Live from Austin!

I was at Staple!: The Independent Media Expo at the weekend. As I browsed the stalls, I wandered into range of a conversation between (I think) a guy from Dreampunk Productions, and someone who mentioned that he was a video game developer. Nothing unusual so far, there are a lot of video game developers around Austin. They were talking about a comic strip I hadn’t heard of, and the artists’ interest in making a video game about it–also not unusual. Then, the man with his back to me mentioned which company he worked for: Retro Studios.

The comic book guy hadn’t heard of them. But I had, and couldn’t help myself. “You made Metroid Prime. The best first person action-adventure game ever.” And so it was that I found myself talking to Mike Wikan, senior game designer for the Metroid Prime series.

Returning home and searching my web site, I found that I had written very little about the Metroid series–surprising, given how impressed I was with the games.

Let’s get the obvious statements out of the way first: If you have a Nintendo Wii, you should go buy the <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ATY7JE?ie=UTF8&tag=a0ef8-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002ATY7JE”>Metroid Prime Trilogy Collector’s Edition</a>. You should probably hurry to do so, as Mr Wikan tells me that it’s out of print, and no more will be produced; prices are already starting to climb.

If you have an old GameCube sitting around somewhere, you should go buy at least the first Metroid Prime, which is the all-time highest rated GameCube game on Metacritic. Yes, better than Legend of Zelda. Better than Resident Evil 4.

If you don’t think first person shooters can work on a console, then you particularly ought to at least buy Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the Wii and try it out, for reasons I’ll get to later.

First, let’s go back to the mid 80s. Having achieved commercial success with classic arcade games like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers, Nintendo wanted to branch out and prove that their NES console could do more. So 1986 saw two groundbreaking games: the original Legend of Zelda, and the original Metroid.

Metroid was designed to be approachable to players expecting arcade action. At first, it seems like a scrolling platform game with a heavily armed protagonist. As you continue to play, however, it emerges that there’s a more complex story going on, and that exploration and mapping are an important part of the game.

There were many details of the game which were brand new at the time: The player was given freedom to explore in any direction. The soundtrack was moody and ambient, giving a feeling of loneliness. Completing the game required revisiting already-explored areas. Power-ups were permanent, rather than timed. Most famously of all, the protagonist was revealed at the end of the game to be female.

Metroid II continued the franchise on the Game Boy, before Super Metroid moved it to the SNES and added an inventory and save points. Super Metroid was universally acclaimed, and amongst SNES games is perhaps second only to Super Mario World.

So when Nintendo decided to revive the Metroid franchise for the GameCube, there was some major skepticism expressed by fans. The announcement that the new Metroid would be in first-person 3D convinced many that it would be another dumb FPS, especially since a US development team was building the game.

Retro Studios defied expectations, however.

Metroid Prime started me off in a wrecked spaceship, where I quickly discovered I would have to scan objects for information if I was going to get very far. The screen used translucent graphics to provide a heads-up display with radar and rotating 3D short-range map, and I learned that I could switch visors to go into thermal imaging mode–a trick I often used to get the jump on enemies lurking in the darkness. Before long, I was following a trail of clues to the planet Tallon IV.

As I left my ship, I discovered that it was raining. Water droplets speckled the view through my visor. As I scouted further into the wet vegetation of this new alien world, I noticed condensation forming. Seconds later in a nearby cave, I fired my blaster at a threatening creature and caught a glimpse of my face reflected from the inside of the visor. That was it–I was captivated. Mimesis achieved.

This was also the moment I referred to back in 2006, when I said that I really didn’t need video game graphics to get any better. Metroid Prime is beautiful. Compare it to the other big console games from that year, like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on the PS2, and it blows them away. Not only that, but the game runs at a rock solid 60 frames per second throughout, no matter how complicated the action on screen, and the controls feel responsive at all times.

By the time I acquired the ability to switch into the morph ball, I was so engrossed in exploring ancient alien ruins that I didn’t stop to worry about the physics of the transformation. Instead, I delighted as the Tron-like neon glow from the ball left subtle tracer effects.

More beautiful still was the scene that greeted me once I managed to make my way through the old transport tunnels to the snow-covered Phendrana Drifts. That was where I learned that different alien creatures would require different tactics to defeat them, with my scanner providing hints.

Yes, there were boss fights–something I personally dislike–but they were mostly fair, and required some intelligence to get past rather than simple twitch reflexes. When the game was finally over, I was genuinely sad that it had to end.

