The first episode is called The Penal Zone and it’s full of all the high-brow intellectual humor that the title implies. We’ve made a subtle shift to the puzzle-solving in this season: there’s a little bit less emphasis on using inventory items together and more emphasis on using Max’s new psychic powers and eventually, figuring out how they work together. The idea is that instead of a lot of random objects that have one specific use that you have to figure out, there’s a smaller set of powers that you can use in multiple places and multiple ways. I’ll be interested to see how people like it.

I already know how they’ll like the other change, which is all the improvements to the visuals. The artists did an obscene amount of work on the environments, characters, and character animation. Plus we got a bunch of lighting and rendering improvements, including real-time shadows.

Plus there’s an evil space gorilla named General Skun-ka’pe, you know, for the kids.

Check out the trailer in high definition because Telltaler Shaun Finney spent a lot of time on it and it came out really good and I’m not just saying that because he could kick me in the head without breaking a sweat. And then you can pre-order the whole season because really, you know you’re going to buy it anyway so why delay the inevitable?

So it’s great to see The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom turn the “experimental game” idea into something really fun and exciting. In concept, it’s similar to Cursor*10 and Time Donkey: you solve puzzles using “clones” of your character that have been unstuck in time.

But comparing this game to other games (which is going to be inevitable, unfortunately) is just shorthand for explaining how the game works; this is still a genuinely novel project. The tutorial is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the game, so you dive right in and start playing and most importantly, having fun while you’re figuring out how the game works. Presentation throughout, including the art and especially the music, are excellent. And the puzzle design is genuinely clever, forcing you to combine everything you’ve learned how to do instead of rote repetition of a concept. It’s just a fantastic idea well executed: it doesn’t sacrifice production values for “experimentation,” it doesn’t let itself get pretentious, and it doesn’t sacrifice fun for intelligence. I love it.

The game was started as a project at USC, and the creators are now calling themselves The Odd Gentlemen and have released it on Xbox Live Arcade through 2K Play. (And it’s only 10 bucks!) As much fun as I’m having with the game, I’m even more excited to see a project that went from idea to execution to publishing without anything getting lost along the way.

I’d bet that plenty of people saw the problem with that immediately, but it took a while for it to occur to me. I’m not talking about the most obvious problem of paying 500 bucks to play chess or poker; I’m assuming that the simpler traditional games will quickly give way to fancier projects, like variants on Magic: The Gathering-type games or Real-Time Strategy or tabletop roleplaying or that global war game that Bond played against the bad guy in Never Say Never Again.

The more interesting problem is that almost every card and board game I can think of requires you to have a hand that the other players can’t see.

Even games like Settlers of Catan, where most of the action takes place on a shared game board, has an element of strategy in what you hide from the other players. When Big Huge Games did their Xbox Live version of Catan, they assumed that everybody counts cards anyway (obviously they’ve never seen me trying to count cards in a game), so they made that information publicly available. But as far as I can remember, the number and type of victory cards each player has is still kept secret.

A cooperative game like Pandemic would be an obvious candidate. And from what I understand, D&D campaigns have players cooperating against a dungeon master. (I’ve been writing this blog for six years and I’ve finally used the phrase “dungeon master.” It’s been a good run). But cooperative games are a niche category even for board games.

Now, I admit that it did occur to me that players could view their private info on an iPhone or iPod Touch, and use the iPad as a central game board. And I do admit that the idea of that gives me a geek boner like you couldn’t imagine. But it still feels deeply, fundamentally, morally wrong to even suggest such a thing.

So two questions:

1. Are there any existing competitive board games that don’t require players to have a “hand” that’s kept secret from other players?
2. Using a shared device like an iPad or a big touch-sensitive video table, what would be some good ways to keep player-specific information hidden from other players?

You can imagine his surprise: a union funded by the dues paid by its members would actually open its doors to a multi-billion dollar industry, bestowing honors upon “writers” to encourage storytelling excellence in videogames and also to encourage people to join the union. (You’re not eligible for the award unless you’re a member of the WGA, which even three years later is still relatively rare in the games industry). They actually treat these “writers” as if they were real professionals, almost as if they had real jobs like TV sitcom screenwriters or movie reviewers!

His article — and I use the term generously — focuses on the charming human interest story of li’l Gary Whitta, the screenwriter of The Book of Eli, who in addition to being one of the founders of the cute videogame magazine PC Gamer also “wrote” for videogames like Prey and Gears of War. I sure hope Whitta remembered to put on his big-boy suit when he made it up to the Big Leagues to work in TV and movies!

(Gleiberman, like most highly-paid journalists, investigated the story using Whitta’s wikipedia page. I expected so much more journalistic integrity from the acclaimed writer of “Dumplings of Justice.”)

After being condescending and dismissive of Whitta’s entire career for a paragraph, Gleiberman goes on to break the news:

What I had no idea of, until a press release that literally arrived an hour ago, is that videogame writing has now attained such prominence and prestige that it merits its own award…from the Writers Guild! The WGA nominations for Best Videogame Writing have just been announced: They include Assassin’s Creed I (story by Corey May; script by May, Joshua Rubin, and Jeffry Yohalem), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (script by Marc Guggenheim), and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (written by Amy Henning). This might be an easy thing to mock, except that it really does make sense.

