The new Batman video game, for example, has swearing and harsh language in it.  In particular, many people have raised concerns that when playing as Catwoman, you are subject to constant unpleasant language and mild threats of rape by the thugs she runs across.

The hardcore gamers dismiss these concerns as silly because having thugs and henchmen be obnoxious and threatening is “realistic”.  There might be something to that, too.  If this wasn’t a game built upon pretending to be a billionaire dressed as a bat who spends his nights fighting criminals dressed as clowns and Alice in Wonderland characters.  If the Batman’s universe was realistic, then he’d either be shot in the back one random night or be so beat up and burnt out from his double life that he’d be a broken wreck.

Superheroes have always struggled with the fantastic and the realistic.  Batman has struggled the most.  Probably because so many of his fans seem to think he’s more “realistic” than other heroes.  I’m not going to get into that fallacy here.  I’ve wasted too many precious hours on that debate.  Regardless of where you stand on that debate, few people would want to read the Batman story where he trips on his cape and plummets to his death while on patrol, realistic as that possibility might be.

Realistically, Bruce Wayne could choke to death on a piece of pie.

I’m not interested in reading the story (or playing the video game) where ensuring Bruce Wayne chews his food properly is the key plot point.  But if you’re going to pull out the “realism” argument, then you can’t just stop where it suits your needs.

Given his status as Gotham’s wealthiest citizen and the obvious fact that Batman needs to have major funding to do what he does, it seems strange that no one has ever connected Wayne and his alter ego.  Or that a man with a prominent face can hide it behind half a mask and not still be recognized.  Or that a single man could have the time and ability to master every esoteric field of study, ranging from acrobatics to chemistry to art history.

And let’s not even get into his bad guys.  A guy with white skin and a hideous grimace who dresses in purple tuxedos.  A man with half his face burnt off.  A pulp style immortal evil mastermind who wants to wipe out the human race.  A crocodile man.  A shapeshifter.  A plant woman.

Realism and Batman are not friends.

This is not to say that a writer needs to throw realism completely out the window.  But when an unnecessary element of realism is introduced for no good reason, realism is not a defense.  It’s the same sort of half-logic that causes some folks to complain that children NPCs can’t die in Skyrim and that this fact “ruins the immersion”.

Oh, I’m sorry.  I didn’t realize that in the game where you pretend to be a dragonslaying badass who can throw fireballs and slay giants that NOT having roasting children would break the illusion.

OR

Dopey me.  I kind of assumed that if you were going to play Catwoman in a video game, you might get tired of being called a bitch a thousand and one times.  But, no, that’s REALISM.  Thanks for clearing that up.

To be perfectly clear, I don’t care if a Batman video game has (justified or not) hostility towards women.  And I don’t care if Catwoman slinks around in a sexy costume and uses kisses to disarm her opponents.  Okay, that’s a lie.  I do care.  I’ll go on record as saying a Batman game shouldn’t have these things in it.  Certainly shouldn’t have them casually strewn about.  But that’s just one guy’s opinion, and if I don’t like the game, I don’t have to play it.

But on the other end, you can’t just say “It’s realistic” and not expect me to roll my eyes a bit.  If your best justification for something unpleasant in a Batman story or video game is that it serves realism then I feel like you’ve already lost the debate.

Did I mention he fights a guy who has a freeze ray?

Realism in this context always seems to mean something other than realism.  It means a pocket of realism in an otherwise unrealistic realm.  And more often than not, that realism is aimed at shock value and “mature” content for its own sake.  So let’s just call it what it so often is.

Pandering.

I’ll stick with Skylanders myself.  Not only is it apologetically unrealistic, it’s also a game where its female characters (though too few) are not subject to dopey fetishism or “justified” sexism.  Stealth Elf is Catwoman without the baggage (and with the ability to vanish, leaving razor scarecrows in her place).  And Hex doesn’t slink around in a catsuit with a whip and wrap her legs around her foes like some softcore pornstar.  She fires shadowbolts and rains screaming skulls from the sky.  And she does it with style.

And really, I’m just glad to have female characters who are treated with respect.  Though apparently they have to hang out with dragons and boomerang throwing dinosaurs to get it.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

It’s the limitations that make things worth doing, that give them value.

