Cruise Elroy

You know what? It’s been too long since we looked at any music around here.

Here’s an excerpt of the Super Mario Bros. theme, composed by Koji Kondo:

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And here’s an excerpt of “Super Mario Bros.: Ground Theme,” a new arrangement from Kondo that appears on the Super Smash Bros. Brawl soundtrack:

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As you can hear, there are plenty of noteworthy changes in the Brawl arrangement — reworked harmonies, a new key, a flashier arrangement, et cetera — but the one I want to concentrate on here is the rhythm.

Take a look at this snip from the original theme (and note that I’ve filled out the note durations in these transcriptions to bring out the rhythm; the actual performances are more staccato):

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There are two notes here that conspicuously fall on offbeats: the one that’s tied over the bar line, and its immediate successor. (These are the sixth and seventh notes, if you’re following along with the audio sample.) This displacement is a form of syncopation, a rhythmic technique which appears in virtually all types of music. Essentially, a syncopated rhythm has accents in unusual or unexpected places.

By contrast, notice how the next-to-last note of the sample falls right on the third beat — you can even hear it match up with the snare-like sound in the percussion part. This note is not syncopated.

Now let’s look at the corresponding spot in the Brawl arrangement:

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This sample is rhythmically identical to the first except for the last two notes, which have been shifted half a beat later. The upshot is that there are now three consecutive offbeat notes (the sixth, seventh and eighth), strengthening the original theme’s syncopated feel. Also notice how that next-to-last note, previously on the third beat, now falls between the third and fourth beats.

Let’s look at another sample from the original Super Mario Bros. theme, about 31 seconds into the audio clip at the top:

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There is a lot of syncopation going on here already; the first measure has three notes in a row that fall on offbeats (the second, third, and fourth), and the second measure has two more (the seventh and eighth). However, the effect is masked because of a new percussion pattern: instead of landing at beats 2 and 4, the snare sound now lands on beat 1, between beats 2 and 3, and on beat 4. This mirrors the accents in the melody — but as ragtime fans know, the full effect of offbeat syncopation requires a simpler, unsyncopated part to provide contrast.

Let’s compare that to the Brawl sample for the same section:

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There are two big rhythmic changes here. First, every note is now on an offbeat except for the downbeats in measures 1 and 3. Second, the bass and drums are accenting the beats instead of matching the melody, providing the contrast mentioned above. The result, as before, is more syncopation. The Brawl rhythm is literally and figuratively more upbeat than the original.

What I think is particularly interesting is that this new rhythm seems to be the one ingrained in Koji Kondo’s head. Check out his impromptu performance at GDC 2007, and we’ll listen for those two examples above.

Here’s the first:

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If you compare it to the two clips above, you’ll hear that this matches the Brawl arrangement. In fact, Kondo uses this rhythm every time in this performance.

The second example is less clear. Here are the three places where he plays the riff in question:

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In each of those clips, it almost sounds as though Kondo plays it “wrong” the first time — with the extra syncopation from the Brawl arrangement — and then tries to “correct” it to the original version the second time through.

Since he’s playing from memory and improvising on the spot, it’s impossible to say for sure how much of this is intentional. To my ear, though, it sounds like Kondo prefers the newer rhythm. What do you think?

Imagine that you’re a game designer putting the finishing touches on your new platformer. You’re too close to the project to have any perspective, so you bring in someone to playtest it with fresh eyes. In one level, he misses a tough jump ten times in a row and slams the keyboard in frustration. You scribble down some notes and offer to skip him through that part.

Now imagine that you’re working on another platformer, and your playtest subject fails twenty times at the same jump. Perhaps you consider explaining that the game is still in progress, that the difficulty is still being tweaked — but the player grits her teeth and attempts it another twenty times. Then another twenty times. Then another twenty times after that. Finally, she gets it.

After gathering feedback you open the level editor, scroll to that one difficult part, and add a few more spikes.

Welcome to Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV.

That hypothetical playtest is not an exaggeration: there is one jump in this game, dubbed “Doing Things the Hard Way” or “Veni Vidi Vici” because of the droll subtitles, that could easily take dozens of tries in the beta, and hundreds of tries in the more difficult final release. Of the 1314 deaths that poor Viridian suffered in my playthrough, nearly three quarters were from the Veni Vidi Vici jump alone.

I have never failed at one jump five hundred times in a row before. I’m not sure I’ve failed at anything five hundred times in a row before, actually. Why now?

