Where are videogames going?

When i started this article, i was asked the question “Where and what will videogames be in ten years” and i am embarrassed to say that i was caught off guard. I did my usual bullshit routine, but i realized this: i don't have a fucking clue. Which got me thinking, at their very core, what is a videogame? Well, for one, it's a manipulation of space, a digital representation of a world that is not there. Sure, there are peripheries, like characters, story and action, but the game is really something that is not there. Yes, it sounds like i am high, but i don't think i can make it simpler than that. A videogame is an abstraction of an object in a space WHOSE CONTROL RELATES TO THE PLAYER. So, the player adds input (most often via a controller), and the game reflects that input. So, if i want to talk about the future of what videogames will be, maybe i should decide what they are right now. Not that that isn't what everything else i talk about isn't. If that sentence made no sense, let me rephrase it as this: the essence of everything i talk about is trying to come up with a metaphor for videogames. Cinema and photography have the parallel of the camera as the eye, so what do we gamers have? Philip K. Dick loved a creature called the wub. It had many iterations in his works, but one of the great ones was in The Zap Gun, where the wub was a telepathic creature that an earth-man used in a board game to scare off a race of slave-trading insectoids. PK Dick's point was this: investment. The player needs a reason to play the game. In the case of the wub, the wub created a psychic link that pressed the player to free (or trap) the captive wub, because the player would experience the wub's fear and anxiety on being punished, or elation and relief on being rewarded.

Now i think that the Wii is really going to be instrumental in the future of videogames. Let's be frank, i really want the Wii to succeed. Heck, i've even added it to Open Office's dictionary with the expectation that i will be writing about it often. So i'm going to highlight some things that i think will be instrumental in creating interesting Wii games.

Everyone is concerned about how well it's actually going to control, so that's a given that i don't really need to go into. And your average mouth-breathing sony or microsoft fanboy will tell you that the graphics aren't as good. But what really matters here is innovation.

Nintendo has a track record of some pretty fantastic consoles (NES, SNES, Gameboy, GBA, DS), some pretty decent ones (N64, GC) and some less than stellar ones (VirtuaBoy). But what made the good ones good? Gameplay. The NES had SMB right out of the box. Then came the Legend of Zelda. SNES had Super Mario World, and then another Legend of Zelda. Gameboy had Tetris. The DS is just impossibly fun to play. I think that these games became system sellers because they simply offered a new experience. And i think that the dark horse for the system seller for the Wii is a little game called Elebits. Sure, there is only like 10 seconds of footage and some promo stuff, but i think that it will be crazy fun to play. I mean, Half-Life 2's grav-gun with the Wiimote? Who isn't excited about that?

So what can be done with a Wiimote that Nintendo hasn't already announced? They have got to be thinking about a pool game, that would easy to pick up and play. Using the nunchuck as a shifter in driving games, that would be nifty. And i'm betting that Japan will be getting some of those camera games. Now how about using rotating the Wiimote to rotate a Tetrad? That would be amazing. Or how about using it like the light pens from the Vectrex console? Or, my personal favorite, as a cellphone for a horror game? Can you imagine putting that thing up to your ear like a phone and then hearing some murderer scream at you? Sure, not as everyone-friendly as Nintendo might like, but they need to do something to grab the people who think that Resident Evil 2 was the greatest survival horror game ever. And they did do a remake for the DS, and are planning sequels for the Wii.

And i really want me a nose-picking simulator. Or, how about resurrecting some of the forgotten franchises? I used to love Little Nemo: The Dream Master. That one has lots of Wiimote potential. Or what about Bionic Commando? You could thrust your Wiimote in the direction you wanted your claw to go.

