With Flight, Microsoft has made a flight simulator that more people are going to want to play. Microsoft has made a flight simulator that more people are going to be able to play. I think this is a great thing.

From a high level, here’s what Microsoft has done with Flight compared to Flight Simulator X.

The graphics engine is completely new. Usually this sort of change is evolutionary, but in Flight’s case, it’s revolutionary. Specifically, rendering has moved into the 21st century by being moved primarily onto the PC’s GPU instead of being CPU-bound. This has a huge number of effects, beginning with “It looks generally better,” continuing through “and runs at higher resolutions on the same hardware” and moving on to “with extremely high frame rates compared to FSX.

Second, where FSX gave you the entire world, with comparatively low detail, to fly around in, Flight has taken another tack: they’ve started with the Big Island of Hawaii for free, and made the entire Hawaiian island chain available for download as a purchase. But the positive side of this tradeoff is that the islands exist in a comparatively fleshed out form. Even flying at extremely low altitudes, the scenery is detailed enough that it looks much better than FSX, to my eyes at least.

LIkewise, where FSX gave you approximately 7,142,528 different models of aircraft to choose from, Flight gives you two (for free), and makes 3 more (at present) available for purchase.

Flight is structured in a very game-like, as compared to sim-like fashion. Yes, you can fly around on your own with no restrictions, or you can run ‘missions’. Some missions require particular aircraft (this, by the way, is what some people complaining about the aircraft choice might not have noticed. The Maule, for example, has a price tag not because of the bitmap of the plane, but because it’s effectively selling access to the cargo missions.) The missions I’ve finished so far have run the gamut and have been fun and engaging – I particularly enjoyed a coast guard Search & Rescue mission to find a lost kayaker, for example.

Furthermore, taking a page from Grand Theft Auto, Flight has a large number of ‘aerocaches’ hidden throughout the islands; finding them awards you with experience points, the occasional achievement, and bragging rights. The aerocaches are a good way to engage in some virtual tourism, since many of them are located at interesting sites around Hawaii.

In what’s an interesting decision for a flight simulator, you can get out of your plane and walk around. The world – at least so far – is fairly sterile, so this is more of a curiosity than a major selling point. But it suggests obvious areas for further expansion if Flight takes off.

The user interface is quite streamlined, working best with a flightstick but also being perhaps the first Microsoft sim to be plausible with a mouse and keyboard. This will no doubt infuriate purists. But they can get off my lawn. Flight also bravely steals the best ideas from non-flightsim games. For example, there is a “Fly to next waypoint” shortcut that jumps you straight to the next interesting thing in a flight. This is not something one would want to use all the time, but it’s nice to have it available when you need it. (Compare this, from a user-interface perspective, with FSX’s pretty-much-unusable time compression feature, and you can see how much more thought went into usability).

Obviously, this usability comes at a price: I seriously doubt that anyone is going to be learning to fly a real airplane by playing Microsoft Flight. But that’s clearly not the market they’re trying to sell to, and as a kibbitzer I can’t say I disagree with their decision.

To those who feel that the existence of Flight is somehow a personal affront, all I can say is
•Microsoft is in the business of selling software.
•The existence of Flight doesn’t take away your functioning Flight Simulator X
•Microsoft doesn’t “owe” you FS XI, XII, or MCMVII.
•No one is forcing you to buy Flight.

“If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” -Henry Ford

Flight is a bold experiment to see if, instead of trying to address the expressed desires of the existing flight sim market, Microsoft can expand it. It’s an attempt to focus on quality over quantity, on accessibility over detail. Microsoft is essentially making a wager. The wager is that by focusing all their efforts on the features that they think 90% of the potential customers of flight sims want, they can safely ignore the 10% of the market that wants more ‘hardcore’ features. My personal opinion is that Microsoft is going to win this wager.

But, of course, only time will tell.

Consider:

1. Insane difficulty and repitition: check.

2. Boss fights: check.

3. Obscure and non-obvious game paths: check.

4. Emphasis on combat and/or physical dexterity: check.

5. Unforgiving failure conditions: check.

6. Ludicrous amounts of useless and tedious expository dia… oh wait. I got mixed up for a second and forgot that I’m not writing about a Bioware or Bethesda game. Never mind. There is hardly any NPC dialog at all and they don’t even try to do lip sync, so they can’t do that badly either. Kudos.