One of the fun things to do in WoW is the dungeons.  Dungeons, for those uninformed souls out there, are segments of the game designed for 5 players to team up, fight bad guys, and (hopefully) pick up some good rewards along the way.  The evolution of dungeons in WoW has mostly been in how you find other players to join you in the dungeon delves.  The current system is simple.  You just que up for a dungeon, carry on with whatever else you’re doing in the game, and when you’re matched up with a group, you can just jump right into the dungeon.  It’s ridiculously easy.  Especially considering that originally doing dungeons meant trekking across the landscape to meet up at the entrance of whatever dungeon you were going to do.  This could lead to all kinds of problems, not the least of which was coordination.  And if even one of your party members was someplace far off…it was just as likely someone would decide not to wait and you’d have to start all over in your search.

But things are different now.

What’s unique about Cataclysm, the latest expansion, is that you have to discover the new dungeons before you can que for them.  This means you have to do some questing and exploring, which I’m sure will annoy some players.  Personally, I love this system and hope they keep it.  Because discovering dungeons makes them special.  Players might be annoyed by it, but that’s the point.  It’s annoying.  It’s meant to be a reward at the end of your playing experience.

You would think that Blizzard would avoid possibly annoying many of its players, and that it would be smarter to just give the players exactly what they want.  But I think that’s wrong.

Giving people what they want all the time is a bad idea.  If WoW was merely an imaginary playground where players could do whatever they wanted, where any reward was within easy reach, then it would not be the game it is.  On the other hand, there’s a balancing act here.  You can’t ignore the audience.  But neither can you just bow down to their every outcry.

The parallel is everywhere.  Especially in entertainment media, where every successful film becomes a franchise and where series books dominate the fantasy and mystery shelves.  I don’t want to say that these are always a bad thing.  Or even usually bad thing.  But the job of an artist, be they a video game designer, novelologist, or filmmaker, is to find the balance betweeng keeping the audience interested without giving them too much or not enough.  Give them everything they want, and they’ll get bored.  Screw with their expectations too often, and they’ll get angry.  Either can be death of whatever you’re attempting to do.

This is something I think about quite often.  And it only gets harder as time goes by.  With my first few novels, I didn’t have to worry about expectations.  There were few.  Gil’s All Fright Diner came out with absolutely none.  Nobody had heard of me and so nobody knew what they were getting.  They might have had some ideas, but they still went in fresh, more or less.  In the Company of Ogres and A Nameless Witch both had a similar advantage, though even Witch started to bear the weight of my previous work.  When I heard The Automatic Detective called wacky and zany, I suspected that had as much to do with my previous books as anything in Detective itself.

It’s not that Detective doesn’t have humor.  It’s just that I never intended it to be a “funny” book.  And it really isn’t all that funny.  It’s a little weird, a little retro, but it’s not nearly as silly as some like to consider it.  Absurd?  Sure.  But isn’t all fantasy?

Whenever I start a new novel, I find myself pondering where it will fit in my previous catalogue.  It’s not like my books don’t have similarities.  It’s just I don’t always know where those similarities lay.  More importantly, I don’t know where other people will think those similarities lay.  I’ve heard the full range of comments, both good and bad, and I realize there’s no escaping them.  If I write something too much like what I (or someone else wrote) then I run the risk of treading water.  If I try to do something different then I could end up annoying my audience.  Both pitfalls are unavoidable.  Especially as I continue to add books to my list.

But if I had to pick a trap to fall into, I think I’d rather fall into the one defying expectation than blindly following them.  Maybe that makes me an artist after all.  I’ll leave that for others to decide.  All I know is that, so far, I’m getting paid to write and have been fortunate enough that I haven’t really had to face that dilemma.  And that’s only because of the fine work and support of a lot of people.  I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating.  I wouldn’t be here without you, gang.

By the by, A. LEE MARTINEZ APPRECIATION DAY!! is on the way.  January 12th, as if I have to tell you.  Hope you have your monster movies and board games at the ready.  If not, you might want to get on that.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Sin & Punishment is a third person rail shooter from Treasure games.  Treasure will always hold a special place in my heart for making one of the most awesome, woefully underrated, games for Sega Genesis: Gunstar Heroes.  Gunstar Heroes was a classic of straight up, shoot-em-up console gaming with amazing originality and non-stop chaos.  In many ways, Sin & Punishment is a spiritual successor to Gunstar Heroes, and that’s a great thing indeed.

