The creative director at 5th Cell has talked more about the decision to add D-pad controls in Super Scribblenauts, and rest assured it's your fault because you're such a whiner.

Upon playing Super Scribblenauts, it becomes readily apparent why you'd want to use the D-pad to manipulate the game's hero, Maxwell. So why wasn't that an option in the first game? Joystiq asked 5TH Cell Creative Director Jeremiah Slaczka, and were told that the original touch-screen input didn't draw any complaints -- at least not from casual players. "We haven't gotten any emails from casual users," he told us this week, "that are like, 'Hey, I don't like the controls.' It's the hardcore users that are like, 'I play Mario all of the time, and I'm a hardcore gamer, and I'm used to these kinds of controls, and what's what I want."

Though controlling Maxwell directly with the D-pad may seem an obvious choice, it wasn't the first time around. "Maxwell's actually an AI," Slaczka said. "So it wasn't just like throw the D-pad controls in." Maxwell was programmed to respond to the rest of the game's systems rather than just follow button directions, and so it didn't occur to the developers to control him directly. "You'd have to overwrite all of the code that we'd built up for him. So in the second one, we basically did that." The team "stripped out" all of the behaviors and responses that had been coded, and created the option for "one-to-one player control."

Intelligent, reactive behaviors and responses like "keep running two seconds after I want you to stop" and "jump off this cliff" and "run into that thing I just set up and knock it over."

You can be forgiven for mistakenly thinking you wanted D-pad controls because the stylus controls in the first game were shit. It turns out, however, you want them because you're a hardcore gamer and set in your ways and you insist on having everything play like a platformer. That's not how it's supposed to play, but since 5th Cell are such kind spirits, they'll let the baby have his bottle.

It alarms me to think that any developer is making decisions based on whether or not they get e-mails from casual players. Here's the thing about casual gamers:

• They don't fucking e-mail game companies. They're too busy having sex and attending sock-hops and whatever else it is regular people do.
• They don't know any better. That isn't a "hurr casual gamers are stupid" comment, it's just natural. When people who don't play a lot of games do get around to one, they often take the game at face value; that is, whatever's happening, that's how the game is supposed to work. People who don't play a lot of games often are more tolerant of certain issues than people who have played enough to know it can be done better.
• Standard disclaimer: the casual/hardcore divide is dumb and arbitrary anyway.

Besides, who writes e-mails to a developer that start out "Dear sirs, allow me to lodge a formal complaint about the unsatisfactory performance of your product Scribblenauts. But first, a brief history of my gaming accolades. I was born..."

Posted by Will at 5:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

YOUR MARRIAGE LACKS... BLOOD

Posted by Will at 3:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Do I look like the kind of person who is going to daredevil the Goddamn Grandmaster Galaxy

okay maybe a little but I'm not going to anyway

It's a shame to be in spitting distance of totally completing the game only to give up now, but I'm pretty sure I've reached that point where the amount of work you'd have to put in to do something is more of an annoyance than anything you'd get from succeeding. Still, there was a whole hell of a lot of game there, so the very last bit being too much of a challenge isn't much worth complaining about.

Posted by Will at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft has written a book. Another book, apparently. I didn't know he had one before.

Is there anything Ashcraft writes about that doesn't boil down to HEY GUYS I'M IN JAPAN, HEY, HEY GUESS WHERE I AM

GUESS

(IT'S JAPAN)

Even his last book was "Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers," a title that tries to first lure you into thinking it's a general discussion of arcade history and then WOAH OOPS DID I SAY JAPAN?? CAUSE THAT'S WHERE I AM

LIKE ALL THE TIME

I learn from the book's Amazon page that he also writes a regular column called "Japanese Schoolgirl Watch," which mutates the whole thing from sad to creepy.

I'm pretty sure there have been Americans in Japan before. In fact, I suspect there might be some, other than Brian Ashcraft, right now. Japanese culture and media has saturated the Internet, why do we (or at least Kotaku) still have this one guy acting like he's a lone, deeply-embedded foreign correspondent who is our only link to strange and novel tales of this exotic and unheard of land? More importantly, even if he was, he feeds a pathetic fetishism on this side of That Other Pond among geeks who believe that Japan is an unspoiled holy land, and that's reason enough to lay off.

