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Citizen Naruto

So back at Christmas 2007, I snagged a copy of my studio's Naruto game - Naruto: Rise of a Ninja (not our more recent sequel Naruto: The Broken Bond, which by all accounts is even better). I finally got around to playing it a bit, and honestly, I'm really enjoying it.

Consider first that, as I have said many times in the past, I am actually really bad at videogames. Due to this, fighters are my bane. I honestly do not believe that I have ever in my entire life won a single match in Street Fighter (sorry Sirlin). Fighters are just too demanding of twitch reflexes and an understanding of how to enter combos, and read an opponent's moves. I am literally unable to decypher the language of a fighter.

Consider also that I know nothing at all about Japanese Anime. I don't know Naruto from (some other famous anime character that I can't even name to complete the phrase).

So with those major strikes against the game right out of the gate, I'm happy to report that it's a really tight, well realized experience. I strongly suspect that if you are interested in Naruto, you'll really like this game a lot. As for whether or not you'll like it more or less than I do if you like fighting games, I can't answer that at all because I have no idea if it is a good fighting game or a bad one.

The most impressive thing about it is the design of the city itself. Anyone designing an open world should take a good look at this game to see how it is structured. It is possibly the most smartly designed open world city I have ever seen in a game.

Here's the Cole's Notes of why it's great:

First - it's not too big just for the sake of being big. Full stop.

Second, it has a credible population of ordinary townsfolk who go about their business believably. All of the townsfolk dislike you at the start, but one of your rewards as you progress is the admiration of the people. As you do missions and side quests and help people, you get them to switch from disliking you to liking you one villager at a time. Unfriendly villagers say mean things as you pass by, but if you interact with a friendly villager, he will give you directions to your current objective in the form of a little arrow on screen for a short while. What this means is that as you unlock more and more friendly villagers, you have this low-level assistance available to you more and more frequently. It's a really subtle and clever way to make it feel like you're winning the hearts and minds of the villagers.

Third - from a level design point of view, the village is really well thought out and put together. The village has four vertical layers to it. As you progress through the game and unlock new powers and abilities, you are afforded access to higher and higher levels of the city - each higher level connected more 'broadly' then the previous.

At the beginning of the game, you cannot even double jump, and you can only access the lowest level - the streets and the rooftops of a few single story buildings. But you quickly learn the major routes and the major landmarks and get a pretty solid understanding of the basic layout.

Soon you are able to double jump and to run vertically up walls a short distance. This gives you access to the rooftops of most of the buildings in the village and is a very liberating step up. You also gain access to the first set of roof-connecting cables that allow you to 'slide' between interconnected rooftops.

Eventually, you upgrade your wall-running ability and can access the third and fourth vertical layers. The lowest level of cabling is the densest, connecting the most buildings with the shortest cables. The second level of cabling is sparser, connecting fewer buildings, but with longer cables. The highest level of cabling is the most sparse, connecting only a very few of the villages tallest structures.

Effectively these layered fast-travel networks allow you to 'climb up levels of movement heirarchy' giving you fewer degrees of freedom in your movement as you ascend, but giving you the ability to move much further and much faster the higher you go. It's really a fascinating topology.

The game has a really well thought-out economy and progression system as well. There are four currencies in the game: cash, coins, antique coins, and stars. Cash is the only unlimited resource and it is the resource you use to buy consumables (throwing knives, noodles, etc). Coins are (mostly) used to upgrade what you can carry - more knives, more noodles, etc). Antique coins upgrade the effects of your consumables (making all future knives purchased with cash into hardened knives or explosive knives or both). The stars are 'experience points' used to unlock and upgrade your personal abilities - combos and jutsus. Stars are doled out by missions. Both kinds of coins are collectibles (with the antique coins about 1/10th as common) and cash is given for just about everything.

The benefits of this system are obvious - it gives the designers the ability to maintain both limited economies (there are only so many abilties to unlock, hence a finite number of stars), and an open economy (once you have unlocked everything, you can still keep earning cash to buy more noodles to keep your health high - something which I desperately need). And further, by breaking the coins down into two separate limited economies, they alleviate decision stress on the player... not sure whether to save up 23 more coins to pay for that upgrade? You don't have to worry about it - the coin-based economy prices items in the 10's of coins and the antique coin economy prices things in the single units of antique coins (instead of in the 100s of standard coins). Very smart (unless of course, you are going for a more hardcore, more player-choice driven, and more consequential economy).

Anyway - I think the Naruto economy is fascinating and it taught me a lot about different concepts for game economies and I think it's worth a look.

There are also a few things I don't like.

