Fighting games and the role of execution

My Dawn of War II excursion was severely sidetracked when my repaired Xbox finally returned home and I was able to play the copy of Street Fighter IV I had lying around.  As of the past few months, I’ve been attempting to immerse myself in the culture of 2D fighters.  3D fighters have always been my forte – Soul Calibur and, more recently, Virtua Fighter in particular.  I never “got” 2D fighting games.  The play was always a blurry mishmash of over-the-top animations from which I could never extract any meaningful strategic decisions.  Hit priorities were a mysterious black box.  And inputs were just… weird.  Maybe Virtua Fighter’s input buffering spoiled me – none of this “just-link” business or one-frame input windows.  I never understood why I couldn’t just start buffering my combos during guard stun like “normal” 3D fighters.

However, with the massive popularity of Street Fighter IV, I resolved to get past this mental 2D barrier and see just what all the fuss is about.  I messed around with Guilty Gear X2 #Reload on XBLA.  I geared up for the Street Fighter IV release with Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix.  And finally, after learning the ropes of Street Fighter IV (and unlearning all of my 3D fighting game habits), I started coming to an understanding of what makes the 2D fighting genre special.  After a lot of thought and analysis, I’ve distilled the essence of 2D fighters to one special characteristic: the execution barrier.

Strategy and exection

Fighting games, like many other competitive, real-time games, have two major components – strategy and execution.  Strategy is comprised of the decisions and the mind-games, frame advantage and disadvanatge, the nitakus and okizemes.  Strategy is the “game” part of the fighting game, in which the smarter player wins.  Execution, on the other hand, is where the mind meets the machine.  It is comprised of the physical dexterity and reflexes that are required to carry out the intended strategy.  A player must excel at both of these components in order to be successful.  In Halo, a pure strategist can find the perfect sniping position, but it avails nothing if he can’t get the crosshairs over the opponent’s head.  An adept executioner, conversely, accomplishes nothing if he keeps getting assassinated by someone who’s always thinking one step ahead.

Various games put different amounts of focus on the two elements of play.  Turn-based games are the extreme example of strategic focus, while something like a time-trial mode of a racing game is probably the extreme example of execution focus.  Fighting games are comprised of a healthy mixture of the two, but within the genre, there are distinct differences in focus.  My personal experience has led me to the conclusion that the 2D fighting game has a much greater focus on execution, while the 3D fighting game has a slightly greater focus on strategy.  I’m not really sure why this is the case.  One of my theories is that early incarnations of the popular 3D fighting game franchises didn’t have the system resources to render complex combo animations, forcing them to opt for subtler, more strategic gameplay.  Another theory is that movement in the third dimension might have conflicted to some degree with the genre conventions of quarter-circle and half-circle inputs.  Whatever the case may be, the two types of games diverged into two distinct styles of play.

Comparing dimensions

Let’s take a closer look at the differences between the play styles of 2D and 3D fighters.  3D fighters generally have fewer buttons.  Soul Calibur has four: vertical attack, horizontal attack, kick, and guard.  Tekken has four: left and right punches and kicks.  Virtua Fighter has three: punch, kick, and guard.  Compare this with some popular 2D fighters.  Guilty Gear has 5 buttons: punch, kick, slash, hard slash, and dust; 6 if you count respect.  Street Fighter has 6 buttons: light, medium, and hard punches and kicks.  Marvel vs. Capcom 2 has 6 buttons: weak and hard punches and kicks followed by two assist buttons.

In addition to the extra buttons typically found in 2D fighters, they also tend to have more complex and hard-to-grasp motions.  3D fighter special moves generally consist of single or double directional inputs plus a combination of buttons.  For instance, in Virtua Fighter, the majority of the moves you’ll see look like 6P+K, K+G, 33K, and the like.  On the other hand, 2D fighter special moves are most often executed with complex quarter-circle, half-circle, full-circle, dragon-punch, and charge inputs.  In Street Fighter, a shotokan player stands little chance without having 236P or 623P burned into their muscle memory.  The complexity of inputs is made most apparent when subjected to the “wife test”.  My wife was able to learn and consistently reproduce a good number of Pai’s moves in Virtua Fighter.  But when it came to playing Chun-Li in Street Fighter IV, her consistent move execution was limited to either the lightning legs (repeat K) or her auto-crossup (3HK).  While she was able to do quarter circles and dragon punch inputs after multiple attempts in trial mode, there was no way she could do them on command in the middle of a fight.  And you can forget the half-circles.

Finally, to seal the coffin on the casual player’s foray into 2D fighting, 2D fighters generally have an additional factor of input timing complexity.  Again, the reasons for this are completely arbitrary, but as far as I’m aware, input windows are far stricter, and combos are much more difficult to execute consistently because of these strict timing requirements.  2D fighter combos are traditionally based on two concepts that rely on strict timing – cancelling and linking.  Cancelling is the concept of cancelling one move animation into another.  Combos derived from this mechanic involve inputting two moves in very rapid succession.  This cancelling window is generally small, so the player has to be very quick in order for the combo to succeed.  Linking is the concept of inputting a second move between the end of the first move’s animation and the end of the opponent’s hit stun.  In many cases, the input window for linking moves is extremely small – on the order of one or two frames.  These are typically what make Street Fighter IV’s hard trials… well… hard.  3D fighters, on the other hand, seem to have very lenient timing in comparison, where a player can buffer a second move anytime during the first move’s entire animation, and it’ll follow immediately after the first move ends.

It’s become quite clear that, for whatever reason, the 2D fighting game has a stronger focus on complex execution than its 3D counterpart.  This gives us the opportunity to examine the role of execution in fighting games by taking a closer look at 2D fighters and the characteristics that set them apart from their more strategic peers.  This is not to say that 2D fighters are inherently unique.  The evolution of the genre just happened to put them in that unique position of possessing complex and more difficult execution schemes.

Many people decry difficulty in execution as the biggest “problem” with fighting games.  David Sirlin, famed Street Fighter tournament player and game designer, wrote a widely circulated rant about Street Fighter IV’s “impenetrable wall of execution”.  I’ve also made mention in the past about my disdain for unnecessarily difficult inputs.  But I’m starting to question whether this “execution barrier” is really a problem at all.

