A Bug’s Life was released in 1998 as a tie-in to the video game of the same name. It wasn’t very good. The problem with Bug’s Life, as with the video games of its ilk, is that it hails from the mass-produced school of the game design. You play the main character of a film you have recently seen in a movie, conversing with other characters you have recently seen in a movie. You jump about on platforms and you jump on a monster’s head to kill it (because all video games are Mario).
You collect lots of collectibles and occasionally a glassy-eyed 3d model of a character you recently saw in a movie challenges you to a race around a part of a level in order to collect an important power-up for later on in the game. Sadly, all sense of flow is ground down by the haunting knowledge that you are playing a licensed game, where the experience of playing the game is made to match the way the movie unfurled.
The interface is standard in that you interact with the game world through the actions of the character you play (I avoid using the word ‘avatar’). The D-pad controls movement, there is a jump button, a fire button and shoulder buttons for the camera. The camera controls in particular are painful, but they were a relic of an era that couldn’t count on the presence of the control-sticks that are the industry standard today, so we can be merciful in that one regard.
In all other ways, A Bug’s Life fails to make the game personal or meaningful in any way, because every aspect of it screams ‘This part of the game is made this way, because this is what all 3d games are like’. Given that the designer is Psygnosis (or ‘the guys who made Lemmings’, a thoroughly original concept), I think there might be a reason for this: Licensed Games are a good way to make money. ‘Licensed Games’ require interacting with the film industry and people who are talented in their own field but have a pared-down understanding of what makes a game a game.
At the time when A Bug’s Life was being created, creating a 3D game was a massive undertaking compared to making 2D games. Creating a failed 3D game would have cost whoever made the game on two major fronts – firstly, the expensive 3D licenses would suddenly have looked a whole lot more expensive given that they weren’t making money back and it would have been harder to acquire any other licenses in the future. In the end, making A Bug’s Life the way it eventually turned out would have been a much safer proposition for the company and for the film studio executives who didn’t really know how games are made.
Of course, who really wants to spend time pushing the envelope when they’re making a kid’s game? (The answer? 5th Cell. Scribblenauts. The only reason I’m not reviewing them is because I haven’t picked up my copy yet.)
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Trivial Pursuit
Trivial Pursuit is an inherently unbalanced game. In a family game, all players start with the one piece at the starting area. There is the normal board-game disadvantage in that if you go first and your opponent goes second, you are both stupendously lucky in your rolls and you answer one correct question each turn, you will win 100% of the time. However, Trivial Pursuit’s other imbalance is very sneaky. The age you are and the country you grew up in can combine to form an insurmountable advantage, depending on the edition of the game you are playing.
I have experienced a game of Trivial Pursuit in which we invited a family who were new to town over for a casual game. We thrashed them quite soundly and laughed privately at their ineptitude with seemingly simple questions. The next weekend, we were playing a casual game when they brought out their copy of Trivial Pursuit and thrashed us. What is the point of this innocuous story? The family in question had just moved from South Africa. When we played with our (Australian) question cards, we had an unfair advantage. When we played with the South African question cards we were completely unable to answer even simple questions, such as “where is the Voortrekker monument?”
Thus, Trivial Pursuit is a board game in which 'who you are as a person' can actually change the play experience for the worst.
I have experienced a game of Trivial Pursuit in which we invited a family who were new to town over for a casual game. We thrashed them quite soundly and laughed privately at their ineptitude with seemingly simple questions. The next weekend, we were playing a casual game when they brought out their copy of Trivial Pursuit and thrashed us. What is the point of this innocuous story? The family in question had just moved from South Africa. When we played with our (Australian) question cards, we had an unfair advantage. When we played with the South African question cards we were completely unable to answer even simple questions, such as “where is the Voortrekker monument?”
Thus, Trivial Pursuit is a board game in which 'who you are as a person' can actually change the play experience for the worst.
Black & White
Black & White is a God-simulator game by Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios and one of the most expensive Tamagochis I have ever owned. You are a ‘god’, defined by dictionary.com as “one of several deities, esp. a male deity, presiding over some portion of worldly affairs.” In this case, it seems likely that you are the god of neurotically pointless weird stuff.
The problem, in a sense, is one of agency. Although you are promised the 'freedom' to be good or evil, in reality you are given a narrow path to walk along, where the left side is 'doing as the designer intended, but evilly' and the right is the same, but with slightly shinier lighting effects. Your character is confined at all times. When you first begin, your exploration is curtailed by two little talking heads who attempt to introduce you to the game’s interface with a series of clunky and difficult activities that you are unable to avoid or circumvent. After spending a little more time free-roaming you discover that your exploration of the world around you is actually limited by your ‘sphere of influence’. This might not be the nail in the coffin.
The nail is truly that its features do not combine to make a ‘god game’ as advertised, nor is it truly a strategy game. “You”, in your capacity as god, are unable to micromanage your villagers meaningfully and there is no particular tech-tree, but all the same you are unable to exert your potentially-useful miracles anywhere where they would be important. Similarly, your creature is a liability in most levels of the single-player game: at first it is small, stupid and useless and given to occasionally eating your villagers or pooping on your village, it is captured in the second level, becomes the main objective in the third and throughout the fifth it is cursed to gradually lose power and swap alignments. In the fourth level of the game, fireballs rain down from the sky.
