Wireless controllers don’t work, they just make things worse….

Having purchased a cheap Sony MOVE controller last week, I have completed my collection of ‘motion’ controllers for all the three home consoles. And having played with all three, I have arrived at my final conclusion which is that they’re all bollocks.

The problems are many, but the principle one is that all three controllers suffer from lag between the movement of your hand and the action in the game. This is a fundamental flaw that cannot be overcome at this time due to the tech not being good enough which is basically down to the fact that it’s in its infancy. But that’s something  that will be overcome in time over the next few generations. The real problem goes deeper than that.

How many of you like to play video games standing up? I’d wager not many (other than when you’re in the zone, pissed as a newt and about to shake your arse into your friends’ face as you beat them in a cup final on FIFA). Also, how many of you can continue to wave your arms and legs around for longer than 10/20 minutes before getting tired? Again. I’d wager not many of you.

The problem is that actually using the motion controllers is uncomfortable and they are physically tiring! Also, due to the positioning of the TV in most people’s living rooms, they often don’t give you a good view of the screen. In my opinion, motion controllers are flawed from a design point of view. And this means that many of the game developed for them are also flawed.

Let me give you just a touch of my experiences from each of the three wireless controllers.

Wii
I put Skyward Sword into the drive and was anticipating a milestone in the history of this once great series. Instead, I got a 10 year old looking game (nothing to do with the controller of course) that was almost unplayable due to the control system. A part of that is because Nintendo decided to make the basic control system shit – that never helps by the way! And secondly, they put a core mechanic in there whereby you have to go into a first person mode to ‘look for’ objectives that is controlled by the Wiimote. It’s horrendous. Completely unusable. This first generation of motion controllers cannot be used in first person – they just don’t work. First of all, it was constantly losing the central point, so I had to reset it almost every time I came into this mode. Secondly, the sensitivity was so bad that I couldn’t be precise with it. And thirdly, every time you touch the sides of the screen, it moves. I don’t want it to move, I was just checking out the bit at the side!

Horrible experience. And this was from one of Nintendo’s own top brands! So you can’t even accuse a 3^rd party of being shit.

PS3
Eyepet. Ok. So this title is hardly a game aimed at me. But I have two young children who would like it. It took about 2 minutes to confuse the fuck out of the game. First - touch the floor with the Move controller so that the game can register where your floor is. Ok. No problem. Second - shake your hand to make the eyepet move towards you… Shake your hand to make the eyepet walk towards you… Shake your hand to make the eyepet… “I AM SHAKING MY FUCKING HAND YOU STUPID BASTARD GAME!! NOTHING’S HAPPENING!!”

Xbox 360
So the Kinect has one obvious difference to the other two motion controllers in that is has no controller – ‘you are the controller’ as Microsoft love to say. It’s your hands and your body that translates interactivity into the game.

Ok, so I’m not going to choose a game to show Kinect in a bad light because I don’t need one. Just the configuration program is enough to prove my point. Stand in the spot shown on your screen. I can’t. My sofa’s in the way. Oh. So I stand as close to the sofa as I can. The Kinect accepts it. Then doesn’t. Then does, then doesn’t, then does, then doesn’t…. This continues for pretty much every single Kinect game there is. It loses you and re-finds you as often as traffic lights change on a street corner. You constantly have to ‘wave’ again… and again… and again so that it can find you. Then there’s the distance problem. Most people don’t have the space between the Kinect sensor and the sofa (as I don’t) so you’re often playing with your legs pressed right up to it which is uncomfortable. I know what you’re about to say –‘buy that Nikon Kinect sensor thingy that requires less space’. Yes. I already did that. It doesn’t work either. Actually, that’s not necessarily true. It does work better, but it has one fatal flaw – you have to stand SO close to the Kinect that you’re looking right down at the screen. My children – who are obviously much smaller than me - have to pretty much stand about 1 foot away from the screen in order for the sensor to see them!

As much as the Kinect tech excites me FAR more than the other motion controllers is spoiled by the he fact it doesn’t work. None of them work! Why on earth would anyone want to use a motion controller when the current 360 and PS3 wireless controllers are SO frigging good anyway!? They are! They work brilliantly, have almost perfect sensitivity and using your thumbs on them works like they’re an extension of your arm and hand. Apart from some slight tweaking which might make them even better in the future, they’re nigh on perfect.

