Justin C. Rounds

The day before yesterday I started playing Fable — not Fable II, although it’s sitting in the “must play someday” pile along with about a hundred other games — on my dust-laden original Xbox. After recovering from the “wow these graphics are really bad” effect usually caused by firing up a game more than five years old, I started to settle in and really enjoy the game. I got almost finished with the guild training exercises (so about an hour in), decided to call it a night, and went to save my game. “Your quests will not be saved…” — huh? So you’re telling me that my quests will not be saved, but all my stats will be saved? I looked around for another save option… nothing. This can’t be right, right?

So last night I go to “continue” where I left off, load my save file, and sure enough I’m right back at the beginning of the guild training. My first inclination was to turn it off and never play it again, but I managed to plow through the guild quests and training exercises (again), and make it to the next autosave point, from which I was sure to be able to resume. I was annoyed, but mostly confused at the design decision. I mean it was intentional, right? There is no technical reason why “save anywhere” can’t work on a console (feel free to argue with me), especially on a console with a built-in hard drive. PC developers have been doing it by default for years. So let’s assume, and I may be completely wrong, Fable’s save system is by design. Why?

In defense of these kinds of save points, saving where a particular point in a game timeline is reached, they provide a nice clean point from which to resume, much like reading to the end of a chapter of a book before placing a bookmark. From a development standpoint, all the events and assets from before the point can be swept in the garbage, leaving the memory clear for the next chapter to be constructed. Unload the old, load in the new, and only maintain the necessary data to transition over. I get it. It makes sense for an autosave system, and a lot of games do it effectively (Half-Life 2′s implementation comes to mind). But forcing the player to effectively restart an entire chapter, whether their stats are retained or not, doesn’t make sense. Especially for a game like Fable.

Fable is all about cause and effect, at least in theory. You make choices and live with the consequences, whatever they may be. Playing with this system is inherently where the fun lies, and either the player can be encouraged to try different things and see the results, or the player can be forced to deal with the consequences of their actions. Fable leans toward the latter approach, and in my opinion, it hurts the experience of the game.

Let’s compare Fable with any similar PC RPG with a sensible “save anywhere” system. The player is faced with a challenge and presented a number of possible actions. In a “save anywhere” system, the player can experiment with any number of options to overcome the challenge, since the player can always restore from a convenient save point and try for a better outcome. In Fable, this option is discouraged, since re-trying would involve (potentially) a lot of replaying, and therefore the player is encouraged to accept (or suffer) the consequences. In playing the game, I can’t help but feel like I’m being manipulated into participating in a system that I feel is inherently broken. I should be able to experiment, play, go back and try different things, and not feel like I just blew it because I shot someone accidentally while aiming at a sparrow… But maybe that is the point; I am invested in my actions and their consequences, for what it is worth.

That said, I can’t help but feel I should be invested in the consequences of my actions for some reason other than not wanting to have to replay a section of a game.

Now let’s take it to the extreme: what if there was no user-directed save system at all? Instead, the game continually autosaved, so at any point in the game the player could quit and start up again exactly where they left off? No replaying, no second chances — wouldn’t this work better for Fable than a chapter-based autosave system?

I just read an article from CasualGaming.biz quoting Nintendo President Saturo Iwata:

“Currently, I think that the appeal of Wii Music has not yet been fully conveyed and accepted by those who could be interested.”

I’m not sure I agree with this statement, and as one of “those who could be interested”, I’m going to take a critical look at Wii Music and try to discern why it fails to appeal to its target audience.

I love playing music and I love playing video games, so naturally I am drawn to music-based games, and if the sales figures of Guitar Hero and Rock Band have anything to tell us, so are many other people. I have witnessed “non-gamers” play Guitar Hero side-by-side with the most hardcore gamers. Chances are a friendly neighborhood pub near you even has a “Rock Band Night”. Now Wii Music is definitely not the same kind of gameplay experience as Guitar Hero or Rock Band, and I don’t want to simply make comparisons between GH/RB and Wii Music, but I believe it is useful to analyze some of the differences between the successful franchises and Nintendo’s offering in order to better define the possible points of failure in WM.

So what is it about GH/RB that works? The gameplay follows the “easy to learn, difficult to master” philosophy; the player persona is clearly defined, and more importantly, attractive to the player (who doesn’t want to be a rock star?); the music is popular and of high-quality. GH/RB focus on doing one thing and do a damn fine job of it.

Wii Music is pretty easy to learn, but once you get the hang of it there is no clear path of mastery; you unlock all the songs and instruments by following the lessons and then that’s it. Of course the lessons progress from simple to more complicated songs, and as a musician I’m going to be somewhat less challenged that a non-musician, but working through the lessons takes a couple of hours, after which you are left to “play” with everything you’ve unlocked, with no further challenges or rewards. The player persona of “musician” is fun for a while, but with a lack of escalating challenge there is little to encourage the player to keep playing. The song list in WM is a collection of pretty unpopular songs (not too many people get excited about playing “Turkey in the Straw”), which are totally hidden from the player. At least in GH/RB you can look forward to unlocking a song, since you are made aware of what songs are unlockable.

