Tetris and the nature of online gaming

So, I just happened across TetrisFriends.com. I've been climbing the ranks in Sprint 5, Battle 2P and Battle 6P. It's been fun having human opponents to play Tetris against.

But when I lost my first Sprint game, it occurred to me that the experience I had might have been easily generated by an AI. There's very little interaction in the game, as there's no chat and what really matters is how fast you go.

All an AI would have to do would be to slowly increase its speed until I lose, then adjust it up and down to give me good challenges and some wins to keep me coming back. I know it's not all that simple. The people at the site can list their names and join friends lists and such.

But given the simplicity of Tetris (which is one of its main strengths), there really isn't much room for individual strategies. Seeing different tactics used against you is one of the cool things about playing other games against people.

Also, TetrisFriends seems to be rather successful, so there's a large pool of people to play against, which makes sure the difficulty curve is very smooth. While this is in principle a good thing, it makes your opponents rather faceless at the same time.

But then it occurred to me: aren't all online games like this? Except for chatting, which AIs can't replicate yet, couldn't most online game experiences be replicated with AIs?

Well, not really. It depends on the complexity of the game. When you play something like Quake 3, and there's a bot in there, it's really obvious. But Q3 is a 10-year-old game; perhaps with better AI it could work. But then there's the issue of teamwork. Getting in a squad in Killzone 2 and working together with the others yields some very interesting teamwork dynamics. This sort of thing is still beyond the reach of current AI techniques, at least with the limited hardware available to home console games.

But in the future, perhaps AI will advance far enough to give a really good approximation of human behavior in games. What then? There is also the wider question of what happens when AI can replace an even greater range of human behavior? I can imagine people needing to interact with each other less and less, and humanity disappearing through disconnection into a new world of computer sentience. Or maybe the same technology will just better enable people to share their imaginations with each other. We can only speculate at this point.

My apologies for this post turning into a ramble. But that just proves this was written by a person.

Or does it?

Impressions of Bayonetta

I played the Bayonetta demo yesterday for about 15 minutes. I'll just give a quick impression, since I haven't seen enough to do a full commentary.

The game looks and feels very much like Devil May Cry. Not surprising, as some of the DMC people are behind the game. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether or not you like DMC.

The combat feels solid, and the control of the character is well-done. There's a DMC-style boss-heavy mix of things to fight. The dodge function works very well, so you can really do some impressive things. Coupled with Witch Time, which slows time if you do a last-millisecond dodge, you can do some very impressive things.

The graphics are good enough, with decent effects and a passable frame rate. On my PS3, it was running 60 FPS most of the time, but occasionally dropped to 30.

I find it interesting that they chose to give her glasses, but they look cool.

That's as much as I can say in favor of it. Unfortunately, some of the things that bugged me will probably prevent me from playing it further.

For a game that centers on its main character and her looks and style, Bayonetta is not characterized very well. But I don't generally like the characters in action games aimed a the Japanese male 17-24 market. DMC's characters were just as silly in my opinion.

I really dislike having to listen to vocal J-Pop every time I start fighting something. This ruins the atmosphere for me.

The following isn't a game breaker for me, but it is an important feature of the game. It is very consciously mixing sex and violence together. Sure, these things have always gone together, but this game is pretty shameless about it. The title of the demo is "Bayonetta: First Climax," which I thought was just going to be a title. It turns out that many of the verses (scenes are called verses) of the game finish with a boss battle which ends with a hud element telling you to hit two buttons for "Climax."

When you do this, Bayonetta turns her hair into some kind of gigantic tentacle with a dragon's mouth on the end which eats the boss. Somehow when this happens, she ends up nude. Like her clothes are part of her hair... in a magic way... or something. This part, is almost a game-breaker for me because it's just so silly. Also, I get this unpleasant vision of 15-year-old boys viciously bashing away at enemies to get to the Climax to get another shot of Bayonetta nude.

Bayonetta is a very competently made game, even if it is derivative. But it's so hopelessly juvenile that I can't bring myself to play it as a 40-year-old male with a more mature idea of what is sexy.