Shin Megami Tensei (And Me)

Taking a break from Dragon's Dogma this week for a strange jaunt into trying out semi-autobiographical writing.

   At one point in my life, I was ardently religious. Not some bible-reading crusader, but when thet opic of religion was brought up I was usually the first to speak.

Being young at the time, most of the views I had we're cribbed from my parents and those around me.
Being from a rural town, I was hardly aware of viewpoints other than my own being valid at the time.
"Dumb kid" is two words that could definitely be used to describe me.
Some of the people I was friends with back then we're the kind of kids sucked up in a religious fervor that I can't ascribe any positive feelings to.

   If you've never had someone tell you you don't believe in 'God' enough to hear his voice you've probably never experienced what I'd like to call the most peculiar feeling in the world.
At a certain point, you'll have enough of it. People didn't give answers, so questions start popping up. In most cases, these questions can't be answered.
The longer questions went unanswered, the more other sources starting popping up.
Maybe it had been my comfort zone at the time, but I checked into other religious faiths.
Nothing ever seemed concrete, the concept of 'faith' was elusive every time I examined it.

  What I initially balked at started one of the most peculiar times in my life, especially as a teenager. A person I'm still good friends with asked me if I'd ever heard of Carl Sagan before.
I delved into what little of his writings I could online; for some reason I never went to this library and checked out The Demon Haunted World. Just as that book advertises though, I finally had a candle in the dark. There was no longer a choking cloak of superstition around me;  some of the questions I'd had for years suddenly had answers. Anything that wasn't answered, I had a deeper understanding of the set of tools I possessed that I could use to find them. 

   Remarkably, my desire to learn about the occult didn't really die down. If anything, it was strengthened; it became substantially more fun to approach the subject from an incredibly skeptical viewpoint.
    Around the same time a friend had told me about Sagan, I happened to learn about something else that might have had something to do with the way I started viewing religion.
There wasn't actually a whole lot of gaming going on at my house. Being wrapped up in card games, roleplaying and tabletop (among other things) sucked up a huge chunk of my time.

   I was busy one day looking around the internet, and stumbled upon Shin Megami Tensei on the SNES. The website that hosted it offered only the barest of description (that website, I believe, was A and TG's Quality Roms) of that game that were more inane 'comedy' bits  about the webmasters time spent with it.

   Shin Megami Tensei immediately lept out to me because of it's use of occult and religious symbolism. My previous experience with videogames that did that mainly used it to add spooky flavor to a level or setting; Shin Megami Tensei based its entire concept around theology.
To make a comparison, what I was used to reading about was information backed up by provable fact or testable hypothesis.

   In many ways, SMT is like a videogame version of skeptical theological texts; especially fictional ones. It presents it and the developers views on religion through storytelling and allegory.
Not that I want to imply Carl Sagan and Shin Megami Tensei both are of equal importance; but there's a case to be made that if scientific reasoning can be our 'candle in the dark' perhaps something like Shin Megami Tensei can considered as a painting we can illuminate with those candles.

   To the effect of that imagery the most, SMT handles it's iconography in a pretty specific way. While it's arguable whether or not the ways it tends to portray that iconography is correct (NSFW)
it's pretty successful when it tries to go out of its way. What that representation is, is the relationship between it's cast's views of religion, and with the occult. Both the sometimes violent xenophobia that religion can cause when bent to the will of malicious people, and the goodwill that people who could be defined as 'truly noble' can accomplish with it are equally represented. Sometimes good isn't neccesarily on the side of Law, and Evil with Chaos.

   SMT games tend to open with the protagonist haunted by cryptic visions. Immediately after, the protagonist almost always plays the role of ardent skeptic. I wonder when playing games in the series now if any of the main characters would identify as being atheists during the events of the game. Would a religious man find his faith shaken by the all too often mortal failing of supposed deities?

   At a time when I was dealing with a type of rejection form some of my more religious friends, the series dug its claws firmly in me. Sometimes I would notice subtle little critiques of religion; how often the sinister characters we're the ones who only ever accomplished good deeds out of some promised reward in the afterlife.

   Sometime around examining characters in videogames, I dumbly realized I could also do it to people I know. Sometimes I would make a shitty mistake like assuming people we're no more nuanced than a simple Law or Chaos hero (or heroine!). Ultimately it had more to do with externalizing my skepticism and critical thinking.
Through what we entertain ourselves with, we can come to understand ourselves.

Highlights Makeruna! Makendou

Highlights is a series focusing on unique or interesting games for every console.

