"300 patapon," by canecodesign on deviantART

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.

 Patapon, developed by Pyramid and published by Sony Computer Entertainment

When you last tuned in to our monthly feature, it was only appropriate that sparks were flying fast and furious as we sparred with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo over the racing game Burnout Paradise in Vs. Mode (also featured on his blog Multiplayer). Right now, it's too early to tell whether tensions will similarly rise as we discuss the strange, sublime Patapon, a "side-scrolling rhythm-based real-time strategy game for the PSP," as we describe it below. Why? For the simple reason that both sides very much enjoyed the game. But rest assured, we'll look for honest points of contention as this installment of the series goes on.

In today's, Round one, we raise three points for discussion: the power of indirect control; the importance of feel; and the thrill of iconic design. For Totilo's part, he addresses the topic of gamer guilt and considers the difference between games that you control and games that you orchestrate. Some excerpts:

N'Gai Croal: There's a mistaken belief that permeates much of the industry, which is that "realistic" graphics will enable videogames to break on through to truly mainstream audiences. But when we consider the success of Bejewelled, Peggle, Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Wii Sports, it's clearly not the case. As graphics technology improves, the exploration of non-photorealistic rendering techniques should go hand in hand with the quest for verisimilitude. Unfortunately, too many developers and publishers would rather focus on the latter, even on the PSP, a platform whose titles could use a complete deign rethink. Thank goodness Sony, at least, is motivated to do so, with games like Loco Roco and the forthcoming Echochrome. Just because it's roughly the power of a PS2 in a handheld doesn't mean that we should be playing PS2 games on the go.

Stephen Totilo: Let me tell you my favorite memory of playing Patapon. I was on the subway, my troops marching to the right, throwing spears and slashing swords against their enemies of war. I kept them fighting by tapping out a rhythm that I could hear in my headphones. I tapped it consistently and repeatedly enough that they became super-charged with "fever." A complex, lovely mix of drums and whistles swirled as I stamped my fingers. I kept tapping the rhythm. They kept fighting. And my subway screeched into my home station. Without breaking the rhythm of my button taps, I stood up. I took my eyes off the game and I walked onto the subway platform. I looked down on the game again, but for just a few seconds, maybe two loops of the four-note Patapon rhythm, my little troops were fighting without me seeing them. I had given them charge, swept them up with music. They acted away from me.

To read Round 1 of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.

 

Note: This email exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo originally ran on N'Gai Croal's Level Up and MTV's Multiplayer blog, in four separate installments, from January 28th-February 1st 2008. We now present it here in its entirety, under a single permalink, for easier printing, emailing and archival purposes.

Note: This email exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo originally ran on N'Gai Croal's Level Up and MTV's Multiplayer blog, in four separate installments, from November 12th-November 19th 2007. We now present it here in its entirety, under a single permalink, for easier printing, emailing and archival purposes.

In Round 2 of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer) on Burnout Paradise, Totilo bravely challenged Nintendo fan orthodoxy to assert that Burnout Paradise had--apologies to Alex Ward for our terminology--beaten Animal Crossing at its own asynchronous multiplayer game. We took that ball and ran with it, inventing on the fly such acronyms as SOS (Shared Open Spaces), MMSS (Minimally Multiplayer Sandbox Simulators) or SSAOWG (Simultaneously Synchronous and Asynchronous Open World Games) to describe the genius of Paradise. In today's Final Round, Totilo challenges our distortion of one of his pet theories, then partially smacks down our idea that Burnout Paradise could or should lead to a One Game Future; we concede the point on satirical grounds, but issue a full-throated defense of our belief that Criterion's racer represents a design approach best described as the Everlasting Gobstopper of Interactive Entertainment. And if you have no idea what the heck any of this means, just read this post and let us enlighten you. Some excerpts:

