This week, Eric finally manages to beat Portal, to his delight, and Richard beats Metroid: Other M, to his sadness. In happier news, Scott Pilgrim is an excellent movie, Japanese gaming is on it way out, and a new vibrating dildo attachment for the Wii appears. Find out all about these and other activities you can do with a friend over the internet on this week’s Cartridge Blowers!

Download the episode

Show Notes

We Like You!

Sorry, Sony

Pound Sterling

Analysis Paralysis

Excitement Alert!!!

Suicide Watch

We’ve revamped our site to a monthly magazine format for your reading pleasure! This month we’ve got a feature about our experiences with Gamefly; reviews of Nier, Dragon Quest IX, and Tropico 3; a contest; and the first installment of our monthly column tl;dr! So go ahead, read and comment, and let us know what you think!

Penny Arcade Expo is about to happen, and Jim Sterling knows what that means: Nerd orgies! Even Playboy is getting into the act–the company has launched a sexy videogame label. But don’t call its games “products”: Leigh Alexander will be very cross with you, much like the cross-shaped configuration of buttons on the original Playstation controller. Speaking of Playstations, Sony thinks they’re going to sell about a hundred and twenty million more PS3s. Poor guys. And on the subject of poor guys, don’t try to save money by buying used games–Penny Arcade doesn’t like it. That takes us full circle! Also: A special Cartridge Blowers announcement about a special new project!

Download the episode

Show Notes

Kotaku Strikes Again

Sure, Let’s Talk About This Again
Sure, Let’s Talk About This Again

Sorry, Sony

We Like You

Pound Sterling

Um, What?

Suicide Watch

Excitement Alert!!!

A special magazine like Cartridge Blowers needs a special contest, and if you’re reading this page, you’ve just found the official rules!

Each month we’re going to ask you a question, and we’d like a thoughtful answer–let’s say keep it in the range of 200-500 words. We’ll do a random drawing and the winner will receive an honest-to-Goodness videogame, selected from Richard’s collection! (Warning: Many of these games are not very good, which is why he’s giving them away.)

This month’s question is simple: What’s the worst game that you’ve played so far this year, and why was it so bad?

Send all entries to mail@cartridgeblowers.com. All entries must be sent by October 20, 2010 to be considered. We’ll print our favorites on the website and we’ll contact the winner with the good news!

If you’re curious, here’s the full list of games. We’ll even let you pick the one you want! Good luck!

Nintendo DS
Contact
Etrian Odyssey II
Feel the Magic XY/XX
Lux-Pain (with art book!)
Moon
Prince of Persia: The Fallen King

XBox 360
Operation Darkness
PGR4

Playstation 2
DDRMAX Dance Dance Revolution (does not include pad)
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (does not include guitars)
Oni
Second Sight
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon
XIII (Thirteen)

Gamecube
Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean

Wii
Baroque
EA Sports Active: Personal Trainer (does not include all the weird fitness accessory crap)
MadWorld
WiiPlay (does not include second controller)

As a rule, if you want to know what the essence of a Japanese role-playing game is, you need look no further than the Dragon Quest series. Other series have expanded upon the formula–telling intricate stories, experimenting with the battle system, mixing it up with other genres–but Dragon Quest has always stayed very true to its roots. Even the recently-released Dragon Quest IX plays very similar to the original incarnation. It’s one of my favorite series, but I’m left strangely cold by this latest installment.

When Dragon Quest VIII was released in 2005, Japanese RPGs were a fairly strong genre. However, the climate has shifted a bit. The fact that Final Fantasy XIII‘s reception was largely chilly seems to be a symptom of a sea change. For one, people are beginning to get bored with stories told through barrages of cutscenes. For another, the West has emerged as a major and equal if not dominant development force. The linearity and baroque storytelling of Final Fantasy seems immature and trite compared to the mutability and openness of Dragon Age or Mass Effect 2. Finally, the RPG as a distinct genre might even be on its way out. Many games feature hit points and determine outcomes not just through skill but a combination of skill and statistics. In many ways, classic JRPGs have little more to their gameplay than manipulation of numbers. Why passively select commands from a menu when you can have a visceral action game which also runs on statistical depth?

And so the past few years have seen many attempts to redesign the JRPG with varying degrees of success. Persona 3 and 4, for example, marry JRPG conventions to dating sims; Final Fantasy XIII less successfully presents us with a battle system based less on tactics than on twitchy speed, and while it confines itself to corridors for many of its chapters, it opens up agoraphobically towards the end for some open-world questing. Dragon Quest, by contrast, is an extremely conservative series–each game adds only tiny, incremental changes–but it’s attempting to get into the modern spirit.

