Prototype is excess. It is what happens when game designers grow up with American comic books post-comics code and the type of Japanese animation that is more interested in overblown displays of power than telling a story. It is a game with rules that are designed to be broken at every turn. The player is rewarded for brazen and barbaric tactics. In Prototype, there are too many abilities and limitless power, yet no loyalty to an ideal. Like X-Men’s Dark Phoenix, Alex Mercer is granted godlike status with no one to stand in his way. The game revels in bloodshed and in selfish pursuits that amount to little more than breadcrumbs on the trail of some government conspiracy. Prototype is advertised as a “superhero” video game. But Alex Mercer is no hero. He isn’t even an anti-hero. He is a plague on humanity. And at the end of it all, after everything he has wreaked upon the city of New York, this descriptor proves to be the most accurate.

After a few hours of play, Prototype will come across as a patchwork of unfinished concepts. On the one hand, it offers up such a varied selection of powers and skills that it will suit any playing style, and in theory adds levels of complexity to completing the tasks that are presented to the player. Yet on the other, Prototype provides two completely overpowered vehicles that will get any job done a lot faster, without the strategic use of Alex’s talents. This is a game that needs rules put in place. While I wanted to figure out other ways to approach Prototype’s challenges, the winning strategy was to cause enough havoc to summon a strike team, and then steal their vehicles. Aside from some fairly engaging boss battles where vehicles were not options, the challenge in Prototype is the player’s own restraint.

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Within the first fifteen minutes of playing a video game, I can tell if it will be good. I have yet to decide whether this is a useful skill in the context of adult life.

Services like Steam and the XBox Live Marketplace have effectively streamlined the process of consuming game demos, often before a game is available for purchase. This strategy is part of any publisher’s winning marketing plan. Let the masses jump on the game to provide free word-of-mouth advertising, and then watch them argue ad infinitum in every corner of the internet, since no one can be proven wrong. This is the ideal way to arrive at launch day. The review scores hit the usual aggregate sites based on the media’s preview copies, and people rush to the stores not just to get their hands on the game, but to prove everyone else wrong.

I am not usually such a person.

I have played and reviewed many demos since the inception of this website. In fact, I find myself relying on them more for the 360 than when I was solely a PC gamer. New PC games don’t stay expensive due to the high shelfspace turnover at electronics and even specialty retailers, whereas console games seem to retain their price a lot better^[1]. When I’m thinking about a new game purchase, reading exaggerated reviews and watching video samples of the game in action aren’t enough.

This makes the demo extremely important to someone like me. And once I start making notes on my first impressions of a game, it’s hard to stop. Most demos I’ve bothered to play provided me enough information to settle on an opinion. I knew the games weren’t going to get any better. And in the case of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, I was ensnared by nostalgia in the hopes that I would be playing Ghostbusters III. I wish I could say that was true.

Then there was Batman, a license that wields even more brand power, arriving in the form of Arkham Asylum last month to an unsuspecting audience. There was suprisingly no hype to speak of; no previews out of the usual. The demo was made available two weeks prior to the full version’s release. It caught a lot of people off guard, myself included. Everyone was excited over the possibility that a video game starring Batman was actually good. Naturally, the initial impressions were positive – and they spread.

I played the demo the week it was available for download and was prepared to post a negative review based on my impressions. There is no way the game should be receiving overwhelming praise. Except something held me back. My experiences with the game felt unfinished.

Surrounding myself with the opinions of people I know and who had played the full version, my suspicions were confirmed: the Arkham Asylum demo was terrible.

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This is the second part of a two-part series. Read “Part 1: Discovery”

I started thinking about writing full length reviews of video games in late 2001. I was still at University. I was going to make a website and came up with some generic name I thought was edgy and reflective of what I wanted to accomplish. It was going to cover more than video games. I had some things to say about popular culture.

After talking to some friends at school about my vision, there was some interest in this collaborative effort. There was already a zine floating around our faculty, but it was horrible. It was a soapbox for people frustrated with school and mostly contained their annoyingly priveleged views on an “oppressive” society. Instead of being provocative or insightful it was lampooning popular culture with pedestrian observations and half-baked philosophy. I could do better.

