I’m probably not the only one, but I am ready to throw up. The current generation box-art is computer-assisted, committee-designed, samey samey samey crap. The only exception is the oft-referenced Japanese box for Ico, but other than that, even the “good” stuff isn’t inspiring. It seems that there’s some set of invisible rules, where everything needs to use orange and/or blue in huge quantities, and you need to have an iconic dude on the cover OR a fake-minimalist image (see Skate. cover) and it’s always gotta have either this really on-its-way-out stark coloring or this really photoshoppy blendy brothers Hildebrandt look. It’s excruciatingly boring.

I’ve been looking at 2600 games recently, and there’s a real magic to the package design back then. Maybe it’s because there weren’t unwritten, unbreakable rules set by advertising “gurus” and stiff-collared CEOs. Maybe it’s because the games’ art was intended to describe, not complement, the in-game assets. There was a certain amount of imagination that needed to be had; not simply InDesign wizardry and wads of cash and an “artists’ liaison.” Here are some of my favourites, and current points of comparision (click for full-sized images):

Possibly the /best/ game cover of 2008.

But 25 years before, Enduro.

Take, for example, the covers of these two games: Burnout Paradise and Enduro. Now, don’t get me wrong: Burnout Paradise has one of the most attractive covers in recent memory. It takes some risks: a (relatively) huge amount of whitespace, a rather cartoony drawing of a car, an off-angle shot of a city in the distance. But, in my opinion, that’s where the awesome ends. In the cartoony drawing of a car, you’ve got a screenshot of the gameplay. You’ve got the same blurry, zoomy coloring method that you see on virtually any other console. The box doesn’t tell me what the game’s about in any way; it’s just a piece of (in this case, better than average) corporate art meant to entice. I think it only entices accidentally.

Against it, look at Enduro. This is a fantastic drawing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Burnout Paradise cover took at least a little bit of inspiration from it. The name alone evokes thoughts of, well, endurance. It doesn’t necessarily tell the viewer that it’s about driving. The image, however, looks at an image of the game (see the four “tracks”), and translates it into a beautiful, fantastic image of a folding journey through night and day. It escapes the box that attempts to contain it, even, and continues right into the bleed.

A modern re-branding of a classic.

A classic cover for an unknown game.

To the left, R-Type Dimensions. It’s not a real box cover, no. It’s also not a new game. However, it falls into all fo the irritating trappings: trading-card shading, mascot worship, no real concept of what’s happening in the game, overuse of orange and blue… it comes off as perhaps mildly related to Halo 3, I suppose, which might stimulate sales, but it doesn’t inspire the imagination.

To the right, Rescue Terra I. Perhaps it’s not a sterling representation of excellence, but I appreciate its use of color and perspective. The game’s title isn’t just crossed thoughtlessly across the top of the image; it adds to the dynamic of the forward-lurching image of the spaceship battling what was probably once an evil alien. Again, it’s maybe not the best, but it’s exciting compared to what’s put on covers these days.

Ubisoft's most transgressive title. That's saying something, huh?

Hey, more rabbits.

Okay, these two have a tenous link: rabbits. But, still: this is about boring vs. exciting cover design. First, Ubisoft’s Rabbids; blueish background, some orangey-yellow mascots, same old shading, no real relevance to gameplay. Just some art loosely based on the game. It implies mischief, I suppose, but not enough to inspire me to buy it for my hypothetical child. Second is Wabbit, which looks like something I really would buy for that child: a dreamlike, pastoral fairy tale of an image that proudly displays a main character who’s some girl who lives on a farm. Content aside, cconsider the design: Avant garde ITC font used somewhere other than a Rock Band game, with angles within the design that compliment such a dramatic font. It’s weird that the company’s name is so much bigger than the game’s name, but I still dig it. A myriad of colors not always seen on covers. Creepy, surreal perspective. I’ve never heard of Wabbit, but I want to play it– or, at the very least, watch a kid play it (not in a creepy way, don’t bother making the joke).

Colorful gem-breaking game 1.

Colorful gem-breaking game 2.

