On JOYLANCER Lv. 1

The Reward is The Game: JOYLANCER Level 1           

           So full disclosure, Joylancer is a game made by one Tyvon Jamal Thomas, an independent developer currently living in Seattle. I consider him a friend, and I’m writing this more or less as an advertisement for his game. Know why?

            Because JOYLANCER is fucking great. And TJ is great. And y’all should fucking play JOYLANCER.

            I don't have a ton of time to screenshot a lot of this or anything, so use this video of TJ playing level 1 to follow along.

            There’s a lot going on in level 1 of JOYLANCER. When I first booted the game up and started looking at all the tightly packed details it was like a Snickers bar of game design: a satisfying initial taste that you’ll soon realize is full of depth.

            What it does well is classic game design. We walk right, pick up gems, and our meter fills. We don’t need to know what the meter does yet, but we learn something important to the system before it ever actually matters. We’re learning in a safe space. A block comes in our way and we press one of the two buttons available to us and we jump, in all likelihood harmlessly avoiding the enemy below us.

            The enemy appears alone. If he hits us we will not be trapped into a loop, we will simply be hit and then have the opportunity to find that the other button uses the lance, and that using the lance uses meter, and it pushes us a little bit forward. And when we use the lance to defeat an enemy, they leave behind a meter-filling gem. We then use what we learned about jumping and lancing when we jump over the next gap and realize that a regular jump won’t cover the gap: we press the lance button in mid-air and are carried across safely, and are rewarded with gems (and thus meter) that allow us to repeat the process.

            Certain possibilities for control are incredibly hard to tell the player visually, so JOYLANCER makes necessary compromises to instruct the player on techniques like super lance-jumping. But it still only has its toes in those waters: we see what we can do, but it’s up to us to figure out the subtleties of using it. We can move directly upward, but we can also veer slightly in one direction, as we do on the next platform up to pick up gems on the way to our next plateau. We also must learn by acting to find that we can go directly from a lance jump to a sideways lance in the air, as we must to continue on.

            We continue forward, and then descend, leading us to my favorite set piece of the level. The game’s hint suggests we can drill downward in the air, which we find is useful for destroying the particular type of block we are just now encountering. We do so, and we plummet downward in gleeful destruction and land on a rail, continuing our downward momentum into a new form of forward momentum.

Great game design is based on rewards. Players understand new mechanics, and by mastering new mechanics they are then rewarded by the game with both forward progress as well as something that might aid their forward progress. It’s salesmanship: you convince the player to do something and then aside from just the basic fact that learning the game will help them beat the game, you sweeten the deal. Think, for example, how learning the wall jump in Megaman X rewards you with a nice life boost.

Thomas does something that I’d describe as quietly radical here. Our reward is not yet again gems, those become secondary in this instant. The reward here is the joy of playing the game itself. JOYLANCER in this case doesn’t give you resources, it gives you affection. And that is incredibly hard to pull off.

And it doesn’t stop there. After this, we enter a doorway into the second part of the level where only one new mechanic is introduced (a device that captures the character and allows you to shoot him full speed in a particular direction.) For at least this level, we’ve learned what we need to know, and now we’re applying that knowledge, and we’re applying it in brazen and stylish fashion, destroying the immense obstacles in our path at our whim. Again, the reward here isn’t anything that makes the game easier, it’s the game itself that we pummel through and conquer. And then the level is over.

But that's not all! Because when we go back through the level knowing what we learned by playing it, we find new shades. We can air lance up and down, which means those enemies we lanced sideways in the air to avoid below us at the beginning of the level can be ours for the conquering, and we can also confront the enemies high above us. Later in the level we lance more or less through what looks like a solid texture, which encourages us to check the walls, and if we investigate a particular ceiling we can find a secret route. Again, as always, the reward is the game.

JOYLANCER is an immense statement from an immense talent. Play it.

JOYLANCER can be downloaded here. And you can follow TJ Thomas on Twitter @TRONMAXIMUM

 - Austin C. Howe, Maryland, 2014

KoFXIII on Objective Game Reviews

I didn't make a huge deal of it, but this is my second piece for Objective Game Reviews, and it's a look at my favorite fighting game of the seventh console generation: King of Fighters XIII. (In case you can't tell, the site is a totally and intentionally a joke.)

http://www.objectivegamereviews.com/king-fighters-xiii-review/

A Quick Note About FFVIII

A friend and I were discussing Final Fantasy VIII and Cameron Kunzelman's brief and brilliant article that he wrote about it on his blog, This Cage is Worms, and I ended up saying this, the ideas occurring to me only briefly before I typed them down.