Valis

If you’ve ever played a game in the Valis series, it’s pretty arguable whether or not Telenet actually succeeded in making a decent game at all. While the series might have been the child of the developers more than their other titles (and even had an entry created by somewhat famous Wolf Team)
When it came to being compared to other platformers, Valis never had design that never had what it took to measure up to it's contemporaries.
The series was notable for having pretty anime inspired designs, and it's drawing charm was it's heavy use of animated cutscenes, a la Ninja Gaiden on the NES.
Though there we're only four titles in the series, it managed to be ported to a slew of different consoles, all of which were pretty different from eachother. Valis draws on the design template of a lot of the games birthed on the PC Engine, simple platforming with a focus on defeating enemies, and usually some sort of rudimentary auto-charging combat system.
Even against a game like Psycho Soldier, Valis fails to measure up mechanically.

By the time the Super Famicom rolled around, even Valis itself had changed as a series.
The PC Engine original versions mostly ditched the simplistic natures of the first few titles, and started embracing industry trends at the time. Valis III is a notable example, by introducing RPG elements to the series.
I used to legitimately love the Valis series, until I realized how tepid and shallow it was; this mostly came about by playing other, better games.
One of the first games I played that made me realize that Valis was doing it's own template poorly was Makeruna! Makendou on the SNES (though I played the Super Famicom version!)

Makeruna! Makendou

 

 

 Released in the Great Country USA as "Kendo Rage" the American release is notable for not changing much beyond interstitial dialogue and some names.
Beyond that, Makeruna! Makendou is the same game in both regions through and through.
The core of Makeruna! Makendou's gameplay can be explained as a pretty simply action-platformer.
Stages generally have a more vertical layout, rarely include any form of branching or backtracking.

 

Nothing's wrong with being straightforward, because was Makeruna! Makendou has is something that works. Rather than the slow, plodding meticulousness that defined the Valis series, Makeruna! Makendou borders on being a twitch-action game. Everything is trying to kill you, constantly, from every angle. Enemies sometimes spawn just out of reach, or swoop down from above.
An interesting comparison is Super Castlevania IV, as both games have similar 'rules' but for different reasons. SCIV is practically plodding in both pase and the way the atmosphere is structured. Makeruna! Makendou is slow because the player has to be pretty cautious to proceed at all, but mindful of a game-spanning time limit.

Developed by Fill-in-Cafe, which was a small Shinjuku based game developer active through the 90's. Notable was that Masaki Ukyo, Director of Guardian Heroes is commonly listed as working for this company, at least for a brief period of time before joining Treasure.
Makeruna! Makendou was also published by the same company that published Valis! (NEC)



-skeletons

Remembering Remember Me

    If you haven’t read [this] article about Remember Me, do me a favor and please click that link.
It covers a lot of ground I treaded on in my review of the game (that’s up on my tumblr) in a much better fashion.
The author also raises several pretty profound points that I completely glossed over on my playthrough, especially in regards to Nilin’s journey being a spiritual one. I tend to gloss over religious allegory in basically everything (oops).
   When I think of Remember Me though, I tend to get lost in imagining more games using concepts like memory as a balancing point for their content.
   Cyberpunk fiction generally uses not only memory, but thought as its key point; even the most plodding of dystopian Cyberpunk fiction generally examines concepts about whether or not our thoughts can be evaluating of our humanity, or if that concept is tied more to what we remember or what we can give to the world. Much like comic books at the turn of the century, mostly this has to deal with that characters are used for in videogames. The industry tends to evaluate characters as if they were solitary in regards to the constructed narrative. As it is, analyzing not only a game but also how the entire world ties everything together, and what actions happening in it might ‘mean’ is kind of a recent trend in the world of games Journalism. That’s not to say it’s ‘new’ but I’d have to say smart journalism is only recently becoming more popular to write.
   When it comes to Remember Me, the bottom line is mostly that it’s a neat, if completely misguided game. Even reflecting upon the game after reading that article – the game’s best points are still its nature as an almost interactive art gallery of console and computer processing power.
   Maybe something like that will be important one day – which isn’t to say it is now, but maybe Remember Me is evocative of the type of ‘before their time’ games that get released on every console.
   Can we be surprised that Remember Me – a title that wouldn’t necessarily be incredibly experimental
during the last few times periods of videogames might be the biggest example of it during this most recent console generation? Let’s not even get started on how many odd games came out during the PS2’s lifespan. With developers having focused more on market shares than any notion of experimentation, it’s still a wonder that the game was even released.

