Mobile, not virtual reality, is the future of gaming

I have a confession to make: I completely and unironically love mobile games. Maybe it’s the fact that my computer has been dead for going on three weeks now, but I can’t deny that there is something very appealing about the idea of having an entire world in my pocket, even if those worlds have, traditionally, been shallow and unrealized, even exploitative. There’s also something about mobile gaming that’s even more accessible than portable games like those found on the PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS. Perhaps it’s the fact that phones are somewhat less clunky than your typical portable gaming device (even my behemoth of a Galaxy Note is less bulky than my 3DS), or maybe the fact that a lot of them can be played with one hand - one finger even in some cases, and it’s hard to deny that, in this day and age, we pretty much always have our phones with us anyways, so it’s no real inconvenience to pocket the thing on your way out the door.

It’s also somewhat more culturally acceptable for me, as an adult man, to have my nose glued to my phone rather than my 3DS in public, if only just.

Even more to the point, as the technology becomes more and more impressive, the possibility of actual, meaty gaming experience coming to mobile becomes more and more likely every day. Not only have we already gotten a bevy of good ports - I recently finished Final Fantasy 6, which is great (questionable artistic decisions aside) and started on Final Fantasy 9 (if you’d have told me five years ago that I’d be playing a PSX game on my phone I’d have had a conniption), and I’ve been interspersing sittings of This War of Mine in between babysitting my time- (and wallet-) killing apps - but getting truly, mobile-exclusive game experiences is not, in my opinion, that far off.

And once we cross that threshold, I think we’ll truly see what mobile gaming is capable of...and I think we’ll find that it is mobile gaming, not motion controls or virtual reality or the next iteration of the X-Box/Playstation/Wii, that is the “future” of gaming.

Don’t worry, that cringe running up and down your spine at the speed of blech is perfectly natural, but bear with me.

The fact that I was able to make that joke and 99% of you understood my intention (even if you didn’t think it was funny...that, also, is perfectly natural) is the first, and one of the biggest, hurdles that mobile gaming is going to have to overcome if it expects to even have a future, let alone a respectful one. For every Sword and Sworcery, The Room, Fallout Shelter, and Knights of Pen and Paper, we have a seemingly endless slurry of cheaply-made cash-in games with shady or even downright unethical business practices meant to trick you or your children into spending (or accidentally spending) thousands of dollars for literally no gain - an endless stream of “addictive” and “time-wasting” drivel for which “time-wasting” and “addictive” are the best (and most frequently-used) compliments anyone can come up with. Seriously, check out the Google Play Store reviews for the best-rated games. Addictive is almost always the number one highlight, followed closely by time-killer or some variation thereof.

Even some of the more-respectable gaming experiences on mobile, games like Clash of Clans and the afore-mentioned Fallout Shelter, are oft-maligned for demanding too much of your money, and those are hardly the worst of the lot. I have sunk more money than I care to admit into Avengers Academy, Kingdom Hearts Unchained x, and Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, far more than I would spend on a mainstream, triple A title, and for a far less-meaty gaming experience. The fact that the term “whale” - a term used by the game industry muckety-mucks to describe someone, generally their target audience, willing to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on their games - even exists is evidence of a massive problem of philosophy in the field of mobile game development. It is something that the industry is going to have to get past if they ever hope to make the medium something substantial and meaningful, and if we are to ever afford mobile games any modicum of respect.

The other rather substantial problem mobile gaming faces is one of identity. Almost every game I’ve mentioned thus far has been ported to other platforms - PC mostly - and many more of the most significant gaming experiences to be found on the platform - your Final Fantasies and Baldurs Gates and the like - started off elsewhere, which substantially diminishes their use in any argument for mobile gaming as the “future of gaming.” In fact, I’d argue that we’ve seen incredibly few games that are truly “mobile-only” experiences. You could argue that this is a problem with all gaming platforms, that there’s really few, if any, gaming experiences that can be experienced on one platform but not another, but the truth of the matter is that the mobile platform is one of the few currently available that is capable of delivering that truly exclusive experience. In fact, we’ve already seen it in AR gaming like Ingress, Run! Zombies! and, yes, Pokemon GO!

This is really at the heart of the whole thing and why I think mobile gaming is the “future” of gaming. I don’t mean that in the future we’ll only be playing games on our phone. Good God, for all my pushing of the platform that’s a world even I wouldn’t want to live in. Can you imagine the eye-strain? What I mean is that the mobile platform is going to be the first platform, perhaps since the inception of gaming, that has a way to play games that literally cannot be played on any other platform. Even some of the less-substantial games I mentioned before - games like Clash of Clans, Avengers Academy, Tiny Tower and the like - benefit so much from the accessibility that mobile gaming provides that I don’t think you could ever experience them properly on any platform other than a phone or tablet. Perhaps a portable console like the 3DS or Vita could emulate the experience, but even the act of having to flick the device open and power it up would kill the sort of frequent and unobtrusive attentiveness that these games rely on to succeed.

You can argue that these games - both AR games and so-called “idle” games - are insubstantial and easily dismissed as such, but I’d counter by saying we have yet to truly see what these types of games are capable of. Between the prevailing mentality that mobile gaming is a haven for either unethical cash-grabs or lazy and shallow not-games (and the industry’s lack of willingness to turn this popular opinion around) and the fact that the technology, while growing stronger every year, lags intensely behind other modern gaming platforms, I think it’s safe to say no one’s truly tried to see how mobile can be used as anything other than an easy money delivery service.

