I was wondering the desert fairly early on in the game and came upon a small camp held by Cesar’s Legion. There were maybe half a dozen soldiers and two slaves, men taken from a town in the South the Legion had raised, and I had a lingering side quest on my Pip-Boy 3000 to save them. From my position on a small hill, I figured I could kill at least three of the soldiers with my sniper rifle, and then pick off the others as they charged me. The problem with this plan, however, was at the time I was on neutral terms with the Legion, meaning I could pass them in the world without them going for my throat. Due to New Vegas’ wonky system where killing members of a faction make the whole group hostile towards you even if you don’t leave anyone alive to tattle, I was in the tricky spot of deciding if it was worth invoking the wrath of an entire army over two slaves, or if I should just move along.

Luckily, a third option presented itself. While surveying my surroundings, I spotted a pair of Giant Radscorpions, horrible creatures that will happily tear through you or anything else in the game that happens to get to close to them, prowling near the camp. I shot one of them, not enough to kill it but enough to get both of them good and angry, then ran in to the Legion camp and past the soldiers with them hot on my heals. The soldiers opened fire on the Radscorpions, the Radscorpions opened up the soldiers, and the two slaves, unarmed and terrified, bolted for the wastes. After that, it was just a matter of chasing after the slaves to free them while their captors were busy with the giant bugs I’d sicced on them. Quest complete, no harm to my standing with the Legion, and everybody wins, except for a handful of slaver jerks and two monsters nobody liked to begin with.

There are lots of other moments in Fallout: New Vegas, of course. There’s a tangled story with loads of choices to make along the way, complete with different outcomes and consequences based on which way you go. There are companions to meet and befriend, a settlement of Super Mutants to discover in an old ski lodge, and of course more underground Vaults to explore, many complete with their own horrible secrets. As fun as many of them are, though, what sticks with me the most about the game is the same thing I loved so much about Fallout 3 – the massive world it all happens in, and the potential for random stories that are all my own to happen there. Unfortunately for New Vegas, it’s how far short its Nevada desert setting falls of its predecessor’s Capital Wasteland that I remember more than most of what I did there.

There’s just not a lot to do there. Oh, sure, there’s multiple warring factions, which makes things interesting, and the writing and variety of voice actors in Obsidian’s game are overall better than in Bethsoft’s Fallout 3 (that said, I can’t tell you how happy I was to get to the part of the game where I had the chance to silence Matthew Perry’s strangely monotone drone forever), but when it comes to the setting, there’s no contest. For a wasteland, the world of Fallout 3 was teeming with secrets to uncover, random scenes scripted or otherwise to stumble upon, and countless opportunities to take on a given situation from any of a dozen different ways. My favorite moments in the game come in the second half, when the landscape is dotted with Enclave patrols and checkpoints, many of which you tend to find trading shots with the local populace or wildlife. New Vegas has these to a degree (another fun memory: travelling with NCR patrols or merchants and their body guards along dangerous roads, watching them get attacked by Cesar’s Legion, and then looting the losers, all while getting safe passage to wherever I was headed), but not nearly to the same degree. Fallout 3 certainly had its flaws, but it more than made up for them with a wealth of things to do however and whenever you wanted, or just completely ignore. New Vegas, on the other hand, ultimately feels empty and a bit dull despite all its strengths. It has the better story, but when that story is all there really is too do in the huge world they’ve provided, who cares?

I like Fallout: New Vegas a lot, but I haven’t finished it. Instead, I went on to play Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a game with a much better handle on what it means to create a world you want to get lost in, and from there to DC Universe Online, where I can hang out with Batman and explore made-up cities I’ve read about for most of my life.. I love open-world games – I have well over a dozen of the things, all lined up under my TV like the Magrathean Spring Catalog – but I love them for their potential for depth and variety, not the size of the world or even their main plot. I want playgrounds, not guided tours, and while Bethsoft’s inevitable return to Fallout is guaranteed to have a an enormous epic plot line, I can also trust them to give me plenty of things to do instead.