Like Demon’s Souls before it Dark Souls is the whole psu-hating package. Every time you turn around in this game there is more evidence that the developer hates you and wants you to die in a fire. Here are a few basically non-spoilery examples:

1. Levels with lots of cliffs and narrow ledges that you must navigate in the dark.

2. Combat on said cliffs.

3. The one hit kill tutorial boss.

4. Enemies that re-spawn every time you save and regenerate.

5. Forced navigation through areas that will poison/curse/cripple you or set you on fire.

6. Friendly NPCs who are gigantic reptiles. And eat you without warning.

7. Areas with enemies that you not only cannot kill, you can’t even hit them and you have to ask someone, or a walkthrough, why.

I could go on all night, but I’d rather stop and go back downstairs and play some more.

The second to last time I was this confused about a game was when, on the strength of a Penny Arcade cartoon I picked up Shadow Hearts: Covenant on a whim. Here was as hard core J a JRPC as they came and I should have hated it, but it tickled some part of my fancy and I played it all the way to the end.

The last time I was this confused about a video game was when I got into Resident Evil 4. Here was a game where you must shoot zombies with a character who can’t walk and hold a gun at the same time. And yet I played the game through a half dozen times on multiple platforms.

After 50 or 60 hours of Dark Souls I finally figured that what I like about the game is what it has in common from these two previous inscrutable favorites.

From Resident Evil 4 you get both the hordes of hostile undead and a combat system that takes a few simple tactics and forces you to apply them with absolute focus over and over again. Although Dark Souls has multiple spell casting systems, the juicy, meaty center of its combat system is the hand to hand fighting. You will inevitably need to engage enemies at close range and you will find that unless you follow a few very important tactical rules exactly and perfectly, you will be dead. Here is my short list of the rules:

1. Never engage more than one enemy at once unless they are all in front of you.

2. Preserve and regenerate your stamina bar (green) at all costs. Stamina lets you attack. More importantly stamina allows you to block enemy attacks.

3. Don’t spam attack. Patiently wait for the enemy to try and hit you and only then when they are open and vulnerable should you go after them. This is especially true with slower weapons.

4. Go in to new areas cautiously and with enough healing resources. Be careful of the white fog.

Of course, since it’s impossible to always follow the rules exactly and perfectly, you will be dead a lot. This, combined with the fact that the game re-spawns most enemies when you die or otherwise rest provides a good justification for the game’s reputation for unforgiving difficulty.

But, there is more to it than that.

Like most video games, there are a variety of enemies that try to kill you in a variety of ways. The creativity in the enemy design is actually one of the pleasures of the game. There are small ones, big ones, flying ones, running ones, slow ones, fast ones and others that just defy explanation. The design of the enemy A.I. is fascinating in what it does not do. There is no real attempt to simulate a smart enemy. Instead most fight in relatively fixed and predictable patterns. Since you will die a lot and since the enemies will respawn every time you die, you will see any given set of enemies a lot and you will learn how to beat them. Herein is the brilliant conceit of the game:

1. You get better at killing the enemies in real life because you kill them over and over again.

2. You get better at killing the enemies in the game because you increase R and level up.

This is one of the few video games where learning the various skills the game wants you to learn actually feels rewarding instead of like busywork that you need to do so you can beat the next cheap boss fight. The fact that it is also loosely coupled with your virtual progression through the character building system is a neat feedback loop.

So yes, the game is unforgiving and sadistic the first few times through an area. But it gets easier each time you go back through not only because you now have a +8 sword of blenderkilling, but also because you know exactly how to beat every enemy in the place.

This would all be for nothing if the combat itself did not hold up under extreme repetition. But for me it does. It becomes familiar and comfortable. And then you zone out and the 20 foot fall knight crushes you under his shield, and you wake up and start concentrating again.