And you know, actually, Mr. Gleiberman is correct there. The idea that anyone in 2010 could earnestly state that videogame writing only achieved prominence once it merited an award from an organization made up mostly of people who don’t work in videogames — that is a very easy thing to mock.

So easy to mock, in fact, that you needn’t even mention that film criticism is such a widely (albeit unfairly) disregarded and dismissed field that anyone working in film criticism should know full well how ludicrous it is to see his career shown such a lack of respect. No, you can mock it merely by pointing out that the videogame industry has its own organizations with their own awards, and that they don’t need the acknowledgement of unrelated groups to “attain prominence and prestige.”

Or by pointing out that anyone who earned whatever prominence and prestige he has by working at a weekly magazine about pop culture, really should have played at least one videogame by now. Especially if he’s going to use the phrase “videogame writing” as a pejorative:

Why shouldn’t we honor the creators of videogame stories as writers in an entertainment universe where more and more credible Hollywood screenwriters are drawing their aesthetic inspiration from those very same games? And, of course, the standards are shifting even as we speak. Evaluated as a traditional Hollywood screenplay, Avatar, as I have argued on several occasions, is thin, derivative, serviceable, and vaporous. But taken in a different context, as a glorified act of videogame creation, it might well seem downright visionary.

And the frustrating thing about that is that it reveals Gleiberman is so hopelessly out of touch, it deflates any attempts to take it seriously and be offended by it. At least when a real film critic complains about the videogames, he acknowledges his preconceptions, and he demonstrates a real attempt to judge games by what they aspire to do. Gleiberman’s sneering at vapid videogames is so lazy and cliched, he might as well be complaining about the hippity-hop music or the evils of comic books or the dangers of billiards.

Not to mention conclusively proving that he hasn’t played a videogame since Tetris if even that. He uses Avatar as an example of the negative influence videogames have had on Hollywood (when it’s clear that it’s the kind of movie that “gamers” will just love), seemingly unaware that the problem is reversed. It’s because of the influence of James Cameron’s Aliens and Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan that videogame players have had to be space marines or had to raid Normandy over and over again for the past twenty years.

Clearly on a roll after his Avatar jab, Gleiberman goes on to point out that he watches real movies, making a weak attempt to disguise his pretentious O What a Cineaste Am I masturbation as a eulogy for Eric Rohmer. And he begins with the supposition “If the videogame mindset represents the most potent threat yet to the rich, classical 20th century ideal of what a screenplay can be….”

The most potent threat to the rich, classical 21st century ideal of what videogame writing (note the lack of sarcastic quotes, you pompous twat) can be is the pretentious sneering of people like Gleiberman, clinging to outdated notions of “high art” and “low art.” Instead of embracing the fact that we’re living in the age of unprecedented access to art and information of all types, available to inspire works of unprecedented richness, depth, scope, and accessibility. (And again: the man works for Entertainment Weekly, the bible of melting-pot pop culture. It boggles the mind).

But even more dangerous than self-satisfied outsiders like Gleiberman are the people within the industry who take attitudes like his seriously. Those self-hating game developers who aspire to other media for recognition and validation, instead of exploring what’s possible in interactive entertainment, simply mimicking what they’ve seen before instead of being truly inspired by it. Or those pretentious and self-serving game developers who assume they have nothing to learn from other media, that vapidity is the property of an entire medium, instead of just being the failing of an individual artist.

It’s not a brand-new topic, and we’re going to be seeing more and more of it. In fact, all of the academic or esoteric or tedious and rambling essays about storytelling, or emergent narrative, or authorial control, or world building — even the ones I disagree with — are all basically getting at the same question: how can we push games forward as a medium?

The Great Debate That Shouldn’t Be

“Pushing games forward as a medium” seems like one of those vague, completely innocuous goals that absolutely nobody could object to. But thanks to the symbiotic (parasitic?) relationship between videogames and the internet, even a goal like that can become bafflingly contentious.

Even taking into account all the varying opinions on how to do that, exactly, there are the people insisting that it’s not even a good idea. “Games are an entirely new thing that operate on an entirely new set of rules.” (Or alternatively, that games predate traditional media and therefore aren’t subject to the same rules). That all leads to a rejection of any mention of Hollywood, followed by comments about “redefining the nature of ‘fun’” and then to a claim as ludicrous as “games are not media.”

Except the problem with that is that games are media. You can go on panels and stamp your feet and insist that the inherent beauty of game design has been corrupted by movies and comics and television, and that everything we need to know we can learn from Chess and Go. That doesn’t change the fact that people have been using games to tell stories ever since Colossal Cave Adventure back in 1976, and people have been buying those games since a few years afterwards. Telling them that they’re doing it all wrong, that the answer is all in enabling the player, or building virtual worlds, or the perennial “if you want to tell stories, you should be making movies, not games:” none of that changes the basic fact that there are plenty of us who want to make and want to play games that “work” like traditional media. It doesn’t add to or promote meaningful discussion; it’s noise. It’s the equivalent of the old joke about the guy who goes to the doctor and says “it hurts when I do this” and the doctor replies “then don’t do that,” except it’s not funny.

On top of that, whenever you talk about “meaning” in videogames, there’s always an outcry from the folks who insist that games don’t need to mean anything. I believe that that’s partly because trying to “redefine the nature of fun” and “develop new models of meaning” so often results in attempts that are dry, tedious, pretentious, and/or amateurish. If they result in anything at all, instead of just existing as pontifications on a blog or message board somewhere. That leads to the response, “what’s wrong with just being fun?”

