Category Archives: Video Games

Why can’t I seem to finish a game of Dyson Sphere Program?

I’ve talked a couple of times about Dyson Sphere Program on this blog, and while I’ve enjoyed my time with it immensely, I’ve never managed to actually sit down and finish a game of it. This post will be a sort of ramble on why a game so similar to Factorio just doesn’t do it for me the way Factorio does.

To start with, I’ve already talked about how I feel the game doesn’t “scale up” in the same way Factorio does. Later research goals in Factorio cost exponentially more than earlier ones, but in Dyson Sphere Program the relationship seems more additive or multiplicative than exponential. Then there’s the difficulty with blueprints, I can’t have a nice big blueprint that does everything I want anywhere I want it because since planets have to be spheres, the gridlines get broken up closer to the poles. This means a blueprint developed for the equator doesn’t work at the poles and vice versa, and means it’s not nearly as fun to make and place my blueprints for a big mega-base.

I’m also not to keen on constantly having to move between planets. In Dyson Sphere Program you have different planets that you’re collecting resources from, which should be really fun but the time it takes you to GET to those different planets is very boring. They couldn’t have realistic space travel ala Kerbal Space Program, but they also didn’t do enough to make space travel interesting in and of itself. So sitting there for a few minutes while you travel to another planet is just boring, and you HAVE to keep going back and forth because there’s no way to build things on one planet while you’re standing on another. This was something Factorio dealt with very well, running around was also boring in Factorio but once you build radars everywhere you could go into your map and change things anywhere that you had radar coverage without ever having to move your character. It was fun, it worked, and Dyson Sphere Program should have incorporated it so I don’t have to trek back and forth between planets just to make minor changes.

The lack of enemies is another thing I think I’ve talked about but it bears repeating because in Factorio the enemies actually did a lot for the game. Their attacks kept you on your toes, pushing back their bases gave you something to do while waiting for research, and it was a very fun structural problem to try to figure out how you were going to make everything you wanted to make while still protecting it. Factorio gives you an infinite canvas to build on, but gives you constraints in that you must protect everything from the enemies. That’s more interesting to me than an infinite canvas with no constraints.

Constantly needing to refuel your character (a robot), as well as needing to physically be in the places you want to build, work together to make me not enjoy the endgame. I don’t like running around making sure I have enough fuel or am standing near a charging station, and I don’t like building a giant conveyor belt across a tundra planet if it means I have to march across the planet myself to make sure it gets built. Having the bots build actually makes building long belts go a lot more slowly in this game than it did in Factorio where at least you could build a belt at your running speed.

Unclear benefits to building the actual Dyson Sphere. The Dyson Sphere in literature and science is an idea of harnessing the nearly unlimited energy of a star to do our bidding, and yet I got all the way to the final Research cube and never found myself with the kind of unsolvable power troubles that seemed to require a Dyson Sphere. I built one for kicks (it’s also unclear where you’re supposed to build the launchers but whatever), but I feel like I’d have been just as well or better served building more and more solar grids across the surface of the planet. Land was super plentiful and why should I spent more to build solar grids in space when I could just build solar grids on the ground. The efficiency gains (if there even were any) weren’t worth it and the energy gains for running your planet-wide base weren’t so great that I felt I needed it.

So overall Dyson Sphere Program is still a very fun game, and it’s a somewhat unique way to combine Factorio with space travel. But I’m feeling less and less confident in recommending it to others considering I can’t even bring myself to finish it.

Final thoughts on Cult of the Lamb

A couple of days ago I said I’d gotten into playing Cult of the Lamb. Well I finished it and as of right now you can buy it for 20% of until December 12th. Note: the game isn’t really about story, but there are total spoilers below.

As I said in my previous post the plot was pretty much what you would expect from the outset, the Evil God you’re serving is your final boss fight after you’ve defeated the False Gods who tried to kill you at the beginning of the game. Let’s put some names to these characters: the Evil God you serve is called “The One Who Waits” while the False Gods you fight are the four “Bishops of the Old Faith”. The only sizzle to the plot is the tiny bit of interest that Bishop #3 is scared of you instead of angry and murder-y towards you like Bishops #1 and #2, and that Bishop #4 basically knows you’re going to kill them all and isn’t too upset about it when you speak to her. They throw a tiny interesting twist that The One Who Waits was originally Bishop #5, but they were so proud of that revelation that they have Bishop #4 repeat it to you verbatim about three different times, killing its gravity.

The Bishops are vaguely themed after a couple of different things, but this theming in incredibly bare-bones. The first 3 Bishops are all obviously deformed, #1 has his eyes removed, #2 has her throat slit, #3 has his ears removed. The in-game achievements then spell this theming out for you as “See no Evil, Speak no Evil, Hear no Evil.” Bishop #4 has a head wound, so “Think no Evil,” and The One Who Waits gives you an achievement for “Do no Evil” to complete the set. Cute. Then they’re vaguely themed after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, only here it’s War, Famine, Pestilence, and Entropy/Change. Bishop #2 (Famine) will make your cultists starve when you meet her, Bishop #3 (Pestilence) will sicken them and Bishop #4 (Entropy/Change) will turn them against you so you have no choice but to kill them.

By the way, I’m saying “Bishop #whatever” here because I genuinely don’t remember these guys’ names, they were not really key to my enjoyment of the game.

The only sizzle the this story is that The One Who Waits and Bishop #4 were an item long ago. The One Who Waits was the god of Death, the ultimate inevitability. But his association with Bishop #4 (who’s dominion was Entropy/Change) screwed him up somehow, you can’t change what’s inevitable but he damn well tried to. This led to the others imprisoning him and killing off all lambs (I guess?) so he could never return. But again Bishop #4 is all about Entropy/Change (it honestly wasn’t clear to me which) and so she knows this situation won’t last, knows that she’ll get killed by the Lamb (your protagonist), and even knows the Lamb will kill The One Who Waits, which indeed you do at the end of the game.

