What does it mean for a creative work to be difficult? When we talk about a book or a movie being “difficult,†we usually mean it requires close scrutiny and multiple viewings in order to be fully understood and enjoyed. When we call a video game difficult, however, we usually mean it requires a greater degree of failure and repetition to complete it than an ordinary title.
How do you write about video games? Until recently, nearly all writing on games was done under the auspices of the “review,†a consumer-minded evaluation of game as product, designed to help determine whether or not a particular title was worth buying. This led to a lot of unsavory practices: scores tying aspects of the game's presentation to arbitrary scales, meaningless comparisons to existing games (“like World of Warcraft in space!â€) or gushing endorsements from sources paid for their positive coverage.
Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City is the third installment of Atlus's dungeon-crawling series for the Nintendo DS. It largely follows the format of the previous entries in the series: you form a party of adventurers, consisting of princesses, gladiators, pirates and the like, and then descend into a vast, labyrinthine dungeon to slay monster after monster after monster after monster, each one incrementally bigger and more challenging. Finally, you run out of items and run back to town to rest up at the inn and prepare for your next descent. The process is repeated ad infinitum, and over time adopts the nature of a fetishized ritual as you watch the bars representing health, experience and magic ebb and flow to the rhythm of the game, an intricate pattern changing gradually with time, but the overall design of which remains fixed throughout. This is a romantic conceptualization of the game over a long term.
Violent video games are an enduring and well-documented cultural phenomenon. Of the 10 best-selling video games of 2013, seven contained some form of armed combat. One one hand, this isn't surprising.
Before Epic Games made it big off of "Gears of War" and its sequels, they were called Epic MegaGames, and they made shareware games. Shareware was a distribution model for games in which companies gave away a portion of their game for free and encouraged people to share it with each other via online bulletin boards that served as precursors to today's internet forums.
The Chinese game of Go epitomizes this axiom. In it, players alternately place stones on a grid, attempting to demarcate territory and to capture their opponents stones by surrounding them. It's a simple formula, but the number of permutations it gives rise to are beyond the computation of even our most powerful computers. Conversely, a game with many complicated rules tends to be less strategically complex because the implications of each rule are rarely every fully realized in play; in part, this is because one rule will often undercut the consequences of another. This explains why people who play too much of Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. turn the items off and refuse to fight on any map other than the flat, featureless Final Destination — items and varied terrain introduce complications that actually detract from the already sufficient complexity of each character's set of abilities. The more rules a game has, it seems, the less relevant each rule becomes.
The roguelike genre of video games takes its name from Rogue, a text-based dungeon crawl game made by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman in 1980 that boomed in popularity on college campuses soon after its release.
