Recently, I finished Silent Hill 2. Many people urged me to play it. I was holding out for the HD Version. However, that turned out to be crap. So I had no excuse and cave in.

And boy have I been missing out. I was expecting a masterpiece. And I wasn’t blown away at first. Details like the controls and the visual design of the interface haven’t aged very well. But as the game progressed, I finally understood what made this such a critically acclaimed title. Here is what stood out for me:

• Pacing One thing that did surprise me from the beginning was the deliberate pacing. For example, the game opens by having the player walk down a very long path. It’s a calm and uneventful sequence. It’s clearly a deliberate tool to emphasize the feeling of the main character’s loneliness and the remoteness of the place he is going to. There are multiple, similar sequences in the game. It’s a surprisingly well thought-out and effective way to control the pacing. Something you don’t see often in modern games, where pacing seems to have only one setting: eleven.

• Discovery Another thing that is actually quite different from modern games is the sense of discovery the game conveys. There are often very few hints on where to go to next. No big glowing arrows, quest logs or radars. You just need to figure it out yourself. Being lost is something the game actually deliberately conveys. Very early on, the game kinda drops you off in a district of the town and let’s you figure out the way on your own. The same happens later when you explore an abandoned apartment building. You need to systematically try out each and every door to figure out how to continue. What really helps in both cases is the ingenious map system. You always find maps of the areas you explore and they are perfectly integrated into the setting. The indoor maps often are emergency evacuation maps, for example. The outdoor map is a road map you brought with you. As you explore, the protagonist automatically writes down notes with a pen on those maps.

  

  The map integrates seamlessly into the setting and emphasizes exploration.

  It conveys perfectly the idea of utilizing found resources to search for a way in an unknown environment.

• Story & Writing Many Japanese games often suffer from incoherent plots or dodgy writing. Certain ideas often just don’t translate very well across cultures. Surprisingly, Silent Hill 2 gets away quite well. The writing sounds a bit odd in some cases. But it never crosses the line. The plot gets pretty crazy too. But it all comes together in the end. The reason for both may be the fact that there is a very simple, honest story beneath it all. It’s really just about the protagonist and his wife. There are some hints of some ancient burial grounds and mass murderers. But they are never allowed to over-shadow the simple, emotional main story.

• Maturity Finally, the game actually seems like it has been made for a mature audience. It deals with a lot of mature topics such as sex, marriage and death. They are addressed in a subtle and therefore disturbing way. The gameplay is reminiscent of horror shooters like Resident Evil. But Silent Hill 2 seems to have none of Resident Evil’s sensationalist stupidity. The combat never really takes precedence. The story stays personal and doesn’t dissolve into genre tropes.

What is perhaps most surprising is that the game was made 10 years ago. It was in the early days of Playstation 2. You can tell that this could have been the future of gaming: cinematic, well-written, mature, emotional games for a gaming audience that coming of age.

But that future never really arrived. Silent Hill 2 turned out to be a dead end. What we instead got was loads of shallow, forgettable, adolescent action and exploding production values. Immediately after finishing, I tweeted “Where the fuck did we go wrong?” and received a lot of resonance.

The conventional response was that developers / publishers went for mass audience and big money. But somehow, this doesn’t seem like a fitting explanation. After all, Silent Hill 2 apparently sold very well. So having the creators make another one would seem like a logical choice if making money was a goal.

Granted, the original team did create a Silent Hill 3, but apparently that title didn’t succeed where Silent Hill 2 did. Which made me consider that perhaps Silent Hill 2 was an accident. After all, there are things wrong with it too. For example, some puzzles lack polish or even sense. Use canned juice to unclog a trash chute? Use the “fish key” to open the suitcase?

But then again, I haven’t played Silent Hill 3 so I can’t really tell. Perhaps those of you more familiar with the series can help out? What do you think?

WARNING: This is a post, where I basically just rave on how awesome my car is. There may be some insight into games, but you have been warned.

So I bought myself my first car a couple of weeks ago. It’s a affordable, used Mazda MX-5 NC. I’m enjoying it a great deal.

My Mum approves.

