Life is Strange and the "What is a Video Game" Debate.

Note:  I plan on writing a full review of this series once all 5 episodes are out.  I've played through the first 3 as of this writing.  

I've been playing Life is Strange recently, an episodic story-driven game with minimal gameplay in the traditional sense.  It's pretty awesome, but it reminds me of a debate among gamers about what these games are.  Should these types of games be classified as "video games"?  Should they be called something else?  It's a grand debate that any human that plays video games will always have....although they fucking shouldn't because it's the dumbest debate of all time.

Here is how dumb this debate is.  Regardless of how minimal the gameplay is, the gameplay is still there, so yes, these are video games.  End of debate.

Whoa.  Shortest blogpost ever.  That was easy.

YEAH!  Time to celebrate with tons of potassium and water (SCIENCE JOKE).

Okay, I'll explain myself.  I have two arrogant points.

Point the first:  

This whole debate seemed to arise after TellTale's The Walking Dead won game of the year in many outlets, followed by Gone Home winning game of the year the following year (although The Last of Us may have won in more places).  I haven't played either of those games although I know Life is Strange is very similar to TellTale games.  These are games that are more interactive than a visual novel, but less so than The Last of Us or Grand Theft Auto 5 which was also released (on consoles) the same year as Gone Home.  I can see why the debate is brought up but....why do you care?

Nobody gives a shit about the Grammys, the Golden Globes, the Tonys, or the Oscars.  Okay, people SORT OF care about the Oscars but not enough to riot if a black and white silent film wins best picture in one...which almost happened in 2011.  Why do gamers care if Gone Home wins Best Game of the Year by whatever publication?  It's just another version of these same awards that nobody really cares about and doesn't really mean anything.

What the hell am I looking at?

Is it about money?  Sort of, yes, but it's complicated.  Movies that win an Oscar have been known to receive a bump, but even then, most of the bump is for whoever worked on an Oscar winning movies' NEXT movie.  The Grammy bump has the opposite effect where the bump is there for existing work, but not for the next.  Winning a Tony can apparently single-handedly save a Broadway Show, but how often do people see Broadway Shows outside of elitist culture snobs?  The Golden Globes however, do fuck all.  Video Games lack a single award show that has unanimous approval.  Does anybody really want to buy a game solely off of what Geoff Knightley says is really good?

Award shows are pointless.  Movies that win Best Picture are rarely the best picture.  TV shows that win a Golden Globe are rarely the best.  Musicians who win a Grammy are NEVER the best because that award show is ridiculously corrupt.  Why does anybody care what game wins a pointless Game of the Year award?  Seriously....leave a comment.  I don't understand these people.*

*Before I go on to the next point, I only realized this first one when talking with members of the infamous #Gamergate.  They seemed weirdly annoyed at Gone Home and thought it shouldn't win a Video Game award because it isn't a video game.  I counter that with, who fucking cares?  Awards, are, pointless.

Point the Second:

The other issue that is brought up about these video games needing to be called something else is because people get hung up on the "game" part of the title.  Doesn't a video game need to have something resembling a fail state, a way to lose so to speak, for it to be a "game"?

I sort of agree with that argument, except that I've always thought the term video game was kind of dumb.  A great video game is "just a game" the same as a great movie is "just a movie".  Both statements are technically correct even though something feels off about them.  Video games feel like they can be more than just a game and I think getting too hung up about being a game can restrict what the medium is capable of.

Like, references and shit.  That movie is awful BTW.

In the end, this whole argument boils down to a stupid semantics debate and what the definition of words are and my eyes are glazing over.  You know a debate gets good when two sides start debating the philosophical meaning of the word "game".  It's the same type of people who would debate whether or not that last sentence was sarcasm.

Life is Strange, the game I've played recently which inspired this blogpost, doesn't have a traditional fail state (although I wouldn't be surprised if one appears near the end of episode 5).  Your character, Max, cannot die.  However, I have ABSOLUTELY failed in this game, as anybody who has played through the end of episode 2 can attest.  Unlike other games, you have to continue on with that failure as a part of the game sort of like real life.  You don't just respawn like nothing happened (unless you went back and replayed the scene you coward).  Without getting into spoiler territory, the end of episode 2 can significantly change the way you see the rest of the story even if most of the changes in episode 3 are in dialogue only (there is a couple of minor visual changes too).

eeeyyaaa....EEEYYAAA.....AHHHHH *starts sobbing*

As for other frequently accused non-games. I know characters can die in Tell Tale games, even if it's not the main character, due to player choice.  Heavy Rain, one of the first games to start this stupid debate, the main character can die if you fail certain quick time events (dumb yes, but still a fail state).  The other David Cage game, Beyond:Two Souls might be the best example as it is impossible to die, or at least I think it is from the tiny amount of gameplay and Let's Play footage I've watched.  And despite the lack of a fail state, there is still gameplay.....OH SHIT!  The "game" word is back!

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Anyway, dumbest video game debate ever.  These types of games are video games until otherwise re-defined.  If they are still lumped in with every video game, and video games as a whole are re-defined, that is what they are.  If they are separated from video games, and are defined something else, Life is Strange is still a great "interactive game-movie thing visual novel weird dream".  Semantics are for whiners.  People who persist can get the fuck over it.

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Cloudberry Kingdom Review

It's been a long time since I've played a super hard platformer, so figuring that I was a little out of practice, I decided to jump back in with arguably the hardest platformer of all time in Cloudberry Kingdom.  I typically have quite a bit of patience in these kinds of games as I can die hundreds of times on one stage and not get too worked up about it.  Cloudberry Kingdom's late stages however, could reach thousands of times....if I actually managed to make it that far.

I mean come on.  Look at this shit.

For those that have never played, those lasers coming from the sky also kill you.

