Some Thoughts on Super Mario Galaxy 2

I recently beat Super Mario Galaxy 2. This may not seem like something big to most people, but I’m not most people. I have a very serious problem. I rarely finish games. This usually comes down to one of two things: either distraction or difficulty. Distraction happens to everyone when playing a game, whether it is something completely outside of gaming(like work or relationships), or something along the lines of a new game coming out. This is completely understandable to anyone who has ever picked up a controller. The second root of my problem is the matter of difficulty. Games almost by definition need to have some sort of difficulty or challenge to them, as without it they are little more than moving pictures.

With implementing difficulty into games comes a whole host of problems on what is the appropriate level for any given part of a game. If a game is too easy the player becomes disinterested and walks off, but if the game is too hard the player becomes frustrated and walks off. Developers have tried to remedy this with the inclusion of multiple difficulty levels, but those open up an entire new host of problems (akin to multiplying the problem with one difficulty setting by however many settings you include).

So when I sat down to play Super Mario Galaxy 2, I sat down to win. I made sure I had no other games tempting me, and I essentially fell off of the Earth for a few days to make sure I wasn’t distracted. This left the only thing stopping me from completing this game: the game itself. Recent Nintendo games haven’t been known for their mind-blowing difficulty, but some have been enough to frustrate me to the point of quitting. So as I first began playing Mario I became overtaken with a childlike joy that made me know for sure that this game was different.

I continued to play for the next few days and never once was I bored, or frustrated, or aggravated in any way; I was happy. I was constantly intrigued by Mario’s world and its constant stream of challenges. These challenges were actually, well, challenging. Instead of setting me up against increasingly difficult waves of enemies I was confronted with constantly changing landscapes and mechanics I had never seen before.

This was perfect for me. I died a few times, but never enough to dissuade me. None of these deaths ever felt like something that was wrong with the game but something that I could track back to one of my mistakes. This didn’t lure me into the overconfidence that comes with any game that is too easy, as with every challenge I wondered if I would die and if this was the challenge that would stop me from progressing. I never stopped.

I think that this is Super Mario Galaxy 2′s greatest achievement: not the beautiful level design, nor the simple joys of it, but the perfect level of difficulty that brings it all together. This is why it is one of the greatest games we have.

Save and Reload Podcast 15: The Laugh Track

Grant and Matt are here for this one, but we also got some guy off of the street to come participate. His name is Jesse and as it turns out he is the Community Manager for DestructoidSanFrancisco. He stops by and talks with us for a majority of the show, but has to leave to go do science. The rest of us then talk about which games you should play to get a crash course into indie games.

Grant made the picture for this episode (tell him it is good).

The song is Wing Beats by Wiklund.

If you want to hear Jesse on a more regular basis you can listen to him here.

As always comments and questions are always appreciated!

EDIT: I totally forgot to whore Matt out. His Gamertag is Juturna916.

Save and Reload 14: Too Much Sex and the City

This week Grant joins me to talk about some new games. I expected this to be Super Mario Galaxy 2-cast, but that didn’t seem to happen. Maybe next week. We did however talk about Red Dead Redemption for a while and how much I want to skin a bear (decidedly quite a bit). We chatted about Bioshock 2 for a little while but we unleashed massive spoilers, so be warned of those.

The song is by La Roux (so hip).

If you liked this nonsense leave us comments below.
If you hated this nonsense leave us comments below.
If you have any ideas for next week’s show leave us comments below.
If you want to nominate a game for our Cougar Seal of Approval leave comments below.

Samus Happens to be a Girl, Or Why Samus Isn’t a Strong Female Hero

A few days ago I read Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock: The problem of what the game is about, by Clint Hocking, and (aside from learning I was the nerdiest person on the planet) I became inspired to write some game criticism of my own. So I sat down to write about why I felt that Samus was not a truly great female hero. I worked at it for the next hour but when I looked back at what I wrote I realized that writing game criticism is difficult. I sat down and argued that a female hero is one who uses her femininity to her advantage, and was strong through being a female, not a faceless character who just happens not to have a Y chromosome.

So I went back to rewrite my thoughts about the woman in the metal suit, but I kept having Vietnam style flashbacks to the 22 pages I just had to write about the play Double Falsehood (for those of you who don’t know, it is a play that Shakespeare may have written), so I quickly shelved that project and got back to playing Beyond Good and Evil. As I was playing I began to pick up very quickly on Jade as one of the best female characters in any video game. She was what I knew Samus was not.

I began to analyze all of Jade’s methods and motivations I had encountered so far in the game (I told you I was the nerdiest person on the planet), so allow me to share them with you:

A) She is nurturing.
When the player is first introduced to Jade, she is running an orphanage with a pig-man but struggling to make ends meet. She continues her nurturing throughout the story as she protects the weak throughout (I’m resisting the urge to call her a mama bear).

