N'Gai Croal
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Apr 2, 2008 10:00
In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer) on Patapon, the Level Up staff struck first with our championing of the value of indirect control, feel and iconic design. Totilo largely sidestepped our talking points, preferring to focus on gamer guilt and control versus orchestration in games. For our second and final round, things get a bit more personal. We belligerently extol our superior taste in games; attack Patapon's leveling grind; and vociferously dispute Totilo's metaphoric interpretation of the PSP title's gameplay. Totilo, for his part, responds with a deceptively polite evisceration of our anti-grinding position--before charging that the last two Vs. Modes have been too chummy. Is he correct, or just dead wrong, as usual? Only you, Dear Reader, can make that call. Some excerpts:
N'Gai Croal: Back to Patapon: is the grind an imperfection? I say yes. It seems like an easy way to pad out a game that otherwise, as designed, isn't very long. Now, it's true that I could go back to any open area to mine it for the resources I needed, but it was still grinding nonetheless. And I'm not as forgiving as you on this point because while the songs are pleasant and memorable, they weren't so good that I would let it slide....A much better solution would have been to let me "sell" my warriors back recover part or all of the ka-ching that I spent on them so that I could use spend it on a better warrior. But in fairness to the designers--and to return to the suspension of disbelief point I just raised--they seem to want to make a point about the value of your individual troops. Each class of warrior can only contain so many troops; when you get the ingredients to make a better soldier, you first have to clear a slot in its respective class. And when you clear that slot, the Patapon warrior in it dies, in a manner suggesting that the air was removed from its body. (Not to mention that with the death of your warrior goes all the ka-ching and experience points you put into it.)
Stephen Totilo: When we curse a grind, we're cursing a game for forcing repetitive gameplay, to block advancement without this repetition. But aren't all games, by their very nature, rife with repetition? Isn't Super Mario Bros. just a lot of repeated hops. Isn't Halo just a few specific styles of engagement repeated and remixed for hours on end? Sure. The grind, however, earns scorn because it forces too much repetition. It crosses a line. It registers an excess. The repetition often becomes too much and turns into a grind once the game has forced the gamer to go backward, to perpetrate the game's initially un-offensively repetitive gameplay in levels they've already run through. Gameplay repetition is changed to gameplay grinding. And that's when it's time to get angry. Except: it's all subjective, isn't it? Where is that line between fun repetition and grinding? Why don't God of War games get accused of forcing a grind? Because they don't? Oh, surely, they do. They require collecting orbs to get powers, some of which you need to advance. Does God of War get off because they just don't do it forcefully enough that it's bothersome?
To read the Final Round of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.
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