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Robot Math Attack!

Last week I took a wonderful 5-day professional education course at MIT titled "Game Development for Software Engineers". After years of playing (and criticizing) video games, I figured it was finally time to get off the bench and see exactly how tough this game development stuff really is. For a while now I've been dabbling with the Unity Game Engine for data visualization and to learn some basic game programming, and the purpose of this course was to teach the kinds of agile software development, rapid prototyping, and playtesting practices that make it possible to develop complex game systems that interact with even more complex users.

What I've Been Playing

Summers here in New England are a frantic time, wherein we attempt to compress 12 months of outdoor fun into 3  months of nice weather. (And of course by "nice" I mean, "oscillating between frigid, torrential rain and humid, 100+ degree heat".) I've never been to Old England, but I can only assume the weather there resembles that of a post-apocalyptic hellscape, because anything less and the British colonials never would have chosen to stay on this side of the Atlantic.

Amidst all the running, hiking, traveling, camping, drinking, working, and occasional parenting, I've hardly had any time to write about video games. Nevertheless, I did manage to play video games, because for some mysterious reason there's always enough time for that. Here are a few of my favorites from this summer. You'll notice most of them are PC games—summer console releases are sparse even when these systems aren't gasping their last breaths, so unless you're interested in playing an atrocity like Smurfs 2, let's hope you dropped some cash on the Steam summer sale.

Let's Spend $100 on Kickstarter! (Part II)

Earlier this month, I decided that if I wanted to keep calling myself a "fan of indie games", it was finally time to join the cause and throw some money down on Kickstarter. Of the 100 bucks I promised to cough up, half went to the four projects I talked about in my last post. In case you're curious how they're doing, two got funded (Stonehearth and A.N.N.E), one is looking fairly troubled with about $40K and six days left to go (Clandestine: Anomaly) and one was outright cancelled (Ray's the Dead), though it sounds like the campaign was terminated because the devs struck a deal with a publisher.

But enough about the past... I've still got a crisp General Grant in my pocket, which left unoccupied is liable to be spent on exotic skin creams to deal with these terrible crows' feet I'm developing. (I'm kidding, of course—there's really no practical way to use paper money to buy anything on the World Wide Web.)

Anyway, here are the rest of the games I chose to fund...

Let's Spend $100 on Kickstarter! (Part I)

I'm sure nearly all of you have heard of the crowd-funding site Kickstarter, but since my grandmother reads this blog, please bear with me for a moment.

Dear G-Dawg: (yes, we actually call my grandmother "G-Dawg")

Kickstarter is an amazing website where individuals can directly fund an exciting new idea, instead of sitting around on their asses hoping someday a corporation or some mad billionaire decides it will be profitable enough. Think of it as a way of distributing a small amount of risk to a bunch of people, which means that there's actually still a way to create something in this shitty economy, even without the intervention of venture capitalists or big-market producers. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than pining for a sequel to your favorite cult classic that never ends up getting made.

Also, sorry I never call. Love, Your Grandson.

Unfortunately, despite Kickstarter's massive potential for nurturing innovation, for the most part I've been too lazy, cheap, or cowardly to fund any projects. (I did fund the Double Fine Adventure—recently announced as "Broken Age"—though one could hardly consider that a bold business venture.) Today, I finally decided to man up, vowing to find $100 of worthy video game projects to fund. Here's what I came up with.

Aftermath, Part II

Earlier this month, we celebrated what turned out to be the most tragic Patriot's Day in the history of the Commonwealth (except for, perhaps, the the original one). Then, eleven days ago, my quiet street here in Watertown was transformed into the closest thing I'd ever experienced to a war zone. By this past weekend, the last of the reporters had finally left my neighborhood, leaving me only a lawn full of cigarette butts and a faint, lingering aroma of broken dreams to remember them by.