From the perspective of game-balance, the challenge to the player doesn’t start out low and gradually increase, it starts out unfamiliar and then level-by-level throws out all the information you accrued during previous stages of the game and replaces them with a fresh, novel game state. What is Black & White? In the end, it is not so much as a single game as a mismatched jumble of tiny little games.
The problem, in a sense, is one of agency. Although you are promised the 'freedom' to be good or evil, in reality you are given a narrow path to walk along, where the left side is 'doing as the designer intended, but evilly' and the right is the same, but with slightly shinier lighting effects. Your character is confined at all times. When you first begin, your exploration is curtailed by two little talking heads who attempt to introduce you to the game’s interface with a series of clunky and difficult activities that you are unable to avoid or circumvent. After spending a little more time free-roaming you discover that your exploration of the world around you is actually limited by your ‘sphere of influence’. This might not be the nail in the coffin.
The nail is truly that its features do not combine to make a ‘god game’ as advertised, nor is it truly a strategy game. “You”, in your capacity as god, are unable to micromanage your villagers meaningfully and there is no particular tech-tree, but all the same you are unable to exert your potentially-useful miracles anywhere where they would be important. Similarly, your creature is a liability in most levels of the single-player game: at first it is small, stupid and useless and given to occasionally eating your villagers or pooping on your village, it is captured in the second level, becomes the main objective in the third and throughout the fifth it is cursed to gradually lose power and swap alignments. In the fourth level of the game, fireballs rain down from the sky.
From the perspective of game-balance, the challenge to the player doesn’t start out low and gradually increase, it starts out unfamiliar and then level-by-level throws out all the information you accrued during previous stages of the game and replaces them with a fresh, novel game state. What is Black & White? In the end, it is not so much as a single game as a mismatched jumble of tiny little games.
Final Fantasy
Which Final Fantasy? I don't like any of them.
Final Fantasy is well known and well-regarded. It is a Japanese style RPG. The characters of Final Fantasy are recognisable, ‘beloved’ and highly marketable. However, the single-player of final fantasy is banal to the point of excruciating boredom. Commands are issued to your four characters by choosing one of four buttons at the start of each round of combat: “Fight”, “Magic”, “Item” and “Run”. ‘So,’ you may say, ‘you have four options to use in each round. That’s a decent number of options for a menu system first developed in 1987!’ You might say that AND IF YOU DID YOU WOULD BE WRONG. For, as you may be well aware, Final Fantasy has a class-based system throughout most of its incarnations.
An ‘optimal’ party consists of a Fighter, a Black Mage, a White Mage and an X (where X is ‘anything that isn’t black belt’). A fighter will always be attacking. A black mage will always use magic. A white mage will use magic, or, in an emergency only, a one-use Phoenix Down to resurrect a fallen comrade. The ‘X’ will do only one of those things (if X is the black belt, that thing will be ‘dying, followed by wasting a phoenix down’. Oh, Black Belt, is there any joke you can’t be the butt of?). To summarise – the optimal use of each character is limited to ONE choice out of ‘fight’, ‘magic’, or ‘item’. It is rarely a good idea to use ‘item’ outside of boss battles, specifically the last and most difficult. Lastly, there is the run command, equally useful for all characters. The only caveat to that statement is that if you want to run away, you’re generally running from a powerful monster. The more powerful the monster, the less likely you are to be able to escape. Thus, one should regard the interface as a sort of spiteful illusion: you have one button for each character.
To top it off, each character needs to be as close to the maximum level as possible (a modest cap of ‘level 99’ seems to be the standard) to have a decent chance of survival against the final boss, or the ‘bonus boss’ that follows it. So that’s one button to press, for 99 levels, at which point you mix things up a bit with careful use of items and then you win. The importance of choice and emergent play is not held in very high regard at Square-Enix, I fear.
Final Fantasy is well known and well-regarded. It is a Japanese style RPG. The characters of Final Fantasy are recognisable, ‘beloved’ and highly marketable. However, the single-player of final fantasy is banal to the point of excruciating boredom. Commands are issued to your four characters by choosing one of four buttons at the start of each round of combat: “Fight”, “Magic”, “Item” and “Run”. ‘So,’ you may say, ‘you have four options to use in each round. That’s a decent number of options for a menu system first developed in 1987!’ You might say that AND IF YOU DID YOU WOULD BE WRONG. For, as you may be well aware, Final Fantasy has a class-based system throughout most of its incarnations.
