Avant Noise

Saw Biosphere at Mutek a while back, and I'm finally getting around to finishing writing this.

The show was excellent. It was low-key, often percussionless electronic music played loud with a large video backdrop by an artist. The art was... odd. It was a series of video clips taken on subways. But they were processed to show different time slices at different horizontal coordinates. So people sort of "stretched" through their walking. There were some other scenes, but I really want to talk about music right now.

Before Biosphere performed, there were two other artists performing: nAnalog, and Tiny Little Elements. nAnalog were the more interesting of the preceding two, because their visual presentation was more interesting. It was largely mechanical sounding noise modulated into more synth-sounding chord structures.

But TLE... Eesh. It was atonal, arhytmic, and VERY mechanical. The visual presentation was simple (which is often good) but looked unprofessional to my Game Programmer's eye. For example, it wasn't V-synced, so you could see tearing in the image as the computer redrew its frames. Diagonal lines that were to erase what was beneath them erased bounding rectangles around them, instead of just their shape. It looked cheap.

So without a good video presentation to occupy my mind, I was able to concentrate on the Avant Noise. Not sure if that's the correct term for it, but it sounds good. :) It just didn't appeal to me on any level. I think I'm pretty good at finding the music in compositions, even if I don't like them. Sometimes the music is buried very deeply in layers of droning synth, as in Biosphere's Shen Zhou. Music might be hidden in the interactions between repetitive layers, as in much of Orbital's work.

Try as I might, I could not penetrate the maze of bleeps, blips, and static. I tried hard, as when they were done, I felt tired from the effort. About 40 minutes in, a 4/4 house beat faded in. About 5 minutes later, they were done. The beat didn't match anything, it was just there. Later, I almost felt insulted. After inflicting seemingly structureless sound on me for 40 minutes, a beat just didn't mean anything.

As a funny epilogue, Biosphere came up next. The video hadn't started yet, and it was dark in the auditorium. From the speakers came 5-second long bass waves. They started with one very low note, and added layers of tones, then subtracted them. It was a very complex sound that was quite beautiful. After about 5 of these, I noticed that each wave was identical. After about 10 of them, they stopped. The video artist came on stage, then the show began. He was just testing the sound system! But Biosphere's sound test was a much more interesting listen than anything in the whole Tiny Little Elements show.

God of War

I just finished God of War on Hard mode. I hadn't played it before, I just started on Hard because I'm the video game equivalent of a masochist. Other examples: I play Gradius V and Ikaruga without continuing. I started Amplitude on Brutal, and got all the way through Insane, include the last bonus track and the hidden extra bonus track. I played the Killing Gameshow on the Amiga. Heheheh.

Anyway, God of War is every bit as excellent as all the hype would have you believe. David Jaffe was the director for the game. He was also lead designer on Twisted Metal 1, 2, and Black. His talent for producing games in which gameplay comes first is legendary, and God of War is no exception. There are a lot of reviews that will explain how brilliant the graphics are, how great the sound is, and how much fun it is to play. I will instead concentrate on what I think are the little details that set this game apart from most others.

First and foremost, there is the gameplay. The game centers on its combat system; there is some platforming to do, but that part feels like a means to get from one combat area to the next. A good combat engine of this type must engage the player's brain to be interesting. If the player can just mash the attack button endlessly without thinking, it gets boring very quickly. GoW's combat is in the tradition of Streets of Rage II (All praise be to its name) from the Genesis. It has a simple combo system, whereby continually hitting square results in a string of different attacks. You can switch to triangle during a square sequence for a big hit. The brain engagement comes between the hits. While each move is being executed, the player needs to evaluate the enemies' new positions to determine if the next move in the combo should be done. The player can change the direction of the next attack, add in a heavy strike, or continue with the normal combo, or combinations of these. Normal mode requires less of this than Hard mode, which brings me to the next point.

This game has properly implemented difficulty settings. Normal mode was designed for the average gamer to play and enjoy, without running into frustrating points. This gives it mass appeal. I want more challenge from a game, so I chose Hard. It was often very punishing, but that was what I wanted. Once I finished Hard and tried God mode, I got what I expected. I tried about 10 times to complete the first battle, and failed. Part of that was because I was being greedy so I could get as many red orbs as possible. :)

GoW has an excellent story, and good characterizations. I can't say much without giving away important plot elements. Kratos' character develops through the cut-scenes, and is present in every move he does in combat. Very few video games have had characters whose stories I cared about. From the first few moments after starting the game for the first time, I wondered how Kratos' story would end.

