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

October has been a hell of a month. First of all, on October 20th I completed the Extra Life 24-hour gaming marathon, and (with the help of some very generous friends) raised $1,462 for Boston Children's Hospital. Other exciting events included catching a debilitating stomach virus during which I literally lost a week down the toilet, my son turning four, and a hurricane. And now I realize there's more excitement yet to come, as I look upon this freshly delivered copy of Assassin's Creed III. Here's a rundown of everything (at least, everything video-game-related) that happened this month.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Xbox 360)

It's hard for a pessimist like me to remember this, but sometimes dreams do come true. XCOM: Enemy Unknown—the recent remake/reboot of the 1994 game XCOM: UFO Defense—turned out to be every bit of the experience I hoped it would be, and then some.

Most of what I needed to say I put in my review, but to summarize: Firaxis did a superb job of translating an 18-year-old PC cult classic to a modern console setting, by staying true to the spirit of the original while making some bold changes to the core gameplay. Perhaps the best assessment of this balance came from Chris Schilling in his review at VideoGamer.com: "Enemy Unknown is respectful of Julian Gollop's 1994 turn-based strategy classic, but it's not reverential." Whether you're a fan of the original, or simply a fan of turn-based strategy, aliens, challenging gameplay, and/or being eviscerated by mutant cyborg space bugs, you should check out XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

Bomberman LIVE (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

As I've mentioned in the past, my friends and I have a standing Thursday night Xbox LIVE play-date, brilliantly dubbed "TNGN" (Thursday Night Game Night). Though traditionally staunch Gears of War supporters, we recently began to tire of blowing each other away with sawed-off shotguns, something I genuinely thought we would never tire of.

To break the monotony, last month we dug out our old Halo 3 discs, and soon we were joyriding in Banshees across the Valhalla map like we'd never left. (For a five-year-old game, it holds up incredibly well.) Of course, we quickly realized that with Halo 4 coming out November 6, perhaps we should find another way to spend Thursday nights in October. (Besides, of course, with our families.)

I don't know who mentioned it, but someone pointed out that there was a Bomberman game on Xbox LIVE Arcade, and we were sold. After all, we all remembered that Super Bomberman for the SNES was the ultimate party video game when we were kids. It was easy to learn, difficult to master, fun as all hell, and once the bad blood started to build up after a few rounds of cheap shots and broken alliances, no other game was better at causing a bench-clearing brawl. Good times.

However, before you go out and drop 800 credits ($10) on the XBLA version, a quick word of caution. There have literally been dozens of Bomberman games, and although I'm nowhere near well-versed enough to claim that Bomberman LIVE is the worst among these, I have to believe it's somewhere near the bottom. There's little in the way of single-player options (e.g. no campaign), its menu system is so poorly designed that it almost appears to be intentionally obtuse, and the online support is cumbersome, requiring you to re-invite your party to the game whenever you change the slightest details of the match setup. Having voiced those complaints, I can now say that once you do finally manage to get an eight-player match of Bomberman LIVE working, you realize that playing even a half-assed version of this classic game online with seven of your best friends from around the country is a hell of a good time.

Dishonored (Xbox 360)

I played Dishonored for almost the full 24 hours of my Extra Life marathon, and before I took ill last week, I fully intended to write a review of it. Unfortunately, with Assassin's Creed III now in my hands, a review is seeming somewhat less likely. Nevertheless, I thought it was a high-quality game deserving of some careful discussion, so I'm going to hold off on my comments for the time being, with the hope of publishing a review by the end of the week.

LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Xbox 360)

Like music, televison, or film, finding quality video games that are appropriate for young children can be difficult. However, as is true for the Beatles, Sesame Street, or Pixar movies, some of the best video games transcend generations, appealing to kids and adults alike.

When I first played LEGO Star Wars on the PlayStation 2, it was a magical experience. Legos, Star Wars, and video games: three pillars of nerd culture, impossibly combined into a thoroughly enjoyable experience that didn't feel anywhere near as exploitative as it should have.

