Shock: Newspapers Oversimplify

Okay, let's have a checklist of things I'll not be swiping at here:

- The "Main Stream Media".*
- Politicians.
- Jack Thompson.**
- Those Snooty Brits.



But I went and read this story in the Sun expecting to feel the usual contrary little glimmer of support, and instead - horror! - found myself agreeing (to a point) with the geeks who're making it the target du jour of their ire.

A study of literacy at primary schools in 41 countries saw our youngsters slip from third to 15th in just five years.

Ministers claimed pupils spend so much time on consoles that they are not burying their noses in books.

Yeeessss, well... Your wording, Sun, gives away the whole game here.

The whole stereotype of kids "burying their noses in books" itself brings to mind not the vast majority of Commonwealth youth, but a spotty, speccy minority who would oft be lampooned in the pages of Buster and Whizzer and Chips for their quizzical literacy.

Surely the children spending three hours a day on games - which, between FFXII and Phantom Hourglass, I'd sometimes approach myself at the moment, and I've read Lolita AND Interview with the Vampire - aren't for the most part using their gaming to supplant nose-in-book-time? Surely that third of ten-year-olds are just (and to my mind this may actually be worse) playing games when they would otherwise be building forts and playing soldiers and the like? Surely it's not that Britain's youth are being tempted from Lord of the Flies to Lost in Blue, so much as they're replacing conkers with Conker's***?

Of course, this is a bit of sensationalist misdirection on the Sun's part (I'm as surprised as you are), as the story here isn't really "zomg video games are turning our kids into dullards" so much as it's "Pol bemoans standard of education, doesn't have answers". Giving several million pounds toward literacy is laudable, but you can throw all the money you like at education and it won't do much if you're not putting it in the right place.

It's a shame Steve Maharey has recently departed his position as our Minister of Ed here in New Zealand (his work was just beginning: our standards of literacy are even lower than the rather abysmal scores in the Old Country): along with not doing a terrible job at getting the bucks for the teachers, Maharey's passion for rebuilding education for the 21st Century was fairly tireless.

Modern education hinges on principles that make it abundantly clear that you can't expect any amount of hand-wringing or funds-appropriating to change the tech-savvy of today's learners. Nor should you. It can't be a case of education versus fun; and when this fact is realised, the resultant changes in outlook don't need to be implemented with a resigned sigh of "if you can't beat 'em..."

Oh, right, we're on a gaming blog! Sorry, that's what happens when you post from work. Anyway, the point I'm making is this: Danny's and my 14-year-old brother is proof positive that Ed Balls [pun reflecting both the quixotic misguidedness and hilarious name of Mr. Balls here].

I think Joe would agree that the #1 factor in his getting past his inherited dyslexia has been none other than his enthusiasm for what I guess we have to call the new media - his mastery of the written word was enabled largely by enthusiastic use of popular educational tool Runescape, and through the reading/writing interaction of games like this and (the Sun's pictorial example) The Sims, he's now an accomplished short story writer and the kind of reader who polishes off books like Wu Ch'eng-En's Monkey saga for fun.

So the real story here, not that the Sun will report it and not that the nerds will spot it through the red mist of their persecution complexes, isn't games ruining education, and it's not politicians ruining games. It's the story of a country whose education system doesn't realise that it's the 21st Century.

* A piece of mine appears in a free little print publication this week, and is quoted in strange, non-rollover-enabled static applets I'm seeing in the odd floppy RSS compendium sitting on the coffee table, and let me tell you, it's making me feel a lot more legitimate than the prestigious dotcom at which it originally appeared.
** Guy's got his head screwed on right. Isn't it odd how the people railing against him re: Manhunt 2 suddenly slowed their collective roll as soon as Manhunt 2 turned out to be rubbish? Surely if you really cared about the ill-informed interpretations of politics supposedly motivating your anti-Thompson diatribes, the quality of the media you seek to defend would be the very definition of a non-issue? But that's a whole nother post.
*** I know, I know, I was very proud of that myself.

Extrapolating Your Extrapolations for Humorous Effect

There's plenty to be embarrassed about in Ars Technica's reporting of how Guitar Hero 3 sells music.

Perhaps the easiest thing to be embarrassed about (depending on how you happened on the story) is that a story on digital music traffic, the effect thereon of videogames, was covered on music-in-popcult blog Idolator, while their sister all-about-videogames blog Kotaku apparently missed the boat entirely*.

