Bite Size 2008: In the Palm of my Hand

Slightly delayed. I was benched due to not feeling good and not wanting to sit and think about stuff I have to type, interest in the Windows 7 beta, and various Princes of Persia, so here’s my next post in the series only a bit late.

Bite Size 2008 is my wrap-up of moments in games from the past calendar year. This post is themed around, you guessed it, handheld games! Specifically, DS games, as I delayed my purchase of a PSP once again. The DS was a pretty big component of my gaming in 2008, because portability is awesome, and good games with said portability is even better. Check out this listing for the rest of my Bite Size 2008 posts!

To be Honest, I’d Spend My Quarters on it Again

In 1995, I was nine years old. I had just recently completed my first full playthrough of Final Fantasy III for the SNES, after many failed attempts, and I was looking for something new. In these days, I didn’t own many games. I saved up my quarters and change I got from returning bottles for my grandmother and helping my dad out with odd jobs around the house, and I rented games. One day, I rode my bike up to the nearby Family Video (which was brand new at the time) and rented a game that sat on the corner of the shelf called Chrono Trigger. I took it home, and played. It was a fun game, with cool characters, and I spent many of the aforementioned quarters on renting it in consecutive rentals. I still remember the way I felt when I first traveled into the future, after the Day of Lavos, to see what became of the world. I never completed it at the time (I ran out of funds, and did not fully complete the game until I was running an emulator on my PC a couple years later), yet the game had such an impact on me, it stands as my favorite game of all time. With the DS re-release of the game, I’m on something like my 7th playthrough of the game, and I still enjoy it. It holds up well against the test of time, and I can’t wait until the day I get to show my children what an amazing game it is.

 

Experiencing a Classic

In the last paragraph, I mentioned my love for Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger. The 16-bit era was the birth of my love for RPGs, with those two games, as well as The Illusion of Gaia, The Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG, and more. However, one game I overlooked in this time frame was Final Fantasy IV, known as II at the time. I had started it once in my also previously mentioned emulator phase, but I never stuck with it. This year, I was given a new chance to take a stab at it, and with the release on the DS, it looked more than likely that I would give it a go. I finally see why so many give it high regards. The tale of Cecil and company is a well twisted one, with plenty of drama, excitement, and mystery to craft an interesting narrative. The implementation of an Auto-Battle system also helped to make the game a little less button-mashy than some old school RPGs tended to get in their later stages. While I’ll admit I have not yet finished the game (I picked it up late, and Chrono Trigger may have interrupted me), I’m about 75% complete, and I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit. My only complaint is that Cecil looks a bit too wimpy after his transformation.

 

It Is Four In The Morning, Oh Damn… One More and I’m Done

I was always the kind of kid who liked story problems in school, while everyone else sat there hating them. I love a good mind teaser, and that’s why I love puzzle games. I’ll admit I’ve picked up a paperback logic puzzle book here and there as well (more recently than one would think). Given that prerequisite, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is a no-brainer as far as whether or not I should pick it up. Throw an actually interesting story on top of it (classic murder mystery, with a twist!) and add in downloadable puzzles, and upon picking it up, I was damn near ready to call it my game of the year. I spent so many nights up until 4 AM trying to figure out puzzles. I’ve completed every downloadable puzzle and every puzzle in the game except the very last bonus room puzzle (the block moving puzzles are my least favorite anyway). I’ve already decided that when I have my own classroom, I will start the students off with a warm-up puzzle, just to get their minds running. The only thing I can wait for now is for the second and third games to make their way stateside!

One more piece left in the puzzle of Bite Size 2008, and then it’s off to the races for 2009!

I Fought the Law and the Law was Scripted

So, as I mentioned yesterday, I’m playing Chrono Trigger. This is, at least, my sixth time playing through the game. If that doesn’t suffice as a neon-glowing statement of fanboyism, I don’t know what does. This is more or less my first attempt at a relatively academic blog post, so please, bear with me.

For whatever reason, when I play Chrono Trigger, I always play the beginning of the game the same way, even though I know how the events will pan out. I’m not using spoiler tags or anything here because the game is 13 years old at this point, and if you play games and don’t know a damn thing about this game, there is something very wrong with you. In all honesty, this is the first two hours of the game, so if people have any experience with this game, this is the part they encounter.

So as Crono, you enter the Millennial Fair, and you hear Lucca is setting up her new machine at the back of the fairgrounds, and proceed to make your way there. However, in front of Leene’s Bell, you run into a girl and her pendant goes flying. Here is where your actions begin to come under scrutiny. At this point, I always talk to the girl first to make sure the pendant. I wait when she wants candy. I leave the lunch alone. I take the cat to the little girl. Say it’s all my fault in court. However, when it comes time for Crono to fall victim to the judge’s gavel, I always get thrown in jail.

I understand that the event is scripted, and that no matter what, I will be hitting the pen as a result of the plot. However, as I sit there in the trial and watch the jurors account for me as “not guilty”, and see the judge still sentence me to three days of solitary confinement. I can’t help being struck by pangs of dissonance. Despite the fact that I know that I have to spend time in the slammer, I can’t help but feel defeated when I do, regardless of my verdict.

It may have something to do with the first time I played it, where I was destroyed by a totally “Guilty” verdict. That time, I grabbed the pendant first, got impatient waiting, ate the lunch multiple times, etc. Yet, I came away thinking “In this game, I can change the past. Next time, I’ll change how I play it.” So I did, again and again, and now I find myself here.

In my paper on games and narratives (ha! I’ve finally mentioned it!), I began to explore the idea of applying Fisher’s Narrative Paradigm to gaming. Stealing Wikipedia’s line, the theory states that “all meaningful communication is a form of storytelling… and so human beings experience and comprehend life as a series of ongoing narratives”. The way we judge narratives is based on fidelity/rationality, or coherence/probability. This begins to tie in to the oft-discussed topic of ludonarrative dissonance, which Michael Abbott describes very well by saying “The world is alive with possibilities, except when it isn't. The world responds to my actions, except when it doesn't,” (in regards to Fallout 3).

Chrono Trigger is a game trying to tell the story of a ragtag band of spunky heroes trying to save the world (or, everything Squaresoft put out up until about… well, still). I want to experience everything the game has to tell me, or has for me to play. I want to enjoy the story and the gameplay. The reason I begin to feel this dissonance is when Chrono Trigger stops being a game and starts telling the story. You can almost imagine the narrator saying, “Regardless of his actions, Crono was thrown in jail…”. As the gavel swings down, and the judge sentences Crono, Fisher would feel the narrative fidelity/rationality snap under pressure. Suddenly, the story we’re being told is no longer coherent with our world view. We know that if a jury finds you not guilty, you walk free. If O.J. Simpson can walk free, Crono should too. I'm feeling all sorts of narrative static, because this “interactive experience” decided it wants to be a scripted chain of events again, and because these events are not the norm of what I hold true. Granted, we have to suspend our disbelief to some extent, such as when fighting monsters or using magic, but this apparently universal concept of justice seems to be shattered.

I know Yakra did it, but in the end, I’m still always pissed.