The Stack

After practicing by replaying some of the earlier songs to get higher ratings and more unlocks, I finally beat “Bark at the Moon”. Guitar Hero is officially off the stack. I’ll probably play with it some more and see how far I can get on Hard difficulty, but I doubt I’ll ever finish it at that level.

About “Bark at the Moon” as a boss monster: Looking back at the last set of songs, it strikes me as unfortuante that the hardest of the hardest songs has a title that’s a verb phrase in the imperative rather than a noun. The same set has songs titled “Frankenstein” and “Godzilla”. Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to be able to say “Yeah! I finally beat Godzilla!”? Even “Cowboys from Hell”, also in the same set, is more fitting.

Like those songs, “Bark at the Moon” is about a monster. Is it deliberate that the final set is mainly monster songs? Is it coincidence? Or is it just that the kind of band that does really difficult guitar riffs tends to be the kind of band that writes songs about monsters?

On an unrelated note, in a recent editorial in Newsweek, Stephen Levy says that the Guitar Hero gameplay experience is “no different from other experiences made virtually accessible by the computer, from being a World War II sniper to playing golf like Tiger Woods.” The gaming-as-fantasy fallacy again! But then, judging by the anecdotal evidence Levy presents, perhaps it’s not a fallacy. Maybe I’m just atypical. Perhaps imitating the real experience really is the central thing for the people who play Call of Duty or Tiger Woods PGA Tour, games which don’t appeal to me particularly. And perhaps the people who become really obsessed with Guitar Hero, who aren’t satisfied with finishing it at Medium difficulty like me, are doing it to feel like they can play “Bark at the Moon” like Ozzy does. I’ve said that the rock star fantasy isn’t essential to enjoying the game, but maybe it’s essential to getting the most out of it.

Levy also asks:

“…by bestowing the rewards of virtuosity to those who haven’t spent years to earn it, is it dumbing down musicianship? If a teenager can easily become a make-believe guitar hero, does that mean he won’t ever bother to master the real thing?”

For once, a videogame is being blamed for inspiring teenagers to not imitate it in real life. Leaving aside the question of whether fewer teenage guitarists might not be a bad thing, my contact at Harmonix points out that the game could easily have the opposite effect. Even if the game reduces the proportion of guitarist wannabes who go through with learning to play for real, it may be making up for it by producing more guitarist wannabes. In other words, there have got to be people who assumed that they could never play a guitar until they tried it in the game and realized that the skills were accessible after all. Pure speculation, of course, but so is Levy’s comment. I know I can report a similar experience with a different game: Slime Forest convinced me that I could actually learn to read Japanese. A couple of years later, I’m still learning, but I haven’t given up.

The songs in Guitar Hero are divided into six levels of increasing difficulty. The highest level is unavailable on Easy mode, so when I unlocked it on Medium, I didn’t know what to expect. The first four songs turned out to be difficult, but not too difficult — I managed to scrape through them all on the first try, albeit missing a lot of notes in the process. Then came the infamous “Bark at the Moon”.

I had heard about this song. It recently made a list of the top 20 videogame bosses. This seemed humorously incongruous when I read about it, but now I understand. It has that bosslike order-of-magnitude-harder-than-anything-else-you’ve-faced quality. The very first thing it throws at you is a rapid alternation between the lowest and highest notes you can play, which involves muscles I haven’t used in a long time. I assume it’s even worse on higher difficulty levels.

It’s been two days since I got that far, and I haven’t successfully barked at the moon yet. Partly this is because I can’t try again immediately after a failed attempt. Not because the game won’t let me, but because each attempt is wearing enough on the hands that I need a break. The game in general is tiring, to the point that I wonder if I’m holding the controller wrong, but not to this degree. (I have experimented with alternate postures a little, such as holding the controller in my lap and playing the fret buttons like a piano keyboard, but these always prove to be more awkward than doing it the right way.)

On my last attempt, I got all the way to the final solo, which, due to its unfamiliarity, I played badly enough to bring the audience all the way from the green zone on the rock-meter down to booing me off the stage. The end result: 99% completion. 99%. I think the final note was actually on the screen.

I’ve completed Easy mode by now. I always start rhythm games on Easy mode, I know my limitations. I still haven’t even finished Frequency on Medium difficulty. In this game, though, Easy mode is missing enough of the content that I don’t think it counts as really completing the game for Stack purposes.