Dragon Quest IX was marketed on several aspects which purport to open up the game, make it more nonlinear, and take advantage of some multiplayer features–aspects which seem more at home in Western RPGs or in completely different genres altogether. I don’t have a problem with switching things up, and make no mistake–I’m not criticizing this from the standpoint of an old man who dislikes change. Rather, it’s how halfhearted these attempts all seem. Far from revitalizing the series, they come off as concessions, marketing gimmicks–and possible admissions that the developers know that Dragon Quest is getting stale and that they have no idea how to fix it. Rather than making major structural changes, it feels more like they’re slapping a few things on to the basic mechanics and hoping for the best. The sidequests and social interaction are poorly-integrated, add nothing to the experience, and seem to highlight just how outdated the genre might be.

Dragon Quest has never been known for its optional content. While a couple of the installments have featured minor sidequests, it’s usually a straight shot from beginning to end. You complete dungeons as they are presented to you, you fight the final boss, and then you win. Dragon Quest IX however, has a quest system. Certain NPCs, instead of simply saying their line of dialogue, give you a request when you talk to them. I’m not opposed to the idea of a quest system per se–it can certainly extend the life of a game, give new ways of interacting with the world and characters, and provide access to some snazzy bonuses. However, the vast majority are simple “Bring me X amount of Y ” quests. You get these items either in the field–hidden in pots and chests, or around the world map–or as random drops from enemies. But there’s no joy to be gleaned from fighting the same monsters over and over and over again in the hopes that maybe this time they’ll give you the object you need. The game does give the concession of letting you know what items a monster may drop, so you can pretty easily tell what you need to fight, and you do get experience and gold from all fights anyway…but I hate leaving things to chance.

Yuji Horii, the series’ main scenario writer, is famous for his love of gambling. Many of the games–oddly enough, not this one–feature casino minigames, and many interpretations of the series view it in terms of a risk/reward mechanic: One must determine whether or not the characters are up for exploring the next dungeon. If you make it through, you’ll gain a wealth of experience points and treasure, but if you aren’t strong enough, you’ll be kicked back to the last save point with half your gold missing. I personally find this interpretation to be a little too on the nose, and a little too generic–the same can be said of any RPG, really, and the fact that Dragon Quest does not give you a game over for dying tends to mitigate any severity of loss–but it’s in full force with the random drops here.

I, however, am no gambler. Given the choice between stalling progress in the hopes that I’ll be able to collect the items I need for a quest and actually, you know, playing the game, I’ll take the latter. Not every single quest is like this, to be fair. Some of the quests required to unlock advanced character classes are actually somewhat interesting–they involve defeating enemies using some esoteric combination of skills, indicating that you’ve mastered the primary class. But I was expecting something more–perhaps some bonus dungeons, some actual sidequests. Instead, what I got was World of Warcraft with Akira Toriyama graphics. And I hate World of Warcraft.

There are some optional secret dungeons hidden throughout the game–tons of them, if my information is correct. I’m unsure if they’re randomly or procedurally generated–I’ve only found one and have only attempted it once because these bonus dungeons are extremely tough. The problem is, you don’t find these dungeons just by walking around and exploring. You can collect maps, which lead you to them. Getting these maps is the issue–I’ve only found the one. I assume others are given by completing quests, but as I’ve said–I’m not interested in that.

The most-hyped feature of the game, and oddly enough the one I paid the least attention to, is the multiplayer. I cannot review this feature because I haven’t used it at all, in fact–none of my friends have the game, and I play mostly on the subway in any case. As I understand it, you can switch out your party members for your friends’ and all explore a dungeon together. I don’t feel left out by this–the game stands on its own as a single-player experience well enough–and given that JRPGs are traditionally a solitary experience, it’s kind of an odd choice to make.

The problem is that Dragon Quest IX hedges its bets. A game composed mostly out of optional sidequests is one thing–Mass Effect 2 is a prime example of that done right–but Dragon Quest IX‘s sidequests are uninteresting to play and reveal nothing about the world or the characters that populate it. Bonus dungeons can extend the life of a game, but if they’re hidden too well or too hard to get to, they may as well not exist. Multiplayer is a good idea, but it should be both widespread and provide an experience that single player cannot.

