Any game company would envy the amount of buzz around Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the Nintendo DS. For months, it’s been getting breathless previews from writers who wanted it RIGHT NOW!!!, and since its release it’s gotten extremely positive reviews.

It’s not hard to see why; it’s got stellar production values. You can see from the trailer:

A DS game with painted backgrounds, animated sequences, voice acting; it’d seem like one of those epic old-school adventure games, with a Nintendo-level budget and a Studio Ghibli-inspired art direction applied to it.

But it’s actually even less a standard adventure game than the Phoenix Wright games are. Professor Layton is a collection of riddles and Brain Age-style puzzles loosely connected by painted backgrounds and fully- or partially-animated cutscenes. The 1up review linked above claims that this separation is a refreshing change from standard adventure game puzzles, because it removes all the ambiguity and artifice from the puzzle-solving. But or me, the effect is like watching Castle in the Sky while taking an SAT prep test.

You go through the village, tapping on different things in the background, and Professor Layton will pop up with something like, “That bookshelf reminds me of this old riddle that’s tangentially related to letters,” or “That’s a boat, much like the one in that old puzzle about getting a group of predator and prey animals safely across a river.”

I can’t fault the presentation at all; it’s slick, well-polished, and more clever than you might think at first. When I was presented with the “predator and prey on a raft” puzzle, my first reaction was “Oh great, this one again.” But the interface for the puzzle itself is seamless, even somewhat entertaining. And after the puzzle was finished, a text screen came up acknowledging the “fun fact” that this is an ancient puzzle, and variants on it have been around for thousands of years.

You can see the lack of artifice throughout: yes, they’re puzzles. Get over it. I can definitely see how it’s a shrewd marketing move, considering how hugely popular puzzle games on the DS have been, and how relatively easy it is to drop new puzzles in for sequels and downloadable content. And I can even see how it’s somewhat appealing to have a puzzle presented to you with its own rules screen and interface and a clear indicator if you’re right or wrong. Complete with short segments of the Professor or his apprentice thinking about the puzzle, this game’s equivalent to Phoenix Wright’s “Objection!” screens.

But still, the whole concept behind this game somehow offends me to my core. It just feels like the developers have thrown up their hands at the notion of integrating story and gameplay, and instead offered up the two duct-taped together. It’s a bunch of disparate elements that as well-produced as they are, still don’t work together.

I’d started to get uncomfortable even during the opening sequence: it’s your standard videogame cutscene opening, giving you tons of expository dialog. And like most console games, it requires “interactivity” in that you tap the screen at the end of each line. I always assumed that console games did that to give everyone in the audience a chance to finish reading the line, but here the lines are voiced. So is it some left over interface convention from console games past, or is it a token nod towards interactivity? I’ll admit that it’s fun during the opening cutscenes to wait a long time before tapping for the next line — to make it seem like the Professor has said something inappropriate, and an uncomfortable silence has filled the car. But it’s not “interactivity.”

There are also plenty of sections where there’s only one valid thing to do, but the game still pretends that you’ve got options — every time you try to just explore something, your apprentice pipes up with “Shouldn’t we be headed to the old manor that we just talked about in that long cutscene?” This plagues tons of games, including several that I’ve worked on, so it’d be unfair to point it out as a criticism unique to Professor Layton. The difference here is that that’s not a problem in puzzle games, so it feels like here they’ve just dragged the worst aspects of storytelling games into the mix.

And the puzzles themselves have so far (I’m only about 15 in) bounced around between “really really old” or “impossibly vague”. Some of them are just plain riddles, not requiring that much cleverness. Others are weirdly esoteric, like choosing the “right type of chair” for a multi-purpose stadium (that one’s triggered by clicking on a chair in a store, for some reason). I don’t know if integrating these in the story would make them any more palatable.

But I do know that Professor Layton’s approach hasn’t magically solved the most common complaints about adventure games. Because I’ve just barely started with the game, and I’ve already encountered all of them: the feeling that everything has stopped because I’m stuck on some esoteric aspect of a puzzle, and the sense that I’m battling against the designers who are vaguely and confusingly pointing me in the “right” direction.

What Professor Layton’s approach does successfully is make it clear that everything you need to solve the puzzle is right in front of you, so there’s no pointless wandering. What it misses out on, though, is the potential for a game’s story to play into the puzzle-solving. While you’re exploring for parts to solve a puzzle, you pick up on the story and characterization. And then that story and characterization can feed into the solution of a well-designed adventure game puzzle: I can understand the answer, because my character thinks about things this way and his obstacle does things that way.