I wasn’t as happy with Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. The first and most obvious annoyance was that I suddenly had to worry about ammunition. Coming to the new episode straight from the freedom of the first game, this was an unwelcome development.

The second annoyance was that Prime 2 had me travel to a dark energy world where the atmosphere continuously ate away at my suit’s shielding. This effectively introduced an arbitrary time limit to exploration, and I hate arbitrary time limits almost as much as I hate random mazes.

The third annoyance was the level design. I’m not a big fan of bottomless pits, and I started falling into them with annoying frequency towards the end of the game. So overall, a disappointing outing compared to the first Metroid Prime, but still worth playing.

Third time was the charm, though. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption made the jump to the Wii, and that allowed a whole new control scheme. Now I could move around in any direction at any speed using the analog control stick on the nunchuk, while simultaneously aiming and firing at any part of the screen using the Wii remote. (This is called “expert mode”, and isn’t on by default.)

As IGN put it, this new control scheme “simulates the accuracy of PC first-person shooters almost perfectly”. In fact, I’d go further–when I try playing games with keyboard and mouse, I find the lack of precision achievable with WASD movement keys extremely frustrating.

The nunchuck was also used for the grapple hook and for ripping armor off of enemies, giving battles a very visceral and physical feeling. The switch to 16:9 format for the graphics also helped improve my feeling of immersion in the game.

The annoyances from the previous game were mostly gone. I fell into infinity a few times in the cloud city, but it never felt as frustrating as leaping over chasms in the dark in Prime 2. Also gone was most of the annoying backtracking, as I could now call up my spaceship to travel between distant parts of the world, an innovation so welcome that I remember saying “Aww, yeah” when it was revealed to me.

I don’t really understand some of the negative reviews the final installment received. Perhaps those reviewers didn’t find Expert Mode, or were expecting an FPS? I had a wonderful time, and resolved to replay the entire game some day.

So with that in mind, I’ve ordered a copy of the now-discontinued <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ATY7JE?ie=UTF8&tag=a0ef8-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002ATY7JE”>Metroid Prime Trilogy</a> for the Wii. If you are any kind of video game fan, I strongly suggest that you do likewise. If nothing else, you’ll get the chance to play the greatest GameCube game ever, with the added bonus of precision aiming via Wii controls and widescreen graphics.

GamePro reports NPD sales data:

Of note, these are sales to end users, not number of consoles shipped; Microsoft prefers to cite the latter.

The Wii is now the #1 console in the US by installed base. So it seems as though as predicted, the Xbox 360’s best days could be behind it.

Once Sony got their act together and shipped a bundle with the rumble controller packaged along with the console, sales took off. When the 80GB PS3 with rumble controller replaces the current 40GB package, expect sales to rise again. It won’t take long to erase the lead in installed base Microsoft has.

This week, people are making a big thing about the announcement that Final Fantasy XIII is going to be cross-platform, appearing on the 360 as well as the PS3–but only in the US, as nobody in Japan has a 360.

I don’t see the Final Fantasy announcement as all that big of a deal, when you look at all the former Xbox exclusives that are now on the PS3 or will be soon.

• Saints Row was the Xbox’s supposed GTA-killer, and Saints Row 2 is going to be on PS3.
• BioShock was the 360’s highest rated game of 2007 on Metacritic. It’s now coming to PS3, with "graphical improvements".
• Half-Life ’s developer Valve was always a staunch Microsoft supporter, with Half-Life 2 an Xbox exclusive–but The Orange Box came out for PS3 earlier this year. (I’ve picked up a copy–FPSs aren’t really my thing, but I want to play Portal.)
• Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion made it onto the PS3.
• Dead or Alive 4 is being ported, and it’s rumored that the sequel may be PS3 exclusive.
• Ridge Racer 6 was Xbox 360 only, Ridge Racer 7 switched to PS3 only.
• Full Auto was Xbox 360 only, Full Auto 2 is on PS3.

So looking at the high profile well-reviewed Xbox exclusives, that leaves Command and Conquer, Project Gotham Racing, Mass Effect, Gears of War, and of course Halo. (Dead Rising is heading to the Wii, along with Beautiful Katamari.) It’s a good job Microsoft bought so many game companies, or they would hardly have any exclusives left at this point.

So the video game industry will avoid Microsoft domination for another generation. I think this is a good thing.

I noticed that The Edge magazine has an article in a recent issue asking if boss fights are a cliché that should be wiped out.

My vote is an enthusiastic and wholehearted yes.

