Ben Paddon

Category: Games & Technology

  • As Someone Who’s Looked At a Thing, You Might Like This Other, Vaguely Relevant Thing

    Amazon just sent me an email. This isn’t unusual – they send me about a dozen of the buggers a day – but this one is a little bit… well, odd.

    There are two problems with this email. The first one, a minor one, is that we didn’t buy our PS3 remote from Amazon. We bought it from a brick-and-mortar Best Buy store the same day we bought our console. I’ve never bought a remote control from Amazon.

    This is dwarfed by a slightly larger question. That being: How in the Hell does a Bluray remote control have any relevance to the game being marketed, besides the fact that they’re both for the PlayStation 3? It makes no ruddy sense at all. It’s like saying, “We see you’ve bought socks from us in the past. Would you like a pedicure?” Yes, they’re both foot-related, but they’re very different things.

    And I’d love a pedicure, although I was sadly born without toenails.

  • Console Yourself

    I bought the novelization of Batman & Robin recently, and I’m reading it at a fairly steady pace. I’ll likely do a write-up on it soonish, but first I thought I’d talk about something that’s been on my mind the last few days: games consoles.

    We have, in our house, One Of Everything. A Wii, a PS3, and an Xbox 360. Generally wind up falling into a particular pattern when we’re buying games – we tend to buy games the 360 version of games with a multiplayer emphasis (e.g. Street Fighter IV or Rock Band), the PS3 version of singleplayer games (e.g. Batman: Arkham Asylum or Ghostbusters), and the Wii version if it’s a family game (e.g…. well, virtually every Wii game out there). I’ve been playing through Arkham Asylum and Ghostbusters on the PS3 recently and I came to a startling conclusion: I don’t like the console.

    We’ve had our PS3 now for two years and we’ve bought, I think, about ten games for it in total. Most of those games I haven’t even finished. Most of those games I’ve traded in. Right now my PlayStation games library consists of the aforementioned singleplayer games, the quite brilliant LittleBigPlanet, and BioShock – a game I bought on the cheap because the PC version stopped working when I upgraded my graphics card (although it started working again when I installed Windows 7). Then there are, I think, about eight or nine PS2 games. My most recent games purchase for the console was Rayman 3, which is a good few years old.

    Don’t get me wrong, the PS3 is a solid system, but I can’t help but feel something is missing from the PlayStation 3 experience – the social aspect.

    It’s weird because four or five years ago it wouldn’t have even mattered to me, but the Xbox 360 has spoilt me. It has. The console has an absolutely perfect social side. It’s all wonderfully put together and nicely balanced and I know what I’m doing with it. The PS3, though, feels like the social stuff was slapped in at the last minute. That may be because it sort of was – player-to-player voice chat outside of specific games was only recently added to the console in a firmware update, and even then the base console doesn’t come with a free headset like the 360 does. What’s more, the advantages of the PlayStation 3’s online capabilities – free online play and a built-in wireless receiver – soon melt away when you discover that there’s no bugger playing the game you’re playing.

    Perhaps most perplexing is that I miss this social aspect even in the singleplayer games I’m playing. I miss being able to bring up a list of players and see what they’re playing, what they’re up to, how they’re doing. I miss being able to compare my scores against my friends because, haha, none of my friends own a PS3 and so my Friends List is remarkably small, consisting mainly of JjAR and a handful of people I met on a forum I seldom visit anymore. Every time I boot up my PS3, I find myself wondering what my Xbox 360 friends are doing.

    So I don’t think I shall be buying any more games for the PS3, save for console exclusives like Uncharted 2 and the inevitable follow-up to LittleBigPlanet. It just isn’t worth it.

  • Ben reviews “The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition”

    monkeySE1

    Whenever a company decides to revisit one of its beloved creations, there is always a risk that they’re going to tamper with something fundemental to what makes it work. Star Wars fans around the world are still having debates over who shot first. Red Dwarf: Remastered left fans of the show complaining about the new, elongated ship. E.T: The Extra Terrestrial Anniversary Edition replaced guns with Walkie Talkies, and consequently looked stupid. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, while not a remastering, did attempt to recreate the formula of earlier titles in the series and failed horribly.

