So I got a chance to see a Kinect in action today, although I didn’t play myself. Here are some impressions.

1. The whole thing was technically more impressive than I had thought it would be. No finger tracking, but [once it decided which person to track,] it looked smooth and pretty accurate. A lot smoother than the demo I saw last year.
2. One cool touch is that the Kinect swivels upward when booting. It was unaccountably impressive, although I don’t know if it’s technically necessary. It somehow makes the thing look intelligent.
3. Safety warnings? Three of them? (Maybe it was only two, but it reminds me precisely of the Wii)
4. Except for graphics and input system, the included games are early 80’s arcade designs, just like all those Wii games. Good party games, not much else.
5. Well, let me amend that statement. There are genius games in the simple early 80’s arcade style. But not many. You can count the games that outlived that era on one hand.
6. And there are innovative ways to incorporate Kinect technology into a primarily gamepad-based game. For example, Johnny Lee’s head-tracking technology is possible for single player Kinect games. But coming up with new ideas is hard, and it’s not something that happens in the game industry much. I think Johnny Lee works for XBox now, so there’s some hope. But only a little, because I think the bottom line is that new gameplay doesn’t sell as well as copies of existing gameplay.
7. All in all, I don’t have much hope that the cool tech in the Kinect will be used to create much more than copies of Wii games. I hope I’m wrong.

Spirit Tracks is “Zelda for kids”.

On the one hand, Zelda was originally for kids. It’s just that I’m not a kid any more. I like Zelda, but when a sequel comes out, I want to see a new take on the old formula. That was the high point of Twilight Princess (though it wasn’t very high—it wasn’t as original as Ocarina of Time). I mean, It’s cool that Zelda is finally an NPC in Spirit Tracks. But she’s basically Navi, reminding me of things I already know; and have known for the last two decades. Actually, she’s more like the fairy from Majora’s Mask (Twingli? Zwingli?), in that she also has an annoying personality in addition to giving chatty reminders. It’s a pretty good game, but it assumes you haven’t seen it all before. If you have played another Zelda, there are some changes, but it’s overwhelmingly a Safe Sequel.

Games are largely software, so sometimes you don’t need to change the narrative. Instead you get improvements in graphics, usability, scope or level design. See for example the Elder Scrolls series. But Zelda technology and usability haven’t improved since Wind Waker, and that was small and incremental over Ocarina of Time, and THAT was because they were solving all new problems in 3D. In this case, this is not Wind Waker 2.1. It’s just Wind Waker 1.0, DS, 2nd release. Cool if you’re 13, boring if you’re 31.

On the other hand, there are some real problems with this game. It’s formulaic: there are four sections, unveiled discretely one at a time. You never get to visit two screens worth of the next section while exploring the current one (the 90s Zeldas did this; it makes exploration more interesting). The exploration isn’t as organic, because there is such a huge distinction between travelling segments and town segments, as well as town segments and dungeon segments. Because of the huge travelling distinction, you are unlikely to be walking by a place and notice that you now have the tools to get there. It’s all explicit backtracking. I guess they wanted you to use the note-taking feature the DS makes possible.

On the gripping hand, you could look at most changes as just .. changes. They’re there. They’re kind of what I asked for, but .. uh .. they’re not better. Just different. For example, the side quests are not collecting random things in the overworld (no overworld, see). They’re fetch quests for people. There are only two things to find in dungeons, the boss key and a new weapon. Specific obstacles are super telegraphed: there is ONE specific structure that you can swing on, and it always looks exactly the same. That’s good for game design, bad for interestingness.

The dungeon puzzles are pretty good. I would say better than Phantom Hourglass, but that’s also because there aren’t any more repetitious segments: the dungeons are better designed for mobile play. I was finishing my dissertation while playing Spirit Tracks, and you can solve a floor or so of a dungeon in 20-30 minutes, then put the game down. The dungeons are designed so that a solved floor can be mostly skipped, so it’s easy to come back the next day and continue.

Overall, the game is good, probably higher quality than Phantom Hourglass, despite being even less creative. Its overall structure is a formulaic copy, and you probably won’t enjoy it much unless you can pour hours and hours in to explore every little cranny. Even then you won’t enjoy it a lot unless this is the first time you’ve done that for a Zelda game. And I already did that for Link’s Awakening, which, by the way, is also much better designed. The bottom line is that it just makes me want to switch from my DS to my old GBA, which now has Link’s Awakening DX permanently embedded in it.