The connection between RE4 and Dark Souls is, at least to me, fairly direct. The connection to Shadow Hearts is more spiritual than anything else. Both games make great use of their settings to communicate a certain mood and overall design sensibility to the player. What Shadow Hearts says to you is “we are batshit insane!”. What Dark Souls communicates is a sense of being completely alone in a hostile environment, and also that “our creature designers are batshit insane!”.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Dark Souls world is the sheer variety of locales and how they are all tied together. The game has prisons, sewers, prison sewers, ruined castles, gleaming castle cities, gardens, forests, lava pits, stone caves and a godforsaken poison swamp. But all of these disparate locations are connected. In the game’s map they are connected because you can and need to walk from one to the other to progress in the game. This aspect of the level design is actually brilliant because with only a few exceptions all of the connections make spatial sense. You will trek from the opening area up a hill and into a ruined city full of the undead. In this city you will fight your way to a small room with a bonfire in it where you can rest. From there you fight through more of the city and then to the top of a tower and across a long bridge. Under this bridge will be a room with a ladder in it and after you kick ladder out of the wall and climb down, you are back at the fire. Taking the short cut back up to the bridge, you eventually make your way into a church. In the church is an elevator that takes you … back to the original opening area.

When you remap this all out in your head, you realize that both the original routes and the short cuts really do fit together. It’s a tour de force of maze design.

But, the game’s world is also connected in a second, more important way. A lot of video games like to give lip service to a “sense of place” or a singular design sense. But to my mind Dark Souls really delivers. And it delivers not in a shallow way, but in that way where no matter where you are standing in the game, your location is obviously of the game. You could be sitting in a fetid and poisonous sewer full of gigantic frogs that breath cursed gas on you, or you could be strolling down a pristine hallway in a marble castle. All of the locales really feel like they are from a single world, or at least from the vision of a single world designer.

Or maybe it’s all in my head. You spend so much time running through the world that it becomes burned into your brain. I’ve never memorized a map to this extent.

Finally, I can’t let the game go without repeating: the creature designers are batshit insane! I’ll avoid specific examples because you should find out for yourself. You can even do this on youtube if you’d rather not spend the time to play through.

So, to summarize:

1. Insane difficulty: yes, but for once learning how to be good at the game is actually worth it.

2. Boss fights: yes, but none that are too obtuse. Also, you can use the multiplayer system (which I have not described) to get other players to help you with bosses. There is no boss that is hard when you are three on one.

3. Obscure and non-obvious game paths: yes, but that’s what youtube walkthroughs are for. Also the multiplayer system gives you hints.

4. Emphasis on combat and/or physical dexterity: yes, but not too much and also see (1).

5. Unforgiving failure conditions: yes, but for some reason in this case it all works.

6. Ludicrous amounts of useless and tedious expository dia… oh wait. I got mixed up for a second and forgot that I’m not writing about a Bioware or Bethesda game. Never mind. There is hardly any NPC dialog at all and they don’t even try to do lip sync, so they can’t do that badly either. Kudos.

I had to say number (6) over again, because it’s important. The lack of useless narrative is a feature. Video game narrative mostly sucks anyway, you won’t miss it.

Anyway, I should stop now because the only place to go from here would be to make a gratuitous connection between Dark Souls and Madden. If you know me well you can already predict how that would go. I’ll spare you.

Notes

A few links to similar thoughts about Dark Souls:

Tom Bissell

The Brainy Gamer

Gamers with Jobs

You know from the start that Dark Souls will be easier on you because after getting killed by the tutorial boss you will immediately notice that there is a door that you can use the escape the fight. You then come back to the same fight later after you have an actual chance of winning.

The rest of Dark Souls follows this general pattern. While it is obviously similar to its predecessor in tone and mechanics, the game has a softer edge to it. The combat is still remarkably unforgiving if you lose focus, but it is manageable as long as you keep enemies in front of you and manage your space so that you never get surrounded. Best to fight the undead freaks one at a time, lest they gang up on you.