So that’s the story of the thing. I’m pretty sure my few paragraphs are about as long as all the dialogue in the game because story really isn’t the focus here, gameplay is.

As for the gameplay, remember I discussed last time that the game is really made up of 2 separate games that vaguely tie together: you have a cult who you have to manage and who reward you with better weapons, and you go dungeon diving with your better weapons to get items and cult members to expand your cult.

Unfortunately the cult ran out of fun things for me way before the dungeon diving combat sections. I had bought every weapon/card upgrade in the game by the time I’d killed Bishop #3, but I still had #4 and The One Who Waits so I kind of ignored the cult and focused on them. This was to my detriment, I hadn’t noticed that each dungeon you entered had a minimum number of cultists required to let you enter, for dungeons 1, 2 and 3 I had had exactly the minimum number and so I actually thought this wasn’t a minimum requirement, it was just the game alerting me to how many cultist I had at the moment. But Dungeon #5 requires 20 cultists so after getting all geared up to kill The One Who Waits I suddenly had to run around and find 6 new cultists in order to proceed.

Like I said managing the cult just isn’t fun enough on its own to justify it’s gameplay when it isn’t providing you those sweet combat level-ups. This isn’t a Rimworld sort of game, the cultists don’t have enough personality or enough uniqueness to really make you care about them. And the good or evil rules you can lay down for your cult are quite interesting in how they can make your cult more efficient, but they grow stale over time.

Remember, I had a rule where I could murder anyone in the cult at any time and all my cult members gained faith when elderly members were murdered. That was a fun little synergy, as was throwing a Feast when Bishop #2 made all my cultists starve. But the cult system isn’t interesting or challenging enough to keep that fun going for the length of the game, which is unfortunate.

The combat sections however are quite fun for the entire length of the game, especially as you start getting into the weird and unique late-game benefits you can acquire. To remind you of how the combat works: you enter a dungeon and get a random weapon and a random magic spell with which to kill your enemies. As you continue through the dungeon you’ll find rooms containing either cards or new weapons/magic for you to choose from.

The cards are pretty sweet, giving you things like extra health, extra damage, or the ability to drop a bomb whenever you dodge-roll. The weapons can be too, with unique abilities like poison, stealing health, or summoning ghosts. One late-game item you can equip though is a new robe which gives you 4 cards at the start of the dungeon but no new cards during the dungeon. The trade-off is clear as getting these super-powers early might be worth having slightly less of them overall, but what wasn’t clear was that this ability also dramatically lowers the number of new weapons you get as the weapon rooms are removed also. I mostly liked using Axes, Hammers, or if I had to Swords. I didn’t like the Daggers or the Gloves, but since I had so few new weapons when using that robe I kept getting stuck with weapons I didn’t like which was unfortunate.

I want to talk more about the combat but I feel I just don’t have the gaming vocabulary to do it justice since I play so few games of this type. I like that the enemies often glow when they’re about to make an attack, as it helps you learn their attack pattern and dodgeroll out of the way. I like that you can cancel an attack into a dodgeroll or a dodgeroll into an attack at any time. I do not like that you can’t cancel a magic spell this way, and find it weird that when aiming magic spells the game slows down time to help you out a bit.

The early game enemies are all about learning their patterns and dodgerolling at the right time. Later enemies start throwing out loads of projectiles (is this what folks call “Bullet Hell“?) which require you to focus on the projectiles and dodgeroll through them to escape. Nearly every attack is telegraphed in this game, so I’m sure speedrunners and the like can learn to play the whole game without taking damage.

I think the boss fights are interesting, they all have a similar gimmick of combining a massive number of projectiles with a massive number of minor enemies plus a big enemy boss, all of which makes it hard to know what you need to concentrate on and makes it easier to take hits. Still the boss fights against the 4 Bishops felt tangibly easier that the dungeons and minibosses that preceded them, I wonder if this was a deliberate move on the part of the devs to make the Bishops feel climactic while still letting you beat them on your first try and feel powerful in doing so. The one exception is Bishop #5 aka The One Who Waits and that’s because he doesn’t even have a dungeon, you just walk straight into his boss fight. I guess again they wanted that climactic feeling and a dungeon would kind of ruin it.

What few quibbles I have left are mostly minor things that other roguelike enjoyers (this is apparently also classified as a roguelike) probably don’t think are issues. I always hated a run where I got stuck with a weapon I didn’t like (say a Dagger) for too long, and sometimes the cards just are useless for you. But whatever, it was a fun game.

New game I’m playing: Cult of the Lamb

Cult of the Lamb is an exciting little hack-n-slash mixed with base building game that I’ve been playing a lot of recently. The game opens up with your protagonist (the eponymous Lamb) being sacrificed to prevent the resurrection of an Evil God. Turns out killing the Lamb just sent them straight to Evil God instead, who resurrects the Lamb and tells them to kill all the False Gods who stand before them. From here the resurrected Lamb is handed a sword and some magic to start going nuts, as well as a few servants to build up a cult and become ever more powerful so they can slay their enemies and presumably resurrect the Evil God in turn.

I haven’t finished the game but I assume once you resurrect the Evil God, everything is smiles and happiness forever and the Lamb just retires to running their cult. There’s no way the Evil God is actually the final boss you’ll be killing at the end.

Anyway this game isn’t anywhere near the kind of thing I usually play, fast paced hack-n-slashers just aren’t my forte, and playing one with a mouse and keyboard probably brands me a heretic in most people’s eyes. Still, it’s a very enjoyable experience with an easy-to-use dodgeroll and a variety of enemy patterns to keep the game interesting. You can cancel sword attacks using the dodgeroll as well (though infuriatingly, not magic attacks) meaning most combat arenas turn into me rolling around like Sonic the Hedgehog on cocaine, hacking and dodging all the while. I actually learned that I get better at the game by taking things a tad slower though (your weapon has knockback and often cancels enemy attacks), so this isn’t always the best strat.