Overlooking Dragon's Dogma (Part 2)

   What is the role of combat in basically any action game, besides giving the player a direct method of affecting the space they’re allowed to inhabit.
Given that we’ve been punching, kicking, slicing and stabbing for over thirty years now, it’s amazing to see what developers are able to do with modern hardware.
   This isn’t a nostalgia piece, but I do think it’s important to recognize that I don't think
any of us figured videogames – let alone action games, would have become as intricate
as they currently are.
This is a sentence that should always be followed with ‘for better or worse’ though, especially in regards to the way the “AAA” game industry makes action games.
   Last time I touched only briefly on the way combat in the world of Dragon’s Dogma is structured.
Moving focus from the ever-brilliant Pawn System and the way the plot in the game is laid out,
there’s a breadth of ground to cover with Dragon’s Dogma that I think has been rarely touched upon in  reviews of the game.
   Something I noted last week is that the size of the world in Dragon’s Dogma is large – not massive.
The most obvious comparison would be Skyrim but Dragon’s Dogma is a little bit closer in regards to Zelda in the presentation of its world; which is a series of disparate landmarks connected by open fields.
   Most of the navigation in Dragon’s Dogma is a lot more about effectively maneuvering challenge, and not discovering a new route to somewhere. As it actually is too, anytime you go to a new area it’s usually on a storyline quest.
Here’s the thing though: Dragon’s Dogma doesn’t bullshit the player at all like Zelda frequently does.
   If you want to go somewhere, the biggest challenge in Dragon’s Dogma is exploring the unknown.
That’s the importance of the midway game twist, which significantly changes what the player has dealt with (and has to deal with).

   What’s exceptional about the way Dragon’s Dogma handles ‘all of that’ which would be everything that navigation is tied to, is how just impossibly tight that weave is.
You might travel to the same location three or four times in the span of a few hours, whether you’re on quests or just poking around and adventuring, but that journey is never meant to be made easy.
Larger monsters can show up at any point in time, and just about the time the player is powerful enough to deal with what they’ve faced before relatively easy, the player is encountering a different type of enemy.

   Many times, the player might fight something on a quest only to face two of the same creature later as a regular encounter, or one with a different set of abilities or a changed status.
I think this type of conditioned-release of content harkens way back to much older RPG’s, and is kind of a hallmark of JRPG’s in particular. That obscured veil of the unknown covers the entire world of
Dragon’s Dogma up until the very end, introducing new abilities and concepts as far as the end of the game.
   Negatively, Dragon’s Dogma downplays one of its most important mechanics throughout the entire journey, and it’s often not until a repeat playthrough you might notice how just important the crafting system is. Not only does effectively embracing the crafting system make the entire game much easier, namely by enabling you to be much more well prepared than you would normally be. The Crafting System is also brilliant because it’s so closely tied to what seems to be the design philosophy behind   Dragon’s Dogma. If I were to put it into words, it’d be a remark along the lines of everything having a role.
   Very little in Dragon’s Dogma is there ‘just because’ which is very different from many of its contemporaries, quite a few of which carried over legacy features that didn’t necessarily evolve as the design did and stood to contribute nothing to their titles they were present in.
One of the most involved aspects of Dragon’s Dogma is that previously mentioned crafting system.
   There’s a host of items in the game, all of which have dozens and dozens of effects either on their own or when used in a crafting recipe and probably the most interesting thing is there are no ‘useless’ items in the game. Every item can be applied to different situations.
As an example, there’s an encounter later in the game with a Gryffon. Usually the player might have to wait until the Gryffon lands to deal damage to it, but a smart player might make an infinite stamina potion and simply cling to its back for the duration of the flight, or stay on the ground but
use their infinite stamina to stay hot on their feet and avoid taking damage.

Possibly one of the more realistic videogame castles.