I think that Nintendo is really going to have to blaze a new path if they want to redefine what people think about videogames. Sure, the violent games and the sports games can stick around. But they will really need to push new boundaries if they want to do something truly different. Like Wii Orchestra for example. Now what if they had mechanics for playing each one of those instruments? Not complicated stuff like Guitar Hero, but cool stuff like a sawing motion to play the strings, a slide motion to play the trombone, drumming to play the drums. Up and down motions to play the brass. You could get a bunch of friends together and all mess up hilariously. And that might be the new future of games, everyone having a good time interacting with situations they never would be exposed to otherwise. And that's my two cents.

Another look...

Okay, i have spent a fair amount of time savaging the portions of games that i disliked, so it seems only fair that i apply the same logic to games that i do like. First, i'm going to hate on Doom3, then, much as it pains me, i'm going to tear in HL2.

Doom3 was a game that a lot of people were really looking forward to. I love demons, i love shooting things and i love shooting demons, so this game was obviously high on my list of games to get. So i did, and found that i needed windows XP to run it, instead of the windows ME that i was running at the time. Okay, so maybe this upgrade was a good thing, but it was still a pain in the ass. When i first played through the game i was amazed at how good it looked. Or rather, at how good what i could see looked. Goddamn, that game was dark. And not just demon-worship, hell-loving dark. Apparently your character only could hold one thing at a time. Sure, some of the weapons may have been two-handed, but no pistol/flashlight combo? Yes, this was obviously an early-on gameplay decision by id, buy nonetheless, it was still off-putting to go from the garish colors of Doom II to the lack of color in DooM3. Another thing that bothered me about the flashlight was the lack of soft shadows. You'd hit the edge of the cone of light and bam, there it ended. No soft edges.

And why rehash a game that was already near the top of the genre? The storyline is something everyone who know the early incarnations knew, so why not take it somewhere else? I appreciated the re-imagination and return of so many classic monsters, but why not come up with some more new ones? Even counting bosses, counting all old versions of zombies as one, and all new zombies as their own enemy type, there 11 new villains, and 9 old. Discounting those qualifiers, there are 8 standard enemies making a repeat appearance, and 6 new ones. So most of the new characters are one-offs. And the majority of new stuff are just rehashes of old stuff. The Trite is essentially a lost soul with legs, a wraith is an imp with legs for weapons, and a maggot is a wraith with an extra leg. Hmm, see any shades of my NPC argument? Don't get me started on the player's weapons either. Ooh, the soul cube... is a box with knives! The chainsaw is a lot of fun, but why not something like the Commando's arm? Push the enemy away, or grab them and swing them around? Or how about the shields that some of the Z-Sec have?

Though they didn't really bother me at first, one of the lamest parts of DooM3 was the monster closets. Walk into an area, see something on the ground, go to pick it up, and stuff jumps out from a secret panel in the wall behind you. Repeat ad nauseum. Sure, they were scary the first couple of times, but how often is an imp really going to hide in a panel until someone goes for the armor that is sitting on the ground in front of it. Which leads me to another pitfall: the imps. Seriously badass characters. Or they could have been. They could have crawled all over shit, but nooooo, they had to walk everywhere. We see them bust out of ducts and pipes and crawlspaces in cinematics or as intros, but never to attack the player. God forbid they jump from wall to wall to ceiling and sneak up on the player. No, that would be too scary.

Another thing i think that the designers missed out on was the fact that the whole Mars colony was falling apart around the marine. That shit should be epic, panels flying across the room randomly, causing damage to whatever they hit, floors falling out from underneath the player, or things the player needed (read: was scripted to need, but could actually do without) were destroyed. Or whole sections of the base being left without oxygen. Inside, not outside.

Now, let me turn my vast knowledge towards Half-Life 2, since i could make a game better than that in my sleep. Seriously though, HL2 is one of my favorite games, both to play, and to work with. But it's far from perfect.

Some people have complained about the story, and that is certainly problematic. Sure, i've figured out what is going on, but that's mainly because i have read making-of books, websites and magazine articles, and studied the strategy guide duteously.

