RIP 1UP.com

Well, anyone who follows games journalism probably already knows that UGO has bought out 1UP.com, fired almost all of the people who made 1UP what it was, and shuttered EGM. I didn't even work there, but this news has made me by turns furious and despondent. I don't want it to be over, but it is. Sure, those people aren't dead, but most of the podcasts I loved are now gone as is a convenient one stop shop for decent games journalism.

1UP was like the last great big media bastion of games journalism. IGN and Gamespot are still around, but IGN has always been garbage and Gamespot has been going down the tubes for a couple years. Now I guess I have to get my gaming news and reviews from Giant Bomb. And, eventually, whatever websites/podcasts the ex-1UP folks start.

Anyway, I think Jeff Green said it best in his recent blog post, so I'll just link that.

Though the staff who remain are good writers, I can't imagine the kind of survivor guilt they must have on top of losing most of their best friends/co-workers. Yes, 1UP.com isn't going away but it's not really the same 1UP.com anymore. And with EGM closing one wonders when the era of gaming magazines will end.

At any rate, this is probably the most fitting send off video I could find for the site:


p.s. Fuck UGO in their most painful area.

Halloween Episodes and Assorted Specials

Along with 'Sick Day', 'Halloweenie' is among my favorite episodes of The Adventures of Pete & Pete. It's one of those episodes of the show I can point to in order to prove to people that this was an incredible, unique kids show that doesn't look or feel like any kids show before or since. Anyway, 'Halloweenie', along with many Pete & Pete episodes, deals with growing up. In this case, Little Pete still loves Halloween and wants to break the record for most houses visited in one night. Standing in his way are the evil Pumpkin Eaters, a group of teens who want to destroy Halloween forever, along with, in a twist, his older brother, Big Pete, who also hates the holiday and feels like an idiot for agreeing to go trick-or-treat with Little Pete because he thinks he's too old. At its core this episode is actually about all holidays, and how as we become adults some of them--Christmas, Easter, and Halloween specifically--just aren't as fun anymore because they're so kid focused. Still, it's a fantastic episode and I usually watch it around this time of year to remind myself of the childhood fun of trick-or-treating.

Retronauts is the totally great retro-gaming podcast on 1UP.com. Though they haven't done an explicitly Halloween themed episode, they once did a podcast about Survival Horror games which is just as good in my book. While this episode has the usual combination of high level criticism, historical context, and very opinionated commentary, it's a fantastic Halloween listen because a large part of the podcast is given over to talk about moments that scared them in games. It ends up having that vibe you get when you gather friends together and you all discuss scary movies or strange, eerie things that have happened in your lives or to people you know. Anyway, here's a direct link to the episode, though you'd probably be better off finding it on iTunes or through the 1UP website. For the sake of ease, it was the 8/23/07 episode though I seem to remember it's listed on iTunes as being the 8/22/07 show.
South Park hasn't had a lot of Halloween episodes, probably because they want to avoid the inevitable Simpsons comparisons. But the handful of Halloween South Parks have been universally great, even the notorious 2006 episode with the "too soon??" Steve Irwin joke. My personal favorite is probably the above pictured 'Spooky Fish' episode with the hilarious Barbara Streisand border, putting the episode in so-called "Spooky Vision." South Park also recently had a Halloween-ish episode that parodies Cloverfield, with giant guinea pigs attacking the world after Peruvian pan flute bands are...you know what, it's silly and complicated and you just have to watch it.
The Simpsons is probably the great grandaddy of modern TV shows--cartoon shows in particular--having Halloween specials. Because these 'Treehouse of Horror' episodes were purposely written to be outside the main "continuity" of the series, it freed the writers and artists to reach for brilliant heights, creating intricate, memorable parodies of well-known horror/sci fi/fantasy films along with Twilight Zone-esque tales. Counting the forthcoming episode from this year, there's been 18 'Treehouse of Horror' specials, all with the established hallmarks like spooky versions of the names in the credits, a different opening sequence often with playful names on tombstones, and the appearance of aliens Kang and Kodos. As these episodes often coincided with presidential elections, there was some great political satire to go along with the fun Halloween stuff.
Penny Arcade, my favorite webcomic, has a habit of producing creative and funny Halloween themed comics. Granted, they don't do it every single year, but if you look back through their archives, you'll fine some good stuff like the above comic about scaring kids with tales of losing a save. It's also worth pointing out the nearly-forgotten 'Fall of The House of Brahe', their only true Halloween story arc to my knowledge, which was most likely produced circa 1999/2000 for GameSpy back when Penny Arcade was doing some of their art. It can still be found here, and I recommend it to newer Penny Arcade fans who maybe didn't know it existed.