"Seriously, FFVIII, like the guy writes about, really is about loneliness and the inevitability of death and despair . . . Add that on top of the fact that, if there are constant companions, they're the [Guardian Forces], and the GFs steal your memories because of what boils down to the RAM they eat up in your head. That's a HUGE blown opportunity in every conceivable way, especially since even a cursory look at how Materia works in the previous game gives FFVII considerably greater narrative depth in relation to it's gameplay systems."

FFVIII is a game I will write about much more in the future (I'm actually a huge fan, it's my favorite game, as I said when the game came out on Steam) but I think I'll just jot this down here for now.

Update

Hey everyone, just a few quick notes since I didn't have a very productive January here at Haptic Feedback

• My New Year was pretty fantastic for any number of reasons. For Christmas, I got an awesome new guitar amp and two new leather jackets that are all fantastic. I went to a good New Year's Eve party where I managed to not feel depressed because I realized that 2013 overall averaged out to being a year with plenty of emotional duress, but also a lot of professional progress. 
• I wrote this: http://www.objectivegamereviews.com/final-fantasy-vii-review/
• The Breadshots began recording our debut album, Love Each Other. I started the process by deciding on click track tempos and laying down scratch guitars so Dan, our drummer, can come in and start laying shit down.
• I haven't touched Dragon Quarter since early December, but I will return to it soon enough. I want to write a lot about that game.
• I might have mentioned this at some point since September, but my new "big essay" is a sexual reading of Kingdom Hearts that's still in drafting phases. I want to try and get it published (as in, get paid for it) but if nothing works out you can be sure and find it here. It's coming extremely slowly: I'm 10 pages in and I feel nowhere near finished, not to mention just like with "Free Will and Defiance" structuring this thing is an absolute fucking nightmare.
• I got a new job, but it hasn't started yet and I'm still waiting for key details to emerge.
• Late January to now has been nothing but bad news that's really brought me back down to earth.
• A little more than a week ago, a gunman opened fire at the mall in Columbia, MD killing two employees of the Zumies store before turning the gun on himself. I've worked two jobs at the mall and I shop there all the time, so the day the news broke was filled with all kinds of anxiety, but I'm glad to say my friends, coworkers, etc, were all safe. 
• A girl I used to consider a friend killed herself. She was still a student at the high school I graduated. I want to write more about this on it's own.
• To top it all off, I woke up yesterday to the news that Phillip Seymour Hoffman had died. It hit me hard: the man's been in more of my favorite movies than I can count. Pirate Radio, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, The Big Lebowski, the list goes on. In particular, his performance was the beating heart of Synecdoche, New York, which is one of the best movies I've ever seen.
• "Make this day like the night/Songs of darkness, words of light." No excuses. I'll be back to work soon, and I'll try another published review and another piece up here at Haptic Feedback.
• As always, thanks for listening.

- Austin C. Howe, Maryland, 2014

"A Place To Cry Alone"

This is a letter I wrote to James Clinton Howell a few days ago about how games can speak to our subconscious. It's about a grieving process I went through. Honestly not sure what trigger warnings to attach, but if you're dealing with recent grief you may very much want to read this or not want to read it at all. In any case, proceed with caution I guess.

"Dear James,

So first of all I'll start by promising you that someday I will leave you alone about Metal Gear. I am more than aware that my enthusiasm for your analysis of the series is well beyond over-eager, and I could learn something from the series and from you by trusting my own instincts more to make analysis of the series with your work on the series in the back of my mind, as opposed to being an infallible bible on the subject.

Second of all: this is going to sound completely crazy, and I just ask that you stick with me.

However, the time of the year has made me realize something quite interesting, and actually quite moving, so I decided to sit down and write this.

December 25th was when my brother David Greyson Howe was born. He was born in 1987, six years older than me, and he died in 2003 at the young age of 15 when I was nine years old. This is a deep wound which has since scarred and healed, but there are still nuances to that tragedy and grief that I am still only understanding today.

Among these things: my brother was not an influence on my early taste in videogames, he basically created it. My parents bought me age-appropriate games that I adored like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot but my brother gave me the first tastes of the game series I would still call my three favorites:Final Fantasy, Legacy of Kain, and of course, Metal Gear.

