League of Legends: Where is the proxy?

             I was watching one of the League "spotlights" and as usual a typical "gamer woman", who is fashioned to capture what riot considers to be the "gamer dream girl", greets me and everyone else in the community as "summoners". At that moment I realized that the player is transformed into a new person when they are playing league of legends. No longer am I Raymond, but instead I'm a summoner, specifically one named ablindleader. The character I control isn't me, yet I'm still in the game as a character. This brings up interesting questions of proxy and who is the proxy in this game? Just for a refresher, the proxy, according to the random semantics I've been using on this blog, is the placeholder or connection between the player and the game world. For example, in the game Legend of Zelda, Link is your proxy. He allows you to interact with the world and morph the people and places around him. One might be tempted to simply call your champion your proxy, but if we're truly following the lore or accepted premise of the game, the summoner could very well be someone in game, you are unknowingly controlling, who in turn controls the champion. This is really amazing when you stop to think about it because the summoner is a mystified version of the player himself. But one might be tempted to burst my over analytical bubble, claiming that she addressed you in the video, meaning you're the summoner and this fictional person doesn't exist. But how do we know? We create our own simulacra with our username. When I play my name isn't Ablindleader, its Raymond. Ablindleader is someone else, who does what Raymond tells him to do. Proxy theory, specifically how proxies are used to connect and disconnect a player from the game is incredibly interesting to me. I feel the denotation of us as "summoners", while seemingly insignificant was a very intelligent decision made by riot. For isn't that all a player is? A summoner, who starts up the world of the game and then supplants the proxy into that world. Perhaps the game of LoL doesn't start with a match, but instead starts when you login.  

Legend of Grimrock

Legend of Grimrock 

Overall: 3.0

Nostalgia: 3.5

Graphics: 2.5

Gameplay: 2.8 

          Welcome to Legend of Grimrock, the game that can only tout how nostalgic it is. Legend of Grimrock is intended to be a nod to the dungeon crawlers of old. A modern Hexen, taking the indie sphere by storm with dungeon crawling goodness in the form of an Elder's Scrolls format. At this point one might think that this game sounds perfect. Hexen and Morrowind combined into one game? Those were both excellent games, so this must have been a great game. Well, not really. Legend of Grimrock certainly has a lot of potential and it feels like the dungeon crawlers of old, but it doesn't play modern. And that is the biggest issue. Why would I play Legend of Grimrock for nostalgia if I could easily just pop in my version of Hexen and indulge in the nostalgia of actually reliving the past. For Legend of Grimrock to be successful, it needed to have a modern flare that took the old school gameplay I used to love and made it more accessible for younger gamers. Let's pick apart why it doesn't feel modern. 

What went wrong

       The Legend of Grimrock gameplay is your typical dungeon crawler affair. Kill monsters, explore rooms, solve puzzles, repeat. However, the monsters you kill are actually quite boring. When the first monster you fight is a slug, the intensity of a battle kind of dies out. This is when an epic opening boss battle could serve to really frame the entire journey or set the mood for the player. Also, using a keyboard for the methodical left, right, up, down, while making camera angles dictated by the keyboard as well, makes the game play very mechanical. This is frustrating because the game makes allusions to games like Morrowind and I can't help but make the unfair comparison between the two when playing. While playing I find myself asking, "would I be having more fun playing this in 3-d with a wider variety of items and better controls?" The answer is always yes, and then I proceed to put in my Morrowind disc. I know it's completely unfair to expect Grimrock to match up to the likes of Morrowind, but Grimrock doesn't do anything to differentiate itself from Morrowind. The stories are near exactly the same, barring the dungeon and the expansive world and the gameplay is very similar. The game makers should have realized how similar they were and asked themselves, "how are we going to make this gameplay experience unique to Grimrock?" I feel the developers accepted that this was a game that was simply going to play on the nostalgic tendencies of the indie community and didn't even bother to add anything to the genre. 

Conclusion

  When working in an old genre, the line between homage and plagiarism is a grey one. A developer needs to either improve or innovate. Sure, Grimrock isn't a carbon copy of Morrowind, but when a game feels identical to another game and it doesn't significantly improve anything then one begins to question the purpose of playing the game in the first place. I'm sure dungeon crawler junkies out there would really enjoy Grimrock, but for everyone else who is just looking for a nostalgia trip, I'd suggest you pop in your favorite old dungeon crawler and play that instead. 

Cave Story

Cave Story
Overall:3.4
Narrative: 3.0
Platforming: 3.8
Characters: 2.8
Weapons: 3.8          

            Aha! I bet you guys didn't think I'd get through Cave Story. Well if that was your suspicion, then you're completely right. Cave Story, while certainly not a horrible game, didn't really do it for me. And unlike some games, where I find myself so engrossed in the plot that I lose track of time, responsibilities and showering, Cave Story was never quite able to really captivate me. But I have reason! Sweet reason that explains  where Cave Story really shines and where it falls off. So let's go spelunking through Cave Story (see what I did there).
         
