Dear Computer:

It is with a sorrowful and guilt-ridden heart that I pen to you these words, words that I thought I never would myself utter: I am now the owner of an Xbox 360. It entered my home two months prior, and was gifted to me by my very sweet and kindly mother as a Christmas gift. However, that is not to say that this new console was unexpected or undesired; rather, I directly asked her for one, and had been saving money to purchase one had she not complied with my Christmas wishes. The blame for allowing a new Microsoft console to enter my home lies entirely on my shoulders.

And I am very sorry, personal computer.

But you have changed, dear computer, and I fear not for the better. I am not entirely sure that this was your fault – but I am not in the blame-fingering business. Rather, I’m in the game-fing .. nevermind. I just play games and write about them. Following are a list of complaints that I feel no choice but to levy against you, and I present them here in the hopes that you might address some of them and return to your former glory.

Inclusive vs. exclusivity: My chief complaint, one that has existed for what seems now a decade since I purchased my first computer that did not belong to my parents’, is the nature of your economic status. You are far too expensive.

I understand that the components that make you the monstrous beast that you are do not come cheaply, either in fabrication or design. I understand that your components, when intelligently decided upon and laboriously installed, can provide a vastly more graphic-rich experience than any console can. However, even with these understandings, I feel that you still cost too much money.

To build you, Ataxia, I spent a thousand dollars. I saved money for a long time so that I might construct you, and you did not disappoint; but still, you cost me a thousand dollars, and that is a great deal of money – particularly when compared to the two primary consoles on the market now, the Xbox360 and the Playstation 3, both of which can be owned for $300.

Although the cost of the guts of my computing machine are a good launching point, they aren’t my only concern with the exclusivity of the personal gaming computer. Following close behind is the level of technical expertise required to even use the damn thing. While installing a game and playing it is, generally, simpler now than it ever has been, this is not always the case. For the non-PC-tech-nerd, getting games to work can be quite the chore; does my PC meet the hardware requirements? Check. Have my video and audio drivers been updated recently? Check. Are there sufficient system resources free to play the game after I’ve met the other requirements? Check. So .. why is it still running slowly? How come some of the polygons are stretched across the screen, and why the hell can I not connect to this Borderlands multiplayer game? Dear Ataxia, you are far too difficult to make work.

I could have just bought a new console.

A gaming console would have allowed me to bypass all of this forced education (although I am thankful for it, I cannot help but wonder how many people were turned off from PC gaming as a result), and would have saved me a great deal of money over the years.

Sure, the games are more expensive – $10 more, on average, for a new AAA title – but at least I could have bought them used, dear Ataxia, which is something that you still do not allow me to do. I understand why – because games are much easier to copy and pirate with a computer – but this has resulted only in me spending less cashmoney on games than I would have otherwise.

Sure, I’ve /played/ a great many new games over the years – but I haven’t bought many. I’ve been a poor college student for as long as I can remember, and my budget barely affords me enough to smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a lot of beer, let alone own new videogames. Instead, I’ve been forced to turn to somewhat more illicit forms of attaining new games – although I’d much rather have purchased used copies at discounted rates.

Instead of allowing me this option, PC game manufacturers, you decided instead to force a series of ever-larger and more invasive forms of DRM down my throat. Remember the Bioshock debacle, in which the game could initially only be installed three times – ever? Or the pain that comes with installing an old favorite game, only to realize that the CD key was missing – and therefore could not be played without purchasing a new copy? Instead of wrestling with the ethics of funding draconian DRM schemes and painstakingly charting the location of all of my CD keys, there would have been – and is – a far simpler solution -

I could have just bought a console.

Granted, piracy remains a major (-ly contentious) issue on the PC. People just don’t want to pay for stuff, but they certainly want to play stuff. But really .. I’m curious, how many fewer games would I have pirated had I been able instead to walk down to the rental store nearby and rent the game I knew I only wanted to play for a few days? The developer’s get their cut from the original game purchase, the rental place gets their cut from my rental, and I get to play the game for an evening for a few dollars. I believe they call this a good value proposition.