Anyway when you’re not dodgerolling through the cultists of the False Gods, you’re managing your own cult to gather the resources needed to improve and expand your abilities. The two sides of the game (cult running and hacking/slashing) are actually way more disconnected than they seem, the combat bonuses you get from managing your cult are rather modest, but it’s definitely a fun way to take a break in between the hyperactive combat sections. Your cult is made up of cultists you randomly capture or save during combat sections, and as per usual they all need to eat, sleep, and stay healthy, and in return they will believe in you more which unlocks higher tiers of weapons and magic later in the game. But besides these very modest combat benefits, running the cult feels mostly like playing an entirely separate game. That’s not a terrible thing mind, because it’s still a fun game, it just doesn’t have as much combat benefits as it at first seems.

The cult itself includes the usual Rimworld-eque activities of getting food, building beds, and making sure everyone is happy. I’m sure Rimworld wasn’t the first game of this type but it’s the first one I played and so everything reminds me of it. The unique selling point of this game though is that since you’re running a cult, you can make all sorts of arbitrary rules and regulations to make it more efficient or just torment your little cultists. You can hold feasts, you can appoint a tax collector, you can unlock the ability to murder any cultist you want (good for removing dissidents). All these rules can make your cult run just a bit more smoothly which lets your cultists level up more and will allow you to unlock those modest weapon upgrades for the combat I was talking about.

To go back to combat, the last big selling point is the cards and weapons randomizer to keep the runs fresh and interesting. Each time you go on a “crusade” against your enemies, you will enter a dungeon with a randomly selected weapon and magic attack. They all have unique properties so two runs can feel entirely different depending on whether you get the hammer (slow as molasses but deals huge damage) or the dagger (quick strikes, lower damage).

In addition, each weapons can have one of several unique bonuses such as stealing health, poisoning, or unleashing ghosts. You may then randomly find weapon shops in the dungeon where you can exchange your weapons for 1 of 3 others. But in addition to all this you will find card shops that will let you select 1 of 2 random cards for a separate benefit. These cards range from poisoning anyone you hit, to getting some extra health, to swinging your weapon faster or more strongly.

The randomness of which weapons you’ll get combined with which cards you’ll get adds a huge layer of replayability to any run ensuring that no two crusades feel the same. And since you unlock higher level weapons and new cards through the cult, they form the major way that the two areas of gameplay interact.

So the game is really two separate games that are both fun in their own right, but which somewhat combine to become greater than the sum of their parts. If I do have any quibbles they are minor, but for completeness sake:

  • I don’t like how choosing the rules of your cult locks you into that rule and can’t be changed. I also don’t like how you don’t get to see all the possible rules before you pick. In my first playthrough I chose a rule that locked me out of being able to murder cultists on demand, which later became a problem as I had a few dissidents running around and not enough wood to build jail cells to contain them. I then found that I had chosen another set of rules which didn’t actually synergize that well with each other, and that I’d prefer to have picked the “murder anyone” rule because it synergized pretty well with the “cultists gain faith when old members of the cult get murdered” rule as well as some others. I decided that even though it’s against the spirit of these types of games, I’d have a lot more fun by just restarting and choosing different rules
  • Speaking of restarting, I don’t like how the game has unskippable intros and tutorials to start off. Maybe there’s some option to skip them but I didn’t find any, so I had to rewatch the opening cutscenes and replay the opening tutorials before I could get back to where I wanted to be. In a game all about high-octane combat, starting a new game should put as few barriers as possible between you and the “good stuff” so it’s disappointing that this game has so much unskippable faffery to start off with. It’s not that the first sections of the game are bad mind you, they should just be skippable on repeat playthroughs.
  • The story is passable, which is both good and bad. Actually I guess it’s mostly good, since in less than a minute it sets up who you are, your goals, and your enemies, but still it isn’t going to knock anyone’s socks off but then it isn’t trying to.
  • I guess every game now wants to let you customize and name your little Rimworld-esque cultists, but to be honest I’ve never felt so disconnected from them as in this game. In Rimworld and other games, the cultists (colonists in Rimworld) are your main asset and avenue of gameplay. What they do IS what the game is about, so customizing them and watching them grow, level up, and die is fun and tugs on your heartstrings. Here the cultists are mostly devoid of personality and unique attributes, and there aren’t even good ways to wrangle them in the ways I’d like to (you have to talk to them individually to give them specific jobs). So customizing them does nothing for me, I’d much rather customize the Lamb (your protagonist/Avatar of Destruction) and give them a unique name and character model, but alas that’s the one character you can’t change.

Anyway with all that said, it’s a fun little game that’s retailing for the equivalent of 2 shares of Ford ($F) common stock. So if you have 2 shares of $F go ahead and sell them to buy this, because it’s honestly a better use of your money.

My favorite mystery trope: the untwist

Before I begin, WordPress tells me this will be my 100th post, yay! Also, here there be spoilers for Deadly Premonition.

I’d like to talk about my favorite mystery trope, I don’t know if it has a real name but I’ve come to calling it “the untwist.” An untwist is when a plotline that you thought was resolved turns out not to be resolved after all, making its true solution all the more unexpected. The plotline that got me first thinking about the untwist was Deadly Premonition, a game with an incomprehensible budget allocation but a strangely alluring story.

The player takes the role of Francis York Morgan (please, just call him York, that’s what everyone calls him). Throughout the game, York will turn to himself and talk to an unseen character “Zach.” York’s conversations with Zach always appear to give Zach total agency over the situation: Zach is asked what he wants to do, or what he thinks, or what the proper course of action for York is. In many ways Zach appears to be guiding and leading York through his entire adventure, but whenever anyone asks about Zach, York dodges the question and refuses to give a straight answer.

At this point in the story I and a couple of other people I know concluded that Zach was a stand-in for the player. Games have occasionally had a habit of addressing the player directly, and having York ask for guidance from the player (who is directly controlling York’s actions through the controller) seemed like an eccentric way to continue in this tradition. Even when York sort of gives an answer on “who is Zach” to Emily (his apparent love interest), he doesn’t say much more than that Zach has “always been with him” and “helps him in every way.” This just seemed to some of us as more confirmation that Zach was a player stand-in since the answers were still vague enough to justify that conclusion.