Execution and risk

Fighting games with simple inputs rapidly descend into strategic territory, where one player is trying to out-guess the other player and counter the next anticipated move.  If you really wanted to, you could probably create a huge and complex game-theory-style payout table (a la Prisoner’s Dilemma) for various situations in the game. At its lowest level, fighting game strategy ultimately comes down to picking a choice on this table to maximize your damage payout based on the choices available to your opponent.  I highly recommend looking into Sirlin’s Flash card game Kongai on Kongregate.  The game is an interpretation of fighting game strategy and the mind games that can ensue when the various payouts are quantified and unobscured by layers of input strings and timing.

Now, looking at the execution barrier strictly from a theoretical point of view, one can consider the difficulty of executing a move or a series of moves as a risk – a risk with percentage chances of success and failure that depend on the particular player’s skill level.  At low- and mid-level play, the difficulty of execution introduces a significant percentage chance of failure – especially with things like linked combo strings.  In fact, I’ve even seen recent Street Fighter IV tournament videos of high-level players missing those links on occasion.  When that kind of combo string fails (i.e. is blocked), momentum turns to the other player and will typically give them frame advantage and higher potential payouts.  The execution risk just boils down to a probabilistic entry in the payout table (or tree, if you want to account for successive choices).  It’s true that, by taking some of the determinism away, the randomness violates the supposed “purity” of the theoretical game.  However, coverting the random outcomes into expected values allows a player to analyze the payouts in much the same way as he would with deterministic outcomes.

That might have sounded like gibberish.  Here’s the translation: just as randomness does not break a game, risk can also be analyzed and optimized.  But there’s an interesting and key difference between risk in fighting games and strictly random events: while random events have fixed probabilities, the probabilities associated with risk change as the player becomes more skilled in execution.  In fact, at the highest levels of play, the difficulty of execution starts melting away and the probability of successful execution begins to approach 100%, reducing the game yet again to one purely composed of strategy and mind games.

So as long as this probability of successful execution is factored in, fighting games, regardless of the difficulty of their moves, still boil down to the same concepts.  A barrier to execution, however, ensures that the strategy and options evolve as the player does.

Execution and discovery

Enough with the theory.  2D fighters are, after all, more than a subgenre of games – they’re the subject of an entire culture.  This culture has thrived on a number of things, and among them is the aspect of discovery and experimentation.

Complex input systems have driven players to search out shortcuts and tricks to simplify execution or to allow players to do things that are otherwise considered impossible.  In essence, the execution barrier acts as an often ambiguous gray area of input processing – one that many players dedicate copious amounts of time deconstructing.  The result of these efforts are the various tricks and shortcuts that litter the lexicon of the fighting game culture.  Instant-air dashing, instant-air attacks, jump-installing, and kara throws are just a few of the terms you might hear.  It’s not hard to find entire forum threads and tutorial videos specifically dedicated to unconventional inputs.

In addition, with the extravagance of special moves that characterizes the majority of 2D fighters, discussions on various move properties are abundant.  Many players enjoy exploring and dissecting the myriad combinations of moves and potential counters.  And there are always those moments of memorable incredulity when something that shouldn’t have happened, for some quirky reason, did.  Many players end up devoting time to determining exactly why the strange thing happened, and whether that particular phenomenon can be exploited to their advantage.

And then there are the combo fiends.  When you combine the complex mechanics of a 2D fighter with the subgenre’s liberal use of frame-advantage-on-hit mechanics and aerial moves, you end up with the potential for insanely long (and insanely difficult) combos.  There is a significant subset of players dedicated to executing and sharing these meticulously constructed and carefully executed combos with the world at large.  Every 2D fighter fan has probably watched a combo video at one point or another.  Street Fighter IV’s infinite combos were even reported by several major gaming sites.  Squeezing in that extra hit has always been an integral part of the 2D fighting game culture.

None of these things would exist, of course, if the 2D fighting game was robbed of its twitchy, wrist-wrecking input schemes and distilled down to its strategy alone.  There’s an undeniable appeal in exploring the unknown, in probing and penetrating that black box of computation, in mastering that which was once mystery, and doing what most might consider impossible.  And that leads us to my final point.

Execution and distinction

Although the difficulty of execution in a fighting game serves the aforementioned roles very well, I’ve found that its best function – one that truly elevates the culture of 2D fighters above their 3D counterparts – is in establishing the renown of its genre’s experts.  The 2D fighting scene has legends of such magnitude that I can think of no 3D fighter equivalent.  Alex Valle.  Daigo Umehara.  John Choi.  Justin Wong.  I’m already intimately familiar with the weight behind these names and I’ve only been getting into 2D fighters for a few months.  I’ve played far more Soul Calibur and Virtua Fighter over the past few years, and I can’t think of a single player with the same kind of recognition as those aforementioned 2D fighting gods.

Why are these people so distinguished among their peers?  It is exactly because 2D fighters have higher execution barriers.  Mind games are an acquired taste.  They require deep understanding of a system to really be appreciated.  It doesn’t, on the other hand, take much understanding at all to stare awe-struck as an opponent gets 75% of his life depleted without any chance for retaliation.  It doesn’t take careful, calculated analysis to admire a combo that just doesn’t seem to end.  You don’t have to play Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike to know that this is epic.  These kinds of easily acknowledged accomplishments cannot be achieved unless the player possesses inhuman amounts of dexterity and reflexes.  It’s this perception of a player’s robotically precise control of a game that really sets the 2D fighter legend apart from someone playing a glorified game of paper-scissors-rock.

This is not unlike the general population’s recognition of highly skilled martial artists.  I think it’s easier to see and appreciate their talent than it is to appreciate that of the world’s chess grandmasters.  Most people know the name of Jet Li, Bruce Lee, Tony Jaa, and the like not because of their ability to get into the mind of their opponent – they’re famous because of their demonstrations of extremely quick, precise, and difficult martial arts techniques and maneuvers.  They do things we only dream of doing.  That same kind of distant admiration most certainly applies to the electronic counterpart.  I mean, isn’t it only appropriate that art (or, in this case, game) imitates life?