Alternatively, I could have purchased some of those games used. Sure, it might generally not be worth the cost of purchasing a used game – Gamestop just loves gouging their customers on them – but they’re certainly a cheaper option that buying the game new, or even over Steam. Unfortunately, DRM schemes, CD keys, and internet activation completely preclude my ability to do so.

What’s more, owning a console – which I am surprisingly more proud of owning than I thought I would be – enables me to play a much wider variety of game. Granted, the PC will likely always be the master of a certain type of game title – the MMO, the sim game, and the RTS/RPG game – but much of the industry has shifted from spending cashmoney to develop titles like these, and have instead focused on more action-oriented games that are better suited to consoles. Even some long-time PC developers, like Peter Molynuex and Epic Games – seem to be developing for consoles only.

The first Fable remains one of my favorite gaming experiences; sure, it had problems, but the thing was so damned charming

Thus far, Fable 2 has been my favorite gaming experience of the last several months.

Yes, I know that I am two years behind. But you didn’t really expect a website about drinking beer and playing games to stay up to date, did you? Oh. Maybe I should work on that.

But even when console releases come to the PC, they’re often ports – and very often bad ones. I understand that not all of the numbers and lines and codes align quite perfectly, but the quality of some ports is absolutely inexcusable. Would patching in real mouse support for the menus be so terribly difficult? Final Fantasy XI was a wonderful example of this; the second-greatest strength of the PC, the mouse/keyboard control scheme, was entirely negated in favor of pressing keyboard buttons to move through menu options, on selection at a time. Although the mouse could be used, the inputs were so laggy that they were actually slower than using the console-style menu manipulation method. That this is at all excusable is astounding to me – but then, having bought both of these games, I find that I am entirely complicit, so I ought to close my beerhole.

Perhaps most indicative of the problems with where PC gaming has gone is the terribly sad case of Modern Warfare 2. Many of the other virtues of PC versions vs. console versions were entirely removed from MW2; dedicated servers, a console, player administration over servers, and, most importantly, the ability to mod the game. Simply put: Infinity Ward released a console game on the PC, and ensured that it played /exactly the same way as the console version/. While not necessarily a bad thing on its own, the ability for players to change the nature of the game to meet a broad variety of playstyles is arguably the greatest strength of the PC – Half-Life would have been a great single-player game, but would any of us be the same without Counterstrike? The enormous plethora of mods and new maps generated by the players in many games have ensured the game was popular and played for far longer than their contemporaries – and yet, some developers, like Infinity Ward, seem to believe that this is a bad thing. To damn the issue even further, Modern Warfare 2 was released as a $60 PC game. To get the same experience -

I could have just bought a console.

And so I did. Well, my mother did, and then she gave it to me. Street Fighter IV plays online brilliantly, with essentially zero setup time. Fable 2 taunts and charms me regularly with beauty and an abundance of cleverness. Modern Warfare 2 .. well, that game didn’t get much play, as I’m not that sort of gamer really. The thing streams music and movies to my television from my PC without flaw, and the Xbox shell operates seamlessly and without pause – something I’ve never been able to say about Windows.

So please, dear computer: remember the stuff that made you awesome, and at least try and return to it. Until then, well .. you can call me Salad Dodger, and I’ll be in Albion.

As part of my videogame analysis and criticism course, this week’s readings focused on violence, racism, and sex in video games.  Two of the readings, which focus on violence and sex, were mostly from the mouths of game developers; they can be found here. Although these three issues are clearly contentious and controversial in gaming – from all perspectives, including that of the player, creator, and parent of the player – none of the readings, and indeed almost none of the readings I’ve done in this field, actually relate to how these games view women.  Predominantly, I’m finding, as sexual objects, often devoid of the personality found in their male counterparts in the same game.

I found the What They Play piece paricularly disturbing considering that  it addressed sex inside of videogame worlds and narratives, and focused directly on the act rather than the participants as if it were some sort of Roman arena game and the participants unworthy of notice by the spectators as being “people.” Is the sexual act – both as an “unchanging” thing from game to game and the detail in which it is rendered – really the only thing worthy of exploration in a piece like this? I do not think so.