It is a bit of a unnecessary investment considering I don’t REALLY need a car and the previous one my Girlfriend had was still in working order. However, I am currently in a unique life situation where I can fully enjoy a car like this. So I decided to take the opportunity. And in the end, the apparent uselessness of the MX-5 is it’s whole point.

But before we go into that, some words on why I picked exactly that car. It’s because of a video game, of course. Gran Turismo 3 to be exact. GT3 was one of the first games I picked up back then when I got myself a PS2. I was way behind on consoles at that point and I really had a lot of catching up to do. The car that really made an impression on me back then was the Dodge Viper – a massive, overpowered American 2-seat super sports car with a bonnet that never ends and a retractable rooftop. It was one of the great, iconic boyhood dream cars of the 90ies. I mean, it even had it’s own, cheesy TV series.

Of course, I could have never afford a Dodge Viper. It’s an impossible car to maintain in Europe anyway. But you know what? I soon realized that the MX-5 NB kinda looked like a baby Dodge Viper. And that’s how it started…

Dodge Viper compared to an MX-5 NB. Close enough.

But I was a long way from being able to buy my own car. I played a lot of Gran Turismo 3 in the meantime. One of the really great features about the game were the car descriptions. Something they later removed in Gran Turismo 4. Some of the cars had quite exhaustive car descriptions. It was there where I first stumbled across the surprising history of the MX-5. In many ways, it’s a car that paved the way for car design of the 90ies – conceptually and aesthetically.

Let’s rewind to the 80ies. Atfer the oil crisis most car manufacturers went heavily for practicality and economy. Perhaps the one car that describes the 80ies the best would be the VW Golf. It’s square so it’s easy to manufacture and to service. It’s super-practical too – it can be used for all sorts of purposes. It has room for 5 people. It’s a hatchback so it has a huge boot. Seats fold over to increase storage space even more.

It was during that time where the people at Mazda realized that there was something missing. Among all the practicality, cars kinda lost a sense of fun. Not that there were no fun cars in the 80ies. But almost all of them were expensive super sports cars well outside of reach for a normal buyer.

Contrast this to the 60ies, where you could buy lots of cheap, small roadsters like the Lotus Elan, MG MGB, Triumph Spitfire or the Alfa Romeo Spider. Sure, they were sports cars. But they were not sports cars like the Lamborghini Countach or the Ferrari 308 GTB

Who’s your daddy? MG MGB, Triumph Spitfire, Lotus Elan, Alfa Romeo Spider and MX-5 NA.

So Mazda did a smart thing. They decided to go blue sky and fill that void. They created a 60ies roaster by the end of the 80ies. An unlikely match. Japanese cars weren’t known for their charm. But they were chap and reliable. And apart from the persistent Alfa Romeo Spider the MX-5 had no competition at all. It was an instant success and it is today the best-selling 2-seat convertible car in the world.

During my studies, as I became aware of the car’s significance, I was considering getting a used MX-5 NA. It was the first version they released and you could get them for almost no money at all. A big draw were certainly the pop-up headlights – a clear indication of how cool a car is. Something I learned very early on in my childhood.

The hammer dropped in 2010 when we went to the GDC in San Francisco. My GF, well aware of the terminal stage of my obsession, found a car rental and we got an MX-5 to drive down the Highway 1. It was neither the pop-up headlights NA nor the baby Dodge Viper NB. It was the newest MX-5 NC. I never considered the NC before. It seemed like one of the many revivals like the New Beetle or New Mini. They tend to make the cars just bigger, more expensive and less quirky. Not so much with the MX-5 NC. I immediately fell in love with it. It fit like a glove and it delivered every promise I have ever read about it. All the Gran Turismo 3 descriptions, all the Top Gear episodes, all the Wikipedia articles fell into place.

No matter what Gran Turismo says, it’s a far cry from the real thing.

What does this have to do with games?

There is an interesting lesson about the design of interactive experiences in here. You see, the super sports cars in the 80ies seemed to focus on performance. Almost all of them tried to maximize speed, grip and braking power because it seemed like all of these were important for “fun”. Yet, “fun” is an elusive beast. Something that is much more subjective and can’t be really maximized this way.