Last night I got to the penultimate battle of "Prince of Persia: Rival Swords". After about half an hour of frustration and annoyance, I gave up. The rest of the game was great, but the last major battle (with the Vizier) exemplifies everything that’s lame and sucky about traditional "boss fights", with some Wii-specific obnoxiousness added to the mix.

1. You’re in a circular arena with no cover and no option to take a strategic approach.
2. In the second stage, the boss is immune to normal attacks. The only way to harm him is to (a) run up a wall behind him, then (b) do a special "speed kill" combo.
3. The arena is filled with floating rotating stone rubble that, rather than simply pushing you aside, for some reason explodes and does you damage if you touch any of it.
4. To "enhance" the Wii version, they added extra swirling sand that swirls in the way so you can’t see what you’re doing.
5. Because of 3 and 4, the frame rate drops in half.
6. Either the timing is arbitrarily tighter for the final battle, or the frame rate drop affects the controls. Either way, it’s substantially harder to get the special attack to be registered properly than at any previous point in the game. This is particularly true because it’s a Wii port of a game designed for conventional console controllers, so the action you have to time to within a fraction of a second is shaking the nunchuck downwards.
7. You have to do the almost-impossible-to-time special attack several times in a row.
8. Once you do that, you’re still not done, there’s a third stage that requires an even more ridiculous combination of jumps and leaps between floating debris, then do another speed kill.
9. Because the Wii is 16:9 and they didn’t rework the battle sequences to fit vertically, the flashing dagger that’s the cue to jerk the controller is sometimes offscreen. This is a problem throughout the game, but it becomes particularly annoying during this fight.
10. If you die, you have to go back to stage 1 and do the whole thing again.

Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can see the final battle in all its irritating stupidity.

Now, there are video game boss fights that aren’t awful. Nintendo tend to do a good job of them. I had no objection to the bosses in any of the 3D Zelda games, because each time there was a strategy that you could work out that would make them pretty easy.

The first Metroid Prime had a couple of questionable boss fights, but after that they pretty much realized what they were doing wrong, and things got progressively better over the next two games in the series.

But in general, while I tolerate good boss fights, I never find myself wishing there were more of even the best ones. Almost all boss fights are lame pieces of arena combat where your abilities are crippled and then you’re given frustrating pieces of arbitrary crap to do, that has to be exactly timed and unnecessarily repeated.

I know there are people who love that sort of thing, of course. For those people, there are games like Shadow of the Colossus. For the rest of us… an end to boss fights, please.

Microsoft’s Xbox division has announced their results for Fiscal Year 2006. Highlights:

• Total loss of $1.2 billion.
• Operating losses up 183%.
• Revenues down 10% YTY in Q4 because of “decreased Xbox 360 console sales”; specifically…
• Sales dropped from 1.8 million units per quarter to just 700,000 units per quarter, YTY.
• Revenue from sales of games down 28%.

This is awesome news, making it six years of losses to date.

Microsoft say they expect to make a profit in the upcoming year. O RLY? They couldn’t make a profit during a year in which they basically had no competition, so how do they expect to do better now that the Wii is outselling their console by a factor of 3:1 or more and Wii games are already outselling Xbox games? Nintendo makes a profit on every Wii console, while Microsoft has apparently lost money on every Xbox 360 they’ve sold, even after you factor out the huge losses from replacing broken consoles under warranty.

Added to that, the PS3 is going to see its first “must have” games ship towards the end of this year. Grand Theft Auto IV looks incredible, but the Xbox 360 version is apparently in trouble because it’s hard to cram the game onto a DVD. Demos to date have been the Xbox version, but there’s a good chance the PS3 version is going to end up looking significantly better. Then there’s Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Heavenly Sword, the new Indiana Jones game, Killzone 2 (with its 2GB levels), LittleBigPlanet, Metal Gear Solid 4, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, and so on.

Basically, Microsoft have already been squeezed out of the low end of the market by the Wii, and the hardcore gamers are likely to start getting more interested in the PS3 soon. I suspect Microsoft has much less chance of turning a profit next year than it did this last year.

The Wii arrived today. So far we’ve played bowling and tennis. It really is as much fun as I’d hoped; we ended up laughing and bouncing around and breaking a mild sweat. Perhaps later in the week we’ll try Rayman Raving Rabbids and smack some bunnies with rubber plungers.

The whole Wii experience is very slick, from the packaging the console comes in to the user interface of the software itself. Nintendo are the Apple of video games.