An ‘optimal’ party consists of a Fighter, a Black Mage, a White Mage and an X (where X is ‘anything that isn’t black belt’). A fighter will always be attacking. A black mage will always use magic. A white mage will use magic, or, in an emergency only, a one-use Phoenix Down to resurrect a fallen comrade. The ‘X’ will do only one of those things (if X is the black belt, that thing will be ‘dying, followed by wasting a phoenix down’. Oh, Black Belt, is there any joke you can’t be the butt of?). To summarise – the optimal use of each character is limited to ONE choice out of ‘fight’, ‘magic’, or ‘item’. It is rarely a good idea to use ‘item’ outside of boss battles, specifically the last and most difficult. Lastly, there is the run command, equally useful for all characters. The only caveat to that statement is that if you want to run away, you’re generally running from a powerful monster. The more powerful the monster, the less likely you are to be able to escape. Thus, one should regard the interface as a sort of spiteful illusion: you have one button for each character.
To top it off, each character needs to be as close to the maximum level as possible (a modest cap of ‘level 99’ seems to be the standard) to have a decent chance of survival against the final boss, or the ‘bonus boss’ that follows it. So that’s one button to press, for 99 levels, at which point you mix things up a bit with careful use of items and then you win. The importance of choice and emergent play is not held in very high regard at Square-Enix, I fear.
Monopoly
Once again, this is a popular and successful game that has ‘withstood the test of time’. It sits squarely on my list of disliked games for several reasons. Firstly, because the game is unbalanced: the player who moves last will often be moving along a board now peppered with properties owned by their opponents, unable to acquire any properties for themselves by the time they have finished paying rent.
Secondly, it is possible for a player to be defeated without chance of recovery many turns before they are actually removed from play and much longer before the game actually reaches an ending condition. This means that a player’s choices become completely irrelevant – their choices are limited to proceeding around the board, hoping to collect money from passing “Go” to make the next rent payment, or leaving the game.
Over a game of Monopoly, it is entirely possible to achieve a stalemate, with a number of players leering over the board, jealously guarding their properties and refusing to trade. In this situation, small gains and losses will be sustained but without the sizeable advantage that owning a Monopoly on a given set of matching colours would bring, it is unlikely any player will ever gain or lose enough to establish a winning advantage.
Secondly, it is possible for a player to be defeated without chance of recovery many turns before they are actually removed from play and much longer before the game actually reaches an ending condition. This means that a player’s choices become completely irrelevant – their choices are limited to proceeding around the board, hoping to collect money from passing “Go” to make the next rent payment, or leaving the game.
Over a game of Monopoly, it is entirely possible to achieve a stalemate, with a number of players leering over the board, jealously guarding their properties and refusing to trade. In this situation, small gains and losses will be sustained but without the sizeable advantage that owning a Monopoly on a given set of matching colours would bring, it is unlikely any player will ever gain or lose enough to establish a winning advantage.
Cluedo
Cluedo is, objectively, a successful and popular game. I personally have no interest in this game, but I don’t necessarily think they’re horrible games, nor do I wish ill on anyone who plays this game. With that said, let the bile-spewing begin!
Cluedo’s conflict is expressed through two main avenues: the conflict between the player’s pool of information and the contents of an inanimate yellow envelope and the race between all the participants to ‘solve the mystery’. The conceit of solving a murder through investigation and the player’s fantasy of being a detective doesn’t lend itself well to the most efficient way of playing: drawing up a huge logic grid as might suit a particular kind of child’s puzzle book and then huddling over it as you cross off various suspects. There are very clear and concise steps a player can take towards ‘playing to win’.
Each player has access to an equal percentage of the whole truth (represented by the cards in their hand), but the imbalance in this game is derived from the skill ceiling’s gargantuan dimensions. A single talented player at a table full of new and inexperienced players will find the game ridiculously easy to win through superior record-keeping and deductive reasoning, but a single inexperienced player sitting at a table of professional Cluedo players will unintentionally share so much information that the game is ruined for all involved.
Cluedo’s conflict is expressed through two main avenues: the conflict between the player’s pool of information and the contents of an inanimate yellow envelope and the race between all the participants to ‘solve the mystery’. The conceit of solving a murder through investigation and the player’s fantasy of being a detective doesn’t lend itself well to the most efficient way of playing: drawing up a huge logic grid as might suit a particular kind of child’s puzzle book and then huddling over it as you cross off various suspects. There are very clear and concise steps a player can take towards ‘playing to win’.
Each player has access to an equal percentage of the whole truth (represented by the cards in their hand), but the imbalance in this game is derived from the skill ceiling’s gargantuan dimensions. A single talented player at a table full of new and inexperienced players will find the game ridiculously easy to win through superior record-keeping and deductive reasoning, but a single inexperienced player sitting at a table of professional Cluedo players will unintentionally share so much information that the game is ruined for all involved.
Bad Games
The following games were selected because of my personal distaste (or hatred) of them. This is not to say that they are 'bad' games. Other people may very well like them and they're welcome to it. These are just games with flaws that I believe merit discussion and that I personally do not enjoy. I recognise that many of the games I have expressed fondness for have flaws, but they had merits that merited discussions and I like them. In the end, nothing on the earth is good or bad, but thinking made it so.
"Bad Games": Cluedo, Monopoly, Final Fantasy, Black & White, Trivial Pursuit, A Bug's Life.
"Bad Games": Cluedo, Monopoly, Final Fantasy, Black & White, Trivial Pursuit, A Bug's Life.
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