I know I railed on orange and blue, but LOOK AT THE SHADING ON THAT DUDE. He looks like he’s made of a blob of sentient mercury. Again, the realer-than-real-in-a-Surrealist-way thing is going on here, and Ram It rocks it. Peggle’s box is one of the most boring, uninspired, lazy bits of box art I’ve seen in ages. I suppose I shouldn’t expect more considering the art IN the game. At least the ball is the “mascot” and not that stupid unicorn. The latter dude, though? He looks insane. I love it. Based on box art alone, the second I would play sooner than the first.

That is, if I were interested in breaking gems. Which i’m not right now.

Space! Again!

Spa--whaaaaaat?

Mass Effect: Blue. Orange. Some people. Space-ness. “Sci-fi” font. Game name at top. This looks like everything ever. EVER. Earth Dies Screaming isn’t much better but let’s tlak about HOW AWESOME THAT FONT IS. It’s called “Shatter,” it’s an ITC font, and it looks insane. It’s my favourite font of the moment– I even put it in my new site banner. The picture’s got wicked grids and crazy perspective and all that, but the name? Wow. That’s important. Mass Effect doesn’t mean anything. It’s like the name and the box were afterthoughts. “I dunno, make it look… spacey. Make it sound… spacey?” The Earth Dies Screaming, though… that’s a name that makes you think someone over at 20th Century Fox found someone on the street and gave him a nickel to name their game. Luckily, he was already yelling “THE EARTH DIES! SCREAMING!!!” as they asked him, so he didn’t even have to think about it or hear that it’s a sci-fi game. Apparently there’s a movie of the same name from the olden days. Who cares, though? That game looks awesome. Mass Effect? If I didn’t know I wanted the game already, I would’ve skipped it based on the box art alone.

Mascot party!

Holy awesome.

Here are two games for kids with “adorable” main characters. The former has the excruciating committee-built feel all over it. I mean, really? Why not just “Boom Blocks?” Or, even better, why not any other name in the universe? Something like “I Want My Mommy.” OH WAIT THAT’S TAKEN. By the GREAT looking game on the right. Huge, unhappy teddy bear takes up the whole image, as if it were some sort of insane portrait, ONLY OF A TEDDY BEAR. HE’S CRYING. But seriously, look at the design. The rainbow? The off-center, off-angle title in a very attractive san-serif font against the black background. It commands your attention; Boom Blox’s cheesy title demands it. Boom Blox’s characters are an embarrassment to an amazing game. Mommy’s teddy bear, if anything, makes the game look better than it inevitably is.

Look, I get that the other game is weird. But, the thing is, the design is spot on. I’d go so far as to say it’s Swiss-inspired (aside from the image, which creates an interesting juxtaposition between adorable and streamlined). The former is from the Videogame School Of Boring Case Design. With Capital Letters. Seriously.

Yuck.

I can get behind THAT flying saucer.

Mid-budget current-gen games are the worst for it. You know that they do it to look like the big guys, but they can’t quite do is AS well. They also don’t want to put too much thought into it for fear of not selling like the also-rans they want to be (note: the also-rans that their investors and marketing teams want them to be: obviously the design and programmers and such would love it to be the best it could be). Here’s a poem to describe this cover: I see orange, I see blue, I see mascot, hey, eff you. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But the latter is boring too! It has lots of orange and blue too!” Well, you know what else it has? It has the cover of Independence Day. A DECADE BEFORE INDEPENDENCE DAY HAD IT. It also uses the orange and blue differently; not to create “Coooool” blending effects, but to create stark contrast. It has the kinds of sci-fi art I can get behind– takes itself seriously, but has a flying saucer. It also has a Futura stencil font, which is awesome on anything. Also, what’s it shooting? A crazy wall? Probably something that is represented in-game because it has the extra duty of EXPLAINING THE GAME (there’s probably… a blue wall, or something). Whatever, I like looking at it. I HATE looking at the other one.