As a young child, I did not understand how to play these games. One of my earliest gaming memories is booting up Metal Gear Solid and pressing Snake's back against the first wall for literally half an hour waiting for a moment when I felt comfortable to move, even though there were of course many opportune moments to do so. (Somewhere in there is a metaphor for my love life.) I often relied on Greyson's prior knowledge about the games I would play to help me know what to do next. (Another distinct memory:Metal Gear Solid's manual teaches you to press the "weapon button" repeatedly to break a guard's neck when you have no weapon equipped. Cue me mashing the R2 button "because that's how you pick a weapon" and getting frustrated, and Greyson shows me it's the Square button.)

That said, while I slowly got better at these games, in the wake of my brother's death, I felt almost a sense of obligation to him and to myself to learn to beat them myself. I had to honor his memory by completing unfinished tasks in his name, (in this case, I decided to finish his save files of his games, which to my luck often left much of the game unfinished, as my brother was a far superior student to myself and therefore didn't play games that often later in his life) and I had to demonstrate to myself that I could do fine without him by learning how to play these games on my own. (And without the assistance of Gameshark.)

To state it more simply: I played games to cope. I locked myself in my bedroom and played games nonstop for maybe 2 years, which was a good excuse for not going outside when I wasn't terribly ready to make new friends. Some people find it sad, but it really did help a lot, especially since the stories of these magnificent games I was playing created what you might call "safe spaces" for me to engage with my grief in a way with which I felt comfortable: Kingdom Hearts for example allowed me to deal with losing friends and trying to stay connected with old friends and make new ones as my family moved away from Germany, where we had lived until a few months following my brother's death. Final Fantasy IX in particular I remember affecting me deeply: the character Vivi is a black mage who is constantly dealing with his mortality until his own inevitable demise, and I was glad to have someone who I could empathize with, especially since his interactions with Zidane reflected my relationship with my brother.

A bit of a jump here: when I was, I believe, 11 years old, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance was the first game I ever purchased with my own money. I saved three weeks of allowance for it, and I am fairly certain that is the most patient I have ever been with my own money.

Being just a young kid, I was not in a mental state to reject it the way many people did. What I remembered most fondly about the original Metal Gear Solid at that point was lots of cool military jargon, and just really crazy plot twists. And MGS2 delivers both of those in spades. Nevermind the fact that I liked Solid Snake just as much as anyone else, the fact that you were playing an entirely new character was a totally crazy twist and I was super behind that. The villain in this game is the President from Metal Gear Solid who had to resign after Shadow Moses? Woah dude, crazy twist!

The many unique factors associated with my experience of MGS2 made it a more impactful experience than the first one. I wasn't confused, even though there was a fair bit of it I didn't understand, I cried for it. 

I cried about a lot of things and for a lot of reasons back then obviously, but still, there was something uniquely powerful in MGS2 that I didn't really yet find in MGS. Perhaps it was my joy at having bought my very own videogame for my very own videogame system and playing it on a TV that was in my room this time, and it was definitely in part my lump of play-doh of a pre-adolescent, post-traumatic brain. 

In any case, it was a more impactful experience than playing the first game, and for the first time in ways that I couldn't entirely understand. Even as a child I understood why I identified with Sora or with Vivi, but for a long time I couldn't understand why I identified with Raiden.

And I think I may have realized that, on top of just the general insights and new understanding that reading "Driving off the Map" brought to playing the game, that it also gives some unique insight into my personal experience with it.

MGS makes the argument that we can't let who we are, our "genetic destiny" define us, but MGS2 makes the argument that we can't let other examples define who we are, that we have to take control of our own lives, forge our own destinies and beat our own paths. 

There were superficial ways in which I resembled Raiden: he and I were both thin and waify whereas Snake was more built. Raiden wore long hair around the time I started preferring not to get haircuts. Raiden was more prone to emotional outburst than Snake, I also identified with that. But it goes deeper than that.

I don't like to dwell on it, because I prefer to remember the positive, as people do, but my relationship with my brother was not entirely positive. Not because of him, I don't think: he was entirely kind to me, cooking me Ramen, playing games with me, and even going so far as to allow me to hang out with him and his friends.

But as older brothers can be, he was a standard I couldn't live up to. He was popular, I was awkward. My life prior to his death was not defined as "Austin" but as "Greyson's little brother" to my schoolmates. My parents are not perfect people, and even in death his standard lingered as his grades prior to his death were usually superlative whilst mine were atrocious, and my mother was not often reticent to make the comparison.

I often did this to myself as well: Greyson wanted to be an astronaut, and during his life I had no idea what I wanted to be when I was older, but in the years following his death I got the idea in my head that I wanted to be President. I grew out my hair, I started wearing his clothes when I reached the age of his death. I made his ambitions, and some parts of his personality my own.

