As usual, I'm totally LTTP on this one, but this is too significant to ignore: The Catholic Newsweekly Our Sunday Visitor (a publication I would highly recommend, BTW, if only because of the spectacular writing of Russell Shaw) published an article earlier this month entitled "A Proposal: Computer Games can be Beneficial for Children." The editors pushed it the article to the front cover of the weekly edition, too, so anyone who has a subscription to the publication should have no trouble finding the article. The author, Eugene Gan, himself a professor at Franciscan University in Stuebenville, Ohio, chronicles the time he spent playing Lego Star Wars II with his son.
Some notable excerpts:
"We've all heard how sports help kids learn important life lessons, including perseverance, teamwork and all the rest. I propose -- and this may horrify some of you -- that computer games can play the same formative role."
...
"Talk about team play: It was in one such level in the computer game that I could hear myself coaching my son to persevere and not to give up so easily.
"Stick with it, son. You can do it."
But he was too quick to whine, "I can't do it," without really even trying. Aha, a life-lesson opportunity. I paused the game to talk about the importance of facing challenges, recovering from failure, and relating it to Our Lord's falls while carrying the cross on the Via Dolorosa. (That last one didn't seem as much a stretch at the time.)
The key is to look beyond the old perception of computer games as solely eye-hand-coordinated diversions for real opportunities to encourage more coordination through thinking and purposeful movement."
Feel free to read the whole thing here.
For my part, I was simply glad to read an article from the Catholic Press that didn't lambast video games as something inherently evil (which, sadly, has been the norm for the past decade or so, even though the U.S. media in general seemed all to eager to perpetuate this same viewpoint even now). This article, however, is actually the latest example of a growing trend in Catholic media outlets. No longer are video games to be ignored as worthless or, worse yet, derided as sinful mind-numbing, soul-stealing agents. The article leaves something to be desired (it leaves an open door to critics that claim the lessons learned from video games are also just as easily learned from sports, clubs, and other activities, which really just reflects an ignorance of video games as both a communications and artistic medium), I'm glad that prominent Catholic publications, both web-based and printed periodicals, are beginning to discover video games as something worthy of accolades rather than something to be dismissed with derision. Kudos to Eugene Gan and OSV for running this piece!
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
Star Ocean vs. Star Trek
On Sunday night I saw the new Star Trek movie. It has its rough spots, particularly in the first half of the movie, but it all comes together quite nicely in the end. I left the theater feeling a little underwhelmed, but satisfied. I don't think it deserves the lavish critic praise its received (95% rating from rottentomatoes.com? are you kidding me?), but I can at least give the movie a mild recommendation.
I also managed to finish off Star Ocean this weekend, and my feelings regarding the game are actually remarkably similar. I made no secret of my disdain for the narrative portion of the game in my last post, but the second half of the game (the last two discs combined took me approximately 24 hours to complete, barely longer than the entirety of the first disc) actually incorporates some much-needed character development, plot expansion, and some much-needed puzzle elements into the mix. Rather than feeling embarrased that I was sitting through 30 minute sessions of vapid dialogue from inane, uninspired characters, I was genuinely impressed with the writing and the overall plot structure. The gameplay, too, generally improved as I gradually reached the game's climax - the characters eventually faced off with a nihilistic nemesis bent on destroying the universe in the name utilitarianism (are you paying attention, Trekkies?)! Overall, like Star Trek, I can't help but think the game has been excessively praised by too many people, but overall, I think that the gaming community has done a far better job assessing the merits and shortfalls of Star Ocean than most movie critics have done in their critique of Star Trek.
On one hand, I'm slightly surprised that my feelings regarding both Star Ocean and Star Trek are so similar; on the other hand, considering that Star Ocean Producer Yoshinori Yamagishi has said many times that the series is heavily influenced by the original Star Trek, maybe I shouldn't be so surprised that my sentiments regarding the former are so remarkably similar to my sentiments for the latter.
And so, a mild recommendation for both Star Trek and Star Ocean. Suffice it to say, both are good, but definitely not great.
Any thoughts?
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Star Ocean Player Diary (Caution: story spoilers! You have been warned!)
