PVG

In one of his reviews for the Star Wars prequel movies, Roger Ebert lamented that the characters were spending too much time discussing politics. Instead of a rollicking space adventure, George Lucas gave us interstellar C-Span. Contrast this with Star Trek which is known for a vast galaxy consisting of multiple races having very complex relationships with each other. If there was ever a sci-fi movie ready to get bogged down like an overeager Wikipedia entry, it was this one. Instead, it is a breezy, fun and admittedly glitzy rollicking space adventure. It is, in short, what the Star Wars prequels should have been.

Whether that means this is not a movie that should properly be called Star Trek is a question I’m not qualified to answer. I have never seen an episode of the original series. I am aware of certain hallmarks of the series such as the catchphrase “Damnit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a (insert job title)!” and the fact that people wearing red shirts tend to die, but that is really the extent of my knowledge. Judging from the reactions of the audience in my theater, there were apparently a fair number of in-jokes for the Trekkies, but they weren’t out of place or intrusive enough to bother me. What I am familiar with is the work of director J. J. Abrams, and Star Trek has gotten me thinking that at least when it comes to science fiction, he may be better off sticking with movies rather than television. When he has to create a plot that has to last for several years, he ends up with incoherent messes like Alias and Lost (and based on what I’ve seen, I don’t have much faith in Fringe either). When he’s constrained to a two hour running time, though, J. J. Abrams comes up with Cloverfield and now Star Trek. It’s an open question whether the sequels to this movie will have the same general narrative tightness, but I prefer to enjoy what Abrams has done in this moment.

Abrams helps himself out immensely in this movie in two ways. Firstly, this Star Trek is a sort of alternate universe story in which a Romulan ship goes back in time and kills, among many other people, James Kirk’s father. Spock later comments that this change in history has altered everyone’s destiny and set them on a new path. In one stroke, Abrams and his writers have thus freed themselves from years of canon, leaving the story to go wherever they wish. The other genius stroke is to cheerfully acknowledge that this story is basically pretty wacky and shouldn’t be analyzed too deeply. This is best exemplified by a scene in which Spock from the future explains everything to young Kirk by a mind-meld. In other words, the plot is so weird and twisted that it requires a mental narration to explain, and just as the movie doesn’t bother to spend more than five minutes explaining it all to us, we shouldn’t spend too much time thinking it over either.

Apparently, the actors in this movie do a good job of channeling their predecessors. I wouldn’t know about this, but I do know that they look like they’re having fun. The whole movie delights in showing off tremendous laser shows and other special effects while the music thunders in our ears. But J. J. Abrams and his actors manage to make the action personal enough that we care about what’s going on. When a ship takes a torpedo to the side, the resulting hull rupture sucks people into outer space. The hand to hand combat is meaty and brutal. Somehow, the whole movie doesn’t feel like a story broken up by action scenes. When the phasers start firing, the characters are still somehow acting. Maybe it’s because unlike Star Wars, Transformers or a myriad number of other movies, the fighters involved in these scenes are physical people and not CGI creations.

It is very rare that I call a movie a “must-see,” and I’m not going to say that about this movie. Star Trek is very good, and your money will be well spent seeing it in theaters. But it’s not the sublime, must-see movie of the year. However, I will say that it’s looking like the movie to beat this summer. Unlike perhaps any other big action movie to come out this year, Star Trek is just fun. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a dreary, brooding affair with very little impact. Terminator: Salvation is surely not going to be much of an upper. G.I. Joe and Transformers are both likely to be overly CGI-enhanced, empty explosion-fests based on their pedigree. And don’t even get me started on the Ice Age movie.

I’m not a Trekkie by any stretch. It doesn’t matter. This movie really is that good. You should go see it.

Prequel movies are inherently hard to make interesting, and Wolverine is an especially tough challenge. Not only are you dealing with a story in which you know many of the characters aren’t going to die but you also have to end the story by giving the main character amnesia. Having Wolverine suffer a traumatic injury and then just run away because he doesn’t remember what happened isn’t exactly my idea of a satisfying ending, but that’s exactly what happens here. Literally. He gets up after losing his memory, he grapples with not knowing what’s going on for a minute or so, and then he runs away and the movie ends. That’s it. It’s really quite disappointing.