The 1UP Yours Drinking Game

Yes, it's time for another drinking game. You may remember the Guided By Voices drinking game I came up with. Maybe you even tried it?? Whatever. Be that way. Today I'm going to list the rules for the 1UP Yours podcast, which along with being a really entertaining videogame podcast also features some of the drinking-est hosts around.
Seriously.
Before I get to the rules, note that the traditional, accepted way to play this drinking game is with the whiskey or scotch of your choice, as well as whatever beer you have lying around. When I say "take a shot" you, well, take a shot of liquor or take a healthy swallow of scotch (assuming you drink it straight or on the rocks, that is...you could do shots if you want to). When I say "take a drink", that means you take a healthy swallow of beer. When I say "finish your drink" that means that you finish off the beer you currently have open. With that out of the way...

--As soon as the music ends and Garnett says his first line, take a drink.
--If at any point someone says "weekend confirmed" or there is talk about a possible confirmation of said weekend, take a shot.
--If there's a British person on the show, take a drink when they're either introduced or you hear their first line, whichever comes first.
--Whenever Shane mentions seeing a game or getting to play a game but he can't talk about it yet, finish your drink.
--If there's an ex-1UP staff member or on-their-way-out 1UP staff member on the show, take a drink at the beginning of the show.
--If Garnett mispronounces a word, uses the wrong word, or slurs his speech, take a shot.
--If the show is over two hours in length, go get a glass of water at the one hour mark. You'll thank me later.
--If they are doing a '4 Minute Warning' segment, finish your drink.
--Whenever Garnett has to explain how people have misrepresented his comments, and that he actually doesn't hate a game or isn't down on it, take a shot.
--At the break between segments, take two drinks.
--If Shane says anything along the lines of the follow phrases, take a shot: "I'm a huuuge fan of..."; if he says anything is the "secret best..." anything ever; any talk of something being over or underrated.
--If Andrew 'Skip' Pfister gets on the mic, you hear him talking in the background, or someone refers to him (particularly with the words "on the wheels of steel"), take a drink.
--If, in the process of fondly remembering something, Garnett refers to it as "the shit", take a drink.
--If a British or other foreign personage is on the show, every time you can't understand a word they said, take a drink.
--If Shane or Garnett aren't on the show, take a shot. If they're BOTH missing, take a shot and finish your drink.
--During the news segment, if they're doing NPD numbers, finish your drink.
--At the end of the show, when someone (usually Garnett) says "we are ghost" take a shot. If they forget to say it, take two shots.

Garnett and Shane and alcohol and microphones

Shadow of the Colossus

I have this problem with videogames sometimes. I become so caught up in the carrot-on-a-string elements of a game that I don't stop to look around and experience the world I've elected to enter. Videogames become something I need to complete or finish (or even play enough of to write a review) instead of something to enjoy and appreciate. This is why I so often don't finish games, and why I initially gave up on Shadow of the Colossus: games start to feel like work, specifically homework. I feel like I have to finish a game in order to competently talk about it. I feel like I have to play certain games because everyone else is, or they games in question are beloved critical classics that didn't sell well but offer something very different and compelling from most other videogames.

So, then, let me just say this: if we really want videogames to be accepted as the new form of art, of expression, that they are, we need more games like Shadow of the Colossus. Though it has a story that could potentially be told in another medium, it couldn't be experienced/told in exactly the same way. And that's the key: the translation of this game to another artform would change it irrevocably.

