Aligments. Many games have them, RPGs in particular. Alignment usually just boils down to good versus evil. Most of the time, aligment choices are that simple. You can be a good person or a bad person. Some games put a small twist on the terms be renaming them paragon and renegade. Other games, have two aligment axes that they judge you by. Dungeons and Dragons has a good versus evil axis and a lawful versus chaotic axis. This means you can be chaotic good (freespirit who still does the right thing, eg. Robin Hood) or lawful evil (stick to strict guidelines and rule with an iron fist, eg. Sauron), or any other of the nine possible combinations. Fable II has a good versus evil and a pure versus corrupt axes. Unfortunatly, I have never been able to have a corrupt good character or an evil pure character since actions will often shift your alignment on both in the same direction.
Which leads me to the problem with these systems, moral choice systems are bad. It's not that they're a bad idea, but their implementation is often incredibly poor. The frequent problem is that your character is supposed to be the hero of the day (or galaxy) and so the story writers have to come up with contrived reasons that everyone would put their faith in such a bum. Personally, I would not trust someone who murdered three villages worth of people to save the world. At least when I'm good aligned the evil people are smart enough to shoot me on sight.
Speaking of the evil people, where are they? Often times there is no real hub purely for evil people. If there is, all too often it is under supplied and lacking in work and quests compared to the good areas. Which leads to the next problem, it's hard to be evil. I can understand if it's a little more difficult, needing to stick to the shadows in cities and avoiding mercenaries hired to chase you down, but often being evil is outright crippling. Usually in the games where it's not, being evil feels no different than being good. You just get spat on in the street more often.
Some games counter this problem by having you be an evil overlord as the main story of the game, an example case would be the appropriatly named Overlord games. The problem here, is that when the game expects and requires you to be evil, it kinda takes the fun out of it. I enjoy playing evil characters when I'm given a true choice in the matter. When it's all evil all the time, you might as well be playing an all good all the time game.
Then, there's a lack of depth problem. If you want to be the ruler of an evil empire in a game, you go cut someone's head off. If you want to be the ruler of an evil empire in real life, you pretend to be good and benelovent until people trust you, then BAM! You can't do that in a game. Of course, the first counter argument to such a system is that it would be complicated to implement. Well, yeah. Of course it would. People's motivations are complicated and good versus evil is certainly complicated. But, if you could put together a working system based on that, players would appreciate it.
All of these point me towards a statement I think many developers are making (intentionally or otherwise), be a good person. Don't be evil and bad. Well, okay thanks. It's not like my parents didn't teach me that when I was little. It's fine with me if you want to reiterate that, but the problem I have is: why are you holding the flag of ultimate freedom up high when you activly discourage the player from a full half of what that freedom should represent?
Now this Overlord knows how to be evil AND get all the girls!
Bosses. They are the big nasties of every game. Big and strong, these are the main antagonists of games and provide the player with a more difficult challenge prior to obtaining some goal. If you need to enter ten dungeons to collect the ten Keys of Nature, then you can bet that each dungeon will have a boss right before that key.
The real purpose of bosses is to provide a sense of climax. If the evildoer you've been chasing the whole game is no more difficult at the end than your average orc, the player is going to feel let down. To this end, the boss should be difficult, but not impossible.
Of course, there are two large exceptions to that rule. The first is scripted losses, and the second is super bosses.
A scripted loss goes by many names: automatic loss, unwinnable fight, and supposed to lose fight are a few examples. These fights take a few forms, but as the name implies the main point is that the player is not expected to win the fight. Sometimes the player characters meet a main antagonist early and are wiped out by their power, coming back years later to defeat that person. Golden Sun has the player meet the two main antagonists as small children. They are soundly squished with no chance of winning. Those same two are fought as the final bosses of the game.
Other times, the battle could/should have been avoided. Skies of Arcadia has the player meet the final boss twice before the final confrontation. Both times the player may either surrender to him, or resist. You are supposed to surrender, as the game rewards you with an increase in renown when you do. Resisting neither gives nor takes renown, but you earn a solid thumping and are usually KO'd in one turn by his Silver Eclipse attack. The main character both times advances to attack, but is warned off by another character who knows him and warns that he is too powerful.
The final commonly used fight of this type is one where the player is encouraged and expected to run from the fight. Final Fantasy III has the player investigate Bahamut's lair early in the game. When Bahamut returns unexpectedly and challenges the player, the character all shout "Run Away!" and the player must either select the run command, or get descimated.
