City 16

Prince of Persia is not a good game. It is also not a bad game. If I had to review it, and assuming I was scoring on scale that actually made sense, it would get a clear 5/10. Not because it’s average but because for every great thing in the game there is something equally as frustrating. Perfect example: There are four types of power plates to be found throughout the game which serve to propel you long distances via some magical guff. Of them, two are passive; pressing triangle activates them and you’ll automatically travel to the end destination. The other two are active and require a certain amount of user interaction. One of them, the wall-running plate, is sublime. Gravity shifts and you run continuously along the wall in a single direction making adjustments left or right to avoid obstacles in your way. The other sees you flying along a set path and forces you to dodge buildings and structures. That one is truly awful due to the fact that the continual swooping of the characters makes it impossible to predict if you should be avoiding to your right or left when they finally straighten out. Good thing balances bad thing.

A Guide to Power Plates: Red - Automatic. Blue - Automatic. Green - Great. Yellow - Fucking Harrowing.

The game is like this for everything: Stunning visuals vs. generic enemy design (the achievements even refer to them as ‘generic enemies’); moments of fluid platforming vs. the black goo along walls that insta-kills you and forces you to redo the entire section; God-awful combat vs tediously drawn out puzzling. Wait, both of those last two were annoying. It may actually be possible that the bad things actually outweigh the good. 3/10. And yet, thinking back to the time I spent playing it, I enjoyed the game. Even this isn’t a simple assessment because I hate the fact I enjoyed the game for the reason I did.

The thing I keep telling myself is that I was a victim of my own success.

I played Prince of Persia on the Playstation 3, a machine that has its now seemingly obligatory rip-off of Microsoft’s Achievement system. The twist with Sony’s version, called trophies, is that if you collect all of the achievements tied to the game you get a Platinum Trophy as a reward. Now I don’t hate the shift into achievements like some seem to but I’m also not enamoured with it. At their best they make you think about the way you play a game and encourage you to try new things. At their very best they make you carry a gnome through the entirity of Half-Life 2: Episode 2. At their worst they get lazy and just tell you to find all of a certain collectable. My experience of Trophies generally involved looking at the list and going for the ones that pretty much match up with the way I’d play the game anyway. I certainly wouldn’t actively go for a platinum as there is always something on a game’s trophy list that I either don’t have the skill or don’t have the patience to achieve.

This combat move, throwing a magical girl into your enemies, is not recommended until the third date.

For Prince of Persia that thing was completing the game having Elika save you fewer than 100 times. Elika ‘saves’ you when you mistime a platforming section or screw up a fight. She’ll fly down and reset you to the beginning of that platforming section. It’s basically the game’s replacement for death. I was ‘saved’ what seemed like a ridiculous number of times and I knew that I’d never complete the game under the limit so you can probably imagine my surprise when it turned out that I had. That in itself wasn’t a good enough reason to actively try and get that platinum trophy. What was a good enough reason, for me, was the fact that I was only borrowing a friends copy of the game and he was nowhere near achieving all the trophies. I’m competitive like that… Also petty.

So I loaded up a save from just before the final boss and started collecting the remaining trophies. Unfortunately some of these came from the worst school of achievement design: find all of the pointless collectables, in this case 1001 light seeds. I hate collectables in games. There are always far too many of them and, now they are tied to achievements, they don’t even offer unlockable rewards any more. This would clearly be the most frustrating 4-5 hours of an already pretty damn frustrating game.

Actually it was the best few hours I had with it.

A note on the light seeds. They only appear in an area once you’ve cleansed it of corruption. At the point in which all 1001 are accessible to you, every area is free of the corruption. This means no annoying black goo, no insta-death and, most importantly, no enemies whatsoever. Instead what you get is pure platforming, which, when you’re given the chance to actually focus on it, is a surprisingly robust and enjoyable system. Essentially it works like a more rigid version of the old Tony Hawk’s games. Once you’ve activated the first jump you are constantly in motion until you reach the next piece of flat land. Whether you are climbing, sliding or jumping between walls you are always moving forward and timing your next press of the face button to activate the jump, climb or power plate animation at just the right moment. The fun, again as with early Tony Hawk iterations, comes from being able to chain a huge run of jumps and acrobatics together.