There is no reason AR games and idle games can’t give us something substantial, something big. Pokémon GO!, for all of its failings (and there are quite a few), shows remarkable promise as an actual game after the sort of experiment that Ingress presented. Yes, I realize many people “play” Ingress, but its value as a game, rather than simply a “go here and push a button” simulator, is questionable. Pokémon GO! provides more game content than its somewhat venerable big brother, and Niantic promises more and more will be added. Whether we will ever see that before the game utterly tanks, which seems to be the direction that it’s going, is up for debate but does not remove its value as an illustrative example of what the platform can deliver.

But even ignoring the game’s current state, and even beyond the promises Niantic has given us, imagine what Pokémon GO! could be. Imagine a game with over 700 (likely well over 800 come this autumn with the launch of Pokémon Sun and Moon) pokémon to find; a game where you can see someone down the street hunting for pokémon and challenge them to a friendly battle; a game where you can travel the world to compete in tournaments and have a different game experience everywhere you go; a game with events that challenge you to go to certain landmarks and find legendary pokémon or stop Team Rocket schemes. Imagine what the game could be.

Now imagine a Digimon game in the same vein with a companion Digivice app in which you train your monster and hunt invading digimon to fight them back into the digital world. Imagine a Dungeons and Dragons game in which you create a character and chase griffons and dragons around your hometown and rescue princesses (or princes!) from goblins that have fortified themselves at local landmarks - all the while gaining experience for distance traveled as well as objectives completed. Imagine a war game in which you form a temporary and uneasy alliance with your nextdoor neighbor and train troops before marching with them downtown to take the gas station from rival armies.

If technology has taught us anything, it’s that if you can imagine it, you can do it. You just have to find out how.

The truth is, virtual reality - which is the recent development that most pundits laud as the “future” of gaming despite its own egregious flaws - can only really change how we perceive games. It’s not an insubstantial technological leap, just like every console generation brings with it new graphical technologies and, with them, shiny new mud-splatter physics, but it doesn’t fundamentally change how we experience gaming or, at its most extreme, how gaming changes how we experience the world around us. Mobile games like Pokémon GO!, Ingress, Run! Zombies! and their ilk, while perhaps stumbling at times, truly show us gaming experiences that can be experienced nowhere but on mobile devices, a sort of gaming that is not possible without a device that is so integrated with the world around us that is uses the world itself as a platform for its experience.

I know it may seem like I’m still riding a high of Pokémon GO! hype in this piece, and maybe I am (it took me so long to regurgitate this opinion that I don’t know if Pokemon GO! has a lot of hype at the moment though, between all of Nintendo/Niantic’s missteps and the simple course of time), but I think the game’s success, despite its (many) failings, shows that the world is ready to see what mobile gaming can really do.

But in order to see that, the medium is going to need some pretty significant champions...and I don’t think Nintendo is that champion. Because Nintendo is a business - a business whose sole aim is to make money. What mobile gaming needs is visionaries who are willing to take a risk on the medium, someone who is willing to break through the perceived stench of money-grubbing, cash-in bullshit that hangs over over the mobile market like a pall. And don’t get me wrong, this is going to take a lot of work. There are few legitimate efforts to make the mobile medium into something respectable in a way that couldn’t be done elsewhere. Sure we have games like the Final Fantasy series and This War of Mine that have received ports onto mobile platforms, and even games that seem to have been designed from the ground up with mobile in mind like Sword and Sworcery. But none of these games tap the medium, challenge it, in a way that truly shows what it, and only it, can do. I think augmented reality is the first real step towards this mobile gaming renaissance, but we’re going to need more developers willing to take this plunge, willing to show what mobile games can do besides just hook whales and cheat unsuspecting parents out of thousands of dollars. Mobile gaming needs its Notch, its Jonathan Blow, its Phil Fish, people who believe in the medium as something worth believing in.

We need someone to take mobile gaming seriously so that we, as gamers, can see what it’s really and fully capable of and I think that then, and only then, will we see the “future of gaming” that everyone has so readily, hastily, and preemptively assigned to virtual reality.

I've made a personal goal to get through all of the Final Fantasy games in the next year or so, so I of course started with Final Fantasy VI, my personal favorite and one of my top 10 games of all time. I'm nearly through the whole thing and I must say, I'm enjoying it immensely, as I knew I would.
But as I played through it, I could see some chinks falling out of the vineer here and there. The game isn't nearly as flawless as I have been harping for years. Ok, I knew it wasn't flawless, no game is, let alone games from 20 years ago, and most of FF6 flaws are due to limitations of its time - the dialogue and story is rushed and awkward in places, particularly where the game doesn't bother to provide checks to see who's in your party (all largely due to memory restraints in the cartridge, I'd bet). I maintain that the game's story is amazing through and through, but being older now and more savy than I was in 1994, I can definitely feel the spots that the great Final Fantasy 6 is showing its age.

I also recently played Mighty No. 9, a game that's gotten a lot of flack, particularly from so-called "major" gaming outlets. Some of these criticisms have been more than earned by Inafune and his team with numerous delays, early gameplay footage that wasn't indicative of the final product (though what we saw at E3 last year was more in line with the final product) and some admittedly shady business dealings. But all that aside - and perhaps because I neither contributed to the project nor followed it that closely despite my love for the old Mega Man games - I really enjoyed the game. I thought the "new" mechanics worked very well despite some steep (and often unfair) difficulty curves and I felt like it was a worthy successor to Mega Man.

