Previously on Non-Virtual Reality...

It's getting pretty late, but there's something I wanna talk about.

Let's talk about Alone in the Dark. This game, developed by Eden Games and published by Atari, is doing something really different. When I heard they were using episodic content, it wasn't a big deal. I kind of just glossed over it, and figured it was another survival horror game, just another Resident Evil ripoff.

And even if I wasn't wrong and this game ends up sucking major donkey butt (which doesn't seem to be the case), AITD might change the way people play games. We like talk about games becoming more cinematic experiences, but did we ever think that eventually we would be able to fast forward and rewind our gaming experiences? That's exactly what Atari is allowing us to do. When you pick up the game, pretty much the whole thing minus the ending is unlocked. Of course, playing through the whole thing is no fun if you start at the end then work your way to the beginning. But it does do some very interesting things for gamers who don't want to commit hours of gaming at a time. Each couple-hour-long "episode" ends in a cliffhanger. This allows gamers to commit just a couple of hours to the game at a time if they choose to, and just go into the next episode if they feel like playing longer.

According to Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's CEO,

...Video gaming has become an exclusive experience. The complexities of some of the newest games have alienated those who used to play games with their entire families.

And he might be right, but this new gameplay mechanism really shows that Nintendo isn't the only company that can change and broaden the appeal of gaming experiences. I honestly think that this game will cause some sort of a shifdt in the gaming market that will eventually lead to broader audience appeal. It's opening up the boundaries of video games. The concept in and of itself, after all, is focused on making gaming something manageable, something you don't have to devote a monstrous amount of time to. This new style of video gaming is more welcoming than that more "hardcore" games, like RPGs, where collecting one item can take the same amount of time as beating one level in a game of any other genre.

I don't think that Alone in the Dark will be the game that revolutionizes the way people play games, nor do I think that it will be the game to make more people play games. I do commend the people over at Eden, though, for doing something differently and taking a risk. If more developers made decisions like these, we could break out of the constraining norms that make the audience of modern gaming such an exclusive one. And besides, I can totally see myself playing by episode. Totally.

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Ode to a Personal Favorite

I've grown up a gamer. From my younger days at an NES to the time spent at my first console, the Playstation, to times of family bonding at an N64, I can't remember a time when I wasn't sitting in front of a screen, wide-eyed and mashing on buttons. One thing that's always stuck with me though, is the first time a game ever made me feel something.
Kingdom Hearts, a Disney/Squaresoft game, combined Final Fantasy characters with the Disney characters I grew up watching. I fought alongside Goofy, Donald, Aladdin, The Beast, and other characters that I was only ever able to imagine as a kid. Right off the bat, I connected with the young Sora, whose life on Destiny Island was about as simple as I thought mine to be at the time. But then, when the Heartless came and engulfed the Island in darkness, I was taken out of the simplicity and thrown into Sora's shoes to face a great evil.

From there, the game took off, and I loved every minute of it. The hours spent adventuring around with my new Disney friends flew by like minutes, and in some strange respect, I became Sora when I played the game. I think it's because in Kingdom Hearts, Sora is the real outsider. All of the Final Fantasy characters and Disney characters all have their established backgrounds and roots, but Sora, he's pretty much alone save his two besties, Kairi and Riku. But even Riku turns to the dark side, and Kairi's missing from the very beginning of the game.

Anyway, during my time with Kingdom Hearts, Sora's disbelief and sense of adventure and fun were always on par with mine, and each new territory to explore was like an incarnation of the flicks I'd grown up watching. Making friends with Donald and Goofy, and traveling to places like Wonderland and Mt. Olympus was always as new for me as it was for Sora. I felt the urgency Sora faced when put into a new and strange world all alone. I felt the happiness in reuniting with Kairi, and I felt betrayed and confused when Riku turned Heartless.

I invested lots of emotion into KH, and its climax still nearly drives me to tears – I don’t know why, but it makes me feel like a kid again. The innocence of childhood friendship, set against Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean”, gives me the same wonderful feeling I got whenever I used to go to Disneyland, when places like Agrabah and Neverland were mystifying, moving and above all, real. In a sense, Kingdom Hearts let me open up my imagination as a young gamer, not only because I could see everything as it unfolded on-screen, but because I was closer to the characters, which I actually controlled and battled alongside.
Kingdom Hearts was the game that made me see that games could make me feel real emotion, not just the satisfaction of doing something fun and rewarding. I'd like to know from any gamers reading this: What game did that for you, and why?