I recently finished Catherine. At least I declared for me I did. Normally, I would attempt to get at least the majority of the achievements. But after witnessing all the endings, I decided to draw the line. The Babel challenges turned out to be a painfully difficult even on the easiest stage. The babel mini game was amusing but at 64 stages, it’s overstayed it’s welcome well before I could get trough them all.

Nothing to gloat about.

As much as I liked the idea of Catherine, the actual game failed to deliver on it’s premise in many ways. The refreshingly serious topic is treated in disappointingly shallow way. It depicts women as well as men in a single-minded fashion. The resolution of the conflict is left to super-natural phenomena rather than to consequences of actual character development. The puzzle gameplay is almost completely divorced from the narrative. What’s worse, the game concentrates on the gameplay a lot. And that’s precisely what is least engaging about Catherine.

I also wanted to mention the endings as an extension of what I already wrote about. For some reason, multiple endings are still this wicked beast that no developer seems to have tamed yet. Catherine is no different. There are 8 different endings. They can be divided into 3 types: “Catherine”, “Katherine” and “Freedom”. Each type has a “Bad”, “Good” and “True” variant (with one exception: “Freedom Bad” is missing). And really, if you think about it, there is only one ending worth having:

• Katherine Endings were probably the most satisfying ones. They all show Vincent explaining the situation to Katherine and asking for a second chance. Surprisingly, I found the “Katherine Good” ending emotionally more effective than the supposedly more desirable “Katherine True”. In the good ending, you see a glimpse Katherine and Vincent having a pleasant, more natural interaction. Throughout the game, Vincent is having a perpetual “we need to talk” situation with Katherine. Katherine herself seems like a very unpleasant, stuck-up character. The good ending alleviates this to some extent which feels cathartic. The “Katherine True” ending does resolve a major mystery about a supporting character so it’s nice too. The “Katherine Bad” is just shit tough. Katherine dumps Vincent. Congratulations, you just wasted 15 hours.

• Catherine Endings are the comedy endings. No matter if bad, good or true, they are all supposed to be funny. The “Catherine True” ending is perhaps the most wacky ending in the game. The problem with them is that Catherine is not a particularly funny game. The topics in the game seem rather serious in nature. There are some humorous moments but the conflict at the story’s core a mature one. So having a wacky comedy ending seems just dishonest and unsatisfying.

• Freedom Endings are for the middle ground. You get these if you haven’t maxed out your freedom vs law meter in either direction or if you answered the final questions in an ambiguous manner. They depict Vincent transcending the conflict and just ignoring both women. Like the comedy endings, they feel dishonest. The entire game is hammering the Catherine vs. Katherine dilemma after all. It begs for a proper resolution. To add insult to injury, if you answer the questions in an honest fashion you are bound to end up somewhere in between. Relationships are a complicated thing with multiple viewpoints after all. And especially by the end, even the questions themselves outgrow the simple-minded law/freedom dichotomy. “Is it easier to love, or be loved?” or “Which is harder: lying or being lied to?”. If you care about the questions you won’t max out your score either way. And that’s where the game delivers you the lazy cop out ending.

Catherine is a good way to learn from because it is so broken in so many ways. The law/freedom dichotomy favors min/max grinding rather than emotional involvement. The endings reflect that and the OCD treatment of gameplay echoes the idea. The endings also betray that the game’s wasn’t actually written with multiple endings in mind. All the dozens of choices you make in the game all boil down to 1 or 2 genuinely satisfying endings that really feel like a good story arc. The rest of the outcomes seem an afterthought. And with that, I think it’s fair to file Catherine as a interesting case of not living up to it’s own premise on multiple levels.

The philosopher’s stone of many game enthusiasts is how to bring their significant other to enjoy games with them. I am no different in this regard and my GF had to endure multiple experiments already. But expect from the occasional freak side-effect I remain unsuccessful in enkindling in her the kind of enthusiasm for the interactive medium I experience myself.

What is… I don’t even… Can’t we just watch the movie?

The recent attempt was LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean. The stars seemed to be perfectly aligned. She loves the series a lot. The new movie was about to come out (and she adores Penélope Cruz). LEGO games are known to be very forgiving but most importantly, they can be played cooperatively. They are divided into simple, byte-sized levels perfect for short sessions so I thought it would be easy to convince her to play for a quarter hour or so.

We started playing and it went well at first. But already after the first movie, the dream boat I was sailing on began to pick up water. It just didn’t really work and we had to stop. Here are some of the reasons:

• Skill Gap – The main problem is something that many people fail to consider. Co-op games work very bad if there is huge gap of skill between the partners. There is this romantic idea of a veteran helping a noob out. In reality, I found that this is actually never a fun experience. The noob won’t actually learn anything because the veteran is always there to help out. The noob will never experience defeat so he can’t really learn from his mistakes. On top of that, he will have a much lesser sense of success because there is always that feeling that the other guy did all the work. As for the veteran, he will just be held back by the noob. He will be constantly torn between picking up the slack for the noob or waiting for the noob to catch up. Ironically, this is something I experience on a regular basis when I play Monster Hunter with my podcast buddies. I’m often the one in the inferior gear because I haven’t invested that much time in the game yet. My podcast buddies are very nice to help me out with some of my quests. But I always feel like I used a cheat code to skip a part of the game I was supposed to do by myself.