Most of the games media seems to disagree with me, lambasting not only the drama surrounding the game but also calling it an uninspired mess. Some people took issue with the controls but it seemed like the folks that didn't like the game hated everything about it, from the character designs of Beck and his "siblings" to the story and the voice acting right down to the mechanics. They said that "the spirit of the Blue Bomber is nowhere to be found here."

But I disagree. I think that good old Rock is everywhere in this game. I just think that we don't want another Mega Man game.

Another game came out in the past decade that people feel is the superior successor to Mega Man: Shovel Knight. But Shovel Knight just felt different. Not in the bad way. But it felt more modern, more updated. And people loved it. And rightly so, it's a great game (well, I mean, it looks like a great game, I unfortunately still haven't gotten around to playing it). But it's a great game because it took the spirit of Mega Man and made it new.

When Inafune made Mighty No. 9, he took the spirit of Mega Man and made Mega Man all over again. Sure he added a dash mechanic that made the game feel faster, but everything from the corny story to the oft-unfair difficulty curve is ripped right out of the old Mega Man games. The fact that people didn't enjoy that tells me that people don't want a Mega Man game - even if they hid that behind claims that Mighty No. 9 didn't resemble Mega Man at all. But the truth is, it did. In everything but name, Mighty No. 9 is Mega Man.

They want to be reminded about the games they love with something made fresh and new from the ground up. They want a balance between retro and modern, a balance that Shovel Knight delivered beautifully, largely with concept and aesthetics.

I started this op ed with my little FF6 anecdote because this has happened to me before, this nostalgia blindness to a game's faults, and I truly feel that if these games had been released today without their ties to nostalgia, even with our seeming clamour for more retro experiences out of the indie sector, they would not be seen so favorably as they once were. If Mega Man was released today, I doubt anyone would cast it a second glance. Why should we hold Mighty No. 9 to a standard that no one was ever given any reason to expect?

I had this same issue with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Having grown up primarily in the 80's, I wasn't quite as poised to enjoy the N64-era games as many others. I had moved onto the Playstation largely because I bought a used model from my friend, and didn't have much of a chance to play the old N64 games. So, without that nostalgia blindness, I'd always thought those old games looked...well, rather janky and unpolished. But of course that was the time. Early 3D was often janky and unpolished.

But after I played Windwaker on the Gamecube, I'd always had a desire to see how the story tied together with Ocarina of Time. So when it was released on 3DS, I jumped at the opportunity to give it a try and, speaking as someone with no prior nostalgia for the title nor any particular love for the Legend of Zelda series, I have to say I was, to put it charitably, underwhelmed.

To put it less charitably, I did not enjoy Ocarina of Time one little bit.

I'm not here to deflate our nostalgia bubbles. I'm still very much guilty of wearing nostalgia blinders myself, and there's nothing wrong with that...except when nostalgia is used to guide the direction of large-scale products only to discover, no, that's not what we really want. It's possible, likely even, that people wanted to hate Mighty No. 9 before it even came out due to the miasmatic pall surrounding the project, but I think Inafune's real problem may have been misunderstanding what people want. But if he misunderstood, I think it's because we all misunderstood. We don't want Mega Man again. We think we do, but we don't. If we get another Mega Man game, we want it to be new. Maybe we want the old aesthetics, but the old mechanics were awkward and jarring. Maybe we want the old concepts (which I personally felt Mighty No. 9 delivered fine), but we don't want those old sensibilities.

We want retro games but we don't want old games. Mighty No. 9 seemingly went in the wrong direction, bringing us an old game with a new look rather than a new game with an old look.

Review: Armello

Gaming culture has undergone a bit of a...well, a regression for lack of a better word. I don't think video games are becoming any less popular as a medium of entertainment, but the last couple years have seen an incredible surge in the popularity of board games. Remember board games? Those things you were forced to play with your parents once a week while they tried to coax out more details about your life in some poor attempt at family cohesiveness? Yeah, those.

But at the same time, not those. Maybe I just wasn't exposed to the geekiest possible board games when I was young, but I remember playing Monopoly and Scrabble and Life. Simple games with simple rules. But those games are nothing like what we've seen come out of the board game renaissance in the last few years. Games like Risk and Settlers of Catan (ok, arguably Chess was very much this type of game as well) set the stage for incredibly complex games like Arkham Horror, Dead of Winter and Legends of Andor, games so complex that many of them could be played cooperatively against the board rather than against each other, which is still a novel idea to this day.

Much in the same way that Hearthstone before it married card games and video games in a way that simply couldn't have been done in any other medium, Armello is very much a child of these two genres and it works very well...for the most part.

Thematically Armello acts as a sort of combination of the Redwall books - which, for the uninitiated, feature tribes of anthropomorphic animals living together in a fantasy setting - and a very watered-down Game of Thrones. The basic premise is that you are a member of one of four clans - the wolves, the rats, the rabbits and the bears - and the ruler of Armello (a lion, natch) has been taken by the rot, a sort of corruption that threatens to drive him to madness before it, eventually, claims his life. Your goal, then, is to put yourself in the best position to take the throne from him and ensure your tribe's ascent to power.