Mass Effect contained a sex scene which generated enormous amounts of controversy. However, as I did not play Mass Effect long enough to develop a sexual relationship, I cannot comment on it directly – but I can comment on what I have experienced. To do this, I look to three games that have captured my attention in recent months, and the suggestions that they make about sexual relationships, those games being The Witcher, Risen, and Champions Online. (Note: Champions Online doesn’t seem to actually have sex acts inside of it, but I am interested in it as far as it portrays physical characteristics of women.)

To begin: The Witcher. A dark, brooding, and often difficult action-RPG game from the eastern side of Europe, The Witcher follows the path of Geralt, a monster hunter, in his quest to figure out what in the hell is going on with the world. While a rather great game on its own that I enjoyed immensely, its treatment of women as sexual objects is nothing less than childish. So childish, in fact, that when Geralt conquers a woman – often by way of showering her in gifts and complements without actually developing any sort of real relationship – a trading-card-style piece of artwork is shown of the woman in an often comprimising position. By comprimising, I mean draped in nothing but a sheet with a black cat centered directly over her crotch. By childish, well -

Although the actual sexual act is shown in blurry, hasty camera shots that reveal no actual details about the act, the process of getting to the act is perhaps more disturbing than anything the act itself could be. Encountering a woman in The Witcher is tantamount to initiating a mini-game; the first question tends to be, “Is she one of the NPC women that will fuck me?” followed by (assuming that the answer was ‘yes’), “How can I get her to fuck me?” The second question is relevant because each woman seemed to have a particular path that must be followed to convince them to engage in coitus; as mentioned above, some women seek gifts, like flowers or chocolate. Some require a topical, conversational relationship and can be rhetorically convinced to disrobe and engorge. Others require Geralt to undertake a quest of sorts, and reward him with fleshy trophies and a trading card.   (Here is a link to a video with all of the sex cards.)

My language concerning the first question asked when encountering a woman is important and intentional: “Is she one of the NPC women that will fuck me?” I feel the most crass language is necessary here, as the object here isn’t even getting to potentially see a naked lady: rather, it’s a mission to collect a trophy. In a game genre dominated by item-collection, little more can be expected when the player is given a trading card for a sexual conquest.

In a similar vein as The Witcher, the recent Pirahna Bites’ game Risen treats women similarly, although doesn’t objectify them quite as literally. For example, as written about by Alec Meer on Rock, Paper, Shotgun , the first woman – and the first NPC the player encounters – is dressed in a bikini top and a long skirt. To quote Meer, “At this earliest of stages, I don’t have the foggiest what the game’s general attitude to women is – but the first example Risen gives of it is not a positive one[,]” and I found that upon finding myself in this situation that I absolutely agreed.

of which lacked women altogether with one notable exception), and found that women exist in quantity only in the whorehouse. Whether it was out of curiosity or chauvenism, I solicitied one of the prostitutes, paying her owner fifty gold pieces.

Almost thankfully, the game neglected to provide me with even a cutscene, instead blacking the screen out and having my character deliver stereotypical lines about how he had places to be. Incidentally, she said I was the best that she’d ever had, and gave me a magical scroll as thanks. At least she didn’t give me a trading card.

The Witcher and Risen, in addition to being similar thematically and in terms of genre, are also direct narratives from the game writers to the player. This sort of relationship forces a certain responsibility on behalf of the game-maker to understand the messages that they are sending: similar to a novelist and a film maker, the views of the artist are often expressed by their characters, whether consciously or not. It’s pretty easy to play through The Witcher and Risen and have eye-roll (or disgust) moments and move on, chalking it up to male chauvinism and sexism at the developer level. They’re both pretty clearly games targeted at 20-something men, and should probably be viewed as such.

(This is one of the screenshots used to display the graphical improvements to the Witcher Enhanced Edition, and is the most common image found when searching on Google for it.  Interesting choice of subject matter.)

However, some games – like Champions Online – are perhaps even more subversive in their views on women than even games like The Witcher and Risen. In Champions Online, as with many other online and role-playing games, the player is allowed to customize the physical appearance of their character. This allows for a veil to be placed in front of the eyes of the player, shielding them from what might be sexist ideas that the game-makers may have: surely, if the player can create their own character, then if it is a false, media-driven idealized image of a woman, then it is the fault of the player.