The placement of the light seeds also proved to be important. The game is divided into multiple hubs, or ‘fertile grounds’, from which there are multiple paths. Each hub is relatively small and contains 45 light seeds. They are big, bright and stand out against the backdrops. There are relatively few occasions in which you find yourself wondering where the final light seed is hidden in an area. Most of the challenge comes from spotting a row of two or three and working out which route will take you to them.

By my 1000th light seed I was feeling pretty good about the game. If I hadn’t got stuck in a wall during the terrible last boss fight that I needed to re-complete to access light seed #1001, thus earning my last trophy, I’d probably look back even more fondly at it. That’s Prince of Persia’s curse: It’s more than the sum of its parts, but only because its parts are terrible. The combat is bad, the difficulty is artificial, the story isn’t interesting, the characters are jarring and collecting things is stupid.

If anything my petty little meta-quest completely sums up what I found throughout the whole game: something brilliant born out of something awful. 6/10?

I’d been getting a constant stream of income, mostly from the marigolds. I’d buy a bunch of newly planted ones from Crazy Dave, grow them to full height and sell them back to him at a slightly inflated price. It was working well up until I’d decided to buy some new types of seeds. Crazy Dave doesn’t sell them cheap, so to fund them I sold him back more marigolds than usual. The seeds are useful, but on reflection I shouldn’t have bought so many. My garden’s bare and I’ve not got the funds to buy enough marigold stems to get back to my old rotation. I need to buy some food for the tree as well. There are no options left, I’ll have to fight the zombies again and hope there’s some change on their corpses.

Recently, for the first time in months, my Steam rating hit 10. This meant that I had logged over 32 hours of play time on Steam in the last 2 weeks. There were two reasons for this:

1. I didn’t realise you could save Plants vs. Zombies mid-level. This meant if I was playing it and a friend popped over I tended to leave the game on pause to go and get drunk and watch 24.
2. I played a genuine fuck-tonne of Plants vs. Zombies.

It's surprising how long I've spent in the Zen Garden given my hatred for real gardening.

Popcap are arguably the kings of casual gaming. Certainly games like Bejeweled and Bookworm Adventures exemplify the simple rulesets and short bursts of gaming that the term supposedly signifies. However, they also seem to have crossed over into the ‘hardcore’ gaming market making them one of the few casual games developers that don’t incur the derision of the traditional gaming userbase. The PC version of The Orange Box came complete with Peggle Extreme, a version of Peggle using Half-Life 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 backdrops. More recently Peggle was incorporated into World of Warcraft, a combination more dangerously addictive than heroin-flavoured Haribo Stripes.

While Peggle was a game that I enjoyed, it was always in short bursts while waiting for Extreme Headshot Shooter 2: Cranial Destruction, or similar, to install. Popcap had an answer for this; they had Plants vs. Zombies. PvZ tasks you with keeping zombies away from your house. As they cross your lawn, travelling down one of 6 rows, you must take into consideration which types of zombies you are facing on a particular level and plant your defence accordingly. The game adheres to the very definition of casual: The gameplay is simple and you can finish a couple of levels in a matter of minutes. Of course you can collect a couple of bits of loot in games like Diablo in a couple of minutes, that doesn’t mean that’s where you’ll stop.

Cat-tails are a force to be reckoned with. This is clearly overkill.

In fact, the Diablo comparison is surprisingly apt. It’s a simple gameplay system wrapped up in excellent presentation, a surprising amount of tactical depth beneath the surface and, most importantly, a reward system that always keeps you looking to progress that little bit further. This isn’t a casual game, it’s the most hardcore of old-school systems made easier and more accessible. These people are dangerous. At my current point in the game everything I do unlocks something new. New plants for my Zen Garden, new mini-games and puzzle levels, new survival modes and even just more chocolate for my snail. In every round played I gather slightly more money drawing me tantalisingly closer to being able to buy a new type of plant to use in the levels or a bag of food for my Tree of Wisdom, which at certain points of its growth will inform me of a cheat code, such as the one that gives all of the zombies futuristic glasses. The most surprising thing about this point of the game? It starts after you complete the main campaign.