Today, thanks to my wholly anemic capacity for emotional memory, I can barely remember what it felt like to huddle with my children on the floor of my own home, while about 100 feet away scores of police opened fire on violent mass murderer. So, before I can forget anything else, I thought it would be a good opportunity to have one more discussion about these events, with the intent of returning thereafter to the serious business of playing and writing about video games.

Manhunt for the Boston Marathon Bomber: What to Do When You Suddenly Find Yourself in an Action Movie

When two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon on Monday—killing 3 people and severely injuring more than 100 others—my first thought was a fairly obvious one: "Wow... that could have been us." We've been down to watch the Marathon many times, and it was simply a matter of chance that instead of navigating the crowds in Copley Square, we had chosen to spend this Patriot's Day kicking around at home in Watertown. Had circumstances been just a little bit different, it could easily have been my family and I caught in that blast.

Except, I don't think deep down I really believed that. Even though a major terrorist attack had just happened in my city, my family and friends all turned out to be okay, and somehow I wasn't surprised. After all, I'm the main character in this story, and in my experience these sorts of things happen to other people.

I'm not sure this kind of narcissistic detachment from reality is particularly healthy, but I bet it's not all that atypical either, and I'm sure the massive amount of time I've spent playing video games in my lifetime has been a factor. Like television and movies, games reinforce our human tendency to distill stories from the randomness and chaos of the universe. We hone our sense of what will and won't happen to a protagonist, which side characters are and aren't expendable, and eventually the whole world appears as a patchwork of overused tropes and predictable plot points.

Just your typical mid-day armored surveillance.
No big deal.

So inertial was my concept of my own narrative, that when my wife woke me up at 3:00 AM yesterday to tell me that there had been a shootout and explosions here in Watertown, I don't think I was all that concerned. Even when we were informed that we were prisoners in our own homes, even as we drew our shades, locked our doors and windows, and retreated to the second floor of our house, I don't think I felt any real sense of danger. Soon they would catch "Suspect #2", the lockdown would be lifted, and life would return to normal.

Review: BioShock Infinite (Xbox 360)

BioShock Infinite does what the BioShock series does best, weaving a thrilling narrative into a rich and captivating world.

Like any medium for artistic expression, video games can allow us to experience fantastic new worlds that entertain and inspire us. Unlike most other mediums, though, games also allow us to interact with those worlds. This characteristic begets an enormous challenge when creating a video game; while a novel or a film has to create a world that is convincing when experienced through the controlled environment of the page or the screen, a video game has to create one that is convincing when you walk around inside of it and poke things, often in an effort to wreck the joint.

In the pantheon of video games, one title stands above all others in terms of creating a truly fascinating and compelling world: the original BioShock. The undersea city of Rapture is one of the most vivid locations I've ever visited in a game, and while some worlds have been bigger or more detailed or rendered with more polygons, none have ever felt as real. In fact, the place that comes the closest is the floating city of Columbia, the setting of the new BioShock Infinite.

Review: Gears of War: Judgment (Xbox 360)

Though a little on the lean side in terms of content, Gears of War: Judgment is pretty good... provided you like third-person Halo games.

Shooters are the video-game equivalent of jazz music. To some people they seem like so much chaos and noise, and many have trouble discerning the subtleties that distinguish one work from another. Through practiced appreciation, though, the connoisseur learns to identify tightly woven patterns of structure and balance, a framework that allows seemingly minor creative changes to have a massive impact on the mood and feel of the piece. This dichotomy of chaos and order is why two games like Halo and Call of Duty can seem like interchangeable murder simulators to the layperson, whilst the expert experiences them as differently as one would a Thai massage and a colonoscopy.

The narrow chasms that differentiate shooters are especially relevant when we consider franchises and sequels. For example, the Gears of War series sets itself apart with combat that is far more deliberate and strategic than that of "twitchier" shooters like Call of Duty, while still achieving the kind of high-octane arcade flair not present in tactical shooters like Rainbow Six. However, when designing a new entry for an established franchise, developers face a dilemma: how can the game evolve, without changing so much that it becomes an entirely different kind of shooter?