It’s because, although the game can brutally difficult, there is virtually no penalty for failure. You can’t run out of lives, your character is resurrected right away, and you rarely lose more than five or ten seconds of progress. It is as close to a frictionless experience as I can imagine.

Removing tedium is a concession to accessibility that I can get behind.

This post contains spoilers for Dragon Age: Origins.

Mages are vitally important in Dragon Age. At Ostagar, Duncan chastises Alistair for his snarky behavior towards them, claiming they can’t afford to antagonize such powerful allies. If, later in the game, you express your concern to Irving over the losses at the Tower, he’ll argue that even one mage can be enough to turn the tide of a battle.

They’re right. Unless you’re playing on Easy or have preternatural talent, Dragon Age is brutally difficult without making good use of magic. Between healing the party and managing large crowds of enemies, the mage is the most indispensable class in the game.

It figures, then, that the first one who accompanies you is such a pain to get along with.

Here is a partial list of actions that Morrigan disapproves of: helping a community of starving refugees, deceiving a demon who threatens to possess a young child, searching for a bereaved man’s missing daughter, helping a waitress escape her life of poverty, refusing to defile a sacred relic, and falling in love. Any character who doesn’t act in absolute self-interest will have a hard time befriending Morrigan.

Even the dialogue choices will tease you. After she refused to help with some menial task or other, my cursor hovered over “I should have known you’d be a selfish bitch” for a few seconds before, grudgingly, I went with “As you wish.” Can’t afford to antagonize the mages!

(Actually, I just looked up the context for that exchange — it turns out that I asked her if she could teach the Shapeshifter specialization, and she refused because her approval rating was too high.)

The real kicker is that the only other mage companion is Morrigan’s diametrical opposite. While Morrigan seems irritated by the mere thought of helping someone, Wynne is virtuous and compassionate. As a result, virtually every decision you make will upset one of them — but since they’re the only mages you have, you need to do what you can to keep them in your good graces.

It’s really a shrewd bit of design on BioWare’s part. The player has to make difficult decisions with tangible in-game effects, but the consequences don’t feel contrived or unfair. I only wish the specialization unlocks did not carry over to new playthroughs; it’s a weaselly loophole that sidesteps some of the game’s most interesting moral choices.

This post contains spoilers for Dragon Age: Origins.

I was initially interested in Leliana because I wanted to know more about the Chantry. Ever since I attempted to unravel the tangled theology of Morrowind, I’ve been fascinated by the way fantasy worlds treat religion; gods may walk the earth and meddle in human affairs, but the existence of magic still causes divinity to lose some of its luster. As a lapsed lay sister, Leliana seemed a good source for understanding how that conflict would play out in Dragon Age.

She was, as it turns out, but I quickly became attached to her as a character and not as a religious ambassador. In fact, within a few hours of her joining my party, she had become my favorite companion.

As someone already invested in stories and music, I was admittedly predisposed to like Leliana. I loved that I could always ask her for a story at camp, or “What do you know of this place?” out in the wild; I enjoyed reading the codex entires, but having a bard to bring stories to life was a welcome and engaging alternative.

That aside, though, I found Leliana to be charming in her own right. Most notably, she has a disarming earnestness that seems to get under everyone’s skin. It’s this quality that convinces the Revered Mother to release Sten, and (if you’re role-playing) that convinces the Grey Warden to welcome her into the party. Later you can hear her gradually soften up the more jaundiced companions, like Shale, with random party banter. And she’s even vulnerable to her own charms — her vision from the Maker is implied to be a fabrication she has deluded herself into accepting.

Leliana also has an amusing goofy streak, though her best comments are quick asides or buried deep in dialogue trees. (Some favorites: naming her pet nug “Schmooples,” suggesting that everyone hold hands and sing to solve the floor puzzle in the Gauntlet, and gossiping about Alistair’s sexual performance.) She’s perhaps not as funny as Alistair or Oghren, but neither does she bear the burden of incessant comic relief; as such, her humor is afforded more subtlety. And thankfully, her comically exaggerated girliness (see: all comments regarding shoes) is only a backdrop and not a stand-in for an actual personality.

All of this generated a positive feedback loop: I liked Leliana, so I was friendly with her and gave her gifts, increasing her approval rating. The higher disposition unlocked more dialogue options — and, eventually, her “personal quest” — which fleshed out her character. And as I got to know her better, I liked her more.

The personal quests are the high points of your companions’ character development. They provide a transition from acquaintanceship to friendship, piercing through Morrigan’s arch cynicism or Sten’s willful inscrutability and revealing the person beneath. Of these, Leliana’s quest was one of my favorites — instead of being merely a nice thing to do, it can actually realign her moral compass.