Speaking of York’s non-answer to Emily, he tells her a story about how when he was little his father killed his mother, cryptically saying “at times we must purge things from this world because they should not exist, even if it means losing someone we love.” Yeah it’s that kind of game. This “why did York’s father kill him mother” mystery appears to take center-stage now that the “who is Zach” mystery has been “solved.” After this point Zach is rarely mentioned and the focus seems to have shifted, again lending credence to the idea that the the mystery is solved and the player was supposed to believe that Zach is just a stand-in for the player but that the game just can’t come out and say it because it doesn’t want to totally destroy the 4th wall. But that the simple answer isn’t the true story.

In the very last moments of the game’s story, York sees a vision of his father killing his mother again. This time he sees the whole scene, in which another character is shown to have “infected” his mother with a tree-like eldritch horror which is growing inside her. This causes his father to utter the line “at times we must purge things from this world because they should not exist, even if it means losing the one we love.” But now he adds another line: “I couldn’t do it, but you have to, you have to be stronger, OK Zach?”

Those two words “OK Zach?” had me staring agape at my screen, suddenly a plotline I thought was solved had been unsolved, then resolved in front of me while a separate plotline also got solved. The story continues with York realizing he is the alter-ego of Zach. Zach couldn’t handle seeing what his father did and so allowed a different personality (York) to take over while he went dormant inside of York. York asks Zach for guidance not because Zach is the player, but because Zach is the personality that is guiding York while York is taking over. This revelation causes Zach to re-take his place as the primary personality, complete with a new scar, a new hair-color, and a new voice just to complete the picture.

The twist worked so well for me because it solved a mystery I didn’t even realize was unsolved. As I said, I had assumed Zach was an eccentric way for York to refer to the player the whole time, so to see that he was actually a character in his own right was mind-blowing. I’ve talked with some others who didn’t have quite the same experience, they didn’t think the Zach mystery was actually solved so weren’t as dumbstruck when it was “unsolved.” But I feel like my interpretation is valid for the story, and it’s what makes the story so great in my mind. Anyway, all mystery stories depend a bit on how you take them yourself, some people get disappointed when they guess the right answer, or angry when they can’t guess the right answer. But for me, I will always hold this as my favorite way a story ever fooled me.

Small coding update: what I’ve done with Unity

A while ago I said I wanted to get back into coding.  I’ve only been doing an hour a week or so but I do have some successes.  Here’s what I’ve got and here’s what I still want to do:

I’ve got a few dispensers that I have labeled “gunpowder,” “nitroglycerin” and “TNT”.   Each dispenser will dispense particles corresponding to their name.  Gunpowder is set to explode with low force, nitroglycerin explodes with medium force and TNT explodes with high force.  I have a button which dispenses particles from whichever dispenser I choose, then another button makes all the particles “explode.”  If only a little gunpowder is dispensed, the explosion is kind of small.  If a large amount of nitroglycerin and TNT is dispensed, it’s a big impressive explosion.  Then I have a button to erase all the particles and dispense new ones.

What I still want to do are some things I think are much harder.  I want a way for the player in-game to create entirely new explosive particles with more or less explosive force.  What if I want them to invent C4, which explodes even better?  I also want a way to “centralize” the explosion.  Currently every particle moves in an entirely random direction, but actually they should all explode outward from whatever point in space the explosion began at.  Once I can centralize the explosion I can make explosions that have multiple starting points, and from there I want parts of the game to allow the player to learn how to use explosive shape to perform certain tasks, and thereby gain the resources to build better explosives to perform new tasks.  Also eventually I’d like to be able to put in some amount of “control” by which certain explosives (like gunpowder) explode easily even when you don’t want them to while others (like C4) are very stable and don’t explode unless you really make them.

So all that’s to say I still have a long way to go.

Games that play themselves

There’s a certain type of game I really really like.  It doesn’t have a good category, some games of this type would be called “management,” others would be called “strategy,” but what makes them enjoyable to me is that they’re the types of games where you struggle mightily to do every task the game throws at you, but by the end of the game you have developed systems in which the game basically plays itself.  Let me give some examples.

Factorio is the game that most comes to mind in this.  For Factorio the key word is “automation,” you start the game crash-landing on an alien world and have to hand-mine and hand-craft every single item you’ll need to survive.  Anything you want to build you have to place one by one across the world as well, and so the early game consists of running around mining, crafting, and building hundreds of things by hand.  The goal of the game is to defend yourself from the aliens and launch a rocket ship to escape, but as you progress closer to the rocket everything you want to build or research becomes exponentially more expensive and difficult. 

The trick is that the game gives you systems that you can do to make everything exponentially cheaper and easier.  This biggest game-changer is the ability to create little robots that can perform just about every job for you, and by that point in time the game almost feels like it plays itself.  You can put down big blueprints of what you want to be built and what you want to be crafted and the bots will do everything for you.  Need more resources?  The bots can build mining bases.  Need more science?  The bots can build your labs.  Suddenly everything you had been doing by hand can be done for you and the feeling is just so liberating that I often like to sit back and watch as the bots do everything for me.

The other game that comes to mind is Victoria 2.  Now this game is completely different, it’s not management but more strategy.  Victoria 2 puts you in control of a historical nation starting in 1836 and tells you to guide their destiny from the 19th into the 20th century.  Want to industrialize Japan and become a world power?  You can do that.  What to unite Italy into a single nation?  You can do that.  What to play as France and enact your Napoleonic fantasies?  You do you man, but you can do that. 