Next, we have super bosses. These guys are for the completionists and the players looking to get more fun and challenge from your game. Such bosses are usually completely optional, hard to even get to, and much stronger than the final boss or any other enemy. The fights are characterized by absurd amounts of health, BS attacks, and much frustration on the player's part. My example for you today is Dullahan from Golden Sun: The Lost Age. Notable parts of his battle include: he moves three times per turn, can use a summon which has a high chance to instantly kill all members of your party, can change his weaknesses at will, and can put all of your Djinn in recovery mode. To those of your who don't know what Djinn are, think of it as having a boss strip you of all your equipment, ultimate attacks, and forgetting half your moves and you have to run around picking it all back up and putting it on while he continues to whale on you.
Dullahan. This guy makes it look easy (most of the time anyway). Fight starts at about 1:00 and about 2:56 is where the player has his closest scrape with death.
There is really so much more that can be said about bosses, but this covers most of what can be said about a couple types of them. Make sure you don't bog your player down with too many scripted losses, they'll feel powerless. A game need not include any at all. But most players will appreciate a super boss, and those that wouldn't can simply pass them by.
Each game has its rules and contraints. These are put in place to keep the game fair and balanced within its gameplay. Such as only having three companions follow you and assist you in combat. Other times, things are done to keep the game within the power of its engine. An example of this would be having corpses decay after two hundred of them are present to prevent overloading the memory of the computer or console.
At the same time, most games are fun for only so long. You beat the game, you're really good at it, and hungry for more. But there's no more to the game and there's been no mention of a sequel yet. So what do you do? You break down those constraints and mess with the heart of the game, you hack it.
By hacking, I don't mean modding. Modding is using the game's builder toolset to make new areas or monsters. I might cover that later, but for now we're talking about what you can do with something like an Action Replay or Codebreaker. These devices directly alter the data read in from the game disk. The results can on one hand be amazing, hilarious, or just plain stupid.
One can (and many people do) use these to give themselves unlimited time or health to breeze through the game easily. I am going to leave those out as I think they're pretty self explanitory and boring to watch. What I am going to look at is some of the more interesting or amusing results of hacking and some of the challenges that people pit themselves against.
First up, and fun one. Many times on a PC version of a game, the developers will leave the console intact in the release version. The console is where all the behind the scenes action takes place in a game. When an NPC gives you an item, the console will display somehting like "player.additem 034bbc45 1". This says, to the player's inventory, add 1 of this item, where the item is referenced by that indescipherable blob of letters and numbers. The developers use the console during development to test things out and bypass bugs until they can be fixed. As I said at the beginning, many times developers leave this in place in the release version. With a little practice and patience, players can learn to use some of the more unique commands to produce interesting results. Here we have Fallout 3. One of the commands is timescale. The timescale is the amount of time that passes in the game for every second of real time. The default is 30, 30 seconds pass in the game every second that you play. Here we have a player messing with the time scale. At first you just see some rather quick night and day cycles, but at about 3:15 he goes inside and observes the "lifestyles" of the NPCs under quickened time. I find it rather amusing.
Warning: This video opens with an epilepsy warning and I believe it. I recommend skipping to 3:15 immediately if you have a problem with flashing lights.
So, there can be a fun side to hacking, and for many people that's the only real goal. They're just trying to squeeze a little more fun out of the game. When hacking a single player game, this is pretty much all it is. When doing so in online multiplayer games, then it can give that player an unfair advantage.
Now, to look at some of the challenges people have set up. Kingdom Hearts II is a particularily good example because the engine is amazingly robust. You can sub bosses in for allies, bringing the ability to fight multiple bosses at once. You can only do so many though, or the game crashes. But you can also fight in areas only seen in cutscenes, use your drive forms (transformation ability) to turn into another character, or give yourself the moveset of one form while appearing in another. Let's look at the results for each of these attempts.
Fighting three of the same boss. Notice that the screen darkens during his ultimate attack, and that it does so for each doing the attack, and that all three do that attack at the same time at one point. Very hard to see.
That same boss (he's a popular one) fought in an area that only appears in the intro scene.
This boss is supposed to be fought with this character using two weapons at once. Instead, he's been hacked to still only use one and can use the drive command to drive into his form where he has two weapons. I particularily enjoy the first time its used and on completion of the effect the boss does the reaction from the cutscene when the player first pulls out two weapons. "Two?!"
