Twelve Years of Diablo May 15, 2012

My first exposure to Diablo came when a copy of PC Gamer arrived in my mailbox back in Summer 2000. In the same issue where Daikatana was reviewed (and received its low score) there was another game reviewed in the exact same issue which took one of the highest scores that PC Gamer had ever handed out at the time. It was my first exposure to the game known as Diablo II. Written by Greg “The Vede” Vederman (who would later become Editor-In-Chief), instead of just a review, he detailed his entire journey to play the game. He wrote about the long nights he would be spending in the offices of Blizzard, his late night triumph over the game’s final boss, and finally he posted up a scoreboard detailing things like the total time it took him to complete the game and his total deaths along with the game’s vital statistics.

I must admit I’ve always been late to the Blizzard game. While I do own plenty of Blizzard’s games including, Starcraft, Warcraft III, and the Diablo games, their difficulty, as well as my preference at the time for action games opposed to role-playing games, made them quite difficult to get into. However, I appreciated the fantastic attention to detail that the games had, the great gameplay, and the wonderful cinematics that made the cutscenes themselves deserve their own DVD boxed set release.

Gamasutra has recently reposted the original postmortem detailing the development of Diablo II, written twelve years ago. It’s a fantastic read which serves as a time capsule for Blizzard and how much game development and technology has changed. I also recommend reading one of the funniest gaming articles I had ever read before, when Dave “Fargo” Kosak decided to stop going to work for one week and instead try camping out in a mall waiting for Diablo II to be released. Ironically enough, Kosak is now working for Blizzard, making the possiblity that he needed to repeat his mall camping adventure slim.

Well, now Diablo III is officially out and I’m sure all new memories will be made from it. Enjoy the games guys, you’ve certainly waited long enough for it.

The Problem With Lollipop Chainsaw at PAX East April 21, 2012

It’s time for a rare Saturday editorial guys. At PAX East 2012 I couldn’t help but become interested in seeing Lollipop Chainsaw. The developers really went all out, bringing a bus into the show floor, and it wasn’t just any bus, it was a living replica of the bus featured in the game! Here’s a behind the scenes video to show you what I’m talking about.

It really was a sweet idea and you could tell a lot of care was put into every single detail about it, and was assembled by people who were probably the best at what they did. But the problem with it wasn’t in its construction, it was in its design, in particular the problem was its size. As you could hear in the video, there were only four demo units inside the bus. Now this was likely due to reasons of comfort and safety, but that meant that only a maximum of four people could be demoing the game at any given time. The typical time frame for a live demo of a game is about thirty minutes. So that means, theoretically that if only four people could see the game every thirty minutes, a line filled with just several dozen people could take hours to clear. So not only were the lines long and took a while to move, when it did move it was only by a tiny amount. A large handful could cap off a line just a few hours after the show started for the day, and that’s exactly what happened on the days I was at PAX East. – Ed: I’m guessing at that timeframe based upon average time of every other game I’ve seen demoed live at events and memory of the line, I didn’t get a chance to see the game demoed but if anyone did could they please post how long the demo was.

The objective of these trade shows are to promote your games and generate buzz among as many people as possible before the game releases. I understand the desire to have lines to keep order in crowded events, but many developers just did not take into account the massive amount of people that had sold out PAX East for months prior to the event. Having booth setups to accommodate the large yet expected crowds is just practical and if planned properly very possible, and there were many publishers who had properly designed their booths to accommodate the sold out show.

This was all I was able to get of Lollipop Chainsaw at PAX East. Really wish I could’ve seen more. I’m a huge fan of Suda51 since the first No More Heroes and I can’t wait to play this game when it releases.

Lollipop Chainsaw is coming June 12th, 2012 to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

The Arcade, Reissued March 2, 2012

With the recent resurgence of the very early classic arcade games from the 70s and 80s like Donkey Kong, Dragon’s Lair, Joust and others, a lot of players from that generation should be quite pleased to find pretty accurate versions of these arcade games available to them in a variety of platforms ranging from the PC to their phones. This has been a fantastic development, as it means that so many of these games which required huge arcade cabinets which had to be purchased, housed and transported can have a much cheaper equivalent version made available to their die-hard fans as well as a new generation of gamers.

However, I’m not a product of that generation. I grew up in the 90s, well, that is to say, I mostly grew up in the 90s. In those days the arcades were getting a major resurgence after the revival of the home video game platforms like the Nintendo Entertainment System. The arcades, which originally started to go south following the gaming crash of 1983, started to regain ground and a new generation of arcade games, with superior graphics to what was achievable with home consoles were being released. Games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The Simpsons sucked plenty of quarters out of my pocket back then.