The important point is that at the start of the game your nation will normally be poor, illiterate, and un-industrialized, even the nations of Europe were like this in 1836.  This means that there will be tough choices to be made in order to grow your economy, educate your populace, and industrialize your society.  But doing all these things makes the game easier and easier, until by the end of the 19th century you’re likely to be rich, highly educated, and highly industrialized, at which point you can make lots of money even with a fully-funded state apparatus, and capitalists will run around building whatever factory your country needs before you can even ask.  By the end of the game, it is almost playing itself in this way.

I don’t know exactly why I like games like this.  Maybe it’s just about the feeling of liberation you get when something that used to be so hard becomes easy to you, but for whatever reason I really really like games like these and would be happy to be recommended more like them.

Weekend venting about video games part 5

I’m finishing my sort-of review of Great Ace Attorney 2 with it’s final case, Case 5.  Note that as always, there are total spoilers for this case and this game.  BUT ALSO I had a lot of thoughts about this case that related to previous games in the Ace Attorney series, so there are also spoilers for Ace Attorney games 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5!  If you plan to play any of the Ace Attorney games, please do as they are on Steam and very good!  Here is the Ace Attorney Trilogy and here is the Great Ace Attorney Duology. But with that said, spoilers ahoy!

I’m gonna be honest, the ending of GAA2 Case 5 was kinda underwhelming  I felt like a lot of the mysteries that had lasted two whole games were solved with wet thud.

I think the most charitable review I can give of GAA2-5 is that it’s an Ace Attorney Final Case.  The series has fallen into something of a formula where in roughly half of the games the final case presents you with an impossible murder (here the murder of Detective Gregson) with seemingly no motive behind it.  Yet as you unravel the tangled web of lies you find that this murder ACTUALLY occurred because of an unsolved murder that happened 7, 8 or even 15 years ago (here the previous murder is “the Professor case”)!  Unraveling your present case necessitates you unravel the case from the past, which usually results in the protagonist solving two murders at once on the same day.  And sure I get it, this formula is pretty strong, but I never felt like GAA2-5 did anything to rise above formulaic.  

And that’s not the only way this case feels like Ace Attorney formula.  Pretty much every Ace Attorney game since the first one has had to have “the Edgeworth” arc.  So spoilers for a 20 year old series, but in the very first Ace Attorney game Edgeworth was an eeeeeeeeeevil prosecutor who acted as the game’s primary antagonist.  He forged evidence, coerced testimonies, and overall acted like a dick.  But halfway through the story, the game starts to humanize him a bit more, until the last case involves him being accused of murder and you having to save him.  This allows him to go from being an evil antagonist to being a good protagonist, and now he’s one of the franchise’s most beloved characters.  This character arc of 

be evil->get accused of murder->become good

Is repeated surprisingly often in these games, and even when they’re not directly accused the prosecutor character for the game has a tendency to start off evil but turn good halfway through.  So I wasn’t really surprised when the GAA duology’s antagonist, Prosecutor Van Zieks, ended up on the docket and had to be defended, he was just going through the necessary motions laid down by Edgeworth.

The only thing that isn’t really formulaic is the tropes this game pulled from other animes, where the childhood friend of the hero gets separated from the hero and turns into an antagonist with their own secret motives.  This happened with Kazuma, who was your protagonist’s mentor in the first game before dying in that game then undying in this one so he could come back as a new prosecutor to replace the Edgeworth-ified Prosecutor Van Zieks. Yes Kazuma was a cool guy, but I don’t think his de-dying between the first game and the second was cool enough for the job he does in GAA2-4 and 5.  He’s nice to have, but not overwhelmingly positive.

With all that, I kinda didn’t like this case.  And it’s hard to put down my feelings in a coherent structure so bear with me.  

I think one thing that keeps making me dislike this case and this game overall is how it undoes the good feelings I had for what came previously.  I really did like Case 2 of GAA1.  It had a bit of a flat ending with the underwhelming “murder” but it worked well enough with the emotional drama that I gave it an 8/10.

  In a way that case reminded me of Case 5 from Trials and Tribulations.  In T&T you had a man who was fundamentally justice-seeking (Godot aka Diego Armando) but who was filled with rage for the one who “killed” him (Dahlia).  He saw Misty Fey channeling Dahlia’s spirit and despite knowing that it was wrong, despite knowing Dahlia was already dead and couldn’t be harmed, he couldn’t help himself, he killed Misty Fey.  Misty Fey for her own part was not a bad person, she had her flaws but was trying to save lives, using Diego’s plan no less. 

This collision between two fundamentally justice-seeking individuals, and one killing the other for a terrible reason, played a lot into the emotion of that trial, and is part of why I hold it in such high regard. 

Case 2 of GAA1 also had some of this.  Kazuma was a good man, and the Ballerina who killed him was motivated by fear rather than hatred, so her feelings could be sympathized with.  A miscommunication between the two of them led to fear and anger and ultimately death.  It was an ok end to Kazuma as a character, even if it was somewhat underwelming.  Then this game comes and undoes all of that.  All my good feelings for Case 2 are completely washed away because now that case is *meaningless*.  Nothing happened, there was no tragedy, no hurricane of emotions, Kazuma didn’t actually die he was just hiding.  It turned one of the first game’s top 2 cases into a joke of IT’S ME RYUNOSUKE, IT WAS ME ALL ALONG RYUNOSUKE.

I felt the same way with this game’s Case 5 and how it altered Case 4 as a matter of fact.  Case 4 was not that good to me, it felt like nothing happened.  Some will try to compare it to Case 4 of Dual Destinies, but I strongly disagree with that. 

In Dual Destinies, Case 4 focused on Apollo and his relation to Clay and Starbuck, Starbuck was the defendant.  Apollo’s sorrow was not “fixed” by any means, but at the end Case 4 at least had a conclusive ending with Starbuck being found not guilty and saying that he would continue what Clay wanted to do: be an astronaut. 