Gameplay wise, Armello is very much a board game at its core. You have a set number of moves every turn and you negotiate the map for resources including gold (to buy things, duh) and cards to empower yourself or snare up your opponents. You must win before the withering lion king's last heart of health wastes away. If no one has claimed victory before then, the person-er, animal with the most influence over the throne (measured in prestige) at the time of the king's untimely death wins.

Combat and other conflicts - like fighting your way through one of the game's many "peril" cards placed by other players or even the king to hamper your progress - is played out through rolls of the dice (many, many dice in some cases) in which you try to match symbols for successes - in combat, swords and shields for hits and blocks and in "perils,"trying to match different symbols. 

In these ways Armello is fun but not especially innovative. It doesn't so much bend the "board game" genre like Hearthstone, in many ways, did with the card game genre, doing things that games like Magic: The Gathering, in its physical medium simply couldn't. But it does it competently and with a nice veneer of paint that wouldn't have been possible on a drab board with cardboard cutouts. And keeping track of all the numbers of modifiers and cards would be a much bigger hassle in a physical medium anyways.

The one thing that Armello does that, while not impossible, would at least be difficult and unwieldy in a physical product is the implementation of the king's "neutral" forces and the universally-hostile "banes," creatures of the rots. While clearly an antagonist, the king is more mad than hostile and while he can be turned on players for various reasons, he and his Labrador guardsmen are more obstacles and nuisances than outright enemies. He can even be manipulated into helping you in various ways. The banes, meanwhile, are a constant, AI-controlled threat that add some spice to an otherwise pretty standard experience. 

Individual games of Armello are fairly short and it would be nice if there was some level of customization to mix things up more, adding health to the constantly deteriorating king to lengthen the game perhaps even additional map sizes to mix things up a bit. But overall, they are enjoyable and nicely paced to be played in a single sitting. Unfortunately, multiple game sessions tend to feel very similar with the only variation being how you choose to attain victory, which mixes things up a bit but I predict not enough to give Armello permanently-lasting appeal.

Finally, the game can be played single-player or multiplayer. I haven't had a chance to play it with my friend yet, but I predict that multiplayer is the way to go. It can be nice to get a feel for the game in single-player mode, but the AI is easily delayed and duped. In the few games I've played so far, I've won primarily by letting time tick away and maxing out my prestige. The AI makes a bit of a clumsy attempt to claim victory but nowhere near the concerted effort a human opponent would. It almost seems to stumble around until the game is almost over and then say, "oh right, I actually have to try and win" before trying for the only victory criteria it can accomplish...one in which it has done very little to prepare for.

So for now, multiplayer seems the way to go, but if you enjoy board games and can gather a group of friends, I'd definitely say give this game a try. It may not have the complexity of some of the insane board games that have been coming out in the past couple years, but it's an experience that I don't think you'll regret.

Dear Nintendo; I love you. I hate you.

Ok, Nintendo. It's time we had a bit of a talk. I love you. You're like my childhood sweetheart and some steamy adult romance all rolled up into one. Now that things have officially gotten weird, let me take a step back and tell me that this latest generation has really made me question the nature of our relationship. I'm not quite to the point of saying "we need to see other people just yet." Compared to the other guys, you're like a knight in shining armor. But lately I've really begun to question your actions.

Firstly, let me preface by saying that the mistakes you're making aren't bad mistakes to be making. You're still being true to you. The mistakes that you're making are all potholes along the right road. Your nearest competitors may be doing sweet wheelies and breaking all sorts of land speed records, but they're going to wrong damn way. I'll keep defending you, probably to my dying breath, but there are some things that I just can't stay quiet about.

Allow me to ditch the tortured metaphors and speak plainly: the way you've been handling the Wii U is absolutely atrocious. It's no secret that you've doubted the efficacy of the thing for years. Low sale numbers seem to have convinced you that your most recent weapon in the console wars is a dud, but that's a conclusion reached on a false premise. The truth is, you haven't given us any reason to love the Wii U. Or, more importantly, you didn't give us any reason to love the Wii U when the thing first came out. Maybe you were sitting high on the hog after basically winning the console war early last generation. Sure things fell through for you in the end, but by then you were basically swimming in cash so no one could call you a failure. Maybe that put you in an attitude of complacency. Maybe you thought the Wii U would coast through on name recognition alone. When that didn't happen, you seem to have thought that we didn't want the system at all. But in truth, what we wanted was more of the system.

Let's get one thing straight: The Wii U has some of the greatest games you have ever made as a company. The latest Smash is an absolute triumph in the series. Mario Kart 8 is the most fun any of us have had in a Mario Kart game for generations. Splatoon? Those silly little kidsquids deserve a place standing proudly next to Mario, Samus and Link. What you have created in Splatoon is a game that will stand the test of time as one of the greats in the catalog. Even some of the "lesser" releases were triumphs. Wonderful 101 was a quirky and unique entry that could have made some nice filler. Pikmin 3 was a great entry into the series and while I never personally played it, ZombiU really added a different sort of flavor to the stew.

