Ten Great Games

Someone recently asked me(in real life, even) about my favorite video games. This is something I've occasionally thought about, but the question set me to mulling it over once again. Here, in alphabetical order, are ten of my favorites. The ten? Maybe. For now. I always change my mind when I re-read these lists.

Frequently cited for Best Game Ever status is Chrono Trigger, an RPG made by a "dream team" of designers from Square and Enix. A simple but charming story leads you through time and space, searching for the cause of the apocalypse in 1999. Compared to the RPGs of its era(and most RPGs of any era), Chrono Trigger is sublimely elegant and streamlined. Battles occur without any interruption, characters team up for attacks, and strategy arises from the placement of enemies. The plot keeps you glued to the screen, introducing new hooks all the time to keep you from turning the game off. And just when you think you're finished, New Game+ is unlocked, along with a variety of new possible endings. Players who manage to defeat the final boss at the very start of a New Game+ are treated to a visit to the Developers' Room, where the game's staff offer a final congratulation.

It's a perfect peanut butter <-> chocolate situation. The "job system" of the classic Final Fantasy games was cast aside, replaced by a deconstructionist philosophy that reshuffled the relationships between abilities, characters and objects in each new game. Meanwhile, the designers of Tactics Ogre had come up with a wonderfully engaging battle simulation, hampered only by the lack of an interesting system of character growth. Overlay the job system on Tactics' gameplay, and the result is Final Fantasy Tactics, the most addictively customizable game I've ever played. I should also admit that the game has its flaws - plenty of them, in fact - but that doesn't keep it off my list, as I have probably spent more time playing this than any other game. Its GBA sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, is also good, fixing many of the flaws while unfortunately sacrificing some of the depth.

One reliable source of new ideas in 3D games has been the rolling of balls. There are two examples on this list - the first is Katamari Damacy for the PS2. This is one of those occasional bursts of mad genius that arises from Japan and demands to be experienced, like sushi, Ranma 1/2, and the head-mounted toilet paper dispenser. The game's opening movie is a stunning experience in its own right, awash in rainbow colors and entheogenic imagery. The actual playing of the game is simple but captivating. You are a small, green fellow with a canister-shaped head, and you roll a ball around that gathers stuff to it like a snowball gathers snow. Anything less than a certain fraction of the ball's size attaches to it, adding to its mass, and increasing the size of objects that you can collect. That's it, except that the objects are identifiable. Ants, pencils, toilets, cats, children, cars, houses, windmills, islands, rainbows, gods - all are objects in the game, and many of them react in some way to being chased down and captured. To transform an entire world of creatures and things into one huge ball of crap is a somewhat disturbing experience, but in a good way.

Probably the greatest franchise in gaming, the Zelda series offers an embarrassment of riches. It's a challenge to decide which title in the series is the best. Is it Twilight Princess, the most realistic and refined of the 3D games? Maybe Wind Waker, which resembles a vivid cartoon more than a game? How about A Link to the Past, the best of the old 2D games, with its classic take on the light world/dark world design? Since this is a list of my favorite games, I'm going to pick the original, the shiny gold NES cartridge, The Legend of Zelda. I'm under no illusion that this is a better game than its successors, but its antiquated charm holds a special place in my heart. I particularly like the nonlinearity of the first Zelda, and wish more modern games would embrace this sort of structure. There is a prescribed sequence to the game's dungeons, but if you choose to walk away from the set path you may do so. Zelda also famously offers a "second quest" with a reorganized world and completely new dungeons. In my fan's heart I mourn the fact that modern games are too complex to make this kind of bonus feature viable in today's game industry.

In video games, unlike other entertainment media, sequels are frequently better than the original. Such was the case with the classic Mega Man 2. The first game had some good ideas but exemplified the sadistic streak of early NES games, when difficulty was equated with quality. Mega Man 2 brought the challenge down to a fair level, still tough for newbies but not dominatrix tough. It also perfects the Mega Man concept. You choose what order to complete the stages in, and gain new weapons at the end of each. The weapons you get change the nature of the game for the remaining levels, adding a lot of strategy and replay value compared to other platformers of the time. As the series continued, diminishing returns quickly manifested in the enemy and weapon designs. None were ever again as good as Mega Man 2, nor were the graphics and music as inspired. Mega Man 2 was the pinnacle of the series, and arguably, the entire NES era.