Case 5 in Dual Destinies by contrast focused on Athena and Blackquill, with Athena as the defendant.  Although Clay’s  murder entered into it, it was primarily about the murder of Metis Cykes.  Dual Destinies had a Case 4 that led into Case 5, but it gave you a conclusion and an ending to Case 4 on the way.  This game by contrast felt like NOTHING HAPPENED in Case 4.  Nothing that happened or was discovered in that case felt in any way related to what happened in Case 5 because the entire murder scene and cast were completely different for the second case.  The closest connection you could make between the two cases was the prison warder who was hiding his identity, but he was a completely different character between cases 4 and 5 since his disguise was revealed. 

Case 4 didn’t end with a verdict or anything decisive whatsoever.  In Case 4, my only highlight was the bit at the end with Sholmes, Iris and Mikotoba, where the game SEEMED to be implying that Professor Mikotoba, our friend of two games, was secretly Iris’ father. But even that emotional ending is undone in the same way that GAA1 Case 2’s ending was undone. 

The emotional weight of “Iris found her dad and it’s Mikotoba” is undercut so we can have that same “Iris’ parentage” dramatic reveal a second time, only now with different parents (it’s Van Ziek’s dead brother).  Her new Van Zieks backstory adds really nothing to the emotional weight except to undo my one and only highlight from the previous case.  Instead of Iris’s dad being someone I’ve spent two games with (Professor Mikatoba), and the emotional connection between Iris and Susato (Mikotoba’s other daughter), Iris’ dad is someone I’ve never met (Van Ziek’s brother), and she doesn’t have any siblings or living parents now. 

We turned a tragedy from the first game (Iris’s dad was supposedly killed in the first game’s first case) into a less emotional tragedy (Iris’ dad was killed before the games even began).  All the fun misdirection in the first game, Iris straight up saying that her dad worked with Sholmes, that he went to Japan, all of that stuff made it seem like her dad was John Wilson. But the evidence COULD ALSO have worked if her dad was Mikotoba.  But nope, all of that was complete lies, her dad was someone we never even mentioned until this game, Klint Van Zieks. 

It reminds me of WWE in a way, you have a story that is careening towards an obvious and much anticipated conclusion, and so you change it to a different conclusion just to throw people off.  It may seem dramatic but instead it’s just emotionally unsatisfying.  Her accepting Sholmes as her new father figure is fine and all but feels incredibly strange when all of Game 1 was treating them like co-workers instead of family.  In fact, this revelation of her deciding to treat Sholmes as her father would have been much better served by being a part of THE FIRST game rather than THIS one. In the first game they had a sort of emotional distance, so becoming closer would have made a happy ending. In this game their relationship is changed without warning and the game treats them more like they already are a family, with Sholmes going out and doing odd-jobs to pay for her (despite Game 1 implying she was the primary breadwinner due to her writing the popular Herlock Sholmes serialized detective stories).

From the moment I saw him, I knew Mael Stronghart was a Damon Gant type of villain, someone who is powerful with the police and prosecutors but secretly kills people to maintain that power.  That’s not a knock on the game, it was satisfying to have been able to meet and talk with this major antagonist for two whole games before taking him down.  And this Mael Stronghart storyline is something that was done well, the opposite of how I felt about the Iris stuff.  These games were careening towards a dramatic confrontation with Mael Strongheart, and when we finally got to take him down it was satisfying. 

My biggest issue with Mael was his goofy animations, he was clearly drawn and animated for his role in the first game where he is always standing up.  But in this case he is sitting at the judge’s bench, so every time he needs to do one of his animations he has to first stand up in order to do it because they only programmed the animation for a standing character model.  Just kind of goofy overall even if his theme is badass.

The ending of this case was kind of my only highlight again (so if they somehow undo this in a hypothetical next game, I’mma be real pissed).  Sholmes wasn’t as wacky as I would have liked, but seeing Strongheart’s side of things, the things he did and the reasons he did them, it all made sense and was nice.  The investigation section before that was very underwhelming however. 

It was nice to play as Mikotoba for a hot second, he has a very different style to Ryunosuke, and a different relationship to Sholmes.  But the “Great Deduction” they did together was the second worst of the two games, only better than the one in GAA2 Case 3’s waxwork museum.  Mikotoba does a little dance every time he gives an answer, which was cute the first time but annoying by the 4th, and it’s always the same dance. 

Then the whole POINT of a great deduction was also undercut here.  The reason I liked them as a game mechanic was that Sholmes would make some insane logical leaps that were actually halfway on the way to the truth, and your character had to nudge him back towards a proper answer. 

Notice this: the things Sholmes says at the START of his great deductions area always true, he just goes off the rails.  In GAA2 Case 3 at Drebber’s hideout, Sholmes says “The device in the center of the room is genuine” and “Drebber is the reason for the upturned furniture.”  Sholmes deduces that the device is a gravity machine and Drebber flipped the gravity of the room.  In fact the device is a bomb and Drebber flipped the furniture to find the safe code.  But finding those little connections between the absurd and the dramatic-yet-true are the fun parts of a Great Deduction.  Sholmes does nothing like that here because instead Mikotoba just gives the right answers. It’s less wacky and a lot less fun.  The logic of it was nice and the character work was ok, but overall this was not my favorite investigation section by a long shot.

Then there was court, starting with Judge Jidoku and ending with Mael Strongheart.  You know, Ace Attorney has had every other character be the villain at some point, the Prosecutor (Mannfred Von Karma) the Defense (Kristoph Gavin) the Detective (The Phantom/Bobby Fulbright) the witness (most of them) and even the defendant once (that guy from 2-4).  Finally we had the judge kill someone (Jidoku and Mael Strongheart).  Now we just need one of the hyperactive female assistants to kill someone and these games can finally walk off into the sunset, having used every possible twist.

I thought the court sections were also underwhelming.  I felt like a lot of things that should have been proven with evidence were instead just told to us by Strongheart and Jidoku, it felt like the game was running out of time and rushing towards a finish line.  And because of that several things didn’t even feel explained despite all the exposition.  Sholmes claims he removed Kazuma from the boat in GAA1 and told everyone that Kazuma is dead because he wanted Kaz to stay in Japan and be safe (he thought Kazuma was an assassination target). 