PAX East 2013: Day Three

8:09 AM - Day three. Last year the third day fell on Easter, while this year we have the Game Developers Conference (GDC) starting tomorrow. We'll see which one is better at thinning the crowd; I'm guessing the latter. Either way, I hope it doesn't have a negative impact on getting to see the games I'm interested in today.

8:46 PM - It's a good thing Boston is an amoral godless Hellscape, because it means there's no traffic this fine Sunday morning and parking is a snap. The methadone clinic is still jumpin', though.

Day three. Watch out for falling ice.

PAX East 2013: Day Two

8:23 AM - Thanks to help from my wife and my mom, I'm less encumbered by child care responsibilities this morning. However, I am encumbered by getting only four hours of sleep, so I still get a later start than I intended. Still, it looks like I'm going to make it to the 10:00 panel on JRPGs.

8:54 AM - On the Common, I walk past a church group feeding a line of bundled, freezing homeless people, which makes me feel just great about how I'm planning to contribute to society with my time today. Although, it's not like these games will play themselves.

Round two. Fight!

PAX East 2013: Day One

8:42 AM - This time last PAX, I was standing in the bowels of the Boston Convention Center waiting in a gigantic line full of bizarre people for no discernible reason. This time around, parental duties required that I drop my two beautiful, screaming children off at day care before I could embark on the pilgrimage to PAX East 2013. Heading out now.

10:54 AM - Two hours, two buses, one delayed subway train, and a brisk walk later, I made it to PAX. The expo floor is in full swing. I'd love to head straight to the indie games, but there's a game journalism panel I'd like to check out, so I trek the half mile down the BCEC to the Sphinx theater.

12:51 PM - The independent games journalism panel was decent, though largely the message could have been conveyed just as well by the immortal words of Fleetwood Mac: "Go Your Own Way". HipHopGamer was definitely a highlight of the talk, though. Now I'm finally down on the expo floor checking out the indie games.

PAX East's expo floor. If it looks overwhelming, that's because it is.

PAX East 2013 Starts Tomorrow!

I can't believe that nearly a year has passed since I abandoned my family for the Easter holiday to attend my first gaming expo, PAX East 2012. This time the good folks at Penny Arcade have taken the less blasphemous approach of not attempting to be "bigger than Jesus", which means that although I'll have a tougher time dodging the annual family ham-and-guilt session next week, the good news is that PAX East 2013 starts tomorrow!

If you've ever been to a Penny Arcade Expo before, you know what a great experience it is. Tomorrow morning I'm heading over to the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center for three intense days of impressive game demonstrations, informative and entertaining panels, and the friendliest bunch of weirdos you've ever met. I'll be live blogging all day every day, so keep coming back to the site to see what's going on at PAX!

You can check out the schedule of events for PAX East 2013 here. If you think there's something I should check out, note it in the comments, hit me up on Facebook, or send me a message on Twitter!

Review: DmC: Devil May Cry (Xbox 360)

Ninja Theory's inspired reboot doesn't just revive Capcom's aging hack-and-slash franchise, it transforms it.

In 1893, after writing twenty-four short stories and two books chronicling the life and times of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned the final chapter on the world's greatest fictional detective. However, after enduring ten years of hate mail from irate Victorian-era Sherlock fanboys, Doyle revived his legendary character in what may have been the first act of retconning in modern literary fiction.

In the 120 years since, we've witnessed every perversion a fiction series possibly can endure: sequel upon sequel, retcons, reboots, remixes, parallel timelines, extra-canon works, and the occasional musical episode. Sometimes these machinations are blatant cash-grabs, attempts to wring a few extra dollars out of an aging franchise. Other times they're more like an intervention, a frantic attempt to salvage a treasured intellectual property that's careening horribly off-course. Every once in a while though, they're a truly visionary contribution, one that unlocks potential in the source material you never suspected was there.