   Further to the point: only the players most willing to look for out-of-reach items in obscure places
(sometimes even at different times of the day) will stumble upon some of the most helpful item
recipe’s in the game. Crafting is a huge part of inventory management, as many times crafting a single item can greatly reduces inventory burden; which is directly tied to player movement speed.
   The player isn’t just encouraged to combine items randomly at the start, when inventory space is much smaller at the beginning of the game they’re essentially forced to get used to crafting items and hoarding what might be necessary to use for a recipe in the future.
   As previously mentioned, inventory clutter is directly tied to how fast the player can maneuver and attack; hoarding items can be a double-edged sword. With only two towns in the game, both located a far distance away from where a lot of the action takes place, inventory management often becomes just as important as actual survival.
   Even the basic combat theme plays up this aspect of the game, sounding more tense than the traditional 'epic' fanfare that tons of western games receive, fitting for the mood of the game.
That mood is incredibly important. I've already mentioned Dragon's Dogma's Berserk references before, but it's important to dwell on that, as both the game and the anime have a very close atmosphere, blending traditional fantasy and a sort of 'grimness' that is entirely seperate from the kind of hackneyed inclusion of 'gritty' elements that's pretty much been the standard design template for the last few years.
   Dragon's Dogma uses the elements of the game to set the mood, not by giving the protagonist permanent stubble and a chiseled chest; or by making everyone mopey all the god damned time.

Overlooking Dragons Dogma (part 1)

   You don’t have to be the Son of Sparda to see that Capcom has been trying to get on the western development train for the last few years. With frequent outsourcing and redesigns, constant re-evaluation of their core IP’s and if you’re a little scared that this is going to read like a piece of actual Journalism, don’t be alarmed we’ll get to the videogame in a second.
   When it comes to talent, Capcom was never shorthanded. Shinji Mikami, Keiji Inafune; those are two names that are immediately recognizable to just about anyone who has more than a passing interest in videogames.
    The thing is though; neither of those two men have worked for Capcom in at least a couple of years. Keiji Inafune cited creative differences when he left Capcom, right around the time Capcom seemed to decide to move in a different direction from their Archetypal mascot, Megaman.
     Regardless of their decision to stop making platformers with a blue robot, or turn the ‘award winning’ formula of the Devil May Cry series into…whatever it is that DMC tries to be, that is neither here nor there.
    You have to recognize that without Capcom’s desire to make Asura’s Wrath or cancel Megaman Legends 3; that every decision they have made has brought them here.
Here is of course, 2012 release of Dragon’s Dogma a rare example of Capcom releasing an in-house studio title to the AAA videogame market.
    Dragon’s Dogma is unique because it accomplishes the Herculean effort, namely ‘make a good videogame’ (for the most part) but not in a way that Capcom itself has been striving towards, like because it’s not a joint-developed game.
    We’re living in a time where the Japanese game industry is far from the behemoth it once was.
Even giants like Square-Enix recognize the advantages of owning a western-based studio and even further than that, western properties. Konami is doing it with much success from the Lords of Shadows franchise, Mercurysteam’s attempt to rewrite and redesign Castlevania so it will be more appealing to those with the mental faculties of a four year old child.
    There’s a list of examples longer than just that slightly too-long paragraph, but the difference between Capcom and almost every other developer that’s been trying it is that Capcom can’t seem to find land with any traction. Bionic Commando was very much a Cult Game, most reviewers unable to look past the fact that you could shoot people in the game, but that the mechanics weren’t focused around it.
    DMC definitely exists, and that’s probably the most polite thing that can be said about the game.
Capcom continued to try it while experimenting with their in house development, but whatever they once had, that ‘magic’ that people commonly associated with earlier titles, was gone.
     Even worse is seeing it as magic that belonged ‘to’ Capcom, with their dubious role as sometimes publisher/sometime developer. Like any company, that ‘magic’ was and continues to be built on the backs of other people; in other words, the pool of talent the studio drew from had dried up.
    When a sports team loses its key players, you begin to doubt whether or not the rest of the team can still strive and reach success. The game industry is no different, except Baseball doesn’t suffer as a whole when a studio is shuttered or someone decides to retire for shitty reasons or negative fan reactions. The surprise that comes when that team wins the world cup without a key player is as genuine as when a talentless (literally) developer manages to release a game that's actually enjoyable.
   Dragon’s Dogma surprised me, and I’ll immediately concede to saying that if nothing else it will always have that going for it.
Taking a lesson that From Software taught videogame developers, Dragon’s Dogma’s core approach is a concept you’re familiar with; which is Roleplaying games.

