#urnow

This week we continue on in our quest for sympathetic(Or baring that at least understandable) ne’er-do-well. For all it's features and flaws, I love Bioshock, the atmosphere is well done, and the story is unique by today standard. Rapture is a beautiful and horrifying dystopia. When the player is introduce to the city, the antagonist Andrew Ryan is introduced as a complete tyrant, the “Bloody King” of rapture.

It was not always so however. As the player can go on to discover following the audio diary trails, he started off hating everything about despotism. He lived he early life in Russia, but moved to America to escape communism, citing that the fruit of hard labor belongs to the laborer. He then became disenchanted with America during the era of Roosevelt's new deal, which was merely a re-purposed form of socialism, finally setting of to form rapture when Hiroshima was bombed

He sought to create a utopia for his views, which where very close to but not totally objectivism. Where there where no censors for artists, no lawfully enforced moral compass and no one to take the profits of those who succeed and redistribute the wealth to help the failures. Not necessarily everybody's exact view on an ideal economic system, but since he paid for the construction of the entire city, and all of its denizens had the option as to accept is invite or not, he can hardly be faulted at the point of it's creation.

The gradual decline in his integrity is showcased throughout his fall. He once owned a large parcel of private land that he used to forested retreats, when the government attempted to nationalize it he burnt the whole forest down to spite the government. By the fall of rapture he had stopped so low as to nationalize on of Fontaine Futuristics. To be fair it was the company that was owned and run by the biggest crook in the city, who had caused many of the other issues facing rapture to date. The story of Andrew Ryan is one of an absolute fall from grace. He was faced with a choice, and chose to forsake his values for what he believed was the greater good. He made choices that, when seen from the outside is a terrible testament to going against your own values. But if you follow along his line of reason, he becomes a much more sympathetic character.

Game Mechanics: Get a Life

I am going to mix and match a bit on this one. Originally it was going to be a pure rant upon limited lives in game, but I found it impossible to separate it from the game over mechanic. They are not mutually exclusive, but can be found together more often than not.

They share a common root in that they were a tool for gathering up many a weeks allowance in the arcades. But it also imparted a sense of reward for improvement. If you were better, you could play longer and get farther in the game, if you were terrible, you ran out of money fast. Now being able to breeze through an entire game after only playing a few time was less than ideal from a game makers perspective, you would quickly lose interest and they would not get all your hard earned money. So a fragile equilibrium was reached; they made games hard to take your money and you played them for the glory.

Lives limit the attempts before a full restart of either the level or game is required. While I don't think restarting the whole game is necessary, it is nice to have a punishment for mindlessly bashing your face against a problem hoping to get lucky. Think about how much more thought and tactics you would put into a given level in any recent fps if dying 3 times before you get your next checkpoint restarted the level.

Now game overs are a bit more commonplace now that lives used to be, fighting games and RPSs in particular. Fighting games as a whole usually only include in what they themselves call “Arcade Mode” but I am willing to latch on to most any semblance of challenge lately, something akin to clinging to a piece of driftwood after falling from a scuttled boat.

“No fair, stop spiking me! Why do ruin like ruining the game?” This article goes out to anyone who has ever ledge hogged, BXR-ed, bunny hopped, 6 pooled, or any of the other vast array or “cheap-shots” that have been available since the dawn of 2 player gaming. They may not be fun to go against, but they do anything but ruin a game. Playing a game in the way that makes it most likely you win is the best way to advance the metagame of anything you are playing.

Before I go any further I feel compelled to give a short intro to metagame thinking. Anyone who plays a multilayer games uses metagame logic on at least one level. Lets use an example, in a standard game of halo scattered around the level are several “Power Weapons” they are limited in supply but well worth the effort, say the rocket launcher spawn halfway between the two team's starting locations. Now when you first play a map and don't know anything about the spawn locations, you might not fight for the rockets at all, the other team grabs them and blows you up. Fast forward to next round you say, “man getting killed by those rockets sucked, but I bet I could do that to them!” so you run down and meet the whole enemy team, also in a dead sprint to get these rockets, they shoot you, you die, “Damn they had the same plan!”. Third round, noting the pattern of the last 2 rounds, you figure the opponents seem bound and determined to get those rockets as soon a possible, so though you cannot see anyone coming and no in game knowledge says to try this, you fill the hallway leading to the rockets with grenades, suddenly you have netted yourself a few free kills, and a shiny new rocket tube! Sweet I am going to do that every round. Round 4 you throw your grenades, but no kills are had, hmm odd, so you proceed to mosey forward when suddenly you have an elbow in the back of your skull, It would seem that the opponents expected you to take the extra time to throw grenades and used this time to sneak around behind you. Now we have a rock paper scissor effect, where had you used logic from game 2, and simply sprinted forward to get the launcher, you would have grabbed it with plenty of time to spin around and blast the backstabbers with a well placed blast. Now we have a metagame decision, before we do anything at the start of a round we must think “What dose he think I will do?” If you can out think your opponent and guess his moves, you can put yourself at an advantage. I will probably do a more detailed right up of meta game in next weeks mechanics article, but this will suffice for the point of this article.