First though, I have to get the most negative part of the game out of the way.  While S&P is a surreal experience, its most bizarre aspect is found in its character design.  Specifically, its two lead characters are just plain weird.

We have Isa, the boy.  He looks all of thirteen with an atrocious fashion sense.  If he didn’t excell at kicking butt, I just don’t know if I could take him seriously with his shorts, thigh-high boots, and light blue jacket.  Add to this an effeminate haircut, a slight frame, and a general androgeny and you end up with one of the strangest action heroes in gaming history.  I mentioned I would have trouble taking him seriously if he wasn’t so skilled at shooting the crap out of everything, but that’s a lie.  I really can’t take him seriously at all.

Kachi is the girl of the duo, and she isn’t much better.  With a jean skirt, a fluffy shirt, and a tendency to stand pigeon-toed, we’re not exactly talking about an intimidating presence.  While she looks like a refugee from the 80′s, she actually comes across as the less ridiculous of the two, so that’s something.

While I don’t know what inspired these designs and they are unintentionally goofy in America, part of me likes the change from the traditional grizzled space marine that dominates most action games these days so I’m willing to overlook it.  Some “manly” men will take one look at our heroes and turn up their noses.  Too bad.  Their loss.  Because S&P is a hardcore action adventure the likes of which we rarely see this day and age.

The plot of the game . . . eludes me.  There’s something about two worlds, demons, super soldiers, genetically modified guardian monsters, and I don’t know what else.  It’s confusing as hell, but who cares?  Playing a video game for the story is like reading a book to admire the font.   It should get the job done, but not get in the way.

S&P’s gameplay is straightforward.  It’s a rail shooter, meaning the camera carries you through the level as you do your damn best to keep from getting killed while blasting everything in sight.  That’s it.  There’s nothing terribly complex about it.  It’s pure reflexes.  You shoot.  You dodge.  You shoot some more.  Dodge some more.  Then you shoot while dodging and dodge while shooting.  Stand still, you die.  Don’t shoot, you die.

Treasure hasn’t tried to reinvent the rail shooter, but instead has elected to take full advantage of what a home console shooter can do.  The levels are huge.  The bosses complex and rewarding to defeat.  And there’s enough variety of enemies and levels to keep gamers looking for a hardcore shooter interested.

The game supports two players.  The first player controls a character and shoots.  The second player just shoots.  I haven’t tried this yet, but I can see why.  There just wouldn’t be much point to having two characters on screen at the same time because usually the screen is so filled with enemies and enemy bullets that there will only be one safe spot to be standing at any time.  Two characters would just confuse each other, get in each other’s way.

And here comes S&P’s second biggest weakness.  It is tough.  Tough as hell.  Even playing on easy, you’ll find yourself facing defeat at later levels.  Fortunately, the game makes liberal use of checkpoints.  Don’t you hate games where you die and have to walk all the way back from point A to point B, only to die again and go right back to point A?  Well, this is rarely a problem in S&P, which has checkpoints like mad.  In fact, this is one of the only games I’ve ever played where even the boss fights have checkpoints.  Sometimes, they even have multiple checkpoints.  And you’re going to need them.

S&P has some nice gameplay options.  After you beat a level, you can always jump right to it and practice.  It keeps track of high scores, and you can even compare your high scores to other players across the world via the Wii’s internet connection.  There’s something charming about this to me.  S&P is a flashback to a time when scores meant something.  Whether it’s topping your personal best or striving to make your mark, watching your score rise can be an old school  joy.  One of the things I love about the gameplay is that you have a score multiplier that rises the more bad guys you destroy, but falls whenever you get hit.  Even if you’re nowhere near dying, you’ll still wince as you take a hit and watch that multiplier fall.

Let’s just get down to this.  The Wii takes a lot of heat (some of it justified) for being a system that plays it safe with countless Mario games and silly little casual game trifles.  But there are some genuinely hardcore games for it, and this is one of them.  Granted, it doesn’t have the hardcore game look.  It stars strangely garbed children and involves a storyline that is both mystical and absurd.  Nobody is grizzled.  The bad guys all look nearly as weird as our heroes, and most people will probably take one look and label it “gay” or “kid’s stuff” and move on.