HL2 was touted as a revolution of interactivity. And to a large degree it was. But i think that the gaming public had wanted some Red Faction thrown in there for good measure. By the way, thanks so much for stealing the source code, and making us wait another two years. We're talking fully destructible environments, the kind of stuff Crysis is promising. And being able to throw chunks of it around at will. Admittedly, the Gravity Gun has changed gameplay forever, and hopefully the Portal gun will take it one step further. But you could only really pick up junk. Imagine being able to blast a washing machine through a wall, into combine forces on the other side, and now you're talking what i wanted.

Oh there's the obvious discrepancies of an MIT Grad becoming a one-man slave-race liberatin', dictator overthrowin', chick-mackin' hero... but there's what bothered me about HL2:

Vehicles? Just why were they necessary? An airboat? A machine-shop dune-buggy? Aside from being rather out-of-place, these scenarios were waaay too long. Sure, it's fun to run combine forces over, but in two different vehicles? I'll pass, thanks.

One thing that really bugged me (lolz for punz) was the Ant-lions. They were an amazing gameplay mechanic, for the 45 minutes that you could use them... how cool would it have been to send ant-lions and the GUARDS up against the striders? Damn, that would be neat. But no, all of a sudden, you are stuck with a useless squeak-toy in your inventory.

I got stuck for a time in the Nova Prospekt section, where you have to fight against wave after wave of combine forces, aided only by some sentry guns. After dying the second or third time, i stacked up a bunch of crates, climbed up on a ledge, set the guns up and sat back while the combine rushed at me and got slaughtered. No damage, ever. On the one hand, it felt damn good to figure out how to outsmart the AI like that. But, damned if it didn't feel like cheating.

And Ravenholm, what the fuck was that about? All of a sudden your stuck in some hick town where the only defense against the rampaging zombies is a Russian priest in converse high-tops? And why not trick out some of the traps? Gravity is an amazing thing, especially in the source engine. Why not throw some flaming debris into piles of straw to start fires? Or burn down parts of buildings? Or just blow them up, even in scripted events. That kind of stuff is kids play in Hammer.

So i've just spent over 1200 words badmouthing a lot of brilliant people's work. The point of this blog is to be constructive, not an asshole, so let's make amends. What would i do if i were a contributor to these efforts...ignoring technical limitations, for the sake of fun.

For Doom3, like i said, i'd give the imps more freedom in the mobility department. Wallclimbing and dropping from the ceiling for starters. A section where you are being chased by a hellknight would be awesome as well, with you trying to close doors and dump crap in its way, and it throwing all of that stuff, or even picking up and throwing imps at you. Or why not let you use the soul cube to convert one enemy to an ally? And this is hell, why don't any of the enemies use flamethrowers against you? And why not make the flashlight into a weapon? Say that the demons can't stand the light, and will either freeze or flee from it. And maybe some of them get enraged by it, going berserk and attacking whatever is nearby?

Now, onto HL2. I've already mentioned that i would like environmental destruction and better integration of some of the sections. Gordon is supposed to be an MIT graduate, so how can that best be show in a game, where the emphasis is on action, rather than logic? Especially in a game where the protagonist is mute, and is never a part of cutscenes? Well, one way would be the McGuyver route. In Under Siege Steven Segal stick a bottle of something in a microwave and makes a bomb out of it. Why not let Gordon do that? I know for a fact that can be done with the existing Hammer engine. You could even put equations on the wall and force the player to use real-world chemical equations to make explosives. That might not be so PC in today's “terrified of terrorism” climate, but fuck that shit. Or go even farther, and have Gordon build traps like Father Grigory's. Anyone remember the Amazing Machine, or whatever that game where you built those crazy contraptions to carry out some mundane task? You could set up equation-like minigames wherein Gordon could build branching trees of gadgets from crap he found lying around.