Posted by Will at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

I mean I dunno

Nintendo started out about as poorly as they have since Cammie came out to shriek at Carrot Top about her kids, and it's a shame it was a new Zelda that was falling on its face. It could've been bad calibration or interference, but that wasn't the way to start things off. Thankfully, it was entirely forgotten as Nintendo proceeded to pull out one game after another that fanboys can cream themselves over. It almost seems calculated as a response to the hardcore crowd -- "okay stop whining here's all the crap you were asking for."

I've never been a big Kirby guy, but I have to admit it looked nice. And I'm glad to see DKC make a return in a traditional 2D form, though somehow the cleaner, brighter look wasn't as appealing as the original kind of grungy look brought on by the SNES palette limitations. Obviously, the big announcement was the 3DS, though honestly the most appealing element of it wasn't the 3D (which I can't see anyway) or even the surprising graphical quality (though it was certainly far better than I imagined Nintendo would bother with) -- the most interesting part was the massive crop of titles already announced as in production for the little bastard. Kid Icarus, okay, fine. Hey, a remake of Star Fox 64, neat. ..A new Pilotwings? Splinter Cell? Metal Gear Solid? Fucking Street Fighter IV?

I mean, Christ.

I'll admit something: Sony's conference is actually still going as I write this. This is primarily because it is boring as shit. Well, boring when it isn't being horribly embarrassing -- the Sony plants whooping at every Goddamn thing. The childish potshots at Microsoft (one or two is funny, beyond that you're just an asshole). The insistence that Sony is about games followed by a ten minute routine that sounded like the Man Show for gamers followed by a commercial followed by another commercial, none of which actually involve games in any meaningful way. I ended up muting it on and off because I simply couldn't stand to listen to it anymore, and whenever I'd unmute it would still be awful or dull. The Dead Space 2 footage we saw yesterday. Little Big Planet minigame maker. Playstation Plus (haha okay). It was saying something that at one point, people watching the Sony keynote online were distracted by news that Ocarina of Time was being ported to the 3DS.

I think the Move actually has the potential to be a nicer controller than the Kinect -- it has buttons, and it seems to follow movements cleaner than what was shown of Microsoft's device. Unfortunately, they didn't pick very interesting games to show it off (rich executives bantering about their golf game, wonderful) and ultimately I'm still left with the question of why I would choose to play a game with the thing.

Oh. It's over now. I guess Steam and Twisted Metal were the big announcements. ..Okay.

Boy I'm sure glad GT5 got delayed to November so they could put in some Goddamn 3D no one is ever going to use

Posted by Will at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think Microsoft's conference was worse than I was expecting. There was almost nothing shown that I care in the least about -- the Kinect, Kenict, Kenwhatever the fuck ruled the majority of the show, and it had nothing but casual games and some bizarre "leer at a car" mode for Forza. Even Harmonix couldn't pull something exciting out of it, and the Star Wars game looked like those bits in Disney World where kids can act in front of a green screen (the perils of having no obvious means of moving your character around using Kinect, you have to make a Goddamn on-rails lightsaber game).

More bothersome than the library, though, was the massive amount of delay there seemed to be between the player's actions and what appeared on screen. Given it was piping through to the auditorium screens, I'm not sure if that was lag induced by video delay or something inherent to the device itself. Maybe a bit of both, but not terribly encouraging.

In the end, Kinect is going straight for the Wii market and nothing more -- not surprising, but a disappointment to people who thought Microsoft might do more with motion control than translating spastic waggling to action.

The core gamer material was frontloaded, with the unfortunate side effect that I had already forgotten I saw most of it by the time the show finished. Halo looked like Halo, Gears looked like Gears. But who knew Kojima would figure out a way for me to get interested in a new Metal Gear. Every time I think I'm out...

Posted by Will at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

E3's already off to a great start and it hasn't actually started yet.