But what if the player cannot help but create this “idealized woman”? I should probably explain what I mean by “idealized”; the purpose of Champions Online is to create a superhero-type character that can aspire to physical and mental perfection, flawless in physique and in mind. Unfortunately, the “idealized” woman of Cryptic’s otherwise pretty-decent MMORPG happens to be the “idealized” woman of American media; tall, long-legged, large-breasted, seductively-hipped.

(full-size for maximim here, full-size for minimum here)

Alright, so this speaks to what Cryptic views as the “ideal” woman – but what does that have to do with an excellent and staggeringly-flexible character-creation tool? Problematically, for all of the options allowed in character creation, small, reasonable breasts are simply not an option. Literally, not an option – see the screenshots below. Damningly, when creating a new character and enterting the “Custom Body” menu, the “Breasts” slide bar begins fully maxed-out. Further, it appears to be difficult (if not impossible) to create a more masculine-looking woman. One of the variants allowed in character generation is the posturing of the character; average, heroic, huge and beast for the men, and average, heroic, vixen and beast for the women. My favorite posture for male characters it that of the beast; hunched over, ready to lunge, ready to kill – but the beast posture for women is rather a girl leaning forward on one leg, which looks nowhere near as badass or aggressive.

The other stances are also troublingly sexual; even average, which for the males means standing with both feet firmly planted and not favoring either side (you know, standing normally and at-ease) .. but for females means flaring the fingers ever-so-slightly and ever-so-coyly, with one leg bent forward at the knee. In terms of posturing, hip and breast size, it is impossible to create a non-over-sexualized female character.

In The Witcher and in Risen, the player could choose not to progress down avenues of fucking women NPCs, and is actually fully-capable of treating women with respect and dignity in the course of their adventures. However, in Champions Online, the player is explicitly barred from playing anything but a

full-hipped, skinny-but-long-legged, fully-breasted woman that carries an appearance of lustful detachment.

Although the quests are generic and boring and lacking and character and, thus, tend to avoid putting women into any sort of constricting role in the confines oftheir narrative, the female figures of Champions Online have nevertheless managed to be more chauvenist and objectified than any of those found in The Witcher and Risen. Many, many more games provide examples similar to these three in the ways in which women are viewed as sexual objects first and characters second, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another that managed to do this with its character creation system alone.

Unfortunately, I believe that the reason topics like this aren’t really addressed, either in the form of assigned readings for a class or from the mouths of interviewers and game developers, is because the way that women are viewed just isn’t thought about. Even though there are more female gamers out there now than there ever have been, it’s still very much a male-dominated pastime. I fear that as a result of this, game developers write their female characters exclusively for men. Not that this justifies anything – far from it – but I believe that it explains a lot.

And that’s part of remedying the situation – it isn’t enough to say, “This is happening.” It isn’t remedying anything by saying, “Men make games for men.” If gaming writers are slowly beginning to feel comfortable confronting sex and racism in the context of a game, then they can become comfortable with those most-dreaded of frameworks: feminism. It really strikes me that the best way to shift the perceptions of women inside of a game is to be able to identify bad perceptions where they lie, and point others in that direction. Once people know what to ask for, I’d like to think game developers would be willing to give it to us. Or maybe just me, but hopefully not.

I don’t know, though.  I’ll close with a quote from one of the developers of The Witcher from an interview with 1up:

“In the game, you can pick up girls. I’m going to show you where to find one, and you can go to bed with her.” Um… OK. We hit the village and quickly find a milkmaid willing to chat. After being impressed with a bouquet of flowers, the maid leads Geralt off the screen to do the deed. In return, I am rewarded a playing card and a painting of the milkmaid topless and pouring a ladle of milk over her bare breasts. “Through the whole game, when you pick up a girl and go to bed with her, you receive a card like this,” says Iwanicki. We observe an awkward silence.”

-Michal Iwanicki

Below, some of the other male/female pose comparisons of the Champions Online character creator.  Note: all poses we made using the default costume, face, and body options.  Note the muscle definition of each, and keep in mind: these are supposed to be superheroes.

Heroic Pose:

Vixen and Huge Pose:

And, finally and most damningly, the choices for average:

Here, let me put my head on the chopping block: I think graphics are incredibly important in videogames.