Actually, I think I’ll go do that.

Post-script: You know how I said that you need to pour a lot of time into Spirit Tracks to get real enjoyment out of it? Isn’t that what Nintendo is all about: making games that are fun to pick up and play without a personal investment? So why are so many of their games NOT like that? Zelda hasn’t been pick-up-and-play fun since it switched to 3D. Anyway, come to think of it, maybe that’s just my bias from playing the 2D ones as a kid. Maybe even they weren’t that good. See? This is what I hate about bad sequels: they make you doubt your enjoyment of the earlier games. I wish we could declare the era of Games As Software over and tell game designers to stop making sequels.

Crisis Core is “Dragon Quest 7, the action-RPG.”

Crisis Core isn’t especially good, it’s just impressive. The graphics are as good as bad PS2 graphics (or really bad Wii graphics. You know they’re out there.) They must have used the models/mocap/expressions from the PS2 Final Fantasys, because Zack looks kind of like a male Riku. Seriously. Kind of sounds like one too.

Crisis Core is fun button-mashing, but pretty mindless. There might be some strategy behind the bewildering array of twirling numbers and random chances, but it’s not necessary to find it. It’s fun enough to grind that if there IS strategy, I’d have to go out of my way to find it. In any event, so much is random that I wouldn’t know where to start. Crisis Core is Dragon Quest 7, the action-RPG—right down to the appeal to nostalgia, which is not normally such a big part of a Final Fantasy game.

So: impressive graphics, fun but mindless button-mashing. Fine, but what do graphics give you in 20 years? King’s Quest V. You have to back it up with gameplay or you get a dated relic. Button-mashing is fun, but what do you get in 20 hours? Sick of it. So this game is optional unless you’re morbidly fascinated with how far the PSP hardware can be pushed, or how far Zack can be retconned into the ENTIRE FF7 world. Or, I guess, you might just want to buy a PSP game. That’s why I bought it, I was in Redmond for 3 months with nothing but a PSP and a DS. But I finished Dragon Quest 4 and not Crisis Core.

OK, here are some miscellaneous comments. The review is over, I just thought I’d share them:

Little did I suspect, Crisis Core introduces the super streamlined no-towns-no-shops system that FF13 uses. So, uh, that’s OK I guess. I don’t have any strong feelings about it, except to say that I feel guilty side-questing from a save point in the middle of Mako reactor that’s about to be trashed by You-Know-Who*. Doesn’t stop me from doing it though.

There are tons of cameos from FF7, and the story is somehow related. I kind of didn’t get the story in FF7 very well (there was like 5 years between playing disc 1 and 2 for me), so it’s super confusing. It’s fun, being confused, so I’m going with it, but I have to admit that it’s really just standard Anime Confusion Tactics. There’s not really any depth to it.

I just found action button dot net a couple of weeks ago. It’s a bunch of contrarian reviews that hold video games to very high standards. They aren’t afraid to rate bad games highly if they have a gem of an idea. One thing I’d like to steal from them is the one-line summary at the beginning of reviews. So I did.

*Not Voldemort**.
**Not Chomsky.

I liked Uncharted in spite of myself. Maybe it’s that the main character is named Nathan. Maybe it’s just a good adventure story. Maybe it’s because Naughty Dog codes with a REPL. Maybe it’s that they’re just one of those groups that makes everybody else look like amateurs. (Hideo Kojima is another, though I think Kojima’s secret is a combination of mad genius and huge budgets, not a REPL.)

Like Kojima’s work, even though I enjoy Uncharted, I have reservations about the total move-likeness of the whole thing. Naughty Dog basically filmed a movie, papered over everything with digital meshes, and then put a game in with it. Isn’t that a waste of a game? On the other hand, Hitchcock was a genius, and his movies (the ones I’ve seen anyway) are basically stage plays. So maybe there’s a place for imitating other media. (Usual disclaimer: I know nothing about movies, but Hitchcock’s are among the best I’ve seen.)

