Quick E3 Roundup

Yesterday I got up at 4:30 AM, got in my car, and drove to the airport. I managed to park my car in the wrong lot, and had to trek on foot between terminals. Despite having left so early, I ended up just barely making my flight. I arrived at LAX at about 8:00 AM, jumped in a taxi, and headed for E3.

E3 is pretty much as close as you can get to sensory overload without going into a testing room at some secret government facility. There is no place to sit down, there are thousands of people milling around, and the conference is spread out over a giant convention center. Though looking at the games is fun, after a few hours my feet and back began to ache from standing for so long. Add to this the incessant flashing lights, the 110 decibel sound, and the throngs of people trying to push by you to get in line for a free T-shirt, and E3 becomes an extremely exhausting experience. At 8:00 PM I dragged myself to a taxi, drove back to the airport, and caught a flight home at 10. I got home around midnight and crashed immediately without even brushing my teeth.

Exhausting as it was, I am glad I went to E3. This year was a very good year, especially compared to last year, which was absolutely horrible. I wanted to drop some news points that are related to this site before talking about the conference.

  • A Resident Evil game is coming out for the Nintendo Wii. No other information is available yet.
  • Rule of Rose is confirmed for US release “by Christmas.”
  • A new Silent Hill game, Silent Hill Origins, has been announced for the PSP. Looks cool.
  • Dead Rising, Capcom’s zombie beat-em-up for the Xbox360, is really fun to play. It was the only game I saw that really interested me last year, and I’m happy to report that it plays just as good as it looks in the video.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find out anything about games like Siren 2 or Possession. There was a lot going on, but the real reason is that I spent a huge block of my time in the Nintendo Wii booth.

Nintendo is, hands down, the absolute winner of the show this year. Last year their showing was a little weak; they had good DS games on display and a couple of GameCube titles but that was all. This year they amassed a huge crowed (you had to wait in line for 2+ hours just to get in) and pretty much stunned everyone with the number of playable (and extremely fun) Wii titles. Here’s what I can tell you about the controller: you need to stand at least three feet away from the TV or the pointer doesn’t work, the resolution on the pointer is extremely high (meaning that the controller is ultra accurate, and you can easily cover the entire TV screen by barely moving your wrist), the nunchuck controller is smooth and intuitive, and the games they are making for this system are really, really fun. I played about eight Wii titles (the lines were so long that each game required waiting for 30 – 45 minutes), including Super Mario Galaxy (amazingly great), Excite Truck (very simple and also very fun), Necro-Nesia (the only un-fun Wii game I played), Wario Ware (awesome awesome awesome), as well as table tennis, Duck Hunt, and a couple of other demos. What’s interesting is that there was such a wide range of usage for the controller: some games used it as a pointers, others did not. Some required the nunchuck, others did not. Some relied on buttons, others simply used motion. Even with this small sampling of games, the controller is clearly versatile. Nintendo was also showing some killer DS titles, including a new Mario Bros. game, and a new Starfox, which were both pretty awesome.

After Nintendo’s booth, everything else on the floor seemed really tired and heavy-handed. Heavily Sword on PS3 looked pretty fun, as did God of War 2 and Okami. The second generation Xbox360 titles looked pretty nice, especially Dead Rising and Viva Pinata. Other than Silent Hill Origins, and yet another Ratchet and Clank, the PSP showing was pretty weak. The rest of the industry seems to still be suffering from the generic protagonist shoots generic enemy in generic third person view problem.

Anyway, it was a pretty successful trip, but I’m really glad that I only went for one day. I’ll write a slightly longer report sometime this week.

Headed to E3

I’m off to E3 tomorrow. Though the conference runs for three days, this year I have decided to visit for only a single day. After six or seven hours in the Los Angeles Convention Center I find myself almost unable to stand and mostly deaf.

Last year I posted a lengthy rant about the direction the industry is moving. The gist of this rant is as follows:

Next Gen = Higher Cost to Make Games = Reduction of Game Quality

This year I have pretty much the same beef with the industry, though I am invigorated by the idea of a cheap console with an innovative control scheme, even if it is called the Wii. And with Sony’s recent and amazingly unsurprising announcement that the PS3 will cost $600, I am even more convinced that the next generation consoles are not good for gaming. Innovation is a function of cost, and the new hardware increases cost by a huge amount.

