Not Exactly Enchanting - WARLOCK: MASTER OF THE ARCANE

I initially wrote a pretty negative article about Warlock (surprising nobody). Obviously I'm not posting that one, but here's the short version: the gameplay isn't varied enough, the victory conditions aren't well-designed and are pretty buggy--the "summon an avatar" condition flatly refused to work during my game, as the gods' like/dislike meters wouldn't pass 99--and the sound design is INCREDIBLY grating.

The primary point of the original post, though, was that the game just feels small, and obviously when I say that I mean in comparison to Civilization. You can't make a turn-based nation-building game without laboring in the shadow of Civ, and then the Warlock team certainly made no effort to avoid the comparison when they cribbed Civ V's UI.

Maybe it's meant to be an homage.

So every negative point I made (apart from the awful sound design bit) ended up with "compared to Civ" at the end of it, which made me wonder if I was being unfair. Yeah, this game is smaller than Civ in basically every way. There's less variety in the victory conditions, there are fewer nation-specific unique things, there are fewer units with less advancement, there isn't a large group of interesting scenarios, there's a much thinner collection of growth mechanics, you have fewer ways to customize and fashion your own civilization... but it's not Civ, so maybe it shouldn't be expected to conform to Civ's scale and aspirations. It's a different game and maybe it's exactly the thing that the designers wanted. So how do I evaluate Warlock on its own merits, without the comparisons?

Frankly, I have no idea. I don't even know if it's something I should do. Here's what I do know: I didn't enjoy Warlock very much for a number of reasons, and at least some of that was because I played Civ V first and I kept thinking things like "Why on earth would they choose to do it that way when the same thing in Civ was so much better?" Also, now that I've played enough of both of the games to really "get" them, there's only one that I still play for fun... so maybe a game's competitors and external context actually do matter quite a lot.

The Same Thing Six Times - VVVVVV

My favorite part is all the tiny colored squares.

There's not very much game to VVVVVV. It feels a lot like Metroid but without all the weapons and abilities and boss fights, which sounds worse than it is. It's actually a reasonably fun experience which only overstays its welcome a little bit.
Its most memorable characteristic is its slavish devotion to that which came before. The chiptune soundtrack and many of the room names make it perfectly clear that the aesthetic isn't coincidental, making this roughly the eight millionth game in the last decade to bash players about the head and shoulders with its degree from the old school. Nostalgia is powerful, and it appears that developer Terry Cavanagh feels that it's a fine substitute for style and voice. Frankly, the whole experience feels a little barren because there is really absolutely nothing here you haven't seen before.
The game is executed well enough, but it's kind of hollow. There's not much of interest to say except that pixel art  (cheap and pragmatic as it may be) doesn't excuse you from creating some kind of visual design. There's no reason you can't have both!

Also, I'm mildly annoyed that it took longer to write this than it did to beat the game.

Suboptimally Subtitled: WARHAMMER 40K: DAWN OF WAR 2 - RETRIBUTION

I love cooperative games. In particular, I'm drawn to games in which planning has to take place extemporaneously, when there simply isn't time to discuss and each player has to try to predict their allies' behavior and execute the most complementary plan on the fly.

Well, I say "has to", but maybe that ought to be "should".

I've spent far more time playing Retribution's Last Stand mode than its single player campaign, which means that I've spent a lot of time getting matched up with two strangers for a rousing game of Smash the Eldar. The game is designed in such a way that no one character can be equipped to fight everything; some waves need strong armor-piercing strikes to penetrate the hulls of tanks and wraithlords, while some need area-affecting sprays to dispatch hordes of termagants and guardsmen. In order to be successful, your team of three has to select complimentary loadouts, each member filling in a weakness of the others.
Unfortunately, nobody actually does that.
You select your character and loadout before joining the matchmaking queue, which may be part of the problem. People decide that they're going to play a Space Marine Captain with a jump pack and a power axe before they even see their teammates, and they'll be damned if they're going to change that over a tiny thing like winning. Once you get matched up and everybody can clearly see that nobody on the team has brought a weapon capable of killing two enemies at the same time, it behooves somebody to make a change, but why do that when you can just stumble awkwardly through the first six waves and then be beaten to death by a hundred banshees? Really, isn't that the true essence of fun?

Bros in Spaaaaaace: WARHAMMER 40K: SPACE MARINE

Space Marine certainly knows its target audience.