I’m also left a little perplexed by the choice of director. By most accounts, Gavin Hood is a fine director of dramas with a social message. For a popcorn action movie, though, he seems mismatched. The appeal of Wolverine in an action scene is that despite being essentially invulnerable, he feels pain and can be thrown about very harshly. The best action sequences in the movie are the ones in which he is thrown in front of an oncoming truck or has a mid-air collision with a helicopter or jumps off a collapsing building, leaving a nice crater when he belly-flops into the ground. There’s even a fun bit when he jumps out of a low flying airplane into some water and skips along the surface like a stone. I could have just watched a whole movie of Wolverine getting unbelievably pummeled and enjoyed myself because Hugh Jackman would have made it seem painful and yet slightly hilarious the whole time.

Unfortunately, these moments are too short and too far in between. Moreover, many of the other action scenes involve other mutants, and those are ho-hum CGI affairs. There’s even one set of scenes involving the Weapon X team breaking into a building, and they literally take turns demonstrating their power. Really, they tell each other, “It’s your turn” even though any single one of them would have done just as well as the others. It’s hard to see this stuff standing up to Transformers or even G.I. Joe. Some if this stuff also seems a bit pointless, even by the standards of a summer blockbuster film. In fact, I can sum up the essence of the movie by describing one particular action sequence. After Wolverine has had adamantium bonded to his skeleton, he escapes pretty much the same way as you would imagine he would from the comics. So the scientist running the Weapon X program sends one of his mutants to capture Wolverine. This mutant (whom I didn’t recognize from the comics) has the power of preternatural marksmanship. This is tremendously useful if you want to take out a bunch of ordinary humans with fancy gun acrobatics. Against Wolverine, however, it’s utterly useless. Even if the bullets didn’t just bounce off his skull, he would just shrug off the wounds and keep going anyway. So this leaves us with an extended action sequence in which Wolverine gets blown up a couple times and fights off a few trucks (not to mention the aforementioned helicopter) but the whole thing is pre-ordained. Just like the whole movie.

Whether you should see X-Men Origins: Wolverine or not basically depends on whether you think Wolverine — and Hugh Jackman’s performance — is enough to justify the price of admission all by itself. If you’re a big Marvel fancritter, you may also be pulled into the movie based on the cameos by various mutants. I noted the Blob, Gambit, Emma Frost, Silverfox, young Cyclops, and Deadpool. Don’t get carried away, though. Each of those characters receives maybe five minutes of screentime each. At the end of the day, this is Wolverine’s movie, and while Hugh Jackman is tremendous as always, he is oddly hampered by a storyline that gives him less character development than in the other X-Men movies in which he was not the title character. Contrary to what the movie’s producers might think, Wolverine’s backstory doesn’t really tell us that much about him. He’s over a hundred years old, he used to be part of Weapon X, and then he lost his memory. That’s about it. The cynical, rule-breaking hardass that we know from later years has yet to develop. From a storytelling and character standpoint, there’s really no reason to see this movie. All it offers is another two hours of watching one of the best Marvel characters do his work on screen. For some people that will be enough. I have a feeling that for most, it won’t be.

Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon, but all the hype over OnLive that emerged out of GDC a few weeks ago annoyed me to no end. The whole rollout was way too heavy on big promises and far too light on specific performance numbers. And for some reason, much of the credulous press at the time didn’t seem to want to bother trying to figure out just how technologically feasible this all was — at least not until Richard Leadbetter at EuroGamer did some basic calculations and figured out that a computing center for OnLive running a million subscbriptions would require massive technological breakthroughs, suck up enormous financing, and would probably be an environmental disaster to boot. And that’s just to put together the processing power. The technological hurdles to overcome the latency problem are even worse. Simply put, the experience promised by OnLive is probably at least fifteen years away if that.