Metroid Prime is an essential title for the Gamecube, combining first-person action with Zelda-like controls and a scenario revealed through discovered data, hieroglyphs, and sensor analysis, similar to Marathon. While its deviance from normal FPS standards is jarring at first, as it lacks the direction inputs to offer full look and strafe controls, once you get comfortable with the game it offers one of the most enthralling virtual worlds yet seen in video games. Having played one too many plot-heavy RPGs(and the one too many was specifically Xenogears), the optional scenario text in Metroid Prime came as a joyful revelation to me. Here was a game in which plot and exposition never came at the expense of gameplay. Sweetening the deal, the game has lots of potential for sequence-breaking, i.e. defying the designed path of events in the game for fun and profit. This accidental feature, partially "fixed" in later releases of the game and more or less expunged from the sequels, adds a great deal of challenge and replay value.

The short but sweet Ogre Battle series merges RPG with war simulation. Instead of leading one party of heroes through a world full of randomly occuring battles, in Ogre Battle you organize an entire army of warriors into groups and send them out to fight an opposing army. The N64 sequel, Ogre Battle 64, is a step up in depth and strategic detail from the original, making it one of my all-time favorites. The task of naming fifty to two hundred characters alone is enough to make me drool with excitement, and each time I start a new game I pick a theme, like mythological gods, or characters from other video games, to add a different sense of fantasy to the experience. Sadly, once you reach the final battlefield, there's nothing really left to do, so I tend to quit in the last chapter a little bit before reaching that sad moment.

I love when a game has bonus content well beyond the norm, whether it takes the form of secrets, cheats, bonus missions, or multiplayer options, or in the case of Perfect Dark, all of the above. It's a great action game, but it's the vast array of multiplayer possibilities that make Perfect Dark almost infinitely entertaining. The game features great weapon concepts like the Laptop Gun, which can act as an AI-operated drone, or the N-Bomb, which causes visual impairment. The maps are fun and full of secret passages and crawlspaces. The game's one flaw is its potential for lag, even with the N64 RAM expansion. Avoiding explosives and the rather superfluous Hi-Res mode helps to alleviate this downside.

The N64 was an ill-fated console that failed to compete with Sony's Playstation, but you wouldn't have known it from their launch titles. The PSX launched with... Um... What did it launch with? Toshinden? Whatever it was, it was unmemorable. Meanwhile, Nintendo had converted the most famous video game character of all into 3D, and the result was Super Mario 64. There's a joy in the movements of Mario in this game that has rarely been seen before or since. The various jumps and attacks that Mario is capable of make the game endlessly entertaining, despite its simple graphics and relatively small world. About once a year I dust off this game and collect all the stars all over again.

The Gamecube, on the other hand, was lacking in launch titles, with no big franchise offerings from Nintendo(Luigi's Mansion was a decent game, but more of a one-off oddity than a real Mario title). Who should come to the rescue but... Sega? Yes, perhaps Sega's last great offering to the world was Super Monkey Ball, a masterpiece of simple game design. Roll a ball from the start of a maze to the finish, move on to the next stage. The levels get increasingly complex and difficult as you go. That's all there really is to it, but like another arcade classic, Bubble Bobble, the simple but clever nature of the design lends itself to hundreds of variations. Bubble Bobble could trust its gameplay to carry it through minimalist concepts, like a floor containing only empty space, and Super Monkey Ball is able to pull off similarly fiendish twists, like a single platform with a rapidly spinning goal. The game manages difficulty level perfectly, with easy levels for beginners and challenges that ramp up gradually to the point of pure insanity. As a welcome bonus, Super Monkey Ball includes a variety of multiplayer minigames, including the best billiards simulation I've played. Super Monkey Ball 2 is also a solid game, although I prefer the first one.

Arpeggioland

More noodling. If I'd thought of it, I probably would have put the album name in the ID3 tags as "noodles" when I started this project. Oh well.

Arpeggioland

With this one I've used reverb to simulate an effect like the sustain pedal on a vibraphone. This is another effect that I'd like to explore further in real-time if I can figure out how to do it. I'm imagining a plugged-in pan setup that would have effects pedals for stuff like this. Could be fun.

There was an audio glitch in this one that I had to delete, along with a very small patch of music. Hopefully it isn't too noticeable. I almost left it in, but I knew I'd be bothered by it later if I didn't fix it.

Sorry I haven't been posting in the past week, but I have an excuse: Rehearsals with Ray Holman.

Storytelling Troubles in Twilight Princess and Final Fantasy XII

I don't get around to playing most of the big franchise games these days, but I did make time for a couple of grade-A titles, namely Final Fantasy XII and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Both games present the player with very convincing virtual worlds to explore, and both take their series' storylines in more realistic directions. The degree to which they succeed at this is quite remarkable, but this trend toward realism clashes with many traditional video game elements.