————————————

So, what’s my point? My point is, the homogeneity in designs these days is excruciating. I didn’t pick these 360 titles just to prove a point: I just picked a few RANDOM 2600 covers, and tried to pick games that were somehow tangentially related to them in modern releases. I am REALLY not trying to “game” your opinion. I am just showing you some observations. And, yeah, a lot of these old games looked like each other. But, they don’t look like anything now– so using their design motifs, however retro, will make you stand out. Actually, no. It wouldn’t even be “retro” if you did it right. They use timeless, Swiss-inspired (I said it… AGAIN!) design rules. And those parts, at least, will stand the test of time.

The first of five forthcoming reviews: Crayon Physics Deluxe

I’m gonig to be writing reviews for Mirror’s Edge, Fallout 3, Operation Darkness another mystery game in the future. I had been close to finishing them, but stupidly, didn’t save the notepad, and my computer crashed. This has actually happened more than once; my home computer has some sort of internal hemorrhaging which prevents it from staying on an unblue screen, and my work computer occasionally loses power because the wiring in Montreal’s Old Port is uniformly miserable. This is about the fourth time I’ve written this, and the other reviews were written at least twice, as well. But, this time, I think I finished it! And saved! Now all I have to do is put it into Wordpress, huzzah!

CRAYON PHYSICS DELUXE

http://www.crayonphysics.com/ — Get it for $20 on the website.

ADD: Crayon Physics Deluxe doesn’t have a too-long, boring tutorial. It ramps up in an engaging way. You always have something new to do, and none of the levels are too boring or same-y. It looks pretty. There’s nothing to criticize in this category; you can sit down, start playing, enjoy yourself, stop whenever, and pick it right back up again. 5/5

OCD: When I bought the game, it was maybe a 2 or a 3 in this category. While the game flowed very nicely and the difficulty ramped up well, there was a certain point where it started to look irritatingly difficult and it was easier to use two fall-back tactics (gameplay spoiler alert: pulleys with silly giant boulders attached, or blocks stuck underneath the ball that raise it artificially, can solve nearly any problem in the least graceful way imaginable). However, the later addition of a second star per level for “cool,” “old school” and whatever the other one is (graceful or something) solutions forced you to go bak ot levels where you might have been lazy, and resolve them for maximum reward. It’s a surprisingly complex game, assuming all of these levels actually can be solved in such a way. 4/5

Escapism: You wouldn’t think this is a game that would incite a high escapism rating, but it turns out to be an incredibly engrossing game, indeed. Some of my most favourite music of the past few years is included in here, a sort of Boards Of Canada-infused dreamfugue with notes of the overworld music from Rome: Total War. This combination pleases me. The simple graphics are not drab and annoying, as I was worried they’d be; they are perfect. They willingly take a backseat, at once clear and subtle, allowing the game’s central mechanic to breathe. Indeed, it’s only when you think about them that the graphics really become a focal point, and when you do, you’re rewarded with washed-out, fuzzy nostalgia for your developmental days. And, unlike the current “nostalgia” trend in games, this one doesn’t cash in on Saturday morning cartoons and NES. It speaks to something for universal: the joy in drawing and creating and imagining those drawings to life. 4/5

Histrionics: The indie game zeitgeist certainly means a lot of people will be talking about this game, particularly due to its interesting presentation and method of gameplay. With Scribblenauts on the way, and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, there’s high interest in games where you get to create your own stuff. However, when it comes to this game, there’s only so much you can say: something this simple, both in front of and behind the scenes, means that there won’t be a lot of staying power. It’s also not exactly the first game to do what it does; those two games whose names I forget were pretty similar (one is a flash title and one was a four-letter free PC download). Still, 4/5

VERDICT: Pick it up. It’s something you can play when you’re tired, or you’re not playing something else. It’s a frontrunner for one of the best games of 2009. It’s relaxing, and addicting, and easy to pick up, and difficult to conquer, and intriguing to even watch others play. There is little higher praise than those things combined. 3/3

The score: 81%. This game represents the top quintile, and, in the opinion of the reviewer, is deemed “an excellent experience, and a lovely way to spend a lazy evening.”