Conclusion

Execution is obviously an integral part of the fighting game genre, and as I’ve explored here, making the execution more difficult is not necessarily a detriment to the game.  Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say that more difficulty = better game.  There’s definitely a balance to strike between fulfilling the roles I’ve mentioned and making the game accessible.  And I completely understand the mindset of people like Sirlin, who prefer to linger as much as possible on the strategic elements of the fighting game.  I’ve been there.  But I have to admit that I’ve reconsidered my adamant and unwavering preference for strategy, and in doing so, I’ve come to a newfound appreciation for the fighting game genre as a whole.

There’s more than one way to tap that

There are two Magic: The Gathering mini starter decks sitting just a foot away from me. My wife requested them for free as part of some Wizards of the Coast mass promotion. I don’t think she quite fully realizes just how big a can of worms she threatens to open by doing such a heinous act. CCG’s were a high-school and college obsession. I still have a large number of voluminous boxes full of various cards sitting in the office closet.

That sinister craving began creeping over me. I resigned to digging through my endless cache once again, if only to remind myself of what could happen if I did not control my hunger. This did not, of course, go without triggering waves of happy, card-collecting nostalgia.

I remembered Brian, one of my best friends from middle school, trying to explain how to play this new craze that was sweeping the campus lunch tables. He babbled on in some accursed tongue about “mana” and “tapping”. That term “tapping” was especially troublesome. It took several iterations of his explanation for me to realize that he wasn’t talking about repeatedly touching the surface of a card.

It’s been a long time since Magic’s 3rd edition. I believe the game is in its 10th edition now – making fifteen years since I rid myself of that addiction.  CCG’s/TCG’s have, in that time, become increasingly ubiquitous – especially among the younger generation. And it comes as no surprise that many of those card games were heavily influenced by Magic. Throughout the course of my personal excursion into the genre, I often stumbled upon a very commonly used convention – the turning of a card 90 degrees sideways. Magic called it “tapping” to denote that a card was “used up” and could not be used again until the next turn, when all of the player’s cards were “untapped”.

The mechanic is a very sensible one, and I can’t fault other games for borrowing it. But while a small subset of games have since used different indicators to denote the “usage” of a card – for instance, turning it face-down, setting it aside, putting counters on it, or just remembering that it had been used that turn – a great number of games continue to use that tried and true card-turning convention.

Out of sheer boredom, I’ve compiled a list of terms used by other CCG’s to fulfill the same purpose as the term “tapping” does in Magic. I’ve left out the games that use the turning of a card to signify wounding (such as in .hack and Doomtrooper, among others) and the games that involve turning the card 180 degrees instead of 90 degrees (such as Shadowfist and Guardians).

• Boot – Doomtown
• Bow – Legend of the Burning Sands, Legend of the Five Rings
• Commit – Universal Fighting System, WarCry
• Deplete – The Spoils (implied)
• Drain – Tempest
• Engage – Dune
• Exhaust – Call of Cthulhu, World of Warcraft, VS System
• Kneel – A Game of Thrones
• Lock – Warhammer 40k
• Roll – Gundam WAR
• Rotate – Babylon 5, Mythos
• Set – Ophidian
• Spend – Warlord
• Tack – 7th Sea
• Tap – Battletech, Magic: The Gathering, Middle Earth, Star Wars: Trading Card Game
• Turn – Shadowrun
• Use – Cyberpunk

Feel free to let me know of any other neat alternative “tap” terms I might have missed.  I have, after all, been mostly out of the CCG loop as of late.

As a bonus, here’s a quote out of the Dune rulebook for the best CCG rule ever:

To indicate the completion of your House Interval, you may turn the palms of both hands toward the ceiling, say “I honor you with my water,” and make a spitting gesture toward the table (no vulgarity or actual spitting, please!). If you do so, each of your rivals must respond “Your gift is a blessing of the river.” Failure to respond incurs a loss of 1 favor.

I never could get that spitting gesture right…

Design rant: Lock’s Quest

There are occasional instances when I get into a state of unfettered rage about some annoyance in a game’s design.  At that point, I typically start cursing its maker and swearing off all of their future products.  Since my wife probably doesn’t want to hear me go on and on about how stupid some specific thing is, I’ve decided to vent my frustrations here.  Oh, and I’ll try to write it up as soon after the experience as possible so I can accurately capture the thoughts going through my mind as I’m in that state of raw hatred.  So, onto our first victim: Lock’s Quest.

I go into the supposed “final battle” more than well prepared, with 40k+ source to build me a monstrosity of a defensive perimeter.  And after three days, my impenetrable fortress (on which I spent at least 60k total) is magically destroyed, leaving me with a piddling 25k to rebuild and take on the arguably hardest boss in the game…  What the hell?!  If the clockworks can instakill entire forts in the blink of an eye, why didn’t they just do that 97 friggin’ days ago and put Antonia out of its misery?  Heck, at least it would have saved Lock a lot of trouble.  Oh, and just to make it more fun, the game decided to autosave shortly after wiping my meticulously planned defenses.  So the source I gained by playing their mind-numbing siege minigame three times in a row was all for nothing.  Thanks.  While we’re at it, let’s make an RPG where, right before the final boss fight, all of your characters’ levels are halved and your entire inventory disappears.  Seriously, did 5th Cell do any focus testing at all?  Did they not note the cries of indignance that erupted at this point in the game?  No wonder the boss is named “Agony.”

Why adventures still matter

I spent a good amount of time this past weekend playing through Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney.  I enjoyed it very much.  The game kept me sufficiently glued to my currently neglected handheld.

When the Phoenix Wright series saw its debut release (or, technically, re-release) on the DS, it got a lot of positive critical reception.  But each new title seemed to garner successively less interest in the gaming media.  It feels like the gaming audience at large is beginning to consider the franchise as just another cog in Capcom’s sequel-laden money-machine (a la Mega Man).

That’s a real shame, because I’m still in love with the series.  I got around to thinking about what made it strike such a chord with me.  After all, the core gameplay across the entire series has, for the most part, remained unchanged.  As a staunch advocate of innovation, I, myself, am baffled as to why I’ve tolerated this supposed “stagnation” across four (!) different titles.