I find the combat system to be rewarding and, for lack of a better way to describe it, it is easy for me to parse. There are three things you need to control:

1. Your position. This is facilitated through the third-person camera lock.

2. Your health. Even at high levels you can’t take too many hits.

3. Your stamina. In melee combat, this is what allows you to manage how many times you get hit. Blocking requires stamina, and blocking limits melee damage.

Every action RPG combat system boils down to these three areas of control, but I think Dark Souls presents a particularly rewarding system. I found it easier to deal with than Skyrim, for example, where controlling your defensive position was always hard because of the first person perspective. Combat always seemed to boil down to running away backwards and casting spells, which gets tedious.

Of course, you will often lose focus and die. And when you die you still have to trudge all the way back to every fight through hordes of re-spawned enemies. This makes the boss fights more tedious than they should be, but it is balanced to some extent by the fact that the bosses themselves don’t seem as punishing. At least in the early game you have room to maneuver and thus a chance to run away and catch your breath if you need to.

The re-spawning also has something of a hidden bonus. If you die a lot because you suck, every time you make your way back to the boss you can collect experience off the bodies of the easier enemies. This helps you in two ways (OK, it’s really fake help, but bear with me):

1. You can eventually level until the final fight is easier.

2. You get practice at combat, and get better at it, making the final fight easier.

You can also come down with Stockholm syndrome and believe that the game is really helping you by punishing you dearly for losing the boss fight. All of these things happen at once.

Which brings me to my second favorite part of the game. I discovered this thanks to the modern wonder of the video walkthrough. These things are great for when you get stuck. If you watch this video the host shows you how to easily collect around 7,000 souls in 2 minutes of gameplay. You can then return to the save point and make the area respawn and do the whole thing again. This allows you to collect an astounding number of souls fairly quickly.

Souls are the currency of the game, standing in for both experience points and money. You use them to level and upgrade all aspects of your character. This little exploit lets you make your character marginally more powerful more easily. A purist might think that this is a cheap way for players that suck to game the system, as it were, and break the balance. I like to think of it as an explicit design decision that helps to balance out the difficulty of the game. I can run through here a few times and use the resulting “R” to make my life a bit easier. It’s an easy way to compensate for the fact that I will always suck at combat. I find it very considerate of the developers to put this into the game for me, especially since they made so much of the rest of their little world so punishing.

Plus, it’s fun to watch the moronic NPCs leap off that cliff. It makes me giggle.

In any case, after farming for a while I started to leave one or two of the guys alive to practice fighting more powerful enemies. After five or six runs, most of them are actually beatable one-on-one. But there is still one guy in there that’s too hard (because I suck). So then I’d just run away and watch him fall off the cliff again. And giggle.

The result of all of this is that I’ve had a much better time getting killed over and over again in the undead prison of Dark Souls than I had running around in Skyrim‘s pinnacle of high fantasy world design getting mauled by bears. At least the enemies that destroy me here were actually powerful, and not just some freaked out wild life.

Well, except maybe for those giant crows.

In playing Skyrim, it’s been clear that Bethesda has played Nehrim, and shamelessly stole their good ideas, which is something they should be proud of, because it made their game better.

Then, today, I reached the section of Skyrim called “Blackreach”. And, this is what happened:

SORY ABOUT THE DEAD GARDS AT YOUR PARTY BUT I NEEDED A THING FOR A MISHUN. MY KONTACT SAID TO BE SNEAKY BUT I HAD BIG ARMOR SO I WAS LOUD SO I HAD TO KILL EVERYONE SORRY.

LOVE,

KRRRNK THE ORC
PS: THANKS FOR THE WINE IT WAS REELY YUMI.
PPS: SORRY AGAIN ABOUT THE GARDS.

Below that is the place where I write; it is decorated here and there with tiny relief carvings, and yellow light radiates from hidden skylights. My desk is in back.

An observatory is to the right. It’s a compact platform, open to the stars, and furnished with a reclining seat and an array of refractors. I’ve left stacks of hand-written notes and charts here and there. A gear-ridden orrery rests on a stand, in memory of simpler models of the universe.

Behind that is a room filled with tall carved bookshelves. Rows of textbooks on sociology and faded maps lean against terse Norse novels. The scent of ink and paper permeates the place.”

