At that point, publishers and developers hadn’t really figured out their DLC strategies yet – they tended to come out at odd, uncoordinated times, and since you couldn’t bill users for it, there wasn’t a direct financial motivation for producing it. (I’m guessing Microsoft probably paid LucasArts for the DLC, but I have no real knowledge about this.) In hindsight, it seems a little quaint to produce DLC for a game without Xbox Live multiplayer like SWON when there was no ability to monetize it. Then again, the time investment in producing the DLC was pretty modest – creating and setting up a new plane was a fairly simple process, and we had an awesome mission editor, SLED, that really made it fast and efficient to create new missions. Comparing that process to content generation on current-gen games makes my head spin, to be honest.

The DLC was pretty much ready to go from the launch date – we had spent less time in certification and re-submission than we had planned, and so the DLC content was started and finished sooner than expected. I also seem to recall some feedback from Microsoft that our DLC was the first that had passed cert the first time through – I’m not 100% sure if I’m remembering that right and that we were the first, but passing on the first submission was definitely something that they highlighted and was a nice feather in our cap. Our engine design and the relatively self-contained nature of the DLC definitely helped with that. (Certification in general was actually a breeze on that game – we passed SCEA cert on our first submission, and I think we only had minor fixes for SCEE and for MS. The project schedule was built around the assumption of two resubmissions for each platform/region.) I think the DLC came out one pack at a time, a couple of weeks apart from each other, and all of the game content was out by early-to-mid December 2003.

My involvement in the DLC was pretty peripheral – I just played it a few times and gave a little feedback. At the time, I think I was working on the Japanese localization of the game (for PC and PS2), which needed some additional code and tool work. That version, incidentally, is the “final” version of the game – there were a couple of tiny bug fixes I made that missed the US and European releases, and of course none of the Japanese text and font rendering stuff was in the earlier releases.

I quite enjoyed the first 10 or 15 hours, tolerated the next 35 or so, and then slogged through the last 20. I would say that once the joy of discovering a new world wore off, the rigid structure of the gameplay took over and gradually wore down my positivity. I played as a human mage, and after the first 20 hours or so, encounters devolved into one of two types:

• the party’s alpha strike is successful in obliterating most enemies, and the rest of the battle is just meaningless mop-up which requires no supervision
• the alpha strike doesn’t kill many enemies, forcing a long drawn-out battle where you cycle through your spells and skills, chugging potions as necessary.

The first portion of Dragon Age did a great job of introducing the world, and really selling the idea that not only was there a well-established world with norms, customs, and history associated with it, but that learning about this stuff would be necessary for navigating the storyline. Once the amount of “historical/travelogue content” began to slow, and once I had exhausted most of my companions’ dialogue, my opinion of the game began rapidly declining, as it had to hang its hat on its comparatively uninteresting quests and combat instead. It seemed like there was a lot of filler content and battles.

The character dialogues, while they lasted, were for the most part memorable and interesting. However, most of my party members spent half the game sitting at the campfire, with no further dialogue or quests associated with them, beyond “their” one quest – this was pretty disappointing. The voice acting was generally good, though – I only started clicking through the voiceover about halfway through the game, which for me is quite a lot!

My interest picked up a bit when I started the last third of the game (the Landsmeet), but the realization that it was mostly a bunch of FedEx quests to get through the final gate to the endgame was a pretty big disappointment. The endgame itself was also sort of unfocused, and unlike the Ostagar segment, didn’t do a great job of selling the cataclysmic battle that was supposed to be taking place. The fact that the final battle ended with my character unconscious and Alistair engaging in cheese tactics to slay the final enemy didn’t help either…

One thing I had blocked from my memory until now was the excruciatingly painful install sequence. I played the game on the PC, and wanted to link my new EA/Bioware account to a specific old Bioware account that I had already used. The process for doing this involved several rounds of deleting my account, and trying to recreate/relink it as I wished. This process took up two hours of my life that would have been better spent on other things.

Overall, I wasn’t disappointed with the game — I certainly had some fun with it, and got my money’s worth out of it — but at the same time, I feel that there were a lot of things that could have been better about it. I suppose I’ll have to wait and see about the sequel, which is supposed to be coming next year.

I found the plane to be quite difficult to control (for no good reason), and the “action camera” mode is extremely disorienting. You are forced to use the “action camera” for part of the tutorial, and it’s quite maddening — for a tutorial mission, I found it to be pretty hard!

