Little King's Story – An Impression of the First Five Hours

Little King's story is an RTS for the Wii, where you play as a (the?) 'Little King', tasked with “World Domination” oddly enough. I personally didn't get very far into the game – only about five hours as you can see from this post's title – and so I'm hardly in a position to write a proper review of the release, however if the game's middle and end continue in the same way as its beginning, then my experience should be a pretty good representation of the rest of the game.

It's Really Really Cute – But Not in a Good Way

From the children's book illustration filter placed over the cutscenes to the adorable gibberish the dialogue is made up of, Little King's story prides itself on being as cute as it can be. This not only adds to the game's charm, but also ensures that the game's simple visuals always look crisp and clear on the hardware they have to run on.

This style does get in the way on a practical level with the way in which the game chooses to present tutorials to you. If you wish to hear information from one of the NPCs about a new unit type you've just gained access to, you're presented with a series of chalk drawings on a board, illustrating how to use that particular unit. It's cute the first couple of times you sit through it, but the system trips up when you try to look something up quickly and then have to sit through what is essentially a medium length cutscene. Browsing a paragraph of text would have been a much simpler way of doing this. Worse still, the game does a poor job of explaining its controls to you, I only knew that you could rearrange your troops (an essential feature to use in battle) after it was pointed out by a friend who had had a similar experience.

That said, overall the art style adds to the game, especially when it makes what would be cheesy dialogue in a more serious game (lines refering to the King's desires for “World Domination” for example) amusing in a very sincere way.

This Game Could Have Been on Any Other Platform

Almost it seems in reaction to the calls by reviewers for an end to pointless Wiimote-waggling, the motion controls of the console lie completely untouched by Little King's Story. You move your character with the analogue stick located on the Nunchuk, and use the Wiimote for its buttons, nothing more.

In many other games I'd personally welcome this approach, obviously not every game is going to benefit from the Wii's unique controller, but in LKS there are times that I found myself wishing that the game had taken advantage of it. In order to send you're followers to undergo tasks in the game, you simply face whatever it is you want them to interact with and press the 'A' button to send them on their way. There are many problems with this, the foremost being that it's impossible to aim whilst on the run, perhaps from a boss creature. In such situations you have to stop and turn around before you can send your minions to attack, which leaves you open to the enemies advances, and never feels like a very intuitive way of going about things.

Other problems exist, such as how difficult it is to select between a couple of close together interactable items, which considering this is your core activity within the game, makes it a much more frustrating experience than it need otherwise be. It seems odd that considering this is a Wii title the developers chose not to allow you to even point at the screen to select items, when this is something that would have really improved the game.

Without speculating on the reason why (though covering up a poor draw-distance brought on by the Wii's hardware seems likely) you're vantage point is always fixed at an angle very close to a top down view. Needless to say this makes switching on the intrusive full-screen map a necessary evil a lot of the time, and made me pine for a more accomplished mini-map.

Simplicity is Not the Be All and End All

To be fair, by this point I'd twigged that I wasn't in the game's target audience. The sound, visual, and writing style all pointed to gamers much younger than myself, so I wasn't to surprised that when I actually got to some combat it fell wildly below my expectations.

The combat consists of two commands, attack and fall back, controlled with the 'A' and 'B' buttons respectively. You send your soldiers to attack an enemy, and then when said enemy's animation shows that they're about to attack you, you withdraw your men to take them out of harms way. This simple system could work if there was any way of aiming whilst moving, but in this particular story you're forced to retreat, stop, and then turn around to face your enemy before you can send your men to attack again, by which time the enemy will usually already be taking steps to attack once more.

In Conclusion

From what I played of Little King's Story, it seemed to have all the right intentions but with none of the good sense to pull them off correctly. The central style and feel of the game, as well as the exploration paired with the strategy seems good in theory, but because of the game's control problems I found it hard to enjoy my time with the game. A younger player might find the game more fun though, as its tasks are rarely too taxing, and the game's style - as previously mentioned - is clearly designed to appeal to a younger audience.

