I’ve kept my interest in Batman: Arkham Asylum at bay, largely because I thought it would be bad. I was even reluctant to download the demo, but I did. At first, it confirmed my worst suspicion, that it was just a high-def beat ‘em up. As it turns out the game is more than that. Still, I’ve now gone from wondering about its quality as a game to wondering about its quality as a Batman story.

Written by Paul Dinni [Batman: The Animated Series], the game is influenced by the graphic novel by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean. The dialog seems better than most games, especially comic book games, but even in the demo, I see some weak motivations and conveniences to advance the plot.

As a game, I was enjoyed the different modes, namely because the combat was itself as bad as I expected, a button-mashing affair. Fortunately, the game relies on more stealth than frontal assaults. You must find ways to isolate one of the many enemies from the others so that you can swoop down [and you will] to take out the goon silently. You might have kevlar armor, but you’re not invulnerable and will die fairly quickly if you stay exposed. Even trying to attack using the batarang and from hiding behind a corner, I was killed rather easily when I encountered the first group of thugs with guns. The detect mode allows you to see possible egresses and clues. This is an invaluable mode, as you can see through walls.

Still how much detective work and actual puzzle solving the game offers is hard to tell from the demo, which really offers none. My fear is that this brain-operated part of the game will have to slog through riddles of the worst and most obvious sorts. But at this point, that is only a possibility, not indicated by the demo.

The problems the demo reveals is that the game could be repetitive, even with the stealth, and that the camera is annoying. The camera seems almost always perched over the Batman’s right shoulder, which felt awkward at times. True, you get to watch the cape physics from that angle. But it felt off to me throughout 2 run-throughs of the demo.

Yet, I’m now pestered with the expectation that the game fails to reach with the story. In the original graphic novel, the focus is more on Arkham Asylum and madness. In the comic, the asylum isn’t a place of rehabilitation. Even as the doctors attempt it, it seems to take the patients, like Harvey Dent, to even worse places. While madness can drive some to great horrors, madness is still a human quality. Can we really shut it up in the darkness and pretend that it’s not real? In the original story, we see what happens when one characters tries to ignore reality. As the Batman says at one point, ‘It’s only that madness that makes us what we are.’

Morrison and McKean create an interesting story, though not an entirely satisfyingly coherent one, which might be fitting. Nonetheless, the questions that the graphic novel poses are worth asking, about the role of madness, about its origins and qualities, about its presence even among the sane. We collectively to try suppress the nature and even necessity of madness, which is what sometimes we call up to do what consider immoral but necessary.

The game appears only losely based on the graphic, so my hope of an interesting dramatic treatment  is probably pointless. The game may have some interesting stealth aspects, but in the end, it could very well still be little more than a good action game.

[Updated]

In my little spare time, I’ve been playing with Kodu, creating a simple game centered around healing sick creatures and removing a pollutant causing the sickness.

Kodu communities are sprouting up. Unfortunately, the tutorials included with Kodu aren’t that useful–I think you can learn more by looking at the ‘code’ for the other included games. This forum is decently active with a couple of very good threads about tricks, creative coding, and tips for a good game world. There’s a kodu wiki, but it’s light on information. The Gamefaqs forum has also picked up in posts.

If you’re interested in sharing Kodu games, read this.

Without a doubt, this is a limited game making app. Yet, it’s very accessible, and with a little creativity, you can do a bit. I’m using it as an opportunity to teach some basic programming principles to my kids and helping them to plan and think through problems with a limited set of tools. In that respect, making the game is actually more interesting than the game output.

In some respects, Kodu is like a robust level editor–it’s for small games, something you can create and play quickly. I’ve done more of trying to create this or that small part of a game. Some people are creating some interesting bits. When you contrast Kodu with Microsoft’s online game maker Popfly, you quickly see what Kodu is. In Kodu, you have template characters where you can’t upload new graphics or sounds. You can’t dive into deep customization of a character or scene, like in Popfly [which is itself a limited game maker]. With Kodu, when you drop in a character, you don’t have to work about animating it when it moves, assigning health points. Kodu isn’t just for kids, but it’s so much more approachable for young kids than Popfly.

Also, it appears that the Kodu team will release an update. But nothing is definite.

For some games, creating is as fun as playing. Maybe it’s just a carryover my childhood obsession with building blocks, but a couple of creative items have my interest right now.

