The charm of Rayman Origins

Rayman Origins is a fantastic game. The art and animations are smooth and fluid, and the music is fun with its integration of the often seldom-used digierdoo. But what makes Rayman Origins enjoyable to play the most is its sense of charm by rewarding for using the path of least resistance.

The path of least resistance in platformers tends to be the bottom lane, to borrow a term from MOBAs. This path is easier, faster, and usually more fun, but gives less rewards in the form of coins, rings, or whatever thing you’re trying to collect. The more rewarding path tends to be the upper lane, where you have to jump from floating platform to platform. You’ll find more power-ups on this path, but also run into more enemies and movement won’t be as fluid.

Looking at what I consider the two biggest platformers in history, the Super Mario Bros. series and the Sonic the Hedgehog series, these paths fit near perfectly.

In Super Mario Bros., the bottom path moves quickly and, while filled with goombas and turtles, your ability to jump makes the obstacles trivial. As long as you can get a running start, most jumps are easy to maneuver. The upper path often takes the form of clouds or small platforms that don’t allow for distance jumping, and flying turtles can easily block your way requiring the timing of jumps to be more precise.

Sonic the Hedgehog had the same approach. With its loops and fast-paced gameplay, racing to the end of a stage using the lower path was usually a lot more fun than taking the higher ground and bouncing off enemies to make the long-gap jumps.

Rayman Origins takes both of those lanes and puts them on the same path. The same route that moves you quickly through the level or stage is the same one that puts the least amount of obstacles in your with the fewer amount of enemies. The video above shows how the lums are placed specifically where you will be running. At 20 seconds, in any other platformer the lums would line up in a straight line up the wall. Rayman Origins recognizes how the player will move up the wall and arranges the Lums in a vector in line with the player’s movements, making sure each one is collected.

These subtle placements of collectables, power-ups, and extra lives makes Rayman Origins not only a fun game because of its presentation, but a charming game because it caters to the player, doing everything it can to help the player along the way.

My hope is that its sequel Rayman Legends, which is due March 5 for the Nintendo Wii U, doesn’t lose this charm in its implementation of the all-controlling gamepad player.

Diary of an Assassin – Third Entry

I can see why people often recommend starting with Assassin’s Creed 2.

First off, Ezio is a much more likable character than Altair. He’s charming, humorous, less dogmatic, and unafraid to show the spectrum of emotions. The cities feel more vibrant and colorful thanks to the renaissance backdrop, and the narrative is more expansive with less repetition. Lastly, and I believe this may be appreciated more now than when it first released, the music is amazing. While Jesper Kyd has a resume of composing music for games starting back in 1989, I don’t think his talent was as highly regarded as it is until his work on Assassin’s Creed 2. Like the themes from other game themes including Battlefield, Mass Effect, and Uncharted, the Assassin’s Creed theme will be one I remember for years.

However, I believe starting with Assassin’s Creed 2 depreciates its value. The Twitter pitch is everything is better; combat is smoother and gives more control, climbing up buildings is faster and traversal on rooftops is even more fluid, and the story is interesting enough to make you actually want to learn more about the characters. Skipping the first game and jumping directly into Assassin’s Creed 2 doesn’t give the player a position to see the leaps and bounds of change, both literally and figuratively. Assassin’s Creed may be a repetitive game, but it will give you a much bigger appreciation of the things added and changed in Assassin’s Creed 2.

And without rehashing what’s already been said about the ending, it is indeed spine-chilling when Minerva looks directly at the camera and utters the name Desmond.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter – missing the mark

Medal of Honor: Warfighter, as a game, plays fine. The movement and shooting feels responsive, the textures look crisp and smooth, and there are some great standout moments like breaching doors and the driving sequences. However, Warfighter in it’s entirely feels uninspired and suffers from a lack of direction of where it wants to go.

The Playlist – 10/28/2012

The great thing about the playlist is it’s open and free. I can write about my goals in a game, why I like a particular genre over another, the lifespan of a release, or certain mechanics that do and don’t work in a game. Like most people last week, I played Medal of Honor: Warfighter. I’ll have a more substantial article about it in general soon, but this week I wanted to talk about one of the best parts of Medal of Honor: Warfighter, breaching.

Diary of an Assassin – Second Entry

Oops, I already completed Assassin’s Creed. It only took me 15 hours, though I suspect further sequels will take substantially more time. The visuals and mechanics still hold up five years later, though it is not without faults, Assassin’s Creed is still a spectacular first dive into an open world setting.

The introduction and tutorial seemed exceptionally long, however. After the 17-part tutorial introduces nearly every weapon and technique, only to become available after you complete certain key missions, making me wonder why the tutorial is overly long in the first place. When each new weapon or technique unlocks, the option to practice them in training becomes available to get a feel of how they work in combat, making the first tutorial unnecessary.