So no, not so much surprising, but strange. I’ve always had a special affection for Guitar Hero, even though I left the series after the second entry to follow Harmonix to the vastly superior Rock Band games. The first Guitar Hero game was released in my first year at a game designer, and it’s funny to me, given how huge and commonplace the games went on to be, to remember trying to explain to my bosses at Pop & Co. about this thing I’d read about where you played songs with a plastic guitar, and how we should get a copy for the office. After reading Kieron Gillen’s excellent “More Than a Feeling” piece for the Escapist about Boston-as-level design savants, I knew I needed to try the thing, and my love for the series was instant and pure. It was just such a good idea: a music game lovingly built by a bunch of musicians-turned-developers for everybody else that somehow emulated the feeling (if not the actual practice) of not only playing guitar, but doing so in front of a packed house of screaming fans. It was fun and funny, something you played with and against friends, passing the controller around to see who could come closest to perfection or at least fail most spectacularly. There are songs I hadn’t given a second thought to until Guitar Hero opened up them up and labeled their vitals with colored gems – I still can’t hear Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Take Me Out’ without seeing button presses scrolling down the screen.

Beyond the fun I had playing it, Guitar Hero was a large part of shaping my thinking as a game designer so early on. Beyond the friendly difficulty levels and helpful tutorials (which Harmonix would only improve upon over time), there was the effect the game had on the majority of those who played it – I know several people and have read about more who picked up actual instruments for the first time because of the games, or dug guitars and drum kits out of storage for the first time in years after a night spent with friends and a toy instrument. It was the first time I’d ever seen a videogame have that sort of effect on someone, to take it beyond the satisfaction of a high score or difficult challenge mastered and actually encourage players to try something new with their lives.

(Which isn’t to say Guitar Hero was met with universal admiration. Some people just don’t like or don’t get rhythm games, and others could never get past the perceived embarrassment of mashing colored buttons on a kid-size guitar. And then of course there are the more tedious detractors, people who are often actual musicians themselves whose response to the game inevitably boils down to “why don’t you play a real guitar and quit wasting your time?” To which I’ve always asked, “why don’t you rescue a real princess?”)

I’m not sad the Guitar Hero franchise is shelved for the foreseeable future – the first installment after Activision completely took it over struck me as hollow and joyless, a feeling that only grew as endless sequels and installments follow, and in many ways it feels like a mercy killing. Any and all bad feelings I have are for the developers, many of whom are now or will be unemployed as Activision shutters their studios and throws them to the mercy of a desolate job market with little to no interest in music games requiring special controllers. I honestly don’t know how anyone works for an Activision studio without constantly picturing CEO Bobby Kotick hovering overhead with an axe twenty-four hours a day.

So Guitar Hero is gone, at least for the time being, and other than the lives directly impacted by its mothballing, I don’t really mind at all. As far as the series drifted from its roots (there’s an entire other post or two that could be written about how Harmonix perfected and built upon what they knew worked while Activision tacked on boss fights, mini-games, and any other mechanic they could find to keep things fresh), none of the lesser titles bearing the name can tarnish the love I had for those first two games or how much fun they still are to take for a spin. Guitar Hero was a big part of shaping my approach to game design, and then as now, when I’m again trying to figure out what’s most important to me as a designer, I’m grateful for all the fun I had with it and its lasting influence.

- A game where your environment is made up almost entirely of loose dirt and rocks, like the bottom of a mine shaft after a cave-in. To climb up and out, you have to use a device (some sort of special McGuffin, doesn’t really matter) to knock out the dirt above you so that it falls to the ground, forming piles and small hills you can scale. Environmental hazards (pockets of gas, underground rivers, etc.) exist to avoid, as well as lost treasures and other survivors to rescue if you want. (2D side-scroller perspective?)

- A top-down shoot-em-up, using magnetic charges instead of bullets. Player ship fires energy pulses that positively or negatively charge enemies and environmental objects, causing them to be smash together or repel each other violently. Ideally, parts of the environment can be wrenched out of the walls on the left and right sides of the screen by magnetic pull to go flying at enemies.

- A game for multiple (ideally younger) players where one player serves as a nuturer for the others, helping (and possibly hindering) them as they progress through the game world. A negative feedback loop personified, keeping the field more or less even and frustrations low, while including the potential for a very different experience each play session depending on who is in the nuturer position. Ideally, the game needs to fulfill this statement from a friend of mine’s seven-year-old daughter:

Sometimes my friends get upset when they lose at games. And it’s not fun anymore. So when I play with them I let them win. It’s still fun for me, though, because I like a challenge. And it’s just as challenging to make someone else win as it is to make yourself win.

