What I've Been Playing

October is going to be a great month for gaming. Not only am I looking forward to the releases of Dishonored, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Assassin's Creed III, I'm also eagerly anticipating the 24-hour video game marathon I'm doing on Saturday, October 20th as part of the Extra Life 2012 charity event, to benefit Boston Children's Hospital. (Here's the link to my donation page! Give, for the children!)

Of course, even though October appears pretty stacked, September certainly was no slouch. Here's a quick rundown of the games I managed to play last month during the calm before the storm.

Spelunky (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

"Roguelikes" seem to be the hot indie trend for 2012. Unfortunately, I tend to view the genre as the video-game equivalent of the band Wilco: I keep giving them a shot, but for some reason I just can't see why people like them so damn much.

In case you're unfamiliar with it, the term "roguelike" refers to the 1980 Unix game Rogue, which was characterized by certain gameplay elements like an aggressive level of difficulty, randomly generated levels, and permanent character death. Today, these gameplay elements seem to have found a wider audience of people who demand crushingly difficult and frustratingly unpredictable game experiences, because they seem to be popping up in every third indie game that comes out.

One such game is Spelunky, a roguelike action platformer released this summer for Xbox LIVE Arcade. Having never played the original version (which was released for PC in 2009), nor having played any similar games (such as La-Mulana), Spelunky was a new experience for me—an experience that involved dying a gruesome death and restarting the game from the beginning about every 2 to 3 minutes.

Spelunky would be like the movie Groundhog Day if instead of learning the piano, Bill Murray just got shot in the face with a poison arrow every morning.

After logging a few good hours of play, I did eventually develop some basic Spelunking skills like running, jumping, climbing ropes, dodging spiders, whipping bats, rescuing damsels, murdering shotgun-toting shopkeepers, and not getting impaled by spikes, to the point where I even finally made it to the second of the five major areas in the game. Unfortunately, by that point I'd decided that Spelunky was probably not the game for me, at least not if I wanted to make it to Thanksgiving without hurling my Xbox controller through my TV screen.

The Binding of Isaac (PC / Mac)

By contrast, a roguelike that does it right is The Binding of Isaac, a Steam title from 2011 that I only recently started playing. A deeply disturbed interpretation of the Bible story of the same name, The Binding of Isaac follows the child Isaac as he flees the murderous zealotry of his mother, descending in to a dungeon of unholy terrors armed only with his tears.

Be warned: this game is pretty disturbing.

Gameplay-wise, Isaac is sort of a dungeon-crawling shooter, like a comfortable mix of The Legend of Zelda and Smash TV. As a roguelike, it's certainly difficult, and death is very much permanent; however, what it really captures about the spirit of roguelikes is the element of randomness. Every time I play, I encounter something I've never seen before (and often, something I hope I never see again). Moreover, the game is balanced such that randomness of the powerups and items firmly guides the gameplay, without undermining player skill to the point where you feel like you're simply a sinner in the hands of an angry random-number-generating God.

Mark of the Ninja (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Having had my fill of indie roguelike self-flagellation, I abandoned for a time playing as either an archeologist with a death wish or a crying child. Instead, I turned to the other extreme: becoming the baddest ninja warrior that has ever existed. Mark of the Ninja is hands-down my favorite XBLA game of the year so far, and may well be my favorite game for 2012 overall. Pretty much everything I wanted to say about the game I put in my recent review, so I think I'll leave it at that. Mark of the Ninja: play it!

Borderlands 2 (Xbox 360)

In my recent Darksiders II review, I claimed that I prefer a game that is too ambitious to one that plays it safe. Well, that claim was put to the test last month by Borderlands 2, which is basically an expanded, more polished version of its predecessor.

Still, sometimes it's the little things, and Borderlands 2 improves a lot of the little things. The difficulty is a little better balanced, the missions are a little less repetitive, the weapons are a little more diverse, and the enemy AI is a little less moronic. All of these little changes—along with some genuinely funny writing—add up to a total Borderlands experience that I've really been enjoying, so much so that perhaps I was full of crap with that whole "respecting games that take risks" nonsense. I'll say more in the review I'll be posting this week, but for now you should know that Borderlands 2 is a pretty solid pick, especially if you either never played or you absolutely loved the original.