And most importantly, strip out all of the gimmicks and you are left with a Dragon Quest game just like any other. The fact that I can even conceive of the game without these additional mechanics shows how poorly-integrated they are. They add nothing; they change nothing. Loath as I am to admit it, the series is getting stale. Adding optional and uninteresting features is a bandaid. Dragon Quest IX comes off as a decent game, but one that does not soar to the heights that the name promises. And given that Dragon Quest is the prototypical JRPG, one is left wondering if the genre might not be able to be saved.

Gaming is an expensive hobby. We here at Cartridge Blowers are underemployed cheapskates. That’s not a good combination when you have to shell out $50-60 for most games. So, last month, after our normal evening of playing the oeuvre of Suda51 while angrily crying, we hit upon the idea of signing up for Gamefly. We are Big Fans of Netflix and have been their loyal and docile customers for many years and loved the concept of a Netflix for games.

This phrasing is not ours–that is more or less an official position that the company takes. Here’s Gamefly co-founder Sean Spector in a 2006 interview with Gamespot.

GS: So do you guys mind being referred to as “Netflix for games”?

SS: That’s a fair comparison.

But that was four years ago. Lots of things could have changed since then. Perhaps the company has moved on to their own, independent model, separate from Netflix.

Well, no. Here are some of the major ways that Gamefly invites comparison with Netflix:

1) An “all you can eat” subscription model for a flat monthly fee

2) An individualized queue of titles that the customer wants, ranked in numerical order

3) Emails whenever games are received or shipped out

4) Emails asking when you’ve shipped a game back, so they can track the time between receipt and shipment of a new game

It is clear, then, that Gamefly is voluntarily and deliberately putting themselves into direct comparison with Netflix. Not only is the Gamefly site basically a reskinned Netflix, their description of the service leads one to believe that the quality of service will be similar.

Like Neflix, customers pay Gamefly a monthly fee and in return get to keep a certain number of games out at a time–two, in our case. Even if we kept a game for a month, that’s a significant savings over buying even used games. That sounded like a pretty good deal to us.

If that sounds like a good deal to you, too, then you, like us, are wrong.

The initial queue setup was fun. Hey, I always wanted to play Mirror’s Edge! Oh, look, Digital Devil Saga! We devised a system of rotating games in the queue so we’d each always have one game. Things were going well. It was the day of wine and roses.

To be fair, there was probably more wine than roses.

The first sign that alerted the reptile part of our brains that something was wrong was the fact that our initial games didn’t ship until a full day had passed after our initial trial charge. It’s been our experience that companies usually try to impress new customers, especially when your business is based on that company wanting to develop a continuing and long-lasting relationship. We signed up early in the day on a weekday–Gamefly could have sent a game out that evening. But hey, whatever, it’s probably fine, right? Some of the best relationships start out a little rocky. I bet they’re just playing hard to get.

For the next couple of weeks things went fairly well. Eric’s first game was Alpha Protocol, a fairly long RPG, so he kept it for nearly a month. Richard went through two games: No More Heroes 2 and Dead Space: Extraction. Neither of the latter two games were his first choice, but they were in the top 10.

Because we are roommates who are paying for an account jointly, we signed up for the two-out plan so, through careful queue management, we would each have one game at a time. We were led to believe this would work because of Gamefly’s marketing of the service as a different version of Netflix as well as by the help information available on Gamefly’s site. Our own Netflix experience had taught us that the way to do this would be to stagger our returns and place our own choices at the top.

This worked well for about three weeks.

Problems arose when both Alpha Protocol and Dead Space: Extraction were returned a day apart. We got a notification from Gamefly that Alpha Protocol was received, so Eric made sure to put a few of his games at the top of the queue. Nothing shipped for an entire day. Dead Space: Extraction was received by Gamefly a day after Alpha Protocol, and Ernestine, who apparently left the telephone company to work for Gamefly, suddenly woke up from her mid-day nap to drop two games in the mail to us.

Those two games were two JRPGs (Digital Devil Saga and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne) that Richard had put on the queue and were down at about 10th place. Yes, that’s right: Gamefly had skipped about 10 games, some of which were Available Now, to send out two seemingly random choices that weren’t even listed as Available Now.

Games in a queue have four possible statuses: Low, Medium, High, and Available Now. It’s a fairly straightforward ranking, helped by the fact that you can click on one to get a more detailed description: You have a 25-49% chance of getting a “Low” game if it’s first on your queue, for example, with greater percentages for each status, up through an implied 100% chance of getting an Available Now game. (There is no description for Available Now, to be fair.) Apparently, Gamefly had taken it upon themselves to skip something like four Available Now games, and several other High and Medium level games.