I keep coming back to the argument that they had on one of the 1UPFM Backlog segments about videogames as a medium, and how the one thing that videogames can do that others can't is interactivity. I absolutely agree with Ryan O'Donnell on this point, because I truly believe videogames as an artistic medium, rather than an entertainment medium, will only continue to evolve if they focus on making the story interactive and embedded in the game world somehow. Not all videogames should do this, of course, because not all videogames are trying to tell a story, or at least are so focused on one. Narrative driven videogames, however, should, in my opinion. I felt such connection to the Shadow of the Colossus world and story because I was the one discovering it all and interacting with it. Moreover, even though there are cutscenes that help tell the story, you can always, at the very least, move the camera around.

As with Ico, I think Shadow of the Colossus quickly divides its audience into people who just want to have fun while a story is spoon fed to them and people who want to experience something and exist in an environment, exploring it, in order to get most of the story. I wouldn't consider this game fun to play, but as an interactive experience, it's one of the best the medium has to offer. Much like Silent Hill 2, I can easily forgive and overlook the shortcomings and awkwardness of the "gameplay" aspect in order to get the fulfilling environmental, atmospheric, and implicit narrative. Speaking of which: that the cutscenes in the game have interactivity, however limited, is a step in the right direction for an artform long reduced to aping other mediums to convey information.

If early RPGs, text adventures, and adventure games represented videogames borrowing from books to be art; if games with gorgeous graphics (2D graphics count, haters) represented borrowing from paintings and visual art to be art; if games like Metal Gear Solid represented borrowing from movies to be art...then games like Shadow of the Colossus represent videogames realizing their potential as an artistic medium on their own unique ground: interactivity. Note that this is not a snobbish way of saying that this automatically makes these kind of games superior. Maybe Shadow of the Colossus (or 'art' games in general) is not a game that you will enjoy. This doesn't mean you're a bad person or that you're stupid. After all, not everyone likes watching art films, reading difficult fiction, or going to museums to look at paintings. It's simply an artistic outgrowth of a form of entertainment, and it's endlessly exciting to see an artform in its infancy produce something so grand.

The two things that this game gets right, that I would argue no other game has gotten right before or since, are a sense of scale and a feeling of utter solitude. Both of these things are tied into exactly what makes Shadow of the Colossus so brilliant, so we'll examine them separately.

Upon encountering most Colossi, your reaction will likely be “wow, how am I going to defeat this thing??” Though your sword will reveal their weak points—a trope of boss battles that have been in videogames for years—it's never immediately obvious how you can get to and assault those weak points. People have criticized Shadow of the Colossus for being “only” a series of 16 boss battles, but that is needlessly reductive. As the common saying about this game goes, the Colossi “are” the levels. Even the ones that aren't towering bipedal creatures are 'levels' in the general sense of the word. They're like a combination of a linear platformer 'level' and a puzzle game. You 'solve' each Colossus fight as much as you 'get to the end of the level.' And given the enormous scale of most of the Colossi in the game, the enormity of your task is directly proportional to how satisfying it feels when you take them down. Seeing the comparatively tiny Wander take down these huge beasts, after being initially intimidated by them, is utterly compelling even though the sneaking suspicion that what you're doing isn't totally “good” quickly becomes a walking and then a running suspicion.

The other half of Shadow of the Colossus's gameplay is getting to the various Colossi. Getting lost in most 3D games of this sort is usually a frustration, but, here, it is a kind of reward. Even discounting the fruit trees and lizards that boost Wander's life and grip meter, respectively, the unforgettable experience of traversing the game's world feels like an optional, but wholly complete, gameplay system. Fighting the Colossi may be the game's big draw, but I would argue moving through the world is equally important. From the brilliantly realistic way that Wander's horse, Agro, acts and is controlled, to the breathtaking but completely barren (note: barren meaning “nobody else is there”, not “wastelands”) scenery you see, Shadow of the Colossus contains one of the most complete and 'natural' worlds in all of videogame history. In most games, when you happen upon a cool looking chunk of architecture, or a clearing in a forest, or some such thing, you have been conditioned to expect that some tangible game reward is there. To get a bit behind the scenes on you, a programmer wouldn't take the time to detail such an area unless there is something there. It's a waste of time and money to do this. Not so for Shadow of the Colossus. As with the behavior of the Colossi themselves—which greatly vary in their aggressiveness and reactive-ness to stimuli, just like animals in real life—everything is put into the game just to be there and to feel natural. There are forests, waterfalls, beaches, and desert expanses that serve no game purpose other than to exist and be discovered.