The realistic nature of these virtual worlds has psychological consequences - the creatures within them are so convincing that I sometimes feel a bit conflicted over killing them. Video games are famously casual about death, with the traditional value of a life being set at twenty-five cents. But as the monsters become more lifelike, the spirit of adventure no longer seems to justify slaying entire ecosystems full of wild animals. It is, of course, only a game, and anyone who thinks my rampant virtual slaughters will be echoed in the real world is a fool. But when virtual reality looks this real, it causes a certain moral dissonance. The lesson of games is that it doesn't matter; those animals you kill will reappear magically when you leave the area and return. Video games have always taken a haphazard approach to ecology, which we didn't really notice until now. The realistic illusion of Twilight Princess's world collapses when you stand in a desert and look over a small hill at a massive lake.

Both games also struggle to present more mature plots while still delivering classic gameplay in the amount fans expect. In Twilight Princess, the storyline starts strong, but becomes stagnant about halfway through. The latter half of the game is occupied mostly by a single goal, and there is minimal dialogue compared to the first half. FFXII similarly reaches a status quo early on, and while its plot keeps moving, it also seems to suffer from having a longer "laundry list" than its script. Things that make the early storyline interesting, such as conflicting goals and motivations, disappear behind the need to have all the player characters fulfill their functions in the game. In both cases, the needs of the game stretch the story to the point of absurdity.

FFXII also flirts with absurdity by having its relatively realistic characters engage in the sort of over-the-top fighting moves that have been part of the Final Fantasy formula since the seventh installment in the series. Anime-like action scenes that were consistent with characters like the spiky-haired Cloud from FF7 seem totally bizarre in FFXII. When rogue hero Balthier waves his hands in the air and conjures a tsunami, I can't help but wonder where this power came from. You can, however, see the roots of this game/story division in the earlier games, particularly the distinction between game-death and plot-death.

I expect that the next stage of evolution for video games will be to overcome issues like these. The PS2/X-Box/Gamecube era gave us convincing 3D graphics, but the design challenge of putting this technology to use still remains.

Summer

New steelpan noodling.

Summer

One of my favorite things to do when playing pan solo is to run up and down giant chords, as you can hear in this recording. The tonality is ambiguous; rather than use the diminished chord that normally occurs in major/minor keys, the chords here tend to escape into foreign areas of the circle of fifths. There's a sense of alternate major-minor-ness going on into infinity. The occasional emphasis of the Lydian #4 tonality adds further mystery.

For some reason, the images that came into my mind while I was editing this noodle were of hot summer days outside in the sun when I was young. A feeling of innocence and passing time.

Phrygdom

Another of my musical experiments is online. More steelpan improvisation.

Phrygdom

This time, I've applied an effect that makes it sound kind of like a weird keyboard... If you played a keyboard with sticks. I like it. I need to figure out how to apply the effect in real time so I can run it through an amp and hear it as I play. It'd be a cool stunt to bring out during gigs, and it might blend with other instruments better.

The scale this time is phrygian dominant, which is heard in flamenco, klezmer, and Indian and Middle Eastern music. It's one of the most dramatic scales, as it has the dark, bold energy of the minor key dominant chord but without ever falling back to the subdued minor tonic.

My plan with these recordings is to keep doing them until I have roughly an album's worth. Since they're improvised, it's not going to be my best work, but the point is to make myself learn more about recording in Logic by doing it. I have some more electronic compositions that are nearly ready to post, too.

Archive.org derives a variety of formats for the files I post, but in the process the ID3 tags are lost, so download the 160kbps MP3. That's the format I upload it in.

The Pentatonic Scale

Pentatonic scales are fun, pure, simple, quick to learn and easy to remember. Their blessing is also their curse - the lack of dissonance in these scales can make them bland. They're very sweet and pleasant. They don't have the attitude of blues scales or extended chords. But they're a great tool for soloing and composing.

One handy cheat is playing the pentatonic scale of the dominant over every chord in a major key - For instance, G A B D E over C major chords. This almost always works, and avoiding the tonic note makes the scale more interesting.

If you want to get clever, you can throw chord changes back in and modulate to the pentatonic scale a fifth up from every chord that occurs. It's a tactic for going "outside" that I've been playing with recently. After playing G over C, for example, you could play D over G, bringing in the foreign note F#.

When I fool around at the piano I love to play pentatonics with big stacks of fifths for harmony. The pentatonic can be seen as five consecutive perfect fifths. The G pentatonic scale, for instance, can be organized as G D A E B. Fifths played like this on the piano create a towering open space of harmonic layers. There's a sense not of chord-ness but of ancient, natural polyphony.