Besides, there is something about the whole idea of cloud gaming that seems a bit anachronistic and antithetical to the way technology is developing. OnLive relies on building and clustering as massive a processing center as possible into one location and then distributing it out to paying subscribers. The greatest strength of the Internet, though, is its ability to distribute tasks out over a large number of people or nodes in order to accomplish a large task. This philosophy permeates everything that has been revolutionary about the internet: file sharing programs present massive amounts of music and movies because they can draw on the libraries of millions of computers all over the world; the best political blogs are so effective because they can employ thousands of people sifting through documents and other data in order to come up with a picture of what’s going on; Wikipedia addresses pretty much every topic under the sun because it has so many people all over the world aggregating their knowledge to contribute to it; SETI@Home is able to accomplish the world’s largest computer calculation because it breaks the problem up into pieces and distributes it among tens of thousands of computers running the computations in their idle time. Of course, this isn’t necessarily going to be directly applicable to what OnLive is trying to do. You couldn’t use the SETI@Home setup to run Crysis, for example, because there are too many variations in processing power and bandwidth throughout the network to harness effectively. But if you were able to standardize everybody’s computer setup and network, the whole apparatus would behave in a much more predictable way, and many years from now, you might be able to use such a beast to process videogame graphics in real time.

In fact, that was the major idea behind the CELL processor that powers the Playstation 3. Ken Kutaragi’s original vision was that clusters of PS3s on the same network would lend computing power to each other and thus achieve greater computing power for the end user. Even better, the CELL would be placed in all manner of other Sony products from TVs to cameras and they would all work together to increase performance. The whole idea was probably about ten years ahead of its time, but I personally think it’s far more feasible than the megalith computer farm required by OnLive. Right now, though, people have successfully clustered up to 16 PS3s together to create cheap supercomputers, and Folding@Home has demonstrated the potential of networking PS3s together in a manner similar to SETI@Home.

Anyway, nobody has been able to adequately explain to me why I would want to subscribe to OnLive in the first place. One big advantage for developers and publishers is that piracy can be reduced to virtually nothing. As a consumer, though, I don’t particularly care about that. The main selling point for the consumer seems to be that you could just plug a client box into your TV or other screen and begin playing, and you would never have to upgrade your computer in order to play the latest games. My solution to that problem is pretty simple, though: I just play on consoles. I don’t see how a service like OnLive could be offered for less than $60 per month (and I’m probably lowballing that estimate). Under such a scheme, a Wii and a few games would pay for itself in under a year, and the Xbox 360 or PS3 would pay for themselves in no more than three years (depending on configuration). Meanwhile, I can see one pretty big drawback which I’m surprised none of the other major publications I read have brought up: what’s going to happen if OnLive stops? When Nintendo stopped supporting the SNES or Sega stopped supporting the Dreamcast, I could still play my favorite SNES or Dreamcast games if I owned the consoles. Many of my friends who own an NES still play it now even though the system hasn’t seen any kind of support in over fifteen years. And today, the fact is a lot of five year old games are still immensely playable and will probably still be fun to play in 2020. Graphics are not likely to improve so very much that such games become an eyesore the way 8-bit retro games seem to some people. But it’s hard to see OnLive continuing to support and provide games over such a long period of time. The upkeep is going to be just too much with the flood of new games coming in as well. And besides, companies sometimes go out of business or are bought out by others. What happens if OnLive goes the way of Sega? Do all the fans of games on that platform just have to suck it up and hope somebody releases an emulator on another platform?

Frankly, the fact that so many in the press are hyping up OnLive without considering these massive issues is just irritating.

Sometimes I read stories like this one and wonder how that phone call must have gone. To sum up the article, new data from Japan revealed that the PS3 had outsold the Wii for the month of March — pretty much the first time that has ever happened. The headline for this article is about Nintendo’s response to this news. Namely: “[W]e are not particularly concerned.”

This conjures up images of an intrepid journalist calling up Nintendo headquarters and asking, “Are you worried that the PS3 has outsold the Wii in Japan for the month of March?” Of course, the actual call was probably more something like, “What is your response to this news?” And to be completely fair, the original article by the Financial Times was a broader piece about sales in the industry in which Nintendo’s quote was an obligatory response at the end. It was Eurogamer who decided to place Nintendo’s response in their headline which is rather odd. The fact that Nintendo is not concerned about PS3 sales isn’t exactly news to anyone. What else was Eurogamer expecting Nintendo to say?

During election seasons, the political press here in the United States loves to discuss negative campaigning. If nobody is currently being negative, the press will speculate about who will go negative first. And when somebody does (almost inevitably) go negative, the press will start analyzing the impact. Are negative ads the way to go? Are they hurting the opponent? Will they backfire?