This past weekend marked the completion of approximately one-third of my escapade into tri-Ace’s Star Ocean (the game spans three disks, and I just completed the first of them this past weekend). The gorgeous graphics and intriguing dystopian plotline that fueled my initial foray into the great expanses of this game’s universe propel me no longer, and the only suitable sustenance I have to satiate my gaming appetite is garnered solely from foraging on the various hospitable planets I come across in this journey through the final frontier. Using the game’s clever item creation system, I can utilize the various items I’ve collected throughout my explorations – items that have very scant utilitarian value by themselves – to create other items that can help me in my dealings with planet natives, friend and foe alike. Unsurprisingly, the battles with hostile enemies end up absorbing quite a bit of time. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. The “fast-paced, action-based” fight sequences are enjoyable enough in their own right (when was the last time that magic spells and clashing swords were boring, anyway?), but it’s never an exercise in arbitrary button presses on a video game controller, as the system grants different rewards for different play styles. Wanna exclusively cast magic spells to wipe out enemies? A nice experience bonus awaits after battle. Would you rather blindside enemies and strike them when they aren’t expecting it? Congratulations, some extra gold is headed your way – just enough to buy that cool sword on sale at the bazaar in town!
Additionally, each playable character in the game gains “experience points” both individually and as an entire crew – the former type of experience can be “spent” to upgrade the character’s particular skills and parameters, making them more effective at fighting, foraging, etc. and the “team experience” is useful in the aforementioned item creation system. Even when exploration itself gets tedious (and it does – if my travels through the Star Ocean are any indication, the universe doesn’t hold much more than planets that are, by-and-large, replicas of medieval Europe populated by cat-eared humanoid life forms that look like they walked out of an anime convention), at least the battles and the item creation keeps me on my toes.
The gameplay systems, however, while certainly gratifying, hardly fulfill the game’s earlier promise of a deep, compelling narrative; with a game subtitled “the Last Hope,” I’d expect some treatment of this significant metaphysical theme. So far, I’ve got very little hope that the game will offer anything of the sort. The characters, like the game’s narrative, initially hold some promise, but are essentially static. Star Wars, among other movies, took a cast of characters that included aliens, cyborgs, and human beings of various ages and genders - all with different worldviews of the universe - into one of the most successful commercial franchises of all time; Star Ocean basically tries to replicate this success in a different medium, with a stronger presence of shamelessly scantily clad female characters for what seems to be no particular reason whatsoever. I suspect that even most juvenile game players would find them to be terribly uninteresting.
Nothing serves to demonstrate this point more effectively than to view one of the game’s numerous cut scenes, which generally involve one character apologizing to another for some vague reason, followed by an awkward 5-second pause, followed by some ghastly revelation of some grave secret that really isn’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things anyway. Even gaming veterans familiar with the generally poor plot direction of Japanese role-playing games will, I think, be squirming at the ludicrous excuse for a plot that this game presents to its audience.
Fortunately, one’s tolerance for poor voice acting, writing, and film direction need not be one’s personal barometer for enjoying the game, as the vast majority of these cut scenes are “skip-able.” Should you elect to do so, the synopses you’ll be forced to read are far more tolerable. Still, I can’t help but decry the game’s inexcusably bad narrative presentation. It’s not enough that Star Ocean fails to make the nuclear holocaust of planet earth into a genuinely interesting story; *SPOILER ALERT* it somehow manages to make the aftermath of the entire destruction of the earth of a parallel universe into one of the most derisibly bad melodramatic movie sequences I’ve ever seen. ****END SPOILER**** Resolving some conflict on one planet just lands the crew on a new one where the same ineffectual, uninteresting, virtually non-existant relationships between the characters take center stage over the far more interesting developments taking place all around them. Rinse, recycle, repeat ad nauseam, and you’ll probably understand why I question if the Star Ocean is worth playing to completion.
Philosophers such as Plato and the Angelic Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas lauded the relaxation from games as something virtuous in moderation, but if Star Ocean is merely an expensive piece of tinker toys and/or eye-candy, it’s not worth paying $60 for a new copy, harmless fun as the game itself may be. Human beings look for more than a quick fix for a longing for relaxation of the mind and/or body; we’re searching for fulfillment for the longings of the human heart! Art attempts in some way to “echo” this search; my journey through the Star Ocean has yielded scarcely even the slightest reverberation of this yearning’s fulfillment.