And finally, the move set of Final Form on the Antiform. (Sorry he picked Marluxia again to showcase this on. I TOLD you he was popular!)
So, at the end of the day, hacking a single player game is pretty harmless and can add extra entertainment value to a game. Hacking to give yourself tons of cash in an online game is considered quite rude, unfair, and can get you permanently banned. Hacking is something you should do in private on your own time, not in front of others.
Sometimes, you just do things wrong. Despite your intentions, things just don't work out. What's surprising, is how often this can have hilarious results. In video games, the "consequences" for failure can sometimes be so amusing, as to warrant intenional failure just to see them. So to take a break from the usual seriousness of my topics for Mother's Day, I present to my Mom a post I hope she will find amusing (and I hope that's true for the rest of you too): The Power of Funny.
First, let's look at the video that inspired me to do this post. This is from the game Dark Messiah. The player can kick just about anything. Here is an example of aforementioned kick, that has a rather amusing (though delayed, which is part of what makes it funny) reaction.
The Monk Who Contemplates Gravity. (You can stop at about 00:15)
Dark Messiah has been a source for this topic though, namely the Freeze Spell. Using this, you can either freeze an enemy directly, or you can create a patch of ice on the ground. What happens when you run over the ice? The same thing as in real life! That is, you slip. Here we see a player taking creative advantage of this ability.
Watch Your Footing
And to close Dark Messiah, an accidental, but very creative way to knock off your support character. How good is your aim with a dead body?
Look Out Below
Here we can see the rather amusing consequences of a player intentionally failing.
Appropriatly Titled: Spiderman's Most Embarassing Moment
Or making good use of the ability to name your characters.
Other times, you can just... break something....
A rather um... quick and intense punch up... yeah that's it.
Remember the LLLIIIGGGHHHTTT scene from Devil May Cry I wrote about in my voice acting post?
In case you don't....
Now, does that look a bit similar to this scene from Megaman?
Any similarity between Dante and Zero in the last 10 seconds or so of this? (Watch the rest if you want some context)
You sure they're not the same scene?
No, these two were made for each other.
Ahh, the power of editing.
So, to seal this barrel of laughs, is the cherry on top of funny moments. This is a vidoe review of Big Rigs Over the Road Racing. The box promises pulse pounding scrapes against the cops as your rush to deliver your illegal cargo to the safehouse. I'll only say two other things: 1. This is a real game that came out in 2004 on a mass scale. 2. This is a real review of the actual game, you see honest truth here.
I'll let the review speak for itself from here on out.
Seriously, how could the developers honestly release that? I couldn't look myself in the mirror after turning out something that horrible.
And there you have it. Hope you got a few laughs out of it. Happy Mother's Day everyone!
I just had to say, "Today cannot possibly get any worse!" didn't I?!
Since about the days video games gained visual graphics, they have all had music as well. At first, there was only a few sound effects, but quickly games began to have a full music score. Today, all games have background music in them. And, just like the story and graphics, good music can make the difference between a good game and a great game.
What role does music play in a game? It must be an important one. Companies have long been hiring full time composers and orchestras to produce their sound tracks. You can often buy the soundtrack on CD, and many consider it worth it. The hint here is that this music can be quite good; good enough to stick on your iPod and listen to. So again, what role does it serve in a game to deserve all this time and effort? As the title suggests: The background music of a game is a powerful catalyst to affect the player's mindset with. The best part about it? It's (when done well) subtle, and very effective.
Take the first Super Mario games. Each level was timed, and the timer counted down in the top right corner of the screen. The player however was usually focused on other parts of the screen, so the timer goes largely unwatched. But suddenly, the speed of the music doubles. There are only 30 seconds left. The change in the music alerts the player, and because it is now going faster, reinforces the notion that the player needs to also speed up. A rather clean little psychological trick, it has since become a standard for those types of games.
Since music is almost always present in a game, changing it is an easy way to send messages to the player. The player is crawling through a series of dark caves infested with cannibals. The music is dark and forboding. The player sees a light ahead, and upon approaching carefully hears the music change to a church organ. The player immediatly puts away their cannibal beating stick and walks right up to the friendly people standing there. They happily heal him and buy his spare loot. How did the player know this? The change in the music. Take care though, this is a pretty well established idea. Misleading the player with music changes will quickly annoy them.
So, the music sets the tone of the scene, and changes in that music change the way the player views the scene. Let's listen to a few examples.
