narcogen's blog

HBO and the HBO forum have both provided links to an editorial by "William Usher" at Cinema Blend about how Halo is killing console gaming.

So now that this specious attempt to nab page hits has worked, there can be little further damage that I can do except to examine the author's premise and see if it holds any merit. For the most part, it doesn't.

When you have to start off your article by saying "this isn't Halo bashing" it's not a good sign. Not because Halo doesn't deserve thoughtful criticism. It does. It is not a perfect edifice placed on Earth by some deity for the entertainment of humanity.

 Click here for the complete text.

When the rumors about "Halo Blue" and an ODST-focused Halo game first appeared, I began to think that from an intellectual perspective this might be a good game for Bungie, or someone, to make.

Part of Halo's appeal, as well as one of its weaknesses, I think, is the special status of the Master Chief as a near-invincible, supercompetent soldier. Ultimately the only challenge the game offers him is near-insurmountable odds.

An ODST game could be different, putting you in the shoes of a more vulnerable character with less ambitious goals. I don't know if that is what Bungie will do, but it's a possibility.

So while at work I downloaded the smallest version of the trailer, right after it was posted at Bungie.net, and wrote the newspost about the announcement. I watched the trailer without sound. I found myself a bit underwhelmed.

The announcement trailer quickly zips through the events of the teaser: evacuated city, incoming drop pods, big explosion. After a long time the occupant of one pod, thought by the Superintendent to be dead, emerges, just as a squad of Brutes is apparently searching for him. He seems to consider following, or perhaps attacking them, but eventually heads off in the other direction.

The hero is recognizable an ODST. Like the Chief, he (or she) has their face covered by a helmet, and doesn't speak a word, so it is difficult to relate to them at first.

Then I watched it again with the music.

That made all the difference.

Now I'm excited to play this game.

I mean... ODSTs, rain and saxophones? How can you go wrong?

So the teaser that Bungie wanted to tease us with this past E3 is now out for download on Bungie.net in the usual flavors of QuickTime and Windows Media.

Luke Smith's post on Bungie.net calls this a "CG-teaser" and the front page refers to it as being for "one of our current projects".

My general impression is that this teaser is for a campaign expansion to Halo 3 that takes place sometime between the departure of Regret's ship from the Mombasa area and the Master Chief's return to Earth at the start of Halo 3. As such the main character or characters may be other human forces, perhaps marines or ODSTs, and the plot may focus on improvising city guerilla warfare against the Covenant forces in the city.

The most noticeable point of this trailer is that unlike nearly every Bungie game trailer produced to date, it is completely without music.

Without further ado, let's peruse the details the trailer offers.

 Click here for the complete text.

What started as another one of those rumors within the span of a day became a confirmed truth: following the release of the upcoming Halo Wars RTS game for the Xbox 360 console, Ensemble Studios, known for the Age of Empires RTS series of games for Windows, will be shuttered. A new studio, like Ensemble part of Microsoft Games Studios, will be formed to support Halo Wars. Employees releated to Halo Wars will be offered spots in the new studio; those currently working on the project have been offered extra incentives to continue working on it through release. Those not directly related to Halo Wars are being let go.

This is being called a "fiscal move" designed to "grow" the company's game efforts.

This is a strange move on many levels, and deserves examination in a wider context.

If the staff working on projects unrelated to Halo Wars formed a significant portion of the studio's payroll, then removing them would indeed make the studio less expensive. However, paying incentives to keep the Halo Wars staff makes them more expensive than they are currently, and also negatively impacts morale. So unless those employees were more numerous or more expensive, those gains are long-term and not short term; and that assumes that they were not working on projects that were going to generate revenue, since that potential revenue is now lost.

The timing of the news is also interesting. There's never a good time for someone to hear that they've been fired or laid off, but the gaming press has covered several studio shutterings that occurred right after a game's release; perhaps Microsoft considered that announcing the closure nearer to Halo Wars' actual release date might negatively impact the game's sales, and so elected to do it earlier. Once people have been given their pink slips they can hardly be expected to keep entirely silent, especially with friends in the industry, so there was no way to keep the closure secret for any length of time; hence the quick confirmation.

