Good Samaritan

After having worked for about a month as a software tester, I had come to the end of my first assignment. At around 10 PM, the project lead gathered everyone together for an announcement. Thanking us for our hard work, he let us know that we had finally made it to the finish line. After three weeks straight of 12-hour shifts, we had earned some time off, so he told us to go home, rest up, and wait for a callback for the next assignment. Since most of us were temps, and this was actually kind of a competitive position, I knew the reality was that many would not get called back, and for them this was essentially goodbye. I wasn’t even sure where I stood, since I had received only minimal feedback from my supervisors.

Before he let us go, the lead asked for a few able volunteers to help out with another project that was just about to wrap up. All that was really needed was some warm bodies to fill seats, so that the company could record that a certain number of eyes had inspected the product for a certain number of hours. But these bodies would have to be in those seats from 9 AM to 4 AM over the next two nights. He didn’t expect a lot of people to jump at this opportunity, after having just been told that they had finally earned a return to a regular sleep schedule. I recognized this as a chance, however, to stand out from the crowd by showing my commitment to the job, and so I raised my hand along with three other guys.

The lead thanked us, told the four of us that this would be remembered, and then dismissed everyone. Only one other team still working on that one project, the building cleared very quickly; people were ready to start living again.

Knowing that my longest nights were yet to come, I intended to get a good night’s rest. Having parked in the relatively empty back lot, I got into my car, my father’s Cadillac, and turned the key for the ignition. Nothing but a pained wheezing sound. I had never experienced this before, but I knew it was no good. The engine wasn’t starting. I tried it a few more times, but it was a no go. I knew just enough about cars to guess that the battery was dead.

What was I to do? I needed a jump-start, but the parking lot was emptying rapidly, and it was a bit late in the night to be calling anybody. I supposed my only option was to go back into the building and find someone.

Still in the driver’s seat, I turned to open the door and get out, and I was startled to see that there was somebody standing right outside my window. It was one of the guys who had been working on the same project as me, although I didn’t know him too well. Like some kind of ninja, he had snuck up on me, or perhaps I had just been so rapt in my own predicament that I had failed to notice anything going around outside my vehicle.

Opening the door—one of the things I sure missed about older cars was the crank handles that let you roll down the windows even when the car was not running—I asked him what was up, even though the question probably should have been his, and the answer should have been obvious. Apparently, even though he had parked a ways away, he had heard my car struggling, and so he had walked over to see if I needed help. I explained the situation to him, and, agreeing with my assessment that it was probably the battery, he offered to give me a jump-start, for which I was exceedingly grateful.

Besides being personally grateful, I was impressed, humbled, even inspired. Now, I was not a complete cynic when it came to human nature; I fully expected that, had I gone back into the building to ask for help, someone would have obliged. But what shocked me was that this guy had taken the initiative to lend a hand without having been asked. Had our roles been reversed, I honestly think I would have just ignored his wheezing car and abandoned him to go home. And I would have thought that a normal reaction. But his act of good Samaritanism changed my mind, and it made me want to better myself toward that example.

Three projects later, I was still working as a tester, and I had by this time established myself as a strong contributor, such that I never had to worry about getting callbacks. For my next assignment, I found myself seated next to that same guy, Murphy, who had saved me months earlier with that jump-start. It was the first time, since that first project, that we had been assigned together.

Seeing each other for the first time since that night, we shook hands, and immediately he asked me how my car was. Yes, that was our shared moment that, at the time, I should have hoped would bond us for the rest of our lives. Indeed, I will be forever grateful to him for what he did for me, but unfortunately that had little bearing on how we got along as coworkers.

Over the next three months, I sat next to Murphy and got to know him as a tester. The truth was that he seemed to do hardly any work. By the end of that project, he had submitted only 5 bug reports. The average, consistently employed tester, over the course of three months, would have turned in about 50. I had over 200 to my name. And, even as pressure increased as we got closer to deadline, his lazy attitude never changed. Instead of stepping up and getting serious, he only continued to distract people with his bizarre hickish stories.

He was eager to remind us regularly, for example, that his father owned a gun shop. And, on one occasion, when someone attempted to break in and rob them in the middle of the night, Murphy, who was sleeping at the shop, caught and shot the burglar in the leg. Sure, I had heard ghastlier stories from the military veterans at work, but those were actual war stories. Here was a nineteen-year-old civilian, who was apparently shooting people and later describing it, totally unmoved and matter-of-fact, as though it were every bit as routine to him as purchasing deodorant. Of course, many others believed that Murphy made the whole thing up just to sound hard. Either way, it made me hate him a little.

He also told us about his girlfriend, a farmer’s daughter, who was strong enough to literally lift him off his feet—he was 5’9” and over 200 pounds—yet was also petite, pretty, and “far too good for anyone in this building,” hence why he adamantly refused to show anyone a photo of her, lest we picture her with impure thoughts. That didn’t stop him sharing with us how her mom would stop by their apartment once a month to supply them with condoms, which made us picture things that none of us wanted to imagine.

Most annoying for me personally, as the guy who had to sit next to him, was his peculiar disorder that led him to make “bleep” and “bloop” noises with his mouth throughout the day whenever he wasn’t speaking. When I asked him about it, he told me he couldn’t help it. If it was a legitimate psychological issue, I had to be understanding, but, even so, it did get on my nerves.

It all left me in a very conflicted state. On the one hand, I could never forget what he had done for me, and I was forever in his debt as a result. On the other hand, I found it hard to tolerate him, and a part of me hoped never to see him again once this project was over.

On my next project—a much smaller one, with only five testers assigned to it—somehow the others got into a discussion about what an annoying fellow and sorry tester Murphy had been. I never joined in on such gossip, but neither could I work up the courage to speak up for the defamed, and so I just kept silent. When our project lead walked in and joined in on the slander, however, things got more serious, because now they were actually deciding upon this guy’s future with the company.

I should have thought that Murphy’s work (or lack thereof) should have spoken for itself, but the lead proceeded to take an impromptu poll of his peers on whether he should get a callback. The other four guys had only negative things to say. I had planned to just keep my mouth shut, but then the lead asked me directly what I thought. I still couldn’t understand why my opinion mattered, especially as there already seemed to be consensus among everyone else in the room, but suddenly I felt the weight of having Murphy's fate hanging upon how I responded. Was it my turn to go to bat for this guy and save him as he had once saved me? I still owed him, but I also couldn’t deny that he was objectively a poor fit for this job. Finally, I tried my best to be diplomatic, speaking about him as favorably as I could without lying.

“He’s dependable,” I said.

Then, when asked in what way, I related the story of the time he jump-started my car.

“But what does that have to do with his work here?” my lead asked me.

I had to admit that there was little connection between the two, and so that was that; I never saw Murphy again.

The Little Things

Back when I worked as a game tester, I remember there was one guy, nicknamed "Speaker Box," who would consistently refer to the stock PS2 DualShock 2, a wired controller, as a "remote."

"Hey Henry, this remote's not working."

For some reason, that always really ticked me off.

The Journey

It was Wednesday, September 21, 2005.  Having completed my first game test assignment on The Con for PSP the previous Saturday, I had just been reassigned to help out on NBA 06 for the PS2, which was in the midst of its final development push.  Thus, with nary a break between gigs, I was back on crunch time.  My shift began at 9 AM, and although I was technically free to leave at 5:30 PM, it was highly encouraged for a temp like me, hoping to get called back for future jobs, to work until 10 PM.   I was dog-tired, however, and did not feel quite like going the distance that day.  I decided on my own to strike a compromise by quietly stepping out at the 8:30 PM break, and then not heading back in.  Since my responsibilities were minuscule at this stage, it was unlikely that anybody would notice my departure.

I made it home before 9 PM, in time for a late dinner.  Since I was eating alone, I turned to the TV for company.  Prime time programming is something that you largely give up when you work twelve-hour (minimum) days for weeks on end, so I didn't really know what was on.  I rolled the dice and turned to ABC.  During my final summer of unemployment, Wednesday nights on ABC had been home to Dancing with the Stars, which had captured my attention for a good few weeks.  On that night, however, what I got was a scripted scene of a lone unidentified man waking to his alarm clock, to meet the day by working out and preparing a liquid breakfast to the diegetic sound of Mama Cass Elliot's vinyl recording of "Make Your Own Kind of Music."

How could I not be intrigued?  This was obviously a very sick man--like, Silence of the Lambs crazy.  The unnerving combination of upbeat oldies music with the mundane routine of a man whose face was strategically obscured in every shot told me as much, even before he started shooting up chemicals in what appeared increasingly like a 1960s fallout shelter.  Things quickly got even crazier once an outside explosion set him scurrying to the gun rack.  As he then peered through a telescope in anticipation of intruders, the camera traced the bounding path of his sight along a system of mirrors winding down an underground tunnel to arrive finally face-to-face with two recognizable men staring curiously down a hatch.  The two men were the stars of Lost, and I was watching the second season opener, "Man of Science, Man of Faith."  It would be the first full episode of Lost I ever saw.

Having heard a lot of hype already during the first season, I had once randomly tuned into the middle of an episode, and after about two minutes of some bald man trying to convince me that the island was destiny, I walked away without regret.  Okay, so maybe I had made up my mind not to like it, having missed the phenomenon's emergence and consequently having felt some resentment at being left out.