    It can’t have escaped your notice that two of the four examples I mentioned above are from the George Lucas stable, which is slightly worrying when you consider that the Secret of Monkey Island was released back in 1990 by a little company called LucasFilm Games. Ninteen years later the company, now known as LucasArts (or “that company who has developed virtually nothing but Star Wars games for the last decade”), have revisited their seminal graphic adventure game, giving it a new coat of paint, improved sound and audio, and bringing in voice actors to read that wonderfully sharp dialogue. But is it another Star Wars: Special Edition? Or are we looking at the gaming equivalent of Blade Runner: The Final Cut?

    monkeySE2

    The answer is, “Yes.” What does that mean? Well, it’s sort-of a halfway house. The change in the art direction is unavoidably noticable – everything has been completely and utterly reanimated from the ground up. Backgrounds have been repainted, inventory images have been redrawn (although in some cases it’s pretty obvious that the inventory art hasn’t so much been redrawn as it has taken directly from the original and smoothed over), and characters have been redesigned and reanimated frame-by-frame. This has, for the most part, been done wonderfully: The majority of the backgrounds look utterly stunning, and I won’t mind having some high-res prints to frame and hang on my way.

    The character redesign is mostly hit-and-miss, though. Fans seem to be split over whether or not the redesign given to protagonist Guybrush Threepwood (seen on the far left of the above screenshot sporting a fetching white shirt and black pantaloon ensemble) is really any good, with most fans focusing on his haircut. Personally I don’t mind Guybrush’s new look, even if I do miss the boyish curly hair of the original, but a lot of the other characters really didn’t mesh for me. The shopkeeper in the centre of Mêlée Island is perhaps one of the better examples – from the original pixel art I got the image of a scruffy, hairy, slightly round-faced old man. In this redesign, though, the guy looks fairly rugged if still remarkably hairy. Stan, the second-hand boat salesman, is another such example. He has far too much chin for my liking, and his arm flailing somehow loses much of the comedic value it had in the original artwork.

    monkeySE3

    Another problem I had with the art design was the close-up headshots you get of some of the characters during dialogue. The original art, which seems to have been based on actual photography rather than having been hand-drawn, gives each character two facial expressions in the headshots. For a couple of these characters the difference between the two is subtle – Mancomb Seepgood has a wry smile, Carla the Swordmaster of Mêlée Island ha sa disapproving frown, Governor Marley has a smile which is subtle but cute. In the revised artwork, wherein everyone has been given a cartoony makeover, the difference between the two shots is far from subtle. Seepgood’s smile is rather in-your-face, Carla’s frown has turned into a rather fierce scowl, and Marley’s smile simply isn’t cute anymore (perhaps because she has ridiculous cat’s eyes now).

    The voice acting, then. For the most part, it’s pretty damned good. The cast from The Curse of Monkey Island and Escape From Monkey Island return to voice their characters, with the recognizable voices of Dominic Armato and Earl Boen returning to fill the vocal chords of Threepwood and LeChuck respectively, and British actor Alexandra Boyd lending her voice once again to Elaine Marley, Threepwood’s love interest. Boyd was the first of two actors to voice the role (Marley was voiced by Charity James in Escape From Monkey Island and came across as far too aggressive and hen-pecky for my tastes) and she is, in my opinion, the better of the two, but here her voice just seems to stick out. She seems to have approached Secret as she would a children’s television show, and she sounds rather sing-song and Pantomimesque at times. She was brilliant in Curse, where the approach suited the hand-animated cartoon style, but here it just doesn’t quite work for me.

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    And that’s a problem I have with a lot of the voice acting in this game. It doesn’t seem to fit. It’s much the same problem fans of novels or book series have when Hollywood decides to adapt them – what comes across on the screen simply cannot match what one envisions inside of one’s own mind, and a lot of the voices in this game simply didn’t seem right to me. Where it works, it works remarkably well – the aforementioned shopkeeper sounds more or less as I’d imagined him to, as did Herman Toothrot and Meathook – but a lot of the voices… Hm. You have to understand, I’ve been playing this game since I was five. The characters’ voices have had eighteen years to develop in my head. When my little sister was old enough to play the game but not old enough to be able to read it, I would sit with her and read the dialogue, doing the voices as I went. It’s a very personal thing for me, and to hear what sounds like a very poorly-matched voice coming from the mouth of a character I’ve been hearing perfectly for nearly two decades… well, it’s jarring.

    I feel I’m focusing far too much on the aesthetic negatives here – for all its faults, the Special Edition builds and improves upon much that was laid down in the original. The musical score in particular is absolutely magnificent – hearing the theme tune swell up for the first time made my heart skip a beat, and it was all I could do to stop myself from crying. I’m serious. The themes to Doctor Who, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), Red Dwarf and Futurama all elicit that same response from me,  because I’m a ruddy great big softie. Right now, I feel like I need to have that theme as the ringtone on my iPhone. In fact I wouldn’t mind having the entire soundtrack. It was beautifully, wonderfully, spectacularly scored, managing to somehow both be the original soundtrack and also be a seperate thing entirely.

