Thoughts on Portal 3

If the comments sections under any blog/article about Portal 2 are to believed, one of the popular demands for a new Portal (either full game or DLC) would involve Doug Rattmann as a playable character.

If you are reading this and you don't know who Rattmann is, you can see him here.  He is also responsible for all of the graffiti around Aperture Laboratories in both Portal games.

The scribbled ramblings of a man we can trust.

My gut reaction said "No, that's a dumb idea."  If you read the comic, you can see that Doug Rattmann's survival was questionable at best.  It's very tricky in storytelling to confirm or deny the survival of a character, especially one in his position.  In addition, it breaks Chell's set tradition of having a silent, somewhat detached protagonist, and Atlas and P-Body's (somewhat forced) silence in the Portal 2 co-op campaign.  Chell, I think, added a lot to Portal because she could have been any one of us, and we experienced Aperture Science in just the way we did.  Doug Rattmann adds a history to the Enrichment Center that separates him from us, the players.

However, after playing Portal 2, I've kind of changed my mind for a couple of reasons.  One thing that initially occurred to me as a negative was the possibility of Rattmann responding to GLaDOS, and actually carrying on a conversation.  After all, he is identified as not being mute, and he does talk back to GLaDOS in Lab Rat.  Adding this to Portal 3, though, would greatly separate the game from Portal and Portal 2, setting it apart.  Considering Valve's level of polish on whatever it is they do, it's likely that Rattmann's conversations with GLaDOS would add to the game in a good way, rather than a bad way.

In addition to Rattmann's possession of a voice, Rattmann has another quality which sets him apart from the other characters of the Portal series: he is a paranoid schizophrenic.  If you haven't read Lab Rat yet, read it, and you'll see the way Rattmann sees the world.  It's all kinds of fucked up.  Things seem to blend into one another, and because he has held off on his medication, his schizophrenia has taken an even deeper root in his mind.  Thinking of this from a level-design point of view opens things up.  Things have been pretty sterile in Aperture, save the takeover by nature.  Even then, though, things obeyed the laws of the land.  Playing from Rattmann's point of view could allow for some unnatural occurrences, like twisted or untrustworthy perspectives, or (literally) insane levels.  The gameplay element of the Portal Gun would allow for levels like that.  Think about the original Half-Life, and the Xen levels.  You could twist and alter the already messed-up landscape even more for Rattmann levels, even as challenge levels akin to the special levels in Super Mario Sunshine.

I'm talking about a twisted, distorted version of this crap.

So you know what?  I kind of hope that I get to see this kind of level design in a future Portal game.  Gabe Newell has said that Chell would have an impact on the Half-Life universe, so I doubt that we would not see her again.  But if I had to wait 'til Portal 4 for that to happen, and I played as Doug Rattmann while we waited, I'd be A-Okay with it.

My Blog About Indie Games

Alternatively called: Why I End Up Buying Every Humble Indie Bundle

So on one of these past episodes of 8-Bit Banter, The Internet and Gaming, the subject of indie games was brought up.  Now, I have a small reputation among the people I know as being a little of a Gaming Hippie, in that I support indie gaming a lot.  I make a post every time that the Humble Indie Bundle comes around, and the HIB is about as hippie as gaming tends to get outside of games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing.

But in an attempt to not be the Gaming Hipster among my friends (Oh, you haven't heard of this game?), I want to clarify something about my stance on Indie Games.  Being a game developed by a small developer is not an automatic way to get more points from me.  Occasionally, I worry that I send that message.

I like Indie games that are GOOD.  Now to decrease the douchiness of that sentence, I have enjoyed a great number of indie games.  As I have stated, VVVVVV is one of my favorite games ever.  I loved the gameplay mechanic, the style of the game, the humor, and especially the music.

Oh look the title is all over the walls

I liked some other indie games from this current wave, too; Super Meat Boy is infuriatingly difficult, but absolutely satisfying.  Cthulhu Saves the World is one of my favorite JRPGs, too, with it's bringing back a huge amount of nostalgia for the older Final Fantasy games as well as having some of the most ridiculous writing in any game I have ever played.

But that is not to say that there are no bad indie games.  I won't list any, because that would be a little rude towards people who have put a lot of love in their projects.  I will say, though, that they exist.  

Importantly, this is just as true for big-name games.  It's a tragedy to see any game do poorly, because there is a genuine desire to make a good game on some level, even if it gets lost in the hype machine and the desire to spite competitors (Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, I'm looking at both of you.).