And now that I’ve made some progress in Medium, I’ve noticed that this game is heavily zone-based. That is, success depends on “getting into the zone” and letting muscle memory take over — moreso even than in other rhythm games, I think, possibly because of the way you need to coordinate both hands. There comes a point where you’re automatically pressing the frets in advance of the note and not noticing that you’re doing it.

Playing this game has been also been filling in gaps in my musical education. For example, until now, I only knew of the band Franz Ferdinand from reading webcomics. And I had no idea how “Smoke on the Water” goes after the first twelve notes.

My one biggest disappointment in the game is the same one as in all rhythm games, and to a certain extent action games of other sorts: that you can’t play the game and actually watch the graphics at the same time. I can catch glimpses, so I know that your on-screen avatar does something tricky and acrobatic with the guitar when you activate “star power”, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what.

Not only is Guitar Hero is enjoyable even if you don’t want to be a rock star, it’s even enjoyable if you don’t particularly like the song you’re playing at any moment. This isn’t too surprising, as the same was true of Frequency and Amplitude, and the gameplay here is very similar to those games. Some of the complexity of those has been removed, as there’s only one instrument and thus no switching from track to track, but the very nature of the interface has extra complexity of its own. Instead of just pressing the right buttons with the right timing, you have the right hand controlling the timing and the left hand choosing the notes. This is difficult and unintuitive! If this is a simplified version of playing a guitar, then playing an actual guitar must be really, really hard.

This was the last game purchase I made before starting this blog. I’d been meaning to get it for some time, not just because of the overwhelmingly positive reviews, but because one of the developers is an acquaintance of mine, and if there’s one kind of game you always have to play, it’s games involving people you know, however slightly. But I hesitated. Partly because, with the custom controller, it’s the most expensive game I’ve ever bought (unless you count Katamari Damacy, the game that finally made me buy a PS2). Partly because no one seemed to be able to answer the question: Is this game still fun if you don’t have a fantasy of being a rock star?

This may seem like an odd question. When I first asked it in an online chat, one person replied “Everyone has a fantasy of being a rock star!” Well… no. Not everyone. It’s not that I hate rock, it’s just that it’s never inspired in me the zealous enthusiasm that makes people idolize its practicioners. Think of, say, John Williams. Here’s a musician whose works have had an emotional impact on millions of people: imagine how dry Darth Vader’s initial entrance onto Leia’s ship would have been without the strains of the Imperial March in the background. But John Williams doesn’t have screaming fans. He doesn’t have groupies. He doesn’t have people quitting their jobs to follow him around on tour. Few if any people have commercially-successful movie sountrack composer fantasies.

Given that the question isn’t purely hypothetical, there’s another problem with it: the assumption that gaming is based on a fantasy of being the player character. Sure, it’s a factor, and a game with a really unacceptable protagonist can raise hackles — witness the recent furor over Super Columbine Massacre RPG! But in most cases, I’d say that character identification isn’t as big a deal in games as pro-censorship activists think it is. If you can play Super Mario Brothers without actually wanting to be a plumber in the Mushroom Kingdom, why can’t you play Guitar Hero without wanting to be a rock star?

(To go off on a tangent: I remember when Infocom released Plundered Hearts, a romance-novel-like text adventure with a female hero. All of Infocom’s promotional materials seemed to be geared towards reassuring their predominantly male fanbase that it was okay to play it, that they knew some very macho people who played it without becoming less macho, etc. And I remember thinking at the time: No one would do this for a novel or a movie with a female hero. And it’s not like audience identification with the hero in a novel is weak; in many, you’re actually privy to the hero’s inner thoughts. But they had to respond to the idea that the player of a game is fantasizing about being the protagonist, and therefore, in the case of Plundered Hearts, fantasizing about being a woman. Of course, no one would bother refuting this notion today. Tomb Raider has rendered it laughable.)

Still, there’s some reason to think that the rock star fantasy may be more important than usual in this game. Whenever people describe why it’s so fun, what they talk about is rocking out. This is apparently the main appeal of the game: it gives you an excuse to rock out, and a context out from which to rock. Sure, it’s a simplified and videogamized version of rocking out, but apparently it does a good job of capturing the experience. The thing is, I wouldn’t describe most games in terms like these. If a first-person shooter felt like actually shooting people, I doubt I’d be able to play it. Jumping around is kind of fun, but the fun in playing a platformer is not based on how well it captures the experience of jumping. That’s because a platformer isn’t about replicating a jumping-on-platforms fantasy.

