Friday afternoon tidbits

In an attempt to cram in as much snowboarding as possible before the season ends, this weekend I head to the great white north. People keep talking about how winter is dragging on and on, but I feel like it's slipping away. So no video games for me. Before then, though, some good links from the past week.

-Jorge and Scott dedicated this week's episode of the Experience Points podcast to discussion of "the fightstick question" with Street Fighter IV, as well a broader discussion of peripherals in general. What I'm afraid to do is hypothesize about playing with the stick. I can guess that playing with the stick is better, but by how much? I can't say. Therefore, I probably shouldn't. But I can say that using a gamepad is tricky. At this point, though, not a dealbreaker. The game is darn fun.

-Also on the SFIV tip, check out David Sirlin's critique of the game for some mindblowing insight. You can count me in with the people who have found this game more accessible than most head-to-head fighters these days, at least compared to the last one I played, Soul Calibur IV. But his point is well taken that there's an awful lot happening here: Focus moves, EX moves, super combos, ultra combos... Truthfully, I've yet to encounter many players who use a lot of these advanced techniques. I'm sure they're out there, but they don't need to reach up that high on the shelf for what will defeat me.

-Last on the subject, a typically solid GameSetWatch op-ed. Nayan Ramachandran wonders: Where do fighting games go from here? Fighting games, moreso than most genres, are amazingly specialized. As Sirlin intimated, what hardcore gamers call "accessible" really isn't. Ramachandran boils it down even more:

Street Fighter IV is a surprisingly accessible fighting game, and seems designed to bring back those who fell off the bandwagon years ago, but throwing a simple hadouken or shoryuken -- both of which must be mastered to be of any use when playing -- takes more practice than most new gamers are honestly willing to put in.

Probably also true. This stuff's not easy. Not only that, but in the culture of games like Street Fighter, n00bs aren't even welcome. It's as though you shouldn't be allowed to play unless you're an expert, but if you follow that logic back to the beginning, then nobody would ever have been allowed to play. There needs to be a low barrier to entry for new players, if only from a business perspective. Maybe this game's is sufficient, or maybe there are enough people who remember how to throw a hadouken to move millions of copies.

-From Kirk Hamilton, a look at the future convergence of music and software. Kirk rightly cheers on the democratization of music, which is helped more by programs like Garage Band than by Guitar Hero. Nobody thinks that playing a music game will replace actually creating music, but might our definition of creating music change as the years pass? Probably. It already has, really -- there was a time when electric guitars seemed like heresy. There are a million ways to make music these days, and that's resulted in more people celebrating the possibilities of music, not less.

-MTV Multiplayer's interview with John Carmack about Quake Live is good reading for a couple reasons. Carmack's perspicacity has always impressed me, even back in the day of .plan files. You get the sense he's got all the angles covered. It reminds me of the discussion we had recently regarding web browser games and casual games versus high-end console games. Here's what Carmack says:

Well, when people think browser-based games, they usually think about what are fairly low-end games, like Java games and Flash games. And there is a market there on the casual gaming sphere. Some people have done fairly well with that but that’s not at all the type of game that “Quake Live” is. “Quake Live” is taking something that at one time was an absolute top-notch, triple-A, very high-end title. And it is still a competitive action game. It’s not necessarily the casual game in terms of what most people would think about a puzzle game or Sudoku or whatever on that.

Sounds like a dream for the hardcasual player. I'm excited to try it myself, but apparently the open beta has lines out the door.

-One more from GSW, an interview about the audio in Flower. The aural component to this game is huge. Each color of flower emits its own chime when you open it, which feeds into the ambient soundtrack perfectly (similar to shooting enemies in Rez). Sound plays a big part in the transportive effect of the game, and it's fascinating to read about the thinking that went into making it work.

PixelVixen707 would have gotten away with it, if not for you meddling kids

Above: Apparently this is not a photograph.

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Some excellent detective work by Simon Carless: It seems solid games blogger PixelVixen707 is a fictional construct, part of some ARG promoting something that has yet to be disclosed. If this is true, I have three reactions.

First, that's pretty awesome. Can't imagine the planning and dedication it takes to execute a stunt of this magnitude. I can't even successfully call out of work sick when I just want to sleep in.

Second, in the future I'll be sure to dig into the personal lives of any and all games writers for fear of this scenario happening again. Frankly, I never read the the post in question, "The Brink," because it started off with the sentence "I love my boyfriend" and then next thing I knew I was asleep with the keyboard imprinted in my face. I guess it turned into some kind of allegedly real-life survival horror scenario.

Last, whoever's actually been writing these posts about video games should keep doing it. They're good!

Update: Simon cracked the case. It's marketing for a book that comes out next year.

Do readers want intelligent games criticism? Do writers?