Before the axe falls, however, let me explain my reasoning.

First and foremost, good graphics – even excellent, bar-raising ones – will not save a bad game from being a bad game. Gothic 3, I’m looking at you; it doesn’t matter how much you tart up a whore, she will still be a whore. Unless you tarted her up as a a maid or Lady Liberty or something and she actually became one of those and ceased in her whoring, then she’d be something different – but if the shifts in appearance are merely cosmetic, then she’s still a whore. Similarly, dressing up a terrible game in the trappings of an excellent game will not make it an excellent game.

Hell, games are even disparaged for succeeding on account of being attractive and not a whole lot else – because the worst thing in the world is something that is vile and terrible that’s pleasant to look at, isn’t it? There’s something incredibly offensive about the idea of Hitler having actually been a beautiful, elegant, but coyly attractive woman.

Further, it isn’t just the graphical implementations of a game that make it beautiful and stunning; there have been many games that, while attractive and easy on the eyes, are nonetheless visually awful. East India Company, I’m looking at you – you may have been optically charming, but boy, did your interface and overall design suck.

That last bit – the design part – is where the importance comes in, and is vastly more important to me than how realistically hair follicles sway about in the setting sun. Are those human-tendrils drifting about framed by golden rays, or are they just kind of hanging around attracting computerized ions? Do the hairs caress the face of the avatar, speaking to some higher purpose, or are they merely .. just there, popping around at random?

Crysis is an excellent example of a game that succeeds on all graphical measures – as well as gameplay ones. The twisted contortions of a North Korean’s (is it more PC to just say, “Korean”?) face as you strangle him show a weird, oxymoronic care and love to design, as well as the interface encasing your visual field. The explosions, even though developed years ago now, remain among the most realistic I’ve ever seen, demonstrate not only enormous technical accomplishment on behalf of Crytek but also of their understanding of aesthetics. From a design point of view, trucks and men under grenades do not just explode without purpose – each injection of fire-red and burning-flesh orange into the visual field bring balance with them, highlight something, or merely contrast the calm blue of the sea and verdant green of the jungle.

Crysis would still be a good game if the graphical slate was wiped clean and replaced with primary colors and black-and-white smoke from the explosions – but it wouldn’t be a great game. Nomad’s often-desperate leaps from cover object to cover object to unfortunate North Korean would still be thrilling, and that first battle with the nano-suited guys would still be harrowing and demanding of the player. But really, would it be so compelling if it didn’t look as .. well, as bloody real as it does?

I don’t think so. Fallout 3 is a pretty good example of a graphically excellent but blandly-designed game; repetitive, post-apocalypse-red-and-orange environments, generic hills, and childishly violent mutant-man-explosions are pretty for awhile, but certainly got boring. The HUD, Pip-Boy or whatever Bethesda called it, was a nightmare of utility; while the aesthetic matched that of the yesterday-technology so prevalent in the game and looked nice, it was a nightmarish bore to use and the ion-green-refresh stuff became more of a hindrance than a utility, distracting from the damn thing’s purpose: to read stuff about the game. Design aesthetics, then, are about more than just looking good: there should be an actual /purpose/ to each design choice, and this purpose should innately reflect itself in the game.

A game doesn’t need, by any means, to be on the cutting edge of graphics technology. World of Warcraft certainly wasn’t, but it used low polygon counts and a dated engine to its advantage – Blizzard built a game that would run on damn near any computer, and would almost always look at least “alright” while doing so. But WoW’s beauty wasn’t in its textures – its beauty resided, and even resides, in superb color choice and shape implementation. Every set piece and costume item accomplishes something; it draws attention to an important area, lightens a dark-and-evil Whenever playing WoW, it was almost always painfully apparent to me that the guys that designed the game managed to get way further through design school than I ever did.

That’s part of my problem, I think – I was a design student. It taught me a love for aesthetics, an adoration for stuff that looked good, and that often, simple things have the most visual appeal. Right now, I’m playing two games; Heroes of Newerth, and Champions Online. While both are elegantly attractive, I’ll return to why the latter is successful shortly. Heroes of Newerth, like World of Warcraft, makes use of a dated graphical engine. In fact, it looks, at best, like a souped-up version of Warcraft III. Given that WCIII is like, I don’t know, almost a decade old or something, it’s hardly surprising that S2 games managed this – but what /is/ impressive is that they managed to retain Blizzard-level design.