My Secret Hideout is the first iPad game by my longtime friend and acquaintance Andrew Plotkin, a.k.a. Zarf. I can’t even pretend to be objective about this – in this case, my loyalty to my friend outweighs any objectivity I might have. So I won’t try. Buy it. For $2.99, you get a neat little amusement that will generate endless descriptions of a mysterious fantasy hideout.

One of the mysteries, for me, is trying to figure out how the various inputs I can make will influence the story. Why are there six kinda of leaves? What do they do? How does combining them change the hideout? I haven’t figured any of this out yet, but I am enjoying the attempt.

It’s not a game. There are no “victory conditions” – you don’t win or lose this, you just mutate the tree and enjoy reading the results. I am glad that there’s a place in the world for things like this.

My Secret Hideout is available for iPad at the iTunes store.

I love them because they’re a somewhat nostalgic throwback to the days of the early Ultima games (I’ve talked about my hate/love relationship with those games in detail before). I hate them largely because the games’ UIs are just clumsy enough that I feel a bit like I’m trying to dice onions while wearing mittens.

Mind you, Vogel himself has an ambivalent relationship with the genre — worth a read is his not-so-tongue-in-cheek article Why I Hate Fantasy RPGs, outlining a number of their flaws.

Vogel’s latest, Avadon: The Black Fortress was recently released for Mac OS X and Windows and, somewhat more interestingly, for iPad. I picked up the iPad version (it’s a steal at $9.99) because I was curious to see how the UI issues played out on that platform.

It turns out, it’s pretty good!

“You are a servant of Avadon. The Black Fortress. Your job is to protect the Pact, five nations that have banded together in a fragile alliance. The purpose of the Pact: To hold back the waves of invaders that seek to destroy you.

Outside the lands of the Pact, there are limitless threats. Barbarians. Fading, jealous empires. Titans and unspeakable horrors. The warriors and spies of Avadon are charged to keep them at bay, weak and divided. You fight in the shadows, rooting out small threats before they have the chance to grow. Your resources are unlimited, and your word is law.”

There are a number of great things about playing Avedon on iPad. Chief among them is the fact there’s no “miniaturization” going on for the platform. You are playing the exact same game that you’d get on the PC or Mac, just with a different way of interacting with it. I can’t quite explain why – and I’ll be the first to acknowledge it doesn’t make any sort of rational sense – but interacting with my cute little avatars by poking them with my finger is more fun than clicking on them with a mouse. Go figure.

As always, Vogel has made a fairly interesting world using sparse but effective text. I’m only to the second major area, but at this point I’d summarize the overall plot as “You play a brutal thug hired by an oppressive empire to enforce the Pax Avadonia by murdering as many orphans as possible”. Presumably as the game progresses I will be given opportunities to decide whether to embrace the orphan-murdering or to instead lead a band of Ewoks in rebellion. I am doing violence to Vogel’s writing with my completely unjustified snark, of course. Vogel has a good sense of when to spell things out, and when to leave things unsaid, and this leads to a well-paced game that draws you in right from the start, and hasn’t so far left me wondering “Well? What do I do now?”

The combat system in the game is a turn-based affair redolent of the original Fallout but moving along a lot more fluidly. And with no wondering whether you’re supposed to left-click or right-click. There are four character archetypes (whom I will summarize as the Hitty guy, the Ninja Guy, the Wizard Chick, and the Healer Chick), and each plays different enough, tactically, to make each combat enjoyable. Especially when I win.

There are a few UI rough spots that deserve special mention. You identify enemies by tapping and holding your finger on top of them — which, if you have big fingers like me, completely obscures the label you’re trying to read. Second, I keep wanting to use a pinch-gesture to zoom in for a better look at something, or zoom-out for an overview. No such luck. Lastly, you can drag the viewport around while your party is running across the map, after which it jumps back. This feels clumsy, but I’m also not sure I have any brilliant ideas that would work better. When I do this, it’s usually because I have tapped on a location I want my guys to go, and I want to get the next location after that lined up. But you end up not being able to do this effectively.