Of course, when you rely on friends to produce something for free, it doesn’t happen unless you get on their case about it. And I wanted to keep my friends. Plus, the whole “trying to graduate from University with a degree” thing. The project died on the vine, and I gave up the dream. For the time being, anyway.

I graduated from school the next spring, and started playing video games while I looked for work. My comptuer was getting old, and at this point the most it could muster was Unreal Tournament and Civilization III. I read the issues of PC Gamer that were mailed to me to keep up with the industry and the hobby I loved. I hung out on the internet a lot, and read too many terrible reviews that people actually got paid to write. My head started filling with ideas again. I could do better.

I started thinking about another website. Something that would capture my love of video games and provide an outlet for my brand of scathing commentary. I would call it “Tales of a Scorched Earth”, because I am an insufferable Smashing Pumpkins fan. I would adopt the handle of “Gatmog”, because it sounded cool and it provided the mystery any good internet handle should have^[1].

During this time, I started playing and thinking about video games as if it were research. I built a new desktop PC after I got a job and some money. I had a new purpose: I would record my thoughts on video games, write some reviews and share them with others. The availability and ease of use of self-publishing tools made this easier than I expected. I thought I would be doing something different than the typical weblog, and I used that as inspiration.

I wrote a lot of reviews and embarrassing posts during that time^[2]. I published most of them. It was a start.

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Magic: The Gathering is a property that formed the foundation of a tabletop gaming empire for a new generation of gamers, changing the face of a hobby that until then was buried in basements and isolated in musty smelling comic book shops. And yet its history in video games is pretty shameful in the numerous attempts to bring this brand even further into the mainstream. While most of the titles bore only a passing resemblance to their inspiration^[1], Magic: The Gathering Online (2002) was the closest thing you could get to actually playing the card game.

The recently released Duels of the Planeswalkers (2009), available on Xbox Live Arcade, is not Magic: The Gathering Online. It is the card game pared down to its most essential components.

As an ex-Magic player that dropped out shortly after the Ice Age expansion in the mid 1990s^[2], Duels has reawakened my respect for what Richard Garfield created in the game of Magic: The Gathering. Despite launching the completely ridiculous trend of collectible card games.

Much like my time with Games Workshop’s Warhammer, I found that the amount of one-upmanship that goes on in these hobbies borders on the unfair if you have unlimited resources (ie. Money) to sink into your collection. Players who don’t invest as much money in the hobby are immediately at a disadvantage when going up against the players who are well equipped and dialed right in to the latest cards and strategies for maximizing the return on their investment. The arms race continues until the only ones left standing are the demigods with ultra-powerful decks containing hundreds of dollars worth of cards. Of course, going into tournaments there are rules for this to balance the playing field, but I’m just generalizing here for the sake of my argument.

Duels of the Planeswalkers is a pre-packaged Magic: The Gathering experience. It successfully captures the essence of the game, without bogging down the player with a ton of cards that all end up doing basically the same thing when you really look into it. And this seems to be the biggest complaint about the game: the lack of comprehensive deck building tools.

Duels gives you a set number of decks to unlock through the single player campaign, while also unlocking individual cards for use in customizing these decks. “Customizing” is a very loose term in this context: you’re either using it in the deck, or you aren’t. There’s no way to get new cards after they have all been unlocked, and you can’t create a completely new deck. For some people this is too limiting, and makes this interpretation of Magic somehow less authentic.

I don’t think the Campaign mode is particularly interesting in the way that it creates “characters” for you to fight; I’d rather have seen an AI controlled player that randomly selects one of the pre-built decks and plays with it, which would provide the most replayability in single player mode. However, I don’t think this was the game’s main thrust. The Campaign mode was put in to get players familiar with the mechanics of play, to (re)learn the rules, and to get comfortable working in high pressure situations. At first, the inexperienced player will feel overwhelmed while they get acquainted with the cards and the rules of the game itself. And this is just the set-up. What Wizards and Stainless wanted to ultimately produce was a game that approximates the experience of playing the card game with humans in the online mode.