Netflix, the company that Gamefly patterns itself after, never randomly sends us a DVD from halfway down our queues for no apparent reason, or delays sending us a new DVD for one or two days. As a matter of fact, neither of us have had anything even remotely resembling a complaint with that service–the closest Richard has come was a two-week period where every DVD he received seemed to be broken, and that could have even been the fault of his mail carrier. In any case, Netflix customer service was extremely helpful and worked through the issue in a satisfying manner. In that spirit, we thought we’d email Gamefly customer service.

Our first email listed our issues with the service; we received a form email back which told us, among other things, “we shipped you the first available game in your GameQ….because our members tell us that fast shipping times are extremely important.” We were also told that games are shipped from our primary shipping center–and yet the availability status “reflect[s] inventory across all of our shipping centers.” In other words, we get games shipped from their warehouse in Pennsylvania. That warehouse may be out of Nier, but because California has a copy, the queue misleadingly leads us to believe that we’ll get it. The response also made note of the fact that “due to the current high demand of our newer releases, we were unable to ship a higher ranked title to you.”

We sent another email questioning that practice, and mentioning that most of the games in our queue were not new games, and received…practically the same exact form letter back. We called them out on their slapdash copy/paste job and let them know we were considering cancelling our account due to the poor service–and we copied the entirety of the Gamespot management team on this email.

Click here to read our correspondence with Gamefly

It was at this point that Cory, a Customer Service Manager stepped in. To his credit, he sent an apologetic email and offered to speak to us by phone. We took him up on the offer, expecting to get a legitimate explanation for our issues and perhaps some assistance about how to better use the service.

Our conversation, however, was unproductive–we did not feel that our questions were answered or that he was giving us any more than canned answers. And the few we received were unsatisfying. Gamefly strives to send us the top-ranked games from our queue and it values customer service. But he avoided many of our questions, gave no real explanations, and didn’t even seem to acknowledge that there was a problem.

Click here to listen to our conversation with Corey

Afterwards, Corey sent us an email letting us know that the customer service team “[would] be monitoring your account to ensure you are receiving the high ranked games in your Game Q”. In other words, they were giving us VIP treatment.

We decided to keep the service for another month–hey, maybe Corey putting us on the special list would actually do something–but soon found ourselves in the exact opposite situation. After returning two discs within a day or two of each other, again, both were processed at the same time, and now Eric has two games. We’re done. The service that Gamefly offers, while excellent in theory, leaves a lot to be desired.

But let’s say that everything had worked out–that Corey’s efforts led to Netflix-quality service. That games were processed the same day they were received, that the queue was followed, and that we got what we wanted. Would that have been enough?

It certainly would have been nice. However, it would have laid bare some major issues, not only with Gamefly, but with videogame culture in general. Getting us baseline-quality service only because we complained would imply that we’re the troublemakers who need to be placated–and that the rest of the unwashed gaming masses deserve the bare minimum–or less.

There seems to be a part of the gamer psyche that says that we don’t deserve better. Go read a negative, critical review of any game. You’ll find comments excoriating the writer for daring to suggest that the game could have been improved. Read sputtering quotes from yet another developer demanding that they get a cut of used game sales—you’ll get gamers agreeing with him or her.

Or go read some of the most popular games journalism websites out there, which are written so poorly, with such immature attempts at humor, with no real commentary or analysis–just a repaste of a press release with a couple of dick jokes added.

Or the fact that many stores won’t have popular games available, will sometimes laugh at you if you ask for them, unless you’ve preordered.

Or the fact that you can buy a “new” game at Gamestop, outside of the shrink wrap, that has almost certainly been demoed by an employee.

Or the fact that companies put restrictive and punishing DRM on games purchased by legitimate customers that pirates have figured out a way to steal anyway.

Or the fact that game developers and game journalists are in an unhealthy payola relationship, which hampers critical analysis of videogames or the videogame industry.

Or that fact that games are often shipped with bugs and glitches in them, some of them gamebreaking, because they can always patch them later.

Or the fact that consoles are often shipped with defects which render the system unusable, with the only fix being sending it back to the company and waiting until they decide they’re ready to send you a refurbished one.

Let’s face facts: The entire industry seems held hostage to a Ponzi scheme, and we all have Stockholm Syndrome. Let’s remember: the videogame industry is a business. Even Nintendo is a business. They may make some of the most beloved games of all time, they may have designers who genuinely care about the games, they may make art, but at the end of the day, they are a company, and we are the customers. They may be friendly, but they are not our friends: They provide us with a product or service. There is nothing at all wrong with that relationship. Where the problem lies is when we allow them to get away with products or services of an inferior quality, which we do every time we shrug our shoulders or make an excuse for them. Companies are going to worry about their profits and their bottom lines. They will improve if they think they are in danger of losing customers or going into the red–but by and large, they are only going to improve to the degree that we force them to. Most gamers seem to think that the companies are always in the right and that we should be on our knees grateful that they have deigned to countenance us. It’s no wonder that they don’t treat us better–we don’t seem to think we deserve it.