Here is the thing about the MX-5. It’s a FUN CAR. It’s a machine that can produce genuine joy at the press of a button or a pedal. Every singe time I get behind the wheel, I start grinning like an idiot just after the first few meters. And that’s even when I’m going for groceries. That’s even when it’s raining. And it’s not just me, my GF observed the same phenomenon. And as much I would like to, I can’t put my finger on why that is. Technically there is nothing about the car that stands out as unique or remarkable.

Whatever the thing is that makes MX-5 fun, it gets better on roads like this. (pic by Veronika Barth. Check out her website for large version.)

It seems to be a combination of the low driving position close to the pivot point, just the right amount of power compared to the low weight, the responsiveness of the steering, the joystick-like short gear stick located in the perfect distance from your body, the open top that lets you enjoy the sun, the cheeky headlamps. It’s not that one single thing that makes the difference. It’s a myriad of little things that create this particular symphony.

Which is one of the reasons why I dislike using the word “fun” when talking about games. It’s a good word for the consumers and perhaps ever for the critics. But if game designers use it, they tend to spread dangerous implications about what “fun” is. Using the word implies that it’s something simple. It implies that it’s something that can be optimized. In the end, it also implies that there is just one way to do it, one way to understand it, one brand of fun. It’s misleading, limiting, disingenuous and elitist. It’s the thing you would say if you had no idea what you are talking about. The kind of thing a Lamborghini driver would have said in the 80ies.

The other lesson in here is that games can do a hell of a job to sell cars and I dread the day when car manufacturers really take advantage of this.

My recent article on Suikoden enjoyed some surprising popularity, so I thought I write a little about Suikoden 2, which I recently finished. Have a let’s play:

Even before I played Suikoden, I heard from a lot of sources that Suikoden 2 was in fact the masterpiece of the series. But it was difficult to get hold of it and I have a thing for playing games chronologically. It turned out I enjoyed Suikoden a lot so I decided to try Suikoden 2. I’ll be honest here and just admit that I haven’t bought the game used. The price was just too steep. I used some PSP trickery instead because it also meant that I would be able to carry over my Suikoden 1 savegame.

Which – again – is one of those odd parallels to Mass Effect. You can actually carry over the savegame from Suikoden 1 to Suikoden 2 just like in the Mass Effect trilogy. But the results are not as dramatic as in Mass Effect. There are no custom faces or important decisions that carry over. The game wasn’t designed with this feature in mind. However, some characters can die, there are custom names and you get an additional quest that revisits old friends.

Outside of that quest, the overlap between the two games is quite subtle. There are just a few characters that re-appear in the sequel – granted, two of them are very prominent. The story is a stand-alone thing as well. It even takes place in a completely different region of the world. So it’s actually completely valid to just start with Suikoden 2 as your first Suikoden game. Here is why it would be a GOOD idea:

• It’s Beautiful – You might remember that I wasn’t very happy about the visual quality of the prequel. Suikoden 2 looks stunning. Especially the character animations are amazing. There are custom animations in most cut-scenes. The environments are full of lovely details such as a flock of birds that flies away as you approach them.

  

  Scaring away birds – Attention to detail that just never gets old. Note also the dust cloud your character leaves behind when running.

  To give you an idea of the kind of detail we are talking about: the eye blinking animations of the character sprites have MULTIPLE FRAMES even though the eyes are just 2×2 pixels. The background art is not always as stunning but it uses a nice, muted color palette that makes the characters pop even more. Suikoden 2 is a sprite-based game released at a time where the whole gaming world went 3D. If you are used to 16-bit SNES JRPGs it’s an eye-opener how far this visual style could have gone if it hadn’t been abandoned.

• It Has Refined Gameplay – A big deal of Suikoden was the 3-way split of combat gameplay showing different scales of battles. The new thing about Suikoden 2 is that they replaced the grand battle gameplay with a Tactical JRPG system reminiscent of Advance Wars, Shining Force or Fire Emblem. It may not be as creative but it’s a very good match. The previous solution was basically Rock-Paper-Scissors and that was kinda redundant as the duels were also based on Rock-Paper-Scissors.