You Can't Play Your Favourate Game Ever

I doubt many of you have heard of Sky Odyssey. This PS2 flight sim game, clearly made on a shoe-string budget does little to wow you when it boots up for the first time, and if the comments on its You Tube gameplay videos are to be believed the vast majority of people continue to not be wowed long after. It's a hard sell to the closed minded, not imbued with the smooth edges of the current generation, or even the art style to make up for it, and thus it's not surprising that this game would be hard to find on most gamer's shelves.

But it's good, really really good, and if you approach it with an open mind you'll have a lot of fun with it. With such a game though, it takes time for word of mouth to circulate, people to write blogs about what an under appreciated gem the game is, to get people to give the game a fair shot. Such a method of marketing however is almost completely incompatible with the hardware cycle.

When every new generation comes out, it's predecessor throws in the towel, and with it an entire generation of games become inaccessible to an audience not prepared to keep their old consoles hooked up to their televisions. Luckily my PS2 sits faithfully connected, ready to serve any fits of nostalgia that take my fancy, but without it I'd be deprived of the hundreds of PS2 games that passed me by the first time around.

Some of the best books of all time didn't become popular at all until after their author's death. These books, often regarded as masterpieces by modern critics were simply too progressive for their original audiences, and it took time for them to become acceptable. Are console manufacturers denying games that same right by not allowing them to run on the most up to date hardware? Has the best game ever slipped under the radar already, and then been denied entrance into the modern gamer's library because of hardware limitations?

As it stands, if I want to play an under appreciated game released on the SNES, I have to go the route of the morally ambiguous emulator, unless the game is one of the small number to be released on modern consoles as a retro-game. I could of course go out and purchase a second-hand SNES, and then hunt eBay for the game in question, but at the end of the day the developer won't benefit at all from my purchase, I'm just filling the pockets of the store in question.

Why don't developers embrace the emulation scene, put a little promotion behind these old games no one would otherwise play, and maybe try and make a little money in the process. They could put out an 'official' emulator and charge a small amount for ROMS. It's going to reach a fraction of the audience of a full-blown retail release, but surely it's better than having your game fall into oblivion after just six years?

Hold on to your old cables, your old controllers and power leads. Keep your vents clear and your disk tray dusted, your leads untangled and systems ventilated. Some of the best games out there are just waiting to be discovered. Finding them should be the hardest part, not getting them to run.

The Alpha Male Poses of Activision

Bobby Kirtick surprised most of the gaming world last week when he publicly expressed doubts that Activision would always be a publisher of Playstation games to The Times. His comments are based on Sony's sales figures for the Playstation 3, the sales of which have lagged behind those of Microsoft's 360 and the Nintendo Wii in the majority of the month's since its release.

Kirtick's comments are strange, not least because of their uniqueness, because whilst sales of almost all of Activision's games have been stronger on 360, their PS3 counterparts have not sold badly. During the development of a game, the porting of assets to different consoles is a task which occurs later in the development process than many other things, and as such the cost of producing games would not be much reduced should Activision choose to stop supporting one platform.

Some, such as GiantBomb's Jeff Gerstmann, have speculated that this discontent with sales figures may come as a result of Activision's heavy reliance on peripheral based games such as Guitar Hero. These games take up a large amount of shelf space with the accessories commonly sold with them, and as such negotiations must be made with retailers to take these items in the first place. The supporting of several consoles he reasoned, may make these negotiations much more difficult for the publisher, which recently announced that the next installment of it's popular Tony Hawk franchise would be bundled with a skateboard controller.

Kirtick did however choose to disclose what Sony could do to redeem itself. His statement that “they have to cut the price” echoes what many have been saying for some time now, though Sony has on multiple occasions denied that any such plans exist. This denial is not unexpected however, as console sales inevitably fall after such an announcement, as consumers wait for the cut to occur before making their purchase.

However likely these threats are to take place, the fact remains that they were made by a very powerful figure in the industry. With its merger with Vivendi, publisher of the massive multiplayer online game World of Warcraft last year, Activision became the largest videogame publisher in the world, overtaking long time rival EA, publisher of such titles as The Sims 3 and Madden. Ceasing support from Activision would be a serious blow to Sony, with titles from the Call of Duty and Guitar Hero franchises failing to make a return to the console year on year in the future.