Reporters will spend a lot of time trying to figure out if it’s a good idea to go on the attack or not. The conventional wisdom is that negative campaigning works, but the reality is more complicated. On the one hand, you have (in)famous cases like the Willie Horton ad that sank Michael Dukakis and allowed the first George Bush to become President. On the other hand, you have Barack Obama who seemed to shrug off any attacks his opponents threw at him. And then you have cases like the Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia who arguably benefited because his opponent went so over the top with negative ads (claiming among other things that Kaine wouldn’t have executed Hitler if given the chance) that the public turned away in disgust.

How do you figure out who is going to be vulnerable to attacks? Talking heads on TV pretend that it requires some great insight into the workings of the public to understand when is the right time to go negative, but actually the formula is pretty simple: attack if your opponent is largely unknown by the public and if you are able to make an attack that squares somehow with the popular narrative that’s already developing. Otherwise, be very wary of the temptation to go negative. And whatever you do, don’t go on the attack when your poll numbers are slipping. The Willie Horton ads worked because Dukakis was already seen as kind of an academic egghead who might not be emotionally involved in his decisions. Hillary Clinton’s 3 AM phone call ad worked because Obama was still not that well known and was campaigning on a platform that could appear naive to many people. McCain’s only effective ad was the one which called Obama a “celebrity,” and it worked because at that point Obama really was an iconic person known to the world who could draw huge crowds (many would argue that’s not a bad thing, but the point of advertising is to take the facts and frame them your way). On the other hand, the vast majority of McCain’s negative tactics backfired on him badly. Some badly aimed (like the one chastising Obama for talking about putting lipstick on a pig). Some were so far beyond any recognizable truth that the media was forced to call foul (like the one claiming Obama supports comprehensive sex education for children). But by far the biggest problems McCain had were that by the time he seriously took aim at his opponent, Obama had been campaigning for nearly two years and had build up a solid lead in the polls. When the primaries were over, the American public felt (for better or worse) that they had seen quite a lot of Obama and knew what he was like. Claims that Obama was a radical socialist with terrorist ties didn’t sway middle of the road voters because they felt he didn’t look like any of those things. Even worse for McCain, Obama was ahead and gaining steadily for the most part. McCain’s attacks were seen as desperation moves, robbing them of any effectiveness no matter what their factual basis.

Which brings me to Sony’s latest salvo against Nintendo. The charge, I gather, is that the Nintendo DSi does not address the hardware issues which people brought up against the DS, that its audience was limited and that developers were having a hard time being successful on it. The whole tactic breaks all three rules of negative campaigning that I listed above. First of all, Koller’s attack is taking on a giant in the industry which is very well known to the public at large–namely, the Nintendo DS which is an even bigger seller than the PS2. Secondly, his attack does not square with the popular perception of the DS which does in fact have games for every demographic (and then some). If Koller had criticized the DS for having a large library of crap shovelware, that might have been another thing. But he would still have the third problem which is that he’s attacking the DS in order to make the case for the PSP which has been the loser by a wide margin in this race. Most people reading this story won’t even bother going past the headline because they will simply see it as sour grapes.

I would normally be surprised that a corporation could make such an incompetent attack on the competition, but after all, this is Sony we’re talking about.

Sony has announced that the PS2 will now be sold for $99. That’s nice, I guess, but I suspect my reaction to this news was pretty much the same as yours and everyone else’s. Which is the title of this post.

No, this is not one of my longer posts. Sometimes you don’t need to say more.

Ha! I bet that title caught your attention. But I wasn’t just putting that up there to be provocative and garner page hits. I have a point here that is extremely poorly sourced and tendentious, but it’s still sort of a point. First, the review.

One of my favorite reviews on the internet is Moriarty’s review of J.J. Abrams’ script for the Superman movie. Of course, reviews of train wrecks are inherently entertaining, but that’s exactly what my review of the Street Fighter movie is going to turn into. Moriarty’s review of the script is summed up in a semi-classic sentence that begins the actual review: “So, of course, first off, Krypton doesn’t explode.” After reading a sentence like that, there really isn’t much else you need to know about a movie. If Krypton doesn’t explode in a Superman movie, there isn’t much hope for it.

So as to Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, first off, Bison is a blonde guy in a business suit with a beard and mustache with an Irish accent.

Take a moment and let that sink in. Yes it’s true. They took one of the most distinctive characters in the Street Fighter universe and made him into a generic European villain. With an accent that the original actor doesn’t have, to boot. Why did they do that? Who knows. Why are they making Kristin Kreuk do a running voiceover which says absolutely nothing? Why are they having Chun-Li enter a night club to seduce one of Bison’s lesbian executives?