Perhaps the kidney stone in the urethra of Nintendo’s supply chain is finally passing, because Wii is now starting to appear in stores. Controllers are readily available, and I managed to put in an order on Toys”R”Us’s web site during one of the 6 minute periods when the console was in stock. So, hopefully in a week or two we’ll be Wii-ing.

Ironically, I finally saw screen shots of a couple of PS3 games that interest me: Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction and LittleBigPlanet. And if Fatal Inertia ends up being disappointing, Sony are working on a real Wipeout for PS3. So I’m fairly optimistic that there will be a good reason to buy a PS3 some time before Christmas.

But right now, I’m much more interested in Zelda, Super Paper Mario, WarioWare, Elebits, Kororinpa, and Prince of Persia: Rival Swords (since I skipped Two Thrones). I also plan to visit some of the GameCube’s back catalog; the cube has been sitting idle since I failed to get component video to work, but the Wii should solve that problem.

We’ve been out getting the food for Christmas. The supermarket sells corn for squirrels—it even has a picture of a squirrel on the bag. I also picked up a big $3 bag of sunflower seeds, it’ll be their Christmas gift. The man standing behind us in the checkout queue was a squirrel skeptic. “You’re feeding rats!”

We got a fake tree this year, after Mythbusters covered how much damage a tree can do if it catches on fire and rothko decided she didn’t want a real tree in the house after all. Safety aside, there’s something to be said for not having needles everywhere, and having branches strong enough to hold up weightier ornaments. You can get Christmas tree smell as scented candles, and probably as an aerosol too.

The big excitement, though, is that we managed to get some mince pies this year. I don’t think I’d seen any since we visited my family for Christmas several years ago.

No Wii for Christmas. I tried stores, I tried online, no luck. I even tried the Amazon customers vote, which said I had a slightly better chance of winning the chance to buy a Wii than I had of getting hemorrhoids, which kinda makes me feel better that that sort of probability is by no means a sure thing.

I now have a Wii…

…component video cable.

Now all I need is the actual console. I figured the cable would be the tougher piece to get, because they were only available by direct order from Nintendo, but it turns out the console is still near impossible to find in Austin.

I have an ear infection. I’m not really sure how I got it. The only thing I’ve stuck in my ear recently is a finger, so I must have nicked my inner ear with a sharp bit of fingernail or something. So now my lymph nodes are swollen and my ear aches and my head is throbbing in sympathy.

It’s my right ear. This presents a problem, as I generally sleep on my right side. Last night was largely sleepless. I went to the doctor today and got prescribed some eardrops and a course of just-in-case antibiotics.

The Prius is being repaired; the perpetrator’s insurance is paying. This meant I had the excitement of driving a Ford Taurus, and once again being reminded of how much I’ve been spoilt by having the Prius as my first car. Still, the Taurus is undeniably better than that Chevy Cavalier was.

On Sunday I made a totally fruitless attempt to purchase a Nintendo Wii. Everyone was very nice about it, though.

Nice ad from Google and 7-11:

I have no joke here, I just like saying “Turn your Slurpee into Wii.”

Nintendo’s web site has a hidden gem: filed away under Iwata Asks… you’ll find a series of lengthy articles talking about the entire design process behind the Wii. If that’s not enough Wii to float your boat, BusinessWeek are also getting in on the act.

Nintendo have gone in pretty much the opposite direction to the rest of the industry. Sony and Microsoft are in an arms race of graphical and CPU firepower. The Xbox 360 has a custom IBM PowerPC CPU which has 3 G5-like processor cores, each at 3.2GHz, with a 5.4GHz front-side bus to connect it to the graphics chip. The PS3 has a 64 bit PowerPC core for general purpose tasks, connected to 7 independent vector processor cores known as SPEs, all at 3.2GHz. (There are 8 SPEs on the chip, but to increase yield they are using chips where 1 is faulty, as well as the faultless ones.) For the tasks needed for video games—3D geometry and the like—each SPE is allegedly about as fast as a general purpose CPU of similar speed.

So, 3 CPUs for Microsoft, 8 for Sony, all 3.2GHz—what about Nintendo? Turns out the Wii has one 729MHz PowerPC, a 243MHz graphics processor, and…er, that’s it. In terms of raw power, it’s a souped up GameCube. Instead of counting on bleeding edge CPU power, Nintendo are counting on innovative gameplay, convenience, and a host of other subtle design factors.

I won’t bother to talk about the controller, because you can read about that everywhere. Suffice it to say, the idea is to dramatically increase the approachability of the system. If you can point, you can play, hopefully. The rest of the design is what interests me more, and doesn’t seem to have received as much attention.

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