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    Perhaps the smartest decision that LucasArts made during the development process was to build the code for this new game on top of the original game, allowing you to switch between the spangly new Special Edition and the original game at any point with the press of a button. It’s a wonderful addition, one that you wish George Lucas would have instated on the original Star Wars trilogy DVDs. I had intended to play through the entire game in the new Special Edition mode but I found my curiosity getting the better of me, occasionally pressing the hotswap button to compare the old with the new. Indeed, in one instance this was actually necessary – there is a puzzle that occurs towards the end of the game’s first part where you have to take a tankard of grog from Mêlée Island’s only bar to the jail cell to corrode the lock and help a prisoner escape, and you have to pour the grog from one tankard to another as you go since it also eats away at the pewter tankard. The new interface, which hides the inventory and verb menus off-screen, simply doesn’t allow you to switch from one tankard to another as hastily as you’d like.

    I had this problem again at the game’s finale. Without wanting to give away the final puzzle for potential newcomers to the series, it’s a time-sensitive puzzle that I can usually execute it quickly – Pick up x, use x on y. Five clicks. Easy. With the new interface, however, I had to press Ctrl to bring up the verb menu, click Pick up, click on x, press Ctrl and Alt to bring up the Verb and Inventory menus, click Use, click x, then click on y. I didn’t do this in time on my first try and had to wait for the second chance to execute it. I swear baby, that never happens.

    A thought occurs – I’m playing on a PC, and I have a pretty quick mouse hand (and you can stop that snickering at the back). I can’t imagine the frustration someone playing on the Xbox 360 with a controller might experience on that puzzle…*

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    And therein, perhaps, lies the crux of the problem with The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. For all the love that went into it, for all the painstaking effort that went into reanimating each sprite, repainting each background, re-recording each piece of music, it has perhaps been over-thought. It would have been nice to at least have the option of shrinking the game window a little and keeping the verb and inventory menus at the bottom of the screen, as per the tradition. It might maybe have been interesting to be able to mix-and-match elements, allowing us to play with the original graphics but keep, say, the re-scored music or the voice acting.

    But mostly it’s nice to see Monkey Island at the forefront of gaming news and chatter once again. It’s fantastic to see a generation of new fans experiencing what I have experienced over the last two decades. It’s remarkable that LucasArts have given players the option of playing the original, untouched version of the game as well as the spiffy new special edition. Despite my chief complaints, this is still The Secret of Monkey Island. This is still one of the most seminal, groundbreaking, important games of all time. It’s still challenging, humorous, entertaining and, above all else, fun. You’ll have a hard time finding a more complete, enjoyable gaming experience for $10.

    Final Scores

    Substance – 8.5
    Style – 7
    Slant – 9.5

    Overall
    8 out of 10

    (For comparison, the original gets a full 10.)

    * Update on July 16th: Andrew Ellard, who I suppose could be described as a friend, has been playing Monkey Island SE on his Xbox 360 and had this to say concerning the fiddly controls on the grog tankard puzzle:

    Here I am, posting at 4am having downloaded TSOMI today and literally just completed this part of the game…and it was fine. By the time I got the the tankards, I’d already dropped using the pop-up command menu almost entirely. The 360 version allocates a command each to the eight directions of the D-pad, and that’s how I’m doing 90% of my selections.

    Though it’s not ideal compared to the mouse-pointing I did on the Amiga way back when (where, in fact, I don’t think I fully played this game, but skipped straight on to Monkey Island 2), it didn’t cause any mayor problem. And it’s preferable, just, to moving the pointer to the options in the Classic mode when using a controller.

    Pfft. 360 gamers catch all the breaks.

  • Why Monkey Island is my Star Wars

    During my childhood I was sucked into a seemingly vast fictional world that was populated with rogues, scoundrels, a dark evil and a plucky young kid wanting to learn the ways a time long gone by. I speak, of course, of The Secret of Monkey Island, a game written by Ron Gilbert and published by LucasFilm Games (who later changed their name to LucasArts).

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    I was four years old when Secret was released, and while I couldn’t really read at the time I would watch for hours as my cousin Andy played the game on our old Amiga 500. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I was captivated by what I saw on screen. Back then games didn’t have voice actors to deliver the lines – there simply wasn’t the space on the floppy disks – so all of the in-game dialogue appeared on screen above the characters. I couldn’t read at that age, but I pushed myself to learn so I could play the game myself. I was, I think, six when I finally completed the game for the first time, when I finally saw the hero Guybrush Threepwood and his love Elaine Marley standing at Stan’s Second Hand Shipyard watching the body of the Ghost Pirate LeChuck explode like fireworks against the night sky. I have never been so infatuated by an image in all my life. It is burned into my mind, a perfect glistening memory, the one thing I think of when I remember the youngest days of my childhood.

