’ll notice that if you look towards the sky the droplets of rain splash black on your visor. After you’ve acquired the suit, some pirates will smash the windows allowing you to trawl around in the rain. Here we see the player again familiarized with the latest upgrade before they proceed. I really should write a rule book on these design tricks.
Now that we’ve got the suit we can swing on around to the other side of Metroid Processing. Just through this area is a surprise boss encounter with a Metroid Hatcher. Think of it like a floating octopus. You attack its tentacles and mouth then, whilst stunned, rip them off one at a time. I rather enjoyed this confrontation, partly because I wasn’t expecting it, but predominately because it was treated as a minor boss encounter and therefore didn’t need to superfluously pile on layers of needless complexity. All you do is use your beam and the grapple, very simple and also very gratifying too. It very much plays on the visceral feel of the grapple.
I think the battle was surprising because it seemingly interrupted a puzzle sequence, yet in the end the battle allows the next part in the sequence to be completed. In a way, the hatcher is a trigger for the switch over to the action-orientated half of the homeworld section. We now have all we need to storm the command center, so the hatcher battle, with the tugging of the grapple, the alternating levels of resistance from the tentacles and the vicious attacks (the tentacle spin covers a large distance of the playing field and can therefore be tough to avoid), kick-start the shift in pacing.
In regards to the puzzle, I like the way Retro use verticality in propelling to morphball above ground into the overhanging morphball slots. Very cool.
The next room links to another transit station which loops back around into the second floor of the Command Center, effectively saving he player piles of backtracking. We can see that as with the cannons in Elysia, transit stations are used to alleviate on backtracking and link separated areas.
Additional Readings
5 Ways Nintendo Can Bring Metroid Back to 2D – Racketboy
Metroid Prime 3: Quarterly Diaries #10
November 6th, 2009
Areas Covered: Landing Site Alpha
Discussion Points: Transition from stealth to mild combat, Scrapvault room, Metroid Processing room, Gandrayda battle, Transit Station
Landing Site Alpha (Research Facility)
The Pirate Homeworld begins very quietly and then slowly becomes more action intensive as the player mines further into the pirate’s base. As we know from last time the first sequence of gameplay, Landing Site Bravo, was primarily a stealth section and only contained a few short lapses of combat. Only a handful of space pirates populate the facility, so rather than facilitate another stealth sequence, the mood is simply quiet. Combat is still fairly lite, yet if the player trips any of the security lasers, reinforcements come rolling in. The lasers become visible with the X-ray visor, so I guess the area is designed as a tutorial, but considering you most likely won’t even flick to the visor and just step right on though (like me!) it’s not very effective. Metroids too populate the area, but they don’t elevate the mood in the same way the pirates do. (Pirate confrontations always feel like a big deal with the intrusive crescendo of the dissonant pirate’s theme, and in the case of the homeworld, the alarm system which blurs red into the already bloodshot environment).
This area, besides junction at the Metroid Processing room, is linear so I’m just going to talk about the individual rooms for this post.
The first major room of this area, Scrapvault, feels rather jarring due to the floors of architecture piled on top of each other. The centre of this room is insufficient in size, strangled and quartered off by the walkway into the environment and the levels of platforms looming over the space. It’s a room which emphasises the constricting nature of the homeworld. Space pirates will later trap you into this area, taking advantage of the room’s layout to bind you in the one spot. The ensuing battle therefore has a good deal of tension as the pirates can easily get in your face. As with the visual presentation of this area, the layout of the environments present themselves as malformed and thereby ugly and uncomfortable to play in.The pieces, both visual and architectural very much work in unison to instill a sense of confinement onto the player.
The next major room, Metroid Processing, a circular room housing several caged Metroids, puts the player in a similar predicament to that of the Metroid labs on Elysia. The player is forced to remove another energy cell and hence free the caged Metroids on themselves. The environmental artist who designed this room posted some commentaries on Conceptart.org, here’s what he had to say:
“This room was a lot of fun too. I always considered the Metroids themselves to be one of the most interesting aspects of the series, and easily one of the most original creatures in gaming. I wanted this room to feel something like a Metroid museum of sorts. I thought about the ways the pirates would test and analyze the Metroids, and different experiments they would put them through. Like the statuary room in Bryyo, I wrote many notes to correspond with some of the different things I put into the room. Many of these made it into the game actually, although they had to be edited due to text size restrictions. I made the Metroid eggs specific for this room. I watched the intro to Super Metroid again, and noticed that the fluid inside the egg dries almost instantly when exposed to the air. I created some “hatched” eggs similar to this, with the embryonic fluids hardened immediately in their dripping state. I’ll include the notes I made as well, for those interested in the fiction I created personally for the room.
When I first started working on this room, I envisioned all different types of Metroids being housed here, as if this was the main research facility where all different variations of the creature were brought and studied. Due to a number of reasons, many of these variations did not make it into the final game, but some of the write-ups mention them.”
The room acts as a junction, but acid rain cuts off complete access to the room on the right-hand side, so we’ll come back to that on our revisiting of this environment. The room on the left will take us to the federation marine who sent out the distress signal.
Samus finds the marine stranded, pinned down by space pirates. After clearing away the pirate vermin, the duo work together to activate the elevator when the marine transforms into Gandrayda that mighty-morphing bounty hunter dead jealous of Samus, she’s corrupted just like the other bounty hunters; a battle ensues.
Gandrayda uses her shape-shifting abilities to morph herself into a series of familiar enemies and bosses. In this regard the battle is a mash-up of previous confrontations. In her normal and Samus states Gandrayda’s movement patterns are akin Dark Samus’ in the duel at the end of Metroid Prime 2. Can’t remember? What I mean is she glides around the environment just quick enough to make her a bothersome target. Particularly as the battle nears its close, she can become just flat out annoying.
The premise leading into the battle, where Gandrayda takes the form of a marine and proceeds to trick Samus, was a cool, justly executed premise, I thought.
The spoils of victory for this round is the Grapple Voltage, another take on the grapple beam which drains and charges various shield generators. It’s very much another bit-part upgrade, but useful nonetheless.
If you follow the trail along you come to a transit station with a giant cargo train which Samus can ride all the way back to the start of this area. I quite liked the trains as they look very industrious and link the environments well together. The train sends you right around to a room just nearby to where we landed the ship.
Additional Readings
Food For Thought: Metroid Prime 2 And Other M – Siliconera
Welcome to Daniel Primed, my self-titled games analysis blog and the online supplement to Adventures in Games Analysis.
Reader Emails | RSS / Email Feed
Game Design Companion: A Critical Analysis of Wario Land 4 - $7.99
Level Design: Processes and Experiences
Speed Boost: The Hidden Secrets Behind Arcade Racing Design - $5.99
Adventures in Games Analysis: Volume I - $5.99