Gordon has also become, much like Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time. So why not make that a mechanic of the game. Sure, it didn't work so well in Blinx, and the slo-mo made a nice appearing in F.E.A.R., but HL2 is a game that follows set scripted action and events until something causes the AI to deviate, so why not use that to your advantage. Gordon could trigger complex chains of events by looking forward into the future and seeing where a guard will be at a specific moment and triggering physical events prior to that. Not original, but sure could be fun. This could be used for stealth purposes too.

But back to the MIT grad thing. Why not let him modify things that he finds? Akin to the weapon mods of Deus Ex: Invisible War, let him change the effects of weapons. But MITers are cool, so he could do the duct-tape thing, like Ripley did in Aliens. Flamethrower + machinegun = pwnage. Now we're getting somewhere. If he has an advanced degree in theoretical physics, why not let him use it for weapons. Armed and Dangerous 2 (or was it Hidden and Dangerous?) had Black-Hole bombs, so why not anti-matter bombs that would let him punch holes in the sides of buildings. Or have Dr. Kleiner build him one, and make him do field repairs on it?

So, DooM3 and HL2 were amazing games. The faults that i have with them are nothing compared to the mountains of good things that could be (and generally have been) said about them. This was merely an exercise in fairness of criticism, and an examination of what could have been done differently.

NPCs

So one problem i have noticed as of late is the lackluster status of NPCs. I don't specifically mean AI, thought that really is a problem. No, what I am talking about is the sheer monotony of character design. Case and point of what people should be doing is a lovely game called 'The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay' (which i'm just gonna call CoR).

Let me just say upfront that if HL2 hadn't had the GravGun, then CoR probably would have been the best FPS out of that generation of games. The game is absolutely stunning, clever design abounds, and most of all, you truly feel like a badass while playing it. But what impressed me most was the prisoners. Each one of them had a different face. Sure, most of the bodies were recycled, but it actually felt like you were interacting with a real population of individuals, whereas with a game like DooM3, you're killing the same damn imp dozens and dozens of times.

Admittedly, this repetition of character models serves two purposes: space and time. First, it saves space on the medium that the game comes in, space in the memory that it is stored in, and space on the gfx card. Second it saves time for the people who have to create the model, saves time for the cpu/gpu to calculate transformations. But as computers get faster, it becomes possible to do crazier things with the characters in game. For one, the PS2 version of Syphon Filter had enemies randomly generated from a pool of resources. GTA:SA did something that begins to approach this (and i suspect will go the whole 9 yards with GTA:4 or whatever they call it) by having your gang members change their clothes to match what you wear. So one possible solution to this problem is to mate the increasingly-common character creators with the NPCs in game.

However, this really only takes care of NPCs who are similar to the player's character. What this doesn't address is the characters who do not match the skeletal systems that the player uses. In the past, developers have dealt with this through palette swapping or alpha maps. Will Wright has taken a new direction with this in 'Spore,' (theoretically, anyway) where characters' rigging and animation are all dealt with programatically, eliminating many of the difficulties that slow down the game creation process. Now, as a modeler as well as full-time hot-air-talker, i don't want to get rid of modeling entirely. But i thin ka path that would be very beneficial would be for modelers to create the most important NPCs, and delegate the rest to programs, or even to make general prototypes for NPCs, and allow the engine to make slight visual modifications for various versions. Hell, this could lead to some really cool stuff. Slightly larger versions of NPCs could have slightly more hit points, different abilities could be indicated on the character's models, and taken to the extreme, game could start modifying character models based on the damage done to them. I'm talking like visible gunshot wounds for FPSs, missing limbs in RPGs, damaged units in RTSs. Sure, some of these ideas are now being incorporated in games, but who really cares about bruising in a boxing game?