Narrative
        I often treat the title of a video game like the title of a poem, I consider it to be the door that I have to open to get inside the piece. And when I see something titled "Cave Story", I have pretty basic expectations. I expect there to be a cave and some semblance of a story that has to deal with said cave.  Luckily Cave Story delivers on both of these targets. There is indeed a Cave and the entire game takes place in it, playing out what seemed to me, an incredibly basic storyline.
        What disheartens me the most about Cave Story is how basic, yet confusing the storyline of Cave Story is. You never really understand why you're doing something. The beginning of the game has a lot of mystery, which I concede had me pretty curious, but when almost all of the mystery was lifted by the middle of the game, I just found myself confused and kind of disinterested with the entire premise. The basic plot is that there is an evil scientist, who wants to do something to a tribe of bunnies, but these two other bunnies, who apparently are from somewhere else, wants to stop him. Where I fit into this as a player I have no idea, but it seems everyone is incredibly trusting of me seeing that they send me on quests, which the entire future of their tribe hinges upon. I guess they didn't really have a choice. Also, there is definitely a scenario of imperfect information going on in the game. What I mean by this is that everyone in the game knows I'm someone from the surface and that I'm a soldier. I was also called a robot at one point. Since I have no idea what this means in this universe I don't really know what to make of the significance. There's also some random hooded dude, who seems content with just chilling and being incredibly wise. Perhaps he's just the bard figure being intermittent in the game.
      All this imperfect information eventually leads me to the one glaring issue with the game, my character is completely devoid of any personality or purpose. I don't know who my character is, how he's supposed to act or if he represents me or a unique character. This makes it hard for me to become immersed in the game because I'm consistently reminded that I'm just playing for playing's sake. And there's nothing wrong with that, but when one is on a busy schedule a game needs to bring something to the table to compete for my attention. The game didn't even need to develop the character. In fact having this everyman transverse the story would have been fine if I at least had the basic tenets of a purpose. One might argue that the arbitrary tasks assigned to the character would be the purpose or that I should as a person inherently feel compassion and want to help the cause of the bunnies, but I really don't buy into this. Mostly because aside from a few baddies (who I made quick work off), I don't ever see a real present threat. I hate overusing this example, but Chrono Trigger is the perfect example of motivating a character (and by extension a player) to want to complete a game. The beginning of the game is simple, rescue Marle. Then that switches to a visual depiction of the Earth being destroyed that you must prevent. All I ever see from Cave Story is a bunch of secret experiments, which people tell me are pretty bad, but I have no reason to believe that's the case. They're eggs, why didn't they just have one of the eggs crack open, letting out a monster that completely destroyed me, thus setting up motivation for me to want to destroy the monster in another encounter and adding validity to the claims of awfulness that the bunnies have been harping on about.

Gameplay
        The gameplay to Cave Story is platformer meets scroll shooter and it's fun. I mean there's just something cathartic about gathering weapons, leveling them up and using them to more efficiently defeat monsters you were initially having trouble with. There are a variety of guns, which are distinct in the way you have to use them in the game. This is a refreshing change from what most shooters do (i.e. increase the damage on the next gun). The platforming itself is actually pretty flat in my opinion. I've never been a huge platform game lover, but I know the difference between intuitive level design and tedious challenges. Mario bros had intuitive level design that allows players to explore new facets of the stages with multiple play throughs. Cave Story is about execution of incredibly tedious jumps and timing mechanisms. This can at times leave me stuck in an area for 20 minutes at a time, attempting the same jump about 20 times. And since I'm not really captivated by the story, I find myself inclined on quitting rather than continuing with this pointless display in tedious timing. If someone enjoys this facet of platforming, then perhaps you should pick up Cave Story, but I'll pass on that funny business.

Cave Story isn't a bad game. It's a game that is paying homage to the old super nintendo games and shows that you can still make a compelling gaming experience without amazing graphics and other perceived triple A necessities. But still, just like many triple A games, Cave story simply doesn't deliver on narrative and with what truly something that has been done so many times gameplay wise, there's really no reason to go out rushing to download this game. 

What do you look for when you play a game?

