So Capcom just confirmed Resident Evil 6, due to come out on November 20. Great! I’ve played each of the numbered Resident Evil games to completion and loved them all, even if I’ve found all the even-numbered games to be superior. I’m hoping that RE6 is also awesome.

Not that it matters, but here’s a quick no-BS bullet point list of what I want when I play a Resident Evil game.

• BOWs. That means moaning, flesh-eating zombies rather than Ganados.
• I don’t want to be able to run while I shoot, but I want the down-and-button quick-turn. Resident Evil is not run-and-gun. It’s stop-and-pop.
• Jump scares. Lots of jump scares. Some people don’t like them. I am not some people.
• No mandatory suicidal AI companion. Shiva drove me insane.
• Set up the unspoken rules, and then break them. Kind of like Resident Evil 2 did when the T-103 zombie came through the wall and then pursued you from room to room.
• More zombies.

And that’s it.

That said, I’m a gamer, and I’ve got the gaming tree to prove it. But whereas I started video gaming around age eight, my daughter has been exposed to video games for the bulk of her life. From her iXL to her Diego game on the Wii to the iPad games she plays, she’s never really known life without video games, as they’re easily as prevalent a form of entertainment as television in our household. (not at issue for this article, but all are secondary to good old books)

When I get home from work in the evenings, I generally have about an hour to spend with my four-year-old daughter before it’s time for dinner and then bedtime. Sometimes, we’ll play her favorite board game and sometimes we play with her Thomas the Train set, but I think her favorite thing to do with daddy is to play video games.

One that we’ve had an absolute ton of fun with is Super Mario Galaxy 2. We played a little bit of the first game in the series together, but I’d already finished the game when she was very young, and didn’t have it in me to start over. Mario Galaxy 2, however, I’ve never played without her. We’re nearly finished with the game, and she’s gotten very good at using the player 2 star to hold enemies still, collect 1-ups and coins, and throw star bits at enemies. She’s only 4, but having her play with me legitimately makes the game a lot easier.

For parents with older kids, reversing the roles might be fun. If your kid can handle those crazy jumps and accurately pilot Mario through a level, let him! Take over the player 2 star yourself and do what you can to help him stay alive.

Mario Galaxy 2 is a fabulous game for parents and kids to play together, but although we’ve loved it, it’s not my daughter’s favorite. Her favorite is Zelda: Twilight Princess. I’m not sure how this came to be, but she’d rather watch my second playthrough of the game than do nearly anything else. When there are areas devoid of enemies, she likes to run around, often as wolf-Link, digging up coins. Elsewise, she loves to watch me navigate dungeons and talk to NPCs

That said, I’ve noticed a number of things missing from Skyrim, and here are the mods I’d most like to see.

Darker Dungeons / Droppable torches
Oblivion had two mods that I loved. One was called darker dungeons, and did just what it said. By default, there are no areas in the game in which you need a torch, lantern, or light spell. You can walk around the deepest caves and still see just fine. The Darker Dungeons mod made it so that nighttime and dungeon environments were actually dark, requiring some light source.

The second was called Droppable Torches, and made it so that if you were holding a torch and drew a weapon, the torch would automatically drop to the ground and continue to provide light. Together, these two mods completely changed the experience of dungeon delving, much for the better.

Improved Alchemy
Alchemy has been one of my favorite parts of The Elder Scrolls games, but there are a few improvements I’d like to see made. Firstly, I think you should be able to name your potions. For example, when I combine Canis Root, Imp Stool, and Orange Dartwing to create my favorite poison, it damages the foe, paralyzes him, and also has a lingering damage effect. But the name is simply “Poison of Paralysis”. There has to be some way to better identify this amidst a list of dozens of potions that I’m carrying. Were I able to relabel the poison “Bloodboil” or even “Paralysis and Damage”, it would help a lot.

Another thing I think could make alchemy more interesting is delayed onset effects. Whether this was governed by ingredients and skill or manually chosen by the alchemist, I think it could add some interesting complexity. Imagine if when I create a paralysis/slow/damage poison, I could delay the onset of the slow effect until after the paralysis wears off. It would be much more useful. Similarly, imagine that when I use the more common Red Mountain Flower in a Damage Health poison, it takes 4 seconds before the damage takes place, but when I use the much rarer Troll Fat, it’s instantaneous. Seems like a cool twist.

Indirect fire weapons
Other than magic spells, bows are the only projectile weapon in the game. How cool would it be to allow alchemy to create molitov cocktails or acid flasks? I’m sure that the physics behind the indirect fire would be a bit tricky, but the engine has gravity built in, so it may not be too bad.