Marjolaine, Leliana’s old mentor and eventual betrayer, suddenly tries to have her assassinated after years of silence. You and your party track her down, ordering her away or killing her on the spot. Either way, Leliana is thrown into crisis as she is overwhelmed with repressed feelings: What does it mean that she still enjoys murder? How much of her piety was an act? Was she living a lie as a cloistered sister, or can she reject her past and choose her own destiny? Her self-identity rests on the edge of a knife, and the player, as her best friend, can nudge her in one direction or the other.

All this is to say that I had a difficult time placing Leliana in a box, which is not something I can often say about someone in a video game. Dragon Age is full of strong characters, but she is the one who struck me as particularly multifaceted.

Rather than consider my overall favorites, I thought it might be fun to name a favorite game for each year of the 2000s. Following are my choices:

2000 — Shenmue

Shenmue’s meticulous attention to detail makes for an evocative experience which, frankly, I’m surprised I haven’t written more about. The whole game exudes a lovable quirkiness; everything from the convenience store music to Ryo’s cheek bandage to the legendary voice work makes me smile. Shenmue III’s slow, painful death remains the only game cancellation I really regret.

Honorable mention: The Sims

2001 — Halo: Combat Evolved

Halo’s single-player campaign is one of I’ve finished in an FPS. It’s full of minor thrills: intuiting the physics of the Warthog, popping off Elites with the sniper rifle, reveling in the wide-open vistas. And even an inveterate solo gamer like me couldn’t help but enjoy the spit-polished multiplayer.

Honorable mention: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3

2002 — The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Morrowind is a flawed masterpiece. The world bursts with creativity and inventiveness, but the game design is occasionally misguided. (Broken leveling system, I’m looking at you.) Even so, it remains one of the most engaging RPGs I’ve played, and has been a huge influence on how I think about games.

Honorable mention: Jet Set Radio Future

2003 — Soul Calibur II

Soul Calibur II is one of the few games, and the only fighting game, that I’ve purchased more than once. Despite my general ambivalence towards the genre, I found myself poring over characters’ move lists in the training mode — not because I wanted to beat my friends, but because I wanted to beat them more soundly. It’s a very satisfying game to get better at!

Honorable mention: Beyond Good & Evil

2004 — World of Warcraft

I picked up World of Warcraft on a whim because my roommate was playing it, and after three months or so I uninstalled it and actually threw the disc in the trash. Both of those decisions, it turns out, were quite forward-thinking; not only did I gain a solid appreciation for MMOs and their insidious design, but I escaped before my GPA had a chance to react.

Honorable mention: Half-Life 2

2005 — Civilization IV

The Civilization games are so intricate that I can’t imagine changing anything without destroying the clockwork. Amazingly, this one adds several major gameplay features (civics, religion, Great People, experience points), streamlines the existing ones, and somehow reduces micromanagement at the same time. This is some impressive design.

Honorable mention: Mario Kart DS

2006 — The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Twilight Princess is an iteration on one of the most successful video game formulas ever, and while it wasn’t the revolution I was looking for, that didn’t diminish its quality. Most criticisms of the game, including my own, rely on comparisons to previous titles; taken on its own, though, there is very little to quibble with here. Years of refinement have made for a high-quality title.

Honorable mention: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

2007 — Super Mario Galaxy

While most gamers were debating whether Portal or Bioshock deserved top honors for 2007, I was busy 100%-ing Galaxy — for the second time. With ingenious level design, impressively second-nature controls, and a triumphant, goosebump-inducing score, this is the best platforming game I’ve ever played, period.

Honorable mention: Portal

2008 — Mother 3 fan translation

There’s not much I can see about Mother 3 that I haven’t said already. I encourage you to check out the eight (!) posts in the sidebar, and my appearance on Michael Abbott’s Brainy Gamer podcast from last year, if you want the gory details. Suffice it to say that this is an all-time favorite.

Honorable mention: No More Heroes

2009 — Dragon Age: Origins

This is the best endorsement of Dragon Age I can offer: I finished the game at about 10 PM, read through the epilogue, watched the credits roll, groused about the 30 Seconds to Mars song…and then hit New Game when the main menu came up. Next thing I knew, it was two in the morning.

Honorable mention: The Beatles: Rock Band

In most RPGs, I either fall in love with the narrative elements (the story, the characters, the plot) or the mechanical elements (the classes, the combat, the strategizing). Even in games where the two are particularly well-integrated, the dichotomy still exists in my head and I invariably like one better. I then alter my playing style to maximize my experience with one at the expense of the other.