And the answer is that there’s nothing wrong with that. And “meaning” shouldn’t have to take the form of a tedious high-concept game, or writing that seems pulled straight from a high school poetry journal. But even if it’s not particularly profound, there has to be something else, something that’s currently missing. There are plenty of us who are tired of seeing a medium with the potential of interactive entertainment keep getting relegated to just a “diversion” or “hobby.” As Chris Remo puts it:

[Games] do the “fun” thing well, and they frequently give me a lot to think about, but they rarely speak to me the same way a wonderful novel, film, or album does. I don’t as frequently feel that I’ve genuinely realized something about myself or my world in the same way I do when I read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, watch “Mad Men,” or listen to The Who’s Quadrophenia.

I’d name-check different works of art, but I’m all on board with the sentiment. I’ve spent hours and hours playing games, and those moments of connection are few and far between. I’ve spent hours playing excellent games that do everything they set out to do, and yet I walk away feeling like I haven’t really accomplished anything, or learned anything. I’ve seen games that come so close to getting it right, but then stumble in one way or another. There’s nothing wrong with a “diversion,” but there has to be a way to make something more.

Intent

Chris ends his post with the conclusion “Intent seems like a great first step,” and I’d agree. I’d disagree with Sean that the question is “what is this game about?” since that’s too easily confused with a plot or story. Is Super Mario Bros “about” a plumber trying to save a princess? Plus it starts to break down when you try to apply it to games that have a consistent vision but don’t try to tell a story: to use Sean’s example, what is Team Fortress 2 about? Or Bejeweled?

The Chris Hecker talk referenced by Chris Remo’s article pulls the question back to “Why are you making this game?” That’s got its own problems, since that’s too easily answered with “because my company is paying me to” or “because the last one made a buttload of money.” That’s not just being flippant, either: that’s a mindset that’s pervasive at game companies, especially as the self-proclaimed “AAA” franchises price themselves out of the range of original IP. It’s also a question that’s so easily-answered a developer can be placated into thinking he’s solved the problem without doing anything. “Why am I making another match-three puzzle game? Because they’re fun, they’re accessible, and this one has [RPG elements/bombs/a wise-cracking companion/tits].”

I think the two questions developers should be asking themselves are:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. Why am I using a game to say it, instead of some other medium?

It’s still not perfect: what is Plants vs Zombies trying to say? But I think it’s pretty close. And I prefer it because it emphasizes a key point that’s not getting enough attention: videogames, like all media, are a form of communication.

The Message

Both Plants vs Zombies and Team Fortress 2 are beautifully-designed games: clear, purposeful and (until the TF2 upgrades came along) balanced. They both have impeccable art direction, music and sound design that work perfectly in conjunction with the game design, accomplishing exactly what they need to do (and in the case of TF2, more than it needs to do).

But, you know: so what? None of that is the element that makes those games stand out, the thing that makes me feel like I’ve actually accomplished something after playing them. Game design is indeed an art in and of itself, but it’s not “meaningful” except on an academic level. Art and music can be appreciated on their own, but in a game they’re “meaningful” because they’re used in conjunction with something else: if the only thing appealing about a game is its art or its music, you’d be better off just buying the soundtrack or the super collector’s edition art book.

No, the most important thing that those games have in common is that they’re funny. You can’t play them without getting a sense of the developers behind them. They’ve communicated with you; they’ve “said something.” What is that “something,” exactly? It’s kind of hard to define in an elevator pitch or even a blog post, which is why it’s a good thing they chose to use a game to say it.

And it needn’t be anything earth-shakingly profound or mind-numbingly tedious, either. It can be as simple as “I think this is funny.” I know that the Sam & Max and Strong Bad games aren’t intended to say anything other than “These are funny characters,” and they’re not intended to ask any questions more thought-provoking than “GET IT?!?” But I think that sense that there’s a real, identifiable voice behind them is key.

Of course, communication doesn’t have to be one-way. The people who are insisting that games are a completely new thing separate from traditional media, that they’re not about communicating a message but enabling the player, that we should remove the developer from direct interaction and instead be allowing players to develop their own “meaning” — I think they’re wrong, but they started out on the right track. That’s why the second question is so important: you aren’t just delivering a message, you’re delivering a message via an interactive medium.

Practically, interactive game development has so much inherent complexity that the statement “if you just want to tell stories, you should write a book or make a movie” isn’t just an insult along the lines of “your kind’s not welcome here.” It’s actually good advice: it’s a lot easier to write a book or make a movie, if only because we have a much better idea of how those work. But I’m not letting the “keep Hollywood out of our games!” types off the hook so quickly: just because something’s difficult to do, doesn’t mean that it can’t or shouldn’t be done, or that the medium is inherently unsuited to it. I’ve seen plenty of examples of stories that are more engaging, characters that become more “real,” or concepts that hit closer to home because they were presented interactively. There’s still huge amount of untapped potential for games to convey a message in a way that traditional media can’t.

And that’s not just a theory; it’s already been done. And it’s not just the province of pretentious, experimental indie games, but for the best-selling PC series of all time.

Like “The Sims,” But Funny

Years ago, when I was working for a small independent developer, we were asked to put together a pitch for a game that emphasized interpersonal interaction and relationships over combat. It was described by the publisher as “Like The Sims, but funny.” That should’ve been the first warning sign, because anyone who doesn’t get that The Sims is funny is someone you probably don’t want to have final creative control over your project.