So I think this is what I have been trying to say.  I like indie games, and whenever I see one become a great success, it feels great because you know that it was not the result of a multi-million dollar ad campaign or the result of yearly releases.  It's a genuine win for a genuinely great game.  And I buy every Humble Indie Bundle because I want to be a part of every great success that I can be.

This is Me Being Mad at Society

Despite the whimsical title of this blog, I do try to avoid whining too much.  I don't really like crying out for attention, regardless of what my vague-booking posts may say about me.  But I'm actually going to hop aboard the complain train for a while because I'm mad, and goddammit I have a podcast to get to and I need this out of my system before I record.

So I grew up with a pretty simple plan.  I followed the rules that were set around me.  If I was told, "Do A and you'll get B," I noticed that I got B when I did A.  It's kinda been my go-to rule for things.  Now, there are exceptions to this rule.  When I get spam mail that says I just need to reply with my Social Security Number to claim money from a Nigerian Prince, I have the idea that there's a lie in there somewhere.  The risk is too high for me to do something as stupid as send my SSN to people I don't know.  Basically, after some risk vs. reward assessment, I decided to play by the rules around me and trust in the rewards promised to me by my elders.

This plan worked really well for me, too.  In school, I quickly learned that if I listened to my teachers, I got better grades.  And from elementary school through high school, that was kind of how I measured how I was doing in life.  My grades were what was important to me.  I played sports when I was little, and even got to be my team's closing pitcher in little league, but my grades were what mattered more than anything.  Well, that and the approval of my parents, which came partly from the grades.

My primary motivation was this: if I get good grades, my life will be better.  Now, I should note that I really had very little in the way of a concrete reward.  It was kind of the hopeful fantasy that young children are so ready to have.  Probably like, "You can have an awesome job like being an astronaut or policeman or being an author if you do all your work!"  So that quickly became my goal.  I needed to do what I could in school so I could get a good job and live a successful life.

So let's fast-forward a little bit.  I make it to middle school, where the pressure of OMG COLLEGE starts to pile up.  By now, it's clear that I'm one of those sad students that cares more about getting homework done and getting my scores as high as possible than they do about having a lot of friends or going to parties.  So I'm a clear target for my middle school to give me college prep information.  And that's where the message I've been hearing gets hammered into me more: "If you go to college, you'll get a great job and make lots of money.  Don't worry about the loans; you'll have so much money that they won't even be a problem."

This is more or less what I was like.  The rabbit, not the carrot.

Because that's kind of what we've been hearing as students going to college, right?  That college means we take out loans, but the investment means we'll pay that back and get a lot more money out of it.  But I'm still young and gullible at this point, and it seems to run with my main rule.  Trusted people are telling me this information, so I can believe what they are telling me.

The cynical members of my audience are seeing the break in the chain.

So I made it through high school with the knowledge that if I get into a good college, I am practically set.  I was in all the Honors and AP classes my little college would let me take, and by the end of high school, I had a 4.33 GPA.  I had played football all four years of high school (starting on varsity for three of those years), wrestled for three of them (HDL champ for two of those years), and I was on the track and field team for my senior year.  Basically, if I wasn't going to your college, it was money issues.  Which I knew would happen, because if I didn't get a full ride, I was going to need loans.

So when it came down to it, I applied and got accepted to three schools: CSU Long Beach, Whittier College, and Willamette University.  CSULB was my first choice because most of my friends were going there, and it would be somewhat close to where I lived (Lancaster, CA).  Whittier was actually closer, and had been recruiting me for football.  Now, there was a lot of talk from my father along the lines of, "I can't tell you where to go, but..."  which I kind of knew was coming.  I know it made my dad proud that I was getting recruited for a college football program.  I got the same offer from Willamette.  The weather really drew me to want to go to Oregon, and my friends drew me to Long Beach.  However, I took a trip to Whittier College, and I loved the place.  It was small, it had beautiful architecture, I loved the aesthetics, and it had the ridiculous mascot of the Poets.

Johnny Poet, or as he's known by WC students, Johnny Rapist.

 Financially, I still thought CSULB was the right choice, but my dad convinced me that going to Whittier was a better idea, primarily because of the football program.  I knew the loans would probably run me more in the long run, but "it will be okay, because I'll get a great degree and I'll have an awesome job and I'll make enough money to pay back my loans while living comfortably."

Oh foolish hope.

And here we get to the point of this whole string of story.  After making the Move of Shame back home to San Bernardino, I sit and write this blog from my mom's house.  During my senior year of college, I lived off-campus, making monthly rent payments through the jobs I had earned from school.  I didn't even have Work-Study during that last year because of a cut in our funding, but I managed to get my job back through the extreme generosity of my supervisors in the college's mail room and from my advisor, Charles Eastman.  I didn't play football my senior year because of some decisions to fire my O-line coaches, and if I had played football, I wouldn't have been able to juggle the work, school, and sports to the standards I hold myself to.