• Chaos – Another issue is that games tend to get very chaotic when more players are involved. In the LEGO games the screen is already filled with lots of objects to smash and interact with. Add a dynamic split-screen that constantly changes orientation. Then add a battle sequence when a group of enemies is swarming in. Then add the ability for both players to change the appearance of their characters. Even for an experienced player it becomes very difficult to merely recognize which character you are controlling. And then you still need to figure out where to go and what to do. Single player is chaotic too, but at least you have all the time in the world to figure things out. Again, this is something I observed in other games as well. StarCraft II being another good example. It’s clearly balanced for 1v1 duels where it is an intense battle of the minds. When going 2v2 and especially 3v3, the game becomes a chaotic, arbitrary troll fest.

• Adaptation Issues – One thing that was driving my GF at the beginning was a genuine passion for the source material. And sure, seeing even the walk animation of Captain Jack Sparrow was just hilarious at first. But then some incongruities set in. For example, one of the most memorable action scenes was the one in the second movie where they are on the water wheel of a mill that has come loose and is rolling trough a jungle. We were both looking forward to this in the game. Sadly, we were disappointed. There is a huge blunder ruining specifically in that scene. You are supposed to throw an Axe at Jack Sparrow, who is stuck in the rim of the wheel. There is nothing really telling you that. It doesn’t really make sense – you can reach him with a saber just fine. And even if you try it, the window for doing it is so small, you never even realize that you were attempting the right thing but just screwed up the timing. So what was supposed to be a smart, memorable, quirky action scene turned into a long, frustrating exercise of blindly trying everything over and over again. It culminated in looking up the solution on YouTube. The game has quite a few scenes like this. The Kraken boss from the same movie was similarly problematic for us. So slowly but steadily, our initial enthusiasm was undermined.

• Source Material Issues – But perhaps that last part wasn’t entirely the game’s fault. Because we both realized that the movies just aren’t that great after all. LEGO Star Wars provides a good counter-example. Those movies are well-known and incredibly iconic. They use very stereotypical characters and easily understandable situations. So LEGO Star Wars worked well as a humorous remix of those familiar stories. Conversely, the story of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies is a catastrophic mess. The character’s motivations are hazy at best. There are multiple parties with unclear goals. Individual characters constantly switch sides. By the third movie, there are so many characters, most of the time you have not the slightest clue what is going on. In a movie, this may be bearable. You just hang in there and wait for the next scene where Jack Sparrow does something silly. But in a game where you need to actively play out all those filler scenes in-between, they can become a drag.

We gradually just stopped playing by the 3rd movie. I returned to the game alone just recently. And it is actually much more enjoyable for me alone. With the co-op issues out of the way, the other problems turned out to be not that bad because I don’t care about the series that much. I’m familiar with the structure of the LEGO games and they represent a very safe, comfortable type of gaming for me. It just turns out that they don’t translate too well into co-op with such asymmetric partners.

The latter two issues have to do with the Pirates of the Carribean series. They were pivotal for my GF’s motivation but could have gone potentially differently with other material. I’m more worried about the first two issues. They may suggest that we will never be able to play together. The best way to introduce my GF into gaming may be by not to getting involved at all. Which kinda defeats the purpose.

This time on the Monster Hunter Podcast: A Christmas Miracle. It’s part deux of the crew searching for the elusive christmas spirit and their monster fighting mojo.

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

Enjoy!

I thought I use this opportunity to boast a little about the Game of the Year nominations TRAUMA received. I don’t think the major gaming sites said anything. But some indie websites included TRAUMA in their picks.

• indievault.it – Alex Camilleri from indievault.it picked TRAUMA for his Indie Game of the Year.

• theindieshelter.com – And while we are in italy, theindieshelter.com also seems to have enjoyed TRAUMA a great deal.

• indiegamereviewer.com – TRAUMA didn’t make it into the top 10 of indiegamereviewer.com, but it did make into the Very Honorable Mentions. Together with Minecraft and Gemini Rue, I think it’s in outstanding company.

• omgubuntu.co.uk – Not really a game of the year but I thought it was worth mentioning that TRAUMA was the top downloaded game on Ubuntu Store in December, outing the previous king of the hill Braid. I think this is something I’m owing at least partially to the guys from Canonical. Nevertheless, it’s a great honor.

So there you go. Certainly a great start into 2011. With the great success of TRAUMA, I have already set up plans to drop my current job and going full indie. It’s a scary step, but it’s something I have been working towards. And I could hardly wish for a better foundation.

This time on the Monster Hunter Podcast: A Christmas Miracle. It’s part one of the crew searching for the elusive christmas spirit and their monster fighting mojo.

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

Enjoy!