Mike Walbridge interviewed me for his latest "Game Anthropologist" column over at GameSetWatch. I thank him for including my rambling, incoherent thoughts alongside insights from some heavy hitters, including N'Gai Croal from Newsweek, Kieron Gillen from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and Shawn Elliott from 1up.com. The subject: The state of intelligent games criticism.

Without knowing how much was left on the cutting room floor, I get the impression that nobody is too sanguine about the state of the art. Of the writers interviewed, most contribute to fairly popular, mainstream paper-and-ink publications. Yet, to a man, it seems like we all see our blogs as the only place we can write about games the way we really want to.

N'Gai says all the interesting writing is being done online. Leigh says her blog is the outlet for her voice (which, presumably, means that Kotaku and Variety are not). Shawn says his blog is a place for him to try writing about games as it should be done (again, implying that Ziff-Davis publications aren't). I feel the same way. Although the quote wasn't used in the piece, I said as much to Mike -- that Insult Swordfighting is the place I can say what I actually want to say.

That's strange. Writing for publications as diverse as Kotaku, Newsweek, the Phoenix, and Games for Windows, and we all feel like -- what? Like we're not serving our readers as best we could? What's the implication here? Are we speaking the softest into the biggest megaphones? Do we think the larger audiences are somehow unready for the brilliance we're slinging on the side? If I didn't know better, I'd think this signaled contempt for the readership.

But that's not the case. If anything, this article makes it clear that most of us have faith that things are heading in the right direction, slowly but inexorably. For one thing, you do have to keep your audience in mind when you're writing for a magazine or a newspaper. You have to remember who you're working for. I see the typical Phoenix reader not as a career gamer, so it doesn't make sense to try to talk to them on that level. Instead, I try to talk put the game in a context they'd understand, focusing on things like story and theme when possible.

Am I sure that I've got this hypothetical reader pegged? No. It's a question of intuition more than anything else. But it's always at the forefront of my mind when I write for the Phoenix. Years from now, I think that reader will have much more of an intimate relationship with games, and the style of review will be different at the time. Still, on a blog, that question never comes up. You write what you want, and the readers either come or they don't. Usually, they don't.

You can't ignore the hard numbers. People want newsbites and they want review scores. Web users just don't want to read long, involved essays. As readers migrate from print to the Web, savvy publishers are going to continue to break their content down into easily digestable chunks of fast facts. I'm not suggesting that this indicates a dumbing down of the general population -- it may even be the opposite, as more and more people get online -- but writers and readers may be at odds as far as what they want criticism to look like. And in every case when such a conflict arises, the readers will win. (As they should!)

Of course, there is still an audience for this stuff. People do read The Brainy Gamer and Save the Robot -- just not in the numbers they read IGN or Gamespot. When 1up editors like Shawn Elliott and Jeremy Parish explore the studio space in their personal blogs, they're reaching readers, too. The level of discourse in games coverage is higher than it's ever been, even if you have to hunt for it a little bit. But even that is starting to change. Mike's article is evidence of that.

It won't happen overnight. If good writers are committed to improving the quality of all writing, then there's really no other choice but to keep at it and hope our efforts bubble up through our blogs and into the "real" publications. We have to do this. We're writers.

What's wrong with Guitar Hero III?

Chris Dahlen has a theory:

If you rock hard enough to score an encore, you notice that the crowd is roaring, and then you look over the fence and you see – a cop car! Someone called the cops! Except they’re clapping too! You’re such a hit that even the police don’t have the heart to stop the show. The long-fought war between the pigs and the kids has finally ended. This was the first in a series of wrong notes that left me with a clammy, phony feeling by the end of the career mode...

...Guitar Hero III has no message, no heart, and no edge. It doesn’t make knowing winks about old Boston rock clubs or out-of-town gig traditions; it’s more like a fratboy yell.

I think he's right, although it's not something I ever much thought about. The first Guitar Hero was the indie breakthrough -- a lean, mean labor of love developed in a short time on hardly any budget. Guitar Hero II was like Nevermind -- the shot across the cultural bow that announced the arrival of a major player.

Guitar Hero III? It's bloated, 1977-era Led Zeppelin, buckling under its own weight.

The largesse that allowed Activision to secure so many ostensibly better songs for the series' third installment also, paradoxically, led to the drop in quality. The concern was securing "cool" music and arranging the set lists accordingly, which is why the note charts vary so wildly in quality and difficulty. This was never the case when Harmonix made the game. Their goal was to make you feel like you were playing the song, and if the song was difficult, so be it.

Neversoft seems to have used a different approach. The difficulty isn't grounded in anything organic, and feels arbitrary. There's still a lot in the game for people to like, as evidenced by its massive popularity, but there's no question it's a departure. What happened to Guitar Hero, man? It used to be about the music!