I’m a bit sad after finishing Assassin’s Creed I won’t see Altair until Revelations. His character arc felt redeeming. When first introduced in Solomon’s temple, I didn’t like Altair. He’s a jerk playing by his own rules and didn’t seem to deserve the title of assassin as he strolled up in plain sight, not even trying to hide in the shadows unseen. Those first few moments took me longer than it should because I was looking around the room, thinking to myself, I shouldn’t just walk up to him, right? But when he’s stripped of his rank and title, his build up back to master assassin is earnest and not without effort.

Once I get out into one of the three cities, though, exploration shines. Free running through the streets of Jerusalem, galloping from rooftop to rooftop, and jumping into piles of hay is so satisfying. Comparing the difference between the old Tomb Raider games where most platforms were based on a grid cube system to seeing Altair run and jump off a building at angle, land on a platform hovering above the street, keep his momentum as he jumps off again, only to land in a roll on another rooftop is simply amazing.

I can plainly see how people describe Assassin’s Creed as repetitive. Effectively, each mission breaks down into a monotonous process: head into town, find the informant, climb towers until you can find and complete any three combination of pickpocket, interrogate, or eavesdrop, return to informant, assassinate target. While the PC version has a dash of variety for side missions with informant missions, they are often more difficult than your run-of-the-mill pickpocket or eavesdrop. Tearing down merchant stands while being chased by guards, losing line of sight with the guards, then making it back to the informant in time can be harrowing.

Besides the repetitiveness, pacing felt fine right up until the end. Making my way through the funeral was tense enough, but once I discovered my target had already fled I head off into the hills to find him, going through wave after wave of soldiers. Combat certainly isn’t the lowest point of Assassin’s Creed, but it still feels a bit clunky when taking on crowds of guards and soldiers. Then I still had to head back to my town to take out my master. It feels like a case of, and then, where each final objective delivers another final objective.

If this were 2007 I would talk more about the ending and the writing on the walls, but seeing as the series goes on and more of it is - hopefully - explained in later games, I’ll save that discussion until I have more information. Now that I’m done with Altair for a while, time to dive into the dark middle chapter of the series, Assassin’s Creed 2.

Dragon Age 3 and the case of the missing platform

More than a month after their initial announcement, BioWare revealed some more details about Dragon Age 3: Inquisition over the weekend at Edmonton Comic and Entertainment Expo. David Gaider will return as lead writer for the game as players take control of a human character once again. Whether that human character will be Hawke, the grey warden, or someone new is unknown.

BioWare wants this to be the biggest Dragon Age yet, with a deeper focus on customization than Origins had for both your character and your followers. Players will be able to take control of a castle as seen in the concept art above. When BioWare talked about scope, they pointed out one dungeon in Dragon Age 3 is bigger than all of the dugneons in Dragon Age 2. They are also exploring technology to allow players to import their saves from previous games without actually transferring the save data.

Despite all this, BioWare was quiet on which platforms the game will appear. Dragon Age 3: Inquisition will be the first BioWare game to run on Frostbite 2, the same engine that’s powered Battlefield 3, Need for Speed The Run, and the recently released Medal of Honor: Warfighter. With a tentative release date of fall 2013, it’s almost a forgone conclusion we’ll see Inquisition on the PC and next-generation consoles, especially to take advantage of the Frostbite 2 engine that stumbles on current gen systems. However, with more than 130 million consoles in total, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t an Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 version as well.

Diary of an Assassin - First Entry

I never played an Assassin’s Creed game. Well, that’s partly true. I played about the first hour of the first game when it released in 2007 on my, at the time, single-core CPU and AGP graphics card. I only played the first hour because the game chugged along in what seemed like slow motion, effectively killing any exciting moments the game had to offer. The system I was playing it on was built before the transition to dual-core and quad-core chips, and before PCI-e cards were a thing.

Fast forward five years later, we’re barreling towards the release of Assassin’s Creed 3. In both an effort to catch up before the release of the newest game, as well as see if the games in the series still hold up, I’m going to be playing through the entire series leading up to the release of Assassin’s Creed 3 for the PC on November 20. That means Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. Four weeks, four games.

Going through previous entries in a series before the new one comes out isn’t a new thing for me. When The Dark Knight Rises released, I watched Batman Begins and The Dark Knight the weekend before. However, I’ve never done this with games. There’s a very real possibility I could totally burn out on the series before Assassin’s Creed 3 releases. I’m willing to take that risk.

I’ll be updating my progress through these entries pointing out what still works in each game, how the series changes from release to release, and how the meta-narrative connects. But first, it’s time to step into the shoes of Altair Ibn-La'Ahad.

Journey into Tyria: Two steps forward, one step back

It’s been more than enough time since Guild Wars 2 released to poke and prod at the way it handles genre conventions. Having played every weekend beta event up until release, and my time with it after, it’s evident to me this was not the second coming of MMOs fans were expecting. That’s not to say Guild Wars 2 isn’t a fun game. It is, but the design foundation seems to ask why certain genre-defining standards are the way they are with changes where ArenaNet saw fit. This works in some instances, but when all the game systems come together it feels like taking two steps forward and one step back.

The Playlist – 10/20/2012

The Playlist – 10/13/2012