Unfortunately, like so many wonderful things in this life, I totally forgot about LEGO Star Wars until a friend recently reminded me about it. After spending 60 seconds and $20 on Amazon, two days later my son and I were chasing down our lost droids on Tatooine. Now I get to spend quality time with my son while playing a game that's actually fun for an adult.

The only problem is that now my son believes the canonical version of Star Wars is the one where Jedi use the Force build their own spaceships out of Lego bricks.

So that pretty much wraps up October. Now, I'm off to re-fight the American revolution in Assassin's Creed III. If I'm lucky, I'll be so busy patriotically murdering redcoats for the next week that I won't have to see another political ad between now and the election.

Review: Mark of the Ninja

Mark of the Ninja not only perfects the stealth genre, it transcends it, such that even non-stealth-game fans are likely to enjoy its rewarding gameplay and captivating atmosphere.

"Fun" and "rules" are two concepts frequently placed at odds with one another, and yet one of the basic truths of video games is that they are fun because they have rules. Video games are simulations of various realities, built on sophisticated systems. Understanding the parameters and limitations of these simulations—what actions are and are not allowed, and what responses we should and should not expect—is often an essential part of successful and enjoyable gameplay.

A genre where rules are exceedingly important is the so-called "stealth game". In a typical stealth game, the player controls a vulnerable (though often quite powerful) character whose primary charge is to ambush, hide from, and/or otherwise circumvent adversaries using methods besides direct confrontation. For this type of gameplay to be effective, there has to be a well-understood set of rules. How can I tell if I am adequately hidden? What actions will cause an enemy to sense my presence? If I am detected, what are the consequences? When these rule sets are skillfully designed and well communicated to the player, stealth games become a challenging organic puzzle that tests the player's capacity for deceit and subterfuge. When they are not, stealth games become a vehicle for limitless frustration that test the player's capacity for anger management.

Mark of the Ninja is a 2D action game that implements the essential design elements of the stealth genre impeccably. Developed by Klei Entertainment (makers of the Shank franchise) and available via the Xbox LIVE Marketplace, Mark of the Ninja follows the Champion of the Hisomu ninja clan in his quest to destroy a powerful private military corporation that has assaulted his ancestral home. To fulfill his duty, the Champion must disable scores of heavily-armed guards, evade deadly and devious traps, and circumvent high-tech security measures.

Enemies can be distracted in a variety of ways. Investigation of mysteriously damaged floodlights and unexpectedly sounded gongs is a leading cause of guard-related death in this game.

Though his mission is daunting, the Champion is well equipped for the task at hand. A gifted ninja with superhuman abilities derived from his mystical tattoos (called "marks"), the Champion can effortlessly scale ceilings and walls, fling bamboo darts with unerring accuracy, and execute an unsuspecting enemy in complete silence. Despite this impressive list of powers, he's hardly invincible; if a misstep or botched kill raises the alarm, a burst or two from a mercenary's assault rifle kills him as dead as anyone else.

It is in its understanding and expression of the player character's advantages and limitations that Mark of the Ninja truly excels. When performing noisy actions such as sprinting or using your grappling hook, blue circles indicate the radius within which these sounds will alert a guard. When standing in light or darkness, the Champion's visibility to a foe is clearly apparent. In other words, whenever you end up dead on the ground with more holes in your face than nature intended, it's pretty much always because of a careless step or a flawed strategy, and you'll know exactly what went wrong.

Attacking an unsuspecting enemy results in a stylish instant kill animation. Attacking a suspecting enemy usually results in getting your head blown off and reloading at a checkpoint.

In addition to the expertly implemented systems for player feedback, Mark of the Ninja has a pretty generous checkpoint system, which typically responds to your untimely demise by restoring you to the point just before everything went all sideways. Together, the feedback and checkpoints encourage a satisfying level of experimentation and choice. If I let that guard catch a glimpse of me, can I return to the shadows quickly enough to sneak past him when he comes over to snoop around? If I hang this guard's corpse from that lamppost, will it terrify those other two guards enough that they'll accidentally shoot each other? I often found myself repeating a section multiple times not because I couldn't complete it, but rather out of a desire to complete it as elegantly as possible. (Yes, I realize I just used "elegant" to describe the act of hanging corpses from streetlights.)