And I'm just seeing it now, but I think that's a major reason why "Driving off the Map" was such an affecting experience in it's own right. By showing how Kojima remixes these elements in his games both to create new stories and gameplay as well as to self-commentate on form and self-criticize, it also allowed showed me how in playing my brother's games, wearing my brother's clothes all while not being able to be what made the memory of my brother so bright in my mind, that I was assuming the role of someone I was and am not.

Anyway, this letter has gone on far too long, and I'm writing it at far too late an hour. But I just felt like maybe I ought to share this because (and this is something I really want to confront this year in my writing) videogames really are emotional experiences, even when they're juvenile or trite, and I think in writing formal analysis we can engage both with how these games function thematically through their narrative and design, but by investigating the nuts and bolts of that construction we can connect those parts of the game to the world around us and to the the world inside of us.

In short: games, (as has been concluded already, I am aware,) are not simply wastes of time meant to fill the hours with frivolity. They are, to say it coldly, empathy simulators. They make us feel amazing just through the psychological effects of good game design, but on a good day they also give us stories to connect with, worlds to live in, and though we are quick to give games a hard time for only seeming to have the ambition for giving us places we want to escape to, I've always chaffed at that suggestion because, on a bad day, in a long month, during the hardest years of my life, videogames gave me a place to cry alone.

If you've made it all the way through this I am sincerely grateful,

Austin."

New Years Resolutions

New Years Resolutions for 2014

• Find a job that isn’t in sales. (Good riddance, retail.)
• Replay Final Fantasy X and give it yet another reconsideration. (I’ve never been a fan.)[1]
• Replay Final Fantasy XII and re-ignite my conversation with Brendan Keogh about it.
• Finish Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter (what “finish” means is in this case flexible because of how the game’s various endings work.)
• Continue to be capable of going on dates with betting the metaphorical emotional farm on it.
• Record, release, and promote The Breadshots Love Each Other, and be ready to follow it up in a year’s time.
• Write and record heavy metal.
• Continue to question my own privilege and the abuse of privilege of those around me even though it is a pain even though, frankly, it is often a pain in the ass to do so.[2]
• Write the scripts and design documents for my game ideas. (I might document these ideas and my difficulties to try and get them right if I’m able to make any progress whatsoever.)
• Write/start writing a good “JRPG”. (This will be at least one of the above.)
• Make a simple game using Game Maker.
• Restart and finish Xenogears,[3] and begin making headway on Xenosaga.
• Finish Persona 3
• Write about why Persona 3 is completely asinine in a formalized manner.
• Become a better competitor in King of Fighters XIII by showing demonstrable tournament results over my previous tournament result.
• Go to a major fighting game tournament.
• Revisit “Free Will and Defiance” and begin work on an updated version that includes as comprehensive a look at MGS1’s flaws as its qualities (This is the least likely to get done.)
• Finish my essay about Kingdom Hearts by September. (It’s more ambitious than “Free Will and Defiance” but a year is where I draw the line.)
• Begin reading Infinite Jest
• Begin reading either Hard-Boiled Wonderland, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
• Purchase and review Drakengard 3
• Have a PS4 ready to play Metal Gear Solid V.

- Austin C. Howe, Maryland, 2014

---

[1] The reduced-size HUD in the HD version looks like crap, by the way.

[2] Wait a minute, is “pain in the ass” homophobic? (That’s a joke.)

[3] I got stuck in a loop of inevitable failure at a particular bossfight thanks to spectacularly shitty game design.

Thank You!

I have had a busy holiday season such that I didn't see it until now, but I am absolutely ecstatic to learn that my essay about Metal Gear Solid, "Free Will and Defiance" was selected by Critical Distance for their year-end list on top of having been selected for their best of in the week it was published. 

It is a huge honor for an essay I'm immensely proud of myself for having finally written after years of pondering the game in question and it's themes and subtext, which has been one of my favorite videogames since I first played it more than a decade ago.

All of my gratitude, yet again, to James Clinton Howell, whose work inspired the essay, and Brendan Keogh, who helped me organize what was previously a mess of worthy ideas into something approaching readable. It's a great cap to what was actually a surprisingly good year overall.

- Austin C. Howe, Maryland, 2013

EDIT: I got so excited that I forgot that one of my follow-ups to "Free Will and Defiance", which discussed the damselization and sexualization of Kojima women and how it related to the thematic frameworks of his games (short read: thematically functional, but deeply problematic), was also picked by Critical Distance in their "This Week in Videogame Blogging" for August 11. Also an immense honor, though that piece in particular didn't make the year end list.)