To be fair, this was back around 2001 or so, after The Sims had gotten to be well-known but before it became such a behemoth. So it’s understandable that people didn’t quite “get it” yet. And, to be fair, the game has lost much of the “magic” of the early versions as it’s gotten larger and more complex (and more valuable as a franchise), while still being a fine game and still keeping most of the essence of the original intact.

But the original was a lot more funny and innovative than people give it credit for. And more importantly, it said something. It had a real voice.

Most of that voice was in Simlish, a practical design decision (we can’t possibly record an indefinite amount of dialogue!) that ended up defining so much of the experience of the game. It implied that these characters exist in a world of their own. It’s a subtle meta-commentary on human conversations: we may believe we’re being profound, but to anyone else it just sounds like gibberish. And it keeps the focus of the game’s strategy on time management instead of story-building or puzzle-solving: it doesn’t matter what the characters are saying, it just matters that they’re socializing.

One of the biggest aspects of the strategy game is the build/buy mode: you buy things that make it easier for the Sims to manage their time during the day. They could’ve made this work just like the shop in an RPG, since it serves basically the same purpose: kill monsters to get loot to buy things which make it easier to kill more valuable monsters. But instead, they made it a fundamental part of the game, and in a way that made it meaningful. It’s not just a strategy game anymore, it’s a satire on suburbia. The text for each item is cleverly written to mimic that of catalogs. The music is a dry parody of shopping center muzak to reinforce the whole joke that you’ve become obsessed with conspicuous consumption. And now, players are encouraged to spend real money to buy virtual items in an interface that’s much like the in-game version. I haven’t yet decided whether that’s a tragic turn of events, or a brilliant continuation of the satire from the game into the real world.

There are plenty of other bits of comedy throughout, most of them brought about by taking a design decision and then turning it into a chance for expression. Sims jump up and spin in the air to change clothes presumably because it was easier than having the whole thing animated, but it’s become one of the iconic aspects of the game. There are moments of slapstick scattered throughout, because everything a Sim does has to have both a failure state and a success state (and the failure is usually funnier). The TV broadcasts give the sound and music guys plenty of opportunities to continue the parody and satire, because Sims have to spend a good bit of time in front of a TV or radio to raise their fun levels.

And the “emergent narrative” promise was way overblown, but the concept of the game does allow for weird situations you simply wouldn’t get from a non-interactive medium. You can end up with a woman who plays roshambo with the Grim Reaper to save the soul of her cheating husband, only to end up starting a fire and having the resurrected husband start dancing on her grave. And it allows for more unstable people to come up with near-genius experiments like forcing an overweight hydrophobe to swim through a pool to get to food.

But these aren’t just player-driven content, and they’re not intended to be. For all the talk about emergent narratives and enabling the player in The Sims — and both are valid design goals, not just marketing — the developers aren’t just sitting back and creating sandboxes for the player to create her own content. They’re saying something.

1. What are they trying to say? That if you abstract human life and social behavior far enough, it becomes a funny satire on how our goals in life can be reduced to simple time management and consumerism.
2. Why are they using a game to say it? Because the message is driven home more clearly if you’re the one deciding whether going to the bathroom is important enough to put off asking your girlfriend to marry you or sitting down and writing The Great American Novel for one more night. And because it’s when the player throws his own wants and needs into the mix that the abstraction becomes meaningful.

Which is pretty heady stuff for a game that’s about watching computer people pee themselves.

It’s an interesting experiment, to break out of the usual publisher model and fund a project directly with the developer. At the site, you can see Heather’s pitch video, read about the game’s set-up, and make a donation. There’s also a description of what you get at each level of contribution, from a backstage pass into the development process to a more collaborative role.

So check it out!

The idea of “finishing” a game is long gone (although I did actually finish 4 of the games on this list, which is a first). Here are my favorites of the games I played long enough to form an opinion. iPhone games aren’t included:

1. Batman: Arkham Asylum
It’s a full-on Batman simulator, and it got almost everything right. Looks fantastic, keeps you engaged from start to finish, and most importantly: it got the pacing right, mixing up the brawling and the stealth sections in just the right combination.

2. Plants vs. Zombies
I could still do without the music video, and the last level is more random than strategic, but everything else is about perfect.

3. Flower
It’s a beautiful game, it’s exactly as long as it needs to be, and it says everything it wants to say via game mechanics instead of cutscenes or dialogue. If we’re genuinely serious about elevating videogames as an artistic medium, then we need to be making and supporting games like Flower.

4. Rhythm Heaven
The Fillbots still drive me nuts, but this is one of the best games of the year just for the stink-eye you get from the other guys in the Glee Club.

5. The Beatles Rock Band
Best opening video ever, and it does what the Rock Band games were designed to do: let you appreciate music in a new way.

6. Torchlight
I’d heard the game was like Diablo, but it is Diablo. It’s hard to fault the team — if I’d made one of the best games ever made, I’d probably want to just keep making it, too. I just wish they’d added something new. Still, there’s a reason Diablo is one of the best games ever made.

7. The Sims 3
It’s a great sequel, but as it’s gotten bigger, it’s lost a good bit of what made it so innovative.

8. Anno 1404
This is one of those European city-building games, and it pushed all my buttons. It’s absolutely amazing to look at, it’s got all kinds of depth at the city building level, and the combat isn’t that annoying.