It was some remarkably chance encounter that saw me caught by this season two premiere, however, and I could not avert my gaze--not for the duration of the episode, nor for the rest of the series.  I thought this show was supposed to be a TV version of Cast Away.  What then was the story behind this man in the hatch?  It was a mind-bender all right, and the crazy man in the hatch was just the beginning.  As it turned out, the bald guy was not being creepy just for the sake of it; he alone knew firsthand that the island was a place of miracles. Season two also included a hostile band of ninja-like "others," a terrifying smoke monster, and a button that had to be pushed every 108 minutes in order to "save the world."  And it was a nail-biter--a tightly scripted thriller where the action had consequences.  Ironically, the one thing I thought the show lacked at the time was appealing characters.  I say it was ironic because, for a show with such a high body count, it was all along, at its perhaps surprisingly sappy core, the story of its characters.

Every week was about flashing backwards, forwards, or even sideways in a character's journey to the defining moments that made them who they were, ultimately presenting a life story in 121 episodes.  At its very best, the show could even, within just a single episode, leave you feeling like you had spent years with a character.  Indeed, it took one very specific such episode to convince me that the show was something special.  For me, the pivotal episode was the season two finale, "Live Together, Die Alone."  The two-hour event, instead of presenting the usual flashbacks to a main character's past, focused primarily on a theretofore undeveloped recurring guest star of seemingly minimal importance.  For a serialized show so notoriously inaccessible to newbies, its greatest feat was probably how, with a single two-hour episode, it managed to convey the entire essence of this character, about whom I had known practically nothing going into the episode, but who, by the end of it, would become my favorite character, not just on Lost, but on any of the shows I was following at the time.

And the show would do it over and over again.  Four seasons in, they had the gall to introduce an entire team of new characters into the established family, and these newcomers quickly became among my favorites.  In season five, they managed, with just three scenes, to fully develop a romance that could not have felt any more natural and believable.  The final season's best episodes were "Dr. Linus" and "Ab Aeterno."  The former more than redeemed a character I never expected I could like.  The latter finally gave fans the story of the island's most mysterious character, after most viewers had already guessed he was a red herring.  By the episode's end, the character's insignificance in the grand scheme was only affirmed, and yet it was a success because it got me to care about the character's life and not his role.

Lord knows things didn't always go down this well.  The writers themselves acknowledged that third season additions Nikki and Paulo were "universally despised."  The aforementioned season four romance was all the more remarkable because the first three seasons had wasted so much time going nowhere with a love triangle that felt forced.  The poorly-timed Jacob origin episode this season was one of the series's least effective.  Bringing back some long-forgotten cast members for, essentially, fanservice moments at the end only reminded me how little I missed them and their lousy subplots that never rang true.  And the show's professed center, Jack Shephard, was never an easy guy to like, and it took nearly all of six seasons of them forcing him on viewers before I finally warmed to him.

Yes, this was a show that had a master plan, yet things did not always go according to that plan.  They cast a child actor without considering that he would grow up faster than time was supposed to be passing on the show.  They cast a fat actor who never got thinner, even though his character should have been barely subsisting on an island diet.  They had to deal with actors walking out on the show, leaving them high and dry on unresolved subplots.  Sometimes they had actors exceed their expectations and earn larger roles than anticipated.  They admirably committed themselves in advance to a strict end date, only to end up constricted by a final season that left no breathing room, resulting in a finale that needed to be a double-and-a-half length, and at least half of that had to be spent just on cleanup.  And quite often the writers clearly could not keep track of the messes they made.  Yet it is in fitting with the show's theme of destiny versus free will that even its own creators could not entirely dictate where the story would go, en route to an ending that gave the hardcore fanboys almost none of the meaningless answers they had been demanding for years (It was all midi-chlorians! Satisfied?), but was nevertheless a love letter to the viewers who had followed these characters over six years.  It's a credit to the show that, at the end, that emptiness that I felt was not from any questions that I felt needed answering, but because I simply wanted more time with these characters to see how they lived.

What can I say?  It's hard to let go.

Clash of the Titans

A few years ago, while we were idling away the second shift, a co-worker asked the room for ideas of "the perfect day." The question was not asked in earnest and neither were the answers to be taken seriously. One person imagined, for example, having three meals of bacon, then bacon for dessert. Another drew from his memories of going to Round Table Pizza after school and playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game with his best friend. Er, come to think of it, maybe that one was not a joke. As for me, I had plenty of time to think while listening to others answer before me. Even so, this was what I came up with:

"I wake up early, but it's not a workday. I don't even have a job. Birds are chirping outside. I walk to the kitchen, pour out a glass of orange juice, sit down and take in the acres of meadow outside my glass house. THEN THE DAY GOES ON FOREVER AND SO DO I."

The response was tepid, maybe because they weren't taking that last bit literally, or maybe because they were but thought I was serious. Maybe it was my delivery. Or maybe it just wasn't very funny.

I didn't think much further about the question after that, until recently, when the release of the Liam Neeson Clash of the Titans called to mind a day that, in retrospect, may have been my perfect day.

I was in elementary school in the fourth grade. It was a Tuesday, meaning it was a minimum day, meaning school let out before lunch. The day began with some fun math activities, followed by social studies and spelling. During the short recess in between, I took a lap around the grass field, afterward feeling quite satisfied with myself. To end the school day, our teacher turned the lights down and read to us from Roald Dahl's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Then my mother drove me home and prepared my lunch, a bowl of rice porridge and some canned dace. While I ate, she worked outside on the yard. My older brother was still in his junior high class and my father was at work. For all intents and purposes, I had the next two hours all to myself.

I turned on the TV. TBS was playing the Harryhausen Clash of the Titans. It was not my first time seeing it; the battle with the stop-motion Medusa had shaped my childhood understanding of Greek mythology.

As it so happened, the TBS airing was about at that scene as I tuned in. It wasn't the most exciting development in the world, but I was content to let myself become absorbed in it once more. Finishing my meal quickly, I made my way to the couch to continue watching it through to the end with rapt attention. Following the movie, TBS ran an episode of The Flintstones. It was the one where Gazoo created mindless doubles of Fred and Barney, so that the boys could go bowling while their doubles took the unsuspecting wives out. Naturally I stayed tuned to the channel.

And that was my perfect day.

Kind of.

For one thing, while all of those memories are real and taken from the same period of my life, I highly doubt they could have all landed on the same day. Surely this perfect day is actually a composite of perfect moments from different days. Nevertheless, these memories are generally characteristic of my daily life then.

Second, those paying close attention probably noticed that my perfect day seemingly ends at about 2:30 PM. Honestly, I haven't a clue how I spent the rest of that day (any of them). Of course, not one of my co-workers actually detailed the whole of their perfect day. I think this just goes to show that the 24-hour day is somewhat an arbitrary unit for this discussion. A lifetime made up of such perfect days as mine would be pretty empty. But if I could have only one day, that is how I would spend it.

Finally, and most importantly, what's weird is that rice porridge and canned dace are not at all my favorite foods. I haven't seen Clash of the Titans again since then, and I'm not sure I could make it through a full viewing today. I haven't even seen any episodes of The Flintstones in over a decade, and I have no great desire to watch any now. And while I suppose I did enjoy school back then, I might have hoped that my ultimate day would have consisted of something more exciting and adventurous.

Looking back at the workplace discussion, I think the key is that everyone, even the guy who joked about eating bacon, described wholly stress-free episodes isolated from any context. In the same vein, my own case takes me back to my childhood free of distractions or complications, to a time when I could spend my day accomplishing nothing yet feeling at liberty to do anything. The attraction is obvious once I consider how, in my present life, I am routinely wondering where my day went for entirely different reasons. Whatever I am doing at any given time, I cannot help thinking about the things I am not doing with that time ticking by. When I watch TV, I think I should be playing video games. When I play video games, I think I should be exercising. When I exercise, I think I should be writing. I wish the day could be longer for me to do more stuff, but maybe I just need to have less stuff to do.

No, I haven't seen the new Clash of the Titans with Liam Neeson. It does look like the sort of fare that would be at home at a daytime TBS slot, if such things still exist.

A Larger Perspective

Of course I wouldn't leave it simply at that. Seriously, the Call of Duty implosion has been one of the more exciting stories in the industry, even for someone like me, who has never played a Call of Duty game. If you haven't been keeping abreast of the latest developments, however, I've gone ahead and drafted this rough chronology of events pertaining to the case and the history of the parties involved:

1979
Frustrated by Atari's policy not to credit the actual developers of the games it publishes, four programmers leave the company to form Activision, the world's first third-party publisher for game consoles.

Activision's determination to release games for the Atari 2600 without the console manufacturer's blessing leads to litigation between the two companies that will not be settled until 1982, when Atari agrees to allow third party publishing in exchange for royalties. The decision leads to a massive boom in the number of software publishers and consequently the number of titles on the market, ultimately leading to the video game crash of 1983 due to oversaturation.

1990
After years of continuous decline for Activision, since renamed Mediagenic, the company is finally acquired by BHK Corporation, an investor group led by Bobby Kotick. Under new CEO Kotick, the company is completely restructured, the Activision name also restored to mark a vigorous reentry into the games market.