The artfully refined mechanics of Mark of the Ninja would add up to a pretty fantastic experience irrespective of graphics and story; however, the game manages to deliver on these other fronts as well. The characters are masterfully illustrated in Klei Entertainment's trademark comic-book style, and the richly layered environments possess a sense of purpose that embraces the visual extremes of light and dark. While for some games, the graphics are the point of the game, for Mark of the Ninja, the graphics communicate the point of the game, by taking the practical requirements of the world and restating them in a visually compelling way.

The story of Mark of the Ninja is also impressive for such a mechanical game, though it shines somewhat less spectacularly than the graphics. The characters are as well acted and are developed about as deeply as one can expect from a handful of cut-scenes and some limited instructional and expository dialogue, most of which involves a stereotypically taciturn ninja clan. The plot is similarly pragmatic, although it contains a few twists that, while fairly predictible, are thoroughly appreciated in a game that could have just as easily have ignored narrative altogether.

The environments of Mark of the Ninja are a triumph of utilitarian design: beautifully rendered, yet wholly committed to the game's essential purpose.

To summarize: Mark of the Ninja refines the stealth game to its functional zenith, and like all great feats of design, achieves in its complexity a certain simplicity. I believe that the elegance of its mechanics, along with its diverse opportunities for player experimentation and appealing aesthetic trappings, allow it to appeal to a wide audience. If you think you might enjoy pretending to be a bad-ass master ninja—which I'd like to think is pretty much everyone—then Mark of the Ninja is a game for you.

Review: Dust: An Elysian Tail

Whether you view it as a visually evocative action-adventure or as a testament to its creator's talent and persistence, Dust: An Elysian Tail is a game worth experiencing.

Whether video games are "art" is a question that has largely been settled, at least by anyone whose opinion I value. These days, someone arguing that "video games shouldn't be considered art" sounds like my grandfather arguing that rock and roll shouldn't be considered music.

Fortunately, moving past the "games as art" debate allows us to address the sorts of interesting questions people have been asking about other art forms for years. For example, when judging the quality and worth of a work of art, how much do the circumstances of its creation matter? Should the value I ascribe to a work of art be affected by knowing who made it, or how they made it, or why they made it?

Of course, I don't know the answers to these questions, but I certainly thought about them a lot while playing Dust: An Elysian Tail, a downloadable title available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace. Dust is an 2D side-scrolling action/adventure/RPG game, a genre more tritely known by the portmanteau "Metroidvania". You play as the eponymous protagonist Dust, an anthropomorphic animal (or "furry", to use a more socially loaded term) suffering from a conventional case of narrative-induced amnesia. Joined by a talking magical sword and some sort of flying squirrel-bat, Dust fights to uncover the truth behind his mysterious past, while helping the denizens of the world of Falana fight back against the forces of an invading army led by a genocidal commander.

Amidst the game's enchanting sylvan environments teeming with stunningly animated fauna, you might think you're actually watching Bambi... up until Dust starts murdering everything, that is.

From this synopsis, you might think that Dust is derivative, uninspired, and full of clichés, and were circumstances different, I might be inclined to agree with you. However, when I was at PAX East earlier this year, I got a chance to play an early demo of the game and speak briefly with its creator, Dean Dodrill. I learned that Dean (or "Noogy", as he seems to be known on the Internet) created Dust almost entirely by himself, and that he was not an experienced game developer or computer programmer, but an artist. In 2009 he won Microsoft's Dream-Build-Play competition, and since then he has toiled with single-minded devotion toward making his game a reality.

For some reason this interaction profoundly altered my perception of Dust. Instead of thinking about it as a product, I started thinking about what it meant to Dean, why he made it, and what it had taken for him to accomplish this task. My personal assessment was that Dust had been a true labor of love, a stunningly beautiful interactive experience created by a gifted animator to honor a group of characters and a fantastical world that he truly cared about. After only playing Dust for a few minutes, I had decided that I loved it, too.

When I first met Fidget (Dust's "nimbat" familiar) I wanted to stuff him in a bag full of rocks and toss him into the sea, but godsdammit if he didn't start to grow on me by the end of the game.