Now back on topic. Cheap-shots. I am going to use Smash brothers as my main example, but I can guarantee you the logic I am about to use can apply to anything in a game you come across that’s not a straight exploit(wall-hack, aim-bots, glitching to get outside the map). Lets take two groups of friends, Group one will be Gold Team, and Group two will be Red Team. Both will have one friend in the group who has decided to start practice spiking, ledge hogging, and WOPing, they will be Gold and Red leader respectively. The groups will be identical in all regards to start with except that Red Leader will, either through guilt trips by the group or by self imposed handicaps will limit or remove these mechanics from his play style. Seems reasonable no one like being chain grabbed and thrown off the edge and spiked down for a 40% KO. So red team goes on to play and have a merry time. While over at the gold camp, Gold leader ha obtained a definitive edge. People are having a hard time coming back to the edge, they find themselves dieing from bottom KOs at 40 – 80% while gold leader has free reign to return to the stage an dies only at 120% plus. Slowly, Gold team begins to pick up the techniques themselves and the edge Gold leader has dissolves into a level playing field, They all now attempt to fine tune there spiking and learn tricks to make themselves just outside there opponents range while recovering. Both groups are now on a level playing with within the groups, and both groups are having fun playing but they are, in essence playing to different games. And where you to pit these two groups of gamers against one another, we would find the best of the red team being unable to deal with the techniques that they refused to learn or play against coming from the lowest ranks of the gold team. Gold Team Rules!

Red leader did them no favors holding back, the same would happen if a group of halo players refused to ever use a rocket launcher, and thus never learned to doge or aim against against opponents with no such inhibitions. If you never rushed your friends in an RTS, Full economic builds rule the scene, but when you switch to an opponent who has no problem killing you at the 5 min mark if you let them, it will be a complete culture shock, you may have have the best economic play-style, but if you refuse to acknowledge a particular “Cheap” way of winning, you will never advance you view of the game.

I love antagonists, just throwing it out there. Without a proper enemy games can be good, but never exceptional. Villains drive the plot and they move the story. Without Gannondorf, Link would be just some little boy in a skirt, Without Bowser, Mario would just be a plumber with 0 ties to royalty. No Templar order? What do you need assassins for? Villains run the full gambit from seemingly nice guys that spend their free time plotting how best to demolish a rain forest to full on sociopaths that wish to summon their multidimensional overlord to enslave the species. No villain challenge has nothing to separate the heroes from the townsfolk. Seeing as how you spend at least a portion of the game attempting to kill these guys and they do their best to ruin your day, they unjustly have very little love going their way. So I am dedicating one week of every month to showing these antagonists the attention they deserve.

That said, lets delve right into the first ever Villainous Villainy, with Final Fantasy 10. 10 has 3 distinct antagonists that are all stitched into the fabric of the story arch. The recurring theme in this game is no villain thinks he is doing anything inherently evil, simply what is right by their own set of morals. Maester Seymour Guado: This guy gets a lot of hate, and he won't be quite as easy to defend, since he runs the whole marathon of things that angers players. Seymour is an arrogantly good summoner who killed his own father and becomes a nihilist that wants to annihilate the world to save it from suffering - this guy knows how to be villainous. Though to add some depth to his character, he was the first child of a human-guado couple. His father held a prominent position and was pressured into sending his wife and child into exile at Baaj. Remember Baaj? It's that scary temple you end up in at the start of the game and return to for Anima. His mother was unwell and the journey to the stay at this waterlogged temple made things a tad worse. Before she succumbed to her illness she became a faith so her son would have the strength to continue his life ALONE. Yeah, nice message sent there by mother and father alike. His mother died so he could live in the exile imposed by his father, then we call him a bad guy when Seymour kills his dad? I would shake his freakishly big hands. Even when he tries to destroy the world he is doing it from the perspective that he is helping, he just had his morals slightly screwed up from his upbringing. He values the life of others about as much as his father valued his.

Lady Yunalesca: She is hated at least in part, for having one of the tougher story line missions. She is perpetuating the cycle of death and rebirth surrounding her father, Yu Yevon. She actually in her own twisted way is going against her fathers orders to give people this false hope. She was the one that first bore the teachings of Yevon to Bevelle, it was just a set of rules that needed to be followed to stop Sin from crushing a town, and Bevelle took it and made a religion around it. She decided she was going to use her husband as an aeon to fight her father and give the first calm, and stayed as an unsent to continue the process. She may not be doing the right thing by the main characters point of view, but she is not wholly in the wrong either.

The ability to continue games approximately where we left of is ubiquitous in games now. This however, has not always been the case. From quarter consuming arcade machines to next-gen auto saving bonanzas, saving has always changed based on game design and tech limitations.

Now before I get too far ahead of myself I feel I need to make a few base points. Game difficulties scale directly with the frequency and the convenience of saving. This is not an opinion on what it should be, just saying that if you are allowed to save before and after every Battle or puzzle, anyone can bash their face against it enough times till they luck their way through it and save on the other side.( I am looking at you Bioshock, hell you made it easier by saving progress on enemy damage between deaths.) Conversely, the really old games designed to eat your allowance at arcades gave you a token sum of lives and restarted the level when you die and ended the game when you ran outta lives. (Ghost and Ghouls is the example that comes to mind.)

So, now with the premise out of the way, lets take a look at how we went from Super Starfox to Assassins Creed: Brotherhood. Hardware and memory usage had a big part to play in the original implementation of save points, particularly in open world games. You simply did not have the memory to throw around with precise locations of player saves, you cut corners to save memory where you could (ever wonder why the stat cap for most RPGs is 255?) Admittedly computers are less likely to succumb to this, not having to fit everything about a players save onto a memory card freed them up to save things like RTS games mid mission with precise locations of every unit they had. As the consoles have caught up in memory capabilities as to PC's saving in a now wholly stylistic choice.