Japanese studios aren’t necessarily known for this type of game, it’s more the hallmark of western studios than anything else. The type of open-world, lore based RPG
isn't something that comes out of Japanese studios very often, so Dragon's Dogma is a unique endeavor.
    Dragon’s Dogma could almost be thought of as the Japanese take on Skyrim. It even follows ultimately similar storyline beats, only involving one dragon instead of many.
Whereas the focus of Skyrim’s world is to wow the player almost from the outset, Dragon’s Dogma is much plainer. There are monsters, but the majorities of them are no larger than you.
   When you run into something like a Gryffon or a Wyvern, the game wants you to think those particular encounters are special. Using lore to actually tie the world together – not merely as a way for the player to experience story that they weren't directly involved in, is used to great effect. The first time a player stumbles upon an ancient Golem on a cliff overlooking the sea, it's particularly surprising.
    Dragon’s Dogma excels at presenting a world that is still familiar, but has the touch of originality, yet mark that the above sentence should always be appended with “for a videogame.”
The game’s world elements are strictly mythological fantasy instead of having much to do with America’s obsession with a certain middle-of-the-road mediocre British writer who popularized the heroe’s journey for a modern audience.
    Those world elements are also important to Dragon’s Dogma because they fit. The monsters that are more wild in nature are appropriately found in places that match them, undead stalk the crypts.
A golem is perched on the edge of a great cliff by the sea, surrounded by massive stones with a purpose the game never tells you about.
    Keener to be used as an example is what the game refers to as ‘The Pawn System’. In addition to the player character, the player also can make a secondary character that has a role as support, freely able to be built just the same as the protagonist but not controlled. In this Pawn System, the player can freely summon up to two other players pawns for support, though those Pawns come as-is.
    This system exists solely for the benefit of the player, it is an artificial system entirely that has no place in the world. People hate pawns though, and deride them for lacking in personality and emotion, and for seemingly coming from nowhere instead of being born. Pawns are an entirely artificial system that’s been given a place in the game world through the actual fiction of the game itself, that’s brilliant because the player never then notices because it’s just another experience.
   Altogether, it’s a thoroughly unique way of including something deeply entrenched in the mechanics of the game and tethering it closely to the narrative. As it’s commonly said, there are many books that do things Videogames are just now starting to learn.
   While it is ultimately a shame that Dragons Dogma does it in such a Video Game kind of way, it’s still neat to see modern AAA titles do.
Ultimately, Dragons Dogma is kind of a parallel of a lot of other titles that have been released in the twilight years of these consoles lifespan. Where I think it excels is the way it borrows concepts from its forerunners and refines them to fit whatever pseudo Dark Souls/Monster Hunter template it fits under.

   It also draws I think, on roleplaying tabletop games, especially in the way it handles its relatively small cast of characters. Each character is more like the fleshed-out NPC's from a campaign in a fantasy roleplaying-game than the relatively huge casts of modern AAA games.    
   Standout among these characters is Mercedes fits the role of closest-ally. If the player had a best friend, it would probably be Mercedes.
   She also has probably one of the only voice actors in the game actually capable of effecting anything close to the stereotypical fantasy accent, but also being capable of putting on a decent performance as well.
    Looking at the game from the point of a massive tabletop campaign I think is interesting, because that closely follows the way Dragons Dogma approaches not just its plot, but the world that the game is set in.
    Appropriately, this is a world where people have been adventuring in for centuries, and the player is expected to not just believe that, but closely adhere to the rules and prophecies laid out by those that come before. By using a cyclical prophecy as the narrative underpinning, it lets the writers do some creative things (for a videogame).
   One of those is the hallmark of letting the player fight previous incarnations of him (and his pawn) at the end of the game. Creative players can recreate the first arc of Berserk, as both of the main characters equipment sets make a cameo. (Mercedes herself looks almost exactly like Casca, without the problematic fate her character eventually met). Steeping the game in a deep mythology and giving the story a cyclical nature, it’s a lot easier for the player to fall into their role than most contemporary RPG’s that try to wow the player with so-called epic set pieces right from the get go. 

    To define the philosophy with the cleverest of analogies, Dragon’s Dogma doesn’t play its full hand until roughly half way into the game, changing what the player is used to – and offering new things to expect right around the time most games are allowing you to get comfortable.
   Dragon’s Dogma’s most important feature has to be the way it approaches the Day/Night system.
It’s a small feature in other games, mostly taken for granted or used to enhance immersion.
What you’ll notice just from looking at screenshots of nighttime in Dragons Dogma is it doesn’t use the standard film or videogame concept of night, replicating the look with in movies what amounts to some stage lights propped up with a black background.