I've seen several posters on various message boards wonder aloud why Microsoft didn't just buy Ensemble. That's just it. Microsoft didn't have to buy Ensemble. They already owned them. Microsoft's high profile studio acquisitions now have a decidedly checkered history. FASA stumbled and was shuttered. Rare tried to make a shooter to appeal to the Xbox demographic and missed the mark, even though it had the field at launch nearly to itself. Their other title, Kameo, was more in line with titles from their Nintendo days, but also received a mixed reaction. Viva Pinata looks like their strongest Xbox 360 title, but it also sits in a niche by itself amongst sports games and shooters.

Then there's Bungie; the unexpected blockbuster that spawned a hit trilogy and a staggering array of related merchandise, propelling the studio from its position as a critically acclaimed Macintosh developer with occasional financial problems to a mass market juggernaut.

Then they walked out the door, leaving Microsoft with the franchise and industry watchers scratching their heads. The goose who laid the golden egg left one last present, left the farm to hang out its own shingle, and prompty announced it would keep supporting and enhancing the eggs, but that new and as-yet-unannounced golden items would be coming in the future. This kind of thing doesn't happen every day.

This might have convinced Microsoft that the way to continue to build its Xbox empire isn't to acquire good independent developers, treat them nicely, let them keep their own corporate culture, and let them do their own thing, because ultimately when you do that, if they're successful enough they'll just leave. If they keep making games for your platform that's good, but suddenly you're getting only the publisher's take instead of the whole enchilada; and ultimately that independent studio might decide to develop for other platforms, and you've lost exclusivity with your premier developer. In short it makes the entire experience with Bungie look much like what I thought it was at the start: not the acqusition of a studio but the acquisition of the Halo property. Despite all the hot air about Bungie's talent and innovation, what Microsoft wanted, and what they ultimately got and had to keep-- and ended up acquiring on the cheap compared to developers like Lionhead-- was Halo.

Now Ensemble Studios is feeling the repercussions of Bungie's independence. The independent identity of the studio Microsoft bought, Ensemble, is being destroyed, to be replaced by a Halo Wars-focused division of MGS that will help monetize the property that Microsoft was able to rescue from the Bungie departure. It is largely a symbolic move; those people worked for Microsoft before and they still will. What is being removed is the idea of that group as something separate from Microsoft; the knowledge of their history before Microsoft, and the kernel of the idea that just as there was life before Microsoft, there might be life after Microsoft. When the studio is a group just part of a larger team, with a name assigned to them that bears no relation to the studio Microsoft purchased, the risk of those people going independent is minimized.

UPDATE: The above was written before I saw notes at Kotaku that indicate that while MS retains ownership of Halo and of Age of Empires, the new studio that is replacing Ensemble will, in fact, be independent of Microsoft, as Bungie is. This ends up painting a picture in which rather than trying to prevent further defections from MGS, what it in fact is doing is divesting itself of game development and becoming more of a pure publisher-- letting independent companies bear the costs of financing and developing the games.

In the end, the real casualties seem to be Ensemble's PC developers. With Starcraft 2 looming in the future of RTS games for Windows and Microsoft focused squarely on building and expanding the Halo property and continuing to add genres to the Xbox 360's repertoire, there was no room for Age of Empires. No room for the idea of Ensemble Studios, a group that used to make its own decisions and might again someday.

I wonder what is going through Peter Molyneux's mind right about now?

So a couple days ago I wrote a bit on how Bungie got the rug pulled out from under them at E3.

As near as the Intertubes can piece it together, a few days before E3, Microsoft let Bungie know they wouldn't be included in the press conference. Bungie then enacted contingency plans for their own announcement, which is what precipitated the countdown on Bungie.net.