Gamers have low self-esteem. If we, as a community, believed in ourselves and in our pastime, maybe we’d have a better time of things. As it seems, though, we’re not really treated well by the companies that we fork our paychecks over to. Gamefly is a perfect example of this. Go to any gaming website or forum and read about Gamefly—you will find that most criticism of the company for the same reasons we dislike the service is usually responded to in one of two ways. Either it’s handwaved away based on an assertion that Gamefly is somehow better than the alternative (which is never actually described) or it’s met with a hostile declaration that the writer has never had a problem with Gamefly. Of course, that same person will go on to describe how turnaround times get continually worse, or that getting new games from Gamefly in any sort of timely fashion is next to impossible.

Restructuring the videogame industry is out of the capabilities of most gamers. But there are small steps you can take. Refusing to give Gamefly money for running a lackluster and apathetic service is one of them. They don’t deserve your business, and they don’t even act like they want it, so listen to them. We are.

Nier is one of the most maddeningly subtle games I’ve ever played. I’ve rarely encountered a game which places so much of the burden of interpretation on the player. With Nier, we are left with more questions than answers after the first playthrough–there is no explanation of what just happened. The closest we get is a handful of cryptic documents given to the protagonist–and more or less ignored–which introduce some odd terminology and, at first glance, don’t explain much at all. This is intentional: Each one of the game’s four endings leaves the characters clueless about what they’ve just done or about the meaning behind the quest they’ve just undertaken.

Spending much of a game in a state of confusion is not an uncommon thing, and in fact is the default mode of storytelling in a JRPG. We may not, for the majority of Final Fantasy VII, know what Sephiroth’s plans are, what Jenova is, or what the nature of the connection between Aeris and the planet is, but by the end we’ve seen several revelatory and unavoidable cutscenes which answer all of those questions. Suda51′s games come closer to what Nier does, but they tend to give more than necessary, as a distraction from the true story. They are usually a mess of red herrings and confusion designed to place the player in a torpor–the glut of information we’re given requires the player to sift through everything he has seen, weighing through the massive amount of inessential scenes, in order to come to a final conclusion about what exactly is going on. Revelatory scenes also appear in Suda’s games, but they are often infamous for how much they subvert exposition. Knowing the metaphysics behind the Killer7, the truth about No More Heroes‘ assassin tournament, or the reason behind Flower Sun and Rain‘s Groundhog Day-esque structure doesn’t really clarify matters–it leads to more questions.

Nier‘s story, initially, seems pretty straightforward. We play a man, canonically named Nier, although you’re allowed and encouraged to rename him, who lives in a rural village with his daughter. She’s sick with a mysterious and possibly mystical plague. During his trips to earn money for her treatment, he meets up with a talking book and the two venture to find a cure. At one point she’s kidnapped and his journey then becomes a rescue mission to bring her back from the clutches of a figure known as the Shadowlord. There’s an incredibly dark undercurrent just below the surface, however–we realize that something more is going on, but exactly what is never explained. The Shadowlord has no bombastic speech detailing his motivations, the exact cause of the plague is never discussed, and the nature of the antagonists is never outright determined.

Some hints are given to the player, but again, they’re no more than intimations. In the second and all subsequent playthroughs, the guttural roars of the enemies are translated with subtitles. Other games have done this, but none to such dramatic effect. These creatures–Shades, as they’re called, shadowy black and gold figures, humanoid in varying degrees–appear as straightforward enemies in the first playthrough. After learning what they’re saying, they come off as much more sympathetic–in their eyes, they’re the good guys.

Games, particularly RPGs, don’t normally shy away from shades of grey, but normally this is achieved by giving villains noble or understandable motivations. Many people find Sephiroth to be likeable or at least pitiable: Created as a scientific experiment, lied to his whole life, hurting and in pain–it’s no wonder why he’s considered one of the best villains in the Final Fantasy series. But no matter his motivations or charisma, few people would agree that his actions–cold-blooded murder, attempted planeticide–are morally justifiable. That’s the normal technique to create villains–give us someone we like and have a group of characters attempt to stop him from doing something unambiguously wrong. Nier is more sophisticated about it: Reading the enemies’ translations makes it clear that we’re actually dealing with two sides, unable to communicate with each other, and unable to realize that they might even be working towards the same goals.