And the more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to the nature of adventure gaming as a genre.  The “adventure” term is typically applied as a fallback classification to describe any number of primarily explorative or non-combative games.  But for me, the words “adventure game” are always automatically and implicitly prefixed with the word “point-and-click”.  Yeah – point-and-click adventure games – those decrepit games of yesteryear with the pixelated sprites rendered atop gorgeous, hand-drawn backgrounds.  Adventure games were a huge chunk of my childhood gaming experiences.  My earliest memories of them were of playing King’s Quest V and Lucasarts point-and-click demos that came packaged with various shareware/freeware CD’s that my dad picked up at a local computer hardware swap meet.  (We weren’t exactly rich at the time – games were truly a luxury.)  After perusing the contents of those discs, my attention always came back to those intriguing adventure games.  Eventually, I got a hold of the full version of King’s Quest V and instantly fell in love with the genre.  My loyalties continued through the next two King’s Quest titles, and I continued to maintain interest in similar titles.  My interest was piqued again with the advent of the Myst series.  I played the first title alongside my best friend in junior high, and I more recently played through Riven and Exile with my then-fiancee after I purchased a Myst collection for cheap.  Syberia, The Longest Journey, Indigo Prophecy – all great adventure titles of recent years.  It wasn’t much longer until I stumbled upon what brought me to this topic in the first place – Phoenix Wright.

To me, the Phoenix Wright series has been a real triumph in the genre.  Sure, it’s got great characters, hilarious dialog (thanks to the superb localization efforts), and an engaging story.  But there’s something about the series that really sets it apart, and, if you’ve read enough of my posts, you’ll know that it all comes down to the gameplay.

With the “games as art” movement picking up in recent years, there have been countless discussions regarding “narrative” and its role in games.  And with all of the philosophizing and applied intellectualism, narratives have increasingly become assigned to the role of “context” – the idea that gives life and meaning to the otherwise mechanical functions of the underlying gameplay.  In other words, narratives are becoming a strict output that is simply layered on top of the gameplay.  There are the game’s core mechanics under the hood, with which the player interacts, and the narrative “skin” that typically has little influence on the play itself.

If you think about it, it’s quite easy to imagine many modern games being stripped of their narratives without really breaking the gameplay.  After all… Andrew Ryan, GLaDOS, President Eden?  They’re all ultimately just voices that can be muted.  Many shooters thrive on reskinning the FPS experience.  RPG’s can still retain the thrill of battles and character development without the thousands upon thousands of lines of character dialog.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that a game’s experience as a whole would remain unaffected by removing or altering that narrative layer.  I’m making the point that many games, even in the absence of their story, would remain largely playable.  This clean separation of narrative and gameplay is easily spied in that not-insignificant subset of players that just want to “skip the cutscenes”.

But this is where adventure games fundamentally differ.  At their core, point-and-click adventures really are as mind-numbingly bland as the genre’s name implies.  You point at different things.  You click on them.  Something on the screen changes.  Repeat.  These games (generally) do not require twitch reflexes, rhythm, strategy, or tactics like many of their modern-day peers do.  However, adventure games do something that the majority of their counterparts do not – they truly integrate the narrative into the gameplay.  In an ideal adventure game, the player interacts with the underlying game mechanic (i.e. pointing and clicking on objects) in a way that is strongly influenced by the player’s understanding of the narrative.  To look at it a different way, without the narrative, an adventure game is little more than random clicking.  One cannot easily swap out the narrative of an adventure game without having to alter all of the interactions in the game.  To reskin an adventure game is essentially equivalent to creating an altogether new one.

Of course, adventure games have integrated their narratives with their gameplay to varying degrees of success.  In reality, a lot of adventure games still have some remnant of this ludo-narrative separation.  On the extreme end of the spectrum, you have the “interactive novel” Hotel Dusk: Room 215, which, although I enjoyed it, really just ended up telling you the story while you walked around and played completely unrelated minigames.  Also similar in separation is the Myst series.  The majority of puzzles throughout the various ages are mostly self-contained and do not typically have any fundamental connection to the story itself.  In these two examples, the narrative could be completely altered without having to change much of the actual play that the player engages in.

A lot of other adventure games will also typically present self-contained challenges that require the player to find objects on the screen and combine them to overcome some obstacle.  Again, a lot of these are mostly narrative-independent.  For instance, one can easily adapt a wide range of narratives to require the player to find an object that opens up some previously inaccessible location.  However, as various parts of the game become inter-dependant (i.e. as your character is required to use multiple objects from different times and/or places throughout the game to proceed) it becomes harder and harder to separate the game’s narrative from the player interactions.  This is because an altogether different narrative would still have to justify all of the interactions.  I would say the majority of adventure games fall into this middle ground of ludo-narrative interdependance.

Finally, we come to the Phoenix Wright series.  What makes it such a great adventure game?  It is such an engaging experience because its narrative is so deeply intertwined with the gameplay itself.  The series’ core mechanic tasks the player with presenting evidence to reveal contradictions in a character’s testimony during a trial.  Doing so inevitably requires the player to truly comprehend the narrative – the crime and its circumstances, and the characters and their motivations.  Furthermore, the gameplay goes beyond a simple “reading comprehension” test.  Knowing what has transpired is often not enough to succeed – the player is also expected to draw implicit conclusions and stay one step ahead of what has been revealed.  In other words, the game is indelibly linked to the player’s discovery and exploration of the narrative.  The narrative is the game.

And it comes as no surprise.  After all, mysteries and crime novels have been around for centuries.  But perhaps what readers enjoyed about those novels the most was the fact that underneath the plot and prose laid what was, fundamentally, a game of sorts – one intimately married to its narrative.

Progeny

My wife and I just got back from the hospital and we’ve confirmed that Schlaghund’s gonna be a daddy!  My wife’s almost 7 weeks pregnant, according to the sonogram.  We got to see it’s tiny little heart beating – even though that basically amounted to a rhythmic blur on a really low-res screen.

Here he/she/it is:

Looks like I’m finally getting a nooblet of my own!

The Xbox homecoming

My Xbox 360 has finally returned from Microsoft’s repair center in Texas.  It arrived yesterday afternoon – exactly two weeks from the day I shipped it.  The turnaround time wasn’t bad, all things considered.  My experiences with the repair are very positive overall.