On Tuesday Microsoft told Bungie they wouldn't be allowed to do that, either, and since Microsoft is Bungie's publisher for Halo games, and Microsoft owns the Halo intellectual property, and the announcement concerned Halo, Bungie had to do what Microsoft says, prompting Bungie president Harold Ryan's apology to the fans, which can also be interpreted as a nice polite way of flipping the bird to the publisher.

 Click here for the complete text.

Now, I'm not saying the whole Keep It Clean debacle doesn't deserve a couple thousand more words (which it surely will get) but I felt I couldn't let E3 week go by without comment on one of the announcements that Microsoft did feel was important enough to show-- namely, the impending renovation of the Xbox 360's dashboard interface in the fall of this year. Besides, I took a straw poll in HBO's irc server and this is the topic that won.

Then words begin to fail me and I long instead to wax poetic about publishing deals and PR tactics.

What to say, what to say...

I wrote a review of the Aeon Flux theatrical film a few years back on my own personal blog, and as a fan of Peter Chung's original cartoons, I was extremely disappointed. I wrote at the time that:

It is as if Paramount took a group of writers, locked them in a dark room with copies of the animated series, but gave them enough time to view only a small portion of them all, and then required them to write their notes about the series in crayon on the back of index cards. These index cards, out of order, were then handed to a completely different group of people, who then went on to make this film.

I can't help feeling that Microsoft has taken a team of interface designers, a Wii, and an Apple TV and done the same thing here. From the cartoony avatars you can see they're aware of the Wii. From the clean, white, sliding 3D interface you can tell they've seen an Apple TV, or at least Apple's Front Row program. Somehow, however, they either didn't quite grasp how or why those things worked and what was good about them, and managed to come up with something that bears only a passing resemblance to those two products, and are in the process of abandoning an interface that-- in classic Microsoft fashion-- after seven years has finally reached a "good enough" level of functionality.

If I'm lucky enough to have anyone at Microsoft involved in this project reading at this moment, let me emphatically state: please do not do this. As a last resort, I'd exhort you to make this interface optional. I know this to be a fruitless request since making things options rarely solves anything. All I can say, though, is that if this is the interface the 360 will be using in the future then I can see myself using it a lot less, and at least putting my console back to booting from disc on startup and bypassing the dashboard as much as possible.

If you haven't seen this thing yet, drop on over to GameTrailers, they have HD and SD versions of the walkthrough. Go ahead. I'll wait.

 Click here for the complete text.

Ah, the heady days of the early and mid 90s, when Bungie was an independent developer and publisher, master of its own destiny. They developed what they wanted to develop, announced when they wanted to announced, and shipped... well, when the boxes were done.

Those days must seem so simple compared to now.

Because what's going on now is apparently a Bungie announcement scheduled for E3 today-- one likely related to Halo in some way-- has been postponed indefinitely by Bungie's publisher.

That would be Microsoft, for those of you keeping score at home, even though the name "Microsoft" does not appear anywhere in the carefully-worded missive from Bungie president Harold Ryan.

Most fans, of course, don't care what happened or who is at fault. They just knew they were supposed to be seeing something exciting and new within the next twelve hours, and now they won't. For a form of popular entertainment whose fans vacillate back and forth between endurance trials of development waits-- three years for each of the last three Halo games-- and the instant gratification of online multiplayer matches where average lifetimes can be well under thirty seconds, such an indefinite delay is a great disappointment. Even if we don't know what it was we were supposed to be expecting.

So what were we expecting, when can we expect it, and why was it delayed just twelve hours before it was to hit?

 Click here for the complete text.

...is apparently how long humanity fought the Covenant over Harvest. It is not, gratefully, the amount of time you'll have to wait for Halo Wars from Ensemble Studios to come out, since supposedly the game is now set for a release sometime in Spring 2009.

So, a little less than one... long... year.

Xbox360Fanboy has the latest Halo Wars trailer, which follows in the vein of the first in showing no gameplay whatsoever, but focusing on cinematic visuals, of the kind more appropriate for a game that actually uses those kinds of visuals. You know, a shooter, and not a strategy game.