On the other hand, my escapades in the realm of videogame-dom (and my gallivanting exploits in the role-playing genre in particular) have also instilled in me the virtue of patience. As Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen says in Life of Christ, “…there are two [ways of viewing the world]: fast before Feast, or Feast and then hangover.” Perhaps my tedious time in tri-Ace’s Star Ocean will yield something more substantive in the near future. I certainly know better than to expect something from a videogame that only Christ can give, but it’s not unreasonable to expect something more than simple mind exercises and sensory overload from a particular form of media. If nothing else, a trek through the Star Ocean at least offers breathtaking visuals and a clever, if often redundant, battle system that makes mental micromanagement fun. The question for this discerning Catholic seminarian is this: Does it offer anything else? So far, the answer is a regrettable and definitive “no.”
Additionally, each playable character in the game gains “experience points” both individually and as an entire crew – the former type of experience can be “spent” to upgrade the character’s particular skills and parameters, making them more effective at fighting, foraging, etc. and the “team experience” is useful in the aforementioned item creation system. Even when exploration itself gets tedious (and it does – if my travels through the Star Ocean are any indication, the universe doesn’t hold much more than planets that are, by-and-large, replicas of medieval Europe populated by cat-eared humanoid life forms that look like they walked out of an anime convention), at least the battles and the item creation keeps me on my toes.
The gameplay systems, however, while certainly gratifying, hardly fulfill the game’s earlier promise of a deep, compelling narrative; with a game subtitled “the Last Hope,” I’d expect some treatment of this significant metaphysical theme. So far, I’ve got very little hope that the game will offer anything of the sort. The characters, like the game’s narrative, initially hold some promise, but are essentially static. Star Wars, among other movies, took a cast of characters that included aliens, cyborgs, and human beings of various ages and genders - all with different worldviews of the universe - into one of the most successful commercial franchises of all time; Star Ocean basically tries to replicate this success in a different medium, with a stronger presence of shamelessly scantily clad female characters for what seems to be no particular reason whatsoever. I suspect that even most juvenile game players would find them to be terribly uninteresting.
Nothing serves to demonstrate this point more effectively than to view one of the game’s numerous cut scenes, which generally involve one character apologizing to another for some vague reason, followed by an awkward 5-second pause, followed by some ghastly revelation of some grave secret that really isn’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things anyway. Even gaming veterans familiar with the generally poor plot direction of Japanese role-playing games will, I think, be squirming at the ludicrous excuse for a plot that this game presents to its audience.
Fortunately, one’s tolerance for poor voice acting, writing, and film direction need not be one’s personal barometer for enjoying the game, as the vast majority of these cut scenes are “skip-able.” Should you elect to do so, the synopses you’ll be forced to read are far more tolerable. Still, I can’t help but decry the game’s inexcusably bad narrative presentation. It’s not enough that Star Ocean fails to make the nuclear holocaust of planet earth into a genuinely interesting story; *SPOILER ALERT* it somehow manages to make the aftermath of the entire destruction of the earth of a parallel universe into one of the most derisibly bad melodramatic movie sequences I’ve ever seen. ****END SPOILER**** Resolving some conflict on one planet just lands the crew on a new one where the same ineffectual, uninteresting, virtually non-existant relationships between the characters take center stage over the far more interesting developments taking place all around them. Rinse, recycle, repeat ad nauseam, and you’ll probably understand why I question if the Star Ocean is worth playing to completion.
Philosophers such as Plato and the Angelic Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas lauded the relaxation from games as something virtuous in moderation, but if Star Ocean is merely an expensive piece of tinker toys and/or eye-candy, it’s not worth paying $60 for a new copy, harmless fun as the game itself may be. Human beings look for more than a quick fix for a longing for relaxation of the mind and/or body; we’re searching for fulfillment for the longings of the human heart! Art attempts in some way to “echo” this search; my journey through the Star Ocean has yielded scarcely even the slightest reverberation of this yearning’s fulfillment.
On the other hand, my escapades in the realm of videogame-dom (and my gallivanting exploits in the role-playing genre in particular) have also instilled in me the virtue of patience. As Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen says in Life of Christ, “…there are two [ways of viewing the world]: fast before Feast, or Feast and then hangover.” Perhaps my tedious time in tri-Ace’s Star Ocean will yield something more substantive in the near future. I certainly know better than to expect something from a videogame that only Christ can give, but it’s not unreasonable to expect something more than simple mind exercises and sensory overload from a particular form of media. If nothing else, a trek through the Star Ocean at least offers breathtaking visuals and a clever, if often redundant, battle system that makes mental micromanagement fun. The question for this discerning Catholic seminarian is this: Does it offer anything else? So far, the answer is a regrettable and definitive “no.”