New Monsters
As much as I love fighting giants and sabrecats, I do sometimes miss Oblivion’s goblins, scamps, and minotaurs. How about a mod that would re-add those monsters?

New Mounts
I know that it’s possible to climb into the back of a carriage. How about making the thing mobile? How about allowing players to mount a tamed mammoth or sabrecat in the same way that you can mount a horse? Could be epic.

New Spells
Skyrim has some wonderful and creative spells. The rune traps and the wall spells are great in that they’re new and creative, and the clairvoyance spell is fantastic. What about a spell that duplicates the effect that occurs when you’re hit by a giant? Boom – and you go flying up in the air.

If we look at game genres, so many of them have a strong sci-fi tilt. FPS games can be military shooters such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, or ArmA, but so many more are Halo, Crysis, Resistance, TF2, Half-Life, Monday Night Combat, FEAR,or STALKER. Role-playing games and MMO games are even more strongly typed to sci-fi – I can’t think of a single one that doesn’t have some fantastical element. Horror games and god games seem to have the supernatural inherent in their types, and even adventure games are more sci-fi than not. I also cannot think of one platformer without some manner of sci-fi.

RTS games, casual games, fighting games, and stealth games are a mix, but for every Company of Heroes, Diner Dash, Virtua Fighter, or Splinter Cell, I’ll give you three Starcraft, Plants vs Zombies, Marvel vs Capcom, or Thief games.

The sports and racing genres seem to be the only ones that have more realism than fantasy, and even they are not entirely devoid of Blood Bowl or Mariokart games, which feature orc linebackers and sentient mushrooms.

Maybe the sci-fi/video game connection was obvious to you, but I’d never previously put much thought into it.

When a developer gives the player an entire world to explore, the player should be able to spend time exploring it. This leaves no room for plots involving any urgency. Many times in the past I’d thought to write about this phenomenon, but I never had anything truly interesting to say about it, and so I’d blown off the article. But last night on my commute home, I got to thinking – how would one solve this problem?

Water Chips and Servomotors

 One of the best examples of an enforced time limit is the water chip quest in Fallout. You had a set number of days to return to valut 13 with a water chip, or else the vault’s population – everyone you’ve ever known – would all die. The game gave you plenty of time and plenty of warnings, but in the end if you took too long you stood a good chance of having to restart the game. This is a very old school approach, and Fallout was a fantastic game, but such an approach would never hold up in today’s video game culture.

The truth is that if there’s a single long-term goal that comprises such a large portion of the game, it’s difficult to predict how long it might take someone in an open world to accomplish that task. The game’s designers are effectively punishing the player for spending time exploring the world they’ve created.

This is similar to another problem that used to exist in old school games. In many games I’d played on my Commodore 64, I was able to save the game in a state where it was impossible to progress. Saving the game in a fail state should never be allowed. But what about a state in which success is incredibly unlikely? What if the player has only ten minutes to cross the northern wasteland, battling snarks and grumkins? It may be possible, but it’s prohibitively difficult. Any time your game includes time limits, these problems crop up. What if I was playing Fallout and saved the game with only 2 days remaining to return the water chip, but I was 5 days away from the vault?

Stages of Urgency

Any storyline worth its weight in bantha pudu has ebb and flow. There will be moments of intensity and there will be lulls. One solution is to allow for exploring during the lulls and enforce time limits during the more intense moments. This approach isn’t without flaws, but for example, let’s take a look at a theoretical open-world game – we’ll call it Neo Uber Tales. In Neo Uber Tales, there’s a huge open world and a player can explore it at his leisure. But partway through the game, the villainous Baron McMoustache captures the player’s uncle Kennist and ties him to some train tracks. Uncle Kennist is on the other side of the mountains, and the only way to get there in time is to travel through the Mines of Schmoria. The player has only an hour to get there before the train arrives, and as the game’s designers, we want to make sure that he doesn’t save the game because he could easily save it in a state where nothing but failure is possible. That’s an hour of gameplay during which no saving is possible, although we could allow a quicksave that would function much like an extended pause. The primary flaw to this method is that if the player dawdles in the Mines of Schmoria, he can potentially lose an hour of gameplay when his uncle is killed and we return him to the checkpoint at the beginning of the mines.