Also embarrassing is the seemingly rushed, fawning, isn't-technology-wonderful extrapolations from the figures**. Three of the bands supposedly reaping the most reward from the "Guitar Hero Effect" actually see marked growth in paid downloads for week of release, but then a drop in that (admittedly, still high) growth once the game has really had time to reach consumers.

It's safe to presume that the spike in downloads is the result of early adopters. The spike occurs on the week that ends on the day GH3 is released, meaning one of two things motivated those downloads: either

- GH3-heads are spending the week pre-emptively downloading everything they can from the final, final final, easter-eggs-and-all setlist; or
- Dorks who call themselves "hardcore" without a hint of irony are playing through the game on release day and downloading songs they like and/or hear as soon as they find them.

Now, these are both nice things to happen. It's always nice when people discover new music to like. But is it really changing the face of music if a few nerds realise that the Beastie Boys are kind of like MC Lars and thus worthy of a spin?

Embarrassing in a more business-as-usual kind of way is the attempts at legitimising this quickly-coined phenom: "a source close inside the music industry" is commenting on our data? Oh my, I bet it's Rick Rubin! And what does this source say?

"As long as your song ships with the game and you offer the track to be downloaded digitally, you see an increase.

"You don't say, dingus! Who'd have thought that making your track available for download would result in an increase in downloads?

Finally embarrassing is the clearest extrapolation from this confusing, half-story of a graph, which is that clearly, no Ars Technica staff were frequenting hipster bars during the big definitive-articles-are-the-saviours-of-rock boom of a couple of years back, which is hardly surprising. Look what they've done! With a simple de-pluralising, they've gone and made Julian Casablanca(s)' band name go and look dirty!

* Kotaku tend to operate on a siege-mentality us-against-the-world position common to geeks, so the easiest reasoning is that the story was passed over - despite Gawker blogs linking to each other whenever possible - on account of it didn't involve nerd-rage righteous indignation, naked non-actual women, or name-dropping re: the Kotaku staff saying nerdlinger stuff to awkward VG execs.
** To combat which, I am about to provide some rushed, ill-informed, isn't-technology-a-bubble counter-extrapolations.

Video Picks of the Week

Probably not updated every week.

This game is SOOOO Mario Galaxy. It's crazy. If it were to be finished and put out today it would probably be accused of being derivative despite being first worked on in 1995.

Reading a fellow blogger's post about saving sonic, finding mention of this game I'd never heard of*, reading the story surrounding the whole thing, and then watching this video added up to one of the most interesting days I've had on the internet in ages. Watching this video is kind of like listening to You Know You're Right by Nirvana, in that it is a somewhat depressing reminder of what might have been**: this could've been the Sonic everyone wanted after his 2D era; this could've been the game to stop Crash getting as big as he did; it could've of forever stopped people laughing at new Sonic games. But sadly it was never any of these things. The politics between the American and Japanese factions of Sega and the near-death work on the part of some developers, and the whole death of Sega thing I guess, would make a really interesting Tetris: From Russia with Love style documentary. You can read a fairly well written account of the sordid ordeal here.

This is developer Chris Senn's pitch video he showed to Sega for the original concept. Sega was quiet about the game for years but since all of the video footage and such came to light about halfway through last year all the nerdlingers are saying that he's a genius and he's the only person who should make the new 3D Sonic game. Maybe they're right, it has worked before, by that I mean handing a 2D to 3D transitional game to an American developer, a bunch of crazy yanks did make Metroid Prime. It is a bit different in this case though because many of Chris Senn's team had previously worked on Sonic 2 and 3 for the Megadrive. The only thing Retro did was play Super Metroid.

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/16333

I suggest downloading this video rather than streaming it, because it's a rather big file and watching stuff on Gamevideos is always a fucking bust because their servers are so shit. I never knew that the FX chip was being worked on so long before the actual release of the SNES. I look back, without the aid of Wikipedia and the like, and think of the FX chip actually being ulitised as quite a late addition to the SNES's lifespan. Once people had got over the power of Mode 7, Nintendo was all like "hey, look what else we can do." Well at least that's how I remember it going down in my head. If Argonaut were doing crazy 3D experiments with the Gameboy that would later become the FX chip, then why didn't we see Super Mario World launch the system with some of the crazy elements that made Yoshi's Island so awesome?