So, that was my September. For my October, I'm really only searching for two things: (1) donations to help sick kids, and (2) suggestions for games I could probably win when playing against sick kids. I mean, I'm willing to donate money to help them fight cancer, but I'll be damned if I let those punks beat me at Halo.

Extra Life 2012: Play Games. Heal Kids.

I've never had much interest in the whole "charity" thing. I don't particularly enjoy helping people I know, much less complete and total strangers. However, one thing that does interest me is finding new ways to validate the unreasonable amount of time I spend playing video games. Also, as a father of two, I have managed to develop some level of fondness for children. I realize how fortunate I have been that my son and daughter are growing up strong and healthy, but I also realize that many families are not always so lucky.

That's why I've decided this year to participate in Extra Life, an annual event where participants engage in a 24-hour video gaming marathon for charity. The donations raised support the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals, which treat thousands of sick and injured children each year. Last year, Extra Life raised more than $1.2 million dollars to help children with life-threatening conditions like cancer and cystic fibrosis, and this year they're aiming to raise even more.

On Saturday, October 20th, 2012, I'll start playing video games at 8:00 AM, and won't stop for 24 hours. In exchange for me doing... well, basically the same thing I did during every spring break in college, I'm asking people to donate to help me reach my goal of raising $1,000 for the Boston Children's Hospital. Your donation is tax-deductible and all proceeds go directly to the hospital.

Here's the link to my donation page: http://www.extra-life.org/participant/appliedgaming.

Of course, the big question is what game(s) should I play during a single 24-hour sitting? Maybe a big, open-world fantasy like Skyrim, or something punishingly difficult like Dark Souls? Perhaps I should play something recently released, like the new XCOM or Dishonored? Or, maybe I could play a different game each hour for 24 hours? Should I go retro? NES? SNES? Maybe I should try a speed run? (Final Fantasy VII in 24 hours?) Maybe I should just try to play the most terrible games I can find, like this one.

The point is, I'm open to suggestions. Regardless of what game or games I choose, be sure to check back with the site on Saturday, October 20th, where I'll be live-blogging during the full 24 hours I'll be parked in front of my Xbox. Thank you in advance for your donation!

What game or games do you think I should play? Let me know in the comments!

Boston Festival of Indie Games Wrap-Up

Saturday was a gorgeous day, the kind of bright and sunny, yet breezy and temperate weather that makes me love autumn in New England. However, rather than spend outdoors one of the few perfect September days we get here in Boston, I chose to lurk in dark auditoriums and elbow my way through crowded (and by the afternoon, fairly pungent) exhibit halls. Why? Because Saturday, September 22 was Massachusetts Independent Game Development Day, which I spent attending the first ever Boston Festival of Indie Games (Boston FIG).

Co-presented by the MIT Game Lab and the Boston Indies community, the inaugural Boston FIG was a free(!) event showcasing the vibrant indie video and tabletop gaming scene in the New England region. In addition to several lectures, a game jam, an art show, and movie screenings, the exhibition halls boasted more than 30 game demos, primarily from New England indie developers.

After attending a keynote by game journalist and Gamasutra editor-at-large Leigh Alexander, I decided to brave the exhibit halls (and by "exhibit halls" I mean "crowded MIT classrooms") to check out some of the local talent. Here are a few of the games that caught my eye.

Lost Marbles

After the keynote, I plunged headlong into the exhibition throng and gravitated to the first game that caught my eye. Lost Marbles is an homage to the classic SNES action-puzzle game Lost Vikings, reimagined by developer Binary Takeover as a 3D Marble Madness style game (hence the name "Lost Marbles").

I think the reason the marbles were lost was because I kept accidentally steering them into the abyss.

I enjoyed the clean, bright cel-shaded graphics (which I thought really worked for this kind of puzzle game), but I honestly had trouble telling if Lost Marbles was actually fun or not. I found the controls to be pretty twitchy, and I spent most of my time driving my marbles off the narrow paths they were supposed to be traversing. After a few dozen restarts, I scraped together what was left of my dignity and went off to look for something that demanded a little less in the fine-motor-skills department.