DmC: Devil May Cry—Ninja Theory's reboot of Capcom's Devil May Cry series of hack-and-slash action games—is a prime example of this third type of work. The original Devil May Cry for the PlayStation 2 was conceived by Hideki Kamiya (whose other credits include Resident Evil, Viewtiful Joe, and Bayonetta), and introduced the series' protagonist Dante, a half-demon mercenary with an enormous ego and an ever bigger grudge against the forces of Hell. Despite its poorly-translated dialogue and nonsensical plot, the first Devil May Cry was one fun game to play, largely because of its incredibly fluid, highly stylized combat, which inspired games like God of War and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

Dante v2.0.

I've never found the lore of Devil May Cry to be overwhelmingly compelling, and thus I was hardly disappointed when the second, third, and fourth installments of the series failed to improve upon the mediocre storytelling of the first. Although I was pleased with each game's incremental refinements in play control, combat mechanics, and graphics, I certainly felt no great excitement at the prospect of a full series reboot. Since I couldn't even really describe what happened in the first four games, why in the world would I care if someone wiped the slate clean and started anew?

Boy, did I underestimate the developers at Ninja Theory though, because they did something I never though was possible. They took Dante, cocky, rebellious attitude and all, and reshaped him and his universe a way that finally made sense.

"The Hunter" is an evil, foul-mouthed bounty hunter and your first boss encounter. In terms of geniality and physical attractiveness, later bosses will make this guy look like a Disney princess by comparison.

Perhaps things will be clearer if we compare and contrast the old and new Devil May Cry. The original Dante (circa 2001) tried to be cool in that whole pre-millineal Matrix leather-trenchcoat-and-backflips sort of way, while exploring a stereotypically gothic island castle and slaughtering his way through waves of demonic marionettes. His nemesis was the Demon King Mundus, who possessed few if any characteristics to distinguish himself from the innumerable other incarnations of the Devil throughout history.

Dante v2.0, though, is pure punk revival. He talks, dresses, and behaves like a man who doesn't give a shit, because at the beginning of the game he really doesn't. His reimagined nemesis is Kyle Ryder, a skeevy business magnate who serves as Mundus's vessel in the human world. His gothic castle is a skyscraper, and instead of controlling humanity through hordes of demons, he controls them through electronic surveillance, tainted soft drinks, and round-the-clock propaganda from DmC's parody version of the Fox News Network.

Nearly all of the action takes place in Limbo, a warped reflection of the human world where even the walls and floors are trying to kill you.

This take on the world of Devil May Cry creates a brash new context for Dante's epic struggle that never existed in the previous games. When Dante dismembers scores of demons, it's not only because Mundus destroyed his family, but also because fuck them, that's why. When he vents his anti-establishment attitude, it's because there actually is an establishment, and it's enslaved an entire realm of humanity.

What really makes the new DmC so remarkable, though, is the way these narrative themes are woven throughout the entire design and aesthetic of the game, creating a visually, aurally, and kinesthetically cohesive experience. For example, Dante not only looks like one of the Sex Pistols, but even his fighting style is a little impetuous and self-destructive, with combos that include the occasional bits of flourish and exaggerated, off-balance swings. Mundus, on the other hand, imposes his will through furious edicts rendered in giant Helvetica text, his very words distorting reality into the twisted shadow forms of the demon world. This contrast—the fluid freedom of Dante opposing the crushing, wrathful order of Mundus—makes the world of DmC a thrill to inhabit.

Mundus the Giant Has a Posse... OBEY.