So, is Guitar Hero fun if you don’t have a fantasy of being a rock star? We’ll find out in my next post, after I’ve tried it out.

I underestimated the amount of game left. There’s a fairly substantial dungeon to be completed before tackling the central castle. The thing is, I don’t think there’s anything left to learn about the game. While the motivation behind gaming is (for me) largely about the sense of accomplishment, much of the actual pleasure comes from mastering new systems, and now that I’ve mastered magic and crafting, there’s nothing new left. I’ve reached the point of tedium.

It seems to me that CRPGs are particularly prone to becoming tedious, because progress in a game is based on developing the skills of the player characters, not on developing the skills of the player. There is one skill that the player learns: how to advance the characters efficiently. Mastery of that skill means that the PCs will be ahead of the difficulty curve from there on out, robbing the game of challenge. When this happens, the game can either end, or throw some new wrinkle at the player that forces them to revise what they’ve learned, or it can become mindless and repetitive. The last option is surprisingly popular among both developers and players.

A reasonable person just would stop playing at this point and get on with things that are either more enjoyable or have practical merit. But this blog is not about being reasonable. I will finish this game. I won’t do it right away, though. It’s high time for a break.

I seem to be getting into the home stretch now. The overall structure of the game involves five castles, a central one on a mountaintop and one in each of the cardinal directions around it, connected by a ring road. I’ve done missions in all of the castles except the central one now, and the only quest currently active is to activate the last remaining teleport gate of the eight on the ring road. This will take me back to near my starting point.

My characters are also nearly all up to the point where they can wield the strongest weapons available for purchase. And that means it’s time to sit down and do some serious crafting.

Crafting in this game involves combining items with monster leavings, such as oni horns and kappa claws, or various kinds of gem. Each item has specific effects: dragon stingers make a weapon poisonous, tengu feathers give a bonus to dexterity, etc. Each weapon and piece of armor has a certain number of enhancement slots; the more powerful items tend to have more. It’s kind of like the Final Fantasy 7 “materia” system, except that enhancement items can’t be removed. To effect an enhancement, you have to pay a blacksmith, who charges more for more powerful effects. More powerful effects also take more time to produce, and while the blacksmith is working on an item, he can’t do anything else, like start on new items or repair damage to the stuff you’re already using.

So there are four limiting factors on how powerful an item you can craft: enhancement items, enhancement slots, money, and time. Money was the chief limitation at the beginning of the game — at least, it was after I had spent it all crafting a wicked bow for my Archer. But for most of the game, it’s been enhancement items. I have lots of certain items, such Elder Kappa Shells, but not the things I really want to use. Shortages trigger the hoarding instinct: rather than use my last precious gems on a suit of armor that I’m just going to throw away once I can wear something stronger, I’ve been saving them up.

And now comes the moment I’ve been saving them up for. There’s no need to wait for a better item to use them on. It’s time to make maximally amazing stuff for all seven characters. Which means spending maximal amounts of money and time. The money isn’t a problem (at least, I don’t think it is), but the time factor means that there’s probably more than an hour of solid crafting built up. I hope it’ll all be ready by the time I get sent to the central castle.

Since my last post, I’ve got both the Berserker and the Ninja up to the same level as the rest of the party and completed the Berserker’s special quest. It turns out that power-levelling characters gets easier as you go along, because there’s a positive feedback loop: the more advanced the charcter is, the more often he succeeds in hurting things and getting XP. The Wizard is still lagging, though, because he’s spending half his time dead. Resurrection is essentially free in this game, but there’s a limit to how frequently you can do it.

Fortunately, the Wizard is the one character that can be effectively twinked at low levels. To explain why, I’ll have to describe the magic system.

Every character class, even the Brick, has its own set of forty magical abilities that can be purchased and enhanced with “spell points”. These abilities are divided into four groups, corresponding to the four elements but with “lightning” substituted for air; spell points are specific to an element. Some of these abilities are spells that have to be cast and last a short time, some are continuous status effects that last as long as they’re selected, some are permanent enhancements that are always active. The list varies from character to character. Obviously the Wizard has access to the most powerful spells, but they’re only powerful if they’ve been enhanced with spell points. For example, there’s a basic missile spell for each element that starts out doing 1-5 points of damage. After you invest a maximum of 10 spell points in it, it does 5-55 points.