I initially hesitated to ship it because Microsoft supposedly offered to send a box for shipment.  Since I didn’t want some inadequacy in my packing process to be responsible for physical damage to the console during shipment, I requested a box instead of opting to print an eLabel and supply a box of my own.  Unfortunately, Microsoft isn’t sending boxes out anymore.  The same issue was reported on Kotaku about a week ago – and I can confirm its validity.  Let me repeat: contrary to what Microsoft has claimed, they are not sending shipping boxes – at least they didn’t for my particular request.  I’m not sure if it’s a location-specific issue (I live in California) or if it’s a global policy.  I even called customer support to make sure I wasn’t going to receive a box at some later point in time.  I was told that no box was shipped.  By the way, getting a hold of an actual human on Microsoft’s customer service line is a real pain.  I had to look online to find out how to speak to someone fleshy.  I believe the method is to not do or say anything when prompted.  Eventually, you’re redirected to a human rep.  So that box-waiting ended up being a waste of four days, as all I ended up receiving in the mail was a UPS shipping label – the very same thing I could have printed at home much earlier.

To prepare for shipment, I removed the Xbox’s hard drive.  I took an old cardboard box I had lying around, put a generous lining of junk mail, and rested the Xbox on it.  I then used whatever remaining newspaper-type material I had and surrounded the Xbox with it.  Since I didn’t quite have enough paper, I took a spare phonebook, tore pages out, and used it to ensure the console was snug in the box.  I taped it up, affixed the label, and handed the box to UPS the next morning.  Even though I was misled about being sent a box, the packing and shipping process was relatively painless.

Then I waited.  It took most of one week to arrive at the repair center.  The repair itself only seemed to take two or three business days.  The return shipment took another chunk of a week.  I had hoped to get the console in time for the weekend, but I ended up having to wait until Monday.  I was also lucky that my wife was taking that day off, as the return shipment requires a signature upon receipt.  The Xbox site was very informative regarding the status of the repair – it indicated when they had received the console, when they had finished fixing it, and the site even supplied a tracking number for the return shipment.

So, after two Xbox-less weeks, voila!  The console arrived safe and sound.  It even came with a 1-month Xbox Live Gold subscription card attached for my trouble.  Honestly, though, 1-month doesn’t really cover it for me – I lost the first two (three, counting the fruitless wait for a shipping box) feverish weeks immediately following Street Fighter IV’s release.  It seems that a lot of the hype is beginning to die down, and I’m sure that the competition on Live is much steeper now.   I can’t get those few weeks of potential practice back.  I’m now behind the rest of the curve.

I have to admit I was a bit hesitant to believe that the repair service had done anything.  The problem is that the red ring doesn’t appear immediately after turning on the Xbox.  Generally, after a cold boot, the Xbox will run fine for a few minutes before hanging.  It usually takes several attempts of running and hanging before the red ring appears on the next boot.  If the repair service didn’t bother to make those multiple attempts, they might have ended up concluding that nothing was wrong and sent me my original, broken console back.  Fortunately, they did, in fact, fix the problem – probably by replacing the components.  From what I’ve read about the issue, it would take nothing less than a swap-out to remedy the issue entirely.  I do know that my original faceplate was preserved (I know because I lost the spring on the USB cover panel); it’s probably safe to assume I got it in my original case, too; as for the internals, it’s really anyone’s guess.

But I’m not content to guess.  I needed to make sure things were right.  So after watching my Monday-night television programming, I hooked up the old girl and took her for a spin.  I was startled by the fact that my original display settings were reset and it almost looked like the console had to reinstall NXE again.  I’m guessing it was because the internals were brand new, and the firmware was still out-of-date.  After watching that ridiculously long NXE intro again, everything was back to the way it was (except for the system time).  I popped in Rock Band 2 – a game I sorely missed – and played a set with my wife to make sure the console didn’t freeze after a few minutes of play.  After inserting the disc, the first thing I thought to myself was that the disc drive seemed much quieter than I remembered.  Maybe it was just the fact that I had gone three weeks without it, but I could’ve sworn that the drive used to be a lot louder.  It’s possible that the repairs also resulted in a swap-out of the old drive.  Which is totally fine with me.  That thing was noisy.

Anyway, after Rock Band 2, I finally popped in Street Fighter IV and continued to play it for the next few hours.  Everything seemed to be in order.  I now have a three-month repair warranty on the console, so if anything went wrong with their repair, I can send the console in again.  I’m not entirely sure whether the extended red-ring warranty of three years applies to a repair warranty.  I can’t see any evidence of it on the Xbox site, so I’m inclined to believe that I won’t be covered by the repair warranty if another red-ring occurs after more than three months.

Let’s just hope that Microsoft speaks the truth when they say that the worst of the red-ring problems are behind them.

Featured Article: Flower’s Precious Play

Flower’s Precious Play

I’m a relatively new fan of Leigh Alexander’s thoughtful writing.  I caught a few of her works outside of SVGL, checked out her blog, and I’ve been hooked ever since.  Considering I just finished playing Flower last night, I was interested to see what her latest posts made of the game.

Surprisingly, she seemed almost scathing in her criticism, although she clarifies it as more of a criticism of the audience as opposed to game itself.  I’ll admit I haven’t really followed the critiques of the game out there – mostly because I wanted to play it for myself first.  Now that I’ve finished playing the game, I can conclude that I agree with a lot of Alexander’s post.  Flower is, indeed a simple, well-crafted game that executes on a very solid design.  And, as I did with Braid, I didn’t feel it was necessary to ascribe any particularly lofty interpretation to it via some quasi-narrative (as tempting as it was to try).  The brilliance was there in the simplicity and elegance of its play and its presentation.  The beauty was to be found moment-to-moment, and not in some big-picture, hippie message of becoming one with nature or something like that.