Even placing all of these stylistic accoutrements aside, DmC is still at its core a great action game. The combat is as tight as it has ever been, with a great variety of weapons and multiple combat styles. While no single battle mechanic is particularly groundbreaking (in fact, many of the legacy combos are carried over directly from previous games), the ability to switch quickly between standard, area-of-effect, and directed heavy attacks encourages fast-paced and innovative gameplay. A particularly interesting addition is the "Ophion Whip", a tether that can be used to pull enemies to Dante (or vice versa) as well as for traversal; it can also disarm certain enemies and perform other special actions via quick-time events. In this manner, the Ophion Whip allows Dante to operate in environments with a massive sense of scale, while also granting him the speed, flexibility, and total battlefield control this style of game demands.

As I'm nearing the end of this review, I realize there's so many other great things about this game that I have yet to mention. There's Vergil, Dante's twin who is as stunningly rendered and painstakingly characterized as is his brother. There's Bob Barbas, the news network talking head whose boss fight is one of the best and most innovative I've ever seen, anywhere. And there's all the thoughtful little design elements, like the fact that the pause menu informs you how long it's been since your last checkpoint, or that you can hop to a training screen to practice your combos from practically anywhere. I suppose I don't need to go on, though, as my opinion by this point should be clear: if DmC isn't the perfect game, then it's pretty damn close.

Metonymy, or Why the Violent Video Game Discussion Is Ridiculous

I used to believe that the path from thought to language traveled only in one direction. It seemed to me that spoken and written words were a poor approximation of the mind's inner workings, a crude limitation of this dreadfully physical plane of existence. Of course, now that I'm older and wiser (or at least just older), I look back on such naively dualist arguments with chagrin. Our minds and bodies, our thoughts and actions—who we are and what we do—these things are deeply intertwined. It's not only the case that how we think affects what we say, but also that what we say affects how we think.

There's a well-worn rhetorical device known as "metonymy". In general, the term refers to the use of a word or phrase as a surrogate for a related concept, like calling a businessman a "suit". Its most frequent use by far, though, is when we refer to some collective entity using a simpler, related word, like referring to the American film industry as "Hollywood" or the executive branch of the United States government as "The White House". Like any part of language, metonymy is a mechanism for conveying meaning and processing the world around us. However, when using certain figures of speech—especially very common ones—we need to be conscious of how they subtly change our minds, lest they subvert the clarity of our thought. And while I don't believe that using the term "Hollywood" places us in danger of confusing a $10 billion industry with 25 square miles of movie sets in southern California, I do believe it places us in danger of forgetting that "Hollywood" isn't actually a real thing, but rather sort of a metaphor. The film industry doesn't think as one mind, and it doesn't act as a single entity.

The link between violence and video games has been debated pretty much as long as we've had both violence and video games, though it's periodically reinvigorated by current events. The number of ludicrous arguments I've heard and read about the subject is astounding, and seems to be bounded only by the number of idiots in the world with a microphone or Internet access. Usually these arguments are a cocktail of ignorance and deliberate misinformation, like claiming that the point of Bioshock is to murder "defenseless, cowering girls" or passing off obscure, poorly-made, intentionally provocative Flash games as mainstream media. However, inane ramblings like these aren't what bother me the most about this discussion. What bothers me the most is something much more subtle, yet fundamental: the fact that folks on all sides of the debate keep talking about "violent video games" and "the video game industry" as though these are coherent, well defined concepts. It's as though these terms metonymns for some broader concept, except that the broader concept has never been made clear to anyone, least of all me.

When I read the words "violent video game" in the news, what does it mean? Is it a photo-realistic first-person shooter, like Call of Duty or Battlefield? What about less realistic games like Halo or Gears of War? Does this nebulous category only include games with violence against humans, or does it include crimes against robots, aliens, and/or mushrooms? What about something like the Binding of Isaac, a game with a charmingly adorable art style and whose disturbing level of violence is largely due to the fact that it draws its inspiration from the brutality of the Old Testament? Similarly, who are we trying to blame for selling this filth to our children? Publishers like Activision or Ubisoft? The developers of AAA games? Indie devs? What about the designer who makes a violent game as a vehicle for social commentary, or the government contractor who develops a serious violent game for the military?