Yep. You heard that right. Chun-Li has figured out that one of Bison’s henchwomen is a lesbian and has hatched a plan to seduce her in a night club. I conclude from this that Chun-Li has vast powers of deduction because I certainly had no clue up until then. Anyway, Chun-Li enters the night club wearing this blue poncho outfit which I guess is supposed to be sexy complete with gold boots. Yep. Gold boots. Anyway, she and the henchwoman circle around each other for a hilariously long time while exchanging smoldering looks until Chun-Li walks to the bathroom and the henchwoman follows. And then a fight ensues. Strangely enough, this may be the part of the movie that is the most authentic to the games because Chun-Li wears her signature double-bun hairdo and executes a spinning bird kick of sorts (although both look terrible).

Oh, and Vega shows up long enough for Chun-Li to throw him over the side of a building. And he’s wearing a mask because he’s ugly, not because he’s trying to protect his beautiful face. Yes indeed, there are lots of reasons for Street Fighter fans to be pissed at this movie, and that brings me back to the title. The Republican party in the United States, as you probably know, is a bit out of sorts right now after being soundly beaten in two elections in a row. There is now an internal debate going on about where the party went wrong and what to do from here. And right now, the leadership of the party seems to have decided that the thing to do is to return to their roots and keep selling their traditional principles of tax cuts, low government spending and no expansion of government. The problem is that at a time when government is pretty much the only thing that can save us from a terrible depression in which, this message is pretty much the exact wrong one to be trying to sell to the public. Republicans have, in other words, decided to pursue their traditional agenda in the name of ideological purity while ignoring how bad the result will be for the country and for themselves.

Which brings me to the Street Fighter movie and the criticisms that gamers have leveled at it. Around the internet you will find lots of people saying things like, “They made it completely unrecognizable from the games” or “Kristin Kreuk looks nothing like Chun-Li” or “They totally changed the story from the game.” Most will also recognize that the acting was pretty bad, the direction was amateurish, the fight choreography was nothing special and the dialogue was terrible, too. But mostly, these gamers are upset that their beloved franchise has been soiled upon.

Only a very few of these Street Fighter fans will recognize the more fundamental problem: any live action movie which is based on the Street Fighter games is going to be inherently bad unless it’s changed to the point of being unrecognizable anyway. Think about what would happen if you made a movie that was completely faithful to the games. No woman would walk around in public wearing Chun-Li’s dress, much less Cammy’s standard uniform. And the other characters would include a skinny yoga master who can stretch his arms out and a green beast guy who can spontaneously generate electricity. Not to mention the sumo wrestler and the Bruce Lee ringer. Anybody who can pull these characters off in live action without making them look cheesy or ridiculous deserves an Academy Award. And it doesn’t help that the plot of Street Fighter, like any tournament fighting game, is beyond thin.

Like the Republican leadership, it seems that a lot of hardcore Street Fighter fans (and gamers at large) want to see their games brought to the movie screen more or less for the sake of bringing it to the big screen. But that’s not the point of making a movie just like the point of tax cuts is not for their own sake. The reason to make a movie is to make good (and generally profitable) entertainment, not to make fan service. The insistence by gamers that movies must pass a purity test if they are based on videogames is going to doom videogame-based movies. Gamers are acting like Republicans. If they think about it, I hardly believe they really want that.

Disclaimer: I’ve been hard on the Republicans in this post, but that doesn’t mean I have a particular beef with conservatives. It should be kept in mind that Republicans and conservatives (however you define that term) are not the same thing these days.

You’ve probably heard about it by now. Most likely if you’re reading this blog, you’ve seen it. I’m talking, of course, about the confrontation between Jon Stewart on The Daily Show and Jim Cramer of Mad Money. If you somehow haven’t seen it, I encourage you to go out and watch it on the Comedy Central website. You won’t be alone. I read that if you combine viewership on the actual night with streams from Comedy Central and Hulu, you would have a total of 14 million people who saw the debate.

Believe it or not, videogame journalists have something to learn from the exchange, too. Unfortunately, that would require them to think reflectively about their profession, and they’re not really very good at that. I might as well give it a shot and hopefully convince you of my point of view as well, though.