1999
Activision acquires Neversoft Entertainment, developer of Apocalypse (AKA "that Bruce Willis Robotron game"). The studio's next project is Tony Hawk's Pro Skater for the PS1. The game is an immediate sensation and is quickly followed by a sequel the next year.

2000
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 ranks as the best-selling PlayStation game of 2000 in the U.S. Released to universal praise, the PS1 version remains also one of the highest-rated games of all-time.

Through 2007, Activision continues to release one Tony Hawk title per year (plus spin-offs), to progressively lower scores and sales.

2001
Activision acquires Treyarch, developer of, among other things, a couple of entries in EA's struggling Triple Play baseball series.

2002
EA releases Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for PC. Developed by 2015, this third entry in gaming's premier World War II first-person shooter series receives near-universal acclaim.

Twenty-two employees of 2015, including Medal of Honor: Allied Assault project leads Vince Zampella and Jason West, leave to found Infinity Ward.

2003
Activision acquires Infinity Ward. The studio's first title is Call of Duty for PC. The well-reviewed World War II first-person shooter receives multiple "game of the year" awards.

Meanwhile, through 2007, EA releases nine more titles in the increasingly irrelevant--only one of them is for HD consoles--Medal of Honor series.

2005
RedOctane releases Guitar Hero, developed by Harmonix. The surprise hit demonstrates the market potential for both rhythm games and peripheral-based games.

Activision releases Call of Duty 2, developed by Infinity Ward. Another WWII FPS, it is the best-reviewed and best-selling Xbox 360 launch title. Speaking for Infinity Ward, Vince Zampella later reveals that "With Call of Duty 2, we were dead set against it being World War II, but Activision really wanted it, the compromise sort of being that we'd get some dev kits for consoles in exchange for doing a World War II game."

(Among its fans is a co-worker of mine at my game testing job. In his first week on the job, this eighteen-year-old son of a soldier declares the FPS the only worthwhile game genre and Call of Duty the best FPS, bar none. He announces that, on the day Call of Duty 3 comes out, he will skip work to pick it up and spend all day playing.)

While PC and 360 players enjoy Call of Duty 2 proper, PS2/Xbox/GameCube owners get Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, a slightly less lustrous offering from developer Treyarch.

2006
Activision releases Call of Duty 3 for PS3/360. The console-exclusive WWII FPS is developed by Treyarch instead of Infinity Ward. The game receives markedly lower scores than Infinity Ward's titles, fueling the perception of Treyarch as a B-team, brought in so that Activision can keep pumping out Call of Duty on an annual basis while still allowing Infinity Ward a two-year development cycle for each of its projects.

(My young co-worker does not end up skipping work to play Call of Duty 3, but he does pick it up. I ask him how it is. His former exuberance for life since tempered by the game test environment, he offers only a defeated laugh at himself.)

Activision acquires RedOctane and, along with it, Guitar Hero. Later in the year, MTV purchases Harmonix.

2007
Activision releases Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for Wii, 360, PS3, and PS2. The title is developed by Neversoft. Meanwhile, MTV releases Rock Band, developed by Harmonix and distributed by EA. Rock Band receives higher scores as a more significant step forward for the genre, but Guitar Hero III is nevertheless the more successful game at market. It is Activision's biggest release yet, eventually becoming the first billion-dollar game and the second best-selling game since NPD began tracking unit sales.

2007 also sees the release of Activision and Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. To much applause, CoD4 finally moves the series away from WWII. Despite coming out weeks later to much less hype than Halo 3, it finishes the year with more units sold (across all platforms) and even overtakes the Xbox's signature game as the most popular game on Xbox Live. It also earns several "game of the year" awards, even up against the likes of Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, BioShock, Mass Effect, and Portal.

Looking back, Vince Zampella says, "Activision also did not want Modern Warfare. They thought working on a modern game was risky and 'Oh my God you can't do that, it's crazy!' They were doing market research to show us we were wrong the whole time."

Adds Jason West: "We had to fight for everything."

In its biggest year ever, Activision merges with Vivendi Games, which additionally owns Blizzard and Sierra. The new Activision Blizzard surpasses EA to become the world's largest video game publisher.

EA releases Skate for the PS3/360. This more realistic skateboarding game receives positive reviews and outsells Tony Hawk's Proving Ground. EA will release two more Skate games, plus one spin-off, over the next three years.

2008
For the first year since it debuted, there is no new installment in the Tony Hawk main series.

Tim Schafer's Brütal Legend, originally to be published by the now defunct Sierra, is among the in-development titles dropped by Activision after the merger with Vivendi. When EA later announces its intention to publish the game, Activision attempts to block its release. The parties eventually reach a settlement, and EA releases Brütal Legend the following year.

EA releases Dead Space to wide critical acclaim. Along with Mirror's Edge and the EA Partners program, the release paints a new and improved image of the monster publisher as committed to pushing new IP and non-sports titles.

Infinity Ward's heads renew their contracts with Activision. The new agreement reportedly includes the possibility of Infinity Ward developing a new IP that it will control.

In the meantime, Call of Duty returns to WWII and Treyarch with Call of Duty: World at War, built off Infinity Ward's CoD4 engine.

November 6, 2008
Noah Heller, senior producer at Activision, promoting World at War as something that builds on CoD4: "In the previous Call of Dutys it might take three or four shots from a bolt action rifle. We made sure that a single shot center mass would kill that opponent because that's the expectation of the player."

November 7, 2008
Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward's community manager, taking issue with "Senior Super Douche" Noah Heller's comments, posts the following on his personal blog:

"Bolt Action rifles are one hit kills in every Call of Duty we (Infinity Ward) made!!

"I won't compare it to World at War's Bolt Actions, I can't speak to that because I don't work there. Just like you don't work here, so please stop talking about our games."

November 11, 2008
Activision releases Call of Duty: World at War days after and with considerably less hype than Gears of War 2. Despite some perception of World at War as the B-team Call of Duty game, the 360 version by itself finishes the year with more units sold than Microsoft's biggest exclusive.

(It is actually with this development that Call of Duty first grabs my attention as a heavy hitter in the stratum of Halo and Grand Theft Auto, if not beyond. Expectations are obviously high for the next "real" Call of Duty.)

March 26, 2009
Activision debuts the teaser trailer for Infinity Ward's "Modern Warfare 2." The Call of Duty name is not attached. With Activision apparently committed to this schedule of alternating year-to-year between Infinity Ward and Treyarch-developed titles, some speculate that Infinity Ward wanted to avoid any possibility of their work being confused with Treyarch's.

July 9, 2009
The latest artwork reveals that the Call of Duty name has been restored for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This is most likely Activision reacting to surveys that showed lowered consumer awareness after the Call of Duty brand was dropped.

Robert Bowling insists, "We still call the game 'Modern Warfare 2.'"

The final retail packaging features the Call of Duty name on the standard edition, but not the enthusiast-oriented premium editions.

August 5, 2009
Bobby Kotick from the Activision Blizzard earnings call, on the high pricing on peripheral games: ". . . if it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further."

September 14, 2009
Bobby Kotick at the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference: "I think the goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks that we brought in to Activision ten years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. I think we definitely have been able to instill in the culture the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."

Kotick also envisions a future "untethered Guitar Hero" that will bypass consoles and hook up directly to televisions.

September 15, 2009
At a Modern Warfare 2 press event, Infinity Ward seems to poke fun at Kotick's "skepticism, pessimism, fear" speech.

October 30, 2009
Infinity Ward slips in a homophobic slur in a YouTube video using Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels to promote Modern Warfare 2. The poorly received video is pulled the next day.

November 10, 2009
Activision releases Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Selling nearly five million copies on the first day, it is the biggest launch in entertainment history.

The Activision logo, while on the box, is curiously missing from the game's boot and intro sequences. Furthermore, the Activision section in the end credits is sped through in thirty seconds following five minutes of Infinity Ward credits.

Activision also releases Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Reflex, a Treyarch-developed Wii port of the first Modern Warfare.

EA cuts 1,500 jobs and announces that it will refocus on iterating upon established franchises.

November 17, 2009
Activision releases Tony Hawk: Ride, an attempt to reinvigorate the franchise by tying it to a motion-sensing skateboard peripheral in a $119.99 package. The game and its use of the peripheral are widely panned.

Activision poaches Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey, executive producer and senior development director of Dead Space, to form wholly owned developer Sledgehammer Games.

December 2, 2009
EA announces the return of Medal of Honor in the form of a reboot set in modern times. The first trailer elicits more than a few comparisons to Modern Warfare.

December 22, 2009
Activision releases Guitar Hero: Van Halen for PS2, PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360. This follows Guitar Hero: Metallica, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, Guitar Hero 5, Band Hero, and DJ Hero for the aforementioned platforms, all in 2009. Meanwhile, Harmonix and MTV remain staunch in their support of Rock Band 2 as a platform, powered by new downloadable tracks released on a weekly basis. Having said that, they then release two new Rock Band titles in 2009 (The Beatles: Rock Band and Lego Rock Band), plus three retail track packs.