As a researcher myself, I fully support pursuing a greater understanding of the psychological and sociological effects that our ever-evolving media have on our cognitive development, our relationships with one another, and our society as a whole. (Since we're handing out research funding anyway, let's also give more money to cancer research and NASA.) There's some great questions to be answered, like how does imagery of physical violence affect our brains and bodies, and how does interactivity and the agency of the user change these effects? Is there a link between simulating violent acts and aggression, and between aggression and violent acts in practice? Why is obliterating one of my friends in Halo with a rocket launcher so much fun? As we ask these questions, though, we must remember that one of the first and most important lessons of science is attention to detail... and if we don't even fully understand the words we're using to talk about these concepts, then we're a very long way from getting any answers.

Review: The Cave (XBLA)

Though it's a clever and enjoyable enough way to spend a few hours, The Cave is unlikely to impress anyone who knows how great Ron Gilbert's games can really be.

In 1987, the debut works of two great artists were released: Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction and Ron Gilbert's Maniac Mansion. Each was a landmark contribution it its respective field, a herald of great changes yet to come. While their contemporaries were concerning themselves with trivialities like stomping adorable Japanese mushrooms and pouring some sugar on things, Ron Gilbert and Guns N' Roses were visionaries alike, breaking new ground whilst addressing raw and edgy concepts like heroin addiction and sentient disembodied alien tentacles.

During the subsequent five years or so, Guns N' Roses would release legendary rock epics like "November Rain" and "Civil War", while Ron Gilbert would create The Secret of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, which are essentially the point-n-click adventure game equivalents of legendary rock epics. After that, the members of GnR and Gilbert would do what all great artists seem to do these days: hang around for another two decades occasionally producing works that will never hold a candle to their previous masterpieces, but that I—like all the other nostalgia addicts out there—buy anyways.

Gilbert's newest work, The Cave, is a downloadable title available on PC, OS X, the PS3 Network and Xbox LIVE Marketplace. A puzzle adventure game vaguely reminiscent of his original Maniac Mansion, The Cave lets you choose three out of seven playable characters with whom to explore a surreal, hostile environment, solving puzzles with found items while unlocking the secrets of a mysterious world. (For some reason there's also a platforming component, presumably to meet some sort of genre diversity quota imposed by our liberal activist government.) The cast is a predictably diverse set of zany characters, such as a a time-traveling museum worker and a pair of possessed twin children. Each has their own special ability that alters the way you solve puzzles in "The Cave" (such as the ability to bypass locked doors or to hold one's breath), and each has a dark motivation for pursuing the wealth and power hidden in its depths.

Welcome to "The Cave".

Despite having been underwhelmed by Gilbert's recent Deathspank games, I approached The Cave with uncharacteristic amount of optimism, in part because it was a collaboration with one of my favorite studios, Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions. Unfortunately, I've found in my life that such incidents of optimism rarely go unpunished, and this time was no exception. Even though Gilbert's Maniac Mansion pioneered the multi-character puzzle adventure, the past 25 years have seen amazing innovations on the original concept (see the classic SNES game The Lost Vikings, or last year's PC title Resonance), and The Cave feels a bit behind the times by comparison. Most of the features that set it apart from similar games feel like concessions instead of improvements, such as the fact that your characters can only carry one item at a time, or that the platforming elements are as tedious as they are unnecessary.

I'm certainly not asking Gilbert to retread old ground, but The Cave could go much further in building on the essence of what made games like Monkey Island great. For me, the magic of these games was that moment when the moving parts of a puzzle clicked into place, when your brain twisted in just the right way and you could suddenly see the perverse logic that governed these fantastical, comical worlds. There's times when The Cave dabbles in these mind-bending realms—for instance, when a guard slips because you placed a "wet floor" sign in front of him—but for the most part, the puzzles are of the fairly straightforward "lock-and-key" variety. Even the multi-character component is only delivered by half-measures, as most areas are either generic enough to be traversed nearly identically regardless of your team, or they're so particular to a single character that the other two are irrelevant.