Maybe the reason I feel uncomfortable about Uncharted’s movie nature is that it rips off the “brainless adventure” movie genre, eg Indiana Jones. These kinds of movies are fun to watch but not particularly intelligent. Here’s the problem: in comparison to other video games, Uncharted’s writing and acting is nuanced and intelligent. But it’s a nuanced and intelligent copy of an adventure movie. Unlike, say, Mass Effect, whose story is just 5 concatenated episodes of Star Trek, it doesn’t copy a B-movie from an ‘intelligent’ genre. But it does copy an A-movie from a ‘dumb’ genre. If games are serious about being narrative and not just procedural, then Uncharted is a sign that they have a long way to go: the best story tellers in the industry have just moved up from copying B-movies to A-movies**.

Besides Indiana Jones, It reminded me of Monkey Island. Was it the questionable historical accuracy*? A female lead named Elaine/Elena? The last boss is a QTE? The parallels are striking. Erm, well, the last bit of Monkey Island wasn’t a QTE, but it was so fiddly as to be the moral equivalent.

My main complaint is that there is too much shooting. I decided this about a third of the way through and suffered until about half-way through. Then I remembered that the switch labelled “easy” should fix that. I tried it, but it didn’t. It didn’t even make much of a difference. Maybe I had to fire fewer shots per guy, but there were still like a hundred guys in every screen. After a while my ears get tired of gunfire and I definitely switched weapons a few times based solely on volume.

So basically yeah. Uncharted reminds me of a cross between Monkey Island and Indiana Jones, plus there is a fun game in there. I liked it, and that’s a testament to Naughty Dog’s level of craftmanship, because it’s not normally the kind of thing I like. They did this with Jak on the PS2 as well. Jak is BASICALLY a cross between GTA and Mario, but it’s actually super fun. Why? I can’t tell. They’re basically just really good at what they do.

*There are no elaborate Spanish forts on obscure Pacific islands off the coast of Chile. My dad’s been to most of those islands and I asked him.

**I don’t want to leave Kojima out. He moved up from B-movies (Metal Gear Solid, arguably) to making absurdist Metal Gear games about how Konami won’t let him stop making Metal Gear games. I don’t even know what the movie equivalent of THAT is.

In my text file where I actually write blog posts, this entry has the title “Metroid Prime 3: The problems". I didn’t like Metroid”’ very much (see: note on terminology below). It’s not really worse than mediocre—I had some fun, I hated it less at the end than the beginning—but it poisoned my memory of Metroid Prime. Now I’m not sure I really liked Metroid’ as much as I thought I did. I’ll have to go back and play it to make sure.

(Come to think of it, this is the same reason I disliked Mario Sunshine.)

So anyway, what follows is actually a rant about all the bad things in Metroid”’. You just read the review. I guess if you don’t like rants, you can stop here, read the review again, and leave.

1. What kind of game has load time for the TITLE SCREEN.
2. A title screen that’s just a bitmap?!
3. Plus: “This game requires the Nunchuk", even when the Nunchuk is already attached. It’s like playing a PC game that isn’t even entirely sure whether you have a computer attached to the monitor.

1. OK, the big thing is: Wiimote shooting doesn’t work. It looked like a good idea in the commercials, but that’s because I didn’t stop to work out the actual mechanism. I just assumed it would like a PC mouse/keyboard FPS, except more natural. Turns out that doesn’t work, because, on the PC, the mouse moves the viewport directly. This works because the mouse can be picked up and repositioned. The Wiimote cannot, so Metroid”’’s compromise is to combine aiming and turning: shots follow the cursor, but when the cursor is near the edge of the screen, you also turn.

   There are problems though: you turn slowly, so you really need to switch turning to ‘advanced’ in order to survive. But the reason it’s called ‘advanced’ is that now you turn whenever the cursor isn’t *precisely* at the center of the screen. So: here’s an example interaction. (1) You walk (straight) down a hall, keeping the cursor aimed at the center of the screen. (2) Enemies jump out. (3) You move the cursor to aim at them, causing you to also turn. (4) The enemies are now at the center of the screen, so you return the cursor there.

   This is annoying, but at least it’s playable. Basic shooting is now into turning until the enemy is centered on the screen. That’s exactly how modern FPSes work, except that here you turn by training your body to aim EXACTLY at the center of the screen, and then darting the cursor in the direction of the enemy before centering it again.