Stephen Totilo: You did acknowledge that you were contorting my original theory. I'd like to re-iterate it, so that we can build off it or contort it again. My big idea, which you've never agreed with before, is that the only games to cross over to a mainstream audience and become cultural phenomenon are the ones that were made to be played--or could be played--in satisfying short periods of time. You could knock through a game of Pac-Man or get a thrill causing mayhem in GTA 3 in five minutes flat. You can feel like you've actually experienced the essence of Tetris, Wii Sports and Guitar Hero in just as short a span--which isn't to say you won't get hooked for much longer. But that's why I don't think Final Fantasy, as popular as it is, has ever crossed over to the point where it gets mentioned on CNN when a new one comes out. It's why I think, while Zelda games are beloved, they do not matter to the world the way Mario games do. Almost all of Mario's adventures can be fun and satisfying in short bursts, which gives them a crossover appeal that can attract the attention of people who only play games in that casual way.

N'Gai Croal: The Everlasting Gobstopper of Interactive Entertainment, however, is the logical outgrowth of the dialogue we've been having in this Vs. Mode exchange....You wrote a post earlier today about Halo 3 and its content expanding features like Forge and Arcade scoring. What if Criterion and EA not only released a downloadable file establishing circuit races, but also let you create your own circuit races simply by driving through the city, automatically blocking off the surrounding streets, as if two "Tron" lightcycles were tearing side-by-side through Paradise City? What if Aftertouch and Pursuit were one of many modes that you could turn or off, like the game-modifying skulls in Halo 3? What if Criterion added a car customization mode, letting you swap out not only Boost Types, but also paint jobs and decals--or design them yourself, as in Rock Band? What if they--gasp--brought back classic Crash Mode? That's what I mean by the Everlasting Gobstopper approach to game design.

To read the Final Round of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below. 

 The Burnout Paradise city map

In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer) on Burnout Paradise, he graciously admitted, after much to-ing and fro-ing about his assorted experiences with the game, that in the end we were right and he was wrong about the quality of the title. We thanked him for recognizing the wisdom of his elders, but in truth, we had long suspected that Burnout's radical reinvention would be the source of much consternation among gamers. In today's Round 2, Totilo risks the wrath of Nintendo fanboys the world over by daring to suggest that Burnout Paradise is a better Animal Crossing than, well, Animal Crossing itself. (We've never played it, so we'll just offer up a quick "no comment" and leave Totilo to stand alone in the line of fire.) For our part, we ran with his suggestion that the next big trend in games might lie in ditching the medium's historically goal-oriented focus, coining such sure-to-be-industry-standard terms as SOS, MMSS and SSAOWG in the process of exploring the power of online-connected open worlds. Some excerpts:

Stephen Totilo: Burnout: Paradise could be my own Animal Crossing. Paradise City is huge. There are lots of things to do, mostly involving smashing thing--cars, gates, signs, etc. There's also just interesting terrain, good lines to race through--across bridges, through railroad tunnels, up and down big staircases, down the beach, in the hidden circuit race track (I found it!) in the southwest part of the city. And like Animal Crossing, I can welcome other people into my city or hop into there's and play together, mostly an improvised fashion. Better for my tastes, though, I can play against them without them, knocking off their high scores while they're asleep. As I said in my Round 1, I don't even care that much about the races in the game anymore. I just like driving around, wandering digitally. I guess it's the difference between going to a specific website or just surfing the web to alleviate boredom. We all know which of those activities is actually more fun.

N'Gai Croal: I wonder though, if die hard, old school, goal-oriented players will wag their fingers at gaming delinquents like ourselves who reject the idea that winning isn't everything, but the only thing, for whom beating the game--or other people--is their entire raison de jeu. As I become increasingly hardcasual in my gaming tastes, I need games to stop boxing me into one way to have fun, one way to progress, one way to entertain myself. I don't want the proclivities of 12-24-year-old males, who have unlimited amounts of time to grind through a developer's set path, to prevent me from having a good time. As Brad Pitt said of Project Mayhem in "Fight Club," "You decide your level of involvement." (Would this be Vs. Mode without a "Fight Club" or Metal Gear Solid reference? I think not.) The more developers that follow in Criterion's footsteps, the more teams that choose to achieve their hours of gameplay by expanding their games along the twin axes of density and variety to accommodate a wider range of gaming desires rather than along the narrow path that satisfies the same old hardcore joypad-twiddler, the more fun I'll be having.