Each of the almost-60 characters has a unique profile and color set, similar to the classes of Team Fortress 2; great care has gone into ensuring that each look not only unique, but are immediately identifiable when viewed by an experienced player for a nanosecond. Even when two full teams of five converge and spells begin flying, the difficulty is never in figuring out which blob of polygons is which character, and this holds true for their skills, too. Rather, the difficulty comes in figuring out how the hell to survive and maybe just maybe kill the enemy motherfuckers – and really, shouldn’t that /always/ be the difficulty in a game? Sure, part of this is because each character has, on average, only two activated skills that need a graphical implementation – but still, that’s almost 120 fully differentiated bits that, at any given time, are immediately recognizable not merely as specific spells, but of also belonging to specific characters.

I think a game that pretty much everybody in the world thought was awesome was Portal. Really, I’ve never seen a game sweep the gaming world in such a fashion – can any of us nerds hear “Still Alive” and not grin like a new father holding his newborn for the first time as if to say, “Look at how awesome this is!” Now – would Portal have even been able to /function/ without high-level design aesthetics? Would the heart cube have been half as charming if it was a mere cube, rendered grey-and-white with a heart? Would it have been nearly as panic-inducing had the final conveyor belt leading to the “cake” not looked and felt convincing? I do not think so.

Great design and well-executed visuals permit gamers to become more engrossed and, to use the buzz word, immersed in the game world. No longer are we required to imagine that we’re a chainsaw-swinging psychopath, because we can, through visual trickery and cleverness, actually be that chainsaw-wielding psychopath. This is not to say that things have to look real; Team Fortress 2 hardly looks like real-life – but just the same, everything meshes so well together that it feels like we really are a cartoon soldier rocket-jumping our way to victory.

To return: I’m playing Champions Online at the moment, and find myself compelled to continue playing, for more than any other reason, because everything looks so godamn wonderful. Nothing actually looks real, not the way Crysis’ Korean-jungle-valley-forests-at-sunset looked real – everything looks like a damn cartoon! But a wonderfully rendered and thoughtfully implemented cartoon, with just enough detail to be, inexplicably, immersive.

And it’s a weird feeling to feel immersed in a world of repressed-homosexuality supermen, fascist-fuck-half-man-soldiers, and cyborg-ninjas. The last, incidentally, is what my character is. One of the choices I found most initially jarring was this little black “horizon” line that appears on the exterior edge of most surfaces. It’s sort of like the kind of drawings us average dudes make – every object has a clear outline. This is why most of us can’t draw a nose or a hand for the life of us – these things are defined by their shadows, not their outlines.

Yet, somehow, the outlining in Champions Online works beautifully, drawing attention to game objects and making them stand out in contrast to one another, differentiating one building from the next, and even allowing giant lightbulbs to exist without looking like giant polygons. That, really, is the huge accomplishment of the system – the game doesn’t look, generally, like a computer game. It looks like a comic book! – and this is exactly why, on a visual level, the game succeeds so well. Cryptic knew exactly what aesthetic they wanted, and the designers followed up on this beautifully.

This – an actual /knowing/ of what the overall aesthetic of a game should be – is what makes or breaks a game for me. Knowing it alone isn’t nearly enough – the designers must also be able to determine if the design actually /works/, as often – like with Fallout 3 – I find that it does not. Heroes of Newerth, World of Warcraft, and Crysis have something in common – each game knows exactly how it wants to look, and knows that the idea works.

As said earlier, wonderful graphics cannot make a terrible game a great game – but they can make it an experience worth having. I’ve found that, over the years, far too many gaming writers just love to shit all over graphical considerations for games, stating the now-cliched idea of them not being important and don’t make up for bad gameplay. We know that. Everybody knows that. But to push them to auxiliary considerations so frequently is madness – if image quality isn’t important, why aren’t ‘Graphics-Aren’t-Important’ folks still using VHS? Fallacious argument, to be sure – but I feel it makes my point, if one assumes that all new films are available in VHS as well as DVD and whatever other new-fangled formats are out now.