   This was originally the case on the PC too. Originally, of course, FPSes, that is, FPS, that is, DOOM, were played only with the keyboard. Then, fresh off their success at designing a mouse-only isometric-3D action-RPG (Ultima 8, with extra jumping!), the evil UI designers at Origin were the first* to try a mouse-only first-person RPG with Ultima Underworld. (Two of them actually, there was also Shadow Caster. I never finished the first level of the shareware version, if that tells you anything.)

   Fortunately, other people eventually tried making FPSes. I don’t know of any PC games with a visible pointer + edge-moving after 1997. (But I don’t play FPSes either, so that doesn’t mean much.)

   All in all, It’s NOT better than mousing, as I had imagined, and it’s only a little better than dual-stick gamepads, which wouldn’t be a problem except…

2. Metroid”’ is an FPS, at least most of the time. You can pretend it’s not, by turning lock-on back on, but it’s not that same as the early games with their emphasis on navigation (more on that later).
3. Oh right, that stuff is broken now too. Remember how jumping in Metroid’ would tilt the view down just enough to see the next platform? It was a first-person game where you could actually jump! You have to do that yourself now, or else you’ll spend a lot of time missing jumps.
4. The accuracy is bad at the screen edges. Conceivably the terrible accuracy could be better if you had a giant TV and could sit further from the screen and still see things. But then…
5. Your huge TV will highlight the low resolution and crummy graphics. It was OK in 2002 but you’d think things would improve with time. Oh wait I forgot. The top-rated Wii game for 2009 was the top-rated Gamecube game for 2002. SO MUCH FOR IMPROVEMENT.
6. Wii gimmicks. They super don’t work if you’re too close to the TV. They’re worthless anyway and when they DON’T WORK it adds insult to injury. It’s even worse when they occur at critical parts of the game, like that one time where you have 5 minutes to fix some stuff and re-insert a plug. I got through the fixing mini-game, but I was afraid I’d die because I couldn’t get the plug to re-insert. At least it wasn’t as bad as the insta-kill in Uncharted if you couldn’t shake the controller fast enough when those monsters jumped you.

1. Level design. The level design seems worse all over, but I’m not an expert, so maybe I’m just being biased. One specific place was the introduction of the metroids. Retro made it almost scary in Metroid’, was uninspired in Metroid'’, but this time they messed it up good. First, you walk through a maze of corridors with contained Metroids. It’s a real maze too, the kind that seems boring and uniform but with constant wrong turns. (This is the opposite of what you want in an FPS, where you want interesting and twisty but actually with only one correct path.) If you scan the metroid cages, the computer says “Man, these cages will totally stop working if the power goes off.". When you reach the end, does the power go off catastrophically? No, there’s a plug for YOU to pull. Why pull it? Well, there’s a power-up behind one of these power-hungry cages. It’s not even that great of a power-up. I don’t WANT to pull the plug. But I have to, because it’s the required key for the next area. Way to remove the suspense, guys. What, is this Bioshock now? I’m not looking for a moral dilemma, an investigation of agency in videogames here. This is a thriller. You know, a ripoff of Aliens? Making ME pull the plug ruins the suspense and excitement. Plus it turns out these metroids are mostly harmless if you run fast enough. So that sucks.
2. Overall level design is paint-by-numbers imitation of previous Metroids: 4 areas with two divisions each. But there are clumsy mistakes, like forgetting to mix up the order. Instead you see Norion, Bryyo 1, Bryyo 2, Skytown 1…etc. With some backtracking thrown in. But never anything like …foretracking. I don’t know, it seems like a word that needs to exist. You know, like that time in Super Metroid where you run through a pipe in Maridia an hour into the game. Or the way you visit the dark world as a rabbit in Link to the Past. Or the way, in Link’s Awakening, you see Writely’s house two hours before you can get up there and four hours before you can do anything useful there. This is the stuff you should copy! Not the fact that Maridia has two distinct zones.
3. Backtracking seems to take a lot longer and to be more annoying, but by this time it’s probably that I’m so annoyed by all the other parts. On the other hand, it could be because they were so interested in making interesting coiled room architecture, they forgot that this makes the map impossible to navigate. This is a problem mainly in Skytown.
4. Even more on the backtracking thing: MAYBE why backtracking worked in the previous Metroid games is because the majority of it was not really backtracking. It was following a different path through the same level, just parallel (or perpendicular) to the one you followed last time. But there wasn’t much “super obvious thing put behind a barrier you don’t have the key for yet". There was a little, but it was mostly optional, usually hidden as a Secret instead. There definitely wasn’t any “oh- stop the game! we missed something (which is super required). time to go back to area 14, pick it up, then come back". Even Metroid Prime did this (though not as much as its sequels), so I think it’s a weakness of Retro Studios. Come to think of it, this could be one reason why Shadow Complex flows so much better than recent Metroids. Not a whole lot of backtracking there either.
5. Still more on backtracking: Retro realised probably half-way through Metroid'’ that they had overdone the backtracking. They didn’t stop doing it though! Metroid”’ is basically a fractal backtrack. Practically each room involves backtracking: you enter, find that the next door is locked. You don’t have to figure out how to GET THERE (more common in earlier Metroids), you have to figure out how UNLOCK IT. This involves some usually fun noodling around (unless it involves platforming, see above). Once you’ve got the key in Metroid”’, there is almost always a cute little slide straight back to the door. This is true of larger backtracking missions, where you have to slog back to a place you couldn’t get to before, grab a new weapon, and come back to use the new weapon to open a door. There’s usually a shortcut from the new weapon back to where you need to use it for the first time. That’s nice, but there’s a better solution: less backtracking!