Flight action game developers seem to love using the Ace Combat control scheme, where your plane’s rudder is mapped to shoulder buttons on the controller. Unfortunately, I feel that this setup makes it very difficult to actually control your plane — it is really hard to yaw and do something else with the triggers at the same time. I much prefer having the rudder control on the second analog stick, as we did in Secret Weapons Over Normandy. The control scheme in SWON maximizes the number of flight controls you have access to at once. In HAWX, the camera control is mapped to the right analog stick. This seldom-used feature effectively wastes one of the main control mechanisms.

While I’m on the subject, SWON (like HAWX) had a “simplified” flight mode. The SWON simplified mode auto-rolled your plane — you essentially flew with the left stick only. The concept behind it was that beginners could “steer the reticle” and concentrate more on shooting stuff (the fun part!) rather than flying. Unfortunately, in HAWX, the “simplified” mode doesn’t seem to be much different from the regular one! The plane is still quite hard to fly.

Like many jet combat games, the combat feels pretty impersonal because of the distances and speeds at which engagements take place. HAWX ups the ante, however, by including targeting/evasion assist modes where you press a button to enter the special mode, at which time you slalom through a bunch of “gates” that appear in front of your plane. When you have passed through enough gates, you will have a good missile lock, or evade an incoming missile, depending on how you entered the mode. The implementation is technically solid, but it really abstracts away the idea of fighter combat — you’re just flying through gates much of the time. There’s no feeling that you’re fighting against another pilot just like you in the other plane.

Overall, I was pretty disappointed. The game looks quite good, but the gameplay seems lacking.

Last year, Rez was re-released as an Xbox Live Arcade title, and when it was part of a Thanksgiving promotional sale, I decided to check it out again. This time, I had the benefit of not only having instructions and a tutorial, but also being able to spend more time with the game. The latter, it turns out, was really the key – you don’t “get” the game until you’ve played through an entire level, in an environment where you can really pay attention to and notice all of the synergy between the gameplay and the audio/visual experience. The music drives the environment art and your character’s animation – in turn, the music is driven by the gameplay, with layers of instruments gradually being added in as you “crack security” throughout the level. Elements of the game are connected to each other in ways that are rarely seen. Your shots are synchronized with the tempo of the music, blending in with the soundtrack, never jarring you as in other games. The base of the landscape acts as a music visualizer. Parts of the HUD, and your character, pulsate in time with the music, and transitions between “layers” (which add layers of instruments as well as change the visual representation of the level) are also synchronized to occur at the start of the next bar. All of this synergy creates an experience that, to me at least, feels very much like being in “the zone,” or that things are all falling into place – a feeling that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced from a game before.

The Xbox version has “improved visuals,” and since I didn’t really play the PS2 version very much (nor the original Dreamcast version!), I don’t know exactly what has changed, but I will say that it looks great, and is very stylish – it’s like an 80s vision of “cyberspace” brought to life. The soundtrack is appropriately catchy, and is a huge part of the game experience. The Xbox version also supports downloadable replays, which will make you realize that, even though you’ve beaten the game, you’re still nowhere near as good at it as the hardcore shooter players. I should note that the game is not particularly tough, and with a little practice, it’s fairly straightforward to get through the entire game.

So, in closing, the hype is true – Rez really is remarkable, with a truly unique audio/visual style, and a stunning final level that proves that a story need not be wordy, or even comprehensible, to leave a lasting impression. Heck, it’s also proof that art direction is timeless (and often sadly lacking in games), even if art technology shows its age. It’s definitely worth at least checking out the demo.

Why is that? I hadn’t thought about it much before, or had ever really anticipated my lack of enjoyment in this way. I believe it has something to do with the lack of meaningful choices that can be made – there’s really nothing novel to which I can look forward on my own playthrough, now that I’ve seen the story play out. Furthermore, the minute-to-minute gameplay isn’t good enough to overcome that – it’s pretty standard action-adventure stuff that doesn’t distinguish itself.

Categorizing games by the criterion of “frequency of meaningful choices” is an interesting exercise, and there’s a strong correspondence between games that meet the criterion and games that I really enjoy. RPGs often feature lots of character customization and branching gameplay, and they’re certainly a favorite genre of mine. Strategy games, by definition, require meaningful choices. Even driving games (good ones, at least) have lots of choices and problems, on a moment-to-moment basis, to wrap your head around. By contrast, FPS games and action-adventure games that fall on the “spectacle” end of the spectrum tend to be one-shot deals for me. I rarely come back to them, and watching or seeing spoilers for them significantly decreases my incentive to play.