9. Trine
I liked this game when it first came out, but I was never compelled to finish it.

10. Magic: The Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers
Apparently the card game was really popular a while back. I never really played it that much, but the Xbox version kind of explains the appeal. The best part is the whole “challenge” section, which reminds you that there’s supposed to be a strategy to the game more than “buy all the cards.”

My honorable mention section has the games I’ve checked out for an hour or so, but won’t be able to finish until midway through 2010 at the earliest.

Dragon Age: Origins
Of all the role-playing games I’ve played, this sure is one of them. It all seems very well made, but the only really novel thing I’ve seen so far is the ludicrous amount of blood that covers everything after every battle. Plus I think I need to start over because my character just looks weird and it’s unnerving.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
The first twenty minutes or so are absolutely amazing, and I was completely convinced that this was a game that could live up to the hype. Then it kind of turned into the first Uncharted, with too-obvious puzzling and some pretty uninspired shootouts.

• $20 for the entire season of five episodes
• $4 per episode (or if you prefer, $2 for the first three and $7 for the two at the end that are especially good)
• 60 cents per Xbox achievement
• around 1.1 cents per hour of my life spent working on the season
• around 0.003 cents per newly-white hair on my head and face
• around 4 cents per joke
• around $1.25 per really good joke

As a special bonus: for the people without the Xbox 360s, Telltale is currently selling the PC version of Season Two for $19.95, to make things fair.

No, it’s real! This is a thing that is really happening!

And here’s a bunch of clips they used at PAX!

What makes the game work so well is its focus. That may seem like a weird claim to anyone who’s played the game or the demo, since the game has so many disparate components. It’s got a ton of melee combat, but it’s not really a fighting game. It’s got sections where you have to take out a group of bad guys without being spotted, but it’s not really a stealth game. It’s got jumping and maneuvering sections, but it’s not a platformer. It has you tracking down evidence, but it’s not a detective or an adventure game. And it’s got tons of cutscenes and character histories and objectives, but it’s not really a story game, either. More than anything else, the game is a Batman simulator.

When I played the demo, I was put off at first by the camera angle: it hovered, Bat-Mite-like, just over Batman’s shoulder, a little too close to be convenient, but too far away to be as immersive as a first-person view. In retrospect, though, that’s the perfect set-up for this game: you’re almost The Batman. You see and do everything he does, but you can’t quite get inside his head. (And for the record, the camera work has the same level of polish as everything else in this game: it felt natural within minutes, and there was only one moment in the entire game where I even noticed the camera at all).

The usual tack for licensed games is to take a cool character and then drop him into an existing game type; for Arkham Asylum, it really feels like they built a game around being Batman. It seems that at every point during the game’s production, the developers asked, What Would Batman Do? They took each of the iconic aspects of the character (and the Rogue’s Gallery) and built a gameplay mechanic out of it.

I’ve read reviews that call out one part or another as being particularly under-developed, but they’re kind of missing the point. One review said that the combat was a little simplistic, the combo system unnecessary, and button-mashing would get you through most of the fights against common thugs. Which would be true, except: You’re Batman. There’s no question he’ll beat up common thugs; he says as much in the game. The only question is how much of a bad-ass he’ll look like as he’s doing it, and that’s where the combo system rewards you. The better your timing and response, the more acrobatic and sophisticated his animations get, until he’s swooping across the room from enemy to enemy, busting heads, doing backflips, pile-drivers, flinging bodies around, and expertly and causally blocking thugs trying to sneak up on him from behind.

You can say the same thing for the “detective” work in the game. The reason this game stands out is because the developers stayed true to the character and remembered that he’s not just a martial arts super-hero. So you spend at least half the game in their special “detective mode,” looking for clues and targets for all the gadgets on your utility belt. But Batman isn’t really a detective; he’s the World’s Greatest Detective. His suit can pick up any kind of evidence, his computer can analyze and synthesize any compound, and he makes wildly improbable deductions to move the story along, just as in the comics. It’s not even “gameplay” as much as character building. That character building is reinforced in the pacing, which always reminds you that Batman doesn’t win based on super powers, or his martial arts skills, or his gadgets; he wins by being smarter than everybody else. He doesn’t act until he’s surveyed the situation and figured out the best possible solution.

And that is exactly where the problems start to creep in. I enjoyed the hell out of the game, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call it the best videogame I’ve played this year. But there are a few pretty significant problems. First is the whole Killer Croc section, which didn’t work for me on any level. I respect the developers’ attempt to change up the gameplay and present something different, but it seems like a decent idea that fell apart during execution. Even if you get past the tedious and repetitive clue-gathering portion of it, it ends with an action sequence that just breaks all the rules of fair play: the villain springs up suddenly, you’re killed instantly if you make one mistake, and you’re forced to run along a fairly narrow platform towards a camera so that you can’t see where you’re going.

The “tedious and repetitive” complaint is my second biggest problem with the game: it belongs squarely in the Bowser school of game design, whose motto is “if it’s fun once, it’s super fun if you do it three times.” You spend almost all of the game traveling from one mini-boss to the next, which in itself isn’t a problem, since so much of the Batman story depends on his fantastic villains. But each of those boss fights requires you to do one semi-clever thing, and then repeat it two more times. And the game’s so obsessed with this structure that even when it does something really novel and interesting, like your first encounter with Scarecrow, it shoots itself in the foot by making you go through the same thing again twice. Three-shot boss fights are a standard structure in games for a reason: they take advantage of the 3-act play structure with a set-up, build-up, and climax built in to each confrontation; and they strike a decent balance between cleverness, skill, and challenge. So its repeated use here doesn’t ruin the game; it just keeps it feeling very gamey and prevents it from becoming a genuinely original experience. (Incidentally, I kept thinking that Batman could’ve avoided half the problems he ran into during this game if he’d just remembered to bring his gas mask).