Revenues for both Guitar Hero and Rock Band are down compared to last year, and the $373 million drop accounts for approximately half of the $720 million dollar decline the industry faces as a whole.

February 11, 2010
Activision shuts down Neversoft and RedOctane, attributing the closures to market conditions that see the publisher more than halving the number of music games it will be shipping compared to last year.

February 18, 2010
Bobby Kotick at the DICE Summit: "I don't know how this happened, but all my life I was the rebel flying the Millennium Falcon or the X-Wing fighter and suddenly I wake up and I'm on board the Death Star."

Kotick admits to having made some mistakes in the past. Looking back at Activision's acquisition of RedOctane for the Guitar Hero brand, he recalls that he knew of Harmonix as "somewhat a failed developer of music games." He regrets that he did not meet to do business with the eventual developer of Guitar Hero's direct competitor.

Summarizing, he says, "If you have a company and you want to protect your creative freedom and the integrity of the creative process, if you want to retain your identity and culture, if you want the support of the mothership and the resources of the mothership, we're a really great mothership. But if you want to sell out and move on, there are definitely other companies to talk to."

March 1, 2010
Less than two weeks after Kotick shows that he might actually be human, Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella are terminated on charges of insubordination.

March 2, 2010
Activision announces its plans to expand the Call of Duty brand, scheduling three games by three studios over the next two years, including an "action-adventure" take by Sledgehammer Games.

March 3, 2010
West and Zampella file suit against Activision. Contending that the publisher terminated them only to avoid having to pay royalties due from Modern Warfare 2, the pair furthermore allege that their original arrangement with Activision granted them control of the Modern Warfare brand.

April 9, 2010
Activision files counter-suit, calling West and Zampella "self-serving schemers," who had secret meetings with Activision's unnamed Northern California competitor.

Activision provides evidence in the form of this uncovered correspondence:

Dunno how to scan secretely 13 [sic]. . . . [IW Employee's] computer down. . . . [IW Employee] did it for me last time. .. .Really. No paranoia about it being in [IW employee] user folder? Her comp down anyway now. . . She had a secret area it scanned into. . . . Probably better to just photocopy and fedex. .. .Can scan or photo - your call. . . . Boom boom pow. Away.

(Censoring hides almost anything incriminating, but that "Boom boom pow. Away." bit seems evidence of douchebaggery.)

Asked for comment, the Northern California-based EA says, "We don't have the time to comment on the many lawsuits Activision files against its employees and creative partners."

Other members of the Modern Warfare 2 team, including all of the design leads, depart Infinity Ward and Activision over the next several days, extending into the present.

April 12, 2010
West and Zampella form Respawn Entertainment. The independent studio is funded by EA, who has partnered with Respawn for exclusive distribution rights.

April 22, 2010
Seven other Modern Warfare 2 team members confirm that they have joined Respawn.

Activision says that the hefty bonuses now forfeited by West and Zampella will be redistributed among employees who remain with Infinity Ward.

And on it goes . . .

UPDATE - April 29, 2010
Amid all the bad news and lawsuits, Activision announces its exclusive ten-year publishing deal with Bungie Studios.

(So much for Inifinity Ward . . .)

_______________

Conclusions:

1. Activision knows how to run a hot property into the ground.

2. So does EA, but it may be changing its ways.

3. Certain people at Infinity Ward may have had a problem with authority.

4. Bobby Kotick is a douchebag.


My expanded take:

It's easy to paint Activision as the monster in this story (because it is and has been), but there's another way to look at things.

Less than two months after they were fired, West and Zampella now find themselves backed by another powerhouse publisher while still remaining supposedly independent as a studio staffed by employees that they have effectively stolen away from Infinity Ward. Why, isn't this the very scheme that Activision accused them of plotting? Having also won the public's sympathy over "the man's" mistreatment of them, West and Zampella really seem to have gotten everything they wanted. And while litigation is far from over, Activision was basically unable to do anything to stop them.

I suppose Activision could have made them a better offer--not just more money than EA is giving them, but also the freedom afforded an independent studio (which is maybe what the fans want also)--but wouldn't that have amounted to bending over for your own subordinates at what was supposed to be a negotiation? Some say that, after delivering Modern Warfare 2, West and Zampella should have been treated like kings by Activision. I'm guessing maybe they were acting like kings anyway, able to get away with anything, which essentially they have. Even if they were your greatest asset, how intolerable a situation would it be to constantly have your own employees disrespecting you? Would you really want to give them even more power and autonomy? Up against that kind of attitude, maybe all Activision could do was remain firm to the unavoidable end.

No, I would never be on Activision's side. But why on earth would anyone feel sorry for Jason West and Vince Zampella? I might feel bad for the remnants of Infinity Ward. Hell, I even wonder where this leaves the Medal of Honor team, given that they are essentially developing a Modern Warfare clone for EA, who is now wining and dining the creators of the real Modern Warfare. Or what about DICE, who in the midst of all this put out EA's Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which some players said was better than Modern Warfare 2? If Respawn is going to carry on 2015/Infinity Ward's military first-person shooter legacy, does that mean EA is going to be publishing three such similar games simultaneously? I think its own history should have taught EA better.

Of course I hope that everybody does well and puts out quality games. This story will probably be just lawsuits and LinkedIn profile updates from here on, so I guess all that's left to look forward to are the actual games that will be coming out of these companies. On that note, I suppose maybe I should finally play some of those Call of Duty games and see for myself what all this was over.

Citizen Game

Michael Thomsen has sparked a lot of community controversy this week with his IGN article and ABC News segment attempting to answer the oft-repeated question, "When will gaming have its Citizen Kane?" Thomsen asserts that it has already arrived in the form of 2002's Metroid Prime.

To give a little background, Thomsen does not even work as a reviewer for IGN, perhaps due to his aberrant views--he has previously praised Haze and Red Steel, two first-person shooters that were almost universally panned. I haven't personally played Metroid Prime, so I can't fairly agree with nor refute Thomsen's opinion, but I do disagree with his approach to the loaded question.

The games that I might consider art--ICO, Ikaruga, Resident Evil--even as they may draw on cinematic techniques, really strike me as closer to painting or music than to film in the ways that they engage players' emotions. Rather than attempt to tell profound and thought-provoking stories, these games use directed interactivity to construct moments that affect us as powerful images or phrases. Of course, I enjoy a good story as well, but I don't know if there are any in gaming that I would consider close to the best in film and literature. Rather, the closer games get to art, the more impossible it becomes to draw direct comparisons to those other narrative art forms. So the question, "When will gaming have its Citizen Kane?" seems to me poorly conceived in a way. I would agree with the implication of the question, however, that gaming is still an immature form that has yet to produce a work of high art comparable to Citizen Kane. So the real question is how long we will have to wait before gaming matures the way film did, or if it even can grow up and break out of its current narrow spectrum.

To me, what holds back gaming as an art form is, not so much the limits of the interactive medium, but rather the practical constraints of the industry. It is simply not feasible for a single artist to produce a major video game work without the backing of a large publisher, and that severely limits the variety of input. Not only are games very expensive to make, but it is exceptionally rare for one person to have the artistic vision as well as the arcane technical expertise--computer programming and art--to even get off the ground with an idea. Working under a publisher, art becomes subservient to business bottom lines, and escapism, most often taking violent forms, is what seems to sell. I think that is truly what is holding back gaming compared to all recognized art forms. While the movie industry may also be largely profit-driven, there are still independent films that can reach a significant audience.

Take Paranormal Activity, for example. An independent "mockumentary" horror film in the model of The Blair Witch Project, it now stands a chance also of duplicating that movie's unprecedented success. Directed by Oren Peli with a hand-held camera and an $11,000 budget, it has received favorable reviews across the board, even earning the praise of Steven Spielberg, while a quasi-guerrilla marketing campaign has generated a lot of buzz. In limited release, it has already grossed several times its production costs, and now Peli has secured a much larger budget for his next film. I have not seen Paranormal Activity, but the story behind it is what blows my mind. It blows my mind because I used to work next door to this guy.

At Sony Computer Entertainment America, Oren was the senior online programmer on MLB 06: The Show, while I was working in quality assurance as a tester principally assigned to the online component. Online was typically the most unstable part of any game, so Oren's name was quite familiar to those of us who had submitted many reports to the defect database; as senior online programmer, he was often listed as the guy assigned to the bugs I found. The relationship between programmers and testers was a delicate one--they often mistook our work as criticism of theirs--so I only once met him in person, when my thumbs were needed to demonstrate a difficult-to-reproduce crash bug that I had written up.

I had heard stories about this guy from the more veteran testers, but he was seemingly better known for his Israeli accent and tacky sweaters than for any of the work he did. During my brief meeting with him, he was relatively professional, but I also noticed that he seemed rather detached and dispassionate about what was to him just a job. That was not unusual among the programmers that I met, and I guessed that it was the crazy hours spent working on a yearly sports title that left these men hollow at the office. Now I know better that his heart was focused elsewhere on something real.

Oren was not really a young man then, and, although I never felt his inferior, his income must have been already several times my own. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel inadequate considering where we have each gone since that encounter. But I digress.