Virtually everyone I’ve spoken to has either not understood or just outright hated these two decisions in my review scale. That’s fair: I assumed people wouldn’t like them outright, and, even worse, I think I did a poor job justifying them in my original article. That’s what I get for writing and posting while incredibly sleep deprived (seriously, every three minutes it seems another motorcycle, bus or truck goes by my window, rattling everything like an earthquake, and I still don’t have curtains so the streetlights light my room like a 3am crime scene). But, now that I’ve woken up and the Concerta’s kicked in and I’ve had some coffee to boot, I am going to take another crack at explaining why I think these two categories are relevant.

The thing you need to recognize is that the ultimate point of the scale is “should I play this game?” <--this becomes important!!!

Histrionics is defined as "Exaggerated, overemotional behaviour, especially when calculated to elicit a response; melodramatics" (thanks, wiktionary). As such, any gamer who intends to talk about games (and, in the end, these reviews are intended to be read by those two like to talk about games) might, from time to time, be a bit guilty of it. But that's just the name.

To write about games, you need to play games. And to write anything that people might read (a histrionic without an audience is perhaps the saddest of things) you need to play what other people might play. This is where the ultimate question comes in: should I play this game? A mediocre game that is nonethless lucky enough to be drenched in hype should be played more than a mediocre game that nobody's playing, simply because it allows the player to engage in the conversation occurring about the game's quality.

Imagine for a moment that there are two games of roughly equal quality to the gamer. In this example, I am going to talk about Clive Barker’s Jericho and Gears of War. Overall, I’d probably give the two of them about 10/15 total in the other three categories (OCD, ADD, escapism). While somewhat engaging (3ish ADD), and somewhat technically interesting, they left me cold emotionally. However, I maintain that Gears of War is infinitely more important for the average consumer of my review to read. Why? Because Jericho is just another shooter, while Gears is currently insanely important to the landscape of shooters (and games in general, really) out there (due to its massive fanbase, Cliff being insane, the ten shitloads of memes is spawns, “introduction” of cover mechanics to games (which I’d more chock up to Clancy games than GOW but I digress), etc). While I don’t think GoW is better, I think it’s more important to play.

Therefore, 15 points are “is it good?”, and 5 points are “…but does it matter?” This is the essence of the histrionics category.

Keep in mind, also, that a game can get a 5/5 without any hype whatsoever. It doesn’t need to be an indie darling or a September blockbuster. It can be virtually unheard of, really. But, if it is wildly new, or introduces a nugget of gameplay that needs to be remade and formed into something new (and therefore needs to be noticed by people) it would also score high. Imagine Assassin’s Creed, for the sake of argument, was virtually unknown. Even though it has zero hype, and isn’t the greatest game, really, I’d give it big points in this category because the free-running mechanics, while imperfect, are worth talking about.

My auxiliary point was that it “removes hype from the rest of the equation.” In my opinion, this is true: if you are consciously aware of the hype and are attaching it to one part of your review, you are far less likely to let it color the rest of the review. Look at Grand Theft Auto IV, for example: to say that its reviews (98 on metacritic? Really?) weren’t colored by hype would be ludicrous. But, if you played through the game, and recognized that it was excruciatingly important to play for those who wish to stay relevant, you could say that in the end and continue to mark the game on its other points. I mean, I’d give GTA IV a 5/5 in Hist, but in ADD only a 3 (good because it lets you destroy shit for a laugh, bad because every five minutes are punctuated by a phone call asking you to play a shitty minigame or ruin your in-game friendships), OCD a 2 (the engine is sloppy and irritating, the pigeons aren’t sufficiently entertaining to addict) and emotion is 3 (the radio stations are as always a high point of immersion, but the character is again impossible to feel empathy for). So, for ‘Is it Good?’ (the other three categories), that’s a 42% score.

Obviously, a 41% score would outrage people. I don’t care if people disagree with me, but they’d be right in one respect — the review only tells them part of the story. They also want to know if it’s worth playing, which, in my opinion, it is, because it’s a shared experience for so many. The 5/5 in histrionics would bump it up to a 56%, by my scale, which at least puts it in the direction of “play it.” Heck, I might even give the hist on GTAIV a 6/5, but that’s another argument for a later paragraph.