To preface, I love Warhammer 40,000. I love the grimdark over-the-top ridiculousness of it. I love the fully automatic armor-piercing rocket launchers, I love the crazy magic Emperor god-king, and I love the audacious heavy metal scifi metal sensibilities of the setting. (That said, I don't exactly love Ultramarines, but for some reason nobody wants to make a game about cool Space Marine chapters like the Salamanders or the Sisters of Battle.) Obviously, a game purporting to be the most Space Marine-y experience to ever hit a TV excited me, but that excitement was tinged with a bit of caution after the stylish but resoundingly mediocre Dawn of War 2 games. Fortunately, Space Marine does faithfully deliver the experience. The Space Marines, Chaos Marines, and orks all feel right (particularly the WAAAAAGH!, which really shakes you to your core if you have a good sound system), and the game does a good job of communicating to you that you are an unstoppable genetically engineered killing machine, even if it does suffer from some tedium and a nearly terminal case of Last Boss Letdown Syndrome.

But what is this, some kind of blog where I have positive opinions about anything ever? Let's talk about the parts I didn't like!

Primarily, the characterization of the protagonist gives me pause. For those of you unfamiliar with the Warhammer 40,000 setting, let me lay out the big problem with a Space Marine protagonist: the Imperium of Man is an intensely xenophobic interstellar fascist theocracy ruled by the corpse of a guy who was kind of a dick when he was alive and the people in charge have no compunction about slaughtering their own subjects by the billion to accomplish even the least significant goals. A Space Marine is just a superpowered soldier for the Imperium, and even among Space Marines the Ultramarines are known for their extreme unquestioning orthodoxy and devotion to the literal wording of the Imperium's holy book, the Codex Astartes. I imagine the developers had some concern about presenting an outerspace ultraconservative hypernazi stormtrooper as a main character, so they decided to make the game about a different group of people entirely.

Haha, just kidding! That would have been pretty sensible, but what they did instead is make the protagonist, Captain Titus, completely unlike an Ultramarine without any explanation as to how he somehow became one of the most prominent members of the order. So if he's not an Ultramarine, what did they make him instead?

I tried to draw in a popped collar, but it was too hard so I gave up.

Honestly, he's kind of a bro.

Now, granted, the line between those two things is narrow in places. When Titus responds to every situation by yelling and charging forward to commit violence, we can hardly say that he's not being a good Space Marine. When he plants his feet and fires a massive automatic weapon into a horde of undifferentiated enemies who are racially evil or resolves a problem with a giant demon by punching it in the face while screaming, it may be OMGBRAHSOME but it's also the proper response to heresy. The divide becomes clear mostly during dialogue.

More than once during the game, a young Marine named Leandros will say to Titus something along the lines of "Hey, you know that book our order is universally famous for following? Maybe this would be a pretty good time to follow some of it." An Ultramarine would either just agree or explain how his plan really does follow the Codex, which is a book so long and vaguely written that you can use it to reinforce literally any course of action. Instead, Titus responds "NO BRO, RULES ARE FOR BITCHES, I'MMA DO WHAT I DO U KNO" and then jumps out of a spaceship with a jetpack on because he's an idiot. (And then he discards it immediately because argsohsad;fklaj.) At the end of the game, when Leandros correctly calls in the Inquisition because not only does Titus not act like an Ultramarine at all but also he has been displaying some very suspicious invulnerability to stuff for no reason, Titus gives him a little speech about how it's bad to follow the rules and narc on people and really he should just like be cool, be a bro. This shit probably sits pretty comfortable for the player at home who thinks that rules are just something the Man uses to keep him down, but for an Ultramarine it's all WILDLY out of character.

How did this guy get to be Captain of a company of Space Marines? I imagine him sitting in the barracks talking to girls on his cell phone while all the other Marines go about their strict regimen of praying, training, and praying, and then he interrupts them and asks if they want to go into town and score some skeech, and they don't even really know what that is because probably he just made that word up but like I bet it's either sex or drugs or sex and drugs and then he gets inexplicably promoted to captain. Maybe his dad bought the chapter a new Land Raider or something.

Really I just feel like the developers betrayed their premise here. Why would you make a game about Ultramarines and then have the protagonist act like he isn't one? Why not just make the game about another chapter (the Space Wolves, for instance) that doesn't care so much what the Codex Astartes says? Or, I guess, why not just write the dialogue a little better and have Titus reinforce his decisions with passages from the Codex? In what feels like an attempt to pander to a large and lucrative demographic, Relic has introduced a great big plot hole into the world and then expected us to happily identify with it.