1. I do have to say that using your ship as a warp mechanism and then disabling it for part of the story without telling you beforehand is pretty stupid. Especially the Dialog Box that pops up, it’s practically stolen from Windows: “You must drop the cargo if you want to warp from here. OK?” Yes | No. No explanation of what happens to said cargo. Does it go to the target? Does it return to where I got it (forcing me to backtrack all over again)? Does it drop it into the void, breaking the game? Does it drop it at the place where I warped from, forcing me to return on foot at some point? Like all hapless users confronted with a Dialog Box, I chose No and changed my strategy.
2. Sequelitis: Let’s see, a metroid’s original weakness was ice, followed by missiles. In Metroid Fusion, it was ice missiles and infected/zombie metroids. Now we have infected buffed dimension-shifting metroids and their weakness is (1) fire (2) ice missiles (3) fire again. But lots of games have this problem.
3. At least the bosses are still pretty cool. Well, except for auto-aim not working on bosses. My attempt to de-FPS Metroid”’ falls flat on bosses. But OK, it requires more skill. No hard feelings. (Not that many)

1. Well, actually, the possessed mid-bosses are lame for multiple reasons.
2. First, they’re introduced at the beginning of the game. That means they should be the main boss fight of each world.
3. Second, they’re introduced as allies, but they look inexplicably evil, right from the beginning. It’s either bad casting (they should have looked good initially) or bad story planning (they should have been evil from the start). (I vote for number two, but whatever.)
4. Combine those two, and you’ve got the opposite problem of Metal Gear Solid: here are these supposed friends (or at least colleagues), which Samus is forced to kill because they are possessed. But there’s no real connection—Samus can’t really acknowledge them in the current Metroid framework, much less feel bad about mercilessly cutting them down. The enemy members of Foxhound got a eulogy and a moment of silence from Snake. You’d think Samus would at least provide the moment of silence, since she’s so good at that.
5. Also, these mid-boss fights are just terrible. The mecha fight is OK, although it’s a simplified copy of the mech boss from Metroid Prime'’, but the first is just a shoot-em-up. There’s not even much dodging. THEN, the shape-shifter is a copy of the shape-shifter main boss we just beat on the last planet, except that instead of cool new shapes, she shifts to the forms of the previously possessed mid-bosses (plus Samus). So it’s a double-recycled boss fight!

1. Oh, right, they have second-form metroids for the first time since Metroid 2. They look pretty cool in 3D. But they take like 100 shots to kill.
2. Factoid: enemies killed: 721. Shots fired: 210,308 (the original didn’t have the comma, they forgot to put it in). That’s about 300 shots per enemy. SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE.

Note: Metroid’ is pronounced as in math: “Metroid Prime". That makes Metroid”’ a much easier to type equivalent of Metroid Prime 3. OK?
*Ultima Underworld might not have been the first. It’s the first that I know about. The Ultima series also introduced the first mouse-only isometric-2D normal-RPG (Ultima 7). Lord British really liked mice, I guess.