Dumb me down.

So what’s really going on with these stupid motion controllers? Why were they invented in the first place? Seeing as they’re so bad at controlling games, which is, you know, what they were created for in the first place, why did they make them? Well. My own personal conspiracy theory goes something like this:

Gaming executives don’t play games. Gaming executives can’t play games. Gaming executives understand gamers in the same way that an average Joe understands a scientist talking about Higs Boson. So when the industry started to invite all these very clever executive marketing and sales people to join their companies, they struggled. Don’t get me wrong, these were brilliant people that could sell ice to the Eskimos as they say. But they didn’t understand games or ‘gaming’ or gamers.

So one days at Nintendo HQ, one of these clever S&M type bosses said “I can’t play any of these games. Those controller thingy’s are shit. Can you create me a new type of controller that even I could use? If I can use it, then anyone can use. That means the mass demographic can use it!”. The rest, as they say, is history.

That one moment at Nintendo towers in Japan changed the course of gaming history. And as is often the case with these things – i.e. when people who don’t really understand something attempt to change the thing they don’t understand – it all goes horribly wrong. Now, be aware that ‘wrong’ in the manner in which I am using it means ‘wrong for people who love and enjoy video games’. I don’t mean ‘wrong’ in a business sense. Because the fact is that motion controllers have made Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft millions upon millions of the stuff that they all love more than their own mothers. The sales stats for all three motion controllers are fantastic – there’s no denying that. The hidden ‘cost’ however, is that it was short termism and they turned their backs on the very people that had kept them – and the entire industry – in business: Gamers. You remember them right? The ones who consistently go out and buy all those games in the first place?

That’s right, in chasing the auntie and grandma dollar, they sold everyone else down the river. Motion controllers were designed to dumb down video games specifically so that those that didn’t play them would be able to. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love the idea that auntie’s and uncles and grandma’s are playing video games. I love it! But the truth is game controllers have reached such a height of design that they are at a point where they are almost perfect. And those executives who proclaimed that the mass demographic weren’t playing games because of those controllers were talking bollocks! I recently played host to eight nine year old boys at my son’s birthday party, all of whom were using the PS3 controllers like they were born with them in their small hands. I didn’t teach my son to use a controller (other than tell him which buttons to press to perform which actions). He did it all by himself, inspired by the sheer desire to play FIFA. He badgered me and badgered me – despite trying my best not to let him play games – until I gave in. Within one hour, he’d picked up the concept of the controller and was performing basic moves. Within two hours he was more than comfortable with that controller.

Six months later, he forced me to buy WWE All stars for him. And even though I played it for five minutes – and therefore didn’t teach him how to play – he picked up the moves and control mechanics all by his lonesome. Is my son a genius? No. he’s a bright kid, but not a genius. So how come he can learn to use the controller in minutes but grown adults couldn’t? I can’t answer that for sure. Perhaps those adults didn’t have the motivation? Perhaps the fact that none of them are gamers or people who even play games meant that they just never had that desire to learn? I can only guess.

Here’s another well-worn belief that is BS in my opinion: The mass market did NOT move to play games thanks to the motion controllers! Anyone who tells you that is talking bollocks. The mass market started playing games because games changed overnight to offer them something that they wanted. Where was Wii Sports on the Gamecube? Where was Dr Kawashima on the GBC? The answer is they weren’t. So the truth is that the mass demographic came to gaming not only because of the Wii motion controller but also because the controller perpetuated the need and creation of games that would appeal to that same demographic.

So! Are there any games that work better with a motion controller than with a gamepad? Yes. Of course there are. The fact remains that any game designed specifically with a principle platform in mind, works best on that platform. So games that were designed well will work well. Wii Sports, Just Dance, Michael Jackson – these games work perfectly on them. Most games don’t however. Because most of them weren’t designed in a clever way to take advantage of the controller – the controller was shoehorned in to a game design.