Sony responded quickly to the threats, with their claims of positive growth and a boast of three hundred and fifty new titles coming to Playstation platforms this year. Interestingly they chose not to comment on the advice that they lower the price of their console. This may be due to a price drop that the PS3 may receive this autumn, though such reports, which included leaked pictures of a PS3 slim from its factory in Taiwan, have yet to be confirmed.

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More a test of how well a newspaper style approach to writing would work in a video game context, this story nevertheless interested me greatly.

The Sims 3 Review: The Land of the Green Diamonds Continues

It was always going to be troublesome making a sequel to a game with eight expansion packs. The Sims 2 now lies as a bloated beast, full of features incrementally added throughout the years in small £20 packages, but unbelievably its long overdue sequel The Sims 3 doesn't feel the least bit castrated. The same winning formula has been carried over, the fat trimmed, the remains toned, and what remains is something that is as engrossing as ever.

The Sims 3, like its predecessors, is not a hard game to understand. You take control of 'Sims' virtual people who must be guided through their life, their jobs, their relationships, and as always, their trips to the bathroom. Chances are though, with the massive success of the franchise, you already knew that, just like you know that it's never as simple as letting your Sim's life simply run its course, that the game is much more intriguing than it would initially seem.

As always, the Create-a-Sim mode is your first port of call when starting a game, and typically it's more powerful than ever before. Not content with just giving you control over every curve of the body, the editor now supports the 'Traits' system, whereby instead of choosing an amount of points to coincide with your Sim's personality you instead pick five traits to define them. These range from the useful (ambitious, brave, lucky) to the destructive (evil, slob) to the seemingly aesthetic (excitable, evil) but this emphasis on personality extremes rather than a sliding scale makes for a game which is much more interesting to watch. With no limitations on how many 'good' traits a player can choose the temptation exists to game the system by choosing the most useful traits for each Sim, but by doing so the player will miss out on some of the game's most amusing features.

With such a robust character creation system its a shame that you hardly ever get to see it. Unlike in The Sims 2 where you took control of an entire neighbourhood, The Sims 3 will see you take control of just one family, and any additional households you make must be played in an entirely different game save. This change allows for every person in your town to grow old at the same rate as your Sims (so you'll never be faced with the awkward situation of out-growing your teenage heartthrob) but also means that you only ever experience the game from one viewpoint - there's no hopping out to check out how that family across the street lives - which leads to less variety in the game, unless of course you're willing to have multiple save games.

As much as I'd like to say The Sims 3 is a completely new game, that simply isn't the case. Instead what I can say is that whilst every major mechanic from the previous game exists here in some capacity, nearly all have received some sort of tweaking. Career progression for example is no longer completely binary. Whereas before you'd have to have 3 friends and a logic skill of 5 to get a promotion, now you'll progress up the career ladder for simply going to work for long enough. There still exists an incentive to get these skill points, as doing so will get you promoted much quicker, but this removes the much of the stress involved with trying to reach the top of a career track, leaving you free to explore the entire town without a load screen in sight.

This relaxing of the requirements needed for promotion, as well as the decreased emphasis on keeping your needs met, allows a much greater level of involvement with the world created. There are exotic ingredients to grow, challenges to complete, and a huge range of skills to learn, all of which means your much more likely to spend your playtime cooking hot dogs for your neighbours in the town square rather than making sure your Sim doesn't take a wizz in the shrubs. There's more stuff to do than there's ever been before, and the game is careful to remind you that it's all possible.

The game does have some rough edges. Sims will warp in and out of vehicles rather than opening the door, which makes having that expensive car in your driveway much less cool than it could otherwise be, and the absence of any form of cutscene for important points in a Sim's life diminishes what importance they hold. Part of me however, wants to look at these shortcomings and forgive them when there's so much content in the game. Less forgivable is the small amount of customisation options for certain items such as hairstyles, which starts to rub off badly on EA when the Sims 3 site is full of additional items that can be downloaded for a charge, available from day one.

If you've read this far, then I can at least assume The Sims mildly interests you. The Sims 3 removes most of what made the previous games boring to the non-fan, and adds enough new stuff to make it worthwhile abandoning those old expansion packs. Of course if you always hated the entire idea of the Sims then your choice here should be a no-brainer, it is after all, still The Sims.

