entropia

I’ve been listening to game journalists at places like 1Up gush about Little Big Planet for what feels like years. And no matter how great they say it is, I’ve always had the same reaction: “Huh?” Is that it? A platformer that lets you make and share your own levels - that’s supposed to be new, original, and paradigm-breaking?

Games have come with content editors for years. Doom was one of the first games with mod support, 15 years ago. The most popular multiplayer shooter in the world, Counter-Strike, started as a mod. A lot of success can come from mods, but you can’t rely on that as your #1 selling point.

So you say Little Big Planet makes it easier than ever? Doesn’t matter. Anyone with the design skill and commitment needed to make a fun game is willing to use a more difficult, but more powerful and flexible, editor than Little Big Planet could deliver.

But then I changed my mind. Via Tales of The Rampant Coyote, I found Fantastic Contraption. It’s one of those physics-based games where you build a machine and let it run. I usually don’t like these games, but Fantastic Contraption is a nice combination of simplicity (there are only 5 objects to build with) and freedom (any puzzle can be solved using a variety of approaches). Once I started playing, I couldn’t stop. I haven’t been so entranced by a game in years.

And once I finished, I immediately bought the game and spent hours browsing through the user-made content and solutions. (And I have to mention, it was the most fluid game-buying experience I’ve had. Clicking Buy opens a PayPal window, and once you hit submit, you immediately get all the benefits without even closing the original game window.)

But what really surprised me about it is that it opened my eyes about Little Big Planet. It’s not just about making it easier to make and share stuff, it’s about the fun of the experience of actually making it. Things like the Spore Creature Creator, Line Rider, and Armadillo Run never appealed to me, so I didn’t believe any similar game would. But if Fantastic Contraption can do it, maybe Little Big Planet can too.

And it’s not just the design phase. Fantastic Contraption also showed me the power of a good community, which I’ve never really cared about. You can save and share your designs with a single click, and there’s plenty of activity in the forum. This is supposed to be another area where Little Big Planet excels.

Still, the games are very different in their goals. As far as I know, the actual “play” portion of Little Big Planet doesn’t involve any design - it’s basically just a platformer. And the design phase doesn’t have any real goal or direction. In my mind this is still a huge hurdle.

I recently started playing Bioshock again. I liked the game when it game out, but I thought it didn’t live up to the hype. But now I’m more excited about it than I was when I started playing it the first time. The story, the atmosphere, and the gameplay are sucking me in. If I were to review the game after playing it the first time, I would have given it a Very Good. Now I feel like it deserves a Great - one of the best games in years.

Game reviewers usually don’t play games like the rest of us. I play games in my free time, which could be a few hours one day and a few minutes the next. They play games as a job, for hours every day. And they have deadlines, so there’s no time to let it all sink in, or revisit their favorite parts. For games like Bioshock, where the lasting impression is important, this doesn’t work very well.

But even worse is the end result of the review. Even if the reviewer writes a masterful article, detailing the highs and lows, it all comes down to the final score. Whether it’s out of 5 stars or 100 points, most people only care about the number.

I’ve seen two sites with better takes on the reviewing process. The (now defunct) Game Chair would review games sitting by sitting and wrap everything up at the end. This way the rating isn’t a single number, but a rolling accumulation. Maybe the end of the game is significantly better than the rest, or maybe the reviewer just isn’t having a good day. With this system, you get a better idea of what the reviewer’s experience was.

The other site is Kotaku, which does away with numbers completely and just gives a short description with pros and cons. This way the reader doesn’t have to guess what 7 out of 10 means. They can give their own interpretation. “The biggest pro is the engaging story, which doesn’t really concern me, and the controls are sometimes frusterating, so even though it sounds like the reviewer really liked it, I’ll pass”.

I do something like a combination of these two methods for myself. I keep a diary-like game log of what I play each day. It’s not for mass consumption, so it’s full of broken sentences and incomplete thoughts. But if I made it presentable and condensed it to just a few days, my Crysis “review” would look something like this.

Day 1
I’m excited for this game. Farcry was good, and Crysis looks like more of the same, with better everything. Especially the graphics, of course.
After a couple levels I’m getting used to the nanosuit, not using much except Armor and Stealth. And I feel like the guns a either underpowered or too inaccurate. Unless you hit an enemy in the head when they’re not looking (because if they are looking it doesn’t do as much damage), it takes a full clip to put them down.

Day 2
After a few more levels, everything has gotten way too repetitive. It’s just Stealth for 5 seconds, wait, and repeat. If you’re spotted, the enemies are quick to forget about you. And the nanosuit isn’t panning out. It’s still just Amor and Stealth, or Speed to save time going through an area you’ve cleared.

Day 3
Despite the repetition, it’s pretty fun after coming to accept the gameplay, which is mostly learning how to deal with the AI. At first I thought the AI was terrible, but it’s actually pretty good. Not “good” as in smart, but “good” in that it feels like there’s actually something making decisions. And after playing for a while you can learn their tendancies and figure out how to exploit them.

Day 4
All of a sudden, I feel like I’m playing a completely different game. After running freely around a jungle for hours, I’m now doing escort, rails, and defend missions. There’s no more playing against the AI (and hence, against the developers, something I’ve always loved). It’s just playing against arbitrary, soulless entities.

Day 5
I can’t continue because of a memory leak. I can’t say I mind, though, because I haven’t enjoyed the game for a while.

Conclusion
Just like Farcry, it didn’t quite live up to my expectations, but I had some fun. The story never grabbed me, and I felt like I could give up at any time. But I stuck around because I really enjoy exploiting the AI, and because the graphics are simply the best you’ll find today.

I think if someone would take a system like this, and give it to a reviewer who can write well and make better points than I can, it would be a good model for reviews. It doesn’t directly fix the problem I would have reviewing Bioshock, but that can be fixed. Since there’s no final score, or a preset timeline, you can always go back and add to your review. So if I were to fire up Crysis again, and have a different experience than during the first time through, I could update it.

Of course, the major review sites will never do something like this. The industry is too focused on the numbers.