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/9143

Continuing the unofficial Vapourware theme of this week's Videos I continue with one of Nintendo's most famous cancelled titles: Starfox 2***. Elements and concepts from this game would later make their way into Vortex, Super Mario 64, Lylat Wars, and Starfox Command. Dylan Cuthbert says in the video that Miyamoto can be quite harsh with ideas and concepts at the time regardless of the time that went into them, but he never really forgets them. Starfox 2 was, at the time of cancellation, very close to being finished. So there have been rumours about a Virtual Console release since the service was launched. In my opinion that's the sort of thing the VC was made for. Bring it on.

I suppose I can't really do a Vapourware themed post without mentioning Duke Nukem: Forever. So that's all I'm going to do, mention it.

Danny

*I'm showing my ignorance here I know, all the Sega nerds are probably laughing right now. But I was pretty much a Nintendo Fanboy growing up. We sold our Master System to buy a SNES and never actually had a Megadrive.

**Although the two things do also both contain really awesome music.

***Also with fucking awesome music.

Metroid Prime 3: Stupid Story

Chief Samus?

The weird thing when you look at the similarity between Metroid Prime 3 and Halo 3's conclusion is that Metroid Prime 3 came out first (they were August and September respectively in the US). So is that Halo's story is scarily like Metroid's, or is that both of their stories are like every other military-based trilogy ever?

Sadly, Corruption is not the Last Crusade desperately needed after the trilogies overly dark Echoes*. It doesn't follow any of the rules of trilogies. It doesn't hark back to the spirit of the original or cleverly bring the story full circle at all, rather it brings a lot of extra plot and character elements that serve to almost ruin the entire Metroid Saga, whether it be Prime or not.

Back when there was Metroid, Super Metroid, Prime, and even Fusion I was excited about the group of scientists that were part of the Galactic Federation**. I'll be honest, what excited me the most was there resemblance to Weyland-Yutani (the nefarious corporate entity from the Alien universe), illustrated best by their dangerous experiments with Metroids and Metroid DNA and the disregard they had for any consequences. Fusion for the first time included Space Marines and through them the game told us a bit about Samus' military influenced past. However somewhere between Metroid Prime 1 and 2 the Galactic Federation and these Space Marines became one and the same, and because just about everything about Corruption is decidedly western, these Galactic Fed were then portrayed as gruff American grunts whose only solution was invasion.

A Storied Story

At the outset Metroid Prime's Phazon saga seemed exciting. Prime started by telling us what the Space Pirates were first really after and then unveiled more of the secrets of the Chozo and Samus's strange armour. By the end of Prime we were beginning to know the true nature of Phazon. At the beginning of Echoes we learnt that Phazon had spread itself to other planets, and then throughout the game we were woven into a nice self contained plot of war between the Luminoth and the Ing (which bought in the Chozo for good measure). However somewhere along the way we were introduced to Dark Samus and this is where the problems began. Dark Samus was never really fleshed out in any way; she was just depicted as an anti-samus. It was hard to understand why or where she fit in. In 3 we now learn Dark Samus was created by Phazon, or rather the planet Phaaze, but why would a bio-form intent on corrupting the entire universe create a doppelganger of a lowly Bounty Hunter? Granted she is a legendary bounty hunter but as 3 shows, Samus is hardly the biggest of the Bounty Hunters you meet in the saga and she does have known weaknesses. Why not just create a huge living monster out of Phazon who doesn't have the same inherent weaknesses as your adversary?

Although Dark Samus did bring about one of the most successful parts of the story: the in-fighting within the Space Pirates caused by the god-like worship of Dark Samus***. Prior to this the Space Pirates were your classic 1 dimensional villains. No one really knew why they were after Metroids or even for that matter what Metroids actually did. The biggest fault with Corruption's narrative is that I imagine it takes great skill to create back-story for a story that didn't really exist in the first place. Back then story in games was nowhere near where it is now: games were looked on more as experiences rather than interactive adventures. The original Metroid's biggest hooks were saving your game, and walking left.

One thing Corruption does well is the Elysian area. It introduces the Chozo into the story and looks and plays exactly like a Metroid game should. If the whole game was like that I'd be happy. As it was I had to put up with a lackluster musical score, two almost identical escort missions involving endless space pirates, and a rush of suit upgrades at the beginning of the game followed by an almost complete lack of them at the tail-end of the game. Playing Corruption brings up a lot of questions, like: 

What are ship missile expansions for?
You only ever use them in I think two scripted set pieces and you never need any more than what you're first allotted. 

Why bother giving me loads of energy tanks if they're not even used in the final section of the game? 
Going into Phazon Hyper Mode makes them largely pointless.

And why do each of the planets have to be so goddamn small? 
The total area of the game probably doesn't even add up to that of Prime 1.