The other great thing about the histrionics score: it makes it really easy to separate. So, if it’s something you don’t want in your score, then instead of (a+b+c+d-4) / 0.16, you could just also have (a+b+c-3) / 0.12 to reach a “hype-free” percentage. But, if my above summation is any indicator, hist is almost a “tilt” category, not simply a “how many dollars advertising” category, so I’m not sure why it’d require removal.

As far as 6/5 goes, I’m not sure what to say. All I can really say is that sometimes, a single part of a game is so good, so transcendant, that it makes up for other faults in a game completely. 6/5 would never pop a game over 100%, because in my process it’d cap there, but it could make up for a less perfect reaction somewhere else. Really, I can think of maybe one game that would reach a 6/5 in each category in each generation, one game that was so pitch-perfect in that one category that it would be worth that extra marker of success. Actually, scratch that: I’d be hard pressed to figure out one for each. The only game I can think of that I’d give 6/5 OCD would perhaps be Football Manager 200X, because nothing else is so complex, so uncrackable, and simultaneously so optional (you can gloss over ANY part you don’t like, like, for example, I don’t much care for the finance-side of things, so it’s automated) that you can spend months attempting to crack its chaos engine and still never succeed.

Is it kind of like “this one goes to eleven?” I don’t think so. 4/5 doesn’t imply something’s wrong with it; it just means it’s in the second-to-top quintile. Similarly, a 5/5 means the top quintile. a 6/5 means top quintile, AND great enough to make other shortcomings less relevant.

In fact, with 6/5, I think it’d be fine if I’d said nothing. If I had just given out a 6/5 at some point, people might say “wow,” but codifying it just made it worse. So imagine I never said it. But I will probably do it one day. Just a warning.

Hey, Internet. Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve written anything; I got laid off, and was unemployed, and went home to Ottawa for a week, where I had precious little web time, then started a new job back in Montreal. In spite of this I spent a lot of time thinking about a few things that’ll hopefully become articles in the near future.

I, and many others, hate the state of review scores. 1UP was probably the best because it was completely arbitrary and subjective, and it wore that on its sleeve. They write their gut reactions, which I really appreciate. It’s not about graphics and sound and gameplay as completely stupid separate categories coming into a terribly useless aggregate. Many other sites and publications have taken this sort of review to heart, but I still think there’s something to the idea of breaking down the score and building your ultimate reaction from the sum of its parts.

To do this, I’ve invented a crackpot four-point review rubric. I can’t say I thought about it that much; actually, while on the brink of sleep it came to mind and I texted the idea to my friend Angus and promptly fell asleep. And forgot about it. I may have already been unconscious. Hey, don’t let that discount the idea though: at least one person thinks the lucid space between regular consciousness and batshit insanity is where the best ideas come from. I just use sleep because LSD is kinda illegal. I’ve given these four categories adorable disorder-based names that poke fun at things gamers are accused of having. Feel free to change them to less potentially offensive names if you’re interested.

THE SYSTEM

ADD x/5

The ADD measure is indicative of how immediately engaging the game is at all (or at least many) times. There are a lot of games I can think of that I simply didn’t like as much as others due to this. A great example would be Fable II; there were far too many times where I found myself bored just because it would take so long for something interesting to happen. What counts as interesting can vary, as can what takes too long; getting from point a to point b might take twice as long in one game, but if the journey is intriguing enough, it doesn’t matter. Now, don’t get me wrong: a game can definitely have parts that are tedious and still get a five. The question is, how often is the tedium broken up? How much of the game’s time does it dominate? Is the tedium rewarding? When it comes to Fable II, the answers to these questions were simply unsatisfactory.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I’ll use a game like N+ to illustrate my point. You go into your Xbox 360’s Game Library. You select N+. Once the game goes through its two (very quick, as these things go) company logo interstitials. A bad-ass BZHOOOOO sound happens and the menu drops in. You pick the menu, you pick a level, and you’re in the middle of the action. It takes less time to get into the action than it takes most disc titles to spin up. The difficulty ranges from enjoyably casual-yet-challenging to downright diabolical, but it stays fun as hell.