   When you’re out at night in Dragons Dogma, the game is appropriately steeped in darkness, you can hardly see even in the brightest areas where the moon is in full view, much less in the middle of a dense forest.
   The lantern in Dragons Dogma offers only a small pittance of light; a field of radiance around the player character that turns the night outside of his vision into a pitch black void. Dragons Dogma, especially at lower levels, is one of the few games where the player aught be afraid of the dark besides maybe Zork.
   Halfway into the game, Dragons Dogma turns the already dangerous night into something actually meant for the player to be afraid. Not only are monsters more plentiful, they're also twice as strong (stacking ontop of the fact that the game gets notoriously difficult here)
The best effect of this is that on the borders of the players vision, they're likely to see the red glint of a monsters eyes in the distance.
   Suddenly, this makes the lantern not just suggested but pretty much required.
Much of the praise I have for Dragon's Dogma is based around how they turned a mechanic that is often taken for granted, and made probably the most important part of the game.
It is also one of the only RPG's I can think of where I actually put my character to rest at night, you know, instead of just when I need to wait ten hours for some dude to not be fucking sweeping or something.

  Even so, you still spend a lot of time in Dark Places, and even though the player can sometimes afford it, the game has its way of forcing you into surviving the night (especially on longer journeys).
Notably, Dragon's Dogma has very few in the way of dungeons, but each one of them is important in their role of taking the player out of a setting he's familiar with.
  Familiarity is what Dragon's Dogma does its best to subvert just when the player is getting comfortable. At the time you're finally settling into navigating the world, it throws a whole new series of challenges at you and completely moves around the many different monsters and where they can be encountered.
Unfortunately, few of the encounters scale with the player, and there's definitely a point in which the player may notice they're becoming stronger than everything thrown at them up to that point, which kind of lessens the impact of the end of game journey.

Regardless of what you think of the character, Superman hasn’t exactly had the best track record when it comes to videogames. From outings as early on the Atari, all the way up to titles on the PS2, 

Superman’s greatest foe in the digital age has been mediocre videogames.

Mediocre videogames are also my weakness, but that’s another article. 

Whatever it is about The Man of Steel, he tended (especially in the 90’s) to star in increasingly pallid beatemups, culminating in the historically derided Superman 64. 

Perhaps, by examining Superman’s entire history, a different way of looking at the character would be necessary. 

Comic-Old-Guy Alan Moore has famously stated he believes Comic Books are an inherently different medium from anything else, which necessitates a different approach to storytelling than what is capable through film, mostly because people kept making shitty movies based on his comic books. 

While there’s probably a series of essays that could be written to contribute a large amount of words dedicated entirely to the different ways Alan Moore works have been brutalized on screen, he’s not special in that regard. 

The words he chose about comics being different than film, though, are definitely true and do have weight. Perhaps then, they could also ring true about videogames. 

Videogames are a different medium again than film is, and profoundly different from Comic Books. 

Would someone like Harvey Pekar have thrived with a medium like Videogames, or would he have stumbled with it? 

I guess you could compare him to someone like Jonathan Blow, still discovering exactly what works in regards to storytelling with videogames, but I also wonder what kind of game Harvey Pekar would have made. 

Would someone who worked in comics have made an indie-game and I mean that in the way that Fez and Braid could almost be considered ‘indie’ as a genre before anything else; they have an approach to storytelling that attempts to use videogames as the medium to present it, and not cutscenes or what amounts to film (basically, there is no attempt to implant a movie into a game).

Over the last 75 years of Superman stories, the focus has largely been not on what he can do but what he’s capable of. Namedropping Grant Morrisons All-Star Superman is particularly relevant, as it may be one of the best told Superman stories ever. 

Partly because Grant Morrison is particularly capable when it comes to distilling a characters entire history, from the characters space adventures to time-travel tomfoolery. 

The underlying current of the story, though, is Superman’s capability to do good. He is always under as much stress to do as much good as possible for the entire world, even when he’s dying.

There are few greater stories involving our capacity to be well to each other than Superman; but that doesn’t necessarily translate to a videogame just by looking at it that way.

To make a Superman game and have it be rewarding and fun to play, I think the goal lies in the conditions for failure. The conditions for failure probably shouldn’t (and really can’t) be the death of the player. They should be the death of other characters; a failure to save people. A good way to enforce this would be by building that concept up through the game, and then placing a player in a condition where seemingly not everyone can be saved. 

We do very little ‘heroics’ in Superhero games, even the quasi-open world ones like Arkham City and I think if that particular genre wants to go any further, it should probably start by involving actual stakes to challenge the player.
Superman can hold the entire world on his shoulders, the player should have to feel that too.