Take a late-game sequence in which a city is being menaced by a group of wolves led by a Shade. The citizens, unwilling to suffer the wolves’ attacks any longer, band together for a final assault. Upon delivering the final blow, the king angrily asks the Shade why they couldn’t just live in peace. The first time through, it’s a valid question–as far as we know, the wolves are a chaotic evil bent on destruction.

But in the second playthrough, we see the Shade talking to the wolves. He laments the environmental destruction that the city has caused, he mourns the wolves that the people have killed and he decides to lead the wolves on their own final attack. And when he’s asked, as the final blow is struck, why they couldn’t live together, he shouts, in frustration, that that’s what the wolves wanted all along: Simple coexistence.

The character Nier’s motivations, throughout the game, are noble: He simply wants to save his daughter. That he might be slaughtering innocents on the way to his goal, and that he may even be destroying the world is never explicitly addressed by the narrative. He’s given incomplete information, but it is in fact left ambiguous as to whether or not he’d even care. Nier has some tragic flaws, and his single-mindedness is his biggest.

It’s slightly frustrating because, when he meets up with some people in the final area who know everything about what’s going on, his first instinct is to initiate a boss battle. My initial instinct was to angrily rue the game’s linearity. I’ve been playing a lot of games lately which have allowed protagonists to make moral choices and which occasionally leave room for non-violent solutions, and the lack of a “let’s sit and talk this over” button seems pretty frustrating. But perhaps this is the point of the game–that a lack of communication is a bad thing. Nier treats his situation as any RPG protagonist would–as a problem to conquer through violence–and in doing so finds that the sword is a pretty poor method to earn a happy ending.

Consider this: Many of the between-level loading screens are excerpts from Nier’s daughter’s diary. She come across in these pages as a very lonely girl. Many of the game’s sidequests are explicitly described as errands that Nier runs in order to earn money to take care of her. In-game, he’s actually by her side very little–either he’s on a fetch quest for the financial reward or he’s completing the game’s main quest, which is the collection of a series of MacGuffins which may or may not lead to a cure. Her diary reveals the depths of her loneliness and her wish that her dad would simply spend more time with her. She sends him letters and wants him to write to her more often–and it’s not insignificant that the game’s save points take the form of mailboxes. Because he is always away on adventures, she is left alone and bored. She might be happier if he just stayed home.

Nier’s actions aren’t fruitless, because they do lead to major ramifications for the world, but they don’t really seem to benefit anyone in the slightest. The game’s now-defunct developer Cavia seemed very interested in examining the personality of a typical RPG hero. One of their other most notable games, Drakengard, also examined the bloodthirsty nature of RPG characters. Final Fantasy VII, for example, never addresses the irony of a group of environmentally-motivated heroes who gain levels by entering various biosystems and mowing down the local wildlife. Normally, the number of kills that you rack up isn’t commented on. Drakengard‘s characters, however, do–Caim, the hero, kills enemy soldiers hundredfold, and rather than that being accepted as a convention, it’s mentioned as a sign that Caim is mentally disturbed, and terrifying even to his friends and loved ones. Nier questions fighting in a similar way. In its first playthrough, we view the Shades as simple enemies, targets to be destroyed. Every other time we play it, the game hammers home the point that they’re not simple sources of gold and experience but sentient beings that you are murdering.

Ultimately, Nier plays out as a condemnation of videogame protagonists. The best-case scenario is that Nier is acting based on a combination of misguidedness and misinformation. The worst case is that he’s just as bloodthirsty as Caim and that his taste for violence and glory outweighs his ability to make rational decisions.

Playing Nier, then, requires a level of comfort with ambiguity that’s not often prized in gaming. To make one final reference to Final Fantasy VII, that game’s ending leaves us with the burning question of whether or not humanity was destroyed by the Planet. It was a masterful piece of unsettled business which was ultimately ruined by its own overexplanation and by the movie Advent Children, which answered the question once and for all. Nier never clarifies its characters’ motivations and never explains its backstory fully–and while it gives hints to the player, it never gives the characters the same courtesy. Likely they themselves never learn exactly what they’ve done or why they’ve done it. To play Nier, one only needs a basic understanding of how to play an action RPG. However, to understand the game, one needs to work to connect disparate pieces of information. And perhaps this is one of the reasons for its poor reception. Because, like Nier, we all want to feel like heroes. We play RPGs because we want to conquer strange worlds and solve mysteries–because we do not want to simply accept our situation for all of its faults. What we take home from Nier is the implication that these instincts might be very dark ones indeed.

