Rock Band Bar Night – Angels & Kings

Having finally gotten enough work out of the way that I felt I could get drunk and have fun on a Wednesday night, I went over to Angels & Kings, at 11th st. and Ave. A, for their Rock Band night. The last time I was there was back in December, when they had a Harmonix employee running it for the first time, and the guitar controllers were broken prototypes.

The good: They had an excellent bartender who could competently mix drinks–not a light qualification given some of the bartending in this city. In particular, I never drink mixed drinks at the Living Room Lounge’s bar nights because they can’t mix a basic highball. They’re still using the neat setup with the screen projected at the other end of the bar so that the players are looking at the audience rather than at a wall with their backs to the audience, but this time, it wasn’t so crowded that people kept blocking the projector. The people are nice, and there’s no group of regulars to make you feel unwelcome for spoiling their fun.

The bad: Really high drink prices, but then this is New York. They didn’t have any DLC on their machine, but apparently there was some confusion where Harmonix was supposed to give them a card to get all the DLC or something. The guy running it said he would try to get that fixed for next week. The guitars seem to be early generation strats, which means they tend to have strum bar issues.

Overall, though, this is my favorite Rock Band night I’ve been to. It doesn’t feel empty (like the Living Room Lounge) or overcrowded (like Pianos), and the people in charge understand the game and don’t just stick it in the corner (like the Village Pourhouse).

Fighting on the Wii

If there’s one genre that the Wii is tailor-made for, it’s sports games.  If there’s a second, it’s fighting games.  We’ve seen a lot of the first, but very few of the second.

One of my favorite modern arcade games is a boxing simulator, in which you take hold of boxing gloves with electronics in them, and cameras let you duck and dodge in a somewhat realistic manner while you punch out your virtual opponent.  If one of the big goals of gaming is fantasy realization, than this is one of the big fantasies that most young men have: fighting and defeating a comparable opponent.  But many of us are out of shape, or just don’t want to have black eyes from stepping into a real ring.  Meanwhile, more dangerous fantasies involving swordplay are just out of the question outside of joining the SCA.

The Wii, with its motion sensitive controls, should be the perfect console to take these fantasies and let people experience them…except that so far, it really hasn’t.  The Wii only has 2 games which feature any form of boxing: Wii Sports, which, while it has a boxing game, it isn’t very deep or playable, and Bully, which sort of has a boxing/pugilist minigame, but it’s not a fully fleshed out boxing experience.  Nintendo’s biggest fighting game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, has no significant motion controls whatsoever.  There is apparently one action game that has realistic swordfighting, “No More Heroes”, and I plan on getting that today and reviewing it shortly.

But in the meantime, I have to wonder if Nintendo really gets what it has in its hands with the Wii.  Sure, they have this amazing and affordable VR-ish system that every consumer can buy, but they seem to be actively discouraging games that make use of it for realizing fantasies much more controversial than cooking pancakes (see Cooking Mama.)  Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, apparently won’t have realistic lightsaber combat, apparently because Nintendo didn’t want kids to be engaging in realistic swordplay.  This design decision eliminated the only reason I would have bought the game for the Wii rather than the XBox 360, so nice going, Nintendo.

The point is, the Wii’s big comparative advantage over its competitors is the motion controls, and where the motion controls are used correctly, it’s a lot more fun to, say, punch the air rather than flicking up on a joystick.  That’s why I bought Bully: SE for Wii rather than for XBox 360.  It’s not going to compete in the graphics or computational depth front any time soon, so if it wants to fight for multiplatform games, Nintendo has to let its developers make their games as close to a form of cheap virtual reality gaming as they can.  Otherwise, everyone will go to the XBox 360 for the better graphics–or worse, when the XBox 360 motion control remote comes out this December, they’ll just switch to the 360 for everything.

RTS as Fantasy Realization

Today brings news that World in Conflict for XBox 360 will use some voice controls. This makes 2 RTS’s this year trying out voice commands for the first time (the other being Tom Clancy’s EndWar). I already own World in Conflict for PC, but the news about voice controls probably makes WiC for XBox a must buy.