The key point occurs during the original scathing montage that The Daily Show plays blasting CNBC. What sticks out most in our minds is how people like Cramer got things spectacularly wrong, but equally important in my mind is when CNBC anchors are shown brown nosing company CEOs (one of whom turned out to be running a Ponzi scheme) and tossing them softball questions like, “Is it good to be rich?” In his interview with Jon Stewart, Jim Cramer tried to excuse some of his colleagues by saying that CEOs lied to their face. “You are pretending that you are a doe-eyed innocent,” Jon retorted.

Which brings me to my main point: mainstream journalists tend to assume that their greatest asset is access to sources and officials to talk to. Jon’s point is that high level access does not necessarily produce accurate or useful information and a little critical thinking will go a long way. The results of this past election bear him out. Remember when the media was going crazy over Obama’s comment that bitter people cling to guns and religion? Or how puzzled the talking heads were that Obama was letting McCain make all the attacks and accusations without hitting back? We now know those things didn’t matter one bit, but you wouldn’t have known that if you were watching lots of CNN. Cable news anchors have more access than almost anybody else in the country. If they really want to, they can get almost anyone to sit down for an interview with them. But when it came to figuring out whether opposition to a gas tax holiday would hurt Obama or whether he was doing well in the debates, talking heads didn’t have a clue. One of the most accurate prognosticators in the presidential campaign was Al Giordano, a blogger/journalist mostly covering drug issues who lived in Mexico throughout most of the campaign and literally owns little more than a guitar and the laptop on which he writes his posts. The most accurate electoral predictor, more accurate than even the professional pollsters hired by the mainstream news organizations, was Nate Silver who rather than conducting yet another poll hit on the simple idea of looking at everybody else’s poll, weighting them according to historical accuracy and then producing his own predictions. Between Giordano and Silver, you got a better idea of what was going on in the campaign and what really drove the voters than you would have by reading The Washington Post’s electoral coverage.

Which is where videogame journalism comes in. I listen to IGN podcasts for entertainment on the way to work, and in one podcast, the editors told a story about a blogger who disparaged a videogame demo right in front of the publicity people working for the company that made the game. You shouldn’t do that, the IGN editors said. Keep that up and the developer won’t give you advance copies of the game and you won’t be able to write about it. Once again, access is key. And if your goal is essentially to post videos and screenshots as soon as possible, I guess that’s valid, but you would have to recognize that even if you write a relatively critical preview, you are still essentially acting as a PR extension of the development company.

If your goal is to inform the readers and provide them with enough context that they can clearly see where the industry is going and make purchasing decisions appropriately, then that’s a different matter entirely. Reviewing a game is pretty easy and requires absolutely no exclusive access; after all, you just need to get access to the same game that everybody else in the general public can get. Meanwhile, instead of spending your time chasing down company representatives to try to get them to talk to you and then sitting them down for interviews in which they will generally dodge the questions they don’t like, you can sit back to take a look at the broader picture to see where this is all going.

IGN, GameSpot and their ilk have decided that they want access above everything else. I can’t really blame them. It’s what the public pays them to get. But if you want truly unbiased opinions and a greater, contextualized view of the industry, you would do better to look elsewhere. Remember when Matt Cassamassina went on a rampage a few years ago because it had been recently revealed that the Nintendo Wii would have no HD capability? Remember how Matt ranted about how this was a huge mistake on Nintendo’s part and that it might doom them to drop out of the hardware business? Boy, he sure hit that one out of the park!

Meanwhile, I’m working on reposting one of my essays from several years back around the time of the PSP launch. I will modestly note that I predicted that it would lose handily to Nintendo’s handheld. I’m not saying I’m smarter than Matt Cassamassina. I’m just saying that when you’re not in the trenches worrying about every news item day to day, you might have a clearer picture of what’s going on.

It’s not that often that you find an article in a mainstream publication that discusses the videogame industry intelligently and thoughtfully. That’s why I found it a very pleasant surprise to read this article on Slate by N. Evan Van Zelfden discussing the reasons why the videogame industry is contracting. By and large, it’s nothing that nobody knew before, but it’s still good to see a non-niche publication point out to the greater world that the cost of development is just way too high.