  

  A Tactical JRPG system for major battles seems like a good fit at first. Note that each unit consists of 3 characters you recruited. Each character adds a unique ability to the unit.

  I also like the way the different characters you collect influence the T-JRPG. Having every character as a unit on the map would be hardly practical considering that there are 108 characters in the game. Instead, each unit consists of 3 characters. Each character adds it’s own unique abilities to the unit. You are free to mix and match the characters at will. You want that unit to have the power to heal others? Just add doctor Huan to the mix.

• You Can Spy on Your Team – My absolute favorite addition to the game must be Richmond. He is a private detective you add to your team. Richmond can do two things. He can give you hints on how and where to acquire characters you might have missed. An incredibly important and useful feature. With 108 characters to collect it can be very easy to miss somebody.

  But Richmond can also spy on your existing team members. He can dig out some factoids from their past or some additional info about their personality. It may sound creepy but it’s actually a great way to flesh out some of characters. Because it’s up to you which character you want more info on, you can focus on just the characters you really want to know more about.

  

  Richmond offers all sorts of useful services.

  Again, Mass Effect comes to mind. The Shadow Broker DLC had a similar feature. When you finished it, you could read some dossiers about the characters in your team. That was similar except it was this huge, dull info drop – a wall of text. Richmond is interactive. The spying missions take some time so the factoids come in at a slow but steady pace. A beautiful solution to bring out the characters in a game that is all about characters. Something I’ll put in my pocket for my own designs.

• It Has Really Evil Villains – Let’s face it. Villains in JRPGs are mostly crap. From the entire Final Fantasy series, only Kefka and Sephiroth spring to mind. And even with them I can’t remember what their goal was. Suikoden 2 blew me away. There are two big villains. Both of them are emotionally incredibly resonant. They are frequently shown doing just horrible things. There is an early scene in the game that really shaked me. It’s not bloody, just cruel.

  One of the characters that joins you is Pilika, a small girl orphaned by the villain. You take care of her as you escape the bad guys and organize a Resistance movement.

  

  Pilika is a good example of incredibly effective storytelling. She infuses the central conflict of the game with some powerful emotional significance.

  Pilika is well written. There are a lot of poignant scenes with her. She is an emotionally effective reminder of why you fight. Take that, creepy nameless Mass Effect 3 catalyst kid.

• It Has Epic Setups & Payoffs – Another thing I really enjoyed about the writing in Suikoden 2 is how the entire story is framed in one huge setup & payoff structure. You know how good stories often have something seemingly trivial happen in the beginning that comes back and becomes this big deal all the way at the end? Suikoden 2 is like that. And it’s not just a cheap trick either. The entire story is centered around a very clear theme of how a friendship changes because of a war. Even after 40 hours, it never fails to drive this idea home. A rare gem in game storytelling.

So the verdict is that it’s great game and we can move on. Well, not quite. You see, while I really appreciated all the great things about Suikoden 2, I was also let down by it in some regard. Here are some of the things I did not like about it:

• Find The Random Plot Thing – Suikoden had this already. But it becomes almost unbearable in Suikoden 2. Every now and then, the plot grinds to a halt and the game leaves the player struggling to find the random thing to stumble across in order to make the plot continue. Generally, a variation of the Invisible Causality problem mixed with the lack of guidance.

  

  Early example of the issue: We are prisoners but we can do what we want? How does that work? What does “trouble” mean? Who are we recruiting people for? Translation: Walk around aimlessly until the next plot thing happens.

  Here is an example that comes up over and over in the game: you are instructed to get some sleep. You go to your room. Your character falls asleep and wakes up in the middle of the night. No reason given why. You need to walk around you castle aimlessly and talk to everybody until you randomly find some person you were supposed to talk to or stumble into some cut-scene. And then you need to walk back to your room and hope that you got it right. Because your character won’t fall asleep until you found the correct random thing. There are numerous instances of this problem. It’s annoying, it breaks the flow of the plot and it drags out the game unnecessarily.