So where next for motion controllers? Well, they aren’t going away if that’s what you’re thinking. No. Too much time, effort and money has been spent on them and anyway, their financial success completely overrides any lack of critical attainment. Personally, I expect them to get better in the next gen consoles. The tech will improve, our understanding of them will improve and maybe, just maybe, by the time we have a 3^rd generation of motion controllers, they’ll be as usable as current gamepad controllers. So we’ll need to have a console ship with both (or a big promotional push). By that time, their complexity will rise - as is always the way with anything like this – they can’t stay the same – they have to evolve, get better and become more usable right? So by the time we reach a 4^th or 5^th generation of motion controllers, we’ll probably not need traditional game controllers anymore because they’ll mould into one. And at that point, some big shot studio executive at Nintendo will say ‘Hey! Those controllers are so complicated. I can’t use them. If I can’t use them then that means the mass market can’t use them either. Let’s design a whole new controller so that non gamers can play games too!’

And on that day my friends, you, the general public (and me, the mid-core gamer demographic) will buy them all over again in droves!

Where exactly did ‘Epic Mickey’ get it so wrong and Castle of Illusion get it so right’.

In part 2 of my assessment of Epic Mickey, I delve right into the heart of platform game design and compare and contrast Castle of Illusion (referred to as COi from now on) and Epic Mickey (henceforth referred to as EM).

I'm not convinced that there's one rule to rule them all but I do know that there is one major rule to developing a great platform game – and it's one that IMO, Junction Point got so wrong.

Rule 1: Platforms in a platform game need to be comfortably traversable.

Obvious? Yes. But you’d be surprised how many games get this wrong. It’s possibly one of the biggest issues that sets apart a great platform game and an average to poor one. But what does the statement actually mean?

Well. It means that the 'real estate' of any platform that a controllable character can jump onto and walk on top of must be of a size that the character – being controlled by the player - can comfortably move around on.

This is basically a calculation that takes into account the character size and the walk animation cycle which is then used to work out the size of the traversable top of the platform. The further the distance the character moves in taking a single step, the larger the traversable area needs to be. My own personal preference is that this space equates to something in the region of about two to three steps of the walk cycle.

In practice, setting up this rule isn't that difficult: Create a flat square platform, place the playable character on it and walk around. The character should comfortably be able to take somewhere between two and three steps when walking from one side of the platform to the other before reaching the edge. As mentioned above, this is heavily dependent on the animation and character size. In some circumstances, you might get away with less and other times you might need a little more. There are exceptions to this rule with a perfectly acceptable way of dealing with the exception discussed below.

Now that we’ve expressed the rule, let’s bring the discussion back to EM and COi.

COi does this to perfection. Every platform Mickey jumps onto is comfortable to be on top of. It’s one of the reasons you feel so 'in control' of the little mouse as he’s walking and jumping around. Mickey is a dream to control; walking, jumping and running around is never stressful, is always reliant on your skills to make the correct jump at the right time and if you die – it’s always your own fault (something that I don’t need to tell you is a #1 rule of any game right?).

So what about EM? How did Junction Point deal with this rule? Well. They didn’t. Every single level in EM is littered with areas and platforms that Mickey can traverse that are simply too small for him to be easily controlled on. Thin balconies, rooftops, lamp posts, ledges, windows – they’re everywhere! And this, in my opinion, is one of the biggest failings of EM. Many people point to the camera, but actually, I believe that although not perfect, the camera system would have been workable if the design had put in place the rules they needed in order to not make it a hindrance to players.

For instance, When Mickey jumps on top of a small platform in EM, you often slide off. When you fall, the camera goes nuts trying to readjust to the world geometry in conjunction to Mickey’s location. Fall off a ledge that has a wall a few feet behind where you were walking and the camera tries to adjust, then readjust as he falls, and continues to readjust all the way down and finally coming to a stop when Mickey stops. Where it stops is reliant on luck. If you happen to be standing on the wrong side of a wall - your fucked: the camera throws a wobbly.

They didn’t even have rules to state that basic geometry should not be built in such a way that causes the camera to adjust. So don’t place buildings, or walls, or in fact anything that sits higher than the camera within a certain distance of each other. I.E. Don’t put a high wall opposite and close to another high wall (where 'high' is higher than where the camera sits).