Here is the World Map music from Lost Odyssey (great soundtrack by the way).
The player is just looking at a map of the world and selecting where they want to go. No pressure. The situation is laid back, so the music is too.
Now, from the same game, the music that plays while you search a field that was just overrrun by (now cooled) lava, decimating two entire armies.
The scenario is a sad one, so the music is too.
I think you probably get the point by now. What about the music that plays during the introduction cutscene? That should get the player on the edge of thier seat, excited to play!
One of my favorite intros I've come across recently, Kingdom Hearts RE: Chain of Memories. Does this do it for you? (Stop at about 2:35)
But what about my favorite type of music in games? The battle music! This is what plays when you are in combat with something. The purpose of this music would be then to "get the player up". Get their heart rate up, blood pumping, and draw them into the fight. There have been games that I have run around for hours fighting things just because I love listening to the music. Let's look at some of these.
The standard battle music from Lost Odyssey (again, I know, but good for comparison)
Lost Odyssey Battle Music from the Arena, very lighthearted and fun for battle music, had to include it for novelty purposes.
Enough of that game. I present my favorite battle music from Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. Each world has different battle music, and the music from Neverland takes the prize.
Final Fantasy IX
And to wrap up, Final Fantasy XIII (Stick it out till the bit that starts at 00:58, my favorite part)
Did any of those get your pulse pounding? You may have liked some of them, but I suspect the answer is probably no. If I'm wrong, then good for you and kudos to the composer of that song. But the problem is, the music here and now lacks the context it has in game. You don't have your characters running up against the big nasty you've been chasing for the last hour. There's no visuals or action on your part. The problem here is that music is only part of the experience that gets the player into that heightened sense of awareness. A critical part, but only a part none the less. Let's try adding the visuals (since we can't really add the interactivity) and see if the music then has a greater effect.
Just the music (for comparison) Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix, The 13th Reflection
Now a fight with that music, Marluxia Data
Did the action add more "get up and go" value to the experience? It should have, the actual fight and the music should compliment each other.
Now, time to reveal my masterfully executed link. The 13th Reflection is different from the rest of the battle music we've looked at so far. It is the first boss music we've listented to. Bosses, the biggest and nastiest of the big nasties, usually get their own type of battle music. They are (supposed) to be more intense than the generic battle music and let the player know that some serious stuff's going down. These themes have something the regular ones do not, an intro. Listen to the music only version of The 13th Reflection again. Note that the first ten seconds or so are not part of the repeating song. Now, watch the first ten seconds or so of the battle again. What is happening during the non-repeating part of the song? The boss is taking time to gloat, laughing at the player he intends to turn into mulch with his giant rose-spewing scythe. Bosses usually get some sort of "introduction" before they fight the player, and the music reflects this (no pun intended).
Lost Odyssey, like most games, has a few boss themes, but this is my favorite, Dark Saint
The fight that uses that music
Let's keep the rest to music only.
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest Final Boss Music, Dark King
The favorite of many, possibly the best known battle theme ever, from Final Fantasy VII: One-Winged Angel
(Note: If you go to YouTube one of the highest rated comments is a rather amusing translation of the words sung. I'm not copying it over as there are a couple naughty words and suggestive themes, nothing terrible, but I'm leaving that as optional.)
Now, personally, I don't like One-Winged Angel as much as the Dark King. "But, they're from different games," you say? Well, it's not even my favorite from FFVII. My favorite is from the fight right before that one, Jenova Complete.
(Note: This song is often referred to as Jenova Absolute. I believe that is actually the name of the boss, and Jenova Complete is the correct name of the song. Either one will get you to the song and fight.)
Did any of those stand out as particularily epic? Boss themes are supposed to be the best of the best after all.
In summation, music is quite important for helping set the player's mindset. I can't stand playing games with the music down or off. Most players use the music (consciously or not) to cue their behavior. But use the music responsibly, be careful not to mislead the player. Also, don't override sound effects with music. The soundtrack might be great, but if I can't hear the mole rat running up behind me then I got problems!
Fortunatly for video games, Yoko Shimomura doesn't dress like this.
The goal of this weekly blog, updated Sundays, will be to create thought provoking video game related discussions. This will range from new gameplay techniques, to using video games to teach psychology. The important thing is to have fun.
This is my portfolio site which contains downloads of games I've made. http://snow.sierranevada.edu/~tbaron/index.html