There is no harvesting. In Devil May Cry, you could kill the same monsters over and over and over, and keep getting more red orbs for it. So anytime I got stuck in DMC, I had this nagging feeling that if I had spent more time being bored at the previous fight, I would have more orbs and more power, and might be able to get past the problem area. GoW only has one place that has infinitely spawning enemies, and they eventually stop giving you red orbs if you kill enough of them. There are many hidden chests with extra orbs, so you can get more for exploring. You can also decide whether to kill enemies in ways that get you more orbs. For example, there is an enemy type that you can kill with the minigame and get health from them. If you kill them normally, you get more red orbs. So squeezing more orbs out of the game is a matter of PLAYING the game the way it was meant to be played, not abusing it.

The Interface works well. This is a small point, but an important one that reduces frustration. If you fail a spot too many times, the game asks if you want to switch to Easy mode. This is a nice option for players who accidentally chose a level too hard for them but only find out late in the game; they can continue the game without having to start over and select Easy. Because of this, the game can save the difficulty into the save file, so you never have to check the options page to make sure you're still on the right setting. Also, when it asks if you want to switch to Easy, it defaults to "no." This means that if you're stuck at a difficult place and are mashing X to hurry up and try again, you won't accidentally switch to Easy.

The things you unlock for completing the game are cool. You get God mode, Challenge of the Gods, several videos talking about the making of the game, more background on the characters, etc.

The game is rated "M," and rightly so. There is very graphic, brutal violence, and some female nudity. But neither feels gratuitous to me in GoW. This warrants an entire post, as I feel that violence in games is not an simple issue. In the case of GoW, the violence is an integral part of both the character and the story, so it seems well-placed.

Recommended: 5 stars out of 5
Definitely not for children.

Def Jam: Fight For New York

Okay!

I've now put in about 5-6 hours with DJ:FFNY (PS2 version). I tried this game since several online reviews of Urban Reign say I should play this instead. The short version: I instantly didn't like it, but I gave it many hours to improve. It DID in fact improve. I had much more fun with the game during my closing hour or two, once I had learned how reversals and other complexities worked. But it still wasn't really fun.

The long version:
DJ:FFNY is a very stiff wrestling-based fight game. I say wrestling-based since most of the really damaging moves are grapples. I say stiff because the controls don't have the fluidity I have come to love in Namco fighting games.

Character animations during the fights are silly and clownlike. It seems odd to me that a game with an "M" rating and the important four-letter words in it would do this. The animations limit the game's ability to live up to its "hardcore" street image.

The health bar is weird: emptying your opponent's health bar does NOT knock him out. It is a two-tiered health bar: there's the max health, and the current health. Each hit knocks about half the inflicted damage off the max health. The only way to score a KO is to do a special move while your opponent is in the "danger" zone, which is about the last centimeter of the health bar. So you beat on your opponent until he's in danger, then try to get in a team grapple with the crowd, use a weapon, a signature move, or a Blazin' move. This just feels wrong to me, though I did get used to it.

Blazin' moves. Hmm, where to start. Over time, if you stay in a fight and don't run around, your momentum meter fills. When it's full you wiggle the right stick, and you go into Blazin' mode. Grapple your opponent, and hit the right stick in a direction to select one of 4 Blazin' moves. These are 15 second long choreographed attacks that cannot be stopped once started. Three things suck about Blazin' moves. When you first go into Blazin' mode, the whole fight stops for your dude to yell (unless you're playing multiplayer); it stops for about 3-4 seconds. Second, once you start the move, there's nothing for you to do but wait. Third, for them to have maximum impact for the player, controller rumble is almost exclusively reserved for these; the rest of the fight feels "light" due to the lack of rumble feedback in the controller.

Okay, I was starting to have a bit of fun with the game, when the 2v2 team fights showed up. Eesh. Once player A and C are in a grapple, players B and D cannot touch them. It feels more like 2 simultaneous 1v1 fights, where the people involved can switch periodically. There are none of the elegant teamwork mechanics that can be found in Urban Reign. Yes, there's a double-team grapple, but it's hard to execute, and just feels like another scripted animation.

After several of these 2v2 fights, I gave up on the game, as it just isn't fun. I feel there are rules governing the fight, which seems silly given it is supposed to be a no-holds-barred street fight.

Oh yeah. There's a load of licensed music, real rappers playing characters in a well-voiced but rather silly story, and other general EA Games features. None of that can save the game since the basic fighting engine is weak. The fighting is complex enough, it just isn't fun.

Not Recommended. 2 1/2 stars out of 5.