There’s also a bit of ambiguity about when a quest has been completed. The first quest in the game gives you a nice big hint in the form of one of your party members saying (I paraphrase) “Well, I guess we did what we were supposed to so we should probably go back and talk to that guy again, huh?” This led me to believe I’d get something akin to that whenever I finished a quest; no such luck. This leads to a little — just a smidge — of low-level angst, along the lines of “Am I about to waste 2 minutes walking across the map only to discover that I missed one rat that was hiding in a corner somewhere?’ I sort of wish that wasn’t the case.

I’ve only been playing this for a couple of days. But my initial experiences have been positive enough that I find myself hoping that Vogel ports some more of his games to the platform.

Geneforge, anyone?

This has always bothered me, on some level, and I dealt with it in what I consider to be a very mature and appropriate way: I’ve pretty much avoided playing chess for 35 years.

There are good reasons to avoid chess if you’re not good at it: there’s no randomness, and both sides start evenly, so when you lose, you have no one to blame but yourself. There’s also a nontrivial amount of memorization involved in becoming a really good player, particularly in the opening, and that part of the game just isn’t fun, no matter who you are.

But with the rise of iPhone-driven asynchronous multiplayer gaming, I sort of stumbled into playing a little chess, badly, with my dad, and also with a couple of friends. I lost every game, of course. But strangely, this made me want to get better at the game, rather than to avoid it.

Now, when I say “get better at the game”, I have what you might call a very modest definition. I certainly don’t imagine that I’m going to be winning many games any time soon. Rather, I have a simple desire: I want to get to the level where, when my opponent takes one of my pieces, I saw it as a possibility before he did it.

You might observe that this is a skill that is easily obtainable to anyone who knows the rules of chess and is, let’s say, 7 years old. Nonetheless, the thing about my chess suckitude that has always bothered me is not so much that I lose, but that I lose completely by surprise. All I want is to be good enough that I won’t be surprised.

I’ve spent perhaps the past month playing match after match on Chess.com, a “correspondence chess” web site. You can play via the web interface, and they also have an iPhone and iPad app that’s convenient. In addition to the matchmaking and games, they also have a pretty nice set of chess puzzles and “post-game computer analysis” so that you can find out, in soul-crushing detail, exactly why 20 of your 40 moves were boneheaded.

Playing so much in such a short period of time has taught me a few interesting principles that I will share with you here. None of them are particularly brilliant, and I will explicitly point out that if you take chess advice from me you are taking reading lessons from the illiterate. But here they are, nonetheless.

Peterb’s Top Ten Chess Lessons Learned Via A Seemingly Endless Series of Humiliating Defeats

10. Take your time before making a move. If you’ve got a day to make the move, don’t feel compelled to make it in 30 seconds.

9. Look at the square you’re thinking of moving a piece to. Consider how it can be attacked.

8. Look at the square you’re vacating. Ask yourself if by vacating it you’ve opened a gap that can be used immediately.

7. If you’re ahead, don’t be afraid to exchange pieces aggressively.

6. When imagining your opponent’s move, never imagine one that is good for you. Always try to find his best move. Then assume that he’ll make that one.

5. Losing to strangers hurts less than losing to people you know. But neither is fun.

4. Practice moving the knights around until you can ‘see’ their threat pattern in your sleep.

3. Leading an attack early in the game with your queen is like wading into a fist fight jaw first.

2. Properly deployed, pawns are way stronger than you think.

1. Don’t make your move after having had a few drinks. Trust me on this one. Really.

If anyone is interested in playing a match, you can find me as “peterb1201″ on chess.com. Feel free to drop me a line.

While I was happy to see Portal 2 show up, I did not really indulge in any of the pre-game hype or marketing. I heard it was pretty interesting though, and the GWJ wasted nearly half a podcast angsting over whether Valve had become a big bully company, not above using its position of strength to cynically feed the pavlovian impulses of the hard core gamer. From what I can tell the answer is of course they are, but so what.

Anyway, in something of a cruel joke, the box from Amazon showed up first thing in the morning at work. So I had to stare at it all day, and then at dinner, and then some more at the Target while we ran some errands after dinner. So it wasn’t really until around 10pm that night that I got to start falling through orange and blue holes.