The point is that, while money helps, vision and ambition can more than make up for limits of funding and equipment, and a small, independent team can put together a successful film. I just do not think the same is possible with video games, and I think Oren's case exemplifies that too. Because they are so technical, not just anybody with an idea can realize it as a game. And because they are so costly to produce, it is difficult for profit-driven publishers to justify taking chances. Yet that is really the only way for any art form to grow. Unfortunately, I really don't know how gaming can overcome this impasse toward art. Then again, I still have yet to play Metroid Prime, so perhaps I should get on that.

Mistakes Were Made

Previously:

"The Life Vol.2" in NBA 07, a late PS2 release, was much shorter, and the title defense story is never as exciting as the rise up. But the sequel did add an interesting twist by having players alternating between the parallel seasons of The Kid and his nemesis from the first game, "Big W." The rivalry comes to a head in a scenario that pits the two protagonists against one another in a mid-season game. The player plays the first half as The Kid, then switches to Big W to finish things off. The actual execution is kind of disastrous, since players basically end up kicking their own asses, but I know of no other game in any genre that allows players to experience consecutive phases of a single contest from opposing angles.

I have a confession to make: I was inadvertently kind of directly responsible for the disaster that was that episode of "The Life Vol. 2."

To begin with, let me describe how the scenario originally played out, before I meddled with it.

(Note: Although I have a copy of NBA 07, I don't have any save data allowing me to access these stages. After playing it through hundreds of times as a tester, I have no intention of playing it again on my own time. Therefore I am describing the following from memory alone. The details may not be exactly accurate, but the basic idea should hopefully come across fine.)

This showdown between The Kid and Big W actually spanned four consecutive stages. Each episode corresponded to one quarter of the same single NBA game, but the player could save and stop after each, just as with any other self-contained stages.

The first two quarters had you playing as The Kid's team. The first, starting from tip-off, was fairly straightforward. A player skilled enough to have made it that far into the story mode should have been able to meet all of the mission's required statistical goals with time to spare, at which point they would probably just run up the score, draining three-pointers to pass the time against the hopeless AI. The second stage was more of the same.

For the last two stages, the player would switch over to the opposite team to finish the game. The third was a one-play scenario that began players at the final seconds of the third quarter. The fourth was nearly a full quarter (Note: "The Life" ran on five-minute quarters) that required the player, as Big W's team, to win the game by at least six points, in addition to fulfilling other goals.

The issue that I originally observed was that there was no statistical continuity across stages, even though they were all the same game. In other words, even if, at the end of the first quarter, I was leading 50-2, the second stage would begin with a preset score that was closer to 21-23 (again, I don't remember the exact numbers). The minor issue did not detract from the playability, but it clearly made no sense and was therefore a bug.

I submitted a report on it, which was all I could do. Indeed, one of the more frustratingly unfounded accusations that reviewers often make is that a buggy game must not have been thoroughly tested. The reality is that testers can only find and document the bugs. It's up to the programmers how to fix them, or to the producers whether to even bother. In the case of this minor NBA 07 issue, they did address it, but the fix ended up more problematic by far than the original bug.

In the finished version of the game, the score did carry over from the first stage to the second, the second to the third, and the third to the fourth. But remember how I mentioned that the first two scenarios left the player ample time to establish a huge lead with The Kid? Well, now that huge lead carried over to the third stage, and in the fourth it became the unknowingly self-inflicted deficit that the player would have to overcome in order to win as Big W.

Theoretically, this could be a truly heinous, game-stopping defect. If the player had played their absolute best during the first two stages, then the fourth quarter would have been more than just a surprising challenge; the game would have become impossible, because stage four would have required them to be six points better than their best, in about half the time.

In practice, it was a major enough issue that the episode was specifically described in Aaron Thomas's even-handed review for GameSpot:

By far the biggest problem, and the only one likely to keep you from seeing the story all the way through, is the uneven difficulty. Some challenges are quick and a piece of cake, while others are lengthy and involve multiple challenging goals. One in particular gives you 4:51 to complete four dynamic goals, make 10 shots with Big W, and limit the opposing small forward to two field goals. You also have to win the game by at least six points, which means you'll need to outscore the other team by 18 points in that time span. Some challenges ask you if you want to temporarily drop down to easy if you fail repeatedly, but after failing over and over for 30 minutes in the case above, the game never offered any sort of mercy.

There was no scenario in NBA 07 that explicitly required the player to come back from a twelve-point deficit to then win by six. It's apparent that Thomas did not know know why he started that stage so far behind. Therein lay the true deviousness of it all. Unless the player were paying the same careful attention to statistical continuity as I had as a tester, chances were that they would never realize that they were burying themselves in those first two stages as The Kid. Because each of the four quarters was its own short scenario, because most scenarios were self-contained with predetermined scores to work from, and because most were easy enough that players hardly had to keep track of team scores, the average player would not have been conditioned to even consider that they had done this to themselves. They would have just thought, as Thomas did, that it was a particularly unreasonable mission.

Since a tester's work is ordinarily the stuff that you don't see when playing a finished title, I have to admit it was oddly gratifying to have something I was responsible for, albeit inadvertently and not proudly, mentioned so specifically in a published review. But this was probably a case where I would have done my job better by keeping quiet, where playability would have been better served by suspending logic. Of course, even if I hadn't pointed it out, I'm sure some young go-getter colleague would have noticed it eventually.

Furthermore, in my defense, there was actually one more bug contributing to the nightmare in the "fixed" game, which, had it been addressed, might have solved everything. Astute readers may already have spotted it.

Remember that the third stage actually only covers the final play of the third quarter. Yet the score at the beginning of the third stage is the exact score carried over from the end of stage two. In other words, neither team scores a single basket during the third quarter, up until the final play, which is the only part that the player plays. Even if both teams were putting up the most tenacious defense and deficient offense of all time, that's nearly a statistical impossibility. Yes, I wrote up this bug too, but, alas, there would be no fix this time.

The proper fix should have carried over the score from stage one to stage two, but then taken advantage of the elapsed "missing" time in the third quarter to balance things out in advance for the fourth stage. The programmers should have set it to automatically add twenty points to The Kid's score while boosting Big W's to, say, six points behind whatever that would be. So if the second quarter had ended with The Kid leading 86-12, the third stage would have begun at 106-100. Would it have been reasonable for Big W's team to have scored 88 points in under five minutes? No, but I don't think even I would have submitted that one as a bug.

"Happiness Is a Warm Gun"

Speaking of Beatles: Rock Band, in the Game Informer cover story a few months back, there was a short interview with Yoko Ono, wherein she promoted the game while also briefly addressing the "games as art" question:

Well, I think it is definitely an art form, but also--like all art forms now, it's going toward a very violent direction, you know? So this venture, doing it all with the Beatles, is really beautiful, because it's not that direction at all; it's to just enjoy music, and to learn about music.

I certainly didn't need Yoko Ono to alert me to the violence that pervades gaming, but it's a good time anyway to bring it up again. The depressing reality is that, if, as a budding patron of the interactive art, you wish to explore the medium beyond the casual fare, you will come up against a "core" gaming library built predominantly on violent themes. Sports/racing is a distant second, and there is little else of quality out there to scratch any other emotional itches.

Like everyone else, I have ideas for filling that void. But I'm not a game designer, so I'll start for now by just pointing to a few examples of existing good, fulfilling titles that are neither violent nor casual experiences.

Along the same music game lines as Beatles: Rock Band, the first compelling non-violent video game that comes to mind is iNiS's Ouendan series for the Nintendo DS. The stylus-based gameplay is not radically different from other rhythm game titles. What sets Ouendan apart is the story that goes on behind the timed tapping.

The premise has the player commanding a Japanese cheer squad that responds to the cries for help of citizens facing challenging life situations. For example, one mission sees a restaurateur desperate to attract business, while another has a student struggling to get ready for exams, and yet another has a young man predictably trying to win the heart of the girl he adores. In each case, the Ouendan team arrives to encourage them through their difficulties, and as the player performs successfully, the short stories likewise develop to show the characters bearing down with increasing confidence to realize their goals. Some of the episodes involve conflict, but the others are no less rewarding. Thanks to the emphatic art and well-matched song selections, it's almost always inspiring to feel your cheers motivating these people to happy endings, no matter the obstacle.

Ouendan unfortunately remains Japan-exclusive, but iNiS also developed Elite Beat Agents, a version of Ouendan localized for American audiences. I don't like it quite as much because it strips out all the "Japanese-ness" that is so much of Ouendan's charm, but it's the same basic idea.

Actually, many of the Japanese music games (e.g. PaRappa the Rapper, Space Channel 5, Gitaroo Man) have tied the rhythm gameplay to light narratives, recognizing that the music-playing need not be an end unto itself. It's a shame that, between its twelve or so Guitar Hero releases a year, Activision can't find time to even try for anything of the sort, especially considering it was the fantastic ad for Guitar Hero II for Xbox 360 that really opened my mind to these possibilities that the games themselves have failed to run with.

Moving on to something completely different now, it's about time somebody gave some props to Sony's series of NBA games featuring "The Life." Full disclosure: I worked on NBA 06 and 07 for the PS2. But I worked on them as a tester, playing them twelve hours a day for weeks straight, which should give me every reason to hate them more than the average consumer.