UPDATE SCHEDULE (also hello)

            

I've been debating what to do on this Blog for a few weeks now, and really what kind of 

direction I planned on taking the entire thing. I'm at the point where I'm thoroughly warmed up, 

at least enough to try some type of update schedule

SO:

Rather than one update a week or two, I'll oficially move to putting up new 

articles/fiction EVERY SATURDAY and additionally I'll be making an effort

to add in smaller musings on a day-to-day basis when I can. 

You'll be able to search between Articles/Fiction/Blog posts because they'll also all be up 

and aggregated over here
------> SKELESAM.TUMBLR.COM 

Additionally, expect some exciting announcements over the next month or so!

Hiding from Crime

    I don’t know, to this day, still, what it was about the original Metal Gear Solid that made me fall in love with the the stealth action genre. From Thief to Dishonored, two titles that we’re released much more recently than Metal Gear Solid was, the stealth-action genre still continues to hold my admiration whenever a new stealth game is announced, I always hold it to a bar that has been set incredibly high.
    Generally speaking, I don’t care much for classification built on genre lines either.
I see stealth more as a set of mechanics, just like anything else, that build towards the finished project
and not necessarily a set of checkpoints that the game needs to ‘fit’ to be considered stealth, or stealth action or whatever games get called now.
    Anyone who’s ever played hide and seek as a kid knows that there’s a certain easy-to-understand thrill of actively trying to hide from someone, for one reason or another it gets our blood pumping!
The act of hiding has been influencing fiction for years, from the chauvinist Spy of yesteryear,
it also contributed to the incredible popularity of not only The Ninja in the western world, but also characters like Batman and Daredevil who managed to capture the unique role of using stealth to instill fear in their opponents.
    An endless amount of saboteurs, spies, vigilante's have influenced our fascination with hiding and to a lesser extent, shadows. It's hard to imagine a character like Batman operating without his focus on stealth and fear, just as it's hard to imagine super-spies not needing disguises or gadgetry.
Permutations on the concept are basically endless, and I’m sure you can think of a dozen examples just off the top of your head.
    Borrowing concepts from action and spy movies of the 70’s and 80’s, Hideo Kojima’s head was filled with an idea of translating the modern action movie to a home console (in this case, the MSX computer).
Constrained by the limitations of the console, maintaining an air of tension even though there was a relatively limited amount of sprites that could be onscreen proved to be difficult (it was the same for the NES, too). Instead he changed the focus of the game, instead of actively pursuing your foes, Solid Snake would have to evade detection and slip past enemy lines undetected.
    Metal Gear was far from the first stealth game, but it was certainly one of the most influential.
Even though I grew up with a Sega Genesis and primarily an orginal-era Playstation, as a ‘little’ kid Solid Snake's first adventure was probably one of the first and most important games I played; my older brother had bought it for our parent's seldom-used (by that time) NES.
    Whimsical platformers never really did it for me, the dark military world that FOXHOUND and Solid Snake inhabited was right up my alley.
To me, it was like being let it on the things my older brothers were constantly talking about! I was shooting guys; more often I was punching guys. I was a fucking adult and the world needed to be ready for me.
    That feeling of being included with people older than me was more than anything, addicting.
I was mature okay. The rest of those kids on the playground didn’t know about Gray Fox! They we're still stuck on saving princesses or whatever.

   For some reason too, I felt oddly powerful playing as Solid Snake. That’s why I’d like to think I drifted towards stealth games being one of my favorite genre of videogames. Not only that, but there’s a strange sort of power associated with stealth games. It doesn’t matter if I’m playing as Solid Snake or Rikimaru, as long you’re not hiding but you’re hunting.

    Maybe it’s the feeling that by way of how stealth games are generally designed, it puts more of a focus of a self-imposed challenge on the player. Few stealth games conditions for losing are being seen at all,
even Metal Gear Solid's sloppy, almost arcade-y combat mechanics we’re meant more as punishment for the player being seen than an outright game-over, so when you can navigate an entire challenge in the shadows it makes you feel fulfilled, and it’s pretty addicting.
    Just like people who might steal for the sake of stealing, there’s a high that comes with being somewhere you’re not supposed to be and doing it well.
I remember it, because it’s the exact same feeling I got the first time I was taken somewhere to break into a house.
    As a teenager, I was a ‘good kid’ which, more important to me than anything, meant that if I did something bad I didn’t get caught. If I was going to be hanging out with people older than me (I was frequently the youngest) I had to be smart about it.
    That frequently engaged in backing out of things I didn’t think was safe, but there were a few times where I’d get pulled into doing something I didn’t necessarily want to.
I would make for a decidedly piss-poor guard. Unless I’m on a hike somewhere, being alone somewhere I’m not familiar with makes me even more anxious than I already am.
     When you think of any good stealth game, the feeling is the very same. Unless you’re waiting for a pattern to open up, you really don’t stay in the same place for too long. You have to be constantly moving and aware of where you’re going, and often time planning ahead of the easiest way to get there.