Professor Layton is a solid game, and there’s not much wrong with it, for what it is. It just feels to me like they’ve taken an evolutionary dead-end in game design and applied the highest production values to it. It’s like the world’s most charming and highly-polished passenger pigeon.

On his blog, Lore Sjöberg announced his new project: a weekly video podcast for his Alt Text column at Wired. The first episode rates Link’s weapons.

According to his blog, more will be available on Wired’s YouTube page or via iTunes subscription.

Seeing as how it’s a video with drawings, and more often than not will talk about videogames, I foresee the inevitable comparisons to Zero Punctuation. I implore the internet not to go down this path. This is a time for celebration, not consternation. Having two of the funniest people on the internet providing material twice a week don’t mean nothing but a good thing.

Besides, Lore did it first.

If we could get Dave Campbell to turn his new Live from LA blog on ABC into a weekly podcast, then the trifecta would be complete.

It’s kind of ironic that this review of the “Lost” videogame faults the game for its reliance on outdated and obsolete game mechanics, because the review itself relies on an outdated and obsolete assumption: that adventure games are no longer relevant.

A game journalist in 2008 saying “adventure games are dead” is kind of like a stand-up comedian making jokes about airplane food. Where’ve you been, dude?

But if you’re going to make the claim that adventure games haven’t been relevant in fifteen years, at least do a little research. The review says that all of its problems are because it’s one of those “adventure games - think Monkey Island” and then goes on to list fault after fault with the game, all of which were already addressed by the time the Monkey Island games were released. I’m pretty familiar with the Monkey Island games, especially The Curse of Monkey Island (1997), and they don’t have any of the problems he names.

There’s no instant death — like, say, Gears of War (2006) or Shadow of the Colossus (2005). No “invisible barriers,” like those of Mass Effect (2007). No items that are only “activated” after talking to the right person, like The Phantom Hourglass (2007). No pitch-black areas — Doom 3 (2005) — that require you to constantly relight or replenish your light source — Half Life 2: Episode 1 (2006) — or “fiddly and tedious” games that require you to collect tons of items scattered throughout the level — Psychonauts (2005) or Dead Rising (2006).

The reviewer claims he’s going to stick with the game, though, because of its intriguing story, strong production values, and good music. The Monkey Island games are guilty of having those.

I can’t offer an opinion on the “Lost” game either way, since all I’ve seen of it is a glimpse on screens being demoed at WonderCon. The bit that I saw had a close-up of a Hurley model whose dead-eyed stare still haunts my nightmares — but I can’t fault it for that, since that’s pretty much the state of the art for photorealistic videogame art these days.

But assuming that the “Lost” game did screw up the game mechanics as badly as the reviewer claims, that’s still just the fault of that game. There’s no need to continue the assumption that that kind of junk is endemic to adventure games, and isn’t found in any other genre. We’ve already got enough people who think that adventure games are doomed to be nothing more than interminable stretches of nothing interrupted by mazes and variations on decades-old “get through that door” puzzles.

I’m just arrogant enough that I tend to automatically dismiss anything presented as a list of rules or guidelines about writing. There’s obviously a ton of craft involved in writing, independent of any concerns about talent or personal style. But attempts to codify it are always either too vague to be practically useful, or too specific to apply to anything but the most pedestrian writing. We’ve already got a set of rules: high school English. Learn those, and then read (and watch) examples of good writing, practice your own writing, and you’ll learn by doing, to the point where you’re confident enough to split an infinitive in your opening sentence.

So I was automatically skeptical of the “Learn Better Game Writing” tutorial, given by Vicarious Visions producer Evan Skolnick and described in this Gamasutra article. I became even more skeptical after reading this quote:

Video games are a product where the buyer didn’t buy to read something — they may not even want a story. You have to accept certain realities when writing in this business. You’re not the next Hemingway, but even if you are, this isn’t the place to show it. Your job is to write tight, efficient, serviceable story content.

So remember that, kids: your goal is to write succinctly and efficiently. Not like that Hemingway blowhard, always droning on and on. Man, that guy liked to hear himself talk!

It’s unfortunate, because one of my own biggest faults as a writer is a tendency to over-write, a failure to be concise, and a habit of unnecessarily repeating myself. So maybe there are still some good tips there, and I’m being overly antagonistic to assume that using the worst possible example of “Insert Famous Author Name Here” means that the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The problem is that the lecture, at least as described in a brief online article, starts out with such a defeatist tone, it’d be charitable to call it “uninspiring.” Launching into a lecture with the loaded words and phrases “product” and “buyer” and “may not even want a story” and “accept certain realities” and “business” and “you’re not the next blank” and “serviceable” and “how much story does your game actually need?” all work together to create a giant vacuum from which inspiration is not allowed to escape.