TeamXbox also has the trailer and new screens, while the official site has 12 new shots in an "E3 2008" gallery.

UPDATE: I've added those shots into Rampancy's Halo Wars gallery.

This trailer also replaces the original score of the first trailer, which was best described as trite and lackluster, and instead inserted the familiar strains of Marty's "Halo Monks".

Also, despite "Contact Harvest" by Joe Staten saying that Brutes were the primary foot soldiers in the first assaults on that colony, this trailer once again only shows Elites-- no other Covenant units are shown.

It's also difficult to reconcile the idea of a 5-year battle over a single world with everything the Halo series has told us about human-Covenant engagements. While the addition of the Spartans into humanity's troop mix gave them parity, if not an outright advantage, on the ground, we're told that the Covenant always retained air superiority, and since ultimately most colonies were wholly or partially glassed, this was always the deciding factor.

So the story of Halo Wars will have to come up with some good reason why the Covenant wait five years before glassing Harvest, or for some reason choose to assault it without ever glassing it.

One of those shots shows a good look at some of the UNSC... well, there's nothing to call them but mechs, since that's what they look like. Frankly, the devs can go on all they like about how the mechs aren't Spartans, aren't as strong or fast or dangerous as Spartans, and play a different role on the battlefield than Spartans... and it just doesn't matter worth a damn.

You can't look at one of those things in a screenshot and not think "wow, if a Spartan is this good and only a bit bigger and taller than an ODST, then that thing must be awesome. Its visual presence on the field demeans the Spartan, and I don't see that being something that can be explained away.

After the discussions about death prompted by my last blog entry, specifically those mentioning the Iron skull, and whether a gamer who dies even once in a level can be said to have accomplished anything, I thought I'd give the skull a serious try in Halo 3 for the first time.

There are some skulls I like playing with, to the extent that I nearly always enable them now when playing campaign, solo or coop: Catch, because more grenades equals more fun, Cowbell, because bigger explosions means bigger fun, Mythic and Thunderstorm, because Heroic with a few tweaks is more tolerable than Legendary, and Fog because it encourages battlefield awareness. Sometimes I also throw in Tough Luck, because it makes sticks tougher and therefore more satisfying.

I hardly ever touch Tilt. In combination with Mythic and Thunderstorm it simply makes killing certain enemies take too much time and ammunition (the return of bullet sponge brutes) and Iron, because I figure I'm going to die once in awhile.

I thought, though, that if I dropped from Heroic to Normal, I might add Iron for some extra bonus points, try to be careful, and see if it actually felt more like an accomplishment.

 Click here for the complete text.

Game Over. Insert Coin.

The balance between carrot and stick, reward and punishment, in game design was so much simpler back in the arcade.

Take the gamer's money and give them a limited number of chances to progress, usually called "lives" since failure nearly always means death. When the player runs out of lives, they can pay to keep playing if they agree within a given time period. If not, the game resets itself to the start.

In some ways, it's a magnificently simple and beautiful state of affairs compared to what PC and console gaming has become, where the entire price of a game, hardware included, is bought and paid for in advance, and "pay for play" means online access fees and MMO subscriptions.

How, in an environment where you can't hit the gamer in the pocketbook for failing to demonstrate the requisite skills, can you punish them? Should you even try? Arcade games were designed to be "finished" only by the best of the best, but today's story-driven, cinematic AAA titles cost millions to make-- is it wise to reveal the entirety of one's design only to a select few? Might that not tempt designers to leave the ending out (I'm glancing in your direction, Halo 2, and yours, too, Indigo Prophecy) and focus energies on the beginning-- the part that most reviewers will see?