Interestingly, there are certain sections in the game where Junction Point did adhere to this rule and the camera and control of Mickey work much better, so I do wonder if they worked it out too late in development but didn’t have enough time and resource to fix earlier built geometry? I have a suspicion that this might be the case.

Ok, so what’s the exception to this rule and how can you have small traversable platforms such as bannisters, ledges etc? Easy. It’s all to do with Mickey’s animations. In COi, If Mickey jumped on top of a small platform – or indeed, whenever he reached the edge of any platform, he started to falter. You could see him, arms outstretched, trying to stop himself from tipping over. This is an incredibly powerful visual feedback to the player; 'I know I can’t run on here, I know I’m on precarious ground. I can see it! So what do I naturally do? I go slower. I take much more care.' COi was very clever in the way they used this and coupled it with a proper ‘sliding down a vertical platform’ animation that meant if Mickey was ever on a bit of dodgy geometry and started falling, he would enter this sliding animation which again, gave the player a powerful visual that told them exactly what was going on – you’re no longer in control of Mickey as he’s falling down. When Mickey landed, you got control back. Very easy, very clever, years ahead of its time!

Contrast this with EM. Mickey gives no feedback that he’s on a small platform and therefore the player doesn’t instantly realise he needs to take care. But even when you learn yourself to go slower, the walk slowly animation is not a good one – it’s too cumbersome and the camera not being a great one means that you often can’t control Mickey comfortably whilst he’s on top. You end up going so slow and having to readjust every micro step to try and stay on there. It’s not nice - it’s frustrating and painful. Had they forced a ‘faltering’ animation and coupled it with an auto ‘careful walking animation’ controlling Mickey on all of those ledges would have been a much nicer experience and the game play would have gone through the roof. Even if this problem was kept to a minimum, it would be ok – no game is perfect right? But the fact that EM is littered with small platforms means it’s a game killer. This, more than anything else, made Epic Mickey a frustrating game to play. What could so easily have been a great game, was turned into a painful experience because of these few, basic schoolboy errors. Well. In my opinion anyway.

COi got these things so right. They are level design perfection. Right up there with the Mario games for me. Epic Mickey on the other hand, got these so wrong and fell the other way. A case of so close, yet so far. Sorry Warren and the designers at Junction Point - it’s easy for me to criticise, but had you got that right, you would have had a great game and a great legacy on your hands. Have you fixed these problems in EM2? I really hope so!

There are several other things that marred the game for me, such as how they used the 2D side scrolling sections as 'hallways' between the full 3D levels or the basic control of Mickey (his jumps and using brushes for instance). But these are secondary to the 'traversable platforms' problem for me. If there's any further interest in discussing those, I'll write another post on the subject, otherwise, that's it for Epic Mickey and Warren Spector for now - until Epick Mikcey 2 is released of course!!  :)

Thanks for taking the time to read my bollocks post.

Love and kisses,

GigiFusc.

Where Warren’s going wrong with Epic Mickey.

So I recently read an interview with Warren Spector in which he discusses a few things about Epic Mickey 2. Amongst all the usual stuff, I found it very interesting that he claimed not to have played any of the old Mickey Mouse games. I think his reasoning was that he didn’t want those games to taint his design in any way.

Now, first of all, I have no beef with Mr Spector – he seems a great guy who has made some great games in the past and I’d even guess that he’s a pretty cool boss to work for due to his enthusiasm and love for what he’s doing. But I find this comment surprising. My initial thoughts are that he’s lying – he doesn’t want to get into any possible legal problems with any of the publishers or developers of those older games who could cry ‘thief’ (ironically) at him.

If however, it is true and Mr Spector really hasn’t played any other Mickey Mouse games, then that could possibly be one of the reasons why Epic Mickey was not the game it should have been.

Now, don’t get me wrong – there haven’t exactly been a wealth of great Mickey Mouse games. If anything, it’s been a mixed bag - ‘The Timeless Adventures of’, ‘Magical Quest’ and ‘World of Illusion’ on the old SNES and Megadrive platforms were pretty decent - but not great. So the vast majority have been quite poor – everything from ‘Fantasia’ right up to ‘Magical Mirror’ on the Gamecube. In my opinion, ‘Epic Mickey’ falls about half way between that list – it was neither truly great, nor terribly poor. For me, the term ‘flawed classic’ which has been used to refer to it by others, is as apt a term as any.