But when all's said and done, the Wii U still lacks a solid core of games, and while the catalog is slowly getting to where it needs to be, customers are still wary because of your rocky beginning. Sure, the system launched with Mario 3D world, a return to colorful form for the pudgy plumber, but it really didn't break  the mold.  The aforementioned ZombiU was certainly interesting and Pikmin 3 was a nice addition...but that was kind of it. Let's get one thing straight here, Nintendo systems sell on Nintendo games. Sure, you had a few third party titles, but people don't buy a Nintendo system to play Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed. They come for Mario. They come for Link and Samus and, to a lesser extent, Pitt. They come for the colorful character that you have delivered so well for years and years and years.

None of that character was front and center at the Wii U's launch.

This put a bad taste in everyone's mouth and even long-time followers of your product were wary to buy onto a system that launched with such a miserable library. Sure we had a few things showing up as glimmers in your eye. We knew there would be a new Smash...eventually. And Mario Kart 8 was starting to show its stuff. And of course we knew there would eventually be a Zelda and a Metroid and a parade of new Mario Titles. But you expected people to shell out $400 for promises. And in the current gaming market with promises being twisted, bent, and broken left and right, you can forgive us for not exactly being ready to jump onto the bandwagon because you told us that the rickety old wagon would be replaced with a luxury model sedan somewhere down the road.

Sorry, had to get one more in.

The Wii sold on promises too, of course. Zelda: Twilight Princess was a launch title, giving those of us who didn't buy into his cutesy cell-shaded appearance in Windwaker (f***ing deviants) a return to his more realistic appearance with a new dark and gritty appearance that seemed to win a lot of people over. But there wasn't much else on display...except the Wii itself. And that was a huge selling point. The Wii was the first real motion control console and it sold itself with Wii Play, Wii Sports, and a bunch of other quirky, gimmicky titles that appealed to a market that wasn't yet sick of gimmicks.

Let me repeat that: a market that wasn't yet sick of gimmicks.

Unfortunately, you kind of ran that cart off the road with the sheer number of gimmicks the Wii bought into. I don't fault you for it. You did a lot of great things in the Wii generation. You gave us a truly great Mario game in Galaxy, several interesting Zelda games, a conclusion to the Metroid Prime trilogy, a truly great Smash title that expanded the roster in ways we never thought possible, and the novelty of having Sonic finally join the Nintendo roster, which felt less like two rivals shaking hands but the fuzzy blue hedgehog finding a new home after his last one burned to the ground.

More importantly, the Wii's novelty at launch dominated the competition by a factor of ten (I don't know if that's true, I just like how it sounds) and that capital gave you some wiggle room and, more importantly still, confidence in the console's future. It was easy to back this prize pony because it looked like people wanted it. The Wii U didn't have the benefit of a strong launch. I get the feeling that you were trying to get a jump on the competition by launching a year early, but let me be clear here: you were not ready. The game's library was not ready to support a system that would not have the benefit of fresh innovation like the Wii did. The gamepad was cool (I still really like it, to be honest), but it wasn't enough to carry the Wii U to glory like the innovation of motion control was when it absolutely crushed the casual market 'neath its mighty tread. Add to that a lot of confusion behind the Wii U's name ("is it the same thing as the Wii? Can I just buy Wii U games without the new system? Do I need all this crap to play the game?") and you did not have a strong enough showing to merit the year jump on the competition. Far better to wait a year, put all your effort into finishing AT LEAST Mario Kart 8 and, at best, Smash Brothers (the latter arguably one of the biggest anticipations of your latest generation). That would have given people a library of games that included games they could run through and enjoy once (Mario 3D World, New Mario Bros U, Pikmin 3) and a couple games that people would literally be playing for years (Mario Kart 8 and Smash Brothers). Let me be straight with you here, those two games would have carried your launch in a way that no other game in your library did because people know they can play those games for months, if not years, long enough to carry them through the production time for other anticipated titles.

And let's look at those anticipated titles. People expect things every generation from you. Good or bad, we always know that we'll get at least a couple Mario titles, one or maybe two Zelda titles, a new Metroid titles, Kirby, some spinoffs, etc. Let's look at what we got from your big names: a new Mario that, admittedly, was a fairly good entry into the series; one weird not-Zelda game that, while great, was not a main entry into the series; a promise of a Zelda game that we've only seen one brief cinematic for before it was delayed to 2016...four years after the Wii U's release; a new Star Fox game, nice but certainly not a grand expectation from your fanbase; Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, a Kirby game that, like Hyrule Warriors, was good but not really a true Kirby game; and...not much else. No proper Metroid title to wipe the bad taste of Other M from our collective mouths (all that game's criticism was just that, criticism of that game. We still love the series, damnit), no sign of a Pokemon game (admittedly unnecessary but come on, a new console Pokemon game would be huge on the Wii U), a bunch of weird spin-offs for Zelda and Animal Crossing (Amiibo Festival was the biggest slap in the face of E3), etc, etc. Innovation is great, don't get me wrong. I love that you "went there" with Hyrule Warriors, but why would you give us that before a proper Zelda title? And shunting the new Zelda game off may have been necessary but it doesn't give us a lot of confidence when we already know you're going to reveal your new console next year.

And that brings me to my biggest point: the Nintendo NX (whatever you want to call it, that's what I'll refer to it as here). Early in the Wii U's life, people were...talking. Sales were low. Confidence was low. Your stock prices were low. And then you went and did the worst thing you could have done: you started talking about a new console. A scant few years after the Wii U was launched, you showed us you had absolutely no confidence in the console and said "yup, we're planning for the NX."