Fun fact: advertising revenues from grog companies have funded nearly all of Ron Gilbert's games.

In the end, though, I found the biggest barrier to enjoying The Cave wasn't the mediocre gameplay, but rather the setting itself. I've always had a limited affection for places like Alice's Wonderland, fantasy settings where literally anything can happen... because if anything can happen, then essentially nothing can happen. In such lands of sheer absurdity, nothing is of consequence, nothing is surprising, and this utter lack of terra firma means there's no foundation upon which to build a compelling narrative. In other words, Gilbert's particular brand of charm shines much better in a place where the rules are ludicrous—like the Edison family mansion or Melee Island—than in a place with no rules at all.

What I've Been Playing: The Feel-Good Edition

We're well into 2013 (actually, it's about 4% over at this point), and that means somehow I made it through another holiday season.

That previous statement is a bit disingenuous... saying "somehow I made it through" implies that I didn't knowingly leverage my other responsibilities (such as work and home repair) to escape from the annual rituals of holiday shopping, frantic housekeeping, food preparation, and entertaining our families. Nevertheless, we all made it through Christmas, New Year's, and the Mayan apocalypse, succeeding in buying ourselves another 10 months or so until we have to deal with another joyous holiday season. The new year is afoot, and in the immortal words of Journey, "the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'".

Anyone who knows me might expect I would scoff at the idea of "New Year's resolutions", as though celebrating an arbitrary discontinuity in the way we measure the Earth's orbital progression should have any bearing on one's choice to quit smoking or lose weight. However, I accepted long ago that traditions are an essential part of society, and our annual making and inevitable breaking of the oaths of self-betterment seem to be as important a tradition as any.

To get in the spirit of things, I've resolved to be more positive and generous in the New Year, a commitment I fully expect to last at least as long as it takes to finish this post. (I've also resolved to bring my lunch to work every day and to go to the gym twice a week, but I'm totally going to keep doing those things forever, from now on, no matter what.) Rather than my usual routine of degrading the creative accomplishments of others, I thought that instead I could run through each of the games I've been playing lately and say something nice about each of them.

Assassin's Creed III (Xbox 360)

Well... fuck. Way to ease myself into this.

If you've read my review of Assassin's Creed III, you know I was pretty disappointed with this game, and might suspect that saying nice things about it would be a challenge. Looking back on my critique, though, I was actually quite positive about certain aspects of the game, although these rare triumphs made its shortcomings sting all the more.

However, putting on my positive thinking hat, I'm forced to admit that after five games, maybe I've simply forgotten what was so utterly amazing about the Assassin's Creed series to begin with. For starters, realizing that the games take place within the Animus was one of the great reveals of this console cycle. Though admittedly trite, the whole "Matrix" angle was so well integrated with the narrative and gameplay that it made this tired old trope feel fresh and new again.

A screenshot from the first Assassin's Creed. Like its most recent sequel, AC1 had its share of issues, but still managed to do some truly amazing things.

More importantly, though—and what still makes Assassin's Creed great today—is the extent to which the franchise expanded the "acrobatic exploration" style of gameplay pioneered by the modern Prince of Persia games. Free climbing, running, and vaulting through the massive historical cities in the Assassin's Creed games really is a complete joy on both a visual and tactile level, and it's easy to forget what an incredible accomplishment this is. It is in this sense that Assassin's Creed III best carries the mantle of its predecessors, and further refinement of this art is arguably its most significant accomplishment.

Halo 4 (Xbox 360)

Speaking of games that are easy to take for granted, let's talk about Halo 4. My recent review echoed the prevailing attitude that this latest entry in the Halo franchise was essentially "more of the same", and I've wondered if the only reason I and others didn't critique Halo 4 more harshly was because everyone simply gave the new developers a bit of a pass. However, like Assassin's Creed III, Halo 4 does certain things so skillfully and effortlessly that they're easy to overlook.