To read Round 2 of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below. 

 Burnout Paradise, developed by Criterion Games and published by Electronic Arts

Another year, another set of games to incite email warfare between MTV and Newsweek. Yes, Vs. Mode is back once again, after a brief hiatus which saw the principals take their battle to the pages of Slate. The subject of our newest Vs. Mode discussion with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer) is Criterion Games' and Electronic Arts' racing game Burnout Paradise. In Round 1 of our exchange, Totilo explains why "It's complicated" is the best way to describe his relationship with the latest Burnout, while we describe how we fell hard, fast and almost completely without reservations in love with Criterion's refreshing new take on its aging franchise. Some excerpts:

Stephen Totilo: EA sends me a review build in December. I play it in my PlayStation 3. My wife and I love Burnout 3: Takedown, me for the racing, she for the crashes. I drive through a few intersection-triggered events in my first sitting, winning enough of them to unlock the crash mode so that I can let me wife give it a try. But I give crash--Showtime--a go before her and it all falls apart. It seems too easy. I tumble my car farther and farther down a road, causing massive property damage and waiting for the mode to get hard. Surely there must a time limit I'm going to have trouble with or a score threshold I can't easily meet. Not really. It's easy. It reminds me of how Lumines got on the PSP, too easy for too long before any challenge emerged. This is happening in my first un-supervised session. I want out of Showtime mode and put the controller down so that my car goes still and, at last, the mode does time out. This seems wrong, even broken.

N'Gai Croal: It would have been so tempting for Criterion to have made the open world optional and layered a structured event system on top of the game as it exists today. Everyone wins, right? Especially since I'm a fan of developers providing players with as many options as possible so that we can customize the experience to be exactly what we want it to be. At the same time, I can't help feeling that we've all benefited from Alex and his team fully committing to making Burnout Paradise an open world racing title. They've embraced it in ways large, small and highly instructive for anyone who follows in their footsteps. Driving through gas stations to replenish your boost; through auto repair shops to fix your car; and through junkyards to switch vehicles. Taking out cars to add them to your collection. Anywhere, anytime Showtime mode for your destructive delight. Having three different burnout systems--Stunt, Speed and Aggression--which both harkens back to Burnouts past and lets players drive the way they want to drive.

To read Round 1 of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.

Note: This email exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo originally ran on N'Gai Croal's Level Up and MTV's Multiplayer blog, in four separate installments, from October 29th-November 2nd 2007. We now present it here in its entirety, under a single permalink, for easier printing, emailing and archival purposes.

In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer) on Valve Software's Portal, Totilo explored the business that might prevent other Portal-alikes from making it to market while making the creative for why developers should persevere nonetheless. We praised Portal's minimalism. In Round 2, things got more heated as Totilo insisted that Portal had characters and story; we kept it minimal and said no. In today's Final Round, the discussion goes haute middlebrow as Totilo makes his case more forcefully and we rebut his argument with dictionary definitions, category lists and a little help from our friends. Excerpts:

Stephen Totilo: I couldn't cast I/Chell in a movie, that's for sure. But I can tell you some things: she's a she; she's a test subject; she's willing to follow orders only to a point; she doesn't get tired when she runs; she has 20/20 vision; she cared about a companion cube; she was willing to kill her boss/captor. Were these all traits programmed into her by Valve? Were some of these brought into the equation by me? Well, sort of. Did I really bring my concern for the companion cube to the game myself? Or did Valve cull that out of me, essentially grafting certain actions and reactions onto me, puppeteer-ing me? Where exactly, in the spectrum between "Chell"-ness and Stephen-ness, is the character I control defined? And if it's somewhere in the middle, is that not possibly a proof of how a character in a video game is defined differently than one written about in a page or displayed on a TV screen?