B) She isn’t aggressive, but is strong when she needs to be.
A large portion of Beyond Good and Evil is taken up by stealth sequences in which Jade can either fight or hide. Jade, however, is not particularly good at fighting these enemies, making sneaking a much better option. But Jade is not weak by any stretch. In the beginning of the game Jade has to defend her orphanage from alien invaders and she does so through brute force (once more I’m avoiding calling her a mama bear.)

C)She inspires others to be their best.
Beyond Good and Evil plays a lot like the Legend of Zelda games, which are primarily focused on fighting your way through dungeons and killing large creatures and evils. Jade could fight her way through hordes of enemies (I’m confident she would survive), but instead she chooses to take pictures of what takes place behind closed doors. These are distributed to the masses, who then start to stand up for what is right and choose to save the world themselves.

So after I made these realizations I thought back to Samus. Was she nurturing? Not really. Was she overtly aggressive? Yeah, but she was sent into these highly volatile areas knowing everyone wanted her dead. Did she inspire others to be their best? This one required some thought, as she never really came into contact with anything that didn’t want to kill her.

So was Samus really a female hero? Not really, she was just a hero who happened to be female. She could really be replaced by anyone else in that suit, Gordan Freeman, Link, Quote, Chell, the guy from F.E.A.R., Soap, or Ness. This isn’t to take anything away from Samus as a hero, or from the games themselves, but Samus could be a man, or an alien, or a robot and the games themselves would not change much if at all.

Save and Reload Podcast 13a and 13b: Fighter X/Chillcast

This week I got to talk with the boys of Fighter X (who have the patience of saints, Brad Pitt’s smile, and Jesus’ abs) and that makes up the first 15 minutes/side a. The rest of the show contains Grant and I just hanging out on the air (while still managing to be witty/pithy.

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I bet you can guess who the music is by.

So did you guys like the casual nature of the show this week? We aren’t terribly certain if we want to keep the show as formulaic as it has been in the past or if we want to make it slightly more casual (probably not so much as it was this week). We want to try something different next week, but we need you guys to tell us what it us you want us to talk about, something broad about video games that we can chat about for nearly a half an hour.

If you have any suggestions/comments, leave them in the comment section below.

Some Thoughts on Lost Planet 2

This past Saturday I got to go down to the Destructoid San Francisco headquarters to play Lost Planet 2 with some members of the community and the Destructoid editors. I ended up playing the game for somewhere near 7 hours straight and it was a generally mixed experience.

The game itself is a third person shooter set in the future on a planet that is somehow both snowy and tropical at the same time. Once I got over that geothermal marvel, I got to fight some gigantic bugs (I later learned that these bugs heated up the tropical areas) and this was genuinely enjoyable. The enemies required the entire squad of people to work together in order to take them down. These were the best moments of the game; everybody got into sync and it became a well executed dance with people grabbing mech suits to target the boss’ legs, another to shoot its weak points for damage, and the remaining two to climb inside and really lay the hurting down.

This lovely experience was marred by essentially every other aspect of the game. The single worst aspect of the game was the blatantly broken checkpoint system. The game is broken up into chapters and larger episodes. Whenever you die you are forced back to the beginning of the chapter, which itself is divided into several smaller areas. This means that every time you die you play through approximately the same hour. This happens to be a problem when the other three members of your squad have had quite a bit to drink. This of course happened to me and I ended up playing the same level for around 4 hours straight. The levels themselves were incredibly linear, while staying under the pretense of being open, and most of the paths that you were on ended up being incredibly confined, which became frustrating as you would be swarmed by a mass of giant bugs and require your teammates to shoot them off of you. This wouldn’t be much of a problem, but when you are hit by an enemy you are knocked back which stops you from doing a number of things including shooting. This means that if you are all surrounded with bugs your group is invariably screwed.

This game felt like a bit like hiking; the trip there is hell, but once you get there it’s great. I played the multiplayer a bit as well and didn’t like it much, but it was at 3 in the morning with a bunch of drunk people so I’m not sure that my experience with that was representative of the whole. I can understand the reviews the game is getting (generally not favorable) despite my hopes for this sequel to sort out the problems the first game had.

I now want to play backseat developer (despite not having any game development background to give me any credibility) and try to remedy some of the problems with the game. The checkpoint system needs to be changed so that it does not force the player to slog down the same hallway 50 times. The co-op life system was a bit janky as well, due to the fact that the the group shares a collective number of lives that increase whenever a respawn point is reached. This system would have worked well if there were not so many instant deaths in the game (fish that happen to eat through your metal armor are in essentially every body of water). There were also too few lives to share between the group. I would fix this by giving the group more lives, but making the respawn timer longer or making the enemies stronger in general. The level design was too compact in most of the places I played, so the act of making a small hallway that was essentially single-file could be widened just a bit to allow for another tactic besides running and gunning. Also while I was playing I had the problem of not being able to see the grunt level enemies against the background. This meant that the only way I could progress in the game is to shoot where I saw giant red Xs pop up over where the game told me there were enemies, this could be fixed by re-skinning the characters in something that isn’t the same green color of the trees/grass/bugs/every other thing in the game.