To be sure, these were some severely flawed basketball video games. The gameplay, fundamentally broken, made for neither a competent simulation nor a fun game besides. Seriously, my 16-bit NBA Live '96 was more playable AND more realistic. Hell, even NBA Jam adhered better to certain vital rules, such as the goaltending violation. NBA 06 didn't allow goaltending, but instead of actually programming in the call and penalty, the developers simply made it so that the game rendered intangible any hands that would try to get between the basket and the ball on its way down. That's some of the jankiest workaround BS I've ever seen. There were other blatant cheats too, like how the game would magically teleport your players back to your end after every basket you made, because it didn't know how else to keep you from stealing the brain-dead AI's inbound pass. So, yeah, it was a pretty awful basketball game. Yet it should not simply be dismissed, because it did include one mode that presented the sports video game in a whole new way.

"The Life" was a revolution that sadly nobody noticed. More critically acclaimed sports titles, such as MLB 07: The Show and NHL 09, have drawn praise recently for their "Road to the Show" and "Be a Pro" modes, which allow players to embark on personal virtual careers, starting as rookies and slowly working their way up the ranks eventually to land in the Hall of Fame. It can add a more personal level of investment to play as your own virtual self, instead of controlling an entire team as both talent and management. But these are still modes based around statistics rather than narrative, and they ultimately do not offer much different from the standard season and franchise modes. Whereas "Be a Pro" simulates the grind of a professional sports career, NBA 06's "The Life" treats players to the glamor of superstardom.

The mode is actually a scripted drama, casting players in the role of a thirsty young point guard nicknamed "The Kid." The story follows him through his first NBA season, from the life-changing draft out of junior college to the NBA Finals. Along the way, cut scenes depict his volatile relationships with his teammates, his coach, his rival, his agent, and the press. Licensing and marketing keep the plot from getting into the really dirty stuff that everybody knows exists in pro sports, but it's not entirely a fluff story for kids either. It's a mostly sober tale of a young star nearly overwhelmed by the too sudden transition from the streets to the show. There's even some enlightening discussion of the "Q score" that is so much the concern of agents.

On the gameplay side, "The Life" gives players a series of objectives besides just winning, but, instead of being randomly generated like in "Road to the Show," these too follow a script. Rather than play season after season, the player progresses through a linear series of episodes not unlike the traditional single-player modes of other genres. Instead of full regulation games, most stages are mid-game scenarios that require fulfilling certain conditions to pass (e.g. "Score the game-winning basket with your point guard"). These are usually tied to the story and meaningfully integrated with the narrative. For example, when The Kid wants to establish himself early on as the franchise player, the goals involve hogging the ball to score tons of baskets. Then, after he realizes that he cannot win by himself and must repair relations with his teammates, the objective becomes to dish more assists.

"The Life Vol.2" in NBA 07, a late PS2 release, was much shorter, and the title defense story is never as exciting as the rise up. But the sequel did add an interesting twist by having players alternating between the parallel seasons of The Kid and his nemesis from the first game, "Big W." The rivalry comes to a head in a scenario that pits the two protagonists against one another in a mid-season game. The player plays the first half as The Kid, then switches to Big W to finish things off. The actual execution is kind of disastrous, since players basically end up kicking their own asses, but I know of no other game in any genre that allows players to experience consecutive phases of a single contest from opposing angles.

The biggest problem with "The Life" was that it didn't really play to NBA 06's audience. The divide between those who play sports games and those who do not grows increasingly pronounced. The idea of a cut scene-heavy story mode centering around fictional characters would probably sound preposterous to a sports maniac in search of a simulation with solid mechanics and stat-tracking, while those not interested in sports games would likely still not care. To be honest, even I haven't personally pursued the series beyond the two installments that I got paid to play.

For those who did pick up a copy of 06 or 07, the frustratingly flawed basic gameplay and severe lack of polish probably kept "The Life" from being an altogether enjoyable experience, but the concept was good and fresh. It not only provided a new way to experience sports in gaming, but it featured a story that was roughly equal in length and depth to most action games. Admittedly, that isn't saying much, and, no, it definitely wasn't brilliant writing, but, at the very least, it showed the potential for interactive narratives to be fulfilling without relying on violence.

We as human beings are so much more than just destructive beasts. It shouldn't be that hard to construct a thoughtful and engaging interactive experience that appeals to any of those other aspects of who we are. In fact, in the cases of Ouendan and "The Life," these are both games that basically just add goals and context to existing genres and mechanics. Yet these are badly outnumbered by the Guitar Hero and Madden releases that, while perhaps fun, are decidedly not art. Truthfully, the problem, as I see it, is not so much that the violent games should be less violent, but that the non-violent games are usually even less ambitious.

* * * * *

But the issue becomes further complicated when you consider the recent story of the Karmapa Lama playing violent video games as a way to satiate aggressive feelings. It has often been the not altogether convincing defense of game violence that, by satisfying their violent impulses virtually, players are able to forgo having to express them in real life.

That's all well and good, but I think it indirectly raises concerns about what we get out of our non-violent gaming pursuits. Does playing Rock Band lessen one's ambition to play a real instrument? Does playing sports video games dampen our drive to become real athletes? The number of NFL players who grew up playing Madden would seem to indicate otherwise, but then where does that leave the Karmapa Lama's argument? Realistically, I'm sure that music, sports, and war are probably all different enough to preclude a universal answer.

But I wonder how a video game might capture the concept of "love." Then my mind turns to dating sims. Although prevalent in Japan, serious gamers in the West generally look down upon the genre as one of the lowest forms of gaming. Often nearly devoid of gameplay, these are basically interactive novels of wish fulfillment fantasy, and many veer into erotic territory. If people are playing these as a substitute for real love, then maybe it would be better for us all if gaming were to avoid trying to tackle certain aspects of life.

The Good Stuff

So Sony sent me an e-mail to let me know that, for a limited time, I can order Papa John's pizza through my PlayStation 3 (via a simple button in the PS3 browser that links to the Papa John's website). Exciting news?

Kind of makes me want to retch, actually. It does, however, remind me of an episode from a time in my life when I worked as a game tester on PlayStation software at Sony Computer Entertainment America.

One day, as a way of thanking us for our hard work and long hours, the company treated all of the lowly QA staff to a pizza lunch. These gestures were not common, so it was an exciting day in any case, but one tester further remarked that it was very impressive how they didn't settle for, say, five-dollar mediums from Domino's. This was "the good stuff"--large, multi-topping orders from, yep, Papa John's! "That stuff ain't cheap!"

But, seriously, my heart ached for that poor sap, who thought that Papa John's was the pinnacle of pizza pies. Perhaps I had been blessed with a more lavish life than I realized, because it had been some years since Papa John's had become the standard (only due to geographical convenience) for pizza night in my household, and some years again since we had all had enough of that subpar dough, the processed cheese, and those meager toppings.

Although I too came from SoCal, even I knew that Papa John's (as well as Pizza Hut and Domino's) was no more a real pizza than Taco Bell was authentic Mexican cuisine. Another part of me envied him, however, because, living in California, it did me little good to know that a better pizza existed. The knowledge only tormented me, allowing me to observe brilliance without being able to grasp it.

I would have had him carry on living in blissful ignorance, but, alas, with a Chicago native and a few New Yorkers in the building, pizza day inevitably turned ugly. Soon enough, we were all made to believe that none of us had ever tasted a real pizza. When the Chicago snob finally declared that he only ate deep-dish pizza shipped across the country from his beloved Lou Malnati's, that the frozen stuff still could not compare to the real thing, there was nothing more that anyone else could say. To pay forty dollars a pie for the merest semblance of home, he clearly took his melted cheese on dough more seriously than the rest of us. And so we sat in silence, chewing on that Papa John's that tasted ever more like sand in our mouths.

Yes, I ate my fill that day. I had earned that free food after all.

Take me for a ride... Again! (or "Backbone are amateurs... Again!")

After months of rumors and speculation, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 has finally arrived on the PS3. I'd really been looking forward to this, but I'm overall pretty disappointed with how it turned out.

The game is a real bore when you don't have friends to play against. The addition of online play was supposed to solve that, but the reality is that I don't actually find it fun to play with people I don't know and can't see. Fighting games are best enjoyed playing against a buddy, while other mutual friends excitedly look on and wait to play winner. With online, at worst you'll get some foul-mouthed, obnoxious idiot on the other end. It's wiser to just turn off voice chat, but what remains is a very sterile experience. But I'll admit that these are my own problems, and I'm sure there are plenty of other people who love playing online.

What disappoints me more is that Backbone Entertainment's port of MvC2 suffers from the same flaw that afflicted their Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. There are no shortcut buttons for "all punches" or "all kicks." Their absence was a minor annoyance in HD Remix, but it's a much bigger deal in MvC2, because very nearly every super in this game is performed with a quarter-circle motion and PP/KK. And super combos see greater use in MvC2 than in any other fighting game. Cable, one of the strongest and most important characters in the game, is feared only because of the threat posed by his damaging beam super. If you can't reliably fire it off, then you're better off not even using him, because an impotent Cable is only going to be a burden on his team. But that doesn't leave much game for the many players who normally base their play around Cable.