Cloudberry Kingdom is deceptive with its difficulty at first.  Stages 1-50 are a breeze.  But each time the game introduces a new obstacle, it adds to the difficulty simply by adding more of them, until the screen is filled with instant death.  Even with everything going on, it's seemingly possible to speed run each stage (until the late stages) and often times, it's the ONLY way to pass some of them.  This game demands precision platforming a la Super Meat Boy, but with a Sanic like sense of speed.  

Rather than just throwing a meteor shower at you while you try to cross a slaughtering house, the difficulty has one other wrinkle to frustrate you just a bit more by frequently changing the way you control your character.  Sometimes he is tiny but you can jump high.  Sometimes he is huge and can't jump high.  Sometimes he phases between being small and huge with a questionable hitbox.  Sometimes you have a double-jump or a jetpack.  Some of them get really weird like "hero in a box", in which you can't move WITHOUT jumping, or a rocket powered minecart, in which the game decides you are not dying fast enough.

The bunny ears and pink suit just make you cute.

The three absolute worst controls however, are wheel, the pogo stick, and the spaceship,  The wheel has you strapped onto, uh, a wheel and as you can imagine, lets you build up some incredible momentum, making stopping a nightmare.  In case you don't know why this sucks so hard, it basically turns those stages into the old "ice level" cliche from older platformers.  The pogo stick ends up being the vertical version of that same problem which oddly enough is WORSE in this game.  I'm constantly bouncing all over the fucking place.  I don't think I'm ever yelled at my TV saying, "I just want control of my character back!" before this game.

And....the spaceship.  Holy shit, the spaceship is a lovecraftian nightmare.  Those stages are setup like a horizontal 2-D shooter only without the shooting.  You have to dodge everything, and by everything, I mean hundreds of flies.  This isn't what pisses me off though since I usually made it through the flies just fine.  It's the elevator platforms, right before the checkpoint, that I died on all the damn time.  In other stages, this part right before the checkpoint is often the "safe zone" with a column of platforms going up, and another immediately afterward going down.  Now, imagine that, and try to fly through it.  Oh, and the checkpoint is tantalizingly close.  It's a goddamn miracle I didn't rage quit on these levels.  

I WASN'T KIDDING ABOUT THE FLIES.  And they are not stationary, they move.

The varying controls do not help with the precision platforming, but neither do some bugs.  Occasionally they benefit you as I've been able to survive direct hits a few times.  Usually though, they screw you, as I've fallen through platforms I obviously landed on.  The worst is a frequent jumping bug when you try to jump off of bouncy boxes and the aforementioned flies heads.  Similar to many platformers with the same mechanic, you can not hit the jump button to do a soft bounce off of these things, or you can press the jump button to reach higher terrain.  Routinely, if I tried to jump off certain bouncy things, I would fail 5 out of 10 times.

"Bouncy things", when stages are still easy.

YES, YES, I know what you're thinking.  Maybe I just suck.  Sometimes this is true but not this time. Around stage 150, I noticed something about all these bouncy thing jumps, and only if I hit the jump button.  Regardless of wither I succeeded or failed the jump, the game would produce a goddamn jump SOUND EFFECT (do you see how angry I am?).  The sound code for the game was registering that I jumped while the graphics did not.  That. Is. Some. Bullshit.  

OH?  Yes.  I know.  Maybe I wasn't holding down the jump button.  Just like many platformers, you can tap the jump button for a light hop, or hold it down for a higher/longer jump.  It didn't matter.  While it was hard to test on the bouncy things, there was a stage with a safe platform, but with a very short window in which I could proceed.  Due to the speed run nature of this game, I would land on the platform and quickly try to jump off it only I repeatedly fell to my death due to lack of jump. After failing 100 times I'd yell, "I jumped!" only to realize that maybe I'm jumping too late.  Nope!  For the first second on that platform, which is an eternity in this game, you cannot jump!  I tested this by purposely stopping on that platform and hammering on the jump button (which would cause me to jump up and down rather than forward).  Nothing happened for the first 4 button hits or so.  

This means, that when you yell at this game saying, "I fucking jumped!" after running off a platform to your doom, you are actually correct.  This game IS fucking with you, you are NOT going crazy....but yeah sometimes you just hit the jump button too late.

There is a story to this game but who cares?  Not the right type of game for me to care.

Cloudberry Kingdom is a good game.  Not great due to it's precision platforming not always being precision, but still good.  I don't normally do this in my reviews, but I would recommend trying it out sometime.  The Story Mode has set stages, they get progressively harder, and can supposedly be finished though I think that is an ancient myth or something.  There is an Arcade Mode with several different types of play, all of which are infinite and randomized.  You can also make custom stages (sort of), where you can manipulate the types of controls as well as the difficulty.  Any of these modes can be played in up to 4 player local co-op.  There is no online co-op but I assume even a slight amount of lag would make this game impossible.

If you do decide to try this game out, keep in mind 4 things.

1. You will not finish story mode.
2. No seriously, you will not finish story mode.
3. Remember that video at the beginning of the blogpost?  That is stage 319, the second to final stage of the game (319 and 320 look similar in video).  There is a reason that leaderboard has a three way tie at the top.  Nobody had EVER beaten 319 legitimately when it was posted.  Oddly enough, you can glitch it, but even that is really, really difficult.  The AI beats the stage in the video above but if you look closely, it should have died multiple times from the lasers.  A handful of people have beaten it, and by a handful, I mean like 2.  (It's hard to find this data but 2 people on PS3 have with video proof on Youtube. Obviously there could be more on Xbox but it's definitely less than 10 people total and that's generous).
4. So I'm not kidding, you will not finish story mode.

This is what awaits at the end, only, all of that is moving.

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Check out my review of Papo & Yo here.  

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