I did learn a couple things from the article, though. One is that although GTA IV was a smash hit, Rockstar apparently thought it was going to be an even bigger hit and is actually in financial trouble because of that. Score one for Nintendo’s brand of conservative development. Van Zelfden also points out something I hadn’t thought of before which is that videogames aren’t really developed on the Hollywood system. Videogames are often developed by an in-house company wholly owned by the publisher distributing and marketing the game. Hollywood is different in that a studio will essentially hire a production company to produce one film and then the two parties have no further obligation to each other (until they decide to work together again for another project). There are lots of problems with Hollywood (did we really need another Underworld movie?), but there is a certain efficiency in this. If the movie business is contracting, studios simply don’t buy as much work or they buy cheaper work. Big publishers do not have that luxury. They have to keep their development teams working or else fire them. The vagaries of the business cycle thus become extremely cruel to individual game developers.

There’s another difference between videogames and movies: spending more money on videogames does create a better game, even if it’s only on technical terms. You can create a perfectly good, even blockbuster or award winning movie relatively cheaply. Your budget may be one-fifth of the typical blockbuster movie, but you will still have competent lighting, good cameras to work with and high quality music. These days, most small movie productions can even afford to buy some CGI. The rest of the movie production is up to the creative team, and the quality of their work cannot be increased just by throwing more money at them. Contrast this with the world of videogames where a minimum standard of graphical and sound quality has to be met before most videogame hobbyists will even give a game a second look. Right now, that minimum standard is very expensive. Costs will go down eventually, but by then, who know what other ways we’ll find to boost graphical quality?

The other problem facing the videogame industry is that there is now way too much product out there. Even if you were a dedicated gamer and you limited yourself only to playing games that received a 90% or higher score on GameRankings, you would have a very hard time getting through everything that’s released in a year on all platforms (if you did do that, your social life would have very significant problems). Any given game’s chances of catching on are growing steadily slimmer as the core audience continues to get older and gain more and more life obligations. Which means the successful game is going to be the one that generates the most buzz, and that game is most likely to be one of the most expensive ones. The industry is trapped.

What we need is to reach a new balance. An equilibrium in the industry, if you will, in which gamers have come to accept and understand that a certain level of graphical quality is “good enough” and they can get on with enjoying the non-technical aspects of the game. And this equilibrium needs to be at such a point that developers can give it to us at a price that doesn’t break their backs. I don’t think we have reached that point, and we may not reach it for time. I also do not think the Wii provides us with that equilibrium. I like the Wii a lot, and I like the philosophy behind it. However, few will argue that it can’t stand to use a little more juice. My personal prediction is that when the graphical quality of higher end Xbox 360 or PS3 games can be produced cheaply and quickly, we will have reached that equilibrium where most people won’t try to nitpick the visuals and demand for things to look even better. The question is how long it will take for us to get there and what people in the industry will be doing until then.

I’m afraid that by this standard, though, we’re in for a very long and dark period in videogame development.

Tenchu: Shadow Assassins comes from Ubi Soft whom you may also know as the company behind Splinter Cell. I’ll come back to that distinction in a moment.

The thing to remember about Tenchu is that it is essentially a puzzle game. If you haven’t played it before, the game consists of ten levels which you must traverse without being detected by enemy guards who patrol around the area. Each level is divided into smaller sections, and being seen by anyone results in you instantly having to go back to the beginning of the section to try it again. The only exception is if you happen to be carrying a sword as one of your three usable items in which case you’ll fight the enemy. The fights, however, are relatively difficult, and you generally want to avoid them (besides, there are almost always items more useful than a sword to carry around. More on that later).

The best way to resolve each level is to find out the locations of each guard and then figure out the best way to approach them unawares so that you can stealth kill them. This is where the game really starts to resemble a puzzler. There are four basic types of guards. Basic foot soldier guards can be grabbed and disposed of easily as long as you don’t approach them from the front. Armored guards have sharp ears and will hear you approaching which means you have to find a place to lie in waiting for them to walk within range. Ninjas usually don’t patrol and instead hide in unusual places so that you have to seek them out and kill them before they see you first. And finally there are gunmen who have very sharp eyes and can see you from far away. To that end, you have a number of ways to stay out of sight including hiding in bushes, hanging from ledges squeezing into narrow spaces in the walls. If you successfully catch someone unawares, you enter a quicktime event where making the proper movements of your Wiimote and Nunchuk will trigger a cutscene in which you execute your unfortunate victim in a highly satisfying manner (ninjas apparently know two dozen ways to break someone’s neck).