Is death in games supposed to be punitive, or is it there only to prevent the player from progressing through the game until they've demonstrated a certain minimum level of proficiency? If it is supposed to be punitive, what does it say about designers' opinions of their own game if the worst punishment they can come up with is playing the game more? Isn't the idea of dying, the message of failure, more important than the actual consequences? Or is it? Can a game design aspire to have replayability and still consider repeat play as a punishment for dying? What other punishments can there be? Should there be any punishments at all? Can any punishment be as useful or effective as requiring the player to insert another quarter, and if not, should gaming return to the arcade model, or should it abandon player punishment altogether?

 Click here for the complete text.

Track listing of Halo 3 soundtrack, as bought from iTunes Store (US).

HBO today points to an interesting blog entry by an English teacher in Korea, playing Halo 3 (apparently for the first time or nearly so) in Korean without English subtitles, and so without much insight into the story or what the player is supposed to do:

Gears of War was subtitled, but Halo 3 had full Korean menus and voice acting. This meant we had NO idea what the story was the entire time we were playing. If we were required to do something, we had to figure it out, usually by destroying things or pushing buttons. This lead to a lot of backtracking, guessing, and traveling to corners of the map "just to see" if this way where to go.

Diehard Halo fans, of course, probably can tell just from the visuals, combined with knowledge of the previous two games, what is going on a lot of the time. Here Halo 3 is a victim of its success: it is played by many, many people who are not hardcore gamers or hardcore Halo players.

So for every Halo fan like me, who liked the idea of the highway tunnel chase in Outskirts but disliked its cramped spaces and linearity, there are probably more than a few like this player-- who doesn't know where to go in a level without verbal cues, and dislikes exploration.

In some of the pre-release weekly updates about Halo 3 Bungie talked about doing some playtesting and putting in some ledges to clearly indicate which way the player should go. I admit that in some levels it is easy to get lost-- some of the jungle areas in Sierra 117, just about anywhere in Cortana-- but I view exploration as a privilege, not a punishment. I'm going to go to all corners of the map eventually just to see what's there, because I think the Halo series, like Bioshock, for instance, is a game that understands one of the first and foremost tasks is establishing a sense of place. 04, Delta Halo, the Ark: these are real places to me. I feel like I've been there. I want to go back there. I keep looking around the corners hoping to find something new, even where I know there won't be anything. I just keep hoping.

Meanwhile other gamers know that they're supposed to follow the signposts, and consider time spent looking for one to be wasted, and time spent returning to a location you've already seen to also be wasted.

I look at it this way: if the player objects that strenuously to returning to a place, then perhaps the place isn't fleshed out enough. Then again, some people don't want to explore real spaces and just want to get on to the next bit of shooting. Oh well.

To open PrintMusic files, get the free FinaleNotepad program. Versions are available for Windows and Mac OS X. It opens PrintMusic files, as well as imports and exports MIDI.

To download the free program, the Finale website will require you to register a free account with them. Be sure to check the opt-in marketing settings at the bottom of the form if you don't want them to email you or give your contact information to their partners.

Now that I've recovered from my Super Bowl hangover, here's the promised conclusion to my three-part review of Halo 3's soundtrack.

Edge Closer starts out airy and atmospheric but soon turns into something like a technofied, up-tempo version of Covenant Dance as you fight your way back out from the map room for extraction, finishing with another drum-pounding Pelican pickup that is very similar to the one that ended the very first level.

Finish the Fight gets turned into a combat anthem for Three Gates, a rollicking piano heavy piece that starts during the introductory cutscene for The Covenant and continues to play as you fight your way from the beach to the first of three towers you must disable in order to follow Truth to the Ark's control room. In the interior sections we get an interesting mix of electronic and acoustic percussion.

 Click here for the complete text.

After the last tutorial on how to download sheet music files there were some requests on how to upload files to the site for other readers to see.

If you've transcribed some music from Halo or any other Bungie or Wideload game and would like to share it with the community here through Rampancy's sheet music section, first you need to have an account, confirm that account, and be logged in. All of those steps are covered in the tutorial on How To Download Sheet Music Files. After you've followed those steps, come back here.

 Click here for the complete text.