But the “killed instantly if you make one mistake” complaint leads to my biggest problem with Arkham Asylum. I had a brief discussion about the game with someone on Twitter (Philip Kollar, assuming he doesn’t mind my calling him out), after he complained about the “trial and error” tedium in Arkham Asylum and stealth games in general. I responded that it wasn’t supposed to be a case of trial and error, because you weren’t supposed to die. Instead, it was reinforcing the idea that you should think before you act. If you play the game correctly, I said, then you would have completely surveyed the scene and figured out a plan of attack, before you even get into a situation where you could be killed. It shouldn’t be judged as a stealth game, but as a puzzle game.

Unfortunately, I said all that when I was still early in the game. I’d just finished a section that had you defusing a hostage situation in a locked room. I had tried it once and failed, but then instantly realized where I’d made a mistake. I’d rushed in and tried the most obvious solution, instead of checking around for a better one. For me, it was one of those adventure game moments: I didn’t get the right answer on the first try, but I realized that the right answer was something that I should have been able to figure out, so I was encouraged to jump back in and try again.

The problem is that this situation gets more severe the farther you progress through the game. I still say that it’s a puzzle game, not a stealth game, because you’re never given adequate feedback as to how “stealthy” you’re being (like Thief’s shadow gauge or the Metal Gear Solid series’s radar and exclamation points). You’re not maneuvering through a combat situation, but trying to figure out the one correct solution to a puzzle. And Arkham Asylum shows just how clumsy and limiting puzzles feel in open-world, free-movement games.

The puzzles here aren’t quite as pre-scripted as they are in an adventure game, since there’s still an underlying system that gives you a little bit of leeway in how you tackle a problem. But that leeway actually makes things worse, here, since it just makes it more glaring when the solution to a problem is use item A on character B. There is exactly one thing you do to take down Bane, just as there is one way to get past the Scarecrow, just as there is one thing that works against Poison Ivy, and so on. This creeps into the melee combat as you get into tougher battles, too: there’s one move that works against guys with knives, and one move that works against guys with tasers.

I’ve spent a good bit of time on this blog defending the concept of “puzzles with exactly one right answer” in games, but there are two aspects of Arkham Asylum that keep it from working well. First is that so much of the game is built on the interaction of different systems, so arbitrary puzzle solutions feel artificial and out of place. If I’m playing a traditional adventure game, my entire interaction with the world is limited to using one object on another object, so it’s implicit that I simply have to find the one key that fits this one lock. But in a game where you can freely roam the environment, and where you’re fighting guys with health bars that gradually get depleted, you’re encouraged to think in terms of systems and influences. It’s more jarring when I’m told that I can easily disarm this guy, but I have to use my “stun” move on this one, and my “backflip” move on this other one; why don’t they all work equally well? And why do I have to use a batarang here, when it seems like this grappling hook gun you just gave me should work just as well? Arkham Asylum does have situations where it sets up a clear cause and effect and leaves the player to make the right deduction: when a wall explodes, it has this effect on bad guys in this range, and here are two ways to take down walls. But it’s also got plenty of “you must use the grappling hook here” moments.

The more pervasive problem is that I hardly ever felt as if I’d made a clever deduction. Whenever I’ve made a defense of puzzles in games, it’s been based on the idea that a well-designed puzzle can feel like a collaboration between the player and the developer. There may be only one right answer, but the point isn’t to enable the player to do whatever he feels like (as in, for example, Scribblenauts); the point is to guide the player to discovering the most clever (or funniest, or most horrific, or most “meaningful”) solution. A system-based game would say: “This is Bane, this is what he does, these are all the tools you have at your disposal, this is the effect of each tool. Have at it; we’ll leave you guys alone for a few minutes and check back in when we notice his HP has dropped to zero.” A puzzle-based game would say: “This is Bane, and you know the absolute coolest way to get rid of him would be to jump on his back and pull out all those tubes. Let’s think of a sequence of arbitrary events that’ll result in a pretty bad-ass cutscene.” (And incidentally, a really cool game would say: “Bane was kind of a lame character, in retrospect. How about you fight Two-Face or the Penguin instead?”)

But the boss fights in Arkham Asylum — and many of the “stealth” sequences, for that matter — try for an uneasy hybrid of the two, and end up having the worst aspects of both with few of the advantages. You get the opening cutscene, you try whatever weapons you’ve been given, you get beaten up, and Batman dies. Over the death cutscene, the game tells you the solution to the puzzle. You hit the retry button, and you try what it told you to do until you get it right. You hardly ever get a chance to try different things (because you’re often in a confined environment and have no way to recharge your health), and even if you do, the most obvious thing might not work. You still get the cool ending cutscene, but you “earned” it not by being clever, but by being persistent enough to keep doing what the game told you to do until you got it right.