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Alleluia!
Frequent readers of this blog have doubtlessly noticed the dearth of postings during the past month and a half that roughly coincided with the Lenten season. Hopefully they have also noticed the recent flurry of activity that has accompanied Easter's arrival, as well!
Catholic Video Gamers welcomes two additional staffers to its ranks: Arturo Felix and Charles Harmata. Both are well versed in the technological knowledge that has allowed for the Easter renovation of the CVG webpage, and their expertise in this field is supplemented with a plethora of gaming knowledge that is, needless to say, informed by a strong Catholic faith. They'll both be posting their own introductions soon enough - stay tuned for more from each of them in the near future!
In addition to the blog's new banner and general aesthetic overhaul, CVG is now proud to announce its two patron saints: St. Isidore (being patron saint of the internet, he seemed like a natural choice for a patron of a weblog) and St. Gabriel the archangel. May their intercession guide and protect all who visit this webpage to the loving embrace of the Savior. St. Isidore and St. Gabriel the archangel, pray for us!
Finally, with the school year winding down, (all four staffers here are students), the impending summer vacation should provide ample opportunities for us all to keep CVG more frequently updated. None of us are planning to "blog-vanish" anytime soon; please keep us all in your prayers as the academic year comes to a close!
St. Apollonius the apologist, pray for us!
Catholic Video Gamers welcomes two additional staffers to its ranks: Arturo Felix and Charles Harmata. Both are well versed in the technological knowledge that has allowed for the Easter renovation of the CVG webpage, and their expertise in this field is supplemented with a plethora of gaming knowledge that is, needless to say, informed by a strong Catholic faith. They'll both be posting their own introductions soon enough - stay tuned for more from each of them in the near future!
In addition to the blog's new banner and general aesthetic overhaul, CVG is now proud to announce its two patron saints: St. Isidore (being patron saint of the internet, he seemed like a natural choice for a patron of a weblog) and St. Gabriel the archangel. May their intercession guide and protect all who visit this webpage to the loving embrace of the Savior. St. Isidore and St. Gabriel the archangel, pray for us!
Finally, with the school year winding down, (all four staffers here are students), the impending summer vacation should provide ample opportunities for us all to keep CVG more frequently updated. None of us are planning to "blog-vanish" anytime soon; please keep us all in your prayers as the academic year comes to a close!
St. Apollonius the apologist, pray for us!
Thursday, March 5, 2009
A Supernova of Star Ocean screenshots!
Those who frequent this blog know by now that I have a nasty habit of making promises I can't keep, so I'm not going to promise any new "player diary" postings on Star Ocean for the immediate future.
Seeing as I did, however, highlight the game's graphical granduer along with its rather seemingly dystopian storyline, I'd welcome anyone interested in the veracity of those claims to view the game's promotional trailer and screenshots (as seen here) both of which, I think, validate my claims from yesterday's postings.
Heck, even the game's boxart is beautiful!
St. John of the Cross, pray for us!
Seeing as I did, however, highlight the game's graphical granduer along with its rather seemingly dystopian storyline, I'd welcome anyone interested in the veracity of those claims to view the game's promotional trailer and screenshots (as seen here) both of which, I think, validate my claims from yesterday's postings.
Heck, even the game's boxart is beautiful!
St. John of the Cross, pray for us!
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
A False Hope?
My dad bought me a copy of Star Ocean: The Last Hope as an early birthday present for me yesterday. I played it for about 2 hours so far; the graphics are great, the music fits the whole Space Odyssey thematic, but the one thing that's struck me so far is the game's story: man destroys the planet earth in a cataclysmic WWIII, then builds a huge space station in the hopes of colonizing other planets...reminds me of the Tower of Babel story from Genesis (which I just happen to be studying in my Old Testament class at Loyola!) Man constantly tries to make himself into a God, and constantly fails (and the story of Star Ocean thus far is demonstrating that all too candidly!)
I hope to have more on this game in the coming days (no pun intended!). St. Kasimir, pray for us!
I hope to have more on this game in the coming days (no pun intended!). St. Kasimir, pray for us!
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Player Diary: Persona 3
I bought this game off of Amazon as an early Christmas present to myself at the beginning of this month. I'm usually not one for purchasing much of anything online, but as any gaming buddy of mine will tell you, my normally fiscally conservative spending habits tend to buckle when my eyes spot a critically acclaimed Japanese role-playing game. When it's only $19.95 plus shipping and handling and comes with a free soundtrack and art book, well, even my rather obstinate and unreasonable case of online shopper's stigma is eradicated almost instantaneously.