For those of you keeping score, I played football for three years of college, worked for three years in a few different departments of the college (and I am thankful for every job I had), and finished my degree with a 3.5 GPA.  I worked my ass off.

So here I sit, quite unemployed, tippity-typing away at this blog.  I wrote the 30 Days of Video Game blog to keep myself writing, and my cousin and I have started a podcast called 8-bit Banter.  Neither of these, though, adds money to my bank account in any way.  I have my Bachelor's in English, but I've run into the best Catch-22 of all: You need experience to get a job, but you can't get experience if you've had no job.  Apparently the three I had at the college don't count for anything to most employers, including the one where I was responsible enough to cover for my supervisors when they could not make it into work.

I've applied to jobs since May when I graduated.  I made it to the final stages of a big opportunity with LA County, but was rejected at the last stage.  I had connections to a store which was right by me during the past summer, but they were worried that I was too qualified for them and that I would just skip out when something better came along.

Click for the full-size image; taken from The Trenches.

And I've really heard nothing.  I've gotten a few "No thank you"s from some of the nicer companies, or just the no-response treatment from most of the other ones.  So far, no job.  I was hoping that I could start saving now to help when my college loans start becoming due in, oh, less than three months now, but alas, this may not be the case.

I want to go on record as saying that this is not the college's fault, nor do I want to demonize employers more than they already are.  It may be my fault for getting a degree in something that isn't a hard science, which I find really respectable, or something that's kind of a buzzword, like the Business Admin degree.  I went and studied what I loved, but it seems like that has been a poor choice on my part so far.  It feels like my ability to write, which people have tried to tell me is a great selling point, is nothing without the right connections.  

I may just be feeling desperate about my current standing, but it feels like I have been lied to on many fronts.  The job market isn't what we predicted it would be.  There are more students than me, I am sure, that feel this way.  We were promised that if we were diligent, and worked our asses off in school, we would be in a great place to get a great job.  A lot of us were promised something.  We held up our end of the bargain, and our reward was never delivered.  Like I said, I'm having a hard time getting a small, regular job, because employers are afraid I'm going to jump ship at my first opportunity.  And I really can't blame them.

So my request is simple: pass this on.  Consider this the only thing I've really asked to have re-posted by you, my readers, family, and friends.  Not for a popularity-contest sort of thing, but because if anyone feels like crap because they worked their ass off for a piece of paper that hasn't done anything for them, I want them to keep up hope.  But importantly, I want to spread the message that things are different than we were told.  You can't count on being so intelligent that you'll impress employers into knowing that you're a great addition to their workforce.  In fact, you can't really count on anything.  We're told to go to college because it's what you're supposed to do.  But if you go in just because you've been told to, you might not be prepared for what's coming after that.  Send this to anyone who might need this message.

Also, if you repost this enough, I might get noticed by an employer who is impressed with my writing skills and who wants to offer me a job.  All job-related e-mails should be sent to freddiemalcomb@gmail.com.

30 Days of Video Games BONUS STAGE UNLOCKED

There were a lot of games that I didn't get to mention because Chrono Trigger, Killer 7, and Team Fortress 2 took all the awards ever.  So I'll shout 'em out here.

Resident Evil 4: If you have never played Resident Evil, 4 is not a bad place to start.  I know, because the first one I played was Resident Evil Zero.  I remember all of the plot like it was seventeen years ago, in that I don't remember the plot.  There were leeches and a giant scorpion somewhere.  But Resident Evil 4 was crazy good.  They greatly improved the control scheme that had hindered the series, and they took away almost everything that could have kept new gamers out plotwise.  

They also won points in Japan by adding tentacles to EVERYTHING.

Metroid Prime:  A polished game if ever there was one in the last generation.  It put Retro Studios on the map, and turned Metroid into a spectacular First-Person Shooter (or First-Person Adventure if you're a tool).  This game really brought the scenery to life, and with the lost transmissions of the Chozo and the Space Pirates, they added a great dimension of mystery to the story.  I can also vouch for the second game as being way cool.

Or maybe I just have a thing for games with tentacles.

