So between the first part and this part I sandwiched a 900-mile move to a different state. Hopefully you can forgive the delay. As with the first part, there be spoilers here so ye be forewarned.

Day 3: Foam gun is sweet. When you shoot it into doors or vents I like the fact they took the time to create a nice animation with it destroying the two. It took me a few hours to realize you could shoot foam against a wall and create a temporary ledge. I think I was too focused on shooting foam into doors and vents. I have failed.

The mega run is somewhat useful but feels largely uninteresting. Running across electric water, or over people, is amusing but so far the other power ups are much more useful. There’s so much stuff in most rooms that it either can’t work or it’s not worth the effort.

I wish you could make notes on the map or something. Running back to a ‘?’ room only to find it requires a weapon I don’t have is frustrating. Not being able to make notes kind of forces you to wait until you have all the weapons.

Day 4: 100% items and 100% map. This is how I roll. Granted, the double 100% is hardly as difficult as completely uncovering the Symphony of the Night map, but I’m still beaming with some pride. Speaking of which, Castlevania frequently had warp points to get to the other sections of the map. Not the case here. The lack of warp feels like a mechanism to extend total game time.

Rockets! There’s not much else to say—we all know how good rockets are. Will a panel that requires a gun open with a rocket? I should’ve tested that. Actually, shouldn’t everything open with a rocket? If shooting it with a pistol, or running through it, or hitting it with foam somehow works, it seems reasonable a rocket point blank would work kind of like an exploding skeleton key.

Triple jump makes mega run more fun. In fact, mega run is largely boring until you need to get some of the final items. Figuring out how to build up enough speed in tight spaces or how to time jumps to hit elevated blue boxes is a fun challenge that seems largely ignored by the core gameplay.

Wheee! Yay for hook shot! Even if it reduces some of the usefulness of the foam. But stealing shields from the rocket guys is really funny. I wish they held clay pots. I also wish you could swing through a room with it like Tarzan.

Wow, the helmet makes this game way too easy. The final fight, on normal mode anyway, is already pretty easy since you get unlimited ammo and health. Being able to stand there and take no damage is just overpowered.

Holy god those faces look terrible close up. The main character looks like Matthew Perry after a weeklong lard binge. These voice actors couldn’t have phoned in their performances any more. I really hope they aren’t professionals.

I was right! She’s NSA! I knew it! This plot is as thin as saran wrap. Amy is disappointed that the main bad guy wasn’t his father. He’s just some random guy. That stinks. Moreover, what’s with the “get ready for the sequel” ending? Can’t the complex just evaporate or become an inverted complex or something? Is the final bad guy Dracula in a mask with no eye holes? Or Cobra Commander?

I’m going to try this in a different format. However, since I didn’t think about it until after I finished playing last night, the first day or two will be summarized. Spoiler alert for this article.

Day 1: This is an XBLA game? It doesn’t look like it. Very visually appealing. Feels more Metroid than Castlevania, but the play style is familiar territory. Oh how I missed thee.

Perhaps this is due to moving from digital to analog, but the controls feel looser than I’d expect with a side scroller. I hate how the camera zooms in sometimes and makes it impossible see ahead.

I love the flashlight. I love how the lighting effect looks; I love how it’s used. It’s a terrific feature. I can’t tell if enemies are more likely to see me if I have it on. I’m playing like that’s the case. I like feeling sneaky. I wish there was a way to put it below my face and make scary faces at enemies to freak them out just before shooting them.

Giving the player infinite ammo is great. Breaking it up by forcing reload is smart—it removes the Metroid/Megaman “run forward shooting at all times” play style.

The voice acting is terrible. I can’t tell if they’re from daytime soaps or late night Cinemax. Every time my character talks I wish he was hit by a bus. I started ending his lines with “brah.”

The only thing missing from the prelude is for the music to go “dun dun duunnnn” before the fade to black. The prelude made me think I bought Contra for a second.