N'Gai Croal: The thinness of Chell's characterization is mirrored in Portal's narrative, a word I've been deliberately using instead of "story" to describe the events in Portal. My choice of words prompted reader tilt3daxis to write in my comments section, "I'm slightly confused, N'Gai, about your distinction between story and narrative. Is it simply a matter of semantics or is there something deeper that I'm missing?" As I see it, a narrative is a series of events, one after the other, as in, "this happened, then this happened, and then this happened." A story contextualizes the events in a narrative by including perspective, context, point of view, backstory, etc. Now GLaDOS could be said to provide all of those things...but by her own admission, she lies, so the only events we can trust are the ones we see through Chell's eyes. In other words, all we can trust is the gameplay. We don't even know if we can trust the "facts" described by GLaDOS on the lyrics to "Still Alive." Are there people who are still alive? Is she experimenting on them? We didn't see any other people--even if we want to believe Portal's embedded narrative of the person(s) who scrawled notes and messages and posted photos on walls inside of Aperture Science, how can we be sure that GLaDOS didn't plant that graffiti herself--so how do we know that they in fact exist. Portal, then, is "The Usual Suspects" of videogames, with GLaDOS as its Keyser Sose.

To read the Final Round of our Vs. Mode exchange in its entirety, click on the link beloe. 

In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer) on Valve Software's Portal, Totilo opened with a rare business analysis of why publishers would rather seek the next BioShock than the next Portal, then volunteered three lessons that developers should absorb from the latter game. As instructed, we followed suit, but distilled our assessment of Portal to a single phrase: Portal is a triumph of minimalism. In today's Round 2, Totilo takes issue with our lavish praise of Portal's final section; prompting us to put large chunks of his post under the microscope. WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND--BEWARE. Some excerpts:

Stephen Totilo: About the final boss: story and boss battle converge smoothly in this game, as I've stated. And while I can't find much to fault with this game, I'm surprised to see you say that the final encounter in Portal is "rivaling 'Metal Gear Solid 3's sniper duel with The End for my favorite boss fight of all time." That's not praise I was expecting. That good? Really? It couldn't be because of the gameplay. Even though I'm far less enamored of The End confrontation than many others, I recognize the value it provided in letting players try different take-down strategies. Fighting GLaDOS doesn't. You have to remove her orbs. Give her the HAL 9000 treatment. De-evolve her. And fry her. And she's dead. So what drew you in?

N'Gai Croal: By the way, you still haven't managed to convince me that there's a story in Portal. The only thing that we know is true is what Chell we did--GLaDOS, after all, is far too unreliable to trust anything she says--so if that amounts to Portal having a story, what then of Tetris, Bejewelled and Lumines? As for the cake being real, that certainly wasn't Chell's our POV. Who are you going to trust--GLaDOS or your lying eyes?

To read Round 2 of Vs. Mode in its entirety, click on the link below.

To be a critic is to compare and contrast; pick and choose, praise and dismiss. And as 2007 slowly winds to a close, our thoughts inevitably turn towards which game we'll choose as our Game of the Year. With eight weeks left before the new year, our shortlist includes such titles as God of War II, Super Stardust HD, Desktop Tower Defense, BioShock and Halo 3, with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Super Mario Galaxy and Rock Band awaiting extensive playthrough to determine their worthiness for inclusion. Near the top of the list, however, is a game we've already beaten twice: the unexpected critics' darling Portal, from Valve Software, which is the subject of our newest Vs. Mode discussion with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer). Some excerpts:

Stephen Totilo: The victory of Portal is that it is fun just to mess with it. Can you agree with me to apologize to the inventors of the English language for all the misuse we've made of the phrase "sandbox game"? Before Portal I, like many people who play games, was using it to describe open-world games like GTA, Gun and Spider-Man--games that allowed me to veer from a linear path and sample many a hidden side-task. I guess that's sort of analogous to what I did as a kid in my and my brother's green plastic sandbox. But I think what I spent more time doing was just: playing. Picking up sand and letting sift through my fingers. Making mounds of said that I probably thought looked like castles. Smushing those mounds of sand back down. Drawing lines in the sand with a stick. Just playing. Portal has such a strong and clever mechanic, that even though it is a strictly linear game not at all designed with the openness of GTA, Gun or Spider-Man, it's much more like my old green sandbox.

N'Gai Croal: Portal is a triumph of minimalism.

To read the Round 1 of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

In which N'Gai forsakes the superior Phantom Hourglass on the DS for the troubled Manhunt 2 on PSP, while Stephen berates journalists and developers who fail to complete the games that they begin playing.

In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode discussion with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer), we once again admitted to our ignorance of the Legend of Zelda series (and offered up an eminently reasonable explanation as to why games of that type don't appeal to us). Totilo, meanwhile, confessed to a crisis of faith over the fact that the franchise he'd once loved for its innovation was now suffering from advanced genre decline (thanks to commenter ksteshenko for reminding us of that excellent Lost Garden essay.) Round 2 and Round 3 could be considered The Re-Education of Level Up, as our staff underwent a crash course on Zelda classics--Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask--from gaming sensei Totilo, prompting a sprawling face to face discussion about the challenge of keeping franchises of long standing fresh.

In today's Final Round, we bring it home with more analysis (of why the sailing controls in the latest Zelda represent another breakthrough of which developers should avail themselves) and another confession (that we've forsaken Phantom Hourglass for the less-polished Manhunt 2). Totilo responds to this disclosure not with rage, but with sorrow, imploring developers to find a way to DVR-and-YouTube a multitude of games so that completists like himself can school slackers like us on exactly what we're missing. Some excerpts:

N'Gai Croal: One of the shorthand ways of criticizing a modern game is to say that part or all of the game is "on rails," meaning that the player doesn't have control over his or her character's path through the level. By letting us determine the path we want our ship to take, Phantom Hourglass gives us control over the rail: first, we trace a line to set the desired route for our ship, then we switch to the sailing screen where we can look around freely, fire cannons, stop the ship, start it up again, or jump over obstacles. And at any point, we can switch back to the map screen to set a new path. With that simple addition, Eiji Aonuma and his team have effectively taken that relic of videogames past, the rail shooter, and reinvented it for today's players. (These controls seem as though they'd transfer to the Wii pretty effectively; wouldn't you like to see a more open-world version of Rez or Panzer Dragoon that used this mechanic?) I know that you're frustrated by the staleness you believe has set into the franchise, but I hope you're willing to acknowledge the genuine innovation on display here as well.

Stephen Totilo: Surprises and innovation abounded in Phantom Hourglass. There had been complaints about the bosses in Phantom Hourglass and in Nintendo games in general. Phantom Hourglass surprised me by actually offering a couple of fresh takes, including some of the best vertically-aligned boss fights since Kraid in Super Metroid. If you think about it, even though most bosses are taller than the player character, the battle strategies required to defeat them involve horizontal movement. This isn't the case in Hourglass. The game also has a boss that you fight while observing the battle from the perspective of that boss, seeing Link from the boss'-eye-view. And there's a boss that you can only beat by controlling two characters at the same time, something I haven't seen since the Gamecube game Geist.

To read the Final Round of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.

In which N'Gai and Stephen continue their Very Special face-to-face edition of Vs. Mode: N'Gai with his restrained praise of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and Stephen with his crisis of faith over the series' failure to regain its innovative heights.