First up is Mario vs Donkey Kong: Minis March Again! which I never played in earlier versions. For DSiware, this is a very full offering, in large part because you can edit, upload, download and rate cutomize levels. Like other Nintendo games with level editors, you have to play the game to unlock new features and items in the editor. I have spent almost as much time editing levels as playing the game. Even though the DSi has larger screen, it’s still not a lot of screen real estate for something like level editing. Yet, it works very well and is easy to use. Minis March Again offers enough items that a lot of variation is possible.

Next, if you want more than level editing and more game creation, then get ready for Microsoft’s Kodu which is coming the end of June. It’s a game creator that is aimed at younger kids, but not limited to them, because it relies on icons, not code snippets. IGN has a nice hands-on with Kodu, which is part of the 360′s community games area. One of the nice features is that you can have more one person authoring a game at the same time.

My son already has summer homework, so we’re talking about creating a game for a part of it on the 360. I plan on wasting much time with it myself, creating some short RPGs and the like.

So, get your creative juices flowing.

A Fading Memory is one of the more intriguing community games on the Xbox 360 that I’ve seen. Admittedly, I was drawn in by the cover art, which is somewhat rare for community games. What makes it intriguing is the premise behind this platform adventure — you play a woman, more accurately a woman’s dream of herself who, in reality, has slipped into a coma. The introductory level has almost lyrical prose to set the game in this dream world.

The game’s challenge is that the world darkens, which you can only relieve by killing the monsters that inhabit the dreamscape, illuminating it again though only briefly. I love this mechanic for bringing tension to a game. The graphics are simple but have a very identifiable style. [For some reason, I thought of Kandinsky, which, although his art really looks nothing like this game, would be an interesting style to adapt into a game.]

The downside is that I thought the controls and the level designs were somewhat awkward. Still, it’s one I wanted to buy and play to see the rest of the story.

I have been swamped with work, and I’ve been trying to ruminate on playing Fallout 3 [I got it cheap] and Chrono Trigger, as well as thinking about the effect of gaming on the gamer. But I want to post this little tidbit: Kodu, a visual game development app for the 360.

Kodu is clearly derived from Microsoft’s web game development site, popfly. It is also clearly a reaction of sort to Little Big Planet, even though that game hasn’t sold as well as expected.

The idea of parents and kids sitting together and creating a game is intriguing, and it certainly has possibilities, especially compared to the PC. My son was very much into some of the level designers on the game sites that he visits, so I could see him interested in something like Kodu. There’s no mention of sharing Kodu games, which I would think would be a major draw, so that kids could share their games with each other. However, that might cut into the community games scene.

Regardless, the option of having such an app doesn’t hurt the 360.

After weeks of checking the Best Buy shelves for a 360 with the Jasper innards, I gave up on finding one and finally bought a replacement yesterday [a Falcon chipset]. After setting up the network and media sharing again, I immediately set up to share Amazon movies [because I'm heavily into catching up on 5 seasons of Battlestar Galactica], and I’m trying out playon to watch shows and movies from hulu.com.

Playon works pretty well and installs very easily and simply. You do have 2 wait, however–one wait as the video is ‘opened’ and another to buffer it. The quality is not DVD quality or comparable to the Netflix streaming video on the 360, but it’s good enough for free videos.

As for games, I picked up Jayenkai’s Johnny Platform’s Biscuit Romp, because my son loves this game. And he’ll be happy to find 5 new levels. I then sent my xbox friends mail, letting them know I was back online and ready to have my butt kicked.

The kids and I are still playing and enjoying Deadly Creatures. But I’m hoping that Nintendo releases the fix to support playing games from the SD slot soon, which is slated for a spring 2009 release. We’re still playing Goo and 3 virtual console games, and I’m very intrigued by Lit and Onslaught, not to mention Cave Story and Sword & Soldiers.

But thanks to an inflamed bursa sac in my elbow, waggling is out for me for a few days. [The life of an older gamer, sigh.]

As much as I support homebrew and indie development, the Xbox community games are a kick to the crotch.

Some of the games are fun, like Word Soup. But others, like A Kitchen Sink War and Swords & Monsters , are just plain horrible. It’s one thing for me to download and try someone’s first DS homebrew project that is yet another Pong clone. But these community games come at a price, even if it’s just 200 points [~US$2.50]. You have to keep in mind that the community review of these games is to ensure only a certain level of functional quality, not a game experience quality or quality of ideas.