One of the great rallying cries of our time, heard in certain corners of the internet and echoed everywhere that people gather to discuss ludology, is that games journalism is broken. The cry takes the same form nearly every time: Where is the (Roger Ebert/Pauline Kael/Lester Bangs) of videogames? Those are the three names that are usually invoked; it’s rare you’ll see anyone else mentioned. And this rallying cry emphasizes The Problem With Videogame Journalism: None of its figures write for the ages. None of its figures write for the sole pleasure of writing. And, frankly, none of its figures write as though they’re proud of the medium. The simple fact that we think we need to find our equivalent of another medium’s prominent critic shows our shame at spending a massive amount of time doing that activity called “playing”. Perhaps that is the reason for all of the facetiousness, the sarcasm, the dick jokes. We write as if we are thirteen-year-olds who have just discovered the joys of appending “not” to every sentence.

This immaturity might be directly related to the nature of the internet. Print games journalism cannot be up-to-the-minute. Online games journalism can. The biggest mistake, however, was to confuse an ability with a mandate. And so we have dozens of stories every hour, some of which are maybe three paragraphs long, talking about an offhand comment made in an interview, or showing some newly-released box art along with the writer waving his hands about how excited he is about the game, or breathlessly describing a doll of a game character. Many stories are fluff at best. Many feel like padding. Go to Kotaku or Destructoid and half of what you see there is simply insignificant. Because a site can publish all of these stories detailing irrelevant minutia, it will.

Once an article is written, it takes maybe five minutes to send it to its readership. This is a potent and double-edged weapon. There are many cases where it may be useful to get information out quickly–covering a major press event, say. But that’s turned into a need to bombard readers with as many articles as possible. During E3, that’s not such a bad thing. During a slow news day, it’s terrible. Gaming sites turn into collections of tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Writing with that kind of sweatshop volume is taxing on anyone. When the vast majority of sites employ people who are not great writers to begin with, the results are insulting to both writers, who are implicitly told that the bar is not very high and that gamers simply don’t care if you’re a good writer, and to readers, who begin to gather that they simply don’t deserve any better.

We seem to call for Bangs and Kael and Ebert because deep down we realize all of these things are true. Destructoid is not the kind of site you can bring home to Mom. If we had a notable intellectual spearheading videogame criticism, the argument goes, we could hold our heads high. As it is, stating that you like videogames elicits a similar reaction as stating that you’re gay. If you’re not in that subculture, people will either throw you a look of disgust or will be patronizingly accepting–will tell you that they’re thinking of buying a Wii or that they’ve got a gay coworker, with a slightly condescending note in their voice: I suppose it’s okay that you feel that way, but maybe you should think about growing up sometime.

We call for a higher degree of critique because we seem to feel that that will bring legitimacy to videogames–as a defense. We should proceed the opposite way–by writing that level of criticism as a form of respect to a medium that already deserves it. Calling for critique in the way we have implies that we don’t respect games as much as we say we do. The New Games Journalism movement had its heart in the right place, but ultimately the writings of Tim Rogers and his ilk were less about bringing a new perspective to game writing than about the writers showing off how smart they were. It didn’t do anyone any favors: Gamers felt they were talked down to, and non-gamers felt alienated by all of the cleverer-than-thou inside references.

For all of these reasons, we at Cartridge Blowers have decided to restructure our site as a monthly online magazine. Whether or not we are gaming’s Lester Bangs is irrelevant. What we want to do is to bring our own perspective to the table, to look at these works in a more sophisticated light, and to have a site where the greatest insight isn’t a simple dick joke. We will publish at a lower frequency in order to present a higher quality.

It is our hope that our writing can make you think, help you formulate your own opinion about the gaming world, and possibly spur on some discussion. Most games writing does not seem to encourage high-level thought; we flatter ourselves into thinking that maybe ours can. One of the reasons people love Ebert, Kael, and Bangs is that, when they’re at their best, they give a sense of what the experience of the work is like and that they’re able to use their knowledge to give you a sense of new and exciting ways to interact with their favorite artistic medium. While we don’t lay claim to that crown, we respect videogames, we anticipate their possibilities–and we think you deserve better.

Love,
Richard and Eric

From the first moment you insert the disc and fire up the game, Tropico 3 assaults you with some of the most over-the-top parody I’ve seen in any videogame released in the past few years. It’s a sun-dappled, pina colada-drinking, Technicolor riot of a game that starts with an at-turns hilarious and disturbing opening movie which covers the mid-20th Century events of a fictional Caribbean island nation. You watch as guerrillas attack the institutions of government, see them move into power, and ultimately witness fat American tourists in loud shirts waddling around the natives as they go about their daily lives.