Dragon Age: Origins fell squarely in the first camp for me. I enjoyed the combat, and eventually even got pretty good at it, but the lengthy dungeons and tactical tweaking took a lot of time and effort. By the fifteen-hour mark I had dropped the difficulty to Easy so I could get through the dungeons faster and spend more time with my favorite part of the game: chatting up my companions.

Handling interpersonal relationships in Dragon Age is an odd chore, but an enjoyable one. Each of your party members has a number that represents their disposition towards you, which number can be affected in three ways: dialogue, plot decisions, and gifts. (A high disposition gives a stat bonus, so you must weigh the satisfaction of telling Morrigan she’s a selfish bitch with the desire to boost her spellpower.)

Of the three, dialogue is by far the most engaging option. While it’s not too hard to avoid pissing off your companions, it’s much more difficult to make them like you; Alistair, for example, will respond well to teasing up to a point but will eventually get offended. It’s possible to play it safe, slowly improving disposition with reasonable choices, but earning more significant boosts requires a nuanced understanding of the characters.

My one complaint is that it’s far too easy to exhaust the dialogue options. New topics become available as a character’s approval increases, which is great, but I’d burn through those immediately. Obviously there can only be so many recorded lines, but I would have liked to see more conversation topics unlocked by plot events; that way, even a character who already loves you will have something new to say sometimes.

Plot decisions are perhaps the best way to alter disposition from a role-playing perspective. Though it’s possible to be a sycophant and butter up your companions in camp, actions can speak louder than words. I particularly appreciated that some decisions are offensive enough to make a companion desert or attack you, and that particularly heinous actions engender a response in camp if the offended party member was not present at the time.

Gifts are the most potent way to improve disposition, and the one I found least convincing. Though I know that the game translates my conversations and plot decisions into numerical bonuses and penalties under the hood, I accept that abstraction because of the narrative framework laid over it. The gift system largely undercuts the narrative framework, though, turning approval into a literal numbers game.

Here’s what I’m getting at: When I gave Leliana an ox bone that “still had some tendon attached to it” — a gift she did not particularly like, as it’s intended for a dog — it still pushed her approval high enough to confess her romantic interest for me. My suspension of disbelief is strong, but that’s pretty difficult to reconcile.

Econ professor Jeff Ely has a fascinating post about the economics of pinball on the blog Cheap Talk. Here’s an excerpt:

Pinball skill is transferrable. If you can pass, stall, nudge, and aim on one machine you can do it on any machine. This is both a blessing and a curse for pinball developers. The blessing is that pinball players were a captive market. The curse was that to keep the pinball players interested the games had to get more and more intricate and challenging.

Pinball developers struggled with this problem as pinball was slowly losing to video games. Video games competed by adding levels of play with increasing difficulty. Any new player could quickly get chops on a new game because the low levels were easy. This ensured that new players were drawn in easily, but still they were continually challenged because the higher levels got harder and harder.

I’ve been mulling over the concept of transferable skill as it applies to video games, and I have a theory.

As Ely notes, arcade games differ from pinball machines in that each game has its own difficulty ramp; a Pac-Man fan won’t automatically have any particular skill with Donkey Kong. Since beginners burn through more quarters than experts, minimizing skill transfer between games was a profitable approach for developers.

In the past twenty-five years or so, that approach seems to have shifted. Arcades have been marginalized by home consoles, and the rising cost of both developing and playing games has made the marketplace more risk-averse. Gradually, skill transfer became a selling point; if gamers enjoy Sonic the Hedgehog, and the developers already have the resources to make it, it makes sense to try Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

More than sequels, though, I think this shift is what helped establish — or at least further entrench — the video game genre.

Genres operate on a different axis for games than for other media; rather than revealing anything about content (Dr. Strangelove and Dogma are both comedies), they tell us about the mode of interaction (Serious Sam and Half-Life are both first-person shooters). Put another way, a video game genre elucidates how and where a gamer’s skills will transfer between similar titles.

This is vitally important information for us. Given games’ relative cost, length, and inaccessibility, we often stick with the familiar. Knowing that one game is similar to another lets us carry over accumulated experience and get the most from our investment in the medium — all of us pinball experts in our own domain. Qualms about stifled creativity aside, I think that’s one benefit of genre that’s worth praising.

Wow, did I ever need the A Boy and His Blob remake.