RTSs are a genre that had grown stale over the years. The trend seemed to be towards complex micromanagement and clickfests. However, to the extent people play video games to play out their fantasies and to immerse themselves in the gameplay, micromanagement clickfests were exactly the wrong direction for the genre. The RTS player wants to command armies and nations; we are Patton and Caesar wannabes. And Patton didn’t have to tell each individual soldier in his army when to fire his gun or take cover; they took some individual initiative. The role of a general or officer isn’t to tell soldiers when to fire; it’s to determine where the various soldiers go, figure out which units they want in their army, and let the individual soldiers do their thing. So, if I want to play a game and immerse myself in the general role, I don’t want to have to tab through each unit telling it to take cover or rally or some such. That’s neither fun nor immersive.

Voice command, on the other hand…that’s immersive. Yes, the professional strategy gamers will whine, and the rest of us who buy games to enjoy them should ignore their whining like always. I’ve heard from people who are looking for a good cane to pace their living rooms with while ordering European tanks to charge Russian infantry. That’s much more fun than clickfests, and it doesn’t have to mean that the depth is gone.

RTS adds real-time decision making, but the addition of realtime isn’t supposed to be used to require faster clicking. The way real-time should work is to require better reaction times–you don’t have as much time to think about where you want infantry unit 1. But the advantage shouldn’t go to the player that most quickly queues up 20 Zerg units through finger and mouse exercises.

So, I look forward to this wonderful new trend in the RTS genre of making games with less complexity, more immersion, and less depending on twitch abilities. Or, in the alternative, slower RTS games with lots more complexity (like Sins of a Solar Empire).

Review – Patapon

Let’s leave the game for a second and talk some about criticism. In movies, I’ve adopted a system of error correction based on genre. What this means is that I, for example, automatically bump up the average rating of a movie by a star if it’s a non-indie comedy; because critics hate non-indie comedies. I automatically drop the rating by a half star if the movie deals with a “very special issue”–see, e.g., Waitress. A full star if it’s an anti-war movie. Critics don’t seem to think like normal people do.

The gaming world is mostly free of this sort of nonsense, or at least suffers from it much less than movies do. There are a few notable exceptions, though:

1. Flagship games for their respective consoles are usually overrated (See: Halo 2 & 3, Final Fantasy games, Zelda games)
2. Niche games are usually underrated (rhythm games, board game ports, lesser-known RPGs)

And the one relevant for this review: Arty games demonstrating completely new gameplay concepts are usually overrated.

Patapon is a weird melding of rhythm, strategy, and RPG gameplay. You command an army of Patapons, little weird looking creatures that march to your beat. You give them commands by punching out sequences of buttons to the beat. Square-Square-Square-Circle (why can’t Sony just use letters, dammit!) will command your army to march forward, while Circle-Circle-Square-Circle will command your army to attack.

The problem is that there’s very little gameplay here. 3-4 hours into the game, there are only 3 commands: Attack, Move, and Defend. That’s it. Which means that the actual gameplay usually consists of just pressing the same buttons in rhythm over and over and over again, and if I wanted to do that, I’d go play the drum part to Roam.

Speaking of the comparison to Rock Band, this game is on the wrong control scheme. It was a budget title anyways, so the developer should have released it on XBLA and PSN with a capability for Rock Band drum input. Patapon with the ability to do war drum inputs would be spectacular.

Anyways, the art is wonderful, the soundtrack is nice, but there’s just not enough of a game there. Even if you restrict it to quarter notes in a 4/4 beat, there’s 256 different possible commands; they could come up with more than 3.

Takeaway: Good concept; execution needs a lot of work. To compare to 2007’s best game, it’s still really at the Narbacular Drop point; someone needs to turn it into a Portal.

Game Review – Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice

Well, tentative review.

I’m in the middle of the 3rd of 4 cases (apparently there are only 4, which is a little disappointing), so here’s a preliminary review. The gameplay is pretty much the same as in the Phoenix Wright games, with a few minor differences. The Magatama is gone, and psychic silliness has been replaced with magic/sleight-of-hand silliness. This means that in investigations, you no longer have the Magatama challenge sections, which I prefer. In court, you’ve now got Apollo’s bracelet, which lets you focus on the witness and see little nervous tics that can indicate a lie. There are also a bunch of neat forensic tools added, such as taking fingerprints, footprints, and inspecting items.