Dialogue in Games

Many developers seem to have taken the fact that actions speak louder than words, to mean that they should ignore the strength of dialogue altogether. The intricate weaving together of tonality as well as factual information that not only develops a game's story, but also its characters, its settings, and its structure as a whole is pivotal to most movies but has been largely ignored in the interactive portion of most games. You may be able to learn much about a character from their actions alone, but when complemented by stunning vocal work, their personality is so much more pronounced and defined. Unfortunately for gamers, dialogue isn't conducted in the spirit of the medium at all in most titles, it is predefined, and offers little in the way of choice for the player to sculpt to make his own.

This almost certainly stems from the inability of current day technology to simulate human speech. Whilst visually we've gone from strength to strength, and have reached a stage where a character can be given lifelike animation without the presence of an actor, speech still needs such an individual to produce it in the first place, and as such become impossible to edit on the fly, as is the opposite with animations which can be blended into each other to give the player complete control. Part of me thinks that if companies invested in new sound technology with the amount of gusto they do into graphics, then sound and the vocal work contained within it, could be miles ahead of where it is today. Whatever the cause the result is the same, it's very hard for developers to allow the player to control a character vocally.

Some games will opt to have a completely mute protagonist. The player will control everything the character does on-screen, and so there's no disconnection between the two. Half Life is the most famous example of this, but we must also remember that Claude from GTA3 never spoke at all. These games were much more immersive than others with a speaking protagonist, you don't play as Gordon Freeman, you are him, and this pays off in dividends for the game's narrative.

Some games relegate dialogue entirely to cutscenes, the wholly un-interactive leaning post for old school game design narrative. When I'm playing Metal Gear Solid, I don't have an active role in it's story, I'm just watching events as they happen, and in between these events I'm simply guiding Snake along. I'm not playing his role in any sense, because he does far too much without me. Uncharted does the same thing, it's narrative is passive, and seeing as that's clearly what Naughty Dog were going for, they get full marks from me.

Interestingly some games have tried to give the user power over dialogue, the most recent example that comes to mind being Mass Effect, with its use of dialogue trees. Whilst this is definitely the best way of allowing the player to completely assume the role of the lead protagonist, (hence role-playing game I presume) containing any part of a game within its own minigame can make it seem much less important than it actually is. It's not a central part of the experience as other actions such as shooting are, but in the best works of fiction dialogue is always hugely important.

To my mind dialogue is as important as any other action you can perform as a character. You could even say it's more important than your trigger, depending of course on what kind of character you're playing as. It therefore follows that dialogue needs its own corresponding buttons to control on the gamepad. You could as an example use the d-pad for such a task, having the up button illicit a positive response, the down negative, the right could cause some sort of query to be asked, perhaps if the player needs something repeated, and the left could be a simple 'Hello' button, to initiate conversation with an NPC. Yes it's a basic system, but it's a start, and would hopefully leave most players much more connected to their lead character than many games today.

The more we examine such a system the more we realise how difficult it would be to pull off. A huge amount of voice samples would need to be recorded, to avoid the repetition that would kill the believability of your character, and all the dialogue needs to make sense as a conversation at the end of the day. If such a system were to be successfully implemented however, just imagine its possibilities, walking into a town and having a natural conversation with an NPC before heading out on a quest, actually getting to control the confrontation with a final boss before ripping it a new one.

Yes it's impossible, and yes it'll almost certainly not happen in our lifetime, but it's a nice idea isn't it?

A Little Post About Music/Games

Music has/Games have been around for many centuries/decades now. In its early days the audience for it was relatively small, consisting mainly of the super rich/nerdy, but in recent years/the last century its popularity has exploded with decreased barriers to entry allowing everyone to enjoy it. Some people believe that the music/games produced today are nothing compared to classical music/retro games, but most are content with modern music/games.

Back in the day, to listen to a piece of music/play a game people would have to go to a concert hall/arcade, but since the invention of the record player/home console people have been able to listen/game in the comfort of their own home. Some modern music/games are still performed live/released in arcades as well as having album/retail releases, and many old pieces/arcade games have been re-recorded/remade over time to allow them to run on the latest hardware and usually in doing so their sound/graphical quality is improved to take advantage of this.