Epic Mickey is very pretty in the looks dept. It has some excellent ideas, an interesting world and great characters. But ultimately, it failed in the single most important area that any video game must not fail in – it wasn’t very playable. A combination of a poor control system and a god awful camera (Sorry Warren - you must be so sick and tired of people telling you that) turned the game from a great one, to a ‘What a shame, it came so close but chuck it in the bargain bin’ one.

We’ll discuss Epic Mickey in further detail later on, but in the meantime, I would like to bring to both your and Mr Spector’s attention to one other Mickey Mouse game that can hold its head above any precipice and stake a claim to be not only a genuine classic, but also, one of the best 2D platform games on any platform.

You know what game I’m about to name check – ‘Mickey Mouse and Castle of Illusion’ - specifically the Megadrive version.

If Mr Spector genuinely hasn’t played Castle of Illusion, then I strongly recommend he does so. Now. If none of his team of designers have played it, then again, they need to – right now. Right this very instant!

Castle of illusion, despite being a ‘Mickey Mouse’ game, is sublime on almost every front. Graphics were beautiful (and still hold their own today relatively speaking), but where it really excels is exactly that one place where Epic Mickey failed – game play. It played like a dream! And more than that; playing it today – it still plays like a dream.

So why on earth would anyone developing a Mickey Mouse game not look at the single best Mickey Mouse game ever made that also happens to be one of the best platform games ever made? Doesn’t make sense does it? I reckon Warren’s telling porkies myself.

So this leads me to a few questions:

-          Just what is so bloody good about Castle of Illusion?
-          Where exactly did Epic Mickey go wrong? (and it was more than just that dodgy camera)
-          Is Warren going to continue to get it wrong with Epic Mickey 2?

I don’t want this to turn into an epic (pun intended) blog post, so I thought I’d separate it out into two or three posts – the next one will be answering the first question above and showing my man love for that game.

Cheers for now,

GigiFusc

I remember the first time I saw his eyes. I was mesmerized by them. “You can see the eyelashes!” my friend exclaimed in astonishment. He did indeed have great eyes. Very detailed and yes, he even had eyelashes. This was 1987. We were 17 years old and the only escape from the dull monotony of working class life in London's east end was the wonder of the multitude of worlds that video games created.

There I was in the sweaty, spunk smelling bedroom of my out of work teenage friend as we loaded up the latest game on his Commodore 64 computer; The Last Ninja. A game that achieved what we now term 'best in class' for pretty much everything. The graphics were jaw droppingly beautiful. Not many games could claim a ‘beauty’ attribute in those days; 8 bit machines just weren’t powerful enough, but Last Ninja achieved it.

And it didn’t stop at the great graphics - the game play was top notch too. You controlled a ninja walking through lush environments, fighting against baddies, exploring, finding weapons and items and solving fairly simple puzzles (for the most part at least). The Last Ninja was a showcase for video games. It played like a dream and it sold by the shed load. I was young, completely hooked on video games and this instantly became one of my all-time favourites.

It’s now 2012. I’m sitting at home. My wife and two kids are asleep upstairs. I’ve had somewhere in the region of thirty years of a wasted life playing games. I've wasted the last fifteen years working in the games industry in the vain hope of actually working on a game that I actually cared about. Old. Jaded and bored by the glut of identikit AAA games, I thought a nice change of pace was in order so I broke out the Amiga emulator.

I scroll down the long list of games, trying to find one the peaks my interest and there it is - The Last Ninja Remix! It takes seconds to load in comparison to the several minutes of the C64 original and when it's finished, breaking through time and space. Bridging 25 years of game play. There they are again. Those stunning eyes of his still hypnotise me. And he still has eyelashes!