This is more tangent than content

Someone smart once asked my why i play videogames. Okay, that person was really me, but the question is still important. So why waste all of this time in front of a screen when you could be interacting with people in real life? (And lets forget MMOG interactions for the moment). Could it be that interacting with software constructs is actually preferrable to interacting with real, flesh and blood people? As i usually say when i am stalling for time so that i can collect my thoughts, that's a tough question. So i'm just going to write support for both the yes and no answers. Not only will this allow me to contradict myself without a second thought, it will also allow me to be glib about it. I can see the validity in both sides of the argument, so take from this what you will.


Yes, I would prefer to play videogames versus interacting with people...

It was the summer after my freshman year of college, and i was working a shitty bagboy job in a shitty, upscale grocery store just down the street from my parents' house. One of my roommates had been desperate for me to get some game he was always wanting to play, some breakout hit called 'Grand Theft Auto III'. I'd heard about it, but being heavily into RPGs at the time, the free-form violence didn't seem all that appealing to me. But i relented, seeing it on sale, (used, of course) at the local Funcoland. I don't remember when i really got addicted to it, but i do remember driving home on my lunch break to try and finish a mission that had been giving me trouble the night before. And i remember how much the sport utility vehicles in the game reminded me of the ones the trophy wives wanted me to load their groceries into. I loved stomping on corpses long after they were dead, trying to get two hookers into my car, and the fact that my family thought i looked like the protagonist. But what really got me was the fact that i didn't have to do any of those things. I can't count how many hours i burned just driving around listening to the radio. Heck, i could have done that in real life with songs i hadn't heard fifty times that week already.

GTA was a way for me to escape from the drudgery of my mindless day job. It's easy to believe that i would prefer to play videogames than go to work, but what's harder to understand is why i preferred to play videogames over interacting with real people in real life. For one thing, when i brought stress home from work, there was nothing wrong with getting angry in (or at) a videogame. The character i played could be exactly what i wanted to be in real life, some silent dude who didn't take shit from anyone. While i had to smile and say paper or plastic at work, i could grit my teeth and let off a few round of my uzi at the passing cops.

And then there's the obvious, when you fuck something up in a videogame, you can press restart and keep trying. There's a lot of people out there who claim that this is making a nation of desensitized killers (fuck off Jack Thompson), and maybe they are right, but what does this say about the games themselves? Perfection of action, or as most people would call it 'getting it right' is difficult to do in life, so it's a reassuring alternative to allow people to go back and retry their mistakes in a videogame.

The next summer i worked the same shit job at the same shit store. But this time i spent the summer playing Final Fantasy X. Same drive home at lunch to level up. This time, i got wrapped up in the story as opposed to the action. Being a hopeless romantic at heart, i identified with Tidus's clumsy attempts to court Yuna. But it was extremely engrossing for me to play out these characters' lives over the course of a few short weeks. Tidus grew from an overconfidant fop to a nuanced hero, and all the while the characters drew closer together as they risked everything to save the world. I kept coming back to Spira, attempting to get a better grasp on what people (even prewritten ones) would do when they were stuck in a struggle to save the world. Obviously that's something that you can't really experience in our everyday life.

So my point is, sometimes i prefer to interact with videogame characters, because i get to meet them in a situation that i never would get to experience in my days as a “courtesy clerk.” And they were relationships that i could tap into on my own time; turning them on and off whenever i felt like it. And i'd never be told “turn that off and come to dinner.”


No, i'd rather talk to people than some prewritten, predefined script...

As much as i hate to use it, Final Fantasy VII is the perfect example for this. While i played it, i was thoroughly engrossed, even though i am less enthused now. It was a huge world i could get lost in, there were people i could meet and try to recruit, sidequests to take part in, chocobo races to win, and a complex love triangle between three of the only people able to save a dying world. But after Aeris died, i kind of lost interest. Sure, revenge is always a good gameplay motivator, but there was no way for me to ever save her. I want to play games where i am a nobody turned into a somebody, worlds where i can actually make a difference in all that i do. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea, in fact, it can really make a game more visceral if connections between characters are made and then broken. But if that does happen, i want it to be my fault. Not part of a script.