Ok, I get that companies are thinking years and years ahead at all times. But there is absolutely nothing worse than buying a $400 machine and then, after years of games drought, hearing that the company is already planning for the next $400 machine. And there's nothing that makes people warier about buying a $400 machine than hearing that the company is already planning for the next $400 machine. That is the absolute worst thing you could have let slip. All other things being equal, if we hadn't heard about the NX last year, things would look a whole lot better for the Wii U now. But right now, we don't even know if the new Zelda game will even be for the Wii U. Sure you say it will now, but with everything else we've had to endure from the rest of your colleagues and even a bit from yourself (I've pointedly avoided talking about the Amiibo fiasco), we can't even trust that.

And now we've heard that Metroid, one of the mainstays of any Nintendo console, won't get a proper entry on the Wii U at all.

This tells me that low sales early in the console's life stole any confidence you had in the console itself, that you feel like you have to go back to the drawing board and design some new gimmick to sell some new console. This is a slap in the face to those of us who adopted the Wii U with faith that you, one of the oldest hands at the video game trade, would deliver despite all evidence to the contrary. But it's looking like that faith was misplaced. You refused to back the Wii U after your mistakes made the thing a bit of a flop...despite the fact that it wasn't the machine but your lack of games that made it that way. The Wii U has some great, timeless entries already. But now that you're looking at the "next big thing," we can't reasonably expect anything else from it. It really feels like this console generation is over for you and even if it ends up being roughly the same eight-or-so year turnaround that the Wii had, it hardly had any of the illustrious joy that that machine's life brought to us...all because it lived under this cloud of unconfidence.

I really wish you had never let slip that you were working on the NX. We can all assume you are, but to say it outright was a knife in the back. I bought a Wii U and I love the thing. I love the few games it has...but I really had hoped to get more out of it. Maybe you did too, but giving up was never the answer.

I hope that when you do release the NX, you make the controversial announcement that it will not be HD. I feel like the longer production times do not suit your unique style of game delivery. We expect more quantity from you, Nintendo, because your quality is almost always assured. And honestly, I'm sick of this push for better and better graphics anyways. It pushes up the cost of game production and lengthens the production time. And I know you catch a lot of flack for constantly rehashing the same games over and over again, but I hope you return to form with Mario and Zelda and Metroid a lot sooner than you have with this generation. "Give the fans what they want" might be a dirty phrase to some, but I think Nintendo fans know that seeing "Metroid 16: The Return of Samus" isn't the same as getting the next Call of Duty or Modern Warfare, that you always find a way to deliver a quality title in a familiar wrapper.

In short: trust in yourself and do what you do. Don't let the peer pressure from the rest of the industry and the people that aren't your fans anyways change how you do your thing.

How failing a quest made me love Darkest Dungeon

So I'm going to tell you a story. A story about a game. A game you should buy. It's not a perfect game, nor is it the flashiest or most polished game. But it is an amazing game, and a game that perfectly encapsulates one part of gaming that I love but don't see very often.

First though, on to my story:

My ragtag party of adventurers was traveling through the ruins beneath Hamlet, a town that was once picturesque but has been overcome by a malaise of madness thanks to my relative, who squandered the family fortune seeking out the hidden power beneath the town. In doing so, he unleashed a Lovecraftian horror upon the town, which brought with it madness and despair.

Thanks, dude.

Anyways, it's my job to basically run an adventurer screening agency and send groups of four cannon fodd--errrr...heroes into the dungeons, clear out the shapeless, faceless, unknowable, unnameable horrors beneath and make the place habitable again. In this case, my group was fairly solid, but not yet very experienced. We had Reynauld, the kleptomaniac crusader ("I'll just be taking this... ...for Jesus."), Dismas, the hard-headed and surprisingly heroic highwayman, Omand the apprentice plague doctor and the faithless vestal Mustel, who wielded the power of the Gods even without true belief.

The group was doing pretty well up to that point. They traveled through the depths, cleaning out the catacombs of the undead like some crazy cross between the Ghostbusters and a zombie plumbing service, as they were hot on the trail of the apprentice necromancer who was to blame for the infestation so they could hand him his eviction notice (Don't look at me like that. The bum wasn't paying his rent, I had no choice. Not to mention the toll the walking dead has on property values. I have to look at recouping my family fortune, after all).

Unfortunately, the journey was taking its toll on their minds. The malaise of madness (remember that?) is a constant strain on their squishy adventurer brains and the challenges of the ruins began to become too much for them. Reynauld was the first to snap and started to become abusive to his fellows, questioning what right they, faithless heathens, had to be battling the legions of the dark. Dismas began to see plots and ambushes in every shadow...and in his own allies. Omand the plague doctor started to become engrossed in masochism, using himself as guinea pig for his unspeakable experiments. By the time they'd set up camp for their first night in the ruins, even faithless Mustel too gave in to her own special brand of madness, babbling incoherently about the invisible light of the sun and stars...though I suppose she couldn't have been too "right in the head" from the start if she was wielding the power of heaven while not actually believing in God.

That night was particularly tense. An insidious trap brought Dismas to death's door just before they set up camp, so I set Mustel and Omand to setting his wounds. It took some time, however. At first, he was wary of them, dismissing the vestal's prayers and claiming he would have no part of the plague doctor's "mad experiments" (which seemed rude considering he'd spent so much time experimenting on himself to get them right). They eventually managed to bind at least some of his wounds, but it took a prohibitively long amount of time and they weren't even able to get to Reynauld's own crippling injuries...likely because they didn't want to go near him considering how verbally abusive he'd become.