My favourite of the two puzzle modes. This is the 'Oh Fuck' point of the round.

The truly irresistible thing about PvZ is the level of consistency throughout. From the artstyle to the rock, paper, scissors dynamic between the different types of plants and zombies, everything is made with a clear singular vision that’s probably difficult to obtain on a larger budget release. Even something as simple as the descriptions of your plants is done with a charmingly irreverent humour:

Everybody likes and respects Torchwood. They like him for his integrity, for his steadfast friendship, for his ability to greatly maximise pea damage. But Torchwood has a secret: he can’t read.

It seems that ‘casual’ games is another in a long string of terribly inaccurate descriptions within gaming. I have no idea how much time I’ve actually put into Plants vs. Zombies, but I’d wager it was more than I have done for any AAA big-budget release in a long while. Don’t call it an addiction though; I’ve simply not seen everything that this fantastic game has to offer.

! – SPOILER WARNING: I’ll be going into some detail about the ending of Braid. If you’ve not completed it yet then don’t read. If you’ve not bought it yet then why not go do that instead? – !

This guy missed the point of Braid:

There’s plenty of discussion that can be had around the numerous interpretations of Braid’s main story. Let’s not have that discussion; it’s been done a million times and ultimately, with the exception of the stunning World 1-1, it just didn’t interest me. What did interest me was, what I at least, perceived as the meta-narrative. Braid breaks through the fourth wall, or monitor as PC users might call it, to speak to the player directly. It has a message to impart and, unlike the bulk of the story, it chooses to impart it through gameplay elements instead of text. The game builds obsession, then presents sacrifice and finally leaves the player to choose their path.

Whatever the literal meaning behind Braid’s story it is essentially about obsession. Tim’s obsession with finding the princess is the driving factor that propels the game forward. The game wants to build a sense of obsession within the player as well. From a gameplay perspective this is done rather simply: the player must find every puzzle piece if they want to progress to the final world. Also, and less simply achieved, the game is really fucking good.

Then there’s the theme of sacrifice. At the end of the game Tim is shown to sacrifice parts of his life in order to chase ‘the Princess’. This is not shown to be a noble or, in any way, a good thing. Braid has a much more convoluted way of presenting a sacrificial choice to the player. In the first world of the game (actually called World 2) there is a puzzle piece that can only be obtained through a bizarre puzzle mechanic that is never hinted at before and never used again.

It involves the puzzle board that is used to assemble the puzzle pieces on. Assemble the right pieces and you create an extra platform that can be used to get up to the piece. It appears to be bad puzzle design… To be honest it is bad puzzle design. As far as I remember it is the only piece that can’t be reached when you first come across it and it could have been implemented in a much more intuitive way. It is a necessary addition though, after all you have to collect the pieces to progress to the final world. It plants the idea that constructing the puzzles may lead to rewards. On top of this there’s an achievement for completing each world’s puzzle. I’d be amazed if the majority of people didn’t get to World 1 without having constructed all five jigsaws.

So you’ve completed the game and you’ve heard that their are 8 stars that can be collected, probably through looking at discussions of the game on some forum or other. The sacrifice? Well that comes in at the 3:20 mark of the video above. If you’ve constructed the puzzle of World 3 you cannot get that star unless you delete your save and start again. The game is asking those who were caught up in their very gamer-centric obsession of collecting and seeing everything possible in a particular game to choose whether or not they are prepared to sacrifice their progress to continue their obsession. Whether or not they want to sacrifice parts of their life to chase ‘the Princess’.

As one commenter to the above post put it:

Today I found out that I had to start over. I like the game, but I JUST solved all of the puzzles, and now you want me to do it all again, Braid, just because of one stupid game mechanic?

No, Braid does not want you to do this. The video above shows you how to get half of the 8 stars and each method is clearly ridiculous. Some will take one look and decide it’s not worth the effort.