Mind you, I don't want to give the impression that Dust isn't a great game in its own right. After playing it in its entirety, I can say that beyond its breathtaking visuals, Dust does a lot of other things right, such as its well-balanced and highly engaging combat system. The main character fights in a variety of ways: with melee combos, by having Fidget (his sidekick) shoot projectiles, or by spinning his sword and/or himself into a whirlwind called the "Dust Storm". However, ideal combat arises from the skillful interplay of these three elements. For instance, Fidget's projectiles are greatly enhanced in scope and power when used in concert with the Dust Storm, but continuing this action for too long damages your character, requiring the intermittent use of sword attacks. Also, certain enemies have strong defenses that can only be lowered by parrying their attacks directly with a melee strike, but such enemies are usually accompanied by large groups of weaker foes that must be crowd-controlled with the Dust Storm.

Once you get the hang of the combat system, it feels completely fluid and highly satisfying... except on those occassions when some monster get in a lucky shot that stops your 1,000-hit combo at hit number 999.

In other ways, though, Dust runs somewhat counter to my tastes. Its story is rooted in a certain kind of traditional "good-versus-evil" high fantasy that's never appealed much to me, especially when compared to the grittier, morally ambiguous (and admittedly trendier) settings of something like Dragon Age or Skyrim. However, like a Disney movie, the characters exhibit such an earnestness that even a stone-cold asshole like me can't help but find them endearing. In particular, the interactions between Dust and Fidget, delivered via some highly respectable voice acting, are often engaging and charmingly funny.

On paper, I typically would consider Dust to be above average, but not truly spectacular— a "check-plus", if you will. If it had been made by a larger studio with a sizable budget, I'd probably be giving it four stars. However, I can't separate what I know about the game and its creation from my experience while playing it, no more than I can watch Braveheart while pretending Mel Gibson isn't a deranged racist. Even though I don't know Dean Dodrill personally, I can tell that that he deeply cares about the world he created and the characters in it, and a sense of that devotion stuck with me the entire time I played his game. Ultimately, the enjoyment of experiencing something that matters so much to someone else is probably the biggest reason why I loved playing Dust: An Elysian Tail. I hope that other people love it, too.

What I've Been Playing

Summer is one of the toughest times in the childhood of a video gamer. Even back when I was in elementary school, I remember lamenting the cutting irony of the fact that summer vacation arrived (a) well after I had thoroughly exhausted all interest in whatever game I'd gotten for Christmas, (b) well before my autumn birthday (at which time I would inevitably recieve gifts of clothes and school supplies anyway), and (c) at a time of year when hardly any new games were released. In the end, I suppose all these barriers to gaming were likely of little real consequence; even if I'd had a stack of unplayed cartridges at my disposal, my fascist parental overlords probably still would have forced me to play outside.

As an adult, I find summers to be much more palatable. Sure, I don't get two months of contiguous vacation, but instead I have disposable income, free will, and air conditioning. And even though there aren't many triple-A game releases this time of year, there's a nearly endless supply of cheap downloadable fun to be consumed via Steam's Summer Sale (which just ended) and Xbox LIVE's "Summer of Arcade". Here's what I've been playing...

Diablo III (PC / Mac)

Released this May following a 12-year hiatus in the franchise, Diablo III has been the preeminent time-sink for something like 10 million people this summer. Despite its success on paper, the game itself has traveled kind of a bumpy road, one rife with server issues, bizarre gameplay limits, and game hacks and exploits. In a typical video game, these issues would be less of a problem; however, Diablo III incorporates a "Real Money Auction House", which (for those of you who don't know) is a virtual marketplace that allows players to buy and sell in-game equipment and commodities using real-world currency. Apparently, the lesson to learn here is that if you create a virtual economy that is already incredibly unstable because of its implicitly artificial nature, piling a bunch of additional problems on top of it yields results that are somewhat of a total clusterfuck.

Is there someone out there willing to drop $200 on a "Focused Beating"? Only time will tell.

Being one of those crazy people who doesn't play games so I can farm loot to sell on the Internet, I tended to approach Diablo III as... well, a "game". While Diablo III is undoubtedly highly-tuned, expertly polished, and addictive as hell, even after my first 30 hours of gameplay I'm still not sure if it's actually "fun". It's entirely possible Blizzard has simply figured out an algorithm for directly triggering the pleasure centers in my brain via randomized loot drops.