To compete with the home consoles the arcades had to be several steps ahead of them. They needed to be capable of things that the home consoles just couldn’t do, or else they would never be able to compete with them. I can think of two major steps that they took to accomplish this. First off, they had better hardware, capable of making games with higher fidelity graphics. Even if a home version of the game could be made, they wouldn’t look anywhere near as good on the console’s of the time. The other thing some of the later arcade games did, especially by the second half of the decade, was make the games more immersive, either by creating larger fully enclosed cabinets, or games with bigger custom screens. When I was vacationing in Vegas fifteen years ago there was a major interest in Virtual Reality, and there were arcade games provided that had fully gyroscopic cockpits. Oh I miss those.

While there was plenty of attempts to get those games on home platforms back when they were in their heyday, in fact there was certainly some success towards it during the 16-bit generation, there were plenty of games that never saw home console releases that met the quality or feel of the original arcade version. Others never saw a home port at all. It may have been that the home consoles just didn’t have the hardware on par with what the arcades at the time could produce, but you can’t imagine how disappointed I was in so many home games that claimed to be ports of the arcade version turning out awful with problems ranging from bad controls, extreme difficulty, to insufficiant graphics and sound.

After an arcade port of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit Xbox Live Arcade, I was hopeful that a lot more of the games I played in the 90s on the arcades would make it to the platform. The digital marketplace has really become the best possible distribution channel for these arcade games. The games don’t take up a lot of storage space and can be launched at much lower prices than a retail disc game. Plenty of games would follow from all over the arcade catalog, but unfortunately I would still be waiting for some of my absolute favorites. Finally, The Simpsons got released, and twelve years after playing the game I have a copy of my own to play.

So, I beg you, can we get an HD-release of Area 51 now?

Halo Reach, Our Generation’s Dirty Dozen February 29, 2012

War movies used to be little more than propaganda to encourage positive support for the country’s war effort. Then, in 1967, The Dirty Dozen was released. It is, to this day, considered one of the greatest war movies of all time, and probably is up there on some lists of the greatest action movies of the last generation.

Based on the bestselling book, The Dirty Dozen told the story of twelve American soldiers during World War II who had been found guilty in a military court-martial and had sentences ranging from death to extended hard labor. Instead of serving their sentences, the military cut them a deal and trained them for a mission to France. Their goal was to break into and eventually destroy a château where several high-ranking Nazi officers were staying and disrupt the Nazi chain of command just before D-Day. It was, by all accounts, a suicide mission. While they were promised exoneration for their crimes if their mission succeeded, if anyone, even anyone in the army, found out their identities or what their mission was, their deal was off and they would be sent back to serve their sentences.

E. M. Nathanson, the author of the original novel, was inspired by the urban legends and rumors that were traded among the soldiers after World War II. He had heard stories about a mythical dirty dozen who were made up of condemned men, and then when he later asked what happened to them he found out that they all perished on their mission. While the US Government and the book’s author readily acknowledge the story as a complete work of fiction, many believe that the story of the dirty dozen was true.

The movie was made after World War II and ironically enough many actors who had served in war through various branches of the armed forces brought that experience to their role. Lee Marvin, who starred in the picture and was the soldier assigned to lead the dozen had been a Marine. Ernest Borgnine, who played a General responsible for overseeing the mission, had been in the Navy. (Yes, McHale really was in the Navy.) As for members of the dozen, Clint Walker had been a Merchant Marine, Charles Bronson and Telly Savallas were in the Army. You can tell that war experience was influential when seeing the actors in their roles. The people who watched him on the movie’s set said Marvin’s performance was “…all Marine” and watching him in the role, you can tell.

Everything about that movie worked in its favor, and it turned out to be a fantastic picture which pulled no punches in its graphic depiction of war. Many believed that something like it could never had been made again. Even the three direct to television sequels of The Dirty Dozen failed to reach anything near the acclaim of the first movie.

In 2010, Halo Reach was released.

Here was the story of six soldiers, called the Noble Team, of extremely differing backgrounds forced to fight in a war with overwhelming odds against them. Just like the dozen, they never had the chance to get to know each other very well. Only five of them knew each other, Noble Six was a recent replacement for a squad member who had died. They also never trained together. Noble Five, (Jorge) was part of the SPARTAN-II program, the same program that produced John-117, the Master Chief. The others were part of the controversal SPARTAN-III program, which was made up of revenge motivated orphans of war. They were developed in secret after the success of the SPARTAN-II program, in a way to be more cost-effective they were not given training or armor nearly as good as the SPARTAN-IIs had, as, like the dirty dozen, they were considered expendable.