But S&P is great and unique.  It’s flaws are forgivable.  This is a game that dares to break the mold, that is both retro and next gen.  So check it out.  You might just be surprised.

I’ve been playing Mario Strikers Charged on Wii lately.  It’s a great game.  I am not a sports guy in any sense.  I don’t play sports.  I don’t watch sports.  I don’t even play sports video games.  Well, not normally.

Before the Wii, my two favorite sports games were Mutant League Football and Tiny Toon Sports.  Both were for Sega Genesis, so that should give you an indication of how rarely I play sports games, even weird ones.

A big part of the appeal of sports games is the atmosphere.  As a non-sports guy, when I see people in football uniforms or baseball jerseys, it just doesn’t catch my attention.  It just looks generic.  This isn’t a flaw in the game, more of a personal perception.

But with Mario Power Tennis or Mario Strikers Charged, I get full fledged characters.  The games are fun to play, no doubt, but there’s also a lot of personality going on.  I love playing Bowser, which really shouldn’t be a surprise with my love of monsters.  He’s the big villain of the Mushroom Kingdom, but that basically makes him a tempermental jerk.  He might kidnap Princess Peach every other weekend, but nobody really seems to hold that against him.  At least, they let him into their tennis tournaments and go kart races.  But maybe that’s just because the people of the Mushroom Kingdom are jovial and forgiving.

Regardless, I love to make up little stories in my head as I play these games.  I spent hours playing doubles tennis, teaming me as Bowser with Mario and thinking how if only these two guys could learn to get along, there’d be no stopping them.  If I’m Princess Daisy and I’m against Princess Peach, I want to win.  No, check that.  I NEED to win.  Because this is my chance to step out of Peach’s shadow and show her who is boss. 

Strangely, when I’m Luigi and I’m up against Mario, I don’t have the same attitude.  Maybe it’s because it seems like Mario and Luigi are really close.  Sure, Mario might be the preeminent hero of the kingdom, but I think he always takes time to acknowledge Luigi’s contributions to his heroics.  Whereas I’m pretty sure Princess Peach thinks of Daisy as someone to pal around with and tell Peach how pretty she is.

But, as I said, I’m mostly a Bowser guy.  And I love playing Bowser because it gives me license to be a jerk.  If I lose a match, I can get pissed because you can bet your ass that Bowser is pissed.  Bowser is not a good loser.  And if I win, I can be obnoxious because you can bet your ass that Bowser is obnoxious.  He’s not a good winner either.

You might think that Bowser would get extra invested in any matches against Mario or Peach, but I think there’s an unspoken respect among these threes.  Perhaps I’m overanalyzing, but you have to assume that if Mario and Peach are inviting Bowser to play with them, they aren’t too annoyed by his antics.  No, I believe the real emotional investment with Bowser is to be found when he faces off against Bowser Jr.

Bowser seems like a decent dad.  He’s not a great role model, but if you’re an ill-tempered turtle in the Mushroom Kingdom, what other job is open for you anyway?  At least he spends time with his kid.  Even gets Junior involved in his hobbies, like kidnapping Princesses.  So I think Bowser is actually pretty proud of his son.

So here’s how it works.  If I’m playing doubles with Bowser and Bowser Jr as my partner, then I sure as hell feel a great deal of pride if we take down our opponents.  And if I lose a match, I think Bowser would be cool with that too.  Because he is nothing if not a supportive parent.

But if Bowser is competing with his son…well, I think the gloves come off.  And they come off big time.  Partly because Bowser doesn’t want to lose to his kid.  And also because Bowser wants his kid to be tough and earn his victories.  I sometimes think Bowser goes easy on Mario because taking over the Mushroom Kingdom isn’t nearly as much fun as TRYING to take over the Mushroom Kingdom.  But when it comes to his own son, no quarter is given or expected.

When I’m playing Mario Strikers Charged and I perform a cheap tackle from behind on Bowser Jr, I get tremendous satistfaction out of it.  It’s just something Bowser would do.  And when Bowser Jr does the same, I’m annoyed by it.  But I’m also just a little bit pleased.  That’s how ya do it, kid! I think.

Maybe I’m putting too much thought into this, but this is why I love playing these Mario sports games.  It’s why I love playing Bowser in particular.