But like a good number of the commenters, I can’t help but object to some of the criticisms Alexander presented.  For one thing, I don’t see any problem with an intention to create emotion.  In her example, an amateur actress fails to stir an audience because of her focus on the intent rather than the act.  But there doesn’t have to be mutual exclusivity between the intent and the act, as a professional actress can surely harbor the intent without breaking character.  It’s hard to pick out a good game at all (by one’s own standards) that didn’t have such a design deliberately “manufactured” to convey or communicate a specific intent.  It’s an integral part of the craft – one that I don’t believe can or should really be criticized.  I think a lot of the commenters on Alexander’s post expressed the same thing.

Furthermore, I disagree with the statement that Flower “so obviously adheres to what has been done before, and in many cases, done to death”.  Maybe I’m taking the quote out of context, as Alexander seems to be referring to Flower’s “gamey-ness”, but I think one of the unique things that allows Flower to impart a sense of peace and freedom is that it actually gives the player the opportunity to play the resolution.  The truth is that the majority of mainstream games consist of an escalating series of challenges that end with passive resolutions – generally, a cutscene.  Flower, by its design, puts the player into the resolution.  The game’s levels progressively add more obstacles and limitations to the player’s freedom of motion, until it concludes with a final level of freedom.  There aren’t many games that give you that final level of freedom.  Most of them get harder and harder, building up to some big boss fight, after which you get a cutscene and some credits.  Sure, Flower’s “active resolution” isn’t at all anything new, but it is rare.

Anyway, if you’ve played Flower, give Alexander’s post a read.  It’s an interesting one, and her writing is always eloquent.  You can also read her followup post: I’d Rather Let The Flowers Keep Doing What They Do Best.

Playing to win: Dawn of War II, part 2

This is part two of a continuing series detailing the journey of a casual player into the intense environment of competitive real-time strategy in Dawn of War II.

When I started playing Virtua Fighter 4, I got schooled for months before I felt I could hold my own against my far more experienced coworkers.  So if there’s one thing I learned from my (admittedly limited) competitive experience in the fighting game genre, it’s that persistence is key – even when faced with an endless number of losses.  I can clearly recall going for weeks at a time where every single Virtua Fighter match I played ended with me passing the stick on to the next guy, at which point I’d sit and watch for the next six or seven minutes until it was my turn again in the player rotation.  And then, with a cold start, I’d fail again and repeat the process.

The past few days have really tested my RTS persistence in the same way that the Virtua Fighter scene once did.  After enduring another three losses on Saturday afternoon, I managed to pull off a two-win streak, bringing my TrueSkill rating to 10 (probably because I managed to defeat a TS 16 opponent).  One of those was a particularly tense match against an Eldar opponent.  The game brought us well into tier 3.  I managed to put some fully-teched Nob Squads and a Looted Tank out to clinch me the game.  The Looted Tank’s bombardment in conjunction with a Rok Strike was able to break the player’s troop cluster, leaving my Nobs to wipe up the mess.  My mobility and control of the map eventually netted me the win.

But my victories were short-lived, as I’ve since played at least six games without a single win – most of those losses being complete VP shutouts.   And in only one of those games did I feel I had a chance at winning.  It was a game I played against a Hive Tyrant player.  I had a lot of early victories due to some great Stikkbomma micro (at least by my standards) and harassment, but in the end, the opponent secured the victory point towers and entrenched himself with an impregnable combination of units.  Fortunately, he congratulated me after the match for doing a great job of harassing him with my grenades, so my performance wasn’t a complete failure.  Regardless, after another couple of crushing defeats, it felt just like those early VF months all over again.

It’s funny to read about the “insularity” of competitive fighting games when the barrier-to-entry of competitive RTS is so comparatively insurmountable.  Even newbies to Virtua Fighter can button mash Lei-Fei and get a few lucky wins against intermediate opponents.  But there is no such RTS analogue.  Every RTS match requires both careful execution and long-term analysis that can’t just be “guessed”.  To be more precise, fighting game matches often linger in what I’ll call “neutral states”, where neither player has any accumulated advantage.  It’s like when both players in Street Fighter are standing on opposite sides of the screen, quickly analyzing whether their next move should be a fireball or a jump-in or a dragon punch.  Neither player in that situation is innately “better off” than the other – they’re both entering into a new guessing game in which either player can win or lose as a result.  But RTS matches generally have no neutral states.  Every player choice has economic repercussions that affect their options for the rest of the game.  In Dawn of War II, if you mismanage your units early on and lose that squad or lose that generator, you are at an innate military and/or economic disadvantage, and you’re forced to fight the odds to turn the tables.  It’s not the neutral-state mind game that you find yourself in when you just ate a combo in a fighting game.  Furthermore, an RTS match in modern, faster-paced RTS’s can go anywhere from 15-30 minutes, which means that competitive play requires a much longer attention span than the typical 2-3 minute fighting game match.  It’s clear why competitive RTS is far more insular than competitive fighting.

And it is with these things in mind that I’m attempting to climb this insanely steep learning curve.  Today actually marks my first week of playing Dawn of War II.  With a current record of 3-17, and TrueSkill rating of 11, I can’t say the journey hasn’t been discouraging.  My efforts are also amidst allegations of Tyranid imbalance, a population cap bug that “breaks” multiplayer, and possibly bugged damage output on the Ork Wartrukk, making the experience that much more difficult (and confusing).  But I’m still playing and I’m still learning.  I’ve made a lot of stupid mistakes in recent games: neglecting my units, floating too many resources, pointing my Mekboy’s turret in the wrong direction, retreating units I didn’t intend to retreat, building incorrect counters (Tankbustas are not infantry counters!).  But I’ve also been getting better at the Stikkbomma micro, map control, multi-pronged attacks, and anticipating the opponent’s actions.  It’s the kind of stuff you really only learn by getting it beat into you.