Resonance (PC)

Eventually I took a break from Diablo III and returned to my traditional summer practice of snapping up old titles and indie games in bulk off of Steam. One of my first purchases was Resonance, an indie point-n-click adventure game in the old-school pixel art style.

Resonance: why wrestle with Diablo III server issues when instead you could be riding the subway as a particle physicist?

Compared to staring at Battle.net error codes, I much preferred Resonance as a way to pass the time. Although the puzzles aren't terribly mind-blowing and the voice acting has the kind of stilted, canned quality that is hard to avoid in adventure games, Resonance is still well-executed in many ways. Not only does it build on the traditional adventure-game formula with a few interesting gameplay innovations, but its plot and character development were more than enough to make Resonance worth a few hours of my time.

Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 (PC)

I really enjoy the webcomic/blog/Internet institution Penny Arcade. I think one of the reasons I like Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik's commentary so much is that it spans the full dynamic range of the human experience from the existential to the profane, in much the same effortless manner of comedians like Jon Stewart or Louis C.K.

It's because I enjoy the eccentricities of the Penny Arcade world view so thoroughly that I've continued to play their "Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness" series, despite the fact each installment thus far has been decidedly middling. Granted, this newest offering is a departure from the two previous Hothead-produced titles, rendered instead in the style of a 16-bit console RPG by the qualified retro enthusiasts at Zeboyd Games. However, the end result is still a mediocre role-playing game that could (and should) be ignored by anyone who isn't a Penny Arcade fan.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations (Xbox 360)

As I've mentioned before, seeing the Assassin's Creed III gameplay trailer at PAX earlier this year really got me getting back on the AC bandwagon. After playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, I decided to ride the sequel train right on through Assassin's Creed: Revelations, the third part of the "Ezio Trilogy". This (hopefully) final chapter follows Ezio's exploits in 16th-century Constantinople, where despite being well into his fifties, he somehow manages to keep free solo climbing, base jumping, and serial murdering as though he was still a teenage assassin.

Apparently three decades of jumping off rooftops and stabbing dudes in the face really ages a guy.

Unless you are deeply fascinated by the lore of the Assassin's Creed universe, AC: Revelations is a sequel that could easily be skipped. While it is certainly as expertly crafted as other entries in the series, its more-of-the-same gameplay and its insistence on extending the already overdrawn Ezio plot line offers more exploitation than revelation.

Double Fine Happy Action Theater (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Recently my kids and I had a playdate with a friend of mine and his two children. After a three-hour maelstrom of toys, tears, and bathroom mishaps, we were starting to run out of hope, as well as beer. Enter Double Fine Happy Action Theater, an Xbox LIVE downloadable arcade game for the Kinect that also seemed to be a safe and legal toddler narcotic. Although it's little more than a tech demo of 20 or so minigames, Happy Action Theater includes some of the most innovative uses of the Kinect sensor I've seen thus far, and each is delivered with trademark Double Fine flair. If you have young children I highly recommend it... at $10, it's one of the cheapest and most effortless ways you'll find for wearing out your offspring.

Terraria (PC)

The first time anyone hears about Terraria, it's always the same description: "It's 2-D Minecraft." To be fair, it's an accurate description; Terraria not only borrows Minecraft's core gameplay concepts (i.e. "mining" and "crafting"), it also borrows almost everything else. However, it's a testament to how genuinely well designed and innovative Terraria is that it can plagiarize so heavily while ultimately delivering an experience that is quite different from that of Minecraft. While life in Minecraft is an exercise in solitary exploration that occasionally borders on survival horror, Terraria is like Legend of Zelda would be if after conquering a dungeon you could lug it up to the surface and use pieces of it to build yourself a kick-ass fortress.

Now if only I would put this much effort into my real house.

My only gripe about Terraria is that the difficulty curve is steep. Even with heavy coaching from online walkthroughs and FAQs, after 20 hours I still couldn't beat the first boss. In the end, I decided just to be happy with the fact that I had built another sweet residence to my long list of virtual properties.