One thing I found interesting was that Halo Reach and The Dirty Dozen were both shot in the same aspect ratio. While this could be played off as a mere coincidence, Bungie did also make Halo 3 and Halo 3 ODST for the Xbox 360, and chose to Letterbox those game’s cinematics, so that they would have black bars even when displayed on a widescreen HDTV. In Halo Reach, the cinematics are not letterboxed, and display at the same aspect ratio as the rest of the game, which ironically enough is the aspect ratio The Dirty Dozen has.

Like The Dirty Dozen, Halo Reach cast members did have military experience. Noble Two (Kat) was played by Alona Tal, who, according to the game’s Legendary Commentary, had served in the Israeli Defense Forces. Heck one of the guys who played a soldier in the game, Ron Livingston (who you probably remember from Office Space) had some experience. He went through military basic training (probably in preparation for Band of Brothers), and the Reach developers remarked that he did the whole recording session while in character (even calling the people at Bungie, “Sir”). When they asked him why he did that, he said he had to since that was how he was trained.

Just to warn you guys right now, I’m going to wrap this article up with some spoilers. As those of you who have played through the game, you know that one by one, the members of Noble Team are killed in action. The game’s promotional material, as well as very early foreshadowing in the first cinematic of the game makes it clear to the player, that Noble Team is on a suicide mission, not because of choice, but out of necessity for the survival of the human race.

It would be a lie to assume that everyone in a war would simply be able to walk away from it just because they’re likable. The Dirty Dozen dared to show that to people at a time when other movies kept that away from audiences. Forty years later, it would take a video game to bring that same message to the next generation.

The Janitor in Mirror’s Edge, I’ve Read That Book Before February 1, 2012

I got a lot of enjoyment out of EA and DICE’s 2008 game Mirror’s Edge, which was the story about a freerunner who used her parkour abilities to transport important information that the senders didn’t want to be seen by the totalitarian government who listened in and censored everything. Over the course of the game you can find a secret room in one of the levels, a janitor’s room, made up to look like an office. In it, you see the Janitor has a pet mouse in its cage, and notes left over that look like they had been written by a small child. When I first saw this room I asked myself, “Where had I seen this before?” and then remembered exactly where I had seen it.

When I was a freshman in high school I had the pleasure to read what I personally consider one of the saddest short stories ever written called Flowers for Algernon. It is a short story written by Daniel Keyes structured as a series of journal entries written by what originally appears to be a child but is actually a grown man named Charlie, who is a janitor living in New York with a mental handicap.

At the start of the story Charlie is about to undergo an experimental operation, specifically, brain surgery. A procedure was invented they believe could fix his mental handicap which was originally tested on a lab mouse named Algernon. The mouse was born mentally handicapped and had already undergone the surgery. Field tests in mazes before and after the surgery showed the mouse had an incredible improvement in its mental capacity and Charlie was selected as a test subject. Charlie and Algernon would race each other in mazes, Algernon would run the maze while Charlie would navigate through the same maze on paper. In the beginning of the story, Algernon constantly beats Charlie at racing the maze.

Charlie undergoes the operation, which is successful, and in the process of retraining his mind learns years worth of studies in mere weeks. As time passes he ends up falling in love with his teacher. It gets to a point where Charlie becomes so smart he becomes distanced from most of the intellectuals around him, smarter even than the people who worked with him at the start of the project.

However a lingering fear comes into everyone’s mind when the mouse’s intelligence starts to wane. Algernon becomes depressed, no longer wanting to run the maze, stops eating and eventually starves to death. Charlie leaves flowers at Algernon’s grave, showing that even in his state he considered that mouse a peer and probably his only friend. Charlie reasons the same will eventually happen to him and he works day and night to publish a thesis of his experiences before he reverts to his previous state. Eventually he does become handicapped again and starts falling back into his old habits. He stops writing his journal entries and instead plans to leave NYC so he didn’t have to see anyone who knew he was smart.

Okay, now onto the Janitor. Judging by the notes he left in his office, along with notes he had passed along to a businessperson who may have been his brother, he appears to be in a mental state of about six years old. You’ll also notice he idolizes his pet mouse (who appears to be alive) who probably is his only friend (like Charlie). They both have the same profession.

Could the Janitor of Mirror’s Edge be a “Flowers for Algernon” reference? It is considered a very popular and well known story, especially among nerds, or people who would design or play video games. The Janitor’s graffiti did also make it into the iPhone/iPad game, which could also give some credibility that this wasn’t just some fluke easter egg but a recurring point of the series. I would love to hear from one of the game’s developers if this was just a coincidence or if anyone working for the company intentionally created the character as an homage to that fantastic story.