But anyway, maybe there will be something cool this year. Last year was really terrible. This year I am interested in checking out Alone in the Dark 5, Siren 2, new Silent Hill information, Resident Evil 5, Rule of Rose, and Possession.

I’ll be sure to write a report upon my return.

Site Updates

I’ve made a bunch of updates to the various game info pages. After moderating the comments on those pages for almost three years, I’ve decided to remove comments from the game pages and focus users on the forums. The forum software is better anyway (it’s threaded, you can have a name and an avatar, etc), and I was getting really tired of the hoards of people who decided to leave a message along the lines of “this game is teh gay it suxors i h4t3 it.”

On the other hand, I do want people to be able to express their opinions about games, so I’ve created a better user rating system. Now you can rate games based on many different factors, and there’s a nice bar graph on each page showing how users feel about various aspects of each game. I think that this system is a lot more informative and a lot less mind-numbing than the comments. Of course, you can still post on the front page and in the features.

Please let me know what you think of this change. Also, I may have introduced some bugs, so let me know if you find problems.

Wolf Creek

Last night I watched Wolf Creek. I didn’t know anything about this film going in, but I’d heard a few people recommend it so I gave it a shot.

The film centers around three young vacationers who are traveling through the Australian outback on their way to Sydney. On the way they stop at Wolfe Creek crater for a hike. When they return they find that their car has died, and they’re stranded alone in the outback. Their circumstance gets progressively worse, but in the end being lost in the middle of nowhere seems like heaven compared to the situation that they end up in.

Though it’s not a ground breaking movie, I enjoyed Wolf Creek. It’s a teen slasher flick with all of the cruft and nonsense that plagues the genre removed. The violence is calculated and intense, but most of it is implicit; with a few exceptions, the movie does not rely on gore for its scares. The movie also avoids most teen slasher cliches, and it manages to keep you wondering about which of the protagonists will actually survive their ordeal. And though the characters make bad decisions throughout the film, most of their actions are believable. Finally, there are some extremely beautiful shots of the Australian wilderness.

So all in all, I’d say that Wolf Creek is not bad. I like that it avoids most of the problems we associate with this brand of horror movie, and I didn’t have any problems with the acting or pacing. The movie isn’t brilliant or anything, but as a teen slasher movie it’s pretty good.

Silent Hill, The Movie

I went and saw Silent Hill today. I’ll try to write a spoiler-free review that describes how I feel about it.

As you might expect, the Silent Hill movie has a lot of elements of the Silent Hill games. In fact, it is not difficult to classify the movie as a collection of such elements. Here’s a few that I thought they did really well:

  • Locale. Silent Hill looks exactly like it should. The otherworld looks the way it should. The sets and locations are extremely close to the game, and I liked them a lot. The first 45 minutes or so in particular will really please people who have played the original Silent Hill.
  • Pyramid Head. He’s awesome, and they don’t overdo him.
  • The soundtrack. They mostly used music from Silent Hill 3, but the industrial booming works just as well in the movie as it does in the games.
  • The fog and darkness. With the exception of a couple of extraordinarily bad shots, the fog and darkness are spot on. They really help to convey the “Silent Hill Feeling.”
  • The body bag monsters. You don’t see much of them, but they look perfect.
  • The sirens. Again, perfect.
  • The nurses. A little different than the variations of nurses in Silent Hill (probably closest to 3’s), but they were still very cool.

There were also some elements that I think they could have done a lot better.

  • The radio. They used the siren well but totally missed out on the importance of the radio.
  • Dahlia Gillespie. They split her character into two, and I don’t think it was really a good move.
  • The pacing. This is a difficult problem for any movie based on a game, but Silent Hill breaks down around the middle. It’s too long and it meanders in the middle.
  • The story. It’s very similar to Silent Hill 1, but it’s far more explicit and far less interesting. The elements are there but the presentation is not as good. I especially didn’t like the last half.

The reviewers aren’t big fans of this movie, but I understand why: the film is built to please people who’ve played the games, and I think it would seem even less interesting and have even more pacing problems if you do not recognize some of the content. So, if you didn’t play the Silent Hill games, you probably won’t like this movie very much.

However, if you are like me and have played these games to death, there’s a lot to enjoy. As I mentioned before, the first 45 minutes or so are expertly lifted from the games, right down to some of the cinematography used in the games. The otherworld looks excellent and conforms to the regular Silent Hill otherworld rules, and the characters in the game are suitably close to their game counterparts. If you like the game I think you’ll get a lot more out of the film.