These and other similar macros have been standard in nearly every home port of a fighting game since the 32-bit era. I don't see that the argument can defensibly be made against their inclusion, and all the poorly reasoned attacks I've seen against my stance only strengthen my case.

The usual position assumed by forum-dwelling posers is that PP/KK buttons are a crutch for the weak, and if you want to get serious at the game, you should at least be able to hit two buttons at the same time.

I suspect these subnormals don't really grasp what "casuals" means when it comes to fighting games. You don't need to be competitive at a national level in order to enjoy the competitive aspect of the game. When my co-workers and I used to play during breaks, none of us were what I would consider to be good at the game, but neither did we just blindly mash buttons until somebody lost, then laugh afterward, nobody even knowing who was playing which character. When we went at it, we played to the best of our ability to see who was the better player among us. Even if they meant nothing to the rest of the world, those tight matches were still immensely rewarding for the victors. Of course even the best of us would have gotten smoked by Justin Wong, but so would almost everybody else in the world playing the game. That doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't be allowed to enjoy a game, just as surely as college basketball players can take pride in their meaningless NCAA careers. But the loss of long standard features in this version means that some players will not be able to play at their best, effectively ruining the contest at those novice-to-intermediate levels.

No, the divide on this issue is not really between tournament and casual players, but between (weak) stick users and pad players. It's not a coincidence that tournament players tend to be stick players, because, for years, arcades were the only way to expose yourself to a variety of play styles in a competitive atmosphere, and they didn't generally offer controller ports for plugging in your DualShock. But ever since Evo, the biggest fighting game tournament in the world, switched from holding matches on arcades to consoles, there have been pad players placing highly among the nation's best. So, no, playing on a stick instead of a pad is not necessarily a mark of superior skill, and the wannabe elites who would say otherwise are themselves complete scrubs at this and every game. I seriously doubt any truly top-level stick player would say that these simple shortcuts make any meaningful difference in the results.

On the contrary, I suspect a larger number of tournament players would regard playing on a pad as a handicap. It's simple enough to click two punches simultaneously on a joystick, but it's another thing entirely when you're playing with thumbs on a pad. The inclusion of shortcuts was never a lazy cheat, but a way to lessen the handicap that thumb players inherently face. It's not exactly helping a scrub to bust out link combos. Simply pulling off a super move would never be considered skillful execution in and of itself, so there's nothing to prove there. Top players expect all this and more, and no tournament player would fear being upset by a lesser opponent's use of an unforeseen PP button.

Not everybody can afford to pay the $70+ for a decent joystick. More importantly, not everybody is comfortable playing on a joystick even if one is available. The hardcore stick users represent only an extreme minority of the people playing this and every other fighting game. I'm sure Capcom must be aware of this, or else they wouldn't have included all those macros in their other games. In fact, I know the real reason why Backbone Entertainment left the shortcuts out of this port.

In the legitimate Japanese-developed games, the key config screen has the player assigning a function to each button.


It can be cumbersome to have to scroll through a long cycle of functions just to reassign basic punches and kicks to different buttons. Players who were around during the old SNES SFII days might wonder why things have seemingly regressed from the elegance of assigning a button to each function. Back then, if you wanted to set Light Punch to the A button, it was as simple as highlighting "Light Punch" and then pressing A.


I know for a fact that Backbone deliberately went back to the old method in an attempt to provide a less cluttered, more user-friendly interface, but it actually does more harm than good, because now the only functions available are the six basic ones. They still could have implemented a long vertical list of additional functions, but maybe that would have been too ugly, maybe it didn't cross their mind, or maybe they just didn't care about the many players who would have appreciated it.

The key configs in all the Backbone ports I've played, dating back to the SFII emulations in the Capcom Classics Collection releases, have been screwed up in other ways too. The default layout doesn't conform to standards established over dozens of Capcom six-button fighting games released over the years. In the Capcom-developed games, the heavy attacks are R1 and R2. Nearly every commercial joystick is laid out to work out-of-the-box with this configuration.


But in the Backbone-developed ports, the heavy attacks (or assists in the case of MvC2) are L1 and R1. In other words, it's modeled after the SNES pad layout. If you want to plug in a joystick, chances are that you'll have to reconfigure the buttons to fit the arcade 2x3 layout. It's as if the default layout is meant for pad play, yet this game doesn't provide the basic options to really help pad players compete. Really, it seems like the simplified button config interface was only necessitated because this game forces you to reconfigure your buttons.

Mind you, I used to play this game on the Dreamcast, where, even though the shortcuts were available, it would have been silly, on a controller with only six buttons, to trade any of the six normal functions for a PP/KK macro. So it's not as if I haven't dealt with this once already. Back then, I found a setup that worked for me, but even that went out the window any time I was playing in a group of more than two people. You see, it's not fun having to sit through the process of every player customizing their buttons each time their turn comes up. Because I was already indisputably the strongest player in my group, I was willing to stick with the defaults in order to save everybody time, but my thumb-based pad play definitely suffered when I had to struggle to hit two sideways adjacent buttons at the same time on the Dreamcast pad. Telling me that I can reconfigure my buttons is no better an answer now than it was then.

My play improved drastically on PS2. (And no, the PS2 port was not a bad version. There were some very minor differences, but nothing close to what mongoloids habitually parrot out of secondhand ignorance. Nor is the Dreamcast version "arcade perfect." ANY TIME you move from one platform to another, there will at the very least be minor speed differences, among other unique glitches that are known to exist in either arcade or Dreamcast, but not both.)

For the PS3, I do own a joystick, so that's an option. But for basic movement, I've always preferred a good D-pad to stick. Me playing on stick, especially in a game with such broad planes, would be me playing with a handicap.

I know these sound like such minor nitpicks, and perhaps my time would be better wasted trying to adjust than in blogging my complaints. But MvC2 was formerly my best game, and it frustrates me that, for the most ridiculous of reasons, I cannot now play it to the best of my ability.

NonEssential #41: Skies of Arcadia Legends

It was the year 2006, when a co-worker of mine, having just purchased a Nintendo GameCube, began asking around the office for software recommendations.

"So what about role-playing games?" he asked. "Are there any good ones on the GameCube?" More specifically, he was looking for Japanese RPGs in the vein of Final Fantasy.

To that, one man answered with Namco's Tales of Symphonia. The suggestion met with my wholehearted approval, and sadly I could think of no other options for players looking for a good traditional JRPG on the GameCube. Baten Kaitos slipped my mind, but, not having played it, I could not have recommended it anyway. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was probably the only other game that came close to what Man #1 wanted, but again I was not sufficiently familiar with it. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was brought up as one to avoid, and, while I noted my fondness for it, I agreed that he was likely to be disappointed, especially since he would have no access to the multiplayer.

Man #1 may have been better-informed about the GameCube library than he'd originally let on, as he then led with "I heard there's a Skies of Arcadia for GameCube?"

He was referring to Sega's Skies of Arcadia Legends, a very slightly enhanced 2003 port of developer Overworks's critically lauded 2000 RPG, Skies of Arcadia (AKA Eternal Arcadia in Japan). It was my most hated RPG of all time.

"Oh, yeah!" Man #2 confirmed. "That's a good one."

A third man chimed in with his agreement: "Yeah, that one's really good."

I had listened as these people spoke affectionately of mediocre 3-D Sonic titles, or recommended the lame Sonic Team-developed Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, but--and I swear it's nothing personal against Sega--Skies of Arcadia was where I drew the line. We were spread out about a room of only five people, one of whom spoke only limited English and would not contribute to nor even acknowledge the conversation. Outnumbered three-to-one though I was, I could not stand by quietly and suffer praise of Skies of Arcadia.

"You liked Skies of Arcadia?" I asked Man #3.

It was a struggle to contain my bitterness, but I tried to speak in a calm and controlled voice. Ironically, although I meant not to discredit myself by betraying too much emotion, the incongruous seriousness and labored slowness of my speech managed to chill the atmosphere. However hard I tried to mute it, there was a confrontational inflection to my delivery that was not lost on the addressee.

"Oh, uh, I never played it. I don't have a GameCube or Dreamcast," Man #3 sheepishly confessed, after having already recommended several titles for Man #1 to purchase. "But everybody who plays that game loves it."

A short pause ensued. The other two guys were fresh fish at the workplace, but Man #2, a veteran peer, perhaps intrigued by this rare glimmer of intensity from me, decided to pursue the topic further.

"You didn't like it, Henry?"

"No," I responded without hesitation. I suppose I did want this after all. "I thought the battle system was tedious, characters were shallow, the story was weak."

Another pause.

"Did you like it?" I asked Man #2 in return.

"Actually I never played it," he admitted. Nor, as it turned out, had any of these people played Tales of Symphonia, Crystal Chronicles, or indeed even half the titles they'd handed out as suggestions.

Another silence.

"I liked it on the Dreamcast," Man #1 finally declared. And this time I could hear him seething beneath his words.

"What did you like about it?" I demanded to know.

"I liked the story. And I liked the gameplay."

Fair enough, and perhaps that should have been the end of it. But no, for some reason, I could not let it lie.

Another silent interlude, and then I said, "It was the worst role-playing game I ever played."

At this, Man #1 was clearly offended. I had already guessed that Skies of Arcadia must have been his favorite video game of all time or something.