Now it isn’t entirely fair to compare GH/RB and WM, since they have different agendas, but I think the successes of GH/RB can help point out the failings of WM. WM is just not enticing enough to really draw the average player in. While there is some depth to being able to shift tempos and arrangements of instruments, the melodies remain unchanged. Sure, I can play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on any of the 66 instruments, but what notes I can play are pre-determined and unchangeable. For each song, the melodies for each instrument are set in stone — all the player is doing is triggering the playback of the preset sound at that particular time in the song, effectively turning the Wiimote into a really fast volume control. Where this stands out the most is on the drums, where you will not be able to play the kick drum “whenever you want”, which takes a lot of the fun out of playing. Now in a sense this is more like classical musicianship, encouraging skill in peforming a pre-written composition, rather than composing original music. But with the song list WM sticks me with, I am dying to make my own melodies. At least if there was a composition mode, where I could arrange note sequences and make my own songs, it wouldn’t feel so shallow. Or maybe allow me to mix the parts from one song with the parts from another.

Wii Music actually doesn’t do too bad a job making playing music accessible, and I found myself exercising my musical muscles in regards to internalizing tempo (as I tend to get sloppy about keeping time). Most of the instruments are pretty enjoyable despite the inconsistent quality of the sound samples, though some instruments are clearly filler (seriously who thought the turntables were good enough to ship?). But where it really falls flat (no musical pun intended) is in the music. The songs limit the experience. Consider this: swap the song list from Wii Music with the song list from Rock Band. There, that’s better isn’t it? What about forgetting the idea of using existing music altogether? Look at Garageband: take a few AppleLoops that go together and arrange them, now you have a song in a particular style that isn’t an already existing song. If this was the approach in WM, it would be trivial to allow players to re-arrange the loops to make new compositions and really add a huge amount of depth to the experience.

So I’m not coming to much in the way of conclusions here, but one thing is clear: Nintendo didn’t learn anything from Donkey Konga.

I am a card-carrying Mac user, ever since OSX came along, but before that (and after an abusive relationship with Windows), I started getting into Linux and learning all the gnarly bits to actually get some real use out of my aging PCs. Nowadays I really like Ubuntu. As much as I am a technophile, I have gone beyond the point where fiddling with software to get it running is anything less than annoying; if it doesn’t “just work”, then I’m out. Ubuntu has that “it just works” feel to it, and I’ve had such a good experience with it that it has become my Linux distro of choice. But sadly, Ubuntu and I have come to an impasse (at least in this case).

I applaud the work of Linux developers — I get “Hulk smash” angry just making a website behave in Internet Explorer, and I can’t imagine what it must be like trying to make an operating system that will run on the myriad configurations of hardware out there in PC-land. This particular configuration, an old Sony Vaio PCG-FX390K laptop, is one such hobgoblin.

I’ve had this thing sitting around unused for far too long, but lately have decided to try and get some use out of it. Reluctantly I put a fresh install of Win2k (the OS it came with) to run Fruityloops, but I soon realized that the management of yet another install of Windows (my Macs run Boot Camp with XP) was something I just didn’t want to do. That, and FL was glitchy and somewhat less than usable on it. At this point I probably should have just thrown it down the stairs, called the incident “an unfortunate accident”, and moved on. But being the obsessive person I am, I couldn’t let it go. I have trouble letting things go, you know.

Anyway, here’s where it starts to get interesting. No, really. Maybe. Since I decided I didn’t want a mostly useless Win2k lappy sitting around, I realized what I really could use was a machine for recording audio that could serve as a web-surfing machine for those days when I don’t extricate my MacBook from its life-support system of peripherals and external hard drives on my office desk. “Good idea” I say to myself, “I’ll just install Ubuntu on it and see how it goes”.

Linux Live CDs are awesome. Seriously. I popped in the Ubuntu 8.10 CD and watched the old lappy being reborn… except for one annoying little problem. The sad little Intel 815em integrated graphics chip was unrecognized, suffering at a miserable default resolution of 800×600, which on this particular laptop leaves a thick black border around the screen and many OS windows dangling off the edge. Great. But everything else works. After some Googling I find I am not the only one with this screen rez problem, and sadly I am not the only one who has yet to find a solution. I tried a bunch of xorg.conf tricks, installed other flavors of Ubuntu, and got nowhere.

Time to try some other distros. UbuntuStudio and Linux Mint, both suffered the same problem (not surprisingly). Moving on to unknown (to me) distros, I decided to give Mandriva a shot, even though the system requirements were beyond my sorry old Vaio.

Bingo. Everything seems to be working great, except… Mandriva just has this “Windows” smell to it. From the installation “wizard” to the over-designed default theme, it feels a bit like WindowsXP, and maybe that is what the Mandriva team is going for. It certainly appears that they are trying to be a Windows-alternative rather than a user-friendly Linux distro. Hopefully with some theme tweaking it’ll feel less icky.

Do you have any favorite distros? Which? Why?