Again, Batman: Arkham Asylum is a hell of a lot of fun, even with these problems. I’m even enamored with the game enough to go back in for all the collectibles and “extra” levels, something I’m hardly ever compelled to do. But I couldn’t help thinking how much better it’d be if it’d been able to strike a more comfortable balance between puzzles and systems. I’ve already said that the first Half-Life promised to render the traditional adventure game obsolete, but a decade later, we still don’t have a great example of a game that balances deduction, storytelling, and action. And I’ve said that instead of treating adventure games as an evolutionary dead end, developers should be paying more attention to what adventure game developers have learned about puzzle design, and applying those lessons to games with more sophisticated and complex interfaces. Arkham Asylum shows that there’s still an audience for single-player games that have an emphasis on characterization and cinematic moments, and which don’t fall into any one specific genre like “shooter” or “brawler” or “stealth game.” Even if it doesn’t quite strike that perfect balance, it’s a step in the right direction, and I’ll have a good time just wailing on thugs until somebody manages to make the game that does strike that balance.

I can also tell you when and where I first bought Revolver: it was at Downtown Records in Athens, GA, around 1991, and I bought it on cassette to listen to in my car, and I was convinced that I’d gotten hold of some super-exclusive collector’s edition with an all-instrumental version of “Taxman” until I realized that it was just that the right speaker on my car stereo had given out again.

I’d only call myself a “moderate” fan of the Beatles — I’ve listened to the White Album and Abbey Road about a billion times since 1987, but there are still plenty of songs by the group that I never heard before tonight — and I can still vividly remember all the details about my first exposure to each of their albums. There are bands I like at least as much — Led Zeppelin and the Pixies, to name two — but I couldn’t tell you anything about the first time I heard Physical Graffiti or where I bought my copy of Surfer Rosa.

And the reason for that is the Beatles have always been presented as a phenomenon more than as a band. People have been going back and forth on the merits of their music for as long as I’ve been alive: for everyone who claims that they’re the greatest musicians of the 20th century, there’s somebody else who complains that they’re just an overrated pop group that in 2009 have become completely irrelevant. Whatever you think of their music — and personally, I’m closer to the “brilliant composers” end of the spectrum than the “overrated pop band” end — it’s only part of what makes the band such a big deal, still relevant 40 years later. Because the Beatles were talented musicians, ridiculously talented and versatile composers, and innovative geniuses (with George Martin) at audio engineering. But I’d say their real genius was in self-promotion.

The current round of hype is over the release of The Beatles Rock Band and remastered versions of all the Beatles’ albums. There are already CD releases for all the records, plus the red & blue greatest hits compilations, plus the number 1 records compilation, plus the Love remixes. And of course, people don’t really buy CDs anymore, and for the past couple of years, websites have been predicting the imminent release of the entire catalog as downloadables any second now. So the question is what the NPR music blog asked back in April when the remasters were first announced: does anyone other than Baby Boomers and obsessive Beatles fanatics really care?

Well, I’m still young enough to have missed the first couple decades of Beatlemania, and I’ve never really been an obsessive fan, but I still cared enough to double-dip on the remasters of a few of the records (Revolver, the White Album, Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, and Past Masters, in case anyone’s curious). I didn’t think I’d be able to hear a dramatic difference, and I’m not that interested in the potential for downloadables, either. But the music’s always been just one part of the appeal. I can’t listen to anything from Abbey Road without picturing… well, Paul’s Boutique first, but after that: the album cover. I can’t hear “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” without seeing the band in their Sgt. Pepper costumes. Listening to “If I Fell” makes me think of the scene from the A Hard Day’s Night movie (which, incidentally, I believed was a documentary until I was in college). Or the cartoon series version of Ringo. Or the Yellow Submarine versions of the band. Or the suits and the unified bow at the end of the Ed Sullivan Show. Or the “bug music!” parody versions from “The Flintstones” who just sang “yeah yeah yeah” over and over again.

The image has always been as much a part of the mystique as the music itself. And the remasters do a great job of perpetuating that image. The packaging is very faithful to that of the original albums (at least, so I’m told: since I wasn’t there to see the originals, I have to take some things on faith, as you would with any religion). They’re filled with pictures, and each has new liner notes to put the record in context and remind you just how important it was to the development of 20th century civilization. Plus there’s a “mini-documentary” on each disc, a short video with more audio clips of interviews and even more pictures. If they’d been released in the 90s, they would’ve been perfect examples of how to do “multimedia” right. In 2009, though, they’re kind of like advertising for Coca-Cola: they won’t necessarily show you anything you didn’t already know, but they’re more a reminder that The Beatles Exist and They Are a Very Important Part of Your Life.

As for the recordings themselves: my prediction was right; I’m not enough of an audiophile to be able to tell much difference between these and the 1987 versions. I finally went through and did a track-by-track comparison, and could hear a slight improvement in clarity on some of Revolver and Abbey Road, but I still don’t know if that was just the placebo effect. It’s a lot more noticeable on older tracks from Past Masters, especially “From Me To You” and “I Feel Fine;” on those, the remasters are much better. That’s as technical as I get, I’m afraid: to my ears, there’s just a little bit more clarity, the instruments are a little bit more separated, and the bass and drums are a little more prominent. (I’ve read some reviews that say the difference is like night and day, so by no means trust my judgement!) I’m still enough of a fan to appreciate having the “definitive” versions, and the packaging is so well-done I don’t regret buying a single one of them. I feel like Rip Torn’s character in Men In Black: I’m resigned to having to buy a new copy of the White Album every so often.