Now i hope you are saying hold on, only a little while ago you wanted exotic and dangerous situations you had no idea were coming. Well, i was raised on the disney ideal of hero-gets-the-girl, and that's the way i want it to be. I like beating goombas disguised as Bowser to rescue Toad before i get to Princess Peach. I like trials and tribulations before a victory, the harder the better. But i want it to mean something when i win. I like the image of the hero riding off into the sunset. And (for now, at least) it seems to me that videogames are really only at the level of a choose-your-own adventure book. You can do what you want, but really, there's only one ending that works.

My original intent with this entry was to map out some of the things that go in in interacting with game characters. Somehow i think that i may have been unable to convey what i really mean when i asked that question. Obviously, it is very difficult for a game to approach the complexity of real life. Answers to questions can very easily come out differently, even if the words are the same.

So, if games can't replicate the subtleties of human-human interaction, what can they do to compensate. As i see it, game interactions fall into very distinct categories. You have your good and evil, your friend and foe. You have your nebulous relationships and you have your clear cut relationships. You have your brothers and your lovers. The role of characters in a videogame has some similarities to the supporting cast of a movie. They mirror the main character, and provide a deeper look into the nuances of the person the player is pretending to be. Often, though, these other characters will be developed in their own right, and even be given the chance to develop on their own. What is missing, for me anyway, is the idea that a character's actions will make a difference to the other characters. Some games have in fact explored this, RPGs mostly. But there is an important distinction here: these are the results of major choices. If you choose option x and go to location y with object z, person Q will join your group. It might take awhile, but i think it would be interesting if a game reacted to what a player did to get object z, and have another person in the group either take offense, or react positively to the way that the player got the object. Say a character chose to leave the party because the player stole and murdered to get object z.

I think that i have strayed far enough from my original topic, so i will close with this: i play games to see and do things that my fragile form could not otherwise accomplish, to interact and fall in love with people i would never otherwise meet, to see worlds i would never be able to survive in, and to make choices that i would never otherwise make. In short, i play videogames to be a person that i am not.

In case you didn't know, i'm working on my MFA in Interactive Media at USC, which i hope to parlay into a career designing and talking about videogames. Having spent a bit of the last week playing God of War with my friend Kevin, here's my thoughts on what seems to be the most difficult part of game design, the ending. It should be easy, it really is, but i guess when you have spent the better part of the development cycle neck-deep in a game, it becomes harder to tell what is a good idea and what makes no sense in the greater context of the game. This entry may get a little spoiler-heavy, but that is necessary.

My first example is God of War, an excellent, if a bit button-mashy romp through mythological Greece. With boobs. The player spends the majority of the game building up Kratos from general purpose badass to uber badass. The final boss fight is 3 smaller fights, which are all difficult in their own right. I'll analyze each section in its own, and then talk about how much of a let-down the final fight was. I do like the game, but my experience was tainted by the number of times that it froze on me. On no less than 3 different PS2s (one slim model, and two old fatties). Granted, it may have been my disc, but console games should be sufficiently tested to weed out show-stopper bugs like that.

The first fight pits a buffed-up Kratos against an Ares who magically grows six bladed spider legs. The battle is a maddening combination of blocks and roll dodges, which can be alleviated by some well-timed magic. My first complaint is that there is little reason to use anything but Poseidon's Rage, as it protects Kratos from harm, and tends to push Ares away. Wail on Ares for awhile and suddenly Kratos is drawn into Ares' portable hole.

The second portion of the fight takes place in the Athenian Temple where Kratos murdered his family. But in Outer Space. There he has to fight the demons of his past (himself) which for some reason look like he does in the present, and wield the same weapons. The past Kratoses(?) all have the ashes of Kratos' family on their skin, even though they are currently trying to kill them. There's even a dude who can throw Zeus' thunderbolts. But all off a sudden, Kratos stops yelling at Ares that he is going to kill him, and suddenly states that he “WILL SAVE [HIS] FAMILY!!!” A startling change in character. Yes, his family is the reason he wants to kill Ares, and Ares has just told him to make up for the mistakes of his past, but this still struck me as slightly out of character.