The problem is that all these new cool things just become minigames in a linear adventure, rather than being added as open-ended investigative tools. The bracelet isn’t available for use in every or even most cross-examinations; just in a few where there isn’t an obvious piece of evidence to present. You can’t dust every item for fingerprints; you can only dust items when a giant black smudge shows up saying, “fingerprints here!”

The stories are as good as always; I prefer them to the early cases of Phoenix Wright 3, and some of the twists are cooler than usual. Supposedly the last case has the best story, so we’ll see.

Takeaway: More of the same, with a few new tricks.

When is it OK to charge for DLC?

Kotaku reported, and later confirmed, that EA will be charging for guns in its upcoming multiplayer shooter, Battlefield: Bad Company. It’s my opinion, and quite a lot of others’ opinions as well, that this is an offense against decency and a horrible idea.  Obviously it’s bad for consumers; here’s why it’s bad for the company.

If I know before a game comes out that people who pay extra are going to have an advantage, then I’m not going to buy the game!  It’s not enjoyable to play a multiplayer shooter when you’re at an unfair disadvantage to the other players.  This means that to enjoy Battlefield: Bad Company, I’m going to have to pay for the Gold edition or the extra DLC guns, which means the game will really cost $70 or $80 rather than the $60 that’s standard for a 360/PS3 game.  And hey, I can buy the Orange Box, Halo 3, or Gears of War for less (all top multiplayer shooters), or wait for another new FPS that’s at the standard price (there’s never going to be any shortage of FPSs coming out for the 360.)

So be smart, EA, and drop this idea.  Well, that’s something we can’t expect; let’s hope customers just won’t buy it.  I won’t.

Review of NYC RB/GH Bar Nights

I don’t particularly like going to bars without a reason, but playing Rock Band or Guitar Hero is often an excellent reason. In general, if I’ve found out about a Rock Band bar night in the city, I’ve gone to it. So, here’s a list:

Pianos Bar & Grill: Tuesdays at 10 PM-close, Lower East Side, Guitar Hero 3 played.

This is the oldest of these bar nights I know of; it’s been running for at least a year now. Unfortunately, they never switched over to Rock Band. When I asked their organizers why they haven’t switched over, they told me that they tried running a Rock Band night once, but too many people were failing out and having trouble with the game; also, their floor plan doesn’t make it easy to set up, and they would have to use the PS2 version. So, for the foreseeable future, Pianos will be running GH3, and I won’t be going. But, if you do still like GH3, it’s pretty well run; the organizers are good, they have excellent fries, and if you mention it, they may do a “free drink for a round winner” type thing (they used to do this as a matter of course, but stopped at some point.) They also lost their original organizer recently to another bar, so they’re still having some transition troubles as of last week.

Angels and Kings: Wednesdays, East Village, Rock Band played

I’ve never been to this weekly event, but I’ll try this week. But I do have something to review from a day back in December when Harmonix employees came to New York to run a very poorly advertised Rock Band night at this bar. It was clearly a last minute thing, but everyone was very pleasant. Unlike most of these bar nights, the staging here had the game projected on the far end of the bar from the players and stage, which meant that the players were facing the crowd rather than away like at every other bar. That was cool. What was less cool was that because the bar doesn’t have that tall of a ceiling, people standing up between the players and the screen would block the screen and make it very difficult to play. That day had special equipment brought from HMX, including two prototype wireless XBox 360 guitar controllers; unfortunately, the prototypes tended to not work. I’m not sure what they’re using now. Hopefully there will be an update on this bar later this week.

Living Room Lounge: Sundays at 7 PM-close, South Park Slope, Brooklyn, Rock Band played

So far, this remains my favorite of the bar nights, because the organizers actually understand the game and it’s a much nicer and larger space than the Manhattan bars. Unfortunately, it can still get a little boring if you come alone, because there’s a somewhat insular group of regulars running the Rock Band night. But at least they know what they’re doing, and they have a good number of downloadable songs. The screen is very large and clear here. The only real problem…it’s usually pretty empty except for the regulars.

Village Pourhouse: Tuesdays, East Village, Rock Band played. See my review here.