But I’ll skip the downloadable versions. And the iTunes and Amazon MP3 releases, if they ever happen, aren’t what will render these CD remasters obsolete. If there were any doubt that we’re now living in The Mysterious Future, then get this: the best testament to the legacy of the Beatles, and the best way to expose new people to their music, isn’t a bunch of pristine re-releases of the music itself. It’s a videogame.

It’s been months since I listened to any of the Beatles music, and even longer since I played Rock Band. But it was pretty much guaranteed I was going to get The Beatles Rock Band as soon as I saw the greatest cinematic in the history of videogames. And that video pretty much sums up the game.

Now, I don’t want to over-sell it, because the game doesn’t ever quite reach the level of imagery that you see in that video. It’s still Rock Band with The Beatles music, just like it says on the box. But it’s full of the spirit of that video; it’s full of all the iconic images you’d associate with the band, and everything that makes The Beatles such a big deal to people. And, somewhat surprisingly, what makes The Beatles perfect for a videogame like this. There are other bands with big catalogs of music that’d be a lot of fun to play (I’ve seen frequent requests for Led Zeppelin Rock Band, and I’d undoubtedly play it), but I can’t think of any other band that has as much fantastic imagery associated with it, as much legend and hype surrounding it, and that fits so well into a Story Mode.

You follow the band through the key moments in their career: early gigs, the Ed Sullivan show, stadium concerts in New York and Tokyo, studio recording at Abbey Road, and their rooftop concert for Let it Be. Most of us were first exposed to their music long after even the hype had already died down, so we’ve seen and heard everything mashed together out of sequence. Playing through story mode was the first time I got a real idea of the band’s progression, and I was surprised at how moved I was by it. When I finished the first show at Budokan, and the achievement “The Final Tour” popped up, I actually said “No!” They’d just gotten started, they can’t be breaking up already!

As you go along, you’ll unlock pictures and accompanying facts about the band, the first time I’ve actually been interested in the unlockables in a game like this. I don’t know if they’d be old news to long-time fans, but they were new to me, and more satisfying than liner notes because I had to work to see them. And as you go from venue to venue, there’s a great transition sequence that combines still photos with animated album covers, kind of a pictorial overview of what the band was doing in between shows. I will admit to getting goosebumps when the cover of Revolver appeared.

Once they leave live shows and go to the studio, the game breaks from Rock Band tradition and starts presenting what they call “dreamscapes.” It sounded like a corny idea from the initial marketing, but after trying it, I’ll just say this: if you can play “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” without grinning like an idiot at everything that goes on, then I’m sorry, but you have no soul. Even better is “Here Comes the Sun.” That’s already a dangerously uplifting song, but actually playing along with it while watching the band in a sunlit field seems to inject euphoria directly into your brain. The game’s full of little uplifting moments like that: John Lennon calling his part out from inside the submarine in “Yellow Submarine,” the band dancing together at the end of “Hello Goodbye,” and pretty much every single moment in “Dear Prudence.”

I do have a couple of complaints. My favorite Beatles song is “Tomorrow Never Knows,” but instead of the original version, they used the weird remix with “Within You Without You” from the Cirque du Soleil Love show. The downloadable content (which I’m already going to buy without hesitation, in case it wasn’t obvious) is going to be in the form of whole albums, so I’m hoping a full release of Revolver will fix that. My other gripe is something they really couldn’t fix: I’ve always hated Let it Be. So the last section of the game is kind of a downer; I wish they’d at least included “Two of Us” and “Across the Universe.” But I will say that “Dig a Pony” isn’t quite as annoying when you’re playing along.

And I don’t want to spoil the game for anybody (they break up!) but I will say that the end is perfect.

The Beatles Rock Band would be impressive enough just for being a pitch-perfect history of, celebration of, and introduction to The Beatles. But even more than that, it’s the perfect vindication for the whole genre of music games that Harmonix created. Obviously, the games have sold so spectacularly well that they don’t really need to be defended any more than The Beatles’ significance needs to be defended. But you’ll still see people dismissing the games as nothing more than a waste of time playing with plastic guitars instead of investing in a real instrument and playing real music. The problem with that is that I don’t believe Guitar Hero and Rock Band were ever really about making music. They’re about enjoying music. Appreciating it in a way you can’t with just an album with liner notes explaining the significance of the music and how it’s constructed, or watching a video of the band’s interpretation of the song.

The game’s easier than other versions of Rock Band; I’m pretty lousy at these games, and I got through the whole story with five stars on every song at medium difficulty. But I don’t believe it’s because The Beatles music is simpler than the tracks they have in other versions. I suspect it’s because the game was designed to be accessible. It’s for all of us who’ve listened to the songs and tapped out drum beats or hummed the bass line or sung along in the car, approximating the harmonies as well as we could hear them.

I’ve heard reviews of the CD remasters claim that the individual voices and instruments are easier to make out in the new versions; I wasn’t able to hear it. But playing the game, I was able to see bass or guitar parts separated out on screen. I’ve read comments on line where people say they have a new respect for Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, now that they’ve gotten an idea of how complex their parts really are and how much is going on in each song. Some of these songs I’ve heard hundreds of times before, but it’s really no exaggeration to say that playing along, mashing big colored buttons on a toy guitar along with a grossly simplified version of the real music, is like hearing the songs for the first time.