This approach only allows for a way to deal with shorter time limits. If we wanted to impart a sense of urgency in a longer term scenario, such as that with the water chip, we’d need a different approach. Barring time travel of the sort we saw in Majora’s Mask, I can think of only one way to deal with the problem: allow the failure. In Fallout, if too much time passed and you hadn’t retrieved the water chip, you’d see the people at Vault 13 dying and you’d receive a game over screen. But it needn’t be that way. I’m looking to Heavy Rain for inspiration here, since that game allowed the story to continue even when a main character died. Heavy Rain had no fail state, which is one reason I absolutely loved the game. In our Neo Uber Tales example, if you arrive at the railroad tracks and more than an hour has passed, you find Uncle Kennist splattered and have to deal with the repercussions.

The “hurry up and wait” issue has been an issue in many games over the past few years, and I’ll be interested to see how developers tackle the issue in the future.

The obvious big players in this realm are Steam, XBox Live Arcade, The Playstation Network, Direct2Drive, and Impulse which was just purchased by Gamestop from Stardock.

XBLA and PSN are obviously tied to their respective consoles, as is the red-headed stepchild of console download services: WiiWare. While each has some excellent games, (Shadow Complex, Pixeljunk Monsters, LostWinds) we’re still in the infancy of digital distribution in that these services are currently used primarily for inexpensive games. And while download-only games like Costume Quest and Hoard can only improve the popularity of these services, it’s probable that in the next generation of consoles, there will be no physical media aside from optional flash cards or external drives.

Steam is the behemoth of digital distribution. It’s tied to Valve, which in my mind stands alongside Blizzard and Bioware as the best of the best in terms of game production. Steam has an amazing feature-rich client complete with achievements and a well-integrated friends list. And best of all, Steam games work. Always. I’ve had $10 of credit on Direct2Drive for nearly a year now after a refund following purchase of Cold Fear,  which flat-out wouldn’t launch on my PC. Cold Fear and Dark Athena are the extent of my experience with Direct2Drive, and I believe I bought Galactic Civilizations 2 from Impulse following the announcement that the game would be launched with no DRM. I bought that game mainly to support DRM-free software. Didn’t like the game so much, but Impulse functioned well. I think I also bought the first Penny Arcade Adventures game from Greenhouse.

The move away from physical media has many implications. First off, it murders the used games market. This explains why Gamestop, whose primary market is used games, was so eager to jump on the digital distribution wagon. And speaking as someone who gets a lot of his games used from Amazon and EBay, my overwhelming instinct is to flinch and yell “BAAD!” at this inevitibility. But then I look at Steam Deals. I’ve gotten a lot of the games I have in my Steam collection on the cheap. Bioshock 2 for $5. Beyond Good and Evil for $5. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom for $2.50. I don’t remember how much I paid for New Vegas and Metro 2033, but they were cheap too. Digital Distribution doesn’t have to mean that games never drop in price, although it may mean that. It all depends on the distributors.

I’ll leave you with one final thought here. Please never say “Digital Download”. That term bugs the crap out of me. It’s redundant. All downloads are digital. Thank you, and goodnight.

The idea was so fascinating to me that I went ahead and drew up my own gaming tree in MS Paint. It’s not pretty, but hopefully it’s legible.

Click for full size version

I’ve wrapped my first playthrough of Batman: Arkham Asylum. I’d delayed playing it as long as I had because it’s a licensed game. In general, licensed games stink. I was pleased to find that Arkham Asylum does not, in fact, stink. Awesome game. The game has me listed as 91% complete, mostly because there are a number of challenges I haven’t hit yet. I won’t be going for 100% achievements on this one, mainly because I know I’ll never finish all the challenges perfectly, and a 40-hit combo feels a bit beyond my reach, but I might consider a second playthrough on Hard difficulty now that I’ve finished the first. I did manage to get all of The Riddler’s challenges.

Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles is a fun little Wii game. I mainly bought it for the trip on memory lane through Resident Evil 2, which holds a very warm place in my heart. Paradoxically, it’s also a very scary place. The game’s fun, but I haven’t played it much recently.

Red Faction: Guerilla has been taking up a lot of my time. I bought it on Steam when it went on sale – I can’t remember whether I paid $5 or $10 for the game. I’m in Oasis, on casual difficulty, and the game’s already feeling a bit monotonous. I might just go back and play every once in a while. If only I didn’t have that damned completionist thing going, I could just put the game aside and be done with it.

Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes turned out to be a mistake. It cost $15, so it sounded like a good deal for a decent tactical fantasy combat game. But it’s seriously broken, and the dialog is hideous. I quit after 3 tries at the first battle. I’m actually unable to move where I want to. I click on a square and the character sprints in the other direction. Avoid this one. I should seek a refund.

Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening is an expansion from my favorite game of last year. I really loved Dragon Age. But this expansion has some problems. Notably, the difficulty is erratic as all hell. After a far too easy first chapter, I set the difficulty to hard, and I’ve played that way through most of the game. But when I got to the dragon at the end, I got stomped. Flat. I set the difficulty to normal, then easy, and kept losing. After my 3rd attempt on easy, I managed to pull off a victory. Barely. Jesus, I just want the game to end now, but I’m having difficulty mustering the will to go back to it for the final two or three battles.

Once I wrap up Awakening and possibly Red Faction, I’ll install the copy of Mass Effect 2 I’ve had sitting here. It might be hard to go right from one Bioware game to another. I just ordered Enslaved, and I might try that one first. I’ve also been considering going back to oldies like Grim Fandango or Metal Gear Solid. I also never got far in Torchlight. I guess we’ll see what strikes my fancy. I’ve been putting a lot of time into Gem Miner: Dig Deeper recently.

Borderlands 2
It’s true, a Gearbox designer called a Borderlands sequel “a no brainer”, but there’s been no talk and no word about it yet. It’s very likely not yet in development. There are a lot of things I’d love to see done differently with Borderlands 2, and I’m really hopeful that my ideas are common-sense enough to be implemented in a Borderlands sequel. The game was a lot of fun, but it had the potential to be truly great.

Dungeon Keeper 3
It’s been a long time since we saw any kind of Dungeon Keeper game. Ten years ago, Dungeon Keeper 3 was cancelled and there’s been no real word about the series since. It’s not impossible that the series will be resurrected though, and I’m very hopeful that if it is, the third game will be more like the first than like the second.

Plants vs Zombies 2
After initially becoming addicted to Plants vs Zombies, I played the crap out of it, and it remains one of only two games on which I’ve ever gotten 100% completion on the achievements. Popcap has released sequels to Bejeweled, Zuma, Peggle, and Bookworm have all gotten sequels, so a Plants vs Zombies sequel isn’t beyond the realm of imagination.

Ultima Offline
…or something to that effect. I played and loved the first five Ultima games on my Commodore 64 back in the day. I’m ready to try The Ultima 6 Project, which is a Dungeon Siege-powered remake of the game I never played. But having missed so many Ultima games was a shame. After 2000, the only Ultima to be had was Ultima Online, and you know how I feel about MMO games. If they could reboot the Ultima series, I would be quite pleased. Of course, that’s less than likely at this point.

The Sequel to Heavy Rain
This game will almost definitely happen, although if it’s out before 2014 I’d be a bit surprised. I loved Indigo Prophecy. I loved Heavy Rain too, for different reasons. If Quantic Dream puts out another game in their interactive fiction series, I’m there.

Resident Evil 6
Another inevitable title. A Resident Evil sequel is as predictable as a Final Fantasy sequel. But so far, the series has shown that the even-numbered titles are the good ones. I’m hoping that this holds true with Resident Evil 6. Maybe they can learn something from Dead Space.

Half-Life 3
There has been no word anywhere about a potential third volume in Valve’s epic tale. Right now, everybody’s too concerned about the potential release of a Half-Life 2 episode 3. And while I admit my own eagerness for that game, I’m curious as to where Valve can go with a legitimate sequel: a third Half-Life installment. The game’s story alone is one of the biggest draws to me, and Half-Life has already brought Gordon Freeman down the rabbit hole and back more times than I can count. What’s next?

Psychonauts 2
Aside from a page on DoubleFine’s site which seems to have been set in place more to debunk rumors than to announce anything, there is no word about a Psychonauts sequel. Still, I think it’s more likely than not that a sequel will eventually appear. I loved the original game, and I’m very hopeful that the sequel will be up to the same standards.

Pixeljunk Monsters 2
There are currently four released games in the Pixeljunk series: Racers, Monsters, Eden, and Shooter. The only one I’ve loved has been 1-2: Pixeljunk Monsters. I bought the game years ago and I’m still playing it nearly every week. There’s been speculation about 1-5 being Pixeljunk Dungeons, which sounds excellent, but following word of Pixeljunk Shooter 2 and Pixeljunk Racers: Second Lap, it’s unclear as to whether these games are just expansions like Pixeljunk Monsters Encore was, or whether they’re legitimate sequels. (2-1 and 2-4) If another Pixeljunk Monsters game ever comes out, I’m buying it on release date.