I come up with ideas all the time, and sometimes they come to life in my head. Some ideas get forgotten, and some live at the fringes. Some just refuse to go away. An idea like that is the Ham-stars from Outer Space.

Years ago I came up with them, just a pun or something out of nowhere; Hamster? Ham-Star? From OUTER SPACE!? It's been congealing in my mind for ages, a team of space explorers, part Flash Gordon, part Bucky O'hare, part Astroboy!

The Ham-stars are the creations of an as yet to be named Mad Scientist, which I just decided that this morning on the bus to work. In my mind he looks sort of like Professor Ochanomizu. Born in tubes and raised as his own children, the Ham-stars strive for freedom, compassion and understanding for all. I'm going to say right here that this is far better than truth, justice and the American way.

They're kind of corny, that was always their intention in my mind, a wacky team of colour-coded space heroes like out of the twentieth century. But now, in my mind, I'm imagining them out of their depth, facing challenges far too dark and adult to ever be in those children's programs. Yet, they face them with pluck and enthusiasm and family-ness, because they're a family, you see? They're all brothers and sisters who grew up together in the Professor's lab. Also they have the power of friendship, because that shit is awesome. Also they have ray-guns and energy shields, because shit, people are shooting at them! XD

I don't know why I can't stop thinking about these guys. Are they really so appealing? Do people want to see and hear the adventures of this legendary team of Space Adventurers as they explore the deep reaches and bring the light of hope to the darkest corners of Outer Space?

Now I can't stop thinking about making video games about them. An action adventure would probably be most suitable, letting you play different Ham-stars in different areas of the game, each with their own special abilities. But I can't stop thinking about an RPG, also.


RPGs are difficult for me, in my mind, these days. I don't like the whole idea of leveling, and the linearity of the stories feels wrong, and forcing the characters on the player... It's like, you say it's a game, but it's really not. It's more like an interactive movie with a bunch of busywork in between that sort of feels like a game.

It's like a slot machine, it feels like a game, but it's not, all you're doing is pulling a lever and getting random results. When you play an RPG, or a JRPG style RPG anyways, you follow a linear story that is always the same, no matter what you the player do. You fight 'random battles' but there is no real challenge in them. You can always fight weak enemies and level up and blast past anything that is difficult. The only 'challenge' is finding the time and will to level grind long enough, and that's not really an achievement. Anybody can sit there pushing a button for fourty hours or whatever it takes to reach level 99 and one-shot all the bosses. You could introduce challenge by limiting yourself to a certain level or gear, yeah, but there's no inherent challenge built into the game.

Some JRPGs have special 'challenge bosses' that are difficult for a party of all level 99 characters, but they only put those in after the story is done, to give the nerds with too much time on their hands something to do, and the fact is it would be considered a bad thing if they put the challenge bosses anywhere but the end. You know why? Because a JRPG isn't a game, it's a story. If you were reading the Lord of the Rings and you loved the first book and the second book and you found out that to get the third book, you had to run a Marathon, you'd be pretty upset, wouldn't you? Espcially if you were asthmatic or couldn't walk or something. JRPGs have to be easy, to not be a challenge, because the players have to win and get their story.

Now don't get me wrong here, I love JRPGs, most of my favorite games were JRPGs. Some of them have little tweaks here and there. Maybe to cut up the linearity, there are a few small choices you can make, like killing Magus or letting him join your party in Chrono Trigger. Some feature battles with some arcade style combat, and those can be challenging. They take skill to beat, though usually very little skill. It's just bothered me for a while, trying to understand why I like JRPGs so much when they're not really games, they're not books, they're pretty poor as movies go... yet I enjoy them more than books, movies, and a lot of games. When I fight the boss that was designed to have just enough hit points that my character which was scheduled to be at a certain level by this point in the game will be able to beat, I feel like I did something. It's kind of a lie that the game tells, to make you feel like you achieved something when you really did nothing. It's exciting! It's an exciting lie. These games tell you that you achieved something and became powerful, but all you really did was sit on your butt and push the same button over and over again while monsters vaporized on the screen and some numbers went up.

I suppose it's also like Bingo. When it comes down to it, Bingo is basically a raffle. Numbers will be called untill someone has the card which has the correct sequence of numbers. This could be done in moments by scanning all the cards against the sequence of numbers as they come up, just like distributing raffle tickets and calling out 'the winning number'. But instead, everybody sits around watching the balls slowly roll out of the machine, and some guy on a stage dramatically calls each number through a loudspeaker system, and you slowly mark down each number on your little card, and then you realize you have a row or a square or whatever, and you call out BINGO! and you're so excited that you won... but what did you do? You sat there on your butt waiting for the winning numbers to be called. You would have won anyways because you had the winning ticket, you didn't do anything. But bingo is exciting. When you play bingo, you're in it for the suspense. They draw it out all long and dramatic to give you an experience of suspense, which climaxes to an incredbile excitement if you win. Mostly though, you don't win, but you keep going back to feel that thrill of suspense. There is also that 'two people at the same time' sort of thing, where you have to call it out first. That's kind of a challenge, but really? Speaking up before someone else? Reading the numbers on your card and realizing you have a pattern first? I guess that's kind of a skill...

So the point of all that was, if I made a Ham-stars RPG, what would it be? The story of a group of characters