What I will say is this: terrible graphics, design, and overall aesthetics will, to me, ruin an otherwise good game. I thought that the newly-released indie title AI Wars was a fascinating concept – but absolutely terrible visuals made the game such a chore to play that I just couldn’t get into it. Similarly, the still-in-beta Fallen Earth had such muddied and dated graphics that, even if the game was good (it was mediocre at best, alas) on all other counts, I just couldn’t have taken it seriously. Partially, this is because I spent a thousand fucking dollars a year ago, and I want to feel like I’m getting value out of that investment and pushing the old rig as far as she’ll go.

More than that, however, its because I feel that game developers that don’t hire talented designers simply do no respect gamers. If your interface is a chore to navigate and actually makes the game harder than intended, you’re doing something wrong. If a player cannot look on-screen and immediately identify everything he ought to be able to, you’re doing something wrong. If, at least once in awhile, a player does not stop and stare in wonder and awe at a clever bit of scenery, charming character design, or a humorous sign, then your game has aesthetically failed.

Good design is eternal, and can elevate games to legendary status. Poorly designed and implemented games are temporary and illusory, even if they sell well. Look back on your favorite games of times’ past, and ask yourself: how many of them are poorly designed? If you’re anything like me, then that number is very low indeed.

The sad fact of playing computer games while inebriated is that you’re bound to miss things. Several things, sometimes, and reading back through my initial post on it – and having watched my room mate play it for a few hours – I realized that I missed many of these, and felt the need to address them:

1. You can light torches!

2. There are a bunch of magical items!

Most of them are typical RPG items – new armors, potions, trinkets and charms – nothing you haven’t seen before. However, achieving these items is a bit interesting, and each of them – there are two per level – are listed as “Secrets” in the level select screen so, even if you don’t care about making your characters marginally more badass, there’s a weird compulsion to discover those things so arrogantly labeled as SECRETS. Speaking of easily-missed things,

3. Sometimes monsters bug out and it’s weird!

The cocktease monster I mentioned in the first article ((link!!)), it turns out, wasn’t an intentional cocktease, but an accidental one. Inexplicably, both of the two that I encountered bugged out the first time I played the game. Instead of standing like an NES bad guy and repeating a singular swinging animation and standing still, the crystalline thing was SUPPOSED to run back and forth repeating the same animation. This, as it turns out, lets you kill him. Also:

4. The wizard is in the “Number 1” slot!

This is a weird choice! Almost every other RPG-kinda game I’ve ever played placed the melee/warrior/fighter/whatever character in the “Number 1” slot – keyboard 1/etc – but not Trine. Instead, the wizard is here, and the thief is in “Number 2,” and the fightery sort holds up the van. As noted in my original comments, I found the wizard to be the most often useful (although I spent most of my time as the thief), so from a game mechanics perspective it makes sense. But I wonder: was there some further, non-game-design-based idea at work here? A sly method of Frozenbyte from suggesting the superiority of the wizard over the fighter? I can’t help but think it is, as the fightery guy is somehow even more stupid than the stereotype of fightery-sorts displays. But the wizard isn’t always an option …

5. Sometimes Trine likes to arbitrarily prevent you from doing stuff!

There was an entire section of a level where, for some reason, I could not use the wizard’s conjuration spells. Hugely disappointing, but not because I couldn’t figure out what to do or whom else to do it with, but because it removed from me my favorite aspect of Trine – the capacity to maneuver through the game solving puzzles in an individualistic way that was the most fun for me. Think of it this way; it would be like half of a level in Deus Ex removing all guns/weapons/actions from Denton, and then expecting him to push crates on top of bad guys to kill them. It isn’t that it wouldn’t be fun. It isn’t that it isn’t something I might try and do anyway. It’s that it takes away from me, the player, the choice of playing how I damn well like!

All of that said, it’s entirely possible that this was another bug – see number 3.

I’m sure that there’s other stuff that I missed but, for as much as I was entertained by aspects of Trine, I just haven’t found myself enjoying it when playing it since the initial night. So it goes, yeah?