OCD x/5

If you are poring over GameFAQs looking for more information you already have the ability to beat, you’re probably playing a game with a 5/5 OCD score. This is a meter of a game’s technical immersion. Droves of games come to mind as high scorers: Street Fighter II and III, Super Mario Kart games, Final Fantasy Tactics, Tetris, earlier Armored Core games… I could go on. The ability to get lost in the intricacies of a game’s play and the urge to do so mean an easy high score, but it doesn’t need to be complex– sometimes it just simply has to be incredibly satisfying. There are certainly amazing games out there that wouldn’t score well in this respect; for example, while playing Ico, I found it technically somewhat tedious and unfulfilling but I continued because I liked everything else so much. But, as such, I could hardly call it a “perfect” game, and it’d be punished in this category.

Escapism x/5

If OCD relays the game’s technical immersion, escapism relays its emotional immersion. How much are you affected by the story, the characters, the world? If it’s something you want to get lost in, and every time you play you forget about your bills and your shitty job and you just want to marry the main squeeze and you wonder what happens in the world once the game ends, it’s a high scorer. Final Fantasy Tactics somehow achieved this. For me, Vice City did not achieve this at all; once I was done playing it, I didn’t think about it again– let alone feel any urge to visit it again. If it made you cry, it’s probably a 5/5. If you tried to skip as many cutscenes as were possible, it was probably closer to a one. There’s not much more to say about this.

Histrionics x/5

This is almost certainly the most controversial of the four categories, but I’ll try to justify it.  Basically, this is a marker of how relevant the game is or should be. Many games will get 5/5 before I even play them: Grand Theft Auto 4 and Braid would start with a minimum of five in this category simply because they’re something anyone who talks about games needs to play. They could have both been humongous pieces of garbage (which, thankfully, they weren’t), but they deserve to be played and talked about due to that hype. However, this is also a category where games that deserve that kind of conversation are highly rated; the “overlooked” gems like Team Ico’s releases that innovate and create fantastic new worlds are pretty important in their own way. Games that are far from perfect but invent a new mechanic that future games will exploit to become amazing are also high scorers in this category. I’m looking at you, Assassin’s Creed.

Some people would argue that a game’s hype should have no bearing on its score (and I don’t mean to sound like I care about material things, LIKE MY SOCIAL STATSSSSS), but here are three reasons I believe this is a valid category:

1. It means that you can easily justify not attaching it to the other categories, and get a more pure review score.
2. It’s honest. I mean, if GTA4 has an all-time Metacritic rating of 98, how can you say that it doesn’t factor into the score already? It’s not like it’s the best game of the decade like that MC rating would imply.
3. If you disagree with the hype, you can easily change this score in your head to something else and get what you consider a more “realistic” review score.

—

Each is marked on a scale of one to five. One is deplorable, three is honorable, and five is spectacular. The final percentile score is (a-1) * 6.25+ (b-1) * 6.25+ (c-1) * 6.25 + (d-1) * 6.25. Or, more simply, each score adds either 0%, 6.25%, 12.50%, 18.75% or 25% to the final score. The worst score is 0%, the best is 100%, and the exact middle is 50%. However, I would very occasionally consider giving a game a rating higher than 5/5 in a category; if it sets an utterly mind-blowing new standard in any of these departments (at least, for me), I’d give it a six. I would’ve given Football Manager 2008 an OCD 6/5, for example, because it dominated my life for months last year with its intricacies. I’d also give World of Warcraft a 6/5 in histrionics or escapism, because it was such an utterly new experience for me: for a year, I had dozens of best friends all over the US and Canada. Needless to say, a 6/5 would be incredibly rare. Like, possibly less-than-once-a-year rare.

However, on top of all of this, I’d still give a game an entirely separate score: it’s a three-point scale. One is “don’t bother,” two is “play it if you have the time and the money to do so and nothing better is available,” and three is “make this a priority.” A scale like that is just as important, if you ask me. Even if Ico scored low in one category and not perfect in others, it’s still a solid 3 in this entirely other system. You just need to give it a spin.

Anyway, that’s the system. I’m toying with the idea of using this rubric for all future reviews of games I write. What do you think?