The Common Sense Cowboy

One of the big marketing points about Dragon Age is about how the player is forced to make tough decisions. How the game takes place in a world full of shades of gray. How there's no clear line between right and wrong. Maybe it's because I've only been playing for a few hours, but this mostly seems to boil down to filling your party with jerks. Let's take a look around the campsite, shall we?

Alistair: Your first and by far most--if not only--likable party member. He used to be a Templar initiate, even though he doesn't care much for the church for whom they work. 'Course, he became a Grey Warden before he was fully initiated, so he's also the only member of your party who isn't a criminal or a heretic. He's got a sarcastic streak but is rarely a full-on ass, and when push comes to shove, he's actually a pretty nice guy. Plus, he's generally in good humor, and his quips are pretty funny sometimes. This is why he's got a permanent place in my party, even though he's specced almost exactly the same as my main character.

Leliana: Leliana is the least unlikable of the rest. She's got some kind of pseudo-French accent, but that's not the problem. She used to be some kind of cleric, but was thrown out of the church because she wanted to rewrite their entire doctrine. They make her out to be some kind of flower child, though, who is just trying to preach love and happiness, and the stodgy old church ain't having any of it. All it really boils down to, though, is that she gets pissed off when you're mean to villains and murderers if they ask for forgiveness, and doesn't give you any credit for helping the church.

Sten is a dick. He barely says 3 words at a time, and they're all three negative. Sten is a member of a race of assholes, who was doing a little scouting in your country when he decided to murder an entire family on a whim. He said he wanted to repent, and by that, he basically meant "die fighting the darkspawn invasion instead of in a cell." I thought that sounded reasonable since we needed all the help we could get, but that wasn't really very smart, because this is an RPG, so he's not in a lot of danger of dying in battle. It looked like I had the option to kill him when I met him, and judging from the fact he's not that handy in a fight and has given me nothing but grief, I regret not doing so. Now I'm stuck with him, because there's only an "I think you should leave" option, not a "time for your repentance" option. Maybe if they pull a Mass Effect and make you pick a party member to die, I can pick him.

Morrigan: The obligatory giant bitch. She's a rogue mage who practices magic without the sanction (and against the wishes) of the folks trying to make sure mages don't get out of control and destroy the world. Again. She's also the one they put in to make the 13-year-olds happy, since she walks around with her tits hanging out and thinks everything is ironically funny, and that everyone and everything is dumb. She hates me for being a generally decent person, and always has some smarmy response or insult to fling at NPCs or my other party members, mostly Alistair. As enjoyable as it is to listen when Alistair insults her, the only reason I keep her around is because she's the mage, and in this game, your party goes down without a spell-flinger. As soon as I get myself another mage, she's out on her half-exposed ass.

Ogre: Ogre is an ugly-ass dog. And also technically your first party member. Ogre tries way too hard to be charming, like a television Jack Russel, but again, he is butt-puckeringly ugly so it doesn't play off that well. That said, he's not a jerk, so he's pretty high up the ranks in this party. Of course, he can't open locks or freeze zombies, so he is of limited use.

So there you have it. An ex-Templar with no love for the church, a blasphemer who wants to rewrite said church's teachings all by herself, a multiple-murderer, and an illegal magic user who is messing with power that once destroyed the world without adequate supervision. Edgy! Guys, if you really want shades of grey in your game, you don't do it by forcing the player to pal around with outcasts and criminals. You do it by letting them build a party of respectable, upstanding folk, and then putting them in situations where they have trouble deciding what the respectable course of action is. To be fair, they look like they are trying to put the player into these sorts of situations, and I can see that I might come across some actual tough decisions later. But when the deciding party is a rag-tag band of assholes, it's not so big a deal when they bend the rules.

Anyone who loved the heck out of Diablo back in the day would do well to check out Torchlight. It's a whole lot like Diablo without all the BS, which I guess makes sense considering I hear it's made by a lot of the same people. Or, to be less negative, it's like what you would expect the natural evolution of Diablo to be after 10+ years. I mean, you can load up all your crap common items on your pet dog and send him back to town to sell them for you while you're in the middle of the dungeon, to give an idea of how streamlined they've made it. Plus, you can cast spells off your quickbar, instead of using it only for potions, like anyone who's ever played an MMO would expect you to be able to do.

Honestly, Diablo was a pretty simple game, and from what I've played so far, Torchlight has absolutely captured its essence. Diablo 3 is going to have to be pretty mind-blowing to beat this out for my click-on-dudes-for-phat-lewt gaming mindshare. Or, you know, just spend another 2 years in development so I'm ready for a new one by the time it hits.

The funny part is that Torchlight, a brand new game full of gorgeous graphics (that can do widescreen if you like) and all manner of gameplay refinements costs exactly as much as buying Diablo 2 from Blizzard's website (not including the expansion). Heck, you'd be hard pressed to find Titan Quest cheaper (it's also $20 on Steam), and that was arguably the best Diablo clone up until now. If you're like me, and only played Diablo-style games single-player to begin with, Torchlight is really a no-brainer, especially for only $20.

