Tag Archives: mirror’s edge

Another Arbitrary 2008 List (Final Part)

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(Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4)

Game of the Year: Mirror’s Edge (Xbox 360/PS3)
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2008 was a pretty damn strong year for games. You had blockbuster sequels, innovative indie games, major 1st party releases, and quirky web games. Yet amongst this sea of quality releases stood Mirror’s Edge. It’s the definition of the a love/hate game, DICE, unconcerned mostly with anything besides the core concept of parkour, stripped the game of just about anything else remotely tangential. There’s no open world, no silly block puzzles, just about all combat is avoidable (with one or two major exceptions). The game is merely about running from point A to point B in the quickest, most elegant path possible.

Mirror’s Edge was muddled and imperfect in its central story mode. But where the true beauty of the game emerged was in the brilliant time trials. Removing all forms of combat and opening up the environments ever so slightly created a true paradise for runners. And by eschewing everything except the essence of running the beauty of the game emerged. You made sure every little crouch jump, every fall was the right height, every path was optimal to take fractions of seconds off the clock.

Few games were as addicting as Mirror’s Edge in time trials. I certainly got hooked. And this is why I find Mirror’s Edge to be the best game of 2008.

Thanks for reading everyone. I started gamedrinkcode this year as a place to dump all my thoughts and musings on games. I hope to continue as regularly next year as I did at the end of this. Have a great New Years and I’ll be back Friday.

Why the game industry sucks

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(Part 1 in an infinitely–long series.)

Hot off the presses is the sadly unsurprising news that Mirror’s Edge, the daring (and dashing!) new first–person platformer from the developers Dice and the studio EA has yet to soar at store counters.

Ignore that the post is based off conjecture and some solid rumors from the back alleys and let’s assume the premise is true. Mirror’s Edge for a variety of reasons has failed to make an impact. So let’s go analyze this presumed failure (and remember, you can still change! I’m the Ghost of Christmas Shopping Future so go out and buy Mirror’s Edge on Black Friday).

Gamers constantly complain that the industry lacks new IPs, new characters, new brands, and new gameplay ideas. Mirror’s Edge delivers all these in spades so it certainly doesn’t fail on those demands. Again, the caveat here is that gamers like most customers at times hardly know what exactly they want themselves, but lets assume these demands are true and actually desired.

Where Mirror’s Edge supposedly fails is its length. Or rather, the length of the game as compared to the price of the game. Mirror’s Edge is a full–fledged release priced at 60 dollars like most major titles released for the HD consoles (the 360 and PS3). However, Mirror’s Edge rests on the short end of game length for most typical major releases. The first run of the single–player story in Mirror’s Edge will typically last around 5–6 hours which compared to what’s normal (a 10–12 hour single player campaign or so). What this translate to is that Mirror’s Edge is now considered a short game in the eyes of many players — there’s little bang for the buck.

Ignore that this characterization ignores concepts like replayability for the main story mode in multiple difficulties or the various speed run modes of each level or even the time trial sections that allow you to run through specially–designed race courses built from the game’s environments. Mirror’s Edge has been branded with the dreaded stigma of being a short title, a rental title, a non–buy. Gamers who seek to derive the most playtime from their dollar will move on to other titles.

And this is where the game industry sucks. Modern games and the industry in general has become less about enjoying games thoroughly and more about churning through content. Modern single–player games in particular are guilty of this crime as the devolve further and further into interactive rollercoaster rides. Gamers love the twists, the turns, the epic scripted action sequences and the narrative–driven events that push the player forward in the Gears of Wars and Halos and Metal Gear Solids of the world. Gamers are addicted to the adrenaline rush of the tightly–paced sequence. And once they’re done with that rush there’s no urge to replay it. You dump it, resell it to Gamestop, and move on. It’s a rush to complete at the moment of release so you can move on to the latest rollercoaster.

It’s a demand that has transformed games into gigantic content munchers. Heaps of content delicately modeled and scripted that can’t be reused, expensive to make and even more time–consuming to produce. As the fidelity required in games rises so does the effort in creating this churnable content and so does the price of the game itself. So developers and publishers find themselves having to trim games in every way they can, cut the excess, but pad it enough that gamers don’t create a backlash to cries of being shorted valuable hours. Shorter games should theoretically lead to less expensive games, but as long as gamers enforce some arbitrary requirement of time and demand the same amount of carefully crafted content, game prices will remain high if not higher.

In this industry, brevity is a sin. It’s a ridiculous standard, like declaring a movie better because it runs 20 minutes longer. Games like Portal should have been the start of the short revolution, games that don’t sacrifice playability for any arbitrary length of time. Games like Mirror’s Edge should be praised for not containing fat in its story, for avoiding useless filler to deliver a compact experience. Instead they are denigrated for being thrifty in its content despite that Mirror’s Edge would not have been a better game at eight hours instead of six.

So that’s where we are. Let’s step back from the ledge and start concentrating on delivering the right experience rather than the longest one. Otherwise the industry will just continue to suck.

Falling off the Mirror’s Edge

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Mirror’s Edge is a wonderful game. It’s unique, visually stunning, and at moments provides some of the best gameplay on any gaming system this year. If you want to read paragraphs of flowery prose singing its praises there are plenty of other websites out there that will satiate that need.