I really could go on.  I haven’t even tackled Donkey Kong, Wario, or even the minor characters like Koopah Troopah or Boo because, yes, I have indeed thought about what might be going through their minds too.  But that would only make the blog entry go on longer, and none of us want that.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to stomp a happy plumber into the ground and win the Crystal Cup tournament.  Maybe then all those dumb people in the kingdom will realize just how cool I am.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Scribblenauts is for Nintendo DS, and it shows that once again, the most innovative gaming system on the market isn’t found in your living room, but in your pocket.  Really, the DS continues to shine.  So much so that I just don’t see the point in buying any other system myself.  The DS proves that it’s not the hardware that makes a great game (although it is a well-designed system), but the software behind it.  And nowhere is that more obvious than in Scribblenauts.

Okay, okay.  “Get on with it,” you’re probably saying.  What is it about Scribblenauts that makes it so cool?  And that’s where it gets tricky because Scribblenauts is not a game easily categorized because it is its own category.

The basic premise of the game is that you’re collecting special starites.  You do this by solving puzzles or navigating simple levels.  This isn’t what makes the game cool.  What makes it cool is that you achieve this goal by creating a variety of objects on the fly.  “What kind of objects?” you ask.

Pretty much anything you can imagine.  All you have to do is write down a word, and POOF it appears.  The vocabulary of the game is absolutely immense.  If you can think of it, the odds are that it is in the game.  Using this nearly unlimited tool of your imagination, you can achieve your goal in almost any way.

An example might be clearer.  In one level, a cat is atop a house.  Your goal is to get the cat down to the waiting girl.  Here are just some of the solutions I’ve employed.

1) Write LADDER.  Use it to climb up and pick up the cat.
2) Write FISH.  Give the fish to the girl.  Cat jumps down.
3) Write MOUSE.  Put the mouse on the ground.  Cat jumps down.
4) Write FIRE.  Set house ablaze.  Cat jumps down.
5) Write BAZOOKA.  Blow up house.  Cat jumps down.
6) Write TRAMPOLINE.  Jump up and pick up cat.
7) Write PEGASUS.  Ride winged horse up to pick up cat.

…and these are just a few of the solutions possible.  I’m sure there are many more.  The only way to “master” a level on advanced mode is to complete it 3 different ways, using different objects every time.

Lest you think all the solutions are this easy, I’m still working on figuring out many of the levels.  Although a game like this isn’t about difficulty, but imagination and novelty.  The title screen acts as a sandbox-style default where you can just throw all sorts of ideas together.  The fun at first is seeing if you can outsmart the game by thinking of something it isn’t ready for.  While it’s possible to end up with something a little different than you expected, it is really unusual to draw a complete blank.  And often, the game will surprise you with its attention to detail.  This is a game that knows there’s a difference between a T-rex and an allosaurus.  And if you’re wondering if there’s a big difference between a regular devil and the fabled Jersey Devil, this game will assure you that indeed there is.

Chupacabra, Cthulhu, Tank, Flamethrower, Forest, Machinegun, Yeti, Bigfoot, Ghost, Wraith, Zombie, Ghoul, Sword, Castle, Apartments, Mall, Skyscraper, Kracken, Skateboard, Butler, Fairy.  This is just a small sampling of random words that I’ve created either to solve a level or just for fun.  And here’s where I draw the strangest comparison in any game I’ve ever played.

Scribblenauts reminds me of Colorforms.  Am I the only one who remembers these things?  You get a simple background and apply reusable sticky images to create scenes.  I had a big Smurf Coloforms set when I was a kid, and I loved it.  I even did my own Do-It-Yourself Colorform with paper, scissors, dinosaurs, and double-sided tape.  And now, my Colorform joy is back in this handy little game.

Maybe I’ll craft my own little city.  Or I’ll design my own dinosaur park.  Or maybe I’ll just pit Cthulhu against wave after wave of werewolves.  Whatever strikes my fancy.  This alone would probably make the game worthwhile, but there is actually a challenging game here as well.

Will you love Scribblenauts?  I can’t guarantee that.  It’s too bizarre, too unusual for easy comparisons.  But this is a game that almost deserves to be bought just because it is so fascinating and unique.  Or not.  Ultimately, if the idea sounds interesting to you, then it’s probably worth checking out.