Well, that pretty much wraps up July's gaming exploits. God and Amazon Prime willing, this time next month I should be writing about one of my most-anticipated games of 2012: Darksiders II.

PAX East 2012: Day Three

9:00 AM - Latest start yet. I think I must have been feeling pretty good last night, because when I got home I was self-assured enough to eat blue cheese dressing out of the jar with a fork. I do feel the tiniest bit guilty walking across Boston Common hung over and on my way to a video game convention, while folks in their Sunday best head the other direction for Easter service.

11:31 AM - Hitting the expo floor for reals today. First stop: Assassin's Creed III. Now I'm normally not one to gush, but the gameplay footage looked absolutely phenomenal. The concept of operating in a wide-open and natural environment like a colonial New England forest is a great innovation for the franchise (which had been getting fairly stale), and it seems that a lot of the movement and combat systems have been rebuilt to accommodate that change. Plus, murdering Redcoats with a tomahawk is always a crowd pleaser, at least provided you're not British.

No photography or video recording was allowed inside the theater, so here's a picture of the outside instead. 

12:02 PM - Checked out some more of the indie and XBLA offerings. There's some good stuff down here, including Guacamelee!, a luchador-themed action-adventure game, and Charlie Murder, a beat-em-up with RPG elements from Ska Studios (makers of Dishwasher: Dead Samurai).

Ska Studios art always looks like you wish the sketches in your high-school notebooks looked, if only you had been an amazing artist and super angsty.

12:46 PM - Had a great chat with the Australian creator of Antichamber, a first-person puzzle game that uses "non-Euclidean" geometry. (Basically, it's like running around in an M. C. Escher drawing.) He described the painstaking design process of user testing and game refinement as he attempted to make the game as intuitive as possible (yet still mind-bending).

Hey, it's not like Euclid is the only person who knows how to organize a three-dimensional metric space.

1:15 PM - The shout-out for Dust: An Elysian Tail at the Giant Bomb panel last night must have had an effect, because a lot of folks were interested on the game today. An upcoming XBLA action-adventure title with a beautiful fantasy-themed visual style, Dust was actually designed, illustrated, and coded by a single guy! I actually ended up in line with Ryan Davis and Jeff Gerstmann from the Giant Bomb site, and got a chance to talk with Ryan about his opinion regarding the collection of games this year.

2:16 PM - Took a break to eat a surprisingly tasty food court burrito, as well as count the number of people walking by wearing Utilikilts. Answer: five.

3:51 PM - Attended the panel, "How Young Is Too Young for Games?" Given how much we hear in the media about violence in video games and its effect on children, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of reliable research on the subject, and the little that exists is inconclusive. The panel's shocking conclusion: there's no substitute for moderation and good parental judgement.

There was a setup where you could text in which games had been most influential in your own childhood development. I sure hope the guy who said that World of Warcraft affected him the most when he was "0 to 5 years old" was either confused or kidding.

4:50 PM - Round two of the expo floor. Best experience by far was Dyad, which you maybe could call a shooter, but is really more of a psychedelic audiovisual experience. Whatever it is, it's coming to the PS3 Network this summer.

After playing this game, I actually was so mesmerized that I wordlessly stood up and then lazily wandered in an arbitrary direction for about a minute, before coming back to the booth and apologizing to the designer for my behavior.  

5:36 PM - The expo floor is closing down. I managed to hit a few more games, but nothing was better than what I've already mentioned. I think it's time to call it a day.

11:24 PM - After making my way home and relaxing for a few hours, I'm prepared to render judgement on my first PAX experience. In two words: mission fucking accomplished. Here are a few take-aways:

1. I was surprised to discover how many panels there were, by the breadth and depth of their topics, and by how informative and entertaining they were. I naively expected that I would spend most of my time on the expo floor, but I ended up much preferring the panels.
2. On the exhibition side of things, I found checking out the indie games to be the best use of my time. There's nothing like getting to play some awesome game that a few dudes created in their basement, while they stand next to you and politely answer any idiotic question that pops into your head. Also the lines are short.
3. Finally, for all those people that think there's a link between video games and violence: I just watched 70,000 people cram into about a square mile of space for three full days where they played violent games literally non-stop, and remarkably no one was murdered. That should be all the evidence anyone would ever need.