The bright side of this second fight is that the player has the ability to siphon off Kratos' life into his family as they take damage. An odd mechanic, but very creative. After you save Kratos' family, Ares rips the Blades of Chaos from Kratos' arms, and somehow negates all of the magic that the OTHER Gods have given to him.

So the player is left to face Ares without any of the spoils that they have spent the ENTIRE game amassing, and armed only with a crappy sword that resembles the Blade of Artemis. Some favor in Olympus. Even better, Kratos' life bar is now tied directly into Ares', whereby damaging one will restore that same amount of life to the other. No explanation is given for this, almost as if the design team had blown their proverbial load on making the other boss battles dynamic and inventive and just settled with the first thing they pulled from their collective asses. What the player is left with is a button-mash fest that has none of the vim and vigor of say, the Hydra fight.

You are probably saying by now that i am no better than any other person who likes to rant about videogames, all hot air and criticism, with nothing really valuable to say. So here i redeem myself. The following is Mike's grand plan to make the ending of GoW good while still retaining the three small fights and the major themes of the whole deal.

First fight:

Kratos has to climb up Ares to thrust the contents of Pandora's Box directly down Ares' throat. Ares' living armor does its best to fight Kratos off, which could result in him being thrown back down to bottom, or tied up which would trigger a button mashing battle to get free. All the while, Ares would be marching into the sea in an attempt to drown Kratos. Upon shoving Pandora's Box down Ares' throat, Ares would cast Kratos onto the sea wall that surrounds Athens, sprout the six spider legs and proceed with destroying the sea wall, cueing a desperate attempt to roll-dodge and jump your way back to pandora's box (say Ares vomits it back up or something), which would then make Kratos grow to Ares' size.

Second fight:

It seems that Kratos can't be entirely ruthless, so to make him human, he has to save his family from himself. So he has to fight an exact copy of himself. Kidding. Well, kind of. Kratos would need to parry all of the incoming blade thrusts using the button matching minigame. The game could even keep the multiple attacking Kratoss, dumb as the idea is. That would at least allow us to retain the life transfer mechanic.

Third Fight:

This should be the culmination fight, where all of the player's skills are put to the test, along with which abilities they have chosen to empasize. At the start of the battle, the player should be forced to rip off Ares' spider legs, two by two, using the stick rotation minigame to maneuver the Blades of Chaos so that they wrap around the legs and can be used to tear them from Ares' back in an appropriately brutal fashion.

Then, the battle will break down according to the most powered up magic, falling to random selection of some or all are equal. Higher difficulties could force the player to figure out which one needs to be used, and go through all four

If the player has chosen to power up the Armies of Hades, the player will have to use them to deflect incoming meteors that Ares calls down.

Or, if the player has chosen Zeus' thunderbolts, then player will have to find an appropriate time to cast them, thereby knocking Ares' sword from his hands.

If the player has chosen the gorgon's stare, then the player will have to freeze harpies hovering above Ares' head until they drop their explosive bombs on him.

And if the player has chosen Poseidon's Rage, the player will have to use it to knock push back tentacles which would otherwise stick to Kratos, giving Ares free hits.

At the final portion of the fight, Kratos will have to embed both Blades of Chaos in Ares' shoulders. The player would have to take part in a beefed-up button matching minigame which would result in Kratos pulling Ares through the blade that he would have otherwise (in the real version of the game) used to kill him. Ares could pull one or both free, or even use them to toss Kratos around, mainting the same exact same mechanic and idea of tied in life bars, but without the (lack of) ridiculous explanation.

Test post.

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Amusing Link.

Music no-one really cares about.