                      When we play games, we often do so passively. What I mean by this is that we don't go into games expecting to take a particular thing out of it. Our requirements are pretty low: entertain us. This is very akin to the process some people take into reading books or watching movies. Not everyone goes into a book and movie expecting a search for meaning. And that's fine. I think the world has enough snobs like me, putting down movies because they aren't narratively up to snuff. Still, the flip side to this are the movies and books that captivate you over and over again. These pieces make it so that eventually you look for more than what you initially bargained for and as a result, enjoy the movie far more than you did before.
                      But sometimes we just don't know what we're supposed to be looking for. When it comes to books and movies, there are entire departments in universities, that devote themselves to answering the title of this post (except for their respective mediums instead). Video games, while appreciated by some places, don't really have a literature that sets up formal theory or explanation on what components of a game people should pay attention to. So we rely on critics and websites that are often ran by complete idiots. These people are in the business of selling games, making the integrity of their critique dubious (There are definitely some video game critics that I respect, but I think most of them are huge sellouts or sheep or both). So I've frequently needed to ask myself what should I be looking for when playing a game. This usually leads to more questions such as, should be I be looking for the same core things in a game? Does this mean that all video games have the same core components? If these components exist, then what are they and why are they so important to the video game process? The logical query goes on and on, but when I play games, none of these questions cross my head. Perhaps it's because my training as an English major kicks in. As an English major I find myself often dealing with text in a baptism by fire fashion. The best way to know what to look for is by jumping into the brisk waters of the uncharted and begin looking. If what you're supposed to find is somewhere in there, then if you look at every single detail you should hopefully find it. The life of an English major ( and basically anyone who does some sort of analysis) is the gathering of tiny strands of strings that may lead to a trap door or a dead end.
                     That was the short answer of what I look for when I play a game. I'm sure I have a less pretentious answer somewhere in me that would come shining through if you would ask me in person. But when thinking about it alone, I realize that often my answers to people in person are spurred by my insatiable desire to talk about video games with people. When I have to talk about this alone, I simply can't.
                     Games are rich pieces that can continually be analyzed. There is no right thing to look for and even if you're judging a game based on a small feature or simply on how awesome its soundtrack is, there is some validity to your opinion (if you can show evidence from the game that supports your claim about it). It'd do you an injustice for me to tell you what you should you look for.
                           I guess this begs the question of what the hell was the purpose of this post? It's to encourage all of you out there, who's willing to take the dive into playing games actively that they are not wasting their time. It makes me happy to take games apart and derive more meaning from them. Games can make me cry. They can make me laugh. They can make me shout out in anger and disgust. And I want to know why, just like how I want to know why I am so moved by the death of Dido or the triumph of McMurphy. So for all of you gamers out there that look for more, know you aren't alone. 

What happened to Terranigma?

           For those of you who might be avid readers of my blog (basically 4 people according to my view reader), you may have noticed that I never finished the classic action RPG Terranigma. This may have caused some of you to assume that it shares the same fate of Final Fantasy and Secret of Mana, both games that I stopped playing due to intense boredom. Well no, Terranigma did not share their fate. The abrupt abandonment of Terranigma is just a product of bad timing. I was finished through I'd like to say 40% of the game and then RA training and school came around, essentially derailing me from the game. The question of why I haven't picked it back up is easy to answer. I've forgotten the gameplay system and so it would be an annoying learning curve to go back into playing the game, especially on my laptop. So I've just accepted that it's a game I'll try to do another time. 

            What I do remember about Terranigma is that it was shaping up to be an incredibly powerful game. The tone of the game was for the most part incredibly serious, lending to it an ominous feel. The game relied on one's natural inclination to bring balance to the world, since the world you're saving isn't a foreign land, but the actual decimated planet Earth. The game is very mindful on how it uses and portrays nature and it's heavily polluted Earth feels quite real to a 21st century gamer. I remember that some character plots were quite exciting and developed cultures for each type of organism. The love interest in the game was also very interesting and how she was going to connect later on is something I was curious to find out. 

         I can't give something my stamp of approval till I've legitimately finished it (on the contrary, I can give my stamp of disapproval to anything that displeases me in the first 20 minutes), but I can encourage you guys to try the game for yourself. It was a tad difficult at parts, but the game seems fairly paced and very fun to play through. Tell me how it turns out for you and if the reception is great enough (i.e. greater than 1 comment), then I will definitely revisit it. 

A blog gone astray

         I realized that yet again I've managed to turn this blog into what it's not. This blog's primary purpose was to review old games, thus the name "Retrospect". The idea was by reviewing these games with a modern take, unsung classics ( and some well known classics) would be revisited and cherished for the masterpieces they are. Well I'm glad to announce that I'm going to refocus the blog this coming year. The next few games I'm going to be reviewing are going to be indie games akin to the 8-bit era that I've been so endearing too. Then I'm going to go back to the Super Nintendo and search for more classics to enjoy.
        The purpose of reviewing old games is not only to get people to look back, but to also remind people the power of video games without the flashy graphics and complicated plots. I want to bring people back to a time where tools were limited and so developers did more with less. I believe if current game designers aren't playing these games, then they are truly missing out and doing an injustice to the games they are currently working on. Just like how a poet who hasn't read Shakespeare is completely blind to a world of possibility, a RPG game designer who hasn't played earthbound is completely blind to how amazing the normalcy of the world can be. I hope bringing this blog back into focus will make my devotion to it stronger and will help spur more conversation on the site (since it currently has none).