"Well, have you played a lot of role-playing games?" he asked skeptically.

This was the crucial juncture that I had perhaps been building to. The guy clearly had no idea to whom he was speaking. I had played and completed over fifty JRPGs in approximately a six-year span. Among those who knew me well, the number was almost an inside joke. Perhaps it was not the most absolutely monstrous list that the truly exhaustively hardcore importers might put up, but I had gathered enough from previous conversations to surmise that it was several times the number that this guy, who had naturally started with Legend of Dragoon, had even heard of.

In my imagined scenario, in which I proceeded to tear this guy apart for his impudence, I would have begun with "I dunno. What would you consider a lot?"

Then this novice, having no clue the hand I held, would have confidently answered with a terse "Ten." Because, of course, to him that would have been a large number. Right.

Then I would have shot back with "Try fifty, jackass!" At which point the room would have erupted in hooting and hollering. The fifth man would have sprung to life with an "Oh, snap!" Other teams within the building would have come flooding down the hall to contribute their ruckus. And even the boss man would have exploded out of his office door to high-five me.

But no, I didn't need any of that. In my heart, I knew that this guy did not have the tools to stand up to me on this point, and, as long as I knew, for me that was enough. I didn't need to embarrass him.

What I actually said was "I've played my share."

So I let this guy live, and nobody took it any further, until, still feeling bad about having ended the discussion on a bitter note, I conceded, "It had some good boss battles." And that was the last time anybody brought up Skies of Arcadia at work.

* * * * *

It's been three years since that incident. I've been able to play only a few more JRPGs since, so Skies of Arcadia Legends remains securely at the bottom of my list. Above, I already briefly described what I disliked about the game, but now that we're here, I'll go a little more in depth.

The gameplay was horrendous. The random encounter rate, already reduced from the Dreamcast original, was still outrageously high. Not only that, but these were undoubtedly the least exciting battles in any JRPG I'd come across.

The turn-based battle system, very similar to Xenogears or Chrono Cross, operated with a special meter shared among all four party members. Characters were defined by their repertoires of attacks and abilities that consumed varying amounts of points from this meter. The party started each battle with a few points, and players could either spend them immediately, or bide their time, filling the meter gradually over the course of the fight to open up stronger abilities.

The problem was that, after maybe the first two dungeons, nearly every random encounter could be won just by starting off fast with the strongest target-all-enemies attack ability available at the time. If one attack wasn't powerful enough to wipe them out, I still began every battle with enough points to pull off a second before they could respond. The frequency of the battling, combined with the mindlessness of the combat, made for one miserable experience. Like I said, as with most turn-based JRPGs, whether good or bad, the combat only became more than a grind in boss battles, where meter management actually mattered and Skies of Arcadia became halfway decent.

The same could never be said of the ship battles, which were strictly terrible. These were less frequent, but they took forever and were full of endless nothing. Battles consisted of long, repeating animations of two airships just circling one another, presumably jockeying for position, although they would never appear in the same frame together. After about a dozen interminable passes, vessels would finally act out the commands given them. The ensuing action possessed a Pokémon Stadium-level cohesion; first would be the shot of one ship firing its cannons, then the camera would cut to an opposing shot of the target taking damage. Then it would be back to the "epic" shots of these ships trying to outmaneuver one another. This was some sub-Advance Wars editing. I never played a turn-based game that so badly needed an option to turn off battle animations.


As for the crap story, I didn't hate it all the way through. I never go into a JRPG expecting it to be lame, or else I wouldn't even bother with the massive investment. Even if a story starts out slow or generic, I remain hopeful that it can turn things around before its 40-50 hours are up. So it was with Skies of Arcadia, and I remember being still fairly interested when an early twist left my protagonist stranded on a deserted island to fend for himself, evoking memories of Celes gathering fish in Final Fantasy VI.

I can't remember exactly at what point after that my optimism faded, but somewhere along the way, with about thirty hours still to go, it dawned on me that these characters were never going to grow or develop. Having already started as clichés, they had not changed at all after close to ten hours, and it had become evident that, just by their natures, they lacked the capacity for growth. Vyse was the free-living, eternal optimist who NEVER gave up. His best friend, Aika, was the warm yet comically abusive treasure hound. Fina, the shy but sweet maiden from another world, did go through a little more than the others, but she also started with less. These three were actually not without charm, and obviously a good story doesn't need to be full of angst and trauma, but, over the course of a JRPG-length journey, I would like to believe that the characters will have actually gone somewhere as individuals. 40-50 hours is too much to reasonably expect players to spend with static characters in a cliché-ridden story of noble pirate youths fighting for free skies against a power-hungry empire.

The only two subplots that I kind of enjoyed were both inexplicably intertwined with the most heinous side quest I'd ever experienced in a JRPG. Every dungeon included some hidden creature called a "Moonfish." They were out of the way and invisible, but if one was nearby, a beeping noise would let you know to begin scanning in first person, using special goggles to locate and capture them. As far as I knew initially, the only point to the Moonfish was that I could trade them to a particular NPC for rare items, but I wasn't overly concerned with that.

As for things I enjoyed, the first was the GameCube-exclusive series of tricky battles against the "Angel of Death," a mysterious female bounty hunter holding a grudge that would be slightly elaborated upon with each encounter. The other mildly interesting subplot was a doctor NPC's periodic tales clearing up the backstory of a major antagonist, whose motives and fall from grace would never elsewhere be addressed. These were about the only things I had to look forward to when I turned on Skies of Arcadia, so it worried me when I noticed that it had been a long time since either story had received a new episode. I had originally assumed that advancement in these subplots was tied to my progression in the main plot, and, in an indirect way, that was true. Looking up an online FAQ, I found that they were actually tied to how many Moonfish I'd collected, and based on where I was with these stories, relative to how many dungeons I had completed, it became apparent that I must have missed a few. But there was no way of knowing which Moonfish I had failed to catch, except to go back through EVERY abominable dungeon, and there was absolutely no way I was doing that! So that was that. Those accursed Moonfish had completely screwed me out of the only things I had been enjoying in Skies of Arcadia.


Better arguments in favor of Skies of Arcadia tend to concentrate on its sense of wonder and exploration. Eager players could sail the unmapped skies searching for "discoveries," which were sights and landmarks that the crew would document, afterward selling the information for cash rewards. I suppose I can respect liking Skies of Arcadia for that reason. That sort of gameplay is certainly not my cup of tea, especially since the ship steered like a tank, ramming into discoveries was made extra bothersome by the dodgy hit detection, and the high encounter rate dampened any drive to stray from the main plot. What I liked better was filling my home base with NPCs, as I recruited obnoxious idiots to fill positions on my crew. Yes, at its very best, the game was like a bad version of Suikoden.

Looking back, I would say Skies of Arcadia is notable only because it was one of the first JRPGs of its hardware generation, and far more technically ambitious than Grandia II. Many of the PS1's best titles had cheated by using pre-rendered backgrounds and cut scenes to provide graphics that exceeded what the hardware was actually capable of generating in real time. Skies of Arcadia took advantage of the next-gen power of the Sega Dreamcast to finally deliver a JRPG-sized world that could be explored as true 3-D space. Based on the finished product, however, I would say it was still too early to be going there. When I came to the Legends edition on GameCube, I thought the character models were okay, but the environments, not only looked crude next to those of Final Fantasy X, but had already aged very poorly even compared to those of the 32-bit Final Fantasy games. The jagged lines and muddy textures hardly seemed to justify my having to grapple with the camera. Maybe one could have appreciated it on a strictly technical level, but I didn't understand how anybody could honestly believe the game looked anywhere close to beautiful.

The limitations of the graphical engine became very apparent during a cut scene in which the protagonists had to escape the enemy by navigating their airship through a slowly closing fortress gate. Watching it, I was instantly reminded of the classic "breaking through South Gate" scene from Final Fantasy IX. Except that this was crudely modeled and not very exciting. Worst of all, the bulk of the sequence was actually one of those slow and boring as hell ship battles. (Courtesy of YouTube user "goodcowgames," here's the Skies of Arcadia version: before and after the awful fight.)


I may have, in the past, been critical of such games as Robotrek, SaGa Frontier 2, or Fire Emblem, and those negative remarks have tended to overshadow my actual assessments of those games as decent-to-good. But Skies of Arcadia was one game that I truly did despise. Goddamned Dreamcast fanboys. As far as I'm concerned, this was merely another case of owners of a failed platform trying to makes themselves feel special by boosting the status of a truly unremarkable game, whose quality they expected most people would be unable to verify for themselves. Even among Dreamcast RPGs, I felt Grandia II was a better game.

Given how much I loathed the experience, and how early on I recognized that I did, you may be puzzled at why I still spent about fifty hours seeing it through. I suppose it was my compulsive need to finish what I'd started. Or perhaps I felt I needed to complete it in order to credibly deride it. Or maybe, just maybe, my enmity toward the game had itself become the story, I the joke, and my rage the punchline. For that very reason, I am filled with dread every time I hear rumors that Sega might be planning a sequel. I know that a part of me might be tempted to play that sequel, just to recapture that intensity of feeling that is so rare in gaming, even if, in this case, the feeling would be running in the wrong direction.