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I've been away for a while due to Circumstances and I'll be back soon. In the meantime, while everyone is (rightfully) getting sad about Dennis Hopper's death and remembering the terrible Super Mario Bros. movie in his honor, let's also not forget he had a starring role directly in a video game:

Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. Yes that was the full title.

Posted by Will at 7:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

...all that remains is to determine whether it or FF8 is the worst post-NES game in the series. I have to say post-NES because otherwise people get all huffy about FF2.

FF8's problem was that it was a poor story told badly with unlikable characters. FF13's problem is that it is almost no story at all -- people walk a lot and every once in a while something completely arbitrary happens to prod the cast along to the next plot point. The characters range from bland to obnoxious, but it's not simply their design that makes them bad. It's that this withered husk of a story gives them nothing to do, and yet they're still expected to stop every five steps and talk about it anyway.

What is FF13's story, anyway? It's certainly nothing that evolves naturally out of a logical sequence of events. Deus ex machina usually rears its head at some point in a Final Fantasy story, but here it's made the core underpinning to the entire plot. Some random people get branded by the Fal'Cie. This branding is supposed to indicate that those so marked have a job to do, but none of them are given an idea what the job is, apparently because Fal'Cie are not sticklers for efficiency. The cast wanders around for nigh on 20 hours of game time, stopping every once in a while only to wonder aloud "Gee, what do you think we're supposed to do," until the Space Pope (sadly not my naming, but it fits too well not to use it) literally tells them what to do.

It's at this point the cast finds their way to the lower world of Pulse, and I've tried on multiple occasions to figure out why. An entire chapter is spent on the planet and absolutely nothing of value is accomplished. There's briefly some talk of finding a town, but that plan dies quickly. After even more pointless wandering around (even the in-game story summary starts this chapter with the title "A Fruitless Search"), the Space Pope sends them back home. What in God's name was the point of that? And if Space Pope has so much free time to be popping back and forth between worlds and leaving behind ships for my party to get around in, surely he can find some faster way to achieve his own ends without my help.

The only hint of any attempt at complexity or subtext in the game's story is in the idea that the people of Cocoon are irrationally afraid of Pulse because they've been led to believe so by the government. If I were inclined to give the writers any credit, I could say this is meant to be a terrorism parallel. But whether intended or not, by the end of the game the message is so blatantly and repeatedly hammered to the ground that it's hardly worth noting anymore. That only leaves us the other major lesson, which is that Australians are an earthy, tribal people unaccustomed to life in a world with indoor plumbing.

Of course, this is all story, and a satisfying plot in a Final Fantasy should be considered more of a pleasant surprise than an expected outcome. But the game also fails elsewhere, and more catastrophically. I've played plenty of RPGs with terrible stories, or no stories, that were still worthwhile for the world they created. FF13 doesn't have a world. It has only a long series of tunnels and hallways passing by pretty scenery, like the game was not so much constructed as it was burrowed by moles through some other, better game we never get to play. FF13 features an intriguing and entertaining new battle system, but even it can't sustain the pure, unrelenting grind of doing nothing but pushing forward and getting into fights for 45 hours. That's the irony -- by leaving out the traditional leveling system they sought to remove the XP grind that has been a common complaint of jRPGs, but somehow in the process they turned the entire game into one long grind. Final Fantasy XIII is an absolute chore.

Is it worse than FF8? Hell, after ten years I don't know that I could give a detailed enough comparison to know. I do know that every once in a while, I consider giving 8 another try just to see if my opinion's changed after all this time. I find it difficult to see myself going back to FF13 after any length of time, because there's nothing to go back to.

Posted by Will at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I swear to God this game has so much walking forward down meandering, branchless pathways that I'd kill for a snowboarding minigame by this point. I'd go in for a pick-up game of Blitzball just for some damn variety.

There was going to be a post of actual substance here earlier but I put it off to play FFXIII HA HA HOW SILLY OF ME

PS SHUT THE FUCK UP VANILLE

Posted by Will at 5:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)