I’ve been excited about the Xbox community games for a while, thanks in part to my wonderful experiences with DS homebrew games. Charging for ‘garage’ games introduces a dynamic that could negatively influence both creating and buying/playing such games on the 360. It’s tempting to say that time and the market will drive the quality up, but, while I like much about capitalism, faith in competition ensuring quality is somewhat naive, in part because we’re not talking about constant competitors. We’re looking at seasonal, part-time, and hobbyist competitors, which is much different than ‘professional’ competitors. [Please, homebrew developers, don't take offense because some of you are highly professional in your skills and imagination: I'm talking strictly about developers who are developing games for a professional living.]

Too many of these poor games will deter gamers from looking at community games, except for the occasional ‘hit’ that gets media attention. I wouldn’t want to see community game development become something only for ‘professional’ developers, but by requiring a $99 fee for being able to publish games to the 360, there almost has to be some charge for these games, even though the game developers have much other costs, including time and tools. Even though gamer rating systems have their flaws, perhaps that would help, or at least, it would allow gamers to feel that the games have some level of content quality control.

I received a notice last week that I was accepted to test the new Xbox interface [nxe]. While I don’t hate it, the new functionality is the only good change. The new avatars and the new navigation format are at best not any worse than what 360 owners had before. The interface is now organized as ‘channels’ which are nothing like the Wii channels.

It takes a few passes to understand the differences among the different channels. The Welcome channel can and should be hidden after you initially log on. It has no real value, except to guide you at a high level through the new features.  But here is my list of the pros and cons of the new interface and features.

Bottom line: The new features are great, but the overall design is not very good.

positives

• The Netflix channel works great and is probably the best feature in the new design. The video looks great.
• Though i’ve not used it, the party feature is a great way to talk to 2+ friends at one time.
• While the ability to copy a disk didn’t speed up loading my games that I could tell, it does prevent that horrid cd drive noise. [However, if you have 20 gigabyte drive, as I do, you'll only be able to copy 2, maybe 3 games, to your drive.
• The avatar creator is actually okay, although we have seen so many that the creation interface is almost a given design. But Microsoft offers some nice features, like different clothes and accessories.
• Those old themes you paid for are still usable as wallaper for the new interface.  But they don't interfere with reading anything.
• The advertising spotlights are now all in one channel. In the old interface, some ad spaces were not clickable so you couldn't easily find out more information about the game or event. That's no longer the case.

negatives

• After hiding the Welcome channel, the default channel isn't the most useful channel [My Xbox] . . . it’s the Spotlight channel.
• You cannot edit your Instant Movie queue for Netflix, which means you have to manage it from a PC.
• Some features are not easy to find. Go ahead  . . . find where you would change the dashboard theme. I spent 10 minutes searching for it and had to repair myself to google. No, it’s not in the System Settings menu.
• You can only see 3 friends at a time in the friends list. The new interface is just not good for some things, like viewing a long list. If you’re like me and have just a handful of friends, it’s not too bad. You have scroll a couple of times to see everyone. But if you have 12 or more, the Friends channel is quite useless. The best way to view your friends’ status is to use the big Xbox button and view your friends in an old fashioned list. [To be fair, friends who are online are moved to the front of the channel.] But overall, the friend channel is dominated by big, clunky graphics that don’t provide any extra information and are just there to look pretty, which you’ll get tired of in about 1 minute.
• For those expecting Microsoft to beat the PS3 ‘home,’ they didn’t do it. The Xbox avatars are all in all just barely there. See the following list.
• The avatar creation, all in all, doesn’t compare with the Mii creator. You can’t finetune the facial features, so you’re not going to see Spider-Man, Darth Vader, Obama, et al. here.

What Microsoft missed

• Customization. While the Wii Menu isn’t completely customizable, it does allow gamers to rearrange channels to put what they use the most up front. Microsoft focused on copying the Miis but completely missed this small but gretaly useful feature. Maybe I’m not interested in Events and Spotlight ads so let me hide them.
• After going to some work to create an avatar, where does it get used? The friends channel is it, and even there, it’s not much. Microsoft couldn’t have given even a small game to use them in? Couldn’t have one-upped Nintendo’s Mii Channel? [While creating your avator, using the left joystick, you can make your avatar look disoriented or angry. It's interesting that they design this kind of interactivity in the avatar but don't really take advantage of it.]

What is good in the new 360 interface is great. But the majority of it is either a step to the side or, in a few cases, a step backwards [either from what 360 owners had before or from what other console owners have]. I applaud Microsoft for the willingness to start over on some of their products, to copy what’s good in their competition and to even introduce new functionality.