    The people I was with had left me alone and told me to wait in the car. The last thing I wanted is to be caught out there, in the middle of the night, alone, so I followed them.
Pulling a window-screen out of the metal groove it fits into and then undoing the often plastic locks that even I’m guilty of using to secure my windows shut with isn’t something that can really be relegated to a QTE in a videogame and accurately surmise how wrong you feel the first time you learn to do it.
    I wanted to get it over and done with, and I did.
The whole time I was in that first house I was being rushed, not just by my own anxiety, but by the people that were there with me. We actually reasoned it’d be easier to do in the day, we pulled up in the driveway in a friend’s car and proceeded to act like we were locked out of the house.
    We even made sure we left through the front door. I recall their neighbor, who was a woman in probably her late twenties asking us if we needed help.
Imagine being a teenager at the age of 14 and someone approaches you trying to break into a house and asks you if you needed help getting in, a deep-seated feeling at the bottom of your gut like at any point in time the encounter would go somewhere bad.
     I wasn’t necessarily In a bad place when I got involved in that sort of thing, I would still go home and tell my parents I loved them, I would still get good grades and I could sit down on a computer game and roleplay being a Knight with my friends; experiencing a kind of quasi-dissonance anytime I fought someone who's character was any kind of Thief or Assasin
(READ: I’ve never broken a neck I swear; thank god Snake still has that over me).
    Even today, I still play tons of stealth games. I enjoy Metal Gear Solid as much as Tenchu or Deus Ex: Human Revolution and there are a handful of independent games I’ve got my eye on (side note: happy to see independent developers embracing the idea of stealth as a main focus)
Do I still get drawn to thinking about things I did as a teenager?
Well, yes. Of course, I can’t get it out of my head and doubtlessly ever will.
   More than being reminded of the act of breaking in somewhere when I sometimes play games today, I’m reminded of how alien it feels, and how maybe stealth games could learn from that. I don’t want to drop a ‘people like me’ here because there are definitely people who’ve come to serious harm or even dealt serious harm to other folks lives because of this sort of thing; and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to empathize with those people because I did it for a different reason.
    I’ll never forget how alien it feels being in someone else space. The feeling still makes my skin crawl to this day. Neither is the feeling ‘exotic’ either, it’s alien. You're not just somewhere you don't belong, you're occupying a space that is someone elses sanctuary. If that sounds particularly nightmare inducing, you still have your higher thought functions.

    Tenchu takes place in a sort of mythological Japan, that despite its setting still presents us with spaces that ‘nerds’ might be familiar with, as much as people that aren’t. There are castles, and within them are homes and bathhouses.
    Yet, do you ever really feel like, despite the presence of soldiers, you’re intruding upon a space?
The inherent nature of being a videogame mean each location is dressed up more like a series of obstacles to be planned around, and not necessarily a real physical space.
    Even in Stealth games where the objective is to kill a specific target, the player never really feels bad afterward, whereas in real life there’s a very real and palpable feeling before and after breaking into a place. I stopped at the age of 16, but that doesn’t mean I don’t remember it like it was yesterday.
     Naturally, our experiences shape the way we view the media we consume (for better or worse)
I don't necessarily know if I’m calling for the spaces we inhabit digitally to be given more concrete form, or to resemble 'real' spaces more, but I think what I'd like to see is Videogames start exploring what might be considered bad experiences just as well as the good one.
    I know people that are in jail for petty theft now, or breaking an entering, but you very seldom take that role in a videogame. For example, in Grand Theft Auto, those sorts of people are hyper-sensationalized and almost romanticized. Maybe I'm not asking that there shouldn't be sympathy for those sorts of characters, but perhaps more of a focus on understanding why they might be the way they are.
    Some of the people I've known (but no longer associate with) have been asked why they might do the things they do, and it's almost never something that can be answered with a simple one-sentence response.
    The memories aren't fond though, so I’m glad to still have things in my life that can serve as an outlet, and more importantly, to remind me I never have to do it again.
I just wish the same could be said for a lot of other people in the world.

-skeletons