I finally popped the game disk into my ps2 this morning, and I played for a good, oh, hour and 30 minutes or so. It was enough to get the general gist of the game's storyline premise, but that's about it. There's alot of in-game cut-scenes thus far, and not very much of anything else. Frankly, given how long I played, I'm surprised I remained as engaged as I did - usually, the first hour or so of role-playing games tend to be dominated by tutorials, and I 've grown to expect this over the course of many years as a gamer. I know when I can "zone out" without missing anything crucial. There really hasn't been any point so far where I've really "disengaged" in this way, and given how the game has done very little to engage me in terms of actual gameplay so far, I'm downright impressed.
Basically, you play as a high school transfer student who discovers that his dormmates are part of a secret school club dedicated to defeating people-eating monsters called "shadows." These shadows only appear during the "dark hour," beginning and ending at 12:00 midnight - the "hidden" time between one day and the next. How do you fight these shadows? Well, you take an "evoker" - a pistol - and shoot yourself in the head (!!!!) to summon a "persona" - a physical manifestation of the psyche that takes the form of some mythological god/goddess. When it's not "the dark hour," you attend school as a student, and the academic performance in classes and relationships your character develops with your friends effect your persona(s) ability to battle. When that "dark hour" comes again, it's time to take the fight to the shadow's nest - Tartarus, a gigantic skyscraper that just happens to render itself directly atop the school building where you attend classes during the day. The school, then, plays an crucial role in the game, an irony that is not lost on this college student currently enjoying respite from the drudgery of grueling schoolwork.
In summary, my Persona 3 experience thus far: its very Japanese, an interesting combination of two video game genres, very Japanese, and most assuredly deserving of it's "M for Mature" ESRB rating. And very Japanese.
Obviously I can expect suicide to be a prominent thematic in the game's story. Whether or not it retains the morally problematic depiction shown thus far (suicide as a way to unleash "inner power" is so unabashadly Nietzchean) remains to be seen. I'm a firm believer in not finishing games if they are not worth my time, and if the game communicates nothing but a morally evil message, well, it's certainly not worth my time. But whether or not that's the case with Persona 3 remains to be seen.
I finally popped the game disk into my ps2 this morning, and I played for a good, oh, hour and 30 minutes or so. It was enough to get the general gist of the game's storyline premise, but that's about it. There's alot of in-game cut-scenes thus far, and not very much of anything else. Frankly, given how long I played, I'm surprised I remained as engaged as I did - usually, the first hour or so of role-playing games tend to be dominated by tutorials, and I 've grown to expect this over the course of many years as a gamer. I know when I can "zone out" without missing anything crucial. There really hasn't been any point so far where I've really "disengaged" in this way, and given how the game has done very little to engage me in terms of actual gameplay so far, I'm downright impressed.
Basically, you play as a high school transfer student who discovers that his dormmates are part of a secret school club dedicated to defeating people-eating monsters called "shadows." These shadows only appear during the "dark hour," beginning and ending at 12:00 midnight - the "hidden" time between one day and the next. How do you fight these shadows? Well, you take an "evoker" - a pistol - and shoot yourself in the head (!!!!) to summon a "persona" - a physical manifestation of the psyche that takes the form of some mythological god/goddess. When it's not "the dark hour," you attend school as a student, and the academic performance in classes and relationships your character develops with your friends effect your persona(s) ability to battle. When that "dark hour" comes again, it's time to take the fight to the shadow's nest - Tartarus, a gigantic skyscraper that just happens to render itself directly atop the school building where you attend classes during the day. The school, then, plays an crucial role in the game, an irony that is not lost on this college student currently enjoying respite from the drudgery of grueling schoolwork.
In summary, my Persona 3 experience thus far: its very Japanese, an interesting combination of two video game genres, very Japanese, and most assuredly deserving of it's "M for Mature" ESRB rating. And very Japanese.
Obviously I can expect suicide to be a prominent thematic in the game's story. Whether or not it retains the morally problematic depiction shown thus far (suicide as a way to unleash "inner power" is so unabashadly Nietzchean) remains to be seen. I'm a firm believer in not finishing games if they are not worth my time, and if the game communicates nothing but a morally evil message, well, it's certainly not worth my time. But whether or not that's the case with Persona 3 remains to be seen.
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