Others will miss the point of Braid.

Narrative in games, for a while now, seems to be closely following the Hollywood action blockbuster model. Levels serve as the action heavy sequences that are punctuated by chunks of exposition served up in cut-scenes. It’s no surprise that the rise of gaming is now compared next to the rise of the film industry. In an effort to legitimise the medium the question has turned to when the games industry will produce something akin to the movie classics. When will we have our Citizen Kane? When will we create a story to rival the Godfather?

It seems that these questions, indeed these comparisons, only miss the very thing games need in order to be taken seriously as a mature medium: A proper narrative delivered in a way that would only be effective as a game. I recently played through Funcom’s classic adventure game The Longest Journey and its follow-up Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. Paradoxically, despite the exposition heavy nature of the games, I was struck by various moments that advanced the story and the user experience through ways entirely unique to gaming.

It’s strange but the moment that has stuck with me in the time since playing The Longest Journey, the moment that resonated strongest, was of such little consequence to the overall story that it’s almost trivial. Towards the end of the game you are tasked with uniting the warring species of the Maerum and the Alatien. In order to gain audience with the leader of the Alatien you have to complete an obligatory puzzle to prove you are indeed the prophetic figure you claim to be. Instead of the puzzle involving runes, an ancient stone dais or a mixture of disparate items, to which I had grown accustomed throughout the course of the game, I was asked to learn the four stories from which the Alatien based their culture. What struck me was the nature in which they told these stories. Each Alatien I spoke to began with this sentence:

This is my tale and I tell it to you in my own words, as it was told to me by my teacher, in her words.

It was only later when I spoke to The Teller, the Alatien’s leader, that the import of this sentence became apparent. She explains how the Alatiens tell their stories in their own words from generation to generation and, while the stories will change over the ages, this is a necessity or they will cease to have meaning to those that tell them. It was an excellent piece of back-story into the philosophy of the race that was only driven home through the nature of the puzzle forcing interaction with their culture.

The Alatiens

Dreamfall, while being a less successful ‘game’, still contained moments of interactivity that heightened the player’s emotional attachment to the story in a way that couldn’t be aped in other media. This is most notable when Zoë discovers Faith’s room. At first her descriptions at the items around the room are dry and clinical, simply stating what she can see. After learning of the nature of Jiva’s testing on Faith leading to her eventual death it is possible to go back into the room and hear Zoë’s thoughts on the same items delivered in a much more personal and heartfelt way. Her sadness at the pictures on the wall and the bed that Faith spent most of her short life serve to tell the player more about Zoë’s character rather than just imparting simple information, and it’s the contrast with the earlier visit that provides the emotional heart of the section.

Faith's Room

Finally there are those stories that are intimately tied to the players personal experience with a game. The Longest Journey shouldn’t feature here as it’s a tightly scripted adventure game, and yet…

The nature of puzzles in The Longest Journey work like this: April will pick up an item and carry it around until she magically divines that she will have no use for it any more, at which point it disappears. One, rather ridiculous puzzle, involves a rubber duck, a clothes line and a clamp. After it was done, all the items disappeared with the exception of the duck, suggesting that it would be used for a puzzle later in the game. Any point where I found myself stuck for what to do next I would try the rubber duck in the hope that I would finally be done with the stupid thing. I never was, it was a bug that kept it in my inventory long past the point it ceased to be useful. It may be a bit of a stretch to suggest a glitch as an example of emergent narrative, except whenever you inflated the duck air would leak out of a small hole in it. After I tried the duck on whichever puzzle had currently stopped me in my tracks I would be rewarded with a minute or so of the sound of deflating air, amplifying the feeling of failure at being able to see the path I was meant to take. By the end I had very strong feelings about that bloody duck.

I Named Him Moby Dick

A 10 year old adventure game is hardly the only example of narrative strengthened by interactivity; it’s not even the best example. Instead it was just the most recent case of something I played that gave me hope that the future of the industry doesn’t lie in over-produced ‘cinematic’ cut-scenes that often do nothing more than remove the player from the attachment that can build from the tactile nature of games.