Serves him right. No one likes a jerk, Reynauld.

Shortly after the group settled in for the night, spread out throughout the room, either not trusting or not liking their fellows enough to spend the night anywhere near them, they were awoken by an ambush. Fortunately, their training and natural skill was enough to keep them from being killed in their sleep, but it was a difficult battle against cultists and more skeletons...a battle that proved to be too much for their already broken psyches.

Mustel continued to try and heal Dismas, to call upon prayers that even she wouldn't believe would work due to her faithlessness, but he was having nothing of it. "I see what you're plotting," he said, waving off her attempts. It was after one of these attempts that he took a blow that finally felled him...ironically, for all his paranoia, he didn't see it coming.

Seeing his ally fall sent Omand spiraling into his own masochistic malady. Somewhere between euphoric bliss and jealousy, he cried, "HE WHO HEALS IS TRULY IMMORTAL!" and cut himself to prove it.

It turns out he wasn't immortal after all.

Shielding his still-babbling ally, cursing about his fellows' ineptitude the whole time, Reynauld managed to finish the battle all but single-handedly (which did absolutely nothing for his insuferable attitude, let me tall you). Unfortunately, the damage had been done. Two were dead, one's mind completely lost and, in the most pragmatic sense, her usefulness at an end. The ruins had broken my "heroes" and they were forced to retreat...not entirely empty handed for they had found some dusty relics and a small amount of coins, but I still had a freeloading necromancer in my dungeons that I will need to organize another party to clear out before his big skeleton block party tats weekend. Hopefully they will prove to be of tougher stuff than the first.

But I doubt it.

This horrific scene was the tipping point that made me go from liking Darkest Dungeon to loving Darkest Dungeon. Through a series of numbers, random (and sometimes repetitive) dialogue and a stress mechanic that is both surprisingly simple and yet has potential for infinite depth, Darkest Dungeon doesn't so much tell a story (it does, but it's a pretty basic story we've all heard before...not bad, but not exactly innovative) as invite you to tell your own. I love it when a game incorporates random elements in such a way that gives you the tools to craft your own tale. Dwarf Fortress does this beautifully, though if infinitely (and some might say prohibitively) more complex. Sure, everyone who plays the Darkest Dungeon will, at some point, go after the apprentice necromancer as I did, some with greater success and some with lesser success. But each of those attempts are going to be different. Perhaps this guy over here will have managed their heroes' stress better so they didn't all snap (or maybe they all snapped in different ways or at different times). Perhaps that gal over there didn't lose her heroes to insanity but to the mundane...a skeleton's axe or a trap. Or maybe, just maybe, you'll find your adventurers overcome with a sudden surge of heroism rather than madness, and their courage will be an inspiration to their fellows, enough for them to carry on their duty to completion. The random element can often be the difference between success and failure and it is quite often completely out of your control.

This is not a game for the faint of heart. It is prohibitively difficult at times (because, as I said, a lot of the success and failure involved in the game is random) and almost painfully unforgiving. It also may not be a game for those who lack imagination. I suppose there is a sort of mechanical challenge to the game, something meant to be studied, broken and beaten like any other mechanical challenge, through aggressive management of mechanics and numbers...but I think approaching the game like that is doing it a disservice. My above story could have gone very much like this:

My crusader, highwayman, plague doctor and vestal went into the ruins dungeon for the apprentice necromancer quest. Since I hadn't done any stress management for them after the last quest they were on, their stress scores were high and they eventually maxed out. My crusader got the abusive state, my highwayman got the paranoid state, my vestal got the irrational state, my plague doctor got the masochistic state. The paranoid state made it hard to heal my highwayman. He was killed by a skeleton. My plague doctor was dropped to zero hit points and killed himself because of his masochistic state. I won the fight with my two remaining characters and left the dungeon.

Strictly speaking, that's what happened in a mechanical, gameplay sense. And it's boring (well, ok, playing it wasn't boring, but it's not the sort of edge-of-your-seat story that's going to be fun to tell at parties). But if you have the imagination to look at the sometimes-random, even nonsensical things the game does and take a moment to think a little deeper about it, then Darkest Dungeon is a game that will engage you for countless hours, long after the mechanical challenge has ceased to entertain you (whether because you beat it or it's too difficult). It'll engage that part of you that used to play make believe in the yard, to pretend you were a pirate or a cowboy or an astronaut when all you really were was just a spastic kid who'd eaten too much sugar running around in some overgrown grass. Sure, there's some joy to be gained from the strictly mechanical, overcoming what is a pretty unforgiving and difficult dungeon crawling, rogue-like game, but I think it really will speak more to those of us who can still allow an experience not to hold our hands and slap us in the face with a story, but an experience that can take us out of the ordinary and put us in a place with a bag of tools to tell one ourselves.

If you're still capable of that sort of wonder, or if you're simply a fan of dungeon crawlers and rogue-likes in general, then I can't recommend Darkest Dungeon enough.

Darkest Dungeon is currently available for Early Access on Steam for $20.

I give up.

“Adding a Surrender option could tempt players to bail out at the slightest setback, removing focus from the game and potentially introduce even more toxic behavior.” 