But Sholmes also believed that John Wilson had been an assassination target, and John Wilson was killed in Japan.  Clearly the assassins were in fact operating in Japan and Sholme’s attempt to stick Kaz in Japan would have just put him in even more danger.  They try to say “oh Sholmes’ plan worked since Kazuma wasn’t forced to become an assassin” but Sholmes didn’t know about the assassin exchange, he thought these were assassination targets. 

Finally, a lot of animations just undercut the seriousness for me.  Van Ziek’s animations were obviously made to look good for his profile shot, they kind of don’t look so good when seen face-on.  Mael Stronhart’s animations were made for him standing, so he kept having to stand up to perform his animation instead of sitting down like the judge normally does.  Jidoku and Strongheart’s breakdowns also didn’t look great to me in general.

I think these two cases were just done in completely the wrong way.  Case 4 should have completely been about the murder of Gregson and the murder should have been solved in that case.  We should have had a lot LESS about the red-headed league and the street vendors, and instead had the ship section and convicting Jidoku be part of that case.  Then at the end Kazuma should have indicted Van Zieks as the “reaper of the bailey” and claimed that Van Zieks gave the order to kill, so case 5 could then have focused entirely on the professor, Strongheart, and Kaz’s father.  As it stood case 4 felt slow as molasses and case 5 rushed way too fast.  

So wow, that’s a lot of words about Ace Attorney.  And I have more words ahead!  I’m going to go and replay the first game some so I can talk about it.  I hope you don’t mind my ramblings, but it was enjoyable to write.  And do play the Ace Attorney games!  They’re great!

Coming soon (hopefully): More programming

So a while ago I discussed a tiny tiny Unity programming project that I wanted to work on.  I wanted to make it so I could create little boxes using a button, then have those boxes all explode outward depending on how many boxes were on screen.  I am proud to say I successfully did it, and am now looking to expand my Unity knowledge.

The most immediate desire would be to make these boxes act more like particles of explosive material, IE they should explode in directions that are away from the densest cluster of themselves.  Then I’d like to see if I can make the explosion start in a particular place and travel along the length of the material until all the material has been exploded.  I’m not sure at all how these would work, but they’re part of an idea for a game I’ve been having for a while now.

Weekend venting about videos games part 4

Yesterday I talked about case 2 in game 2 of The Great Ace Attorney. Since I’ve done cases 1 through 3, I’d now like to talk about case 4, but not so much for the case itself but rather the pattern it follows that I’ve seen a lot of in murder mystery stories. As always, spoiler alert!

This case isn’t really a standalone narrative on its own, rather it is part 1 of a 2-part mystery which makes up cases 4 and 5 of Great Ace Attorney 2. Now that on it’s own is perfectly valid, but here’s the catch. The general pattern of an Ace Attorney or other investigative mystery story usually goes like this: the narrative is built as a trail of breadcrumbs in which the hero starts with a mystery that they have to solve and a bunch of suspicious people they have to talk to. Each person they talk to or clue they uncover is another breadcrumb leading to the truth.  One by one each suspicious person is interviewed and gives their side of the story, so eventually these sub-stories SHOULD build together to create a whole story that tells you everything that happened in the case, right?  Except what often seems to be the case is that everything learned in the first half of the case is basically thrown out as irrelevant, while the real revelations all happen in the second half of the case.  

To get specific with this case: the mystery we start with is the death of Detective Gregson, long-running character for these two games. In case 4, we get a lot of breadcrumbs relating to how Gregson was investigating a Red-Heads Society, and some characterization of the witnesses who found his body. But neither the Society nor the witnesses from Case 4 actually get us anywhere closer to solving the mystery of Gregson’s death. This is because Case 5 reveals that Gregson was ACTUALLY killed on a boat in the English channel, and his dead body was delivered to it’s location in London to be “found.” So everything we learned in Case 4 turns out to be pointless and irrelevant to solving the mystery.

This pattern feels common in a lot of mysteries, the story seems to have forward momentum as each character is interviewed and their part in the mystery is uncovered, but for the most part these characters usually end up having hidden backstories and suspicious circumstances that are completely unrelated to the mystery at hand, and which doesn’t always give any information to SOLVE the mystery at hand except for the fact that this character definitely didn’t do it (usually). So when the final BIG mysteries are uncovered, they at times feel unsatisfying because they’re completely divorced from pretty much everything our characters have been discussing up to this point.

Let me remind you, the Red-Headed Society and every witness from Case 4 are irrelevant to the final answer of who killed Gregson, they could be completely removed and the story would little change. I get why mystery stories do this, you want the player/viewer to constantly feel like mysteries are being uncovered and they’re getting closer to the truth, but you also want the ending to be a BIG UNEXPECTED TWIST that throws the whole case upside down.  But I feel like just completely trashing the first half of the case does this a disservice.

I think there are good mystery stories that avoid this problem, by having later revelations recontextualize what we learned earlier, rather than entirely superceding what we learned earlier, but I also feel like I’d need to spoil have a dozen other stories besides Great Ace Attorney in order to do that conversation justice.

So for now I’ll leave with a final few thoughts: this case was really underwelming but in part that isn’t even the mystery (although it doesn’t help) but rather the emotional weight of the story. Gregson is someone who has been with these characters for 2 games, and the player for more than 40 hours of playtime (by my estimate). He’s someone the players and characters should have grown attached to, yet besides his sidekick no one in the game seems exceptionally broken up about his death. The story kind of has to do this as you find his body and then immediately have to investigate the crime scene, so there isn’t much time in the narrative for sentimentality.

Still I feel it could have been improved by having all the main characters get together for a wake in Gregson’s remembrance right before the Court section, and them all not only remembering him but vowing to bring his killer to justice. A short scene like that could have made the emotional impact of his death work a lot better.