And believe me, it’s definitely being beaten into me.  But I’ve got high hopes and a stride in my (limping) step.  My most recent game was against yet another Hive Tyrant player – TrueSkill 21 – a step up from my own abilities.  I went with a very unconventional build order, opting to use the Mekboy to build turrets to secure capture points while equipping my Sluggas with early flamers as opposed to teching my HQ.  I was sick of early game ‘gaunt dominance – they were going to burn.  With a Stikkbomma squad to help out, I had pushed the opponent back into his base, and I had almost entire control of the map.  With all three victory point towers under my control, I brought his VP total down to 19.  This was shortly before his massive pushback hit me hard.  The opponent’s T2 and T3 units began dominating everything I threw at them, and he was able to spread his forces out enough to guard two of the three points.  I used an infiltrated Kommando squad to target his clustered forces with my Looted Tank, and I had some success, but I just could not get the leverage to snag those last VP’s.  The opponent made a huge comeback and won the game.  But it was a great match.  I even saved the replay.  It was one of those losses where you’re proud of the fight you put up.  I was beginning to glimpse that light at the end of the tunnel – the enjoyment of going toe-to-toe in epic battle with peers of comparable skill.  It was like seeing the holy grail of multiplayer RTS.  So few survive the treacherous trek to it, but those that do cling tightly to their priceless treasure.

I mentioned my first two victories, but I never mentioned my third one.  I played a Space Marine player that was clearly not proficient in the multiplayer game at all.  I defeated him with almost a complete shutout (I lost 4 points), and I had only lost 2 units throughout the entire battle.  Looking at his stats post-game, I noticed it was his first ranked match.  Would it be his last?  I couldn’t help but wonder if he was just like me in past years – dipping his toes into the frigid competitive RTS waters, getting a bit of frostbite, and moving on to something warmer and fuzzier – like campaign mode.  “First game?” I asked in post-game chat.  He had already left.

Playing to win: Dawn of War II, part 1

I am probably the worst RTS player ever.  At least out of the people that still devote time to the genre.  The original Command and Conquer: Red Alert was the game that pulled me into the entire real-time strategy scene.  I remember blabbering on and on about it with a friend in high school – about strats, exploits, and “what if”’s.  The guy even came over to my place and LAN’ed a couple of times.  Working at Westwood Studios was my dream job back in those days.  Since then, I’ve played a disgusting number of RTS titles just to relive the wonder from my youth.

The problem is that I’ve never truly played them competitively.  Aside from playing the single-player campaigns, I’m generally a care-bear comp-stomper that’s afraid of losing.  I’ve played a few competitive multiplayer games of Starcraft way back in the day with a friend, and more recently, a few competitive games of Rise of Legends and Tiberium Wars.  I never once played Red Alert 3 against another human, even though I enjoyed the heck out of the single-player game and AI skirmishes.

Well, by now, I’ve had just about enough of turtling.  I know I’m missing out on an entire dimension of the genre by shielding myself from the outside world.  That is why I’ve decided to start playing Dawn of War II online.  I have a great amount of respect for Relic’s decision to buck genre conventions with their most recent titles.  So with Dawn of War II’s removal of base building, the game seems to me like an ideal candidate for a title on which I can make my online debut.  I can focus more on the micro, the tactics, and the matchups than on the economic repercussions of every one of my actions.  The game’s design makes player disadvantage a lot less of a slippery slope than it is in traditional RTS gameplay, since smart moment-to-moment decisions can turn the tide of an entire battle.

To prepare, I comp-stomped a lot during the “multiplayer” beta to learn my way around the mechanics and the units, so I had a basic understanding of what to do.  My excuse for not going online during the beta was because there were still a lot of bugs and blatant imbalances/exploits, and I didn’t want to teach myself behaviors that wouldn’t carry over to the retail patch.

“Losing is part of the game. If you never lose, you are never truly tested, and never forced to grow. A loss is an opportunity to learn.”

-David Sirlin, Playing to Win

For the past couple of nights, I’ve been alternating between the single-player campaign (which, by the way, is much more compelling than any other RTS I’ve played – probably because it plays more like an RPG than anything else) and some multiplayer ranked matches.  How have I done?  Let’s see… my head-to-head record is, as of this writing, 0-5.  Yeah, that bad.  Last I checked, my TrueSkill rating was 2.  2!!!

It didn’t help that the first night (only a few hours after the game was unlocked on Steam), I played the same person three times in row.  (I always hated Xbox-/Windows-Live’s matchmaking).  I decided to stick with my favorite race from the first Dawn of War – the Orks.  The Warboss seemed like a good, vanilla commander to use, so I stuck with him for my first five games.  My very first opponent (or rather, first three opponents) was an Ork player as well.  There isn’t much to tell about those first three games except that I clearly didn’t actually know my way around anything.  The guy ran circles around me.  I ticked down some of his VP’s in the first game, but by the second and third time, he was shutting me out without even blinking.

Being the fresh n00b that I was, I asked my opponent for some tips.  The guy was nice enough to help – he wasn’t really all that condescending.  He showed me just how amazing Stikkbommaz are at shutting down infantry and how Shoota Boyz aren’t as good as I used to think they were in the first Dawn of War.  His T1 strategy generally consisted of getting to Stikkbommaz quickly and microing them carefully to gain an early military advantage.

I kept this new info in mind for my next multiplayer outing.  Last night, I played two more games – one against a Hive Tyrant commander and another against a Techmarine.  I was able to get some early victories in both games.  The Tyranid player, however, came back with huge swarms of units, and I neglected to make the Stikkbommaz until later in the game, when it was too late.  I threw some Deff Dredds carelessly into awaiting Warriors, which tore my new toys to shreds.  It took a bit of time, but he eventually established map control and won the game.

My second game last night was just baffling.  The problem?  I was winning.  It was the first time I got to play Caldaris Dunes (the map I played the most during my dabbling in the beta), so I was fairly familiar with my surroundings.  I went with early Sluggaz and Stikkbommaz, and I was able to establish a tight hold on two of the three VP towers.  Unfortunately, that feisty Techmarine setup a little stronghold in the northern part of the map, garrisoning some troops in the northernmost building and putting a turret in front of it.  He held the northern points – VP, requisition, and power.  I felt comfortable with my lead and didn’t think to use the Stikkbommaz to coordinate an attack on the garrison.  At that point, I was dumbstruck – I was so used to losing, I had absolutely no idea what to do in an advantageous position.  I launched a few half-baked attacks on his generators, to no avail.  I brought him down to about 200 VP’s with little opposition.  It was too quiet.  I was teching my platform, but I knew he was teching too, and I knew I needed to prepare, but I wasn’t thinking straight.  Eventually, as I expected, two Dreadnoughts appeared and began wreaking havoc with my mostly-T1 forces.  If I only had the thought to build some Tankbustas to counter vehicles (what I naturally expected the opponent to build in that situation), I could’ve probably held back his forces.  I also didn’t realize that vanilla Deff Dredds were really bad against the Dreadnoughts.  Anyway, with my sloppy micro and his unstoppable vehicles, he took the map back from me and locked down the northern and southern routes.  He also had some weird plasma gun thing that kept knocking down my T3 Nob squad.  (I tried all the races in beta, but I’d never seen that weapon before.  I guess it’d help to study the other races a little better.)  Anyway, before I knew it, the game was over.  The game summary was unbelievable.  I had a hearty economic lead and even a couple of commander kills.  There was no reason I should’ve lost that game.  But I did.  Looks like I still have a lot to learn.