At the moment, Living Room Lounge is the best one, though Angels & Kings may be quite good as well. Only go to Pianos if you’re not bored with GH3 yet, and just don’t go to the Village Pourhouse until they get their act together and stop treating their Rock Band night like a kiddy table at Thanksgiving.

Update: Gibson Patent Lawsuit

Gibson has apparently responded to Activision’s complaint for declaratory judgment with all the grace and temper of a spoiled fanbaby, and they not only countersued Activision for patent infringement, they’ve sued a whole bunch of retailers, and Harmonix and Red Octane. Kotaku reports on Harmonix’s press release in response to the lawsuit, reproduced below:

It is unfortunate that Gibson unfairly desires to share in the tremendous success enjoyed by the developers of Rock Band and Guitar Hero. This lawsuit is completely without merit and we intend to defend it vigorously.

Gibson’s patent, filed nearly 10 years ago, required a 3D display, a real musical instrument and a recording of a concert. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are completely different: among other things they are games, require no headset and use a controller only shaped like a real instrument.

100 points to Harmonix’s PR department for actually explaining why they don’t infringe; they are, of course, correct–though they seem to be responding to the abstract rather than the claims. The abstract states:

A musician can simulate participation in a concert by playing a musical instrument and wearing a head-mounted 3D display that includes stereo speakers. Audio and video portions of a musical concert are pre-recorded, along with a separate sound track corresponding to the musical instrument played by the musician. Playback of the instrument sound track is controlled by signals generated in the musical instrument and transmitted to a system interface box connected to the audio-video play back device, an audio mixer, and the head-mounted display. An external bypass switch allows the musician to suppress the instrument sound track so that the sounds created by actual playing of the musical instrument are heard along with the pre-recorded audio and video portions.

The claims do require an actual musical instrument, but don’t require a 3D interface or a musical concert (some of the dependent claims talk about a 3D interface and concert, but not the independent claims.) Remember, in patent law, it’s the claims that lay out the boundaries of the invention; the rest of the specification can help to define the words in the claims but can’t substantially change the limitations of the claims.

In a typical patent prosecution, a drafted patent goes back and forth between the lawyer and the Patent Office (hereafter PTO). During this process, the PTO will search the prior art, and object to claims; the lawyer will then either argue back that the objection isn’t good, or modify the claim to avoid the objection for every claim. Eventually, when the PTO runs out of objections, they have to grant the patent. The specification usually goes unchanged in this process. What this means for the layman is that the abstract is actually not a good description of the invention the patent actually claims, and shouldn’t be relied upon for public opinion. When you look at a patent, go to the claims, not the abstract.

Rock Band Night – Village Pourhouse

I left the TV on in the background the other night, when I suddenly heard, “And Guitar Hero night is apparently more popular than the Giants games!” Immediately, I went to the living room and rewinded the local news program, and they showed footage of a Rock Band night at the Village Pourhouse, at 3rd Ave. & 11th St. I checked their website, and headed off for their “Guitar Hero” night last Tuesday.

Sadly, there wasn’t much there. I showed up around 8:30 PM, and went to a deserted back part of the bar to find a Rock Band setup with a group of 4 20-somethings attempting to play (badly), and no management types managing it. The microphone was plugged in, but wasn’t working; apparently, no one realized that you have to plug in a standard controller to make it work. The drum set was broken (the yellow pad had a broken wire and didn’t work), but no one seemed to know about getting a warranty replacement. The 20-somethings left after about 20 minutes, and I stuck around and had dinner. No one else showed up, and I left unsatisfied.

That being said, maybe it was just a slow night; apparently they had had a tournament the previous week with about 40 people showing up. Since this tournament was never posted on one of the major RB/GH sites like ScoreHero or the Rock Band forums, or on Kotaku or Joystiq, I doubt that any particularly good players showed up.

At least the food was decent, if very overpriced–and at least it was Rock Band. Pianos still hasn’t switched over; apparently they tried to do a Rock Band night and had too many groups failing out.

Call of Duty 4 Tentative Critique

I’m only halfway through the single player game so far, and haven’t tried multiplayer, so take this as a tentative critique. But from what I’ve seen so far, CoD 4 joins Bioshock and Portal as one of the best single player FPSs ever, deserving all the credit it’s been getting from reviewers.