By limiting the number of cards and decks, the game is already pre-balanced. New players will never feel like they will be overpowered by some unknown card, and experienced players will be able to make the most out of their decks from the beginning. This effectively curtails the arms race. There is a ceiling that is predefined: once everything is unlocked everyone is going to be using the same cards. In the end, it simply comes down to luck (just like the real thing) and being skilled enough to use the cards at hand to overpower your opponent.

Putting in the Challenge mode was a terrific idea, as I found it to be an excellent training tool. It is a collection of “puzzles” that sets up one turn where you must win the game with the cards in play and in your hand. It encourages players to test their knowledge of the game; to solve a puzzle by taking advantage of its nuanced rules. This would then carry over into the Campaign or online versus mode, where you are working with the same cards and with enough luck and determination can put together a similar last-ditch counter-attack. However, there are only eight of these challenges and the advanced player will rip right through them.

Some might say that this game is simply a focus-grouped promotional tool for the upcoming release of the 11th Core Set that will get people out and buying into the physical card game. I would partially agree; It’s pretty clear from the beginning that Wizards and Stainless focus-grouped the shit out of this game, but it was to make it balanced for new and experienced players to enjoy the essentials of Magic: the Gathering. It’s no Magic: Online, but to me that was always for the players I mentioned earlier; they just don’t want to go out and physically buy the cards. Those players will never touch Duels because it is not meant for them. They should stop complaining.

I must admit I felt the pull of my old card collection, long since sold, after playing a few rounds of Duels. But it’s just another box of stuff that would end up collecting dust in a closet somewhere in my house. I’m glad I can pick up this game, play it, and put it away knowing that I have spent only $10 for an experience that will remain timeless.

Ninja Gaiden II is unyielding. It represents my history with video games: a time when I was too stubborn to resist the challenge from an indifferent master that taught the path of practice, patience and persistence. Only a few months ago, the entire gaming community was busy falling over themselves to proclaim that nostalgia and accessibility were the true winners in 2008 (Braid was basically a more forgiving version Super Mario Bros. with a generous layer of whimsy slathered on top). However, they ignored an accomplishment that was just as important in this era of reheated video games disguised as the triumph of independence. Ninja Gaiden II preserves the history of the franchise while reminding us why video games were so irresistible to us all those years ago.

While critics and hobbyists continue to complain about the length, price, and difficulty of modern video games, there is one game that defied this call to submit to the needs of video games’ aging audience. Ninja Gaiden II stands alone, upholding the virtues of its forebears from the 8- and 16-bit generations, challenging players at every turn, taunting them, provoking them to attempt to “beat” the game if they dared. It mocks their frustration at the difficulty, its spartan save points allowing only a brief respite, while complaints continued about the repetition and dependence on button mashing. Apparently, nobody has the inclination to repeat entire stretches of a third-person action game anymore, let alone figure out bosses and actually defeat them. Ninja Gaiden II is born of the Old School: it does not agree with the current philosophy of video games, which states that it must be accessible or have some kind of meaning to be worth playing – let alone be worthy of discussion.

Indeed, Ninja Gaiden II is “Old School”, but not in the ironic or patronizing sense of the word. It is of an Old Philosophy, one that has been lost over the years to improvements in graphics, compromises for accessibility or the obsession with coming up with that ever elusive project that will cement video games in cultural legitimacy. We grew up with the Old Philosophy, because that was the most common way video games could add value to its experience. What kind of production could developers put together when writing music and coding graphics for 8-bit video games? Instead, they made them difficult, taking cues from their cousins in the arcades, where the entire point of an arcade cabinet was to take your money. They wanted you to insert credits to continue, even though you weren’t ready for what would come after. These were games that encouraged players to learn the mechanics to the point where it was like breathing, to appreciate the steady increase in difficulty, and the challenges these games posed. Because at the end of it all, when the bad translations scrolled up the screen in a half-hearted closure to the story, you felt like you accomplished something. There was skill involved – and whoever completed that game clearly had some. Any player that had the patience and perseverance to truly learn the game was rewarded. Even though no person outside of that arcade cabinet, TV screen or the subculture itself would be able to appreciate or acknowledge the feat. This was the life of the video games enthusiast, and the reason why we played them.

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