In Round 1 of our Vs. Mode discussion with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo (also featured on his blog Multiplayer), we offered up a theory--Linear Gamers Vs. Circular Gamers--to explain why even brilliantly-controlling games like The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass don't float our boat. Totilo, meanwhile, said that he was being to feel a bit run down by Zelda Fatigue, 12 games into the series. In Round 2, we collectively did what Totilo wished Nintendo would do and switched up our own formula. We met face-to-face in order to a) correct Level Up's own ignorance of the Zelda series with a crash course on Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask; and b) talk about how much the series has progressed, if at all, since those twin high water marks. In today's Round 3, we serve up a wide-ranging discussion about the pros and cons of long-running franchises--for both developers and gamers. An excerpt:

Stephen Totilo: What would you like to see Aonuma and his team do next? Take the controls that they were able to sort of build atop the Zelda foundation and then to go and make a better Zelda? Or would you like them to take the controls that they built atop the Zelda foundation and now move those controls into some brand new game experiences?

N'Gai Croal: Well, again resisting the fiction as I do, selfishly I'd say, "Try your hand at another fiction." But I think the question you're asking is a bit deeper than that, which is what should incredibly talented artists and teams, you know, what does it mean when they either are forced to--we don't know that for a fact--or by choice restrict themselves to working on a single series.

I mean it's interesting to contrast that to the team that did Ico and Shadow of the Colossus because Shadow of the Colossus didn't turn into the game that people thought it was. People loved it anyway, but people thought, when they first saw it--with the horse and the bow and arrow--they thought that this was going to be Zelda for the PS2, And it turned out not to be that. It was a very sort of pure, stripped down ,focused game design, but coming off of Ico--for the, say, 500,000 people worldwide who bought that game and loved it--a lot of us would've been happy with Ico 2, but that team, Ueda-san and his team, they didn't make that game.

Totilo: Right, Nico as it was rumored for a while--

Croal: Exactly. He didn't play that game and so what I'm hearing from you is a desire for Nintendo to rethink how they're doing, dealing with the Zelda franchise and maybe walk away from it for a while, let us miss it, maybe remake some of the other ones, which have exemplary game design and spif it up for a new generation. And then have Eiji Aonuma's team to do something different.

Totilo: Yeah, and I guess to wrap this up I just need to go and ask you one more time to help me figure this out: to what extent do you think that the feeling that I'm having is the byproduct of having played so many more, so many of these games already? And is my fatigue of Zelda and my disappointment with the new ones something that people are going to have when Gran Turismo hits its 15th iteration? Is it a feeling that you suspect Final Fantasy fans might be having at some point soon? Or is this something that you think is unique to Zelda?

To read Round 3 of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.

In which N'Gai and Stephen resume their epic battle--not in their customary epistolary form of email, but rather in a face-to-face conversation--and compare The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the DS to its Nintendo 64 predecessors Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.

Over the past couple of months, there has been a small but influential handful of voices who have called for a Vs. Mode podcast: a smattering of developers, publishers, fellow journalists, forum posters and readers alike. But as the staff of Level Up and our sparring partner--MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo--explore our multimedia options, we've seized upon the opportunity afforded by our own ignorance of Zelda gameplay to bring you the next best thing: A Very Special Vs. Mode.

Last Saturday, the Level Up team made the trek to Totilo's Brooklyn apartment--not far from where the Notorious B.I.G. grew up--where Totilo guided us through some key moments in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, then handed us the controller to play the first section of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Immediately following the playthrough, we recorded our discussion of the the Zelda series, which we present to you today and tomorrow as Round 2 and Round 3 of our Vs. Mode exchange. An excerpt:

N'Gai Croal: Did Majora's Mask feel like a radically different Zelda when it came out?