I just crawled through a vent, then dropped down and snapped a guy’s neck from behind, shot a robot off the ceiling from across the room, which fell and exploded on another guy. I approve of this. Eat that Steven Seagal. Speaking of gratuitous violence, it’s funny how quickly this guy went from pacifist to Enemy Antichrist. He has this emo flashback about telling his father he’s nothing like him, which is hilarious since the actor couldn’t have delivered it any more half-hearted yet filled with melodrama (“I’m not like you! I don’t want to kill people! I just want to… sing!”). But then, in the same scene, he watches his girlfriend get beaten like a piñata filled with travel bottles of tequila at an AA meeting, and suddenly all his pacifism goes out the window. He picks up a gun lying on the desk, because nothing mitigates an escalating crisis like introducing firearms into the equation, and proceeds to go on a rampage. The guy’s personality went from The Dude to Walter in like five seconds (“I myself once dabbled in pacifism. Not in ‘Nam, of course.”).

Steven Seagal should’ve voiced this guy. It would’ve been great if he voiced the main guy, and all the lines from the lackeys contained movie titles that he starred in, like:

“Man, this guy is hard to kill.”

“This guy is dead! You hear me? Dead! He’s on deadly ground now!”

The girl has marbles for eyes. To look into her eyes is to see my own death.

Day 2: His girlfriend is NSA, right? Can I toss that out there now as a possibility? When she tells the lead that “they” need to “do all they can” to stop this Evil Corporation/Military/Taco Stand™ I don’t get how he acquiesces. She isn’t bugging him to go shopping or take out the garbage—she’s demanding he alone kill an entire army. Normal, well-adjusted people who aren’t in government agencies don’t suggest this. Where’s the reasonable person who knows doing “all you can” might, maybe, be escaping and telling, I don’t know, perhaps the actual U.S. military? Just a thought. Amy is also placing her bets now—his dad is the main bad guy.

Double jump is a go. Maybe I’m too twitchy, but this also highlights my earlier complaint about the controls feeling soft at times. I can run up a wall, fall down, and try to do the exact thing again but the next time my character refuses to grab the wall. I don’t know why. This is exacerbated when you have to navigate up tall shafts; missing a jump because your guy decided to be a priss and not touch an icky spot he saw on the wall is just frustrating.

Yay for assault rifle! The sub machinegun’s small clip was starting to get annoying. Chair is pacing this well. As soon as I start to get annoyed with the confines of my current ability set they’re there providing a new addition. That’s quality.

Being able to snap necks from behind is nice—it adds variety to the play. I know I already mentioned it, it doesn’t make me a psycho. There’s also this point where you shoot a grenade into a tube, and somehow that turns into this hellfire on the other end that kills all the enemies. It might be Nintendo logic, but that’s awesome. They’re playing with variation in a side scroller and winning the Internet.

Scuba Steve time. This reminded me of Undertow, so I looked up Chair. Same studio. They do this well. I can’t get over how good this game looks for an XBLA game.

I’m divided on the placement of the question mark on the minimap that indicates a particular room has a hidden item. It might be Easy Mode, but I have to admit that it helps prevent tunnel vision sometimes.

Does a video game require [some feature] to be successful?

Those who discuss video games have heard or seen this question at some point at least once. There are plenty of opinions to go around covering this topic. But there are people in the industry whose job it is to answer this kind of question, so it’s an important one. I think most would agree that the question in the public realm tends to gravitate towards three features—graphics, story, or multiplayer. My immediate response is almost always, “That depends on the kind of game you want to make, and what your definition of success is.” I guess in truth that’s kind of a classic non-answer.

In regard to BioShock, when some reviewers and boo-birds chastised 2K Games for not including multiplayer, debate in the public arena once again raged. Here was a game, a “triple-A title”, that was both critically acclaimed and enormously successful, containing a compelling storyline and attractive graphics. But, in the eyes of some, it committed a cardinal sin of the modern big-budget first-person shooter by omitting a multiplayer feature. The FPS genre has almost always been the torchbearer for multiplayer gaming, and BioShock really was kind of an oddity for skipping it altogether.

Defenders fired back that BioShock didn’t need multiplayer to be successful. Some argued that, in fact, had 2K included multiplayer, the overall impact of the world and plot in BioShock would be lessened by the state of play where multiplayer dwells. It’s a convincing statement. I love Halo, especially co-op play, but the effect of Halo’s one man ass-kicker storyline loses its edge when I can turn and see a Master Chief clone right next to me. Other “me against the world” storylines, like BioShock, probably would likewise lose something in co-op, let alone in watching 32 Jacks running around igniting each other on fire in a Fort Frolic deathmatch. Clearly I’ve been in the category of the defenders. But I wanted to reevaluate that position, and in retrospect I wonder if perhaps they missed a terrific opportunity (or could be missing one with BioShock 2, for that matter).