So really at the end of my night with the game I had to put the controller down and walk away. The game had good intentions, but that couldn’t carry it far enough. I wouldn’t recommend buying the game at a full retail price, but paying somewhere near $20 would probably be worth it.

The picture up above is the Sir Omnomnom plushie I got at the event.

Save and Reload Podcast 12: A wild Pokemon attacks!

Grant is not on this one. Just getting that out of the way first. Stan was around this week. So Matt talks about the Wii for a bit, and then we all talk about games that we want to come out (even though we sort of did that before). Matt has to leave after a while, and the show takes a turn for the pokemon. Like seriously, after about 30 seconds of Matt being gone the episode turns in to Save and Reload:Pokemon Edition.

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The song is More Four (Sex Edition) by Fighter X

If you want us to ask Fighter X a question on the air next week we need you to tell us either via comments on this post or over on the Facebook page (although here is preferable).

We still need people to write for us, so if you are interested please send me an email at Oldspencer(at)Gmail.com

Save and Reload Podcast 11: Call of Duty: Ultra Warfare 2113

This week Matt was off saving the UK from the Loch Ness Monster, so Kyle and Gary showed up along with Grant as usual. We argued a bit about Halo: Reach and I gave the worst explanation of Audiosurf of all time.

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If you liked hearing Kyle and Gary they have a podcast over here.

If you want to help support indie developers (do it) and/or sick children (they need your help) here is the link to pay what you want for some great games.

The song is from Fighter X again.

We still want writers and people to guest host, so if you are interested send me an email at Oldspencer(at)gmail.com

Save and Reload 10: We made it this far!

Whoa, we have made 10 podcasts!
How neat is that? (the answer to that is very neat)
So in honor of this occasion we all made lists of our top 10 games of all time and we now present them humbly to you. I should clear up before hand that we only picked one game from any given series as to keep Matt’s list from being a reordering of the numbers 1-10 with the words Final Fantasy attached to them.

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This has our first ever techno remix as our intro song. It’s called Rock and Reload and it’s by one of our listeners Tyler. You can download that bad boy right here.

I won’t include the music I promised for one of the games in my list because that would spoil it, but I highly recommend you all go listen to it.

The E-mail I sent to Anthony Burch (now with an actual article attached)

EDIT: Here is something that I can pretend looks like Journalism attached to this e-mail.

So Anthony Burch has left the world of gaming journalism for good today. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but to me it has a monumental impact on the level of Superman dying. One year ago I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life, and didn’t get any real enjoyment out of anything. This seemed like a problem to me because I was leaving the world of high school and had to plan out the rest of my life. When I was asked by Counselors, friends, and family what it was that I liked doing I said “Playing video games,” out of what felt like obligation. Several months had passed and I was shown a silly web series called “Hey Ash Whatcha Playing.” I started watching this show whenever I had some extra time to kill. They released a podcast a few weeks later entitled HAWPcast. This piqued my curiosity as I figured it would be some more humorous takes on video games. This assessment was only partially right. What I found was one of the most painfully brilliant people I had ever heard. The more I listened to this man talk the more I realized that he was saying the things that I wasn’t aware I was thinking, that I thought games were art, and how much I loved indie games.

I continued to revel in every little insight he brought, and waited each week for his podcasts so I could hear everything he had to say. It was at this time that I realized, for the first time in my life, that I had someone I looked up to; I had a hero. This man made me re-realize my childhood dream of becoming a games journalist. Since that time one year ago my passion for games has only increased as I sit around and think about video games and the theories that come along with them. I realized that without this man I would still be sitting around with no goals, no motivation, and no future. Anthony Burch has given me all of that. Today I have created my own humble gaming podcast and blog, which are being continually updated, and every day I work on improving both my skills as a journalist and my skills as a gamer.

So with this I wish Anthony Burch nothing but the best in everything that comes to him (and I know he won’t need it) at his new job at Gearbox, and his upcoming wedding to Ashley Davis. It is my sincere hope that one day he will understand just how much he has done for the gaming industry as a whole, and for me personally.

Give them Hell Rev A.

The E-Mail:

I want to thank you for everything you have done for the gaming industry as a whole and me personally.

One year ago I had to choose where it was I wanted to go to college, and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I had no idea about either of these things. The only real interest I had was in video games, and I had spent all of my life believing that video games were just a pastime in the real world, and that they wouldn’t help me do anything. It was about then that I started hearing you talk in podcasts and Rev Rants, and it blew my mind. I was sitting at home and there was this guy on my computer who was saying that games were not only legitimate but he was talking about the exact feelings I had about games my entire life. You made me realize that I wanted to become a games journalist.
Several weeks ago I saw you talk at UC Berkeley and it inspired me to keep going on with my tiny little blog and unpopular articles. Since that time I have made strides in every area of my life to bring me closer to my newly realized dream of legitimizing games (Ebert be damned) and hopefully helping someone the way that you helped me.

I wish you nothing but the best of luck in everything that happens to you, and Congratulations on the engagement.

Thank you.