I guess another way to think about this is that:

• Nobody wants to watch people play board games – people want to participate.
• Similarly, it’s rare that you would get something new out of watching a movie by yourself, after having previously watched it with friends. (There are certainly cases where the passage of time might give you a different perspective on a film, but similar analogues exist for games as well. I don’t think that invalidates this point.)

Interestingly, the economy of the game is mostly centered around retrieving items found in the exploration game – there’s a concept of money, but after the first couple of hours the focus shifts almost entirely to item retrieval. (There’s an alchemy system by which retrieved items can be transmuted into more useful items. All of the items are intended for use either as alchemical components, or as ammunition for your tank.) Capturing monsters also plays a role, as capturing certain amounts of monsters unlocks additional crew members for your tank. I have to say that collecting items can get tedious, as the quantity of items needed to do any “serious” alchemy is quite high. Fortunately, there’s a relatively low bar to clear for capturing monsters, and it’s not required to finish the game.

While it may sound like I had a lot of complaints, it’s an enjoyable 10 hour game that doesn’t overstay its welcome by too much. There are some additional quests and battles for completists, but which are not necessary by any means to finish the game. You could certainly do a lot worse than to play Rocket Slime…

I saw a post by the author commenting on the fact that getting the game to run on the PS3 would be a "gargantuan effort," and that got me thinking about the reasons why, along with how the game engine works to begin with.

First of all, the time-rewinding mechanism appears to be using input recording rather than state recording. That is, the state of the user’s controller is stored for each frame of the game, and is used to control the player’s character during time rewinds/fast forwards. I base this idea off of the fact that, in the world that uses your "time shadow," the shadow’s actions are based on the player’s controller input, and the replayed actions can be affected by the current state of the world.

Naturally, there is additional information stored to assist with the time mechanics of the game — input alone is not enough to reconstruct the state of the world. Jumping, for example, plays a significant role in the game, and being able to "rewind" a jump requires knowledge about when and where the jump started. (If it were possible to efficiently reconstruct the state of the game up to a certain time, you could avoid storing the "where" part, but I don’t think this is the case.) Additionally, the behavior of AI actors like the bunny and cannons would require some state to be saved in order to properly rewind or replay their actions.

The game runs at a steady 60 FPS. If we assume that replay data is stored at the same frequency, and we assume 128 bytes of replay data per frame (a number that I simply pulled out of a hat that said "reasonable assumptions"), then 15 minutes of gameplay results in about 7 MB of uncompressed replay data. This back-of-the-envelope calculation leads me to believe that the reason that Braid would be difficult to port to the PS3 is not related to utilizing more than 256 MB of RAM. (The Xbox 360′s 512 MB of RAM is unified, whereas the PS3 has a hard separation of 256 MB of main memory and 256 MB of GPU memory.) There should be plenty of memory for the replay data on both platforms, given the relative sparseness of the levels.

With that possibility ruled out, what does that leave? I think it’s related to the game engine (and replay system) architecture, not the amount of data being created. My guess is that the updates performed by the game engine are, by design, fully reversible, in order to minimize the amount of replay data that needs to be stored. Furthermore, in order to allow for really fast rewinding/replaying (up to 8x, while remaining at 60 FPS), the game update tasks are parallelized.

The game state that is touched by these parallel steps, however, is large enough such that it will not fit into the 256K memory on each SPE of the Cell processor. Furthermore, the game update phase is not organized in any way that would permit "windows" of the game data to be sent to (and modified on) the SPEs. This is pretty much the worst-case performance scenario for the PS3 and the Cell — the need to parallelize algorithms that touch a large data set in a random-access manner.

I don’t think this is an insoluble problem, but a solution that would work well on the Cell would likely look drastically different from what you would write if you only had to consider the PC and Xbox 360. And when you consider the size of the programming team that created Braid, it’s easy to make the choice between rearchitecting the code and moving on to the next game by scrapping the notion of a PS3 port.

Please note that all of the above is just speculation — I don’t have any idea if this is actually the case, but I like to speculate about game engine design and implementation, since I’ve had quite a bit of experience with it…

Now, I am hardly a paragon of cool, but let me put it this way — freebie t-shirts for games sit at the back of my drawer, and are worn a) on lazy days when I don’t leave the house, b) to the gym, or c) when I’m doing any sort of messy work. I wouldn’t wear them out to a show…it would be too weird.

"If kids are sitting up all night smoking super skunk [cannabis] and they come so desensitised to crime because they’re playing these videogames, it’s really, really scary."

* "sudden expertism" being a bit of Ticket lingo describing people who insist that they are an authority on any subject you care to bring up.