Shadow of the Colossus is an extraordinarily lonely game on top of all this. By the time you finish the game, you'll have spent hours with just your horse, riding around the world and trying to find paths to the next Colossus. This might sound frustrating on paper, but the game is purposely designed to evoke solitude and loneliness in the player. Though dread quickly supersedes the feeling, your immediate reaction upon seeing a Colossus is one of relief: finally, another living thing!! As someone who enjoys being alone, I found this game to be surprisingly satisfying for the amount of time you go without hearing or seeing anything other than the environment and your horse. Some have compared this feeling to the Tom Hanks movie, Castaway, and I think it's pretty apt, especially when you realize you're personalizing and sympathizing with a horse, albeit probably the most realistic horse in videogame history.

I'd like to close by saying that the story of the game is one of the best the artform has to offer even though there isn't technically that much of it. But due to its minimalist style, less is indeed more. The game, like a good art film, trusts you to fill in the blanks yourself. It's also open to interpretation, as most great works of art are, and once you really start to question and think about the implications of the story line, the motivations of the characters, and the results of your actions in the world, you're left with a lot of things to chew on. If most gamers of my generation entered the artform through Mario, in which you were obviously the good guy, saving the helpless princess love interest, then Shadow of the Colossus is, arguably, the point where everything became a little more complicated, and grew up a lot. In this game, you're maybe not a good guy, doing maybe not good things, to save a girl (we're not sure if she's a princess, a priestess, or just an average person) without really knowing our motivation for doing so (she could be our love interest, or a girl we love from afar, or our sister, or something else entirely).

Well, OK, the motivation of the game is, simply, love. Love is the only thing that could cause what is ostensibly an average guy to try to take on these huge beasts, potentially losing his life in the process. Good or bad, what Wander does is for his love of this girl, and that's something that I don't think we, as the player coming to this world from the outside, need explained to us. We've all been crazy enough due to love to try the impossible. So even if we, as the player, have only a vague idea of our motivation in the game, we understand and sympathize with Wander because we've been there. After awhile, I wasn't questioning whether Wander was doing good or bad; I felt like, he's in love, and I've been in love, and good or bad doesn't come into the issue when he is trying to help the one he loves. It's very rare that a videogame can make me relate to a character on a pretty fundamentally human level while not knowing anything about him or her otherwise. And that, if nothing else, proves to me that Shadow of the Colossus is art, and is one of the best videogames ever made.

Denis Dyack, Please Stop

Thank heavens for 1Up writer Shawn Elliott, who provides an intelligent, succinct counter-argument to all the stuff Denis Dyack of Silicon Knights, developer of soon-to-be-released Too Human, has been yammering about for the past few weeks. (Note: click the title of this post to read Elliott's blog I'm referring to)

While I admire Dyack for being so high-falutin' with his ideas and ideals, I can't help but feel he's putting way too much time and effort into worrying what critics and message board denizens have to say about his game. It feels like he's trying to use all kinds of philosophical/social concepts to try to dismantle how both function, forgetting that message boards are basically the modern day, mass equivalent of a bunch of people getting together to talk shit and when you use the Internet you sign up for this kind of thing (and need to develop some thick skin and a sense of humor), and that critics should have no basis on your "art" whatsoever. I'm sorry you don't like that they are putting criticisms into their previews, but we consumers find those kind of things useful. All kinds of movies that get bad reviews from critics still are blockbusters and loved by many, so why worry about critics ruining the reception of your game before its release?? You're doing more harm than good to public perception of your product if you spend most of its ramp-up-to-release making yourself look like a pompous ass.

In the end, I really wish Dyack could keep his mouth shut and let his game speak for itself. Almost everyone else manages to do it. But I suppose if I had spent way too long developing what amounts to Diablo II with a cyber-Norse reskinning, I might be more defensive, too.

And yeah, I haven't played the game and I said that to be a jerk.