“Get over yourself” is fine advice which would be good for all writers to remember, regardless of their field. But that’s generally followed by an example of great writing to which we should aspire. Instead, Skolnick takes a completely dismissive tone towards game writing, presenting it as a necessary evil at best.

His quote: “The amount of story content you put in is generally how much the player will tolerate, and if you break those expectations, you do that at your peril.” There’s your objective, writers: to be tolerable. Spoken like someone who uses the term “creatives” like high school students use “drama fags.” Just do your job and get out of the producers’ way, so we can check you off the task list and move on.

He does give an example of a game that does it right:

As an example, Skolnick showed the opening cinematic from Grand Theft Auto III. He then broke down the timeline: 1:30 credits, 2:45 cutscene 1, 10 seconds for the transition to gameplay. [...] Your required viewing time 2:55 seconds, and you’re into the game. Quite reasonable. Now it’s time to bring up the whipping boy — Metal Gear Solid 2.

No discussion of the quality of the writing in each game, the way writing is used in each game, or the effect it’s trying to achieve. There’s a single quantifiable measure of the quality and usefulness of game writing, and that’s oh my God are you still talking press A skip cutscene press A!!!!!.

The quality of writing in games in general, and my own writing in particular, still has plenty of room for improvement. We’re not going to get there by following the teachings of a caffeine-addled 14-year-old with attention deficit disorder.

Even those of us with normal attention spans don’t like to be barraged with reams of dialogue coming out of nowhere with no regard to pacing or story flow. But even a well-placed dialogue-heavy passage can be annoying if it goes on too long, for the simple reason that the writing in most videogames sucks. Why does the writing in most videogames suck? Mostly because so many people in game development consider it to be secondary to everything else, a necessary evil that must be tolerated, whose only virtue is its brevity.

Using films as an example, because “movies are our culture’s main shared storytelling experience, for better or for worse,” Skolnick leapt into discussions of the classic three act structure, delineating the acts and plot points of films before turning to the audience to suggest examples. At this point the class became a classic creative writing workshop at a basic level, so if you’re interested in pursuing the ideas presented here, you could easily find some books to read.

Or, you know, watch some movies or something. Whatever. They’re all the same three acts with plot points pretty much, for better or worse. The Matrix was pretty bad-ass. And you should watch Aliens, or if you’re making a game with gangsters instead of space marines, see Scarface.

What Skolnick did note that is worth emphasizing is that the structure of games, with a series of levels building toward a climactic final boss encounter, maps very well to the classic act structure of continual conflicts.

I guess you could make a game that wasn’t just a series of levels building up to a final boss level, you know, bring some level of art and creativity to the storytelling process to tell an unconventional story, but you do that at your peril.

After discussing act structure, Skolnick moved into the Monomyth as presented by Joseph Campbell in Hero With A Thousand Faces and more latterly, Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey, which he recommended as popular with Hollywood writers.

Thanks, dude. Hero With a Thousand Faces: let me write that down; I don’t believe that’s ever been recommended before. I tried getting through it one time, but it was way too long. I’m still trying to slog through The Old Man and the Sea.

Previously on Spectre Collie, I got alarmed at what I saw as the rising sentiment against storytelling in videogames. The people on the message boards and blog comments kept saying that storytelling and interactivity are mutually exclusive, that story-based games aren’t games at all! And notable people like Will Wright were making proclamations that the old ways are dead, and sandbox games are the future.

I did the most sensible thing in response: I made a game that proves storytelling and gameplay can not only co-exist peacefully, but can support and enhance each other, turning videogames into the most engaging storytelling medium there is.

Wait, hang on — I didn’t do that, because really, who has that kind of time? Instead, I started writing a series of lengthy posts on a low-traffic weblog about it. And as it turns out, I was being a little reactionary. It’s never a good idea to interpret postings on message boards and comments on weblogs as being accurate, objective indicators of public opinion. And Will Wright’s championing sandbox games is about as alarming as Frank Miller advocating stories about whores.

Three of last year’s biggest releases — The Orange Box, Mass Effect, and BioShock — were mostly story-driven, and the two that I’ve played found ways to start innovating with storytelling in a big-budget high-profile title. And if you look at the schedule for this year’s Game Developers’ Conference, you’ll see dozens of seminars about how you approach videogame storytelling. So either the field is still wide open for story-based games, or game developers will say anything to get a free pass to a conference.

Still, I know where my paychecks are coming from, and I do like to pontificate, so I’m going to keep on trying to debunk the Myths of Interactive Storytelling, responding to actual statements I have read on the internet.

Myth 3: Storytelling is inherently passive.