Man, Trine, 'Splosion Man, Shadow Complex, and now this? I can really get used to all these super-awesome, cheap, downloadable games with modernized classic gameplay.

Also, the music for Torchlight is done by the same guy who did Diablo's music, so fans of the Tristram theme (like me) are going to be quite pleased by the new town theme.

Alright, let's everyone stick their heads up their butts and let's start talking about Games As Art!

Ugh, let's not. Let's just talk about Small Worlds and why it is so good.

Small Worlds is an exploration game, and that's all its about. That's all you do. You cannot die, you cannot fail. The game-rules goal is to get to the glowing thing, but that goal is really secondary to exploration. The genius of the game is that everything in the game works toward that goal.

You begin each area zoomed in on your 3-pixel character, standing in a small bit of visible area surrounded by blackness. As you explore, the blackness recedes to reveal more scenery, and the perspective zooms out so that everything you have explored in that area is visible at once. And as the perspective zooms out, the initially dirty-looking textures on the individual pixels fade together to give the completed image a soft, almost needle-point quality.

The real joy, though, comes from the scenery itself. Each of the game's small worlds clearly has its own story, and its own feel. The great thing is that you are free to decide much of what that story is yourself. The game merely presents its worlds to you, and they compel you to explain them. I'm one to find heavy-handed messages even where they might not be intended, but I found the game refreshing in its hands-off minimalism with respect to storytelling. It simply paints a picture, and invites you to imbue it with your own narrative.

The great part about it is that because it is a game, and you are exploring yourself, you will often discover details that change your narrative as you reveal more of the picture. Or maybe they will reinforce the story you've come up with. It's sort of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without the box art. Then once you've revealed everything, you've got the whole scene there on the screen at once.

It's also worth mentioning that this is a game worth playing with the volume on. Generally when I'm playing a Flash game, the first thing I do is find the mute button. In this case, however, the game's soundtrack provides an ambiance that complements the solitary exploration quite well.

Really, if I have any complaints with the game, it's with the ending. And the unresponsive jump controls (protip: sometimes it's easier just to hold down the jump button and approach the jumps like a bouncy ball). All things considered, Small Worlds is a great way to spend the next 15-20 minutes. If there is such a thing as an "art game," this is the only enjoyable one I've seen.

Most people probably already know this, but I would like to make this point very clear: Batman Arkham Asylum is a fantastic game.

Something struck me while I was playing it, though. Batman is weak. At one point, the Joker is standing over a deadly drop, precariously perched on some sort of machinery. He has just escaped from captivity and his stooges have taken control of Arkham Asylum, killing half the guards in the process. The other half are fighting for survival against apparently dire odds. Oh, and the Joker may or may not have planted bombs all over Gotham. The Joker has just told Batman that he has to go, because his plan still isn't complete, but before he goes, he tells Batman "or, you could just kill me right here, and end this right now," as he dances on the edge of the precipice. Batman thinks about it, but puts away his batarang. Because, you see, Batman doesn't kill. Because he's too damn weak to deal with some personal guilt in order to save hundreds of lives.

Shortly before or after that scene, there is another scene in which Batman is sneaking around, and he watches two guards mercilessly gunned down by a couple of inmates. Just before the trigger is pulled, one begs "You don't have to do this! I've got a kid!" The murderer's retort of "I know, I don't have to do it," suffices to prove his complete lack of remorse. Those murders are on your head, Batman.

A bit later in the game, you collect an audio recording of the new warden interrogating the Joker. That means that even within the continuity of this particular game, the Joker has been incarcerated in and broken out of Arkham asylum within the past three years. At what point do you realize that a criminal is un-reformable? At what point do you realize a criminal is un-containable? How many more people does he have to murder before you are finally ready to put a put a stop to his rampage once and for all? Apparently, for Batman, that point is somewhere completely out of view. I know what Jack Bauer would have done when he had the Joker there on that precipice, though.

OK, so I know it's pretty silly to go this deep into rhetoric for a video game. Especially one based on a comic book. Indeed, this was initially going to be a much shorter post. But then I kept on thinking. What if you could go ahead and pull LT to have Batman finish the Joker in that scene? What if there was a "Batman's finally had enough" button? Maybe that would end the siege of Arkham, or maybe it would make it worse! Either way, it would be giving the player an actual, meaningful choice about how he wanted things to turn out. And it would have been done in a much more graceful and immersive fashion than the "Good Ending/Bad Ending" dialog option you see at the end of games like Mass Effect that are all about player choice.

Preferably, you wouldn't even get a popup telling you how many "morality points" you just lost, you would just be choosing how you dealt with the situation. You would be given the choice of whether or not you stick to your Ethos as Batman, or whether you will do whatever it takes to save the lives of the remaining guards. And what if the game gave you this option all the way through? What if, after watching the guard gunned down in the scene I mentioned earlier, Batman decides this particular henchman isn't going to live to kill again? Or what if your partcular Batman decides to use lethal force on the armed henchmen who pose a higher risk to him and any bystanders? Or what if you just decide to become a homicidal vigilante, bringing ruin to every offender in Arkham?