I’m thinking of switching to the Mekboy commander, as I think it suits my playstyle a little better.  I also didn’t take kindly to having my lumbering Warboss swarmed by smaller, runtier melee squads that prevented him from retreating.  I’ll probably take the Mekboy for a spin and see how things go from there.  At least my last two games netted me about 400-500 rank points each – much more than the 100 or so I got playing against the Ork player.  I guess I’m getting a little better.

Does the casual player still have hope in today’s hardcore, competitive RTS scene?  Can he still find some measure of enjoyment in such an unforgiving environment?  Stay tuned, follow my progress, and find out!

Game Alert: February 2009: (Living on the) Street Fighter IV

I neglected to write sooner about the deluge of games this month, but after my Xbox died, I’ve suddenly found myself with a lot more time on my hands. So, I present to you this month’s money-burners. Now with PSP and Amazon!  There are a couple of late-January and early-March titles in there for good measure.

• DJ Max Fever (PSP / Jan. 27) [Buy]: I bought this a few weeks ago to see what DJ Max was all about. Apparently, it’s hardcore! I’m barely getting by on 4-button mode, so 8-buttons is out of the question. Anyway, I’m sold on portable rhythm games by default (unless they’re made by Activision), and I’ve never spent any significant amount of time playing a Beatmania-style game, so DJ Max was a good pick for me. There’s a ton of unlockable content, and the gear/character/note upgrade system is a neat mechanic that other rhythm games should look at for inspiration.
• LocoRoco 2 (PSP / Feb. 10) [Buy]: This one’s in the mail. It’s a no-brainer for a new PSP owner such as myself. I didn’t get to try the first title, but seeing how the second one seems to improve on the first in every way (and MSRP is $10 cheaper), I’m going to have to go straight for the sequel.
• Flower (PSN /Feb. 12 ): Jenova Chen, the mind behind fl0w, is at it again with what looks to be an experimental/experiential masterpiece. It’s already been released on PSN, so go grab it. I plan on doing so sometime this week.
• Street Fighter IV (Xbox 360 / Feb. 17) [Buy]: The next-gen iteration of Capcom’s legendary franchise, this is the game I want to play this month. It will be the first 2D fighting game (gameplay-wise, anyway) that I plan to play with any level of seriousness. Guilty Gear is great and all, but it’s accessibility (or lack thereof) limits to me to playing with one particularly practiced friend maybe once a month. Anyway, thanks to Microsoft’s crappy hardware, I won’t be sonic-booming anyone until probably three weeks from now. Sigh… By the way, to those of you lucky enough to snag those Mad Catz tournament fightsticks, I HATE YOU ALL. Mad Catz had seriously better be churning more of those suckers out.
• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (PC / Feb. 18) [Buy]: This is the other game I want to play this month. I’ve finally started getting Company of Heroes gameplay, so I think I’ll try playing this one competitively. Besides, Starcraft 2 is still some undetermined amount of time away from release, so something’s gotta fill that RTS void. Waaaaaaaaagh!
• Noby Noby Boy (PSN / Feb. 19): Keita Takahashi – the eccentric designer that brought you Katamari Damacy – is releasing his newest plaything on PSN. From what I can gather, it involves stretching around objects and eating things. It doesn’t look nearly as elegant as Katamari (and it certainly doesn’t seem as goal-oriented), but I’ll probably give the demo (if there is one) a whirl and see whether it holds my interest.
• Star Ocean: The Last Hope (Xbox 360 / Feb. 24) [Buy]: I’ll say this right now – there is no way I’m getting this title in the near future. I still have a backlog of unfinished RPG’s I want to get to, one of which is the previous Star Ocean title, still sitting mostly unplayed in my PS2 library. This doesn’t even figure in my desire to play Tales of Vesperia, for which I have absolutely no time. But for you RPG fanatics, I figured I’d mention this game, since it sounds like it’s going to be good.
• Puzzle Quest: Galactrix (DS / Feb. 24) [Buy]: D3 struck gold when they merged the casual puzzle game experience with the persistent RPG experience to make the original Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords. I’m hoping to see some of those creative juices return for some interesting gameplay in their next, space-based title in the Puzzle Quest franchise. The recently-released Flash demo didn’t hint at any spectacular divergence from the original Puzzle Quest formula, but it was different enough to hold my interest.
• Killzone 2 (PS3 / Feb. 27) [Buy]: Lauded as one of the PS3’s defining titles, and one that reportedly makes amazing use of the hardware, it probably goes without saying that it’s a must-have for PS3 owners. I’m not quite sure I’ll have the time to play this one – and I don’t have a hunger for shooters at the moment – but I’m positive that I’ll add this to my library at some point in time.
• Empire: Total War (PC / Mar. 3) [Buy]: The Total War franchise is an interesting one – a mixture of high-level, turn-based strategy and real-time tactics. If you’ve never tried any of the titles in the series, now’s your chance. And you’re just in time to see glorious rows of musketeers volleying shots at each other.
• Halo Wars (Xbox 360 / Mar. 3) [Buy]: I’ve decided that I don’t really like the Age of Empires series. After playing so many other RTS’s, the AoE titles just feel way too slow-paced. But playstyle preferences aside, the now defunct Ensemble Studios certainly know how to make a quality RTS title. We’ll see whether their magic was enough to make it work on console.

That’s all, folks. Time for me to go back to sulking about my broken Xbox.