Feel free to hit the comment thread if you are unable to restrain yourself from mocking me about getting mad over Warhammer lore.

Learning to Hate All Over Again: ZENO CLASH

We're jumping back to the bottom of the alphabet (all the way from W!) because I received a free copy of Zeno Clash. You may be shocked to find out that I didn't like it very much.

These versus screens are pretty slick, though.

The game commits a multitude of sins, but today I just want to talk about two fairly common narrative devices that Zeno Clash manages to completely foul up.

1) The Diegetic Tutorial. In these increasingly common sequences, a character (or, occasionally, delusion or sentient computer program) within the game teaches you how to play the game under the pretense of putting you through a training course. Now, I understand the desire to couch everything crunchy within something fluffy, to always ensconce a mechanic in a bit of story and flavor. Theoretically, relating every game concept through the fictional world aids immersion.
The problem with this is mostly that it causes frustration, especially if you're replaying the game. Many games rely on control conceits common within their genres, so tutorials are often completely unnecessary for experienced players; a person who plays first-person shooters regularly does not need to be told that W moves forward and mouse1 attacks. Worse, these sequences are far too rarely removed from the main game and often cannot be skipped. This all works against the intent because nothing breaks immersion quite like being compelled to scream "I KNOW HOW TO PLAY THE GAME, PLEASE LET ME PLAY THE GAME" at your screen.
These sequences really work best when they're not a part of the main game—perhaps behind a "Tutorial" option at the main menu—or when they can be skipped easily. The latter is trivial to implement: your instructor/sensei/evaluator/robot asks "Do you know how to X?" and then you answer in the negative to start the tutorial or in the affirmative to skip it. Zeno Clash, impressively, manages to screw this up even worse than most games. Not only is the tutorial a mandatory but thoroughly unimportant part of the main story, but (presumably to ensure that the game's Half-Life 2-style chapter structure doesn't let you skip past it easily) it's broken up into three parts that occur during three different chapters. And then, to really rub it in, the controls for the game are incredibly simple (yet somehow still frustratingly inconsistent*) and there's nothing in the tutorial actually worth learning.

2) The Lure of the Unknown. It's common in many different media for creators to attempt to pull the audience into a story by starting them with insufficient information to understand the earliest events of the plot. The author hopes that the mystery will entice the audience to stick around, wondering "Who's that man? Why does he have a gun? Whoa, where'd that robot come from? Wait, am I in the wrong theater?"
Sometimes this works beautifully, but frankly I think it fails more often than it succeeds. Frequently it ends up looking amateurish and driving the audience away because they have difficulty identifying with characters who are strangers and caring about situations that they know nothing about.
Even in the cases where it works, though, it's vital to open the information valve pretty early on. Regardless of their quality, enigmas grow stale quickly if not hydrated with a little bit of insight now and again, and this is where Zeno Clash fails in a way that seems almost malicious. This mysterious woman that travels with us, what's her story? Who is she? How do the Corwids survive long enough to grow into adults if they're so single minded about things that they never stop to eat? How did ANYONE not immediately know Father-Mother's "secret"? What happened to the gun I was carrying? Why can't I just sneak back into town myself? Who could possibly have thought that ending was a good idea? All these questions and more, Zeno Clash boldly refuses to answer.
Seriously, there is a woman with you in nearly every scene in the game and the only thing you learn about her is her name. Why did she decide to hang out with you? What drives her? The game's only response is a resounding "Who cares? She's not actually a character! We just needed some reason for the protagonist to slowly divulge uninteresting memories."

*You press Spacebar while walking sideways to step out of the way of enemy attacks, but this only works if your hands are empty. If you're holding a weapon, Spacebar throws the weapon instead. Several times during the game, you are expected to fight charging enemies who can only be damaged with weapons, but if you try to dodge to the side when they charge you all that happens is you throw your hammer at them and then get flattened. Brilliant design decisions, guys.

To Conclude the Interlude

The other half of that thing I posted last time, once again mostly to justify my time expenditure.

Holiday Tidings

Happy Easter from PAX, bitches!

Also, I'm sorry about all the profanity. If my mother read my blog, she would be appalled.