To the point, its more interesting to discuss the game’s flaws. And Mirror’s Edge is by no means a perfect game. And one of the most interesting failures of the game is how badly the story is delivered to the player. Mirror’s Edge’s strengths lie in its gameplay and its story is not exactly Philip K. Dick levels of sci-fi dystopian intrigue, but the game’s weak story is made even worse by the poor execution.

Games have generally always had a hard time figuring out effective methods of delivering narrative to the players. As game stories have gotten lengthier and more involved (if not better scripted and more interesting) games have had a tough time figuring out how to insert these relevant plot points into the thick of the game. Cutscenes delivering these necessary narratives inbetween portions of the game have long been the preferred method of delivery.

But starting with older games like System Shock and Half-Life continued on in recent games like Bioshock and Portal games have gotten more ambitious in attempting to tell the story during the midst of gameplay — or even better — through the gameplay itself. Whether they be audio logs left behind that can be listened to fill in exposition or actually making the player execute certain plot important actions games have gotten more sophisticated in providing this (warning! bullshit marketing term ahead) immersive experience.

Portal in particular seems to be one of the more recent high watermarks in this mode. The story of you and GLaDOS is not one filled with a ton of action. In fact, most of the actual story has occurred in the past with the sad history of Apeture Science. Yet through its clever techniques of constant narration and chatter from GLaDOS and punctuated by some memorable environmental storytelling, the telling of the story of Portal is particularly compelling. Combine that with some clever writing and plenty of raves have been written about the narrative elements of Portal in the past year.

Unfortunately, Mirror’s Edge seems to ignore these methods for the standard cutscene-gameplay-cutscene-gameplay method. The cutscenes themselves are of relative poor quality, the 2d Flash animated sequences contrast far too greatly with the rest of the game and the animation itself isn’t anything to write home about. Mirror’s Edge in particular is disappointing because outside of these sequences there’s nary a moment where you’re not viewing the world from your character Faith’s eyes. The game has a few moments where events will occur within the actual game world, but even these are strictly camera controlled, as if the developers (or EA) feared that players might shift their attention elsewhere.

It’s a complaint that hopefully will be rectified in any upcoming sequels to Mirror’s Edge. Until then, gamers will need to be satisfied solely with the (mostly excellent) gameplay of Mirror’s Edge and have to get their narrative chops elsewhere.

(Full apologies for my inability to resist puns in titles)

On the Mirror’s Edge

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A few weeks ago EA and DICE (of former Battlefield glory) unveiled their newest title in development for the PS3/360, Mirror’s Edge. It’s the kind of game that jumps out immediately in the crowded next-gen market with too many me-too titles. It’s the kind of title that makes you angry — not because it exists — but because it exists and you weren’t the developers who came up with the idea first.

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Faith (yes, that’s her name) and the city of Mirror’s Edge (not the actual city name)

For anyone who hasn’t seen the trailer yet, I urge you to view it in HD at GameTrailers.com. The trailer demonstrates a simulated gameplay experience showing off the core concepts of the game. Running, sliding, and the use of momentum and proper acceleration to overcome obstacles be they inanimate or human. Also included is an awesome tune that pretty much makes the trailer.

One aspect of the game that immediately jumps out is the beautiful spartan art style employed on the architecture of the city. The simple color scheme with highlights various objects with a few bright colors among a lot of white is a welcome change from the typical grim and dirty realism that most FPS games strive for nowadays. The color scheme however isn’t just for giving Mirror’s Edge a unique look amongst a sea of derivatives, but also represents a smart way to accentuate important gameplay aspects of the city in this parkour-inspired game. From an interview with MTV’s Multiplayer blog:

Multiplayer: Is that the visual design? No green?

O’Brien: Well, the visual design isn’t that we targeted green to take it out. The art direction grew out of the gameplay. We wanted to give people a sense of the world very quickly and move through it very quickly. We initially stripped out all of the colors and then just put in red [to guide people to objectives]. But we needed more colors to break it up

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How does anything get done in a city with a population of one?

I hope the use of colors to illustrate potential paths is just the first step DICE made in developing Mirror’s Edge. Various screenshots lead me to believe this is true. Note how both in various images for the game and the trailer (which I know you’ve seen by now) seems to consistently highlight certain objects using specific colors. Red is the most obvious and striking. In the trailer red is used on ramps that are to be jumped, pipes to tightrope walk or grab onto, doors to kick down, and other objects which scream “action”. Blue and oranges seem to be more general colors highlighting areas that would be useful for running, jumping, or sliding to quickly advance through the city. Even the color green makes two brief appearances in the trailer coloring the car in the city and the rail that Faith is using to avoid detection during the montage making green a “stealth” color.

The development of Mirror’s Edge lends credence to John Riccitiello’s claim that EA has moved on from its homogenized, sports-and-licensed-properties-only past and is now fully supportive of developers crafting their own unique games. Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space this year along with such titles from last year like skate show EA are all promising signs of a more mature company that understands the need to balance their portfolio with both original fare and licensed games/sequels. Titles like Mirror’s Edge are still multimillion dollar ventures that other studios can only dream of matching, but instead of being typical generic titles that litter this industry the gameplay ideas are both different and innovative. EA is taking actual risk when they support games like Mirror’s Edge and I for one can only hope these gambles pay off for them in significant ways.