Metroid Prime: Corruption is a really excellent first person shooter, with some of the best controls I've ever come across for the genre. It just also happens to be one of the worst Metroid games ever made.

Danny

* It was so dark it had its own dark world.
** The Galactic Federation were setup as a kind of interplanetary UN.
*** This wasn't the only example of God-like worship in this game: The Elysian's worshipped the Chozo, who were labelled as The Creators. On account of discovering their planet and creating their civilisation.

Dimensional Dilemmas

Videogames stand at the forefront of a crisis.

Beyond this generation games cannot move into the 4th dimension*, that of course being Time and Space. Now before we get too far ahead of ourselves, its fair to say games have not yet conquered the 3rd dimension, and some would say that they have not explored all they can in 2D. But moving through the dimensions over the years has been a symbol of game developers moving forward, and it has usually been shown through the growth of the platform genre: 2D platformers had you moving left, right, up, and down on a single plane, then 3D platformers added depth with the...well you all understand what that brought to the genre. The platform genre is the best one to explain these dimensional upgrades, if you take Racing games for example: racing games have always been to a certain degree 3D because a 2D racing game wouldn't make sense (I'd be interested if someone could prove me wrong here). You could never see enough of what was coming up next, and in most racing games you can't Jump - an incredibly vital part of the mechanics of 2D games.

These leaps forward are best viewed in key Mario games. The breakdown is: Super Mario Bros. showed everyone how 2D platformers were supposed to work; Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island then showed us all everything that was possible with 2D platformers**, and then Super Mario 64 did the whole birth of the genre thing again with 3D games***. But in order to go more deeply into how games have moved through the dimensions we have to look at what Videogames have done to the concept of dimensions, how that concept has been so skewed by developers, journalists, or marketers to suit whatever point they are getting across. We have to look at the addition of a little thing called ".5".

Making things up


Ever since maybe Yoshi's Island, videogame industry publishers, developers, and commentators have been labeling certain types of 2D platformers as 2.5D. This is a fabrication, in the real world something cannot exist between two dimensions, dimensions are absolute. But for this line of thinking to work all you've got to do is forget that the 4 main dimensions can be labelled or assigned to actual things (lines, squares, cubes etc) and instead think of games as being on a multiple point scale. As I've said before Doom can't really be described as a true 3-D game but if you put it on the games industry's scale it would probably be about 2.75D.


Let's explore this notion further in 3D

Take a moment to compare Super Mario 64 with Crash Bandicoot: Mario 64 is the benchmark and is a true 3D game on the industry's scale, Crash on the other hand looks and plays somewhat like a 3D platformer but because of a conscious decision against freedom by its developers you always run largely in one direction (sometimes misguidedly towards the screen) through it's very narrow environments or even what you could call 2D sections. So Crash Bandicoot is probably about a 2.9D on the scale. It seems odd when a critic might complain about Super Mario 64's use of Invisible Walls on the edge of some areas but then gladly play and rave about Crash Bandicoot which sometimes feels like 3D platformer's equivalent of prison. Both games were very well received and are still revered today, you could argue that Crash Bandicoot is the better game of the two because instead of having a reliance on breaking-new-ground and experimentation it concentrates on the conventions that made platforming games fun in the first place****, although you probably won't win because it's like saying Sonic The Hedgehog is a better game than Super Mario Bros. because it's faster. Alternatively, you could argue that Crash Team Racing is a better game that Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing combined, and in that argument you should always win.

Beyond the 3rd dimension there has been little experimentation: Microsoft's Blinx played around with it first in 2002 with Blinx: The Time Sweeper then further explored the 4th dimension with 2004's sequel Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space. Underneath all the new play mechanics however the two games still played like Mario 64 clones***** so on the scale they'd maybe sit at about 3.25D. I haven't yet played it, but from what I've seen Super Mario Galaxy does something a little more than 64, Sunshine, and just about every other 3D platformer before it. So on the industry's scale it could be a 3.5D game. And maybe that's just as far as the industry can (or should) go?

- Danny* I suppose it would be possible to make a Tesseract in a 3-D platformer, but I can't imagine it would be very fun to traverse.

** Despite the release of New Super Mario Bros, Yoshi's Island is probably the greatest 2-D platformer of all time. Closely followed by Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil.

*** It was sure a lot more fun than the isometric funfest Sonic 3D: Flickies Island.

**** It's probably more than a coincidence that Super Mario Galaxy has 2D play sections...and a Spin Attack.

***** In the same way that most Sega Megadrive/Genesis games played like Super Mario World clones.