Silent Hill was surprisingly the most gory movie I’ve seen in quite a while. Most of the gore is well done and it’s only used in a few key scenes, but it was a bit of a departure from the games’ usually understated and implicit violence. The main failure of the movie, in my mind, is the trap that so many horror movies fall into: explaining everything to the viewer. There are a couple of scenes where the movie just stops so they can go back and explain everything in excruciating detail. The Silent Hill games are very careful to never give too much away; they drop many hints, but putting the story together has always been a job for the player. The movie, however, fell apart for me towards the end because they insist on making everything as brutally clear as possible. There are also some major changes to the story that I thought were bad, and the ending was sort of annoying. Still, the movie was by far the best video game translation I’ve seen, but on the other hand, there’s not a lot of competition in that category.

In short: Silent Hill is enjoyable if you’ve played the games, but probably not if you haven’t. As a film translation of various game elements, it works pretty well. As a horror movie, it’s not all that great.

Innovating within the corporate world

Warning: long, sort of pointless rant that has very little to do with horror game follows.

If you read this site often you might have noticed a recurring theme in my rants: I’m of the opinion that the video game industry is shooting itself in the foot with its death march towards computational perfection. Every time we increase the power of video game machines, we also increase the cost to create games, but this cost increase is not accompanied by a similar increase in game players. The result is higher risk to game publishers (they need to sell more units to make the same profit as before), fewer games on the market, less overall innovation (it’s too risky), and greater reliance on licenses and other tie-ins to artificially improve the size of the audience. This ground is well trodden on this web site, I think.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about the few developers who actually have the ability to try something new. Now, I’m not talking about the huge self-publishing companies like Capcom or Konami–these guys are large enough that they can absorb a lot of risk, and their products are pretty consistently innovative. No, I’m talking about second- and third-party developers like Surreal (The Suffering series), High Moon Studios (Darkwatch), Headfirst (Call of Cthulhu), and the now-defunct Computer Artworks (The Thing). These guys are in an odd spot: they are paid by some publisher to make games (and often must relinquish some degree of creative control to their publisher), but they are also small teams who can maintain an innovative vision and execute on it. At big publishers like EA, teams are shuffled around for every game, and the long term fiscal outlook of the company as a whole is the deciding factor when selecting games to produce. But these smaller studios have, to some degree at least, the ability to choose their destiny and (assuming they can secure funding) work on innovative products.

Take The Thing, for example. There is a crapload of new game design ideas in this game. It’s got a fear/trust system that has never been done before, where you need to convince your team mates that you are not an alien (and thus stave off their irrational fear) by giving them weapons and ammunition. The level design is intelligent, and the way the game uses the license from John Carpenter’s 1980 film is excellent. This should have been a revolutionary horror game, but instead, it fell apart because of a few design flaws.

The alien test system is broken. You are supposed to be able to administer a blood test to people you meet and see if they are aliens or not, but in practice the test tells you nothing because it might return a false result 30 seconds before they change into an alien in a cutscene. The Thing’s designers had a cool idea about having team members with different roles (you can’t turn on the lights unless you have an engineer with you), but this falls apart when you realize that any of your team members can be killed at any time (so it ends up being that you can’t turn on lights yourself if your engineer is alive, but you can do it yourself if he’s died… dumb). These are probably the result of the schedule for this game being compressed, or of a lead designer leaving in mid-development. These few flaws pretty much ruin the whole game, and they were probably the result of having too little time to finish the game.

Which brings me to my point, if I have one. Innovation is a hard thing to do. It takes a LONG time to get new things right. If you look at games that are known for their innovative content, you’ll see that they invariably have extremely long development cycles. Companies like EA don’t have time to waste on the sort of iteration necessary to make an innovative game, but smaller studios like Computer Artworks do not have the funds to set their own schedules. The result is that innovative games don’t get made, or they get made poorly because they were crammed into insufficient development cycles. The Thing should have been an awesome game, but Computer Artworks also needs to pay its employees which means that its publisher (in this case, Vivendi-Universal) set the schedule based on when products will be most profitable for them. Basically, it’s a sucky model that does not link innovation to profit.

Sorry for the rambling rant. This came out way longer than I intended. Oh well, it was cathartic to write.