All of this requires a great deal of suspension of disbelief as the behavior of your enemies is rather dense. The guards display all the typical problems that have plagued stealth games since the genre was invented: they give up searching after an unrealistically short period of time, they don’t communicate well with each other (if at all) and they have all the sensory perception of a dog with a stuffy nose. You could be out in the open in the same hallway with them and as long as you are more than thirty feet away or so, they won’t be able to see you. To a certain extent, these are necessary conventions of the stealth genre. If the guards acted like realistic humans, all stealth games would be basically impossible. Tenchu’s advantage in my mind is that unlike Splinter Cell or even Metal Gear Solid, its entire universe is patently unrealistic to begin with. The fact that it plays like a puzzle game rather than an action or adventure game also helps temper your expectations — you think of everybody as moving pieces on a board rather than full-fledged human beings, and so you can get on with enjoying the game. One more advantage Tenchu has over Splinter Cell is it’s not a game of trial and error. If you proceed slowly and carefully, you will be able to see the terrain ahead of you, and once you understand the rules, the game pretty much plays fair. And as I’ve said before, getting caught doesn’t send you too far back in the game.

The game also has a pretty neat collection of items, all of which can be used in at least two ways. Throwing weapons usually don’t kill people unless they are standing near a precarious ledge or something, but they can also be used to put out candles. A sword isn’t just a weapon for fighting. It can also break locks or be jammed into certain walls to serve as a springboard. My personal favorite is the shinobi cat which is pretty much what it sounds like: a small cat that you can send out to scout the territory as well as grab items to bring back to you.

All of this apparently is old hat if you’ve played previous Tenchu games. I guess the original Tenchu also had tank controls for the ninjas. It works, but it definitely feels outdated and more than a little odd. You’re playing a ninja, for crying out loud. But since this is a relatively slow moving game which places more emphasis on strategy, the controls don’t detract too much from the game. If this game gets a sequel, I very much hope the developers will consider updating it. Another point against the game is that unlike the other Tenchu games I’ve tried briefly, this one forces you to use certain ninjas in certain levels. To wit, the first five levels have you playing Rikimaru, the strong but slow moving male ninja, and the last five levels have you playing Ayame, the weaker and quicker female ninja. This is for story reasons, but the ability to choose between the two of them at will would still have been nice. Also, Ayame ends up retreading quite a lot of Rikimaru’s territory, and although she plays sufficiently differently that it doesn’t feel like a cheap length-extending trick, I still wish she could have gotten more of her own original content.

There’s nothing wrong with the production values, though. The graphics are quite good (particularly during cutscenes), and the voice acting is competent although not outstanding since none of the dialogue calls for very demonstrative emotions (Rikimaru in particular is very stoic by nature). The only flaws are a tendency for objects to clip through each other. In general, the game looks like a latter era PS2 game which is not bad at all.

These days, the idea of stealth in games is paradoxically stronger and weaker at the same time. More and more games incorporate stealth into their gameplay, but actual stealth-centric games are growing fewer and far between. Recent Metal Gear Solid games involve so much shooting and destruction that calling them stealth games is frankly ludicrous (tactical espionage is a little better, I suppose), and Splinter Cell games seem to be in a bit of a rut with reviewers generally agreeing that the single-player gameplay hasn’t evolved very much over the years. The only big new stealth game I can think of in recent years is Assassin’s Creed. Tenchu: Shadow Assassins will never be accused of great innovations, either, but I actually find its stealth gameplay much more tolerable than either Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid (I recognize this opinion will be controversial). Unlike MGS, Tenchu really will punish you for being discovered and you actually will have an incentive to get through the game without being discovered even once. And unlike Splinter Cell, the gameplay does not consist of trial and error with overly severe punishments for being discovered. Both MGS and Splinter Cell have other features to recommend them, and ultimately they are better games than Tenchu which is a more focused and narrow effort. With some updated controls and new AI routines, it could be totally reinvented (I hear most Tenchu games other than the first one were actually pretty bad).

I can’t really recommend buying Tenchu: Shadow Assassins at full price. It does stealth the way I like it, but that doesn’t change the fact that this feels like a pretty good game from five years ago. I think it’s worth $20 if you find it at that price point in the future, though.

Xantar’s rating: 3 out of 5