I really can’t believe a company as veteran as Blizzard would be this naive. This is Blizzard's reasoning behind not giving players a surrender option in Heroes of the Storm. But people are starting to be surprised that, even without the official option to surrender, negative Nancies and all-around toxic players are finding other ways to surrender. I called this the minute I knew there was no surrender option in the game. Removing the surrender option from the game won't change people's attitudes. It'll just make them change how they are toxic. No one will play a game they believe is unwinnable.

I’ve railed about Blizzard’s decision to not include a surrender option for months now, though. I disagree on a fundamental level that “no game is unwinnable,” not necessarily for mechanical reasons or because of a substantial early lead, but because for a game to be winnable, you have to have A) people capable of recognizing, admitting, and correcting the mistaken behavior that led them to be behind (a rarity online where people would much rather blame everyone else than recognize that they may possibly be culpable in a loss) and B) people willing to put in the extra effort to make such a comeback possible. The latter is more common and, I will admit, I was on the winning side of a SUBSTANTIAL comeback yesterday that was very gratifying.

But I’ve also been on the losing side of such comebacks and they are heartbreaking.

And that’s the other side of my argument. Sure, it’s a pain to have half of your games end in surrenders. But a surrender is only frustrating for half of the players involved...the winning side. And even then, it can be a huge boost to your ego to be in a position where you’re stomping someone so soundly that they feel surrender is the only legitimate option. Still, I’ve had my share of groans where I’m playing well and just getting into the rhythm and the game ends. But I’ve also typed my share of “let’s just surrender and try this again, shall we?” after a domino-effect of terrible mistakes led to a game that is just frustrating. And that’s the big thing. While it’s a mild nuisance for the winning team to have to stop a full-on stomp, it can be absolutely game-ruiningly infuriating to be on the receiving side of that stomp. Maybe I just want to throw in the towel and start again fresh.

So why does Blizzard feel the need to remove the option altogether and force me to coincide with their personal philosophy? If I believe, like them, that no game is unwinnable, I would never try to surrender. Sure, Heroes games are typically shorter, but I can recall quite clearly several games that I was 99% (because I can never be 100%) sure that we were going to lose at five minutes (we’ve all been there. One player AFK pushing in a lane, refuses to help with tributes/seeds/skulls, there’s no way to win when one or two players refuse to play with the team) but the game goes out to 30 or even more minutes because the enemy team just haaaaaaaas to get that last objective or just haaaaaas to push down all of the keeps. We’ve all been there too. Not only are we losing but now, because Blizzard feels like “no game is unwinnable,” we have to sit there and have our noses rubbed into it to boot. That’s not fun at all. And it’d only be marginally less fun for the enemy team (who would still enjoy the thrill of victory) if we were allowed to surrender. I’ve also often heard that it’s annoying to have people throw up a surrender vote and start yelling at people after one bad play 20 minutes into a League game. And I agree. That is annoying. But that person is NOT going to turn into the picture of determination just because surrender isn’t an option. Removing the surrender option from the game doesn’t remove an annoyance from the game. It just forced the toxic players to find their outlets elsewhere. And actually, if surrender was an option, you’d have an easier way to at least divest yourself of said toxic player. I’d rather surrender a potentially (but unlikely) winnable game at 20 minutes and not have to listen to a guy call me a fag who should uninstall and shoot himself than be forced to listen to him while his avatar sits on the spawn point while the enemy team finishes us off at their leisure.

I’ve always said this, but taking away options is rarely a good idea. Maybe just make it very, very difficult to surrender. Obviously putting the surrender option at 20 minutes wouldn’t work in Heroes where the longest games are very rarely 30. But they could put it at 15 or even 10. But more to the point, if you make it so everyone has to agree to the surrender, you’re ensuring that only the most terrible stomps (or a premade) will be required for such a surrender. Perhaps you could put in a 12 Angry Men system where the vote, once initiated, remains on screen and one player can argue their point to try and convince everyone. Maybe if everyone (or even three or four out of five people) vote no, the surrender option goes away for the rest of the game. Blizzard is a smart company. They can figure out a way. But taking away the option, as you say, only encourages people to surrender in worse ways, by going AFK or, worse, just feeding the enemy team more kills...generally while lambasting and just generally being toxic to their entire team. And those people are going to make a miserable situation even more miserable.

On Final Fantasy XV's "Gamplay" Trailer

Nice to see Square Enix hasn't changed any. Their "Gameplay" Trailer for Final Fantasy XV is so typical for them.

*cinematic* 

*guys running (technically gameplay)* 

*cinematic* 

*Shot of generic anime/Final Fantasy girl "Cid" who is nowhere near as visually interesting as her male counterparts*

 *guys running (technically gameplay)* 

*Cid again, boobs* 

*cinematic*

*cinematic*

*guys sneaking past a behemoth (actually kind of awesome, also technically gameplay)* 

*cinematic* 

*cinematic* 

*done*

So, if we are to take this trailer at face value and indicative of Final Fantasy XV's gameplay (which is what a gameplay trailer's for, I would remind you), we can assume there are no mechanics other than movement mechanics and no actual combat. Sounds exciting to me! I suppose after Final Fantasy XIII, we shouldn't be surprised that we, the player, are relegated to the role of simply moving the characters from one cut scene to the next.