Weekend venting about videos games part 3

Last week I talked about cases 1 and 3 in game 2 of The Great Ace Attorney. I know this is out of order but I’d like to put my thoughts to paper on Case 2 of that game. As always, this is a murder mystery game, so total spoilers below!

The case starts out strange but OK, we’re told that after the events of the first game, our protagonist (Ryunosuke Naruhodo) has been barred from lawyering in Britain.  This is… an odd twist as it kind of makes sense and kind of doesn’t.  So spoilers for the first game but in the end of that game the protagonist uncovered a massive spy ring operating in the heart of Britain.  On the one hand yeah that’s a big thing, on the other hand he didn’t do anything wrong so why is he being punished?  Whatevs, it sets this up as a flashback case since he can’t do real cases

In a neat moment, this case is somewhat closely related to a case from the first game, with several characters lifted directly from it.  One of them is a bit of a reach though, you meet a man in a Victorian costume for about half a second and wouldn’t you know it he’s the victim in this case!  He’s not dead though since we needed him to be a kooky character for this one.

At this point I’d like to talk about the best character in Ace Attorney history: Herlock Sholmes.  You may remember when he was called Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, but to avoid copyright lawsuits the developers of this game LeBlanc’d him up to having a new name.  Anyway he’s absolutely awesome. 

His gimmick is acting like the all-knowing Sherlock Holmes from fiction, while actually being a clutz and a goofball (but surprisingly astute when the plot demands it).  He’s awesome for bringing the best of Ace Attorney wacky humor into a character who can also be serious when need be.  His main gimmick is the “Dance of Deduction,” in which he points out a bunch of unnoticable Holmesian clues and then uses them to build an impossible and hilarious theory, which Ryunosuke then has to “correct” to find the truth.  Anyway, this case gets +10 points just for including him.

Now as to the actual murder mystery, it started off good, had some great moments, but also had just enough frustrating moments that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have.  It starts off well with the unexpected death of the guy in Victorian Costume (his name is “William Shamspeare” and he speaks in forsooth’s and thee’s naturally), who then unexpected isn’t dead and claims to have been poisoned. 

We totter about with a mystery about how he could afford to pay for gas heating when he was so poor (more on that later) until finding out that a victim of a stabbing from the 1st game (Olive Green) came back and tried to kill old Shamspeare in this game.  It’s all meant to be very tragic, as Shamspeare had poisoned her boyfriend, but it falls off for me at a few points with regards to its timeline.

The basic timeline of this case is supposed to be as follows: 

William Shamspeare learns of a buried treasure hidden in the second floor apartment unit of this lodge.  He is unable to rent the second floor however because it’s occupied by Olive Green’s husband, named Duncan.  So instead he kills Duncan by turning off the fire in Duncan’s gas lamps, causing Duncan to asphyxiate from gas poisoning.  The way Shamspeare does this is by blowing into Shamspeare’s OWN gas lamps, which disturbs the fire in Duncan’s lamps because they’re all on a single gas line.  Duncan’s death creates a rumor that the apartment is haunted, which allows Soseki Natsume (a real historical dude) to rent the unit for super cheap.  Shamspeare still wants the money though, so hatches a plan to kill Natsume too.

At this point Olive Green is distraught over her husband’s death, she hear’s Natsume talking about how haunted his apartment is and apparently deduces from this that her husband Duncan was murdered.  She writes a vaguely threatening letter to Shamspeare and then sneaks into his house, bringing strychnine poison with her. 

In Shamspeare’s room she finds proof that he killed Duncan, which causes her to deduce his method and put strychnine on his lamps.  Now when Shamspeare comes home, he wants to kill Natsume just as he killed Duncan, by blowing into his own lamps and causing a gas leak in Natsume’s apartment.  But since Olive Green put strychnine on them, he ends up ingesting some and very nearly dies.  The plot of this case begins with him (apparently) dead.

My problem is that Olive Green seems to deduce that Duncan was killed AND THAT SHAMSPEARE killed him on very little, almost no evidence whatsoever.  She overhears Natsume talking about how Shamspeare is weird and the apartment is haunted, and from that she concocts a scheme to kill Shamspeare.  The case when you play it implies that it was reading the note in Shamspeare’s apartment that causes her to hatch her scheme, yet she came to his apartment WITH THE STRYCHNINE so she was already planning a murder beforehand.  And she can’t have come into the apartment a second time after reading the letter because of the events of the case. 

So overall although there’s a wonderful bit of Agatha Christie-esque tragedy to the whole thing, it just feels weird to me that this lady leaped to MURDER on almost no evidence whatsoever.  The evidence she finds in the man’s apartment does prove her suspicion, but again she’d already decided on murder before even going in there.

Anyway that’s all for the plot of this case, now onto the question of gas, and I’m wondering if anyone knows the answer here: during this case, it’s revealed that Shamspeare is incredibly poor, but somehow has the money to pay for gas heating in his house every day.  In this era, you could pay for gas heating via a vending machine installed in your residence.  It’s a mystery where Shamspeare gets the coins to pay, but a further mystery is raised in that when the meterman comes to collect the money from his vending machine, it’s always empty. 

Clearly Shamspeare is stealing gas, but how? 

The only clues are a small hole drilled into the bottom of the vending machine, and a puddle of water beneath it.  The answer to this puzzle is thus: Shamspeare cuts coin-shaped depressions into bars of soap, and then leaves water in them outside to freeze in the cold London air.  What he’s left with is pieces of ice in the shape of coins that he then puts into the vending machine to pay for his gas.  The apartment he lives in warms with the gas heating, and the ice melts back into water.  Then the hole in the vending machine lets the water escape into the room, removing any evidence of his crime when the meterman comes to take the money out. 

What’s most interesting to me is that this mystery was actually lifted directly from a different book which I don’t know the name of.  I told this mystery to a family member who told me she’d read a book in which this exact situation plays out, with a poor man paying for gas using ice “coins,” but she didn’t remember the name of the book.  Does anyone remember the name?  If you do, please tell me!  In the comments below or at theusernamewhichismine@gmail.com.