Review: Bastion

This week I’ll be reviewing Bastion, an action RPG developed by rookie indie developer Supergiant Games and released for the Xbox LIVE Marketplace (XBLM) and PC. Bastion follows the adventures of an unnamed protagonist (referred to as “the Kid”) as he tries to piece together remnants of a shattered world.

Design: 4/5

I’m really growing to like the “downloadable game” concept, particularly as it’s executed on XBLM. Downloadable titles allow small developers to take solid, innovative concepts and realize them on a limited scale, without having to compete with multi-million dollar blockbuster titles. Sometimes fifteen-dollars-worth is just the right amount of game.

Apparently, the Kid slept right through the Apocalypse.  Typical teenager.

In the case of Bastion, fifteen dollars buys you 5 to 10 hours worth of old-school action RPG gameplay. The basic structure is textbook: go to some location, kill a bunch of things, and eventually collect some magic stone or crystal or whatever. (I honestly don’t remember what your character collects; it could have been ceramic unicorns or virulent STDs. Frankly, it doesn’t matter.) However, there are a few things that attempt to set apart Bastion’s polished but heartfelt rehashing of this familiar formula... though not necessarily all of them succeed. Let’s discuss them, shall we?

Artistic: 4/5

The first thing one notices about Bastion is its look. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world (presumably because it’s more compelling than a pre-apocalyptic one), rendered in a hand-painted art style reminiscent of the sprite-based gaming days of yore. However, unlike most destroyed game worlds (e.g. Gears of War, Fallout), this one isn’t a pile of monochromatic rubble; instead it’s full of vibrant colors and lighting effects.

Okay, do these people have huge heads and tiny feet, or are they all just leaning toward me?

A main part of the game aesthetic is that as you make your way through this bizarre world, it magically reassembles itself around you. Paths rise up to meet your feet, while trees, rocks, and houses reconstitute themselves in response to your very presence. While the effect can be pleasing to the eye as it happens, I found that the finished product actually appeared over-wrought, almost too cluttered by the revived scenery.

Narrative: 4/5

Another potential selling point of Bastion is its innovative concept of “dynamic narration”. As you progress through the game, your adventures are recounted by a gravel-voiced raconteur reminiscent of Sam Elliott from the Big Lebowski. (In fact, part of me kept waiting for him to ask me for a Sarsaparilla.) In theory, this narrator responds to your in-game actions, telling your story as it unfolds.

If this concept had really been taken all the way, I think it would have been incredible, but unfortunately Bastion just touches the surface. The majority of the time, narration responds more to where you are in the game level than to what you’re actually doing at the time. Compare this to the handful of instances when narration responds to your immediate actions, and you’re left feeling like there were a lot of missed opportunities.

Gameplay: 4/5

Beneath all of its accoutrements, Bastion boasts some fairly solid gameplay. The controls are fast and responsive, which combined with a variety of weapons and enemies keeps the combat from getting too tiresome. One welcome change would be if the game let you swap weapons anywhere (instead of only at “Forge” locations), because by the end of the game I had settled into using the Cael Hammer and Scrap Musket for pretty much everything.

The land reforms under your feet as you move about the world, which I suppose is more convenient than the alternative.

Summary

All in all, Bastion is the video game equivalent of listening to a fun, fresh cover version of a classic song. If you’re looking to pass the time by running around killing sentient plants with interesting weapons Secret-of-Mana style, it’s certainly a reasonable place to start.

Review: Stacking

Stacking is the latest adventure from the developers at Double Fine, makers of Psychonauts and Brütal Legend. Available as a XBLA and PSN downloadable title, Stacking is a puzzle adventure set in a quirky Industrial-Age world inhabited entirely by Russian nesting dolls. As Charlie Blackmore—a child laborer and apparently the smallest denizen of this bizarre universe—the player solves puzzles by possessing larger dolls and using their abilities. In the interest of dispensing with any obvious off-color jokes as quickly as possible, let me add that this is a great game concept for anyone who enjoys being inside several people at once.