Shoot the big one first.

I thought about this further as I pondered why I prefer Halo games to so many other shooters. (In fact, only Gears of War 3 beats out Halo 3 for the "space marine game" spot on my desert island list.) It's not simply that I'm much, much better at it than something like Call of Duty, though admittedly it's hard to enjoy Black Ops when you can't seem string together enough kills to buy yourself an exploding toy car, whilst everyone else is regularly calling down orbital laser strikes.

Perhaps the question, then, is why do I suck so much less at Halo? I believe one reason is that compared to many other games, I find the game design elements communicated by its artistic choices to be much more intuitive. The moment when your shields go down, the reaction of an Elite to a thrown grenade, the subtle visual cues that indicate how an armored foe can be damaged—in all these cases, Halo works very hard to inform your gameplay through intelligent choices in its artwork and animation. In many ways this is thankless work, but it ultimately leads to Halo being one of the toughest, fairest, and most enjoyable shooters around.

Tales of the Abyss (Nintendo 3DS)

For me, Japanese-style role-playing games (J-RPGs) have always been a bit of a comfort food. Whenever I find I've run through a few particularly challenging titles in a row, it's nice to revert to a genre possessing the kind of story and gameplay pacing that allows you to save the world with one hand while absentmindedly soothing a screaming baby with the other.

To extending the J-RPG / comfort food analogy: if the Final Fantasy series is a favorite sugary cereal from your youth that now tastes like being orally sodomized by a high-fructose dildo, then by contrast the Tales series is a favorite ice cream, reliably waiting in your fridge to console you after your wife divorces you because you gained all that weight from eating sugary cereal. From Tales of Symphonia on the GameCube to Tales of Legendia on the PS2 to Tales of Vesperia on the Xbox 360, Namco Bandai has made a habit over the years of releasing high-quality RPGs that improve with each iteration while remaining comfortably familiar. Since I missed playing Tales of the Abyss when it first came out on the PS2, the 3DS re-release seemed like a perfect opportunity to pick up a title for my mobile gaming pleasure I could be certain I'd enjoy. So far I haven't been disappointed.

Batman: Arkham City (Xbox 360)

I'm pretty compulsive about finishing the games I start, so it's significant when I tell you that a few days after picking up a copy of Batman: Arkham City, I found myself back at the store, receipt in hand, considering whether I wanted to return it. As we're still being positive though, let's ignore the many glaring design flaws that nearly caused me to give up on this supposedly critically acclaimed game, and instead focus on its incredible combat system.

Don't fret, gentlemen... there's plenty of beat-downs to go around.

Having never played Rocksteady's first Batman game (Arkham Asylum), I found the learning curve for Arkham City's combat system to be pretty steep, but was doubly impressed once I started to get the hang of it. I've rarely played a game that deals with crowd control quite so elegantly. In most hack-n-slash games (such as Diablo or God of War), the mechanics for dealing with swarms of enemies follow a simple, standard formula that balances light, heavy, and area-of-effect (AoE) attacks. Often the AoE attacks serve as a sort of "panic button", allowing graceless players like myself to substitute cheap shots and giant explosions for actual combat finesse.

A remarkable thing about Arkham City is that the splashy AoE attacks are largely absent, forcing you to take each of your foes out behind the wood shed for an individual old-fashioned whuppin'. In almost every melee battle, you'll hit a point where you start to fantasize about casting Ultima and vaporizing everyone, but with a bit of discipline and practice, eventually you'll have the Dark Knight leaping around the room breaking arms and smashing heads so handily, it will feel less like a game and more like an expertly choreographed fight scene in a badass martial arts movie.

So that about wraps up my holiday gaming, and other than my use of the term "high-fructose dildo", I'd say I stayed pretty positive. Maybe this whole resolution thing isn't such a joke after all... which I suppose could be a good thing, as I've also resolved to write blog posts more often.