If you did, maybe Commisioner Gordon would have words for you when you next saw him. Maybe he would decide you were just another criminal, and the police consider you just another baddie who needs to be locked back up in Arkham. There really doesn't even need to be that much of a gameplay element to it, either. One of my favorite parts of Deus Ex was right after the first mission, when you were in UN headquarters. Since your orders were to use non-lethal force, the guy running the armory would dress you down for crossing the line if you had gone around killing the enemies, and he wouldn't give you more ammo. That's the extent of the gameplay penalty--you missed out on a few bullets. But just the fact that he told you to act like one of the good guys was pretty powerful.

That could easily work in Arkham, as well. Throughout the game, the Joker is taunting you on the loudspeaker. As you disable thugs in a room, the remaining baddies get progressively more nervous, until the last one standing forgets his patrol and just starts walking around randomly while freaking out. All the time, the game is giving you these subtle reactions to your progress. If you made a few corpses in there, imagine how much more freaked out the henchmen would become. "What's going on? I thought he didn't kill?" Maybe a few would abandon their posts. The Joker (or any surviving supervillains if you decide to finish him) might also start getting nervous. Or angry.

Maybe you could drag their entire plot (or the entire game, for that matter) off the rails, just because the player decided he'd had enough of this mollycoddling and opted for a more permanent solution.

I don't know if that'd be a Batman game anymore, but I would love the hell out of it. Even more than I already love Arkham Asylum.

Scribblenauts is pretty much completely jank. Lord knows what's gonna happen if you click anywhere near your dude. And you can forget jumping--ever--unless you have a jetpack. It's become the first thing I type on any level. Also, let's say you want to stand on a stool. You have a 10% of doing that, and a 100% chance of just knocking the damn thing over instead. You'll notice from those odds that even if you manage to get on top of it, it will be sideways and no longer where you wanted it. And don't het me started on how easy it is to get eaten by a shark because dude decided your click was a walk command instead of trying to pick up an item.

It has taught me a few important life lessons, though. First, you cannot ride a unicorn into battle wielding a lightsaber, because unicorns are giant pussies. Second, a single Orc is able to take down an elf, a halfling, a dwarf, and a ranger, but a full-on demon is no match for a construction worker with a power drill. I also dicovered that rat poison does not actually kill rats, it just makes them kinda sick for a bit. PETA can stop worrying about that, I guess. Finally, I learned that vampire hunter hunters are surprisingly pacifist when confronting their quarry.

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that this was destined to be a game where you make your own fun, and it's a terrible shame that almost every input mechanism stands in the way of doing that.

EDIT: Allow me to further clarify now that I am not typing on my phone, and therefore it is no longer an ordeal to write every sentence. The puzzles in Scribblenauts, at least as far as I have played, are not terribly clever. You could probably go through the whole game using only a handful of items. The game's conceit is that is meant to allow you to create clever solutions. In practice, however, the game cannot keep up with the player's creativity.

Say I have a switch. I can press that switch with a box, a hamburger, a hippie, or a house. But I will always be pressing that switch by dropping something onto it and leaving it there. Levers are even worse, since there should be a lot of different ways to pull levers. With another lever, for example, or tying a rope to it and pulling it (maybe with a dinosaur), or gluing metal to it and using a magnet to move the metal, or putting a hobo on one side and some change on the other. But you can't do any of these things. If you need to flip a lever, you need to move your dude over to it and click on it.

And don't get me started on trying to use ropes (or chains, or whatever). This is in exercise in sheer frustration, for several reasons. First, you move a rope by dragging one end, and the other end always follows the front end (not your path), so if you drag one end around a corner to tie to one thing, chances are some point along the length of the rope will intersect with something else, and the entire rope will be considered in an invalid position, so it won't attach. That's bad enough, but if you ever get the rope where it isn't touching anything, letting go will immediately cause it to become part of the scene and subject to physics. So you move one end to your point, it doesn't attach because the other end is touching something, so you move that end away, but now it falls to the ground and starts sliding off the corner of something, getting further away from your tie-off point, so you pull it back to the tie-off point, but now it's touching something again, and you repeat until you take the game back to the store.

The good news is that you will never ever need to use a rope, because it is not good for anything whatsoever. You can't attach it to the level, only other objects, you can't climb it because if it dangles down over a corner, dude will not climb over that corner, and you'll never be able to make the elaborate rope and pulley system you want to because, because you can't hook a pulley to anything, either. Hell, I don't even know if you can run the rope through the pulley, because I haven't been able to get that far in my construction.

So in essence, the game pretends it gives you the option of using any solution you can come up with, and then makes you feel bad because you solve every level with a jetpack, a box, a gun, and a pickaxe, even though that's really all you can do. I mean, sure, you could use wings, a basket, a laser pistol, and dynamite, but it's still the same damn solution. About the only creativity it really allows is coming up with one animal that will eat another in your path, and then putting something there to kill that animal before it eats you. But again, the gun will work just as well.

Bottom line, go find The Incredible Machine and play that instead. Scribblenauts is nothing but hype and frustration.