First - I really don't understand the side-mission structure, as simple as it is. In the very beginning of the game, I am told that 'noddle delivery side missions' are unlocked. So I go do some. They are fun, easy, and help you learn the city. Then shortly thereafter, they tell you that races are unlocked, and also that hide-and-seek games are unlocked.

However - when you go to try and do a race or a hide-and-seek game, you cannot. The mission-givers tell you you need to train more - but I spent at least 4 hours (!) playing the game, doing missions, training and buying and unlocked new things before I was actually able to DO one of these supposedly 'unlocked' side-missions. Then - arbitrarily - the missions lock again after a few and you are told 'you need to train first'... but of course, I had no idea what I needed to train in or how, and went another couple of hours before being able to do these missions again.

I understand the notion of wanting to tease the player forward -but you need to tease the player forward with an IMMINENT reward, not one that they may unlock sometime this week. Additionally, by unlocking and relocking the side-missions, you end up playing two different games in parallel - you play a game where there are bunches of side missions and collecting to do - then you finish it all, and play a game of doing main missions until the side-missions are arbitrarily re-unlocked, then you switch back. It's weird. I would much prefer to just do side missions as they suit my whim.

Also - and this is probably the shelf moment for me - I am about halfway through the main story missions and a strange icon appeared on my health/chakra HUD following a major battle with a boss. This icon capped my health and chakra at 500 each, when formerly they were both around 1000. There is no explanation anywhere of what happened to cause it, or how I get rid of it (or even if I can)... I don't even know what it is or what it means - but it has stripped away fully 1/3rd of my power... and I am certainly not a good enough player to make due.

In both cases - the inexplicable locking and unlocking of side-quests and the bizarre 'capping' of my two main combat stats - are simply not explained, leaving me frustrated. Not only is it not explained to me what I need to do to continue forward and/or solve the problem, or when or if I might expect plot progression to solve the problem automatically, it is not even explained to me what the problem is - these impediments are just arbitrary.

Anyway - I still enjoyed the first half of the game quite a bit, and for the city structure alone, I once again recommend it to anyone interested in a rock-solid level design for an open world.

If the two problems mentioned above have been ironed out in the sequel, I'll definitely be picking it up.

In Sid We Trust

"You say you want a Revolution. Well, you know, we all wanna change the world."

Change the world? As far as I'm concerned, for the first time since Alpha Centauri, Civilization:Revolution [2] has allowed me to do it. More than that, it has, itself, changed the world.

I never played Civ or Civ 2. The first time I had a PC that could really do the job SM:AC was the flavor of the day and I got my first taste of Meierian awesomeness as the Spartans. Locked into an abusive relationship with the Hive, I was unable to do anything except what they demanded for over a thousand years. Until I got the bomb and began stockpiling. I was eventually forced to win that game by carpet-nuking the entire planet, wreacking untold devastation on every enemy city - and even some of my own - spartan concrete and iron cities shattered under the overpressures of proximal planet buster detonations. If the only honorable death is in service of Sparta... I unleashed a lot of fucking honor that day. Only a handful of domed Spartan cities remained - awash in a radioactive sea.

Civ 3... I must have played it ten times and never finished a game. Somewhere around the Renaissance - either at the tail end of the Middle Ages or the dawn of the Industrial Era at best, I would become swamped. With hundreds of units in play and often well over fifty cities, I would not be able to maintain any forward momentum. The sheer weight of Civ 3's background systems would drag the pace of the game down to a standstill. Maintenance, Inefficiency, Unit Support and proper basing, Pollution... all of these factors would fall like a hammer on my growth and mire the game down into turns that would sometimes take me over an hour to execute. My PC would then need to churn away on the turns of the other factions - sometimes for 30 or 40 minutes or more.

I never even considered playing another Civ game after that... until they announced it was coming to console. It was then that I realized there was no way they could even release a game whose turns would take two hours to complete. They would be forced to deliver a game that could be played from beginning to end in that time. The only question was whether or not the game would be fun with all the complexity stripped out? How much simpler and lighter could you make Civ without it becoming too easily solvable or too degenerate.

I've now bought the game twice. Once on DS and once on X360, and I have played the game upwards of 20 times. In almost every case I have finished the game (after having played it 5 to 8 times, I would tend to abandon a fresh game if starting terrain seemed particularly lop-sided either for or against).

So what's so great about Civilization: Revolution?

You will finish every game you start
And you will do it in between 2-6 hours, depending on how you play, which path to victory you choose, and how singular your commitment to your strategy. Playing on DS will be faster as you can skip the animated depiction of combat... cutting quite a lot of dead time from the game.