Let’s just throw some ideas out and see if they stick, and pretend 2K did in fact decide to include multiplayer. How could they do it? As I said, 32 Jacks teabagging one another would destroy the setting. So I think we should remove the main character from the equation. Rapture is a big place. What BioShock has, and conveys quite well, is the feeling that this underwater world is both empty yet still inhabited by characters with their own agendas. Factions, in fact—and these factions I believe lend themselves well to the notion of multiplayer.

Think Left 4 Dead. Instead of 32 Jacks, what if we had 8 Big Daddies fending off 24 Splicers? Or, better yet, 4 teams of 6 each trying to simultaneously defeat the Big Daddies and each other? Houdinis fighting Spiders fighting Thugs and Leadheads, all trying to capture Adam for their faction. This mostly fits in the world of Rapture—if there are multiple enemies during the single player, they’re almost always in a pack of the same type. Andrew Ryan may control them when he wants something done, but otherwise they seem left to their own devices.

You could include RPG leveling aspects similar to Call of Duty 4. New ranks allowing for new abilities based on experience earned. For example, when the Houdini teleports there’s a coalescing event so the player knows where to shoot, but higher ranks could reduce that timer or even increase the duration of the Houdini’s invisibility. Thugs could be granted speed or strength increases, and Leadheads could increase clips and armor (not unlike Jack). Spiders could earn increased stealth abilities, and/or increased damage from sneak attacks. Big Daddies could earn increased armor, speed, or damage (direct or indirect).

The number of plasmids you carry would increase, but be limited (unlike Jack) to a set number chosen at the start of the game. Perhaps your experience earned is spent in a talent tree, like World of Warcraft and Diablo, allowing for greater flexibility on characters; so a Spider, for example, could be stealthier or faster depending on player preference. You would have to spend a good amount of time balancing to ensure that those who play 100 hours a week wouldn’t have a decided advantage over those who play 10 hours; after all, some of the early weapons in CoD4 are just as good as the last weapons unlocked.

I think the biggest argument I can muster against my idea is development time and cost. Besides the obvious questions of networking, lobbies, how to balance the factions, etc, you have to look at asset management. Instead of creating the gameplay experience for just Jack, now you’re committing to creating gameplay for Jack in single player and 5 factions in multi. How would the UI change for each? Does the artwork need to change for any of the enemies to accommodate their expanded role? Are the weapons and abilities for each enemy in single player enough for multiplayer, or do they need more (or are they perhaps even too much)? Would the levels in single player be reusable? If not, can they be tweaked to accommodate or do you need to create all new levels? Are the differences in gameplay, between single and multi, so great they make the project too big to effectively manage?

These are all valid questions with potentially expensive answers. However, keeping to the original question, I think this could be a quality multiplayer experience, which fits sufficiently inside the world of Rapture and the BioShock storyline.

So, EA has started a blog. I used to wonder who officially came up with corporate blog posts. Then my wife interned in the communications department for a city mayor, and one of her tasks was to write the mayor’s blog posts in first-person concerning certain topics assigned to her by the mayor’s communications lead. Now, I’m smart enough to know that if a major elected official has a blog odds are small (s)he’s the one actually doing the writing, but hearing a first-hand account still felt like the exposure of a dirty cover-up. Reading posts from “EArl” seems to tug on the same nerve, even though there is no reason to believe EA is secretly pushing its PR work off on interns. Indeed, there is no single “EA Man”, so as an intangible corporate entity someone has to write for it. But it feels the same—like no matter what this “EArl” says I feel like I can’t trust it because I know it’s carefully crafted corporate speak. The personal feeling you get from a blog is hollow.

Anyway, it (they?) posted an article regarding software piracy. I can’t really disagree with the stance much. I’ve seen a lot of arguments over time, but most feel akin to telling someone who just got mugged to look at it from the mugger’s point of view and expecting the light of sympathy to turn on suddenly. I posted in the article’s comment section, but I felt the need to republish it here, which follows below (edited slightly). No reason EA should have all the fun, or all of my hot air.