The gameplay will be familiar to anyone that has played a sim game before. The player chooses either campaign or sandbox mode. The latter is an open-ended island simulation in which the player can establish any goals he or she wants, but it’s obvious that the designers consider the campaign to the be the meat of the game. Each level starts with an establishment of goals (ship 8000 units of papaya, get island happiness to 65%) and a time limit. You always start with the same basic buildings, and you then are set free to meet the stated goals in any way you see fit. Placing buildings and roads is very reminiscent of Sim City, and keeping the population happy reminiscent of The Sims.

Once you’re asked to step into the shoes of one of those guerrillas from the opening movie, however, the game is revealed to have a strange tension between parody and the real world. The player starts by choosing a leader to play as, which gives you such options as Fidel Castro, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and Juan Peron. There is no real penalty or advantage to picking one over the other. One leader may have a gambling problem, resulting in a yearly loss of money from the treasury, or another may have a slightly-worse relationship with the USSR than the others. In all other aspects, the leaders are given a level of parity that is odd. They’ve given us the choice of playing as some wildly-divergent people, but have divorced them from any sort of context.

The game offers no opinion. Playing a benevolent Che Guevara or a tyrannical Juan Peron because the game forces you into that role based on the scenario’s goals is a dangerous anti-choice. What is the purpose of giving the player the ability to play as a real person, if the game offers no perspective or even an opinion about the appropriateness of taking inspiration from these real-world figures? It mocks the unique ability of videogames to contextualize others’ actions through our own because it offers no context, and, worse, the game says that context is unnecessary.

And that’s a shame, because the game could have done interesting things with that context. As it is, the only way to “lose” the game is to be deposed, either by the US, the USSR, or your own people, and so the game becomes a strange exercise in making choices about how to stay in power. You can build a strong military and subjugate your citizens, or build schools, hospitals, and cathedrals to make them happy, but there’s no real difference in the end. And that seems to be what the game is saying–governance isn’t about making anyone’s life better.

This is why the refusal to draw any clear differences among the various leaders is so troubling, because governance isn’t about staying in power, at least not for everyone. It’s a strange argument to make, one which seems rooted in a very underdeveloped understanding of politics. Why present the choice between Peron and Duvalier if you’re not going to make any substantive gameplay differences between them? It doesn’t fit with the game’s over-the-top parody–it would have been more fitting to give the player a series of broadly-exaggerated fictional characters to play as.

One thing the game does well, though, is the mechanic of happiness, and it is this mechanic that fits best within the structure of the game. At any time you can click on a person and get a detailed list of their likes, dislikes, interests, financial status, etc. Within the game there are “factions” such as intellectuals, communists, capitalists, and the religious, and each person that lives on the island will be a supporter of one or another of these factions. Actions taken to appease one faction may lower standing with another–for example, building a church to satisfy the need for religion may lower the happiness of the communists. Happiness is judged, then, not by how satisfying a person’s life is, but by a strange calculus of churches built, military bases constructed, and literacy initiatives enacted. People become pieces on a chess board, turned into supporters or rebels based on what you’ve done for them lately. It’s a wily piece of cultural criticism.

We’re left, then, with a game with a very strange schizophrenia. On the one hand, it wants to parody the American concept of the banana republic, but on the other, it’s informed by and never actually challenges those misconceptions. A large part of the problem, I think, is that this game’s Bulgarian developer took the bones of the original American-developed Tropico and tweaked it slightly, adding things here and there, without a clear idea about what those changes would do to the game’s message. There’s an insightful look at cultural myopia somewhere in here. It’s too bad it’s buried under thoughtlessness.

Hey, who remembers McKids? Eric and Richard do, but that’s not the only thing they disagree on this week on Cartridge Blowers! Actually, come to think of it, they’re pretty much in agreement the entire time. Both of them think the nonexistence of ladders in Fallout 3 is irrelevant, that Louis Castle is an idiot, that nobody cares about Owen Good’s credit card, and that we definitely don’t want to hear anything about Jim Sterling’s penis. Plus, a newly-released trailer proves that EA doesn’t realize that The Sims needs to be tied to the rack and executed.

Download the episode

Show Notes

Sorry, Sony

Why Is This Important?

Our Enemies List

Pound Sterling

Kotaku Strikes Again

Excitement Alert!!!

Suicide Watch