    A couple of years later I’d heard that a second game, LeChuck’s Revenge: Monkey Island 2, had been released. Although I would read about it in the Amiga magazines my Dad bought it would be several years before I finally got to play the game myself. I filled that time with other, similar adventure games. I found my Dad’s old King’s Quest games and worked my way through the first three in the series. They were charming but they didn’t elicit the same feeling of excitement and wonder that the first game did. The closest a game came to doing that was 1993’s Simon the Sorcerer, a British-developed game that felt spiritually very similar to Secret. This was also the first adventure game I played with voice actors instead of on-screen text, and it featured none other than Red Dwarf star Chris Barrie as the titular teenaged wizard.

    1997 saw the release of The Curse of Monkey Island, the third game in the series, but that year I was too busy wrapping my head around Revenge for the first time, having been given a cracked pirate copy for the Amiga by a friend of the family. That beast came on eleven floppy disks, by far the biggest game I’d ever played at the time. I can’t define the sheer amount of excitement that filled my young heart as I installed the game to my computer’s hard drive (at that time a beefed up Amiga 1200 that my Dad had left us when he moved to the States). Each time the installer asked for the next disk I felt the grip of anxiousness and glee tighten. One disk down, ten to go… one step closer to being able to see what happens next to our entrepid pirate wannabe.

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    I was probably just as taken aback by the ending to Revenge as practically every other Monkey Island fan out there had been years before when the game had first come out. Without wanting to ruin it, the ending was a bizarre, unexpected, bittersweet cliffhanger that has been both hailed as one of the finest endings to a game of all time and the laziest, worst piece of trash ever to come from the Lucas stable. At the time I hated it. It felt like a kick in the groin, like LucasArt and Ron Gilbert had taken our money and ridden their solid gold speedboat down the cash river out to the open waters of the Financial Gain Ocean. Anyone who’s played any game by Hideo Kojima no doubt knows the feeling well.

    Over time, and after discovering an article that explores Guybrush’s world and what the secret of Monkey Island might be, the ending began to make more sense to me. It began to feel less lazy and more finely crafted. A second playthrough of LeChuck’s Revenge some years later (and, in fact, a playthrough of the very first game) revealed a ton of stuff to me that helped make the ending much less nonsensical to me. I now think it’s the greatest ending to a game ever produced.

    The series could, and perhaps should have ended there. It didn’t. Two further games were produced, without the aid of Ron Gilbert who left LucasArts to do his own thing. While The Curse of Monkey Island was an exceptional game, a thoroughly enjoyable and very humorous adventure, it was missing something integral… some key element that made it feel like a Monkey Island game. In many ways Curse is the end of Monkey Island because the fourth title, Escape From Monkey Island, is a trainwreck – the leap to 3D didn’t benefit the game at all, leaving fans with horrible controls, terrible fan service and failed attempts to revisit locations from the previous games. It still had that classic Monkey Island wit, but without the charm and with an ending even worse than Curse‘s it wasn’t worth the time it took me to go to the store and buy it.

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    The entire Monkey Island franchise can be easily compared to the Star Wars saga. Secret is an utterly brilliant game that took gamers by surprise when it was released. Revenge is a marvellous experience building upon the groundwork laid down by Secret building to a crescendo cliffhanger (in this case, almost literally) that fans desperately wanted to see resolved. Curse is a good third entry, but the veneer is beginning to peel – it’s clear that this is the beginning of the end. And Escape… well, Escape is the entry everybody was looking forward to that couldn’t deliver and left fans feeling bitter and angry.

    The Star Wars parallels continue – yesterday saw the release of The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, a high-definition reworking of the game that started it all. The artwork had been completely redone from the ground up. The music has been rescored, this time using actual, real, actual instruments. The dialogue, that brilliant, gloriously witty dialogue, has been recorded by a team of voice actors many of them reprising their roles from later games in the series. The entire thing has been, dare I say, remastered. And has it worked? Well, it’s hit and miss, and I’ll address that in another blog post.

    I grew up with Monkey Island. I grew up wanting to be Guybrush Threepwood. The Secret of Monkey Island is the game that made pirates cool again. It’s the game that made adventure games not just another game on the shelf but made them events. Before Secret I hadn’t experienced a game with such a wonderfully crafted narrative before, and while titles like King’s Quest had stories they were so loose and freedom (what you’d probably call a “sandbox” game in today’s gaming vernacular) so as to be largely irrelevant. Secret was the first game I fell in love with. It’s the game that made me want to make games myself. It’s the game that made me want to be a writer.