Call of Duty: Black Ops: I don't get to play much online multiplayer in first-person shooters much anymore, and whenever I try to get into COD, I get wrecked by everyone else in the world.  But it is a good, tight game which is based heavily on skill.  I really do enjoy the single-player experiences, though.  It's rare that a game which gets so well-known for its multiplayer to take so much care for their single-player experiences.  Modern Warfare 2 was so good to me that I could get past the bullshit deaths I kept experiencing and try again over and over and over and over and over and over

Left 4 Dead: I loved Left 4 Dead.  When I heard about the concept for the game, I was immediately on board.  4 survivors who have to use communication and teamwork to make their way through a zombie-infested wasteland?  Amazing.  Good job again, Valve.  OHMYGAWD IGETTOPLAYASTHEZOMBIES WHAAAAAAAAAT?

Also one of my favorite covers in the business.

30 Days of Video Games Day 30

My Favorite Game of All Time

Oh God.  I knew this was coming.  I knew this was coming, and I could not stop it.  All of the preparation in the world would not be able to help me now.  I'm not going to BS this and give you multiple answers.  No shout-outs, no I-was-thinking-of-this-games, just the answer.

Goddammit.

Easy and awesome as it would be, I can't just post this and call it a day.

Must...resist...mentioning...seven...games...

Okay.  I think I have my favorite game chosen, and I will probably regret this shortly after I type it.  At least three of the people reading this already know the answer and are thinking, "Why doesn't he just type it already?"

Okay.  I think that as of this writing, my favorite game of all time is Team Fortress 2.  I'll actually make a case for this.

1) The game is just too damn fun.  I love the don't-give-a-fuck attitude it takes with everyone's bad exaggerated accents, the cartoony graphics, and the very tight gameplay.  Pretty much every class is at least somewhat accessible, though it's almost guaranteed you are going to get raped when you start out as a Spy and don't know what you're doing.  

2) The updates have kept an almost four-year-old game new and interesting.  I'm pretty sure that if TF2 were the same game it was when it was released, very few people would still be playing it.  It's held on to the players it has by constantly bringing new weapons into the game and drastically altering certain classes.  Everyone hates Snipers, right?  A lot of it is because their advantage is distance; there is often nothing you could have done differently to beat them in a battle, as opposed to thinking, "Well if I had used my melee weapon instead, I could have killed that guy."  To fix this, you give the Sniper an option of using a Bow and Arrow set.  This gets him up close into the action.  Plus, the announcements for new weapons are often  retardedly awesome.  

3) The media surrounding the game.  Meet the Medic came out a full year after Meet the Spy.  Meet the Spy was so good, there were people worried that Valve wouldn't make Meet the Medic or Meet the Pyro because they wouldn't be good enough to top Meet the Spy.  Well, Meet the Pyro is marked as Coming Eventually, but Meet the Medic exceeded peoples' expectations.  It's stuff like this that gets you connected to these characters that we set on fire, riddle with bullets, and blow up into many small parts.

4) The community.  Valve hasn't designed all of the new weapons that are in the game.  Hell, at this point, they probably haven't designed more than half.  Half might even be pushing it.  Every single class has a weapon or four that were added to the game after someone in the TF2-playing community designed it.  Three updates all have work from The Polycount Pack, which was a new-weapons design contest by Valve and the folks at Polycount.  They aren't just new skins, but they also have different stats, making choosing your weapon a big decision.

5) Hats.  Hats are stupid.  When they were introduced, they did nothing.  They still do nothing.  No hat on its own has changed the game for anyone unless it was a mental thing, which would be stupid on the user's end.  To make a random hat, you have to sacrifice upwards of 50 useful weapons that actually do stuff.  There are only five hats that actually do anything, and you need three matching weapons in a set to make them be useful.  And goddammit do we want them.  We want them so much that often players will pay real money for something that has no effect on the game whatsoever.

Pictured: a hypothetical scenario, but a realistic one.

But they look cool, and they reflect on the characters' personalities, which is really cool for someone obsessed with that like me.  It's stupid, irreverent, and overall a waste of time.  But fun.

Those last two sentences actually pretty much sum up my feelings about TF2 succinctly.

30 Days of Video Games Day 29

A Game I Thought I Wouldn't Like but Ended Up Loving:

Chrono Trigger

I'm going to run out of pictures for Chrono Trigger soon.  Internet, come to my aid!

Okay, maybe next time we find a more exciting battle.

As I may have said before, I found Chrono Trigger on a SNES 9X CD.

THAER BE SPOILERS AHEAD.

So I was browsing the contents of the CD looking for a new game to play on my computer.  I had played Super Mario RPG over and over and over, so I thought I'd give one of these other games a shot.  I made it down the alphabetical list into the Cs and saw a file name called CHRONO_TRIGGER.EXE (or something along those lines).  I remember thinking, "Okay, with a name like Chrono Trigger, this is either going to be a waste of time or an awesome waste of time."  I was kind of waiting for a so-awesome-it's-bad scenario.  