Girls Like Robots

Hoping to purge myself of the stink of failure, I looked around for a game that might play more to my strengths. Enter Popcannibal's iOS title Girls Like Robots, a self-proclaimed "romance, adventure, puzzle game about seating arrangements". (Apparently this game was at PAX East this spring, but I must have missed it there.) Reminiscent of the classical "ménage problem" in combinatorial mathematics, Girls Like Robots asks you to arrange various people in a space, each according to their particular preferences. For example, you might surmise from the title that the girls like to sit next to the robots.

Girls like robots, but hate nerds. Who do those bitches think built all the robots?

Girls Like Robots seemed like the kind of fun, stylish, tightly-designed puzzle game that is perfect for mobile platforms. It has a light-hearted sensibility that plays well with its eccentric art style, and I'm sure it will be well worth the dollar or two purchase price via iTunes when it releases.

Prime's Quest

Next, I stopped by to visit my friends at the Intrepid booth, to talk to them about their upcoming game Prime's Quest, debuting soon on iOS platforms. Prime's Quest builds on the traditional "sobokan" (warehouse keeper) style of puzzle game, wherein the player has to shift a bunch of blocks or crates around a crowded room to make it to the exit. I've been playing the beta, and so far it's got some great new mechanics that make this classic puzzle style seem fresh. I'm looking forward to playing the finished product.

Rite

One of the great things about the game expo environment is that you get to see products before they are finished. Some of them, like Rite are still in the prototype stages, allowing you a unique opportunity to engage the developer early in the design process. Developed by Father Octopus (which is also the name of the founder's band), Rite is a puzzle-platformer where you guide some sort of futuristic priest through a maze of deadly traps. The primary puzzle element I saw was a "dimension-splitting" mechanic, wherein you divided the player character into two copies of himself, which you had to control simultaneously.

The web page for Rite describes the protagonist as "trapped in a horrible room filled with programmer art".

Given that puzzle-platformers have become a somewhat trite and overutilized genre as of late—they're basically like the dubstep of indie games— Rite may have a hard time standing out from the crowd. However, even in its infancy, I could tell the game captured a certain distinctive ambience, one that could really shine with right graphics and audio direction.

Snapshot

Of course, after disparaging the whole genre of puzzle-platformers, the next game I played was Snapshot, a puzzle-platformer by Retro Affect available now on Steam. I first played this game at PAX East this spring and really enjoyed it.

In Snapshot, you play as an adorable robot who uses his camera to capture items from the world, which he can then use to solve puzzles. Captured items maintain physical qualities such as their momentum, giving many of the puzzles a physics-based bent. One nice thing about Snapshot is that unlike most modern indie platformers, the grisly character deaths are kept pretty much to a minimum, meaning that I can play this game with my three-year-old without worrying that he'll be waking me up in the middle of the night because he thinks Meat Boy is trying to kill him.

Candlelight

One of the last games that really grabbed my attention was Candlelight by Idle Action Studios, a game that I'm not going to call a "puzzle-platformer" only because I'm sick of typing those words. In Candlelight, you to control two characters simultaneously with independent controls (e.g. with the WASD and OKL; keys on a keyboard, or eventually with dual joysticks, one would presume). The silhoutte-based graphics divide the environment into light and dark, positive and negative spaces over which the pair of characters can exert certain powers. For example, the one character's lantern might cause hidden platforms to appear, or remove certain obstacles from view allowing the other character to pass.

I'm pretty sure if this were my wife and I, she wouldn't let me wander off with the lantern while she crawled through the spike-and-rock tunnel by herself.

The game still has a long way to go, but the version I played at Boston FIG already had some really smart design choices. For example, when the characters became separated, the view gently separated into a split-screen arrangement, which gradually shifted to corners of the screen as the characters became even farther apart. The effect gave me a subtle sense of where my characters were in the world, and was a much more elegant solution than more traditional approaches such as zooming way out, or plotting my location on some sort of mini-map.

All in all, Boston FIG was a great event. Although I played plenty of other promising games, I hope the handful I talked about give you a sense of just how exciting the indie game scene is here in Boston. Speaking with one of the festival organizers late in the day, he shared that in his estimation, there were about 2-4 times the number of attendees than they expected—about 2,000 or so total. Hopefully the success of the event was such that Boston Festival of Indie Games will continue to be an annual tradition for years to come.

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.