Obviously presents huge balancing challenges, but not impossible.

And you will mess up. A lot. You’ll hit ramps at the wrong speed to make a jump, or be going fast enough only to realize your position on the bike was all wrong, ending your run (and the structural integrity of your neck) in a messy face plant and sharp crack that echoes through the abandoned warehouse-turned-stunt track-turned abattoir each of the tracks are set in. Or you’ll fly too high, a motocross Icarus for the X-games generation, only to land so hard the shocks in your bike collapse in on themselves and leave you eye level with the underside of your tires. Or you’ll tumble in to a clutch of exploding barrels. Or you won’t be fast enough to get across a bit of collapsing track in time. Or any of a dozen other horrible things will happen, resulting in the always fun sight of driver and bike ragdolling themselves to bits against the environment.
Which brings us around to my favorite part of Trial HD’s controls – the reset buttons. At any time, alive or dead, you can hit one to send you back to the last cleared checkpoint (helpful for avoiding frustrating bits you may have lucked through, but later hurting your final score), or you can hit the other one to start the whole level over. Thanks to the smallish size of the game and the whole thing living on the 360’s hard drive, resetting a level is an instant process, with no loading screen giving you a horrible few seconds to reconsider the merit of beating your head against a stunt track-shaped wall. With the push of a button any disaster is wiped away as though it never happened, nothing left of it by a distant, painful memory from a past life where you leaned forward a bit too much at the wrong time.

Trials HD gets a lot of things right – it’s lovely to look at, its camera, despite being fixed, is fixed just so that you rarely think about it if ever, and it’s challenges, while often utterly bastard hard, escalate in such a way that you almost don’t notice when they turn in to devious Rube Goldberg devices of death and flame. But what I love it for, what I most admire and keep coming back for, is its ability to keep me around for one more go. No matter how frustrating a level might be, no matter how sure I am that I did everything right only to die in a flurry of shouted curse words, I’m always in for one more go. The ability to instantly reload a level, the scores of my friends (and how I’m doing against them) displayed across the top of the screen, the way the track falls apart around me as I stumble towards the finish line, often on fire and seconds from death, it all adds up to one of the most addictive games I’ve played in ages. At it’s best, Trials HD manages real magic, wiping away the urge to throw my controller through my very nice television with a push of a button, replacing my pure rage with the faith that this time, this one time, I’ll do everything just right and stay on the bike and moving forward long enough to cross the checkered line.

When designing games I’m personally not a big fan of traditional binary fail states. I think in a lot of games they break up the flow of play in unnecessary and frustrating ways – being around to deal with the consequences of not doing as well as you’d hoped or needed to and having the chance to make it up is a more interesting design challenge for me than who shot first and fastest. In a game like Trials HD, though, I’m just fine with the Groundhog Day-esque cycle of death and rebirth nameless stunt guy is trapped in, as developer RedLynx have made it just so compelling. Cringing and laughing out loud as your latest botched run sends your little guy in to a physics-upped flurry of broken bones pretty much never gets old, taking the edge off even the most crushing defeats. Between a failure sequence so entertaining it becomes more of a reward for trying in the first place and the ability to instantly start the whole thing over with the push of a button, it becomes clear why it can get away with some of the mind-boggling (on first brush, at least) level designs they throw at you.

Yes, it can be an intensely hard game at times, and yes, there have definitely been moments where all I’ve wanted in the world was to see my TV explode in a shower of sparks and broken dreams as my controller flew through the screen. That I never do, instead stabbing the Back button with all the rage I can while growling “One more” at the hapless rider on his bike as he reappears at the start of the track before gassing the engine, is where it becomes clear just what sort of game Trials HD is. It’s not about getting everything exactly right the first time, it’s about learning from each and every mistake, finding the perfect degree to lean at for a jump, positioning your bike just right for landing, ad slowly discovering the correct blend of insane risk and precision needed to get from one end of the track to the other as fast as possible while remaining in one piece. It’s one of the best “just one more go” games I’ve played in ages, and looking at the ways it quickly funnels you back to the starting line, siphoning off just enough anger to keep you from quitting in a rage (or at least postponing it), it’s not hard to see why. Trials HD is a master class in balancing fun and frustration, giving players all the tools they need to become good enough at the game to perform incredible feats of dirt bike derring-do. Making the most useful tools the subtlest is something I’m very much trying to learn from.