My memory kicks in and within minutes I’m playing it like I’m still 17 with more time on my hands than Scot Bakula in Quantum Leap. It's incredibly impressive how much they managed to fit into this game. If you push aside the amazing graphics and animations, you’ve got full combat, world interaction, exploration, puzzles, multiple item usage, multiple weapons and they’ve even got time for niceties such as praying to Buddha who gives you hints! Truly impressive; for the time – this was up there.

So I’m playing loving it all over again. And then, it comes. The first river crossing!

Something that has been hidden in the dark recesses of my mind kicks suddenly back into life. ‘These river crossings were pretty hard to do weren’t they?’

Yes they were Gigi. Yes they were. My body shivers. Last Ninja, for all its greatness included one of the most frustrating mechanics ever in that each level had one or two river crossings where you had reach the other side by landing on several stepping stones. This wouldn’t be a big problem other than the fact that using these stones required pixel perfect jumping – and I mean ‘pixel perfect’.

That would still be ok (if a little hard) if it wasn’t for the fact that the jumping mechanic on Ninja was fucking shit. It wasn’t awful as much as broken. Performing a jump was a simple affair – you held down a direction, pressed the button and Ninja jumps. There’s no control of him once you initiate it – he just jumps and lands according to whether you performed a long or short jump.

The problem is that you rarely land where you expect to land. Ninja seems to do some kind of diagonal jump that takes him from bottom right to top left and vice versa. The horrible jump combined with pixel perfect jumping sections was a recipe for hardness 25 years ago. Today? It’s a game killer. Seriously. I’m sitting here wondering how on earth I played this game back then. With only 3 lives on level 1, I would have died again and again and again just trying to get across these river sections. How I didn’t give up I just don’t know.

Today? Well, thanks to emulators being incredibly sophisticated and frankly outstanding pieces of software, I have two things that turn this game from pure frustration to keeping its place of greatness.

1. Save states

2. Cheats

Infinite lives mean I can now die as many times as I need to try and get over the jumping sections, but also, save states mean I don't have to go back to the start if I make a major mistake.

To give you an example of how hard those jumping sections are; level 2 has a fire breathing dragon that cannot be beaten by combat. If you walk past it fries your ninja arse instantly. So the puzzle is to find a magical orb that gives you a shield of some sort that will let you walk past it unharmed.

The orb has a time limit – something like 5 minutes. It is located on the other side of the world from where the dragon lives. Not that big a deal when you consider the levels are quite small. But when you realise that you have to fight several baddies on the way, this make it a bit tougher. But then factor that you have to overcome two, yes, that’s right TWO, jumping river crossing sections that lie between the orb and the dragon… Well. How the fuck anyone finished this level without cheats is beyond me. I know they did and I know I did. But today. Bloody hell. It’s IMPOSSIBLE!

So even though it’s still quite a tough thing to achieve and very frustrating, the cheats and save states get me through it. I have to look at myself in the mirror and realise I'm not the hard core gamer I once was. I still love all the same hard corey things. But I no longer have the patience or the time to play through excessively difficult sections in games anymore.

The tolerance levels in video games have changed vastly in those 25 years for me. I assume that younger gamers have that time. But do they have the patience? I'm not so sure. Is this change in tolerance added to the lack of patience of today’s youth what has made the entire games industry move towards linear corridor games with high ratio of WOW:pace? I think so. And that's a shame. Not because the shit jumping mechanic in Last Ninja is something I'd ever propose, but the knock on effect of change but I do miss the ability to explore worlds. Some games still have it I guess. But the high number of AAA's that use Call of Duty as their blueprint has led to games becoming samey and boring in my opinion. I'm sure the youth will disagree.

In the meantime, if you’ve never played a Last Ninja game, well, I strongly suggest you try it out. I recommend the C64 version as that’s the best one, but the Amiga ‘Remix’ is still good if second best. I’d also say jump in at #1 – don’t play 2 or 3 first. It’s a continuous story that spans all three games and you do need to play them in order to appreciate it.

Hey! How cool is that? I went through an entire blog post without using the word ‘bollocks’! Oh. L

Video games are bollocks. Fact.

They're a complete and utter waste of time.

What better way to waste my life then, than to talk about them?

Feel free to add your comments to any crap posts I write.

Thanks.

GigiFusc.