This one usually comes up whenever a Hollywood type announces plans to get into the videogame industry. They’re all doomed to fail, apparently, because movies and TV shows have nothing in common with games, and there’s nothing to be learned from passive, old-school media. Every time you try to apply the techniques of cinematic storytelling to a game, you’re killing the interactivity and stabbing a dagger into Mario’s heart.

The reason this is bunk is pretty simple: it assumes that communication between an artist and audience can only go in one direction at a time. In a movie, you shut up and watch while the filmmakers tell you a story. In a game, you’d like to get to playing at killing bad guys and saving the world, but the designers refuse to shut up and instead keep trying to tell you a story.

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Or, “Gore Verbinski’s Going to Make You His Bitch.”

If you want to see me start channeling my inner crotchety prospector hankerin’ for a feud, there’s no easier way than making the claim “videogames need to adapt the auteur model from movies!”

It comes up fairly frequently on the internets, and I’m usually able to summon my Bruce Banner-like reserves of calm to keep the beast at bay. But sometimes, like with this post about Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski at the DICE summit, it’s compounded with so much inanity that I’ve got no recourse but to commence to bitchin’.

Start with this quote:

“We created value out of nothing, and then I watched as they created nothing out of value,” he said of the games based on the Pirates films.

You created value out of nothing, Mr. Verbinski? Really? In a movie called Pirates of the Caribbean, that in its first minute of screen time attempts to recreate the theme park ride the movie’s based on, down to having someone singing the ride’s theme song? This idea about a Disney movie with pirates who are in the Caribbean just sprang Athena-like from your skull, fully formed right down to the clever scene with a dog holding a jail key just out of a prisoner’s reach?

Could this guy have possibly picked a worse platform for launching a campaign for originality? It’s not like the Pirates movies are his only claim to fame; his breakthrough was a fairly well-made and extremely popular horror movie (which was a near shot-for-shot remake of a Japanese original, but whatever).

So let’s assume that was just a poor choice of quotes, let it slide and move on:

Verbinski said that he was pushing for a massively multiplayer online version of Pirates to coincide with the films’ release, but “it wasn’t in their business plan,” he said to an audience mostly comprised of game industry executives.

“They actually contractually come under merchandising, they’re considered the same as a poster or a wind-up doll.”

Wait wait wait, Mr. Verbinski — you’re actually saying that Disney executives made a decision that was marketing-driven instead of based on creative or artistic merit? Holy shit, you’ve just blown the lid off the entire industry!

Just ignore the fact that it’s a bad idea to take the actions of one developer or one publisher and extend that as being endemic of all of videogames. In the case of Disney, it’s not just a bad idea, it’s completely absurd. Nobody takes Disney’s games division(s) seriously, not so much because they do bad work (although they often do), but because everybody understands how they work as a corporate entity. They are totally, unapologetically, and surprisingly successfully, a marketing channel, or a revenue stream. People know this. People within the company know this — it’s not some dirty little secret shame; it’s what they do.

But that’s still all just effluvia spiraling around the dumb idea at its chocolatey center:

“On a design level, you need someone to carry the vision. It is time for the auteur of gaming.”

“Homogenization of voice,” he said, is the biggest issue facing the industries today.

As a director, “I fight tooth and nail for my opinion because I cannot stand watching a film that has too many of them,” he said. Game designers’ ideas should make executives “shit themselves,” he added.

Except for the executive incontinence, that all sounds reasonable enough. It should, because it’s all a rationalization, and that’s what rationalizations are supposed to do — sound reasonable.

You can’t argue against that stuff, because it’s trivially true — games should be creative works, and a creative person’s influence on a work should be visible from project to project over the course of his career. But that’s not something you need to declare, any more than I need to insist that eating an entire box of cookies is going to make me fat. It just happens, whether you want it to or not.

And nine times out of nine, the people arguing for the “auteur” in videogames are doing nothing more than throwing an ego-driven temper tantrum, insisting that everybody should listen to them because they’re awesome.

(Incidentally, while it’s now common to hear the “Directed by…” or “A film by…” credit given the voice-over at the end of a movie trailer, I still remember then this started happening. It was around the release of “The Ring, a film by Gore Verbinski.”)

I’ve worked for companies that were primarily production- and schedule-driven, and I’ve worked on games that were pure marketing, existing to fill a SKU plan instead of because they were games that cried out to be made. And still, there’ve been creative people who’ve come up with ideas to work within those constraints, and had the skills to see those ideas through to implementation. And if those ideas are strong enough, they carry through and are visible from game to game. It’s a meritocracy, and it happens as a nice side effect of putting the quality of the game first, before pitching a fit over whether your name is in front of the title.