• Confusing Castle – To add insult to injury, the castle in this game is really big and really confusing. In Suikoden you refurbished this small cave and turned it into a nice, cozy castle. In Suikoden 2 you refurbish an entire village with a castle attached. It consists of multiple buildings connected to each other with convoluted hallways and staircases. There is an elevator that was supposed to let you access the floors quickly. But it’s made almost completely useless by the fact that the interesting locations are often on the same floor but just horizontally spread-out. There were locations in my castle forgot about or never bothered to visit. I never even got an establishing shot of that place, for god’s sake!

  The inhabitants are not better either. Besides the 108 characters you recruit, there are also nameless NPCs in the castle. This helps to make the castle look more crowded and lively. But it also dilutes the experience of recruiting people. You are never really sure who the people hanging around in your castle are and who brought them here. Also, it’s so time-consuming to talk to all those people you eventually just stop doing it.

• Ludonarrative Dissonance – Here is that crazy word again. The T-JRPG part of Suikoden 2 suffers from a huge deal of Ludonarrative Dissonance. This is basically just a fancy way to say that the story and the gameplay don’t work together. For starters, almost none of the battles you fight actually finish properly. In every damn battle, one of the factions retreats after a few rounds in a scripted sequence. Initially, I thought this was some kind of tutorial thing. But almost every battle in the entire game works this way. It completely undermines that whole part of the game. None of your strategic decisions really count.

  

  Whoop-de-fucking-doo…

  What’s even more annoying, the story focuses very much on various tactics like flanking, ambushes and the use of terrain. In fact, many of the above mentioned retreats happen because of ambushes. But the game mechanics never actually reflect those aspects. It’s never important which direction you attack from. Units can’t be surprised or demoralized. Terrain does play some role, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as the story suggests. So all the strategic justifications and motivations fall completely flat.

  Generally, the gameplay just seems to be at odds with the kind of story the writers want to tell. It’s a shame because when you eventually get into a fight that goes for longer than 3 rounds, it’s actually pretty solid.

• Too Long – And as always, the thing that really makes all of the above problems really matter is simply the fact that the game is too damn long. I finished my playtrough in 40 hours. I was thoroughly done with it at hour 25 or so. And it’s just easy to see that they could have told the same story much quicker. There are dungeons that could have been much shorter. There are cut-scenes that could have been more concise. Making the castle smaller would have reduced the amount of walking you need to do.

  The irony is that the game is actually made for re-playability. For example, there is a certain quest associated with the character Clive. It requires you to do a “speedrun” of the game, if 20 hours could be even considered a speedrun. But after 40 hours, there is no way you will invest another 20 just to get some a bit of additional dialogue. And that’s not even the worst. The game even has multiple endings depending on what decisions you made. Imagine learning that you didn’t get the “good” ending after investing the 40 hours into it.

  It’s not that all the interactivity is bad. It’s just that it would have worked so much better if the game was scaled appropriately. Because in the end, the story they tell is very clear and simple. So trimming off some fat should have been easy.

So is Suikoden 2 a good game to start the series with? I’m still not sure. It sure is easy on the eyes and does some really great things with storytelling. On the other hand, there is a good chance that especially adult players will just give up midway through and miss how the story wraps up. Considering how difficult it is to get hold of the game anyway, I would personally recommend starting with the original Suikoden as a more manageable title. You can always move on to Suikoden 2 if you get into it.

This time on the Monster Hunter Podcast: All Aboard the Krystian Train. Due to Shepard having a hardware malfunction, today’s footage is the result of a drunken Krystian fumbling absentmindedly with the controller. Also, there is Jazz.

Get the mp3 of the episode here.
The RSS Feed is here.
Get us in iTunes here.
Visit the new SocialDissonance Website!

Enjoy!

This time on the Monster Hunter Podcast: Thanks For All the Fish. Somebody was making Dolphin noises. We deployed Smooth Jazz. Krystian is showing off his Vita. A toot flute?

Get the mp3 of the episode here.
The RSS Feed is here.
Get us in iTunes here.
Visit the new SocialDissonance Website!

Enjoy!