Even though I spend the majority of my waking hours reading about, discussing, analyzing and testing video games, I’ve had little interest in actually playing them lately (perhaps you’ve noticed). A Boy and His Blob, for whatever reason, shook me from my listlessness; I plowed through to 100% completion within a week and a half.

I had Sega consoles growing up, so I didn’t encounter the NES Boy and His Blob until college. A friend of mine remembered it as a childhood favorite: “This white blob follows you around, and when you feed it jelly beans it turns into stuff — like a ladder or a trampoline!” I agreed that it sounded awesome, and we resolved to play through it one day.

When we did, though, we found it to be a frustrating experience. The controls were clumsy, the difficulty curve was brutal, and that awesome jelly bean mechanic was overshadowed by tedious precision platforming. The game ostensibly encourages experimentation, but the limited lives and jelly beans meant constant restarts that dampened our enthusiasm. By the end, my friend had removed his rose-colored glasses; we reevaluated A Boy and His Blob as a fun idea with a flawed execution.

The brilliance of the Boy and His Blob remake is that it is, itself, rose-colored. It exists in reality the way the original exists in your head. It is nostalgia made manifest.

That’s not to say that you need to have played the NES version to appreciate this one. Between the hand-drawn art style, the younger and more endearing protagonist, the adorable “hug blob” button which serves no gameplay purpose, and the pleasant score, A Boy and His Blob on the Wii is charming in a way that the original never was. Like the best modern Nintendo games, it has an aura of sentimentality that evokes a simpler time.

It doesn’t hurt that the game is much easier to play now. There are unlimited jelly beans, unlimited lives, and frequent save points. You no longer have to memorize which jelly bean flavor goes with which tool. It’s now easy to place a bean with pinpoint precision. You also only receive a limited subset of jelly beans for each level, so there is less blind experimentation — a change I initially hated but grew to appreciate towards the end.

I was less fond of the new enormous signs with instructions on which tool to use. (Next to a high ledge there might be a sign with a picture of a ladder, for example.) Given that the choice of jelly beans is already restricted, it seems unnecessary to offer such obvious hand-holding, especially later in the game when the player could be reasonable expected to figure things out herself. I get that the game is meant to more accessible now, but that was one concession I could have done without.

The level design and organization take a leaf out of Braid’s book: a hub world grants access to individual levels, each of which has several discrete puzzles, some lightweight platforming, and three collectible items. The puzzles themselves, though, are pretty mild compared to Braid; it wasn’t until the last few levels that I couldn’t immediately discern the solution. There were a couple of tricky boss battles, and some of the unlockable bonus levels brought me close to frustration, but on the whole Blob is a smooth ride.

Perhaps that approachability is what drew me in to begin with; it offered a much-needed reminder of how it feels to invest oneself in a game. Beyond the warm nostalgia and gentle brain-teasers, I owe A Boy and His Blob a debt of gratitude for rekindling my interest.

Most of my work at Harmonix concerns the weekly Rock Band DLC. I’m unfamiliar with a lot of the songs we do, and though I get to know them pretty well during the testing process, I rarely have a chance to get sick of them thanks to our relentless schedule. So when faced with a year of testing 45 very familiar songs for The Beatles: Rock Band, it seemed inevitable that I’d end up a Stones guy when the project was through.

Then, last night at the company release party, I hung out in front of an Xbox with some thirty coworkers and sang along to Beatles songs for over four hours at the top of my lungs. When I woke up this morning, I actually yawned blood.

I’m probably in too deep to make anything resembling an objective recommendation, but suffice it to say that this game is more than the sum of its parts. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

Hit Self-Destruct was probably the best video games blog I’ve ever read. A unique mix of fiction, biography, history, and analysis, it put the rest of us to shame with its depth, breadth, and well-crafted prose. To call it ahead of its time would be an enormous understatement.

The most astounding thing about Hit Self-Destruct, though, is the tense I now need to use to describe it. “Hit Self-Destruct was always something that would end eventually,” author Duncan Fyfe wrote earlier this month, “and this is the ending.” The last post went out this morning.

Blogs, of course, are not typically things that end. Yes, they are forgotten, or replaced, or they peter out with increasingly apologetic posts about how busy the author has become. A premeditated conclusion at the peak of one’s popularity, though, is virtually unheard of. Bill Watterson would be proud.

Some games feel like places: you visit and revisit them, you play and explore and loiter, and in time they come to feel familiar. Others are tightly authored experiences that hook you, direct you along a path, provide a narrative thrust — and eventually, suddenly, end. Then you have to reload your save from the last corridor, or else start anew.