    The Secret of Monkey Island, along with two of its three sequels, is the greatest computer game of all time. It will always have a special place in my heart.

  • Technology Crisis

    BEN sits at his computer, ready to work.

    BEN

    Okay iTunes, give me something AWESOME to get me PUMPED for work.

    ITUNES

    Here, listen to Jonathan Coulton’s “When You Go”, followed immediately by “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You” by Colin Hay.

    BEN

    (Gently sobbing)

    You bastard.

  • Disk Editing For Fun And Profit

    Amiga Power is the magazine that made me want to write about videogames for a living. I’ve since changed my tune, but it’s hard not to read stuff like this and not think to myself, “Man, that sure sounds like fun.”

    Disk Editing For Fun And Profit

    Easily the most harrowing aspect of AMIGA POWER, the universally hated though vitally important task of organising games (as opposed to physically compiling the disks) fell to anyone who wasn’t icy enough not to care.

    Ten rubberingly-stretched days of crushing desperation would then happen to the hapless individual, on top of their usual duties of writing the mag, or subbing it, or being the Editor, with no safety net of a humorous feature to put in instead and everyone else treading round them carefully as you’d do with someone due to be executed on Thursday, at the end of which a set of games would appear as if wrought from the air by sheer mental effort.

    These would then be sent off to Kenny The Disk Compiler and by noon he’d have called back to report four of the games had custom loaders that would need two days to crack, three were A1200-only, one of the others needed 6mb of memory and anyway there was only room for that PD version of Pacman, provided we didn’t mind it split across both disks.

    Shouting would occur while everyone else ran away, and four days later the finalised disks would arrive with the duplicators, who would then lose the labels or spontaneously forget how to work their machines. Eventually, samples would be returned to the office, where they’d fail to work on at least the two most popular of the 790 models of Amiga currently on sale, and weeping would result, and kicking in of photocopiers.

    Finally, the okay would be given to copy thousands of disks, and with only a few days’ delay while the duplicators neglected to examine the fax or spontaneously forgot how to read, the issue and its shiny game-packed coverdisks would appear on the shelves.

    The pallid wretch who had pulled this off would then swear on the eyes of the orphan children of the world never to do it again until it was his turn.

    And why did we go through this stomach-clutching terror month after month? Because we cared. Do you see? Do you get it yet? We cared. Because we cared. That was the point. Because we cared. Do you understand? Is it clear? Because we cared. It was because we cared that we did it. Have you grasped that thought and do you hold it in your head, that we cared?

    Gagh. (Dies.)

  • I’m Selling These Fine Leather Jackets…

    I think it’s safe to say that The Secret of Monkey Island is the single greatest computer game of all time.

    That game is responsible for so many of my ambitions growing up. Back when I was very young I would watch my cousin Andy play the game incessantly, and I learnt to read specifically so I could play the game too.  The artwork of the game inspired me to draw, something I don’t do so much these days. The fantastic dialogue, utterly superb story and brilliant characters made me want to write stories of my own. Monkey Island helped shape so many of my goals growing up. It’s my favourite game ever and, like a good book, I replay it once a year every year forever.

    You have no idea how excited I was to wake up this morning and discover that not only are LucasArts releasing a special edition for the Xbox 360 and PC, but that TellTale Games are working on an episodic series of sequels.

    Go to the special edition website and check it out. They’re not just repackaging the original game. They’re giving it a complete overhaul. They’re going back and recording the voices for all of the characters (the original game was text-only, with the characters getting voice actors for the third game in the series). They’ve reanimated all of the sprites, repainted all of the backgrounds. They don’t appear to Lucasing the game, either – it doesn’t look like they’re going to do silly things like add more background characters to Melee Island™, or make the clock in the centre of town show the correct time. This is not, haha, a Lucas’d remake like A New Hope. This is the exact same game we played twenty years ago. They’re just giving it a polish for us. The option to switch between the original graphics and the new versions at any point during play is indicative of that, and is a fantastic touch.

    I watched the video on LucasArts’ website, and I smiled. Lots. It looks like LucasArts will be at E3, so hopefully I’ll get a peak at the game on Tuesday. I’m overjoyed that series creator Ron Gilbert is involved in both of these projects. The man’s a genius, and to continue Monkey Island without him would be a travesty (as evidenced by Escape From Monkey Island, which was a disaster).

    I’m going to stop typing now and play Monkey Island again.

  • Weathering Heights

    I <3 LA

    I just fixed the Weather app on my dock. I needn’t have bothered, really – I live in LA.