I do feel the need to nitpick a little bit. The blog post makes two grand assumptions–(a) that every user that pirates The Sims 3 would’ve purchased it, and (b) that by pirating The Sims 3 they will no longer purchase it. The first assumption I think we can safely say cannot/would not be true, and the second assumption is contradicted by quotes from the Bloomberg article the blog uses to build its case. That being said, while it may be true that these statistics therefore cannot be taken as rock solid, I think we can also all agree that you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and need to acknowledge that piracy is a legitimate concern.

However, I believe that incredibly restrictive DRM practices actually work counter to your intended goals. You only negatively affect those who are or would be honest customers; those who were always planning to steal your products aren’t going to have to deal with DRM anyway because it’s neutralized in the pirated release. Spore saw a very vocal consumer backlash for its DRM methods initially, from those who would be honest customers and pirates alike, and apparently went on to be the most pirated game of 2008 despite its dictatorial measures.

The more effective method, in my opinion, is to provide positive solutions and product value to entice people to purchase new copies. If you can do that you’re really combating three big problems facing company profits since the 1980’s–piracy, rentals, and the used games market. An example would be Gears of War 2, which provided additional maps for those who purchased the game. For The Sims 3, perhaps you could provide unique outfits and items to users for registering their product with EA. Remember, however, that I’m not talking about pay-for content updates; I’m saying offer some of these things for free, as incentive to be legitimate users. You need to make the user feel like they’re missing out on something if they don’t purchase the game. Reward them for good behavior. Current DRM methods are akin to penalizing the entire classroom for the actions of a small subset of students. You just breed contempt.

For the PC market I think Steam has a terrific model for dealing with the community. Digital distribution eliminates the used/rental markets. But beyond just forcing PC users to play games through a company-run portal you want to, again, make having the portal a positive experience for the user. Make it something they can’t get from a rental or pirated copy. A current example is Blizzard, who just revamped Battle.net. By registering your WarCraft 3, StarCraft, Diablo, and World of WarCraft keys you can download the digital versions. Provide user profiles with robust stat tracking, achievements, and ladders. Community events and content updates for registered users. These things are positive both for the user, who has increased incentive to play legitimately, and the companies that not only see more purchases and longer shelf life for their products, but also can mine valuable data for future products. Companies are already doing this with console services like XBox Live, why not in the PC market?

Piracy isn’t a new phenomenon, and it isn’t going to ever fully go away, but I definitely think there are measures that can be taken to reduce the number of pirated games. You likely won’t convert the die-hards, but the majority of pirates aren’t die-hard; they’re people taking the easiest, most cost effective route for perceived maximum value, but also aren’t think of the ripple-effect consequences of their actions.

Square-Enix (or is it Square-Enix-Eidos now?) has a new studio in Los Angeles. I met one of their artists during GDC, who was really nice, but who also let me know they’re not looking for my kind at the moment. “My kind” being one of the many unwashed masses that have no professional games industry experience.

Anyway, I was scouring the Internet for job posts (“jerbs”) and happened upon the Square-Enix site. Not shockingly, there were no positions available for someone such as myself as per usual. However, they did have something—oh yes, they had something indeed. For context, let it be known I’ve played My Life as a King through about three times now. I’m not sure how many hours total, but way more than a game that costs $15 would normally warrant—more hours than I spent on a lot $50-60 titles for sure. The way MLaK blends city management with the classic RPG elements Final Fantasy is known for presents a game that permeates my system like heroin. It’s not without its flaws; the framerate once the town grew crawls and the controls can be unresponsive. But, if My Life as a Darklord can improve on that and on its delicious nuances, particularly on the underwhelming endgame, I might have to enter a rehab program.

Is My Life as a Darklord being developed at the new L.A. studio? If so, who do I have to bribe, sexy-time, and/or kill to get a job on this project? Let’s be honest: I’d take a job with any game company at this point. But you can’t bring development for this kind of game into my country and expect me not to drool just a little at the prospect. To quote the legendary interpretation of the human condition, Friday, “Don’t be playin’ with my emotions Smokey!” Indeed.