Last month, Wired’s blog ran an interview with Warren Spector, where he tackles the same question. He acknowledges that there are a ton of people involved in the production of a videogame, and that crediting one person for the success or failure of a game (except maybe Rollercoaster Tycoon, I guess) is wrong. But Spector’s built a name for himself; I’d say that it’s not from insisting that the game be titled Warren Spector’s Deus Ex, but simply by virtue of the fact that he’s the common factor between a lot of great games.

The topic bugs me, because we all saw what happened in the 90s when there was a push to sell videogame designers as rock stars. I was hoping we’d all outgrown that, but the topic keeps coming up.

It also bugs me because it’s ego-tripping disguised as advancement of the art. It kills morale on the team, and it does the opposite of what it claims to do — how do you expect to encourage a creative work when you’ve cut off 99% of your team from feeling any real ownership over the end result?

There’s always going to be some element of this, simply because people are attached to names. I know I tend to give Wes Anderson or the Coen Brothers all the credit for the movies they release, and I couldn’t even tell you the names of their cinematographers, art directors, etc. And I’ve got no doubt people are going to give Will Wright all the credit for Spore when there’s in fact a whole team of designers working on that game (and Wright seems pretty selfless and secure enough in his position to acknowledge the team, and EA has done a good job of giving everybody a voice in the game’s PR). So if it’s going to happen anyway, why would people keep encouraging it?

I really had no interest in getting Rock Band (warning: site has noise, and changes your browser window size). I skipped the last two releases of Guitar Hero, since the songs past medium difficulty stopped being fun for me. With Rock Band, at the time all the cool kids were getting it, it was impossible for me to find a copy. At this point it’s too late, especially since I keep hearing how it’s all about the multiplayer, and I know a few people who’ve already got a set (and are welcome to invite me to come play it, now that I’m not working so much).

But then, something happens when you’re in a Best Buy with a $100 gift certificate left over from Christmas, and they have a now-long-neglected set hooked up, ready to play “Wave of Mutilation.”

It wasn’t quite the bone-shattering awesomeness of playing “More than a Feeling” in Guitar Hero for the first time, but it did remind exactly why I liked Guitar Hero in the first place.

My first impression, after playing through on Easy (gotta get used to the new axe, after all): the solo game is just a really highly-polished, well-done Guitar Hero, if they’d sacrificed the quality of GH1’s set list in favor of having more original recordings instead of covers. Everything looks really sharp and professional — kind of like, oh, a company that’s seen what a monstrous amount of money you can make from having the first true crossover videogame hit, and that it’s really actually feasible to build a whole platform out of a game franchise.

The guitar is much nicer than the original GH one — it’s still clearly a plastic toy guitar, but it feels significantly less silly. So far it seems less responsive both to quick strumming and to tilting the neck up for overdrive mode, but I’m guessing I’m just not used to it.

The drums are loud and humiliating, which have kept me from spending much time on them. If it were possible to hear the song’s drumming over my own, it’d be worth suffering the constant reminder that I have no rhythm. But since the only reward seems to be hearing tokkatokkatokka somewhat in relation to a song that’s playing on the TV, while the bar goes down and the crowd starts booing, I’ve relegated it to the back burner for now.

The microphone went immediately into a cabinet, likely never to be seen again.

The online stuff is really well-integrated (I got the Xbox 360 version), and by the looks of it, they’ve done a phenomenal job with the downloadable content. Charging two bucks a song is a little on the high side, but that’s outweighed by the sheer number of songs available, and their commitment to keep a steady flow of songs coming.

And I’ve got to say the ending credits are awesome; the first time in recent memory I’ve willingly sat through the credits of a videogame.

So that’s my late-to-the-party impressions: it seems to me that they did the best possible job of making the game. The only reason you could have for not liking it, is if you don’t like this type of game anymore. I’m waiting to see if I do. The one thing that everybody seems to agree on is that this is the ultimate party game: playing it with other people is a completely different experience, and it’s what the game was designed for. I’m impressed enough with the polish on the solo version, so I’m ready to be convinced.

Nick, Jake, Jared, and the rest of the gang are cranking out Sam & Max episode trailers so quickly, it’s almost like there’s a new one every month. (Come on, give me a break. I’m home sick and pumped full of cold medication.)

The next episode is “Night of the Raving Dead”, and so far it’s running neck-and-neck with episode 204 as my favorite of the ones we’ve done. It’s coming out worldwide the day before Valentine’s Day, so it’d be the perfect gift for that loved one who has Windows and enjoys point-and-click adventures that poke gentle fun at Europeans.

Hooray for well-timed blurring!