Sometimes, I feel the neighborhood cat lady . . . except that I’m a dude, not a lady. And I don’t take in stray cats with all kinds of afflictions and scars. Instead, I take in stray games [which at least don't literally stink up my house].

Such a game is Fable 2, which this review well captures the game’s defects:

• A rather blah story
• A game that is hardcore in its size and other features but lacks the depth we’d expect from an RPG of this size
• A game world that is huge and offers vistas of places that you can’t get to [or at least easily]
• A lack of a good map tool that allows you to visit the world easily or even relate the different areas to each other
• Too few baddies to fight, unless you just want to get a whole town mad at you
• Lots of linear play with the appearance of openness

To which I would add:

• A really clunky interface with almost ability to customize
• Way too easy to make money
• Dreadful job mini-games that become mind numbing after a short time

I admit that all of the above is true, only to say that I still really enjoy the game. I do wander around the world, even though it’s not completely open. Even though you might not discover a place that doesn’t have a quest attached to it at some point, you can still explore the world and find surprises. When I happened across what seemed like a large, abandoned mining camp, I was still fascinated, although I never saw anyone to fight. But I didn’t know for sure . . . and I had that experience of wondering what happened there, why was everyone gone.

In a way, too, my expectations weren’t for another Oblivion thanks to the fact that Fallout 3 fulfills that expectation. I had played Fable and knew what to expect. And that’s what I’ve gotten, but better. I can do much more in Fable 2 than in Fable, like buying all sorts of properties. In the original, I could not spend that much time outside of the main quest and story because there wasn’t that much to do. But in Fable 2, I can . . . I’m maxing out those job skills with the minigames, and I’m investing in property, just my pa advised me.

The other thing is that the game is light-hearted, even for its seemingly dark main story. From item descriptions, to quotes during the load screen, to NPC chatter, there’s usually something in every game session to make me smile just a little. I think it’s the kind of game that shows why itemizing the faults can be so very misleading and how a game can be fun without being the most complex or sophisticated game in a genre. The game has enough relationships among player actions and the game world to make it the kind of sandbox game that doesn’t overwhelm you and make you feel you’ll be playing it for months.

Plus, any game that provides stories like the two in this forum thread can’t be that bad.

* Image from the gamersinfo.net WOW blog

Gamers who enjoy RPGs have several games to entertain themselves with, and I am still wrestling with The Witcher: Enhanced, Fallout 3, and Fable 2. I think I’ll end up playing Fable 2 first for a couple of reasons: 1. I put down a deposit on it at Gamespot so that I could get the Fable Pub Games for free [a waste of time], and 2. my brother is getting it as well so we’ll try the multiplayer as soon as it’s ready, whether at release or shortly afterwards in a patch. There’s actually a third reason–I think I’ll be so engrossed with Fallout 3 that I won’t be able to play Fable 2. [And speaking of gross, I have to admit the exploding heads in the Fallout 3 trailers somewhat put me off. I hope we can dial down the gore.]

Plus, as I mentioned before, my son and I have picked up Star Wars Miniatures again, which we’re really enjoying. We’re now printing custom maps, and we’re creating our own scenarios, which I’m encouraging him to come up with. He’s understanding the idea of creating a goal and having obstacles, the basics for any story or real-life problem solving. We’re also creating our own characters with the generic minis, like the clone troopers and droids. We’ve watched the clone wars animated series, and one thing they’ve been doing there is to develop personalities in those seemingly un-individual characters. The droids have humor and some personality, and as Yoda pointed out in a recent episode, clones are not identical.

For example, I have a droid character called ‘Klink’ who is not really into being a soldier and does what he can to avoid battle, including destroying himself. But there a technological karma at work, so he always gets reincarnated as a soldier droid. But having his character in play introduces a wildcard, a piece that might not follow orders or that might throw itself in the line of fire. Sure, it’s a way to sabotage my own game, but it also makes the game less serious and provides a little wonder of ‘what’s he going to do this time.’ Part of this goes back to my time on Everquest when it seemed that making mistakes, like getting lost or killed, was a part of being in a team and made it more fun and interesting. And my son is developing a character who thinks he isn’t a clone but is the original, which I’m interested in seeing where he takes the character.

Sometimes, there’s a fine line between being involved with your kids’ interests and abetting their obsessions.