About a week later I had gotten through it all. It took five or six play sessions averaging around and hour to and hour and a half. As expected this is somewhat longer than the first game. This is because the market dictates that AAA full price games need to be too long in order to sell to their core audience who like games that are, in general, too long.

That said, Portal 2 was not too long by much. And the fact that the pacing was just a tiny bit off is really my only complaint about the game. In every other way Valve has managed to capture what was good about the first game and amplify it. So let’s review:

1. Interesting mechanics. Generally good pacing.

2. Puzzles that require that you compose the interesting mechanics in interesting ways so that you feel a little rush of genius when you get to the other side of the room. This rush is also used in an interesting way in the narrative… but that would be a spoiler.

3. An interesting narrative that doesn’t get in your way while you are playing the game (for the most part).

4. Good writing, funny jokes, excellent characterization in the voice acting, and an enjoyable song.

So, about the pacing. My feeling is that each major area of the game felt about one “level” too long. This was especially true in the overlong middle act that tried to expand on the narrative arc with an interesting twist while at the same time introducing some new mechanical tricks to layer into the portal-based puzzle solving. I have been accused in the past of being an unfeeling oaf, but I wasn’t really that interested in the back story presented here. And, the new mechanics wore thin by the end of the sequence. So, as I said before, if they had taken one test chamber out of each part of the game, I feel like I would have been happier. As it was, I spent a long time in this mid-game staring at industrial platforms trying to figure out how to get off of them. Or staring at vertical walls trying to figure out how to launch myself upward. It got old. I got impatient. I think we are both at fault here.

That’s all I have to say. That’s really all I can say without getting into spoilers. I think this is as much of a winner as the first one was, which means that there probably won’t be a better video game released this year.

I had originally ignored Uncharted 2 because when I played the demo of the first Uncharted game I found the setting to be a pedestrian and the controls to be sloppy at best and difficult not to hate at worst. When I finally got around to trying the second game, I was happy to find out that the controls were much better. In fact, everything was much better. Here are some things that Uncharted 2 does that are simply excellent:

1. Top notch dialog and voice acting. Voice acting is never that convincing in video games, but they come close here.

2. Superbly rendered environments.

3. Integration of gameplay into “action” cut scenes. They don’t do it too much, but the scheme used in the opening sequence, for example, where you climb a train falling off a cliff is pretty cool. Makes you want to play more.

4. Music and sound design.

There is almost nothing in the production values of this video game to complain about. Nothing will put you off. Nothing will make you throw up your hands in disbelief at the arrogance and stupidity of the development studio. Naughty Dog has done a great job.

Unfortunately, my main complaints about the game are all around gameplay and the overall design. Here, sadly, the developers constantly give you reasons to quit. It’s like they wanted to sprinkle a series of “game over” signs throughout the game’s world and make you prove that you could get past each one of them one by one. There are the levels where you have to see the correct 4 pixel wide feature in order to climb a wall and escape. There are the timed platforming sequences that require controls that are tuned to the level of Mario Galaxy, which, sad to say, is far beyond what the control scheme in Uncharted 2 can provide. And of course there are level bosses, mid-bosses and final bosses. Each one of these design elements is the developer saying “I don’t want you to see the rest of my video game unless you can perform this tedious and basically useless task.” That is, “do this or it’s game over.”

It is perplexing to me why games that are otherwise excellent insist on doing this. Even the best games, it seems to me, make it their business to make us work for the right to enjoy the fruits of the game developer’s sweat and blood. I have examples from Uncharted 2, but playing through this game reminded me of my experience with another excellent game with an infuriating game over sign in it. Recall that about six years ago Pete and I both played through parts of Prince of Persia: The Sands of TIme and both stopped at precisely the same spot. Here is my description of the sequence:

1. Run up a wall and hit a switch to make a pillar appear.
2. Run up the pillar and swing on to a pole.
3. Jump over to that platform over there
4. Wall run over to that other platform.
5. Jump down and crawl around to that ledge.
6. Run into the scary spacey area and drink the magic water.
7. Swing through 3 poles to get over to that other ledge.
8. Evade the knives of doom.
9. Wall run under the saws, hit switch on the floor then wall run back under the saws to get through a door before it shuts.
10. Pull out a lever which opens a door one level above me.
11. Evade the knives of doom.
12. Run up the wall to hit a switch which brings up a pillar so I can jump up to it and climb this shaft.
13. At the top of the shaft, wall run through the hall over another set of saws and slide under the door which is closing.