I don’t have nightmares about scary monsters, or being naked in front of a hall of people; my nightmares tend to involve getting shot at or nuclear weapons going off. So, the obvious step is to play a game that focuses on getting shot at and nuclear weapons going off. CoD 4 is set in the present day, where you play an American or British soldier fighting in an unspecified Arab country or in specified parts of Russia (not a choice; you switch between the two.) The plot involves Russian nukes finding their way into Arab terrorists’ hands, and U.S. and U.K. forces trying to clean up the mess. What separates this from your average FPS, though, is the game doesn’t gloss over the horrors of war; instead it sinks the player in the horror about as much as any form of media can. Two big scenes that you won’t find in any other game have really stuck out for me so far (spoiler alert):

1. In the intro, after a preliminary mission involving a raid on a ship, the game sticks you in the person of the just ousted president of Blankistan, as the terrorist coup takes you from your prison to a town square to be executed. No, you don’t fight your way out; you just have to sit there, turning your head to watch the riots and executions in the streets while tied up in the back of a car, as you’re driven through the streets. When you get to the town square, again, you’re just a passive observer–of your own death. You’re pulled up to a post, tied to it, and you get to watch as the terrorist leader points his gun at you and shoots you in the face.

2. About halfway through the game, while you’re playing as a U.S. Marine, you’re in a helicopter flying out of the city when a nuke goes off behind you. Of course, you’re looking out the back of the helicopter when this happens; you see the blast, and the shock wave as it comes towards you; you see your chopper crash as the blast hits, and then it fades to black. A cut scene shows up showing a news report and a long list of names of American soldiers killed in the explosion, and then you’re put back in the person of this U.S. Marine–now on the ground, unable to walk, just alive enough to drag yourself around for a bit, see the destruction, and die.

This is powerful stuff; far more powerful than could be done in a passive medium. It’s all well and good to read about nuclear weapons on an intellectual level, or even to read survivor stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it introduces an entirely new element when you’re virtually experiencing the horror. The same goes for the first scene; it’s one thing to read about a terrorist coup, it’s another thing to virtually experience it from the perspective of a soon to be executed former president. CoD 4 is doing something unique to the medium here, which is a common thread with Bioshock and Portal other than simply “Best FPSs of 2007″.

As for the actual gameplay–it’s quite good; I preferred Bioshock, but that’s a personal preference for that style of FPS that’s more like Valve’s shooters (Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Counterstrike), where you have hit points and you have a heads-up display that gives you information that makes gameplay easier. CoD 4 doesn’t have that kind of HUD; the wound system isn’t really transparent other than, “When the screen turns red, duck for cover or the next shot will probably kill you.” It gives the game a more cinematic feel, but it can also be more frustrating after the 7th or 8th time you’ve been killed by the crossfire from 10 automatic weapons without time to react. I also don’t particularly like the “enemies respawn forever” trope that’s common in a lot of shooters and is very noticeable here, but was thankfully left out of Bioshock. If you don’t press forward, an enemy rifleman at a post is likely to keep popping up until you’re pretty sure the terrorists have recruited 150% of the local population. If the actual war worked this way, U.S. forces should just set up a few sniper posts in one battle, and shoot respawning bad guys until Al Qaeda is eliminated once and for all.

This is just nitpicking, though, and the environment is destructible in particularly awesome ways. A battle in a TV station is particularly pretty as monitors and windows break, and you can shoot enemies through cubicle walls. You’re also not always in infantry grunt mode; sometimes you’ll be in a gunner position on a gunship covering infantry grunts, delivering impersonal death from above. You switch between different combat roles often enough to keep things exciting, which is a nice change of pace from, say, Halo.

Any storytelling game that takes full advantage of its medium gets a lot of credit from me, and a war game where the good guys suffer like actual soldiers is so rare (see Halo and Gears of War for counter-examples) that it will actually shock the player. Even before taking into account its multiplayer mode, this is a must buy for any FPS player or gamer who appreciates the art of gaming as a storytelling medium.

Summary: Don’t let the “Call of Duty” title fool you; this is a truly unique military shooter and a must buy.