It is 'Civ:Lite'... but in a good way
A lot of the heavy underlying systems of previous Civ titles have just been removed. Not consolidated. Not automated. They are just gone. Unit Support? Talk about hidden numbers that have very far reaching effects... this concept is gone entirely. Efficiency? Again - a hidden 'tax' on what a city could produce that diminished the further the city stood from the capitol - it's gone... simply removed from the game. Does this unbalance the game? Now you can support 10,000 units if you want. Now growth is unchecked by efficiency. Isn't that a problem? Well, we could talk about it for hours, these sorts of questions are rooted in fundamental questions about game themselves. In the end, I am pretty certain that the answer we will arrive at is 'no' ... boy I could write 100 pages on that...

It's the same game on X360 and DS (and presumably other platforms)
This is what is world changing for me. In a game development climate where we seem to be trying to release a version of a game on every imaginable platform and we seem to have to do a lot of work and make a lot of compromises and a lot of changes for each platform (often staffing an entirely new team to deliver the game on each platform), Civ:Rev proves that you can release the exact same game on a handheld as you can on a Next-Gen 'living-room' console. Why - oh why - have our DS games tended to be shoddy reskins of other DS games painted up to look like whatever AAA console title we're launching. Why - oh why - do the big console versions of handheld titles seem almost like a joke of an 'up port'? For me - this is the most important statement made by the game. It is the thing that proves Sid Meier still fucking ownz all our asses. It is the thing that calls into question all of the assumptions we've made about game development for this entire generation - even making Will Wright's statements about player creativity and proceduralism, and the 'second processor' and sharing, ranking, rating - seem a bit off the mark. How do we deal with the current generation's 'divide' between the big machines from Sony and Microsoft and the generation-winning machines from nintendo? Sid just showed us.

The Air War
My friend Greg loves kicking people's asses with air-power. From the TIE Defender to SMAC's shard helicopters, nothing can stop him gloating over his air power as he pounds the fuck out of everything with endless waves of aircraft that seem to materialize around him when his singular Goring-esque commitment to air-war pays off at the start of the end-game. Civ:Rev's air-war is different. Civ: Rev wins the air-war thus; there is no better game to play while on an airplane than Civ:Rev on a DS. Period. Trust me. I flew to Africa, Tokyo, Sydney, Shanghai, and then Africa again with Civ:Rev DS. If you don't have a DS and you have a flight coming up, it is worth buying one right now, just so you can play Civ:Rev on it while you fly.

What's wrong with Civilization: Revolution?

It is degenerate
The game is degenerate. Keep in mind, I still had to play the game ~10 times to lock down degenerate strategies, but lack of some of the above mentioned overly-complex balancing features leads to two major problems. The first is that aggressive growth strategies always win. I typically win the game with 20+ cities compared to my next leading opponent having 8 or so, and behind him a cluster of opponents with 4-6. The AI simply does not seem able to keep up with even moderately aggressive player growth strategies.

Another unfortunate degeneration is that the Aztecs simply seem unbeatable. The ability to have units always heal to full, plus the later bonuses that this Faction receives (Temples producing science, reduced cost roads, increased gold production) all stack up to make a faction that is just too powerful.

Geographical Determinism
As I mention above, I tend to restart a game within 50 or so turns if the starting terrain seems too lop-sided. If a kind of bias to a theory of geographical determinism is leveled against Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, then nowhere could this bias be more clearly expressed than in Civ:Rev (note - this is a failing of all the Civ games I ever played, not just this one). The reality is, there are myriad ways in which the starting geography of the game can determine the entire outcome of the game, and after you have played half-a-dozen times, you will probably want to abandon about one game in three after the first 45 minutes or so should the geographical advantages be too extreme.

No customization
A sadly missing feature is the ability to customize - even to a slight degree - the nature of the planet you will play on. The planet tends to always be a fairly similar Pangaea, causing games to often play out in similar ways. In Civ 3 and SMAC you could tell the world generator how much to age the planet, how wet or how dry to make it, how eroded, how old, etc. I miss this feature. For example, I would like to try a very naval focused game playing as the Spanish, English or the Japanese - but the probability of an archipelago-style world being generated by the game is low. Also, you cannot choose which factions you will play against. Having the ability to customize the planet generation parameters and the opponents allows you to play some interesting edges of the game... setting the world up as an archipelago and playing as the Spanish - but offsetting your naval advantages by filling the world with powerful military factions like the Mongols, Germans, and Aztecs forces you to play a game of aquatic commerce and culture, which is very different from the 'typical' game which is imposed by the  degenerate elements. I miss that.

Anyway, that's my review of Civilization:Revolution for the XBox360 and Nintendo DS. I highly recommend you try one or the other (or both).

Gamasutra Interview

So immediately following my GDC presentation, I did an interview with Bonnie Ruberg from Gamasutra, which is now up on their site. It goes into a few more details about the talk, and Bonnie also asked a few good questions about gender issues in exploration... some stuff I hadn't thought much about.