AGAIN, THAR BE SPOYLURS.  If you haven't played it and have thought even for a moment that you might kind of sorta want to think about playing it, I will loan you my DS and my copy of Chrono Trigger so that you can play it.  I mean that, even after my current lessons in not loaning things to people.  This game is too important to ruin even a shred of plot, so if you want to play it, don't read on.

All right, so I turn on the game.  The title screen confirms my allegations: the C in Chrono is half of a clock.  Sweet.  So then I start playing, and I'm lead to the "choose your character's name" screen, where I swear I thought I saw a leftover character from Dragonball Z.  The suggested name is Crono, and I decide to leave it like that.  Next, I go to this Millennial Fair everyone is talking about.  As I talk to vendors and see what's happening, a girl runs smack into me.  "Who are you, mystery chick?" I ask myself.  I go and grab the shiny thing that she lost and give it back to her.  Oh neat, she wants to be my friend.  I leave her name set as Marle.  So we go along, and I'm told my friend Lucca is going to demonstrate a new invention.  Eventually, we get to go there.

Then you learn that Lucca is your inventor chick friend who has a knack for messing up some of her devices.  But it's okay, because you are a loyal friend, and probably kind of dumb.  You step into her teleporter, unaware that this is pretty much how Half-Life started, and boom!  Everything goes fine.  :AWESOME," says Marle, "it's my turn!"

So at this point, I'm enjoying the world and this Millennial Fair thing, having fun with the music.  Marle goes up, and she'll come back in the other exit.  Incorrect.  The pendant I gave back to her starts reacting weird to Lucca's machine and makes it malfunction.  A portal opens and swallows Marle into it.

Me: Uhhhhhhhhh, what the hell?

Then Lucca and her dad pull crowd control on this whole thing, and it's apparently up to me to go rescue this girl who still means nothing to me.  

Actually, this is appropriate because this is the first battle I had.

I wind up in a place that looks like the one I was just in, but darker.  I was talking to NPCs because I had no idea what to do, and one says, "Millennial Fair?  Have you been drinking!? It's 600ad!"  And I was like WHAAAAAAAAAA?

Chrono Trigger is such a good game if you don't know what you're in for.  I loved it.  Playing that stupidly-named file on the SNES 9X is still one of the top 5 decisions I have ever made.

30 Days of Video Games Day 28

My Favorite Developer:

It's a tie, it's gotta be a tie.  I like these two developers for different reasons, so let's hash this out.

First is Valve.  I pretty much told you why I love Valve a couple of days ago when I wrote about the best voice acting I have seen in a game.  But I didn't touch on the polish that Valve gives each game before it is released into the wild.You can watch any video of a game released by Valve to get an idea of just how polished their stuff is.  Of course, this comes with a cost.  Click the link to be taken to a chart of Valve Time.  A little-known fact: Valve works in a temporal vortex which results in their time-stream fluctuating rapidly.  In short: they rarely live up to a release date, even when it's "...any minute now."

We could've had Half-Life 2 in January 2003 if they didn't put so much time into that sweet goatee.

Despite all of this, Valve makes games that tend to amaze players and critics alike, and it makes the wait worth it.  Maybe when I'm 30 we might actually see Half-Life 3 (or to be more realistic, Half-Life 2: Episode 3).

The second developer I would have buttsecks with if that was a thing you could do with developers is Grasshopper Manufacture, headed by Suda 51.  They are the madmen (and ladies, I must remember to not be sexist) responsible for Killer 7, No More Heroes 1 and 2, and most recently, Shadows of the Damned.  I've said a lot about Killer 7, so there is little need for me to go on with that track.  But added to the games I wish I could play are the other three I've listed.  It's amazing when you can get Yahtzee to like a game, and he  sums up the appeal like this: there's nothing like Killer 7 or No More Heroes.  Flawed as the games may be, get them anyway! (he says.)

Travis Touchdown (yes, that's his name) recharging his lightsaber.  Note that he is shaking it up and down near a certain nefarious region on his body.  Very subtle, Grasshopper.

And I agree on that note.  Shadows of the Damned was the game that critics had been waiting for, giving Suda 51 a little bit of leeway with his weirdness in a gameplay setting that makes the game appealing to more than just weirdos like me.  For an example, watch this video.  Great gameplay combined with an 8-year-old's sense of humor?  Sign me up!