Stephen Totilo: It felt like they had put enough aside and done enough that was new that at the time I thought, "Well, this is a worthwhile and different enough experience. We’re going from a game where it’s primarily about explore the territory at age 7 and then age 14, I can sort of see the distinctions." So taking that idea and warping it so that it’s this 72-hour repeated cycle, and then adding the whole mask system in--which was a whole new way to interact with the world--seemed like a significant addition to the formula. At the time there had only been a handful of Zeldas before it. Since that Majora's Mask game there have been two Gamecube Zeldas; a Game Boy Advance Zelda; two Game Boy color Zeldas; and a Wii Zelda so there have been six Zeldas since then and that’s part of where--at the time the world could’ve still used more high quality Zeldas--but they’ve knocked it out of the park enough times that that’s where I’m feeling like, "Maybe they don’t need to make any more."

Croal: Well, it’s an interesting design choice, looking at the mask system and the 72-hour system repeated. Because I wonder if any game developers making games now--you look at this whole thing of shorter games; some people were complaining that Heavenly Hours is just six hours and--

Totilo: Heavenly Sword. Certainly not Heavenly Hours.

Croal: [Laughs.] Heavenly Sword is only six hours and Gears of War is only nine or ten hours. What you get out of designing a game [like Majora's Mask] in that way--and it would be interesting to sort of go back and talk to the people who worked on the game to see if that was something they thought about--is you get density of game play as opposed to scope of gameplay. The world itself doesn’t need to be as massive to give you that rich gameplay experience. You can use a more limited amount of architecture, levels and dungeons, but make it denser because the mask system brings those areas of the world to life in new ways once you've accessed a new mask.

To read Round 2 of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.

  

In which N'Gai reflects on the experience of playing his first Zelda game, and Stephen wonders whether this may be his last.

Heading into the sixth Vs. Mode exchange, it occurs to us that we've never focused an entire Vs. Mode on a Japan-developed game. So what better way to rectify this oversight than by tackling the newest entry in Nintendo's longstanding Zelda franchise, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the DS? In Round 1 of our exchange with MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, we try to articulate why, despite the game's breakthrough control scheme, we aren't having an unreservedly good time playing it. For his part, Totilo scrutinizes Zelda's rich past and diagnoses the series as suffering from a crippling case of sequelitis. Some excerpts:

N'Gai Croal: I've been struggling to figure out why I'm not digging this game more. Allow me to offer up a half-formed theory. There are two types of action-adventure gamers: those who like to move in a straight line, and those who like to move in circles. By that, I mean that when I'm playing an action-adventure game, I like to move from point A to point B. I don't mind exploring--in fact, I rather enjoy it--but generally speaking, I only like exploration if it propels me forward. I don't like to backtrack, as you well know. I don't like fetch quests, but I can tolerate them in small doses. And I don't like venturing out from a central location to which I always return. Hence, the action-adventure games I tend to enjoy the most are games like Devil May Cry, God of War, Metal Gear Solid, Halo and, with a few dispensations, BioShock. Clear, hold, move on, and above all, never look back: that's my motto.

Stephen Totilo: If I may, I would like to blame Nintendo. I would like to blame them for not finding a way to get their wing of the gaming industry in step with the book, music and movie industry. George Lucas doesn't keep making new "Star Wars" movies for me year after year. I haven't seen 12 of them. He made three back in the day and made them well enough. Then he made a few more and even that might have been stretching the concept. After that he just drilled down on selling me new copies of those same movies again and again. I can't begrudge him that. The movies were good enough that they deserve not to be swamped by six more sequels. Nintendo got Zelda just right a few times already. More than a few times. Can't they just keep re-releasing the really good ones, polishing them up for new platforms, and make some newer non-Zelda stuff? I've heard all the arguments about limited development resources, but I'm unconvinced that remaking Ocarina wouldn't net Nintendo more money and do a better job of solidifying what is great about the series than routinely iterating sequels. The era of Zelda-as-rough-draft is past.

To read Round 1 of our exchange in its entirety, click on the link below.