After all this, the Prince is then treated to a long fight with several zombies. This fight is much harder than the zombie fights that have come before it, and you will die several times before you figure out how to finish it.

Here again we have a game that presents you with a fantastic world, great platforming mechanics, and what I am told is wonderful writing. But in the middle of it all the developers feel the need to put this huge “game over” sign right in your path and make you jump over it before you can see any of the rest.

In Uncharted 2 this happens at least three or four times. The most egregious example comes about half way through the game where the game throws you into a long and drawn out set piece in which you navigate from the back of a train to the front, fighting goons as you go. This piece requires that you die many times to figure out the timing, die several more times to figure out the right way to engage in the combat and then die several more times while you figure out just the right sequence of button pushes you need to use to kill the boss at the end of the train. As in Prince of Persia, the checkpoints are also suddenly further apart. And like Prince of Persia the combat suddenly gets harder when you reach the boss guy.

After my fifth try at the boss, I went and looked up my old article on Prince of Persia because I recognized the feeling of rage and frustration that was glowing in the back of my brain. I let the game idle for fifteen minutes while looking up how to fight the guy in the GameFAQ (always a true sign of developer failure). I knew that if I turned the game off at this point I might as well throw it in the trash. Then I got lucky and knocked the guy out on my next try. I did nothing different. It just worked this time where before it had not.

There were several more sequences like this in the later parts of the game. Most involved needing to climb on things quickly. The problem being that the platforming controls feel more like Drunk Mario than Mario Galaxy. Nathan Drake does not jump when you tell him to, does not always run or climb in an intuitive direction, often climbs things you wanted him to jump on or jumps off of things you wanted him to climb. Finally, he does nothing of this sort very quickly or smoothly. This can make for slow going when precision is required.

As is usual with this sort of production, the game ends with a tedious and pointless Boss Fight. This one is at least easy. Or it would be if you could keep Nathan from continually leaping around in the wrong direction. No matter. The pattern is easy to figure out, and things are over soon enough.

Then, as if they wanted to emphasize their hatred of your entire being, Naughty Dog ends the game with yet another shitty platforming sequence that puts the weaknesses of their control scheme into stark relief. Yet again they decide to tell you that you are not allowed to finish their game, even after you have finished it. It’s a final insult in a a game that has dragged on far too long. I wonder how many people put the controller down after falling off that last platform for the fifteenth time and just threw the Blu-Ray in a fire.

In the end and against my better judgement I got past the last game over. But rather than looking back on the experience with a sense of pleasure or excitement, I just think that Naughty Dog took all of the credit that I might have given them and pissed it all away one bad decision at a time. I think game developers need to reassess their approach to pacing and difficulty in games whose major purpose is delivering narrative. Big narrative games are almost universally too long, too tedious, and get too difficult in their later stages. I even played Uncharted 2 on easy, to no avail.

Unsurprisingly, I think the template for how things should be done is found in Portal. Here is the only game in recent memory with perfect pacing, a smooth difficulty progression, no filler, no tedious sloppy bullshit thrown in for the sake of “variety” and most of all only a single Boss Fight which was not too stupid. Portal stands out because all you remember of the game is the good stuff. The game does not hit you over the head with the bad stuff over and over again until you hate it. Unlike most other games, it was allowed to remain a tightly paced five or six hours instead of being turned into a ten hour slogfest.

Uncharted 2 does not escape this fate. Instead of remembering it fondly for its awesome environments, excellent writing, and superb production values I think the average player will be remembering which game over sign he stopped at. It’s too bad that all that excellence will ultimately be overshadowed by what Naughty Dog did wrong.