There is a large community surrounding music/games containing many who enjoy a large number of different genres. Some music/game types however, enjoy a much more passionate fanbase such as metal/fighting games or jazz/point and click adventure games, two genres which have in the past been far more popular than they are today.

Whilst much music/many games have huge mainstream appeal such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers/Grand Theft Auto and Green Day/Call of Duty, a large majority of music/games are only appreciated by a small enthusiast audience. Major labels/Publishers have started to target more mainstream audiences in recent years, efforts which tend to be looked down upon by music/game connoisseurs, as being shallow and of little worth such as Hannah Montana/Wii Play. Due to this shift in audiences many music listeners/gamers have turned to the independent scene where much more original music/games can be found, usually having been produced with a much smaller budget.

Most high brow art critics would not deem modern music/games to be art, but there are individuals who produce work many listeners/players would deem to be artistic. As the audience for these pieces is very small, music/games tend to be generalised by the wider population as having no artistic worth. This will probably never change as there is little financial incentive for music/game executives to find artistic titles/acts, and so most people will be unaware that this art form exists, regardless of its quality.

Music/Games have also been threatened in recent years by digital piracy which has lead to a radical shift in the industry. Much music/Many games can now be downloaded legally from places such as itunes/steam and some music is/games are completely free to play in a browser, their revenue coming instead from advertising. Some people hove claimed downloads are killing the industry, others say that it has merely caused it to evolve.

Despite what many people say the music/game scene is greater today than it has ever been. with something to suite everyone's tastes being produced somewhere.

Moral Choices

Like many games before it, the recently released 'Infamous' by Sucker Punch, developers of the Sly Cooper series of games, has moral choices. In a medium driven by interactivity and pining for a wider appreciation the inclusion of such a system should be applauded and praised, but instead it has been greeted with a nonchalant "meh" by gamers and critics alike.

They're not wrong in doing so of course. Infamous' system of morality is relegated to a mere side-show, and has no bearing at all on the game's overall plot. One of the most common choices a player must make, between reviving or harvesting downed civilians is made with a single button press, and the result is to push you towards two polar opposite, yet equally rewarding extremes of 'hero' or 'villain.'

The choice here is completely binary, but seeing as each choice is in theory equally rewarding this should prove to be an interesting moral dilemma. Except it isn't of course because 95% of players will invariably always choose to be good if the rewards for being bad are just the same. There's no moral choice here, just a sense for the player that they're missing out on half of the experience.

It also doesn't help that as with every game ever made to include moral choices it is blatantly obvious when such a choice is being made. This isn't merely jarring in as aesthetic sense when big huge button prompts appear on screen, but also holds the game's morality system back from achieving its full potential in that it announces exactly when you are being judged on your actions, and of course once you know that, you know your actions throughout the rest of the game will carry no moral consequence. Grand Theft Auto 4 did this, and it resulted in its handful of choice scenarios adding next to nothing to the game (the exception of course being when the choice was not whether to kill but who to kill).

Of course these choices could be done much more subtly. A game could choose to give you the option of going down one of two paths, but not tell you that you're making such a choice. It could even give you the option not to kill certain individuals.

This highlights an interesting thought however, that all gamers would choose the path they'd be conditioned to choose through years of gaming so long as they were unaware that they had any other option. Every time you reach a level's boss you kill it, because that's what you do in every other game. When playing the Darkness the opposite happened to me, and I held off killing the final boss because I thought it was a moral choice scenario in which I should choose to resist the evil inside f me in order to reach a 'good' ending. Evidently no such ending existed, and I was eventually forced to kill him.

Another interesting point is that if the player or reviewer doesn't know they're making a moral choice, haw are they supposed to appreciate it? You could argue that this means the consequences of the choices need to be obvious to all but this brings us back to our core issue of subtlety.

Morality is never compelling if it's as block and white as games so often make it out to be, but the dated systems developers hove been using for years will only ever allow it to work this way. Hopefully some day games will have moral choices that are included for reasons other than as extra bullet point on the back of the box. Until then we can continue to play as the 'good' guy in every game we play, and ask ourselves if choosing the evil path was ever really an option.