Clearly, spell points make a big difference. Assuming that you don’t try to make him use a sword or something, the Wizard’s capacity for dealing damage is limited mainly by the number of spell points he has to spend, rather than by his experience level, stats, or equipment. So, how do you get spell points? Ordinarily, you get a spell point for each of the elements when you gain a level, but you can get bonus spell points by sacrificing magic items. Each item is worth a fraction of a spell point, and they build up.

At the point I’m at in the game, there is an abundance of magic items that I don’t want to keep, mainly armor and weapons that are too heavy for the Wizard and too wimpy for everyone else. This is how I know that the Wizard’s missile spell caps out at 10, even though I’ve only levelled him five times.

I said earlier that there were twelve levels in this game. This is incorrect. There are twelve main quests. The first quest is simply to escape the castle where you start the game, so when I left that area and the first of twelve empty boxes filled in, I mistakenly thought that the rest of the quests would be similar: a linear series of endpoint-reaching exercises, as is common in videogames. But it turns out that some quests are given in parallel, with at least one of them spread out over multiple areas.

In addition to the main quests, there seem to be three “single” quests which require a specific character. The first one I was given involved talking to an old friend of the Leader. Only the Leader can do this. The second, which I have not completed, requires the Berserker. An NPC mentions three powerful adversaries who have set a challenge, and the Berserker immediately declares that he accepts the challenge, even if he’s not in the party. Which he wasn’t, because he’s one of the charcters I had decided to ignore. But I can’t actually do the challenge without shifting him into the party.

I haven’t checked the docs on this, but I’m guessing that the single quests are optional. However, I’m too much of a completist to just leave this challenge unattempted.

It’s going to be hard. The party is nearing 20th level at this point, and the Berserker was abandoned at level 1. In most RPGs, this wouldn’t be a big problem: you could just stick the low-level character in the back of the party and tell him to defend himself while the big boys win him some XP. That doesn’t work here, because the party doesn’t share XP at all. In most RPGs, that wouldn’t be a problem either, because you could just take the low-level characters back to the earlier areas and level by means of random encounters. But, as in Diablo, the monster supply here is finite, and I’ve been pretty thorough about clearing areas as I pass through them. There just aren’t any low-level XP farms left. In order to reach a level where he’s capable of completing the quest, the Berserker will simply have to fight a large number of things that are tougher than him.

Well. Can the other characters help, with buffs and twinks and healing? Sadly, there are no healing spells, and no buffs other than self-buffs. They can twink to a certain extent, but the better items have level and/or stat requirements that prevent this. Mainly what they can provide is cash. There’s no reason not to give the Berserker the best equipment he can use and a big stack of healing potions.

Despite difficulties, I have managed to get the Berserker up to level 5. I should bring out the Ninja and Wizard and start levelling them too, just in case I need one of them for the third single quest.

Early in Throne of Darkness, I decided to keep things relatively simple by playing only with the four simplest characters: the Leader, Brick, Archer, and Swordsman. (The special roles of the Ninja and Berserker weren’t obvious, and playing the Wizard would require learning the magic system immediately.) I did try using fewer than the full complement of four, but doing that for very long is risky. You never know when you’re going to find yourself suddenly outnumbered.

When more than one character is active, you directly control one of them at a time, switching between them at will. The ones you’re not controlling at the moment act autonomously, following you around unless they see something that they want to kill, like the dog in Nethack. I suppose the developers were trying to make the single-player campaign more like cooperative multiplayer play, since that’s generally acknowledged to be the best way to play Diablo.

This scheme yields ironic results. To explain: Each character earns experience points independently, and they seem to get them by hurting foes, not necessarily by killing them. So the more often a character can successfully strike a blow, the faster he’ll level. Now, the characters you’re not controlling at a given moment are pretty efficient about finding and attacking foes. They’ll rush at things that aren’t even onscreen yet, leaving the player-controleld character chasing after them. Melee is rapid, and it’s easy to misclick, either by clicking the spot that a moving foe has just vacated or not being able to distinguish friend from foe. These clicks are interpreted as instructions to move. Consequently, in most battles, the player-controlled character spends a lot of time running around aimlessly instead of fighting. Overall, then, the characters that you’re not controlling directly will tend to level faster than the one you are. If only there were a way to just abandon control of everyone, let the computer play the battle for you so that everyone would participate optimally! Which, come to think of it, is the idea behind the Final Fantasy XII “gambit” system..