Archive for category Let’s Try to Understand
Developing a Persona Part 2: The Daily Grind
Posted by digital love child in Let's Try to Understand, Reid McCarter on May 3, 2012
Life can often seem like a nasty, samsaric ritual. Almost every morning I wake up around 8am, take a shower, change the cat’s water, pour a cup of coffee and do the dishes before starting work. Every evening I take out my contacts, brush my teeth, wash my face and get into bed before falling asleep. These are the kind of things that we all just do and, for the most part, we do them mindlessly and automatically because they just have to be done.
Other parts of our day are usually far less predictable. Whether the spontaneity of a surprise phone call from an old friend or an email from a business client bears good or bad news, at the very least it colours our daily routines with the kind of random chance that makes life interesting (if not always enjoyable necessarily).
I play games — and I suspect a lot of people play games — because they also provide my days with that element of unpredictability. Taking part in an unfolding story or trying to win against a digital opponent makes for pretty engaging entertainment. Despite the fact that games, being constructs of cold hard programming, can only offer us a pre-set variety of outcomes (a variety that is always expanding as developers and technological engineers push the medium forward) they can give us a sense of being somewhere else, taking part in a world of chance — a world that can have more in common with the unpredictable parts of our days than the rote, habitual ones.
That isn’t always the case with Persona 3.
Developing a Persona Part 1: Time Management
Posted by digital love child in Let's Try to Understand, Reid McCarter on April 13, 2012
The Persona series is revered, the third and fourth entries to the series being particularly adored. A lot of platitudes are tossed around about these games, including (but not limited to) bold claims like their being “saviours of the Japanese role-playing game.” Obviously this warrants investigation so, about two months after buying a PlayStation Vita and playing three actual Vita games on it, I ended up downloading the PSP version of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3.
Now, a few hours in I’m willing to take a (self-inflicted gun)shot at trying to unpack just what it is that makes this game compelling to so many people.
Welcome to Erf: X-COM: UFO Defense
Posted by digital love child in Let's Try to Understand, Michael Campagnaro, Reid McCarter on January 30, 2012
Michael Campagnaro and I sat down to play an hour of X-COM: UFO Defense, the 1994 alien invasion cult classic for PC. The point of it was to kick off a Let’s Try to Understand series with a game that neither of us had played and know little about, but that has many devoted fans. Because X-COM is a unique brand of strategy and because it was designed 18 years ago, it seemed like a good choice. We strapped on our tinfoil hats and settled into our commander’s chairs in an attempt to fumble our way through saving the world, reconvening one hour later to talk out the trauma of intergalactic warfare as conducted by total newcomers.
The Word of God Hand
Posted by digital love child in Adam Burch, Let's Try to Understand on January 25, 2012
Put simply, God Hand is the reason I stopped liking videogames. But that doesn’t even come close to reaching my editor’s Demanded Word Count™!
*ahem*
A Big Thing with videogames these days is difficulty. Difficulty is an especially poorly explored topic, because most videogame critics and designers+ suck at videogames++, and ESPECIALLY at videogames that have Actual Difficulty. Actual Difficulty is a unique beast; it doesn’t rely on memorization, or on setting you back far from where you were+++. It relies on intricate patterns, robust interactions, and strong knowledge of the underlying system mechanics. Actual Difficulty arises solely from strong design, constant testing, and the type of genius that only years of experience can create.
God Hand has more Actual Difficulty in the first level than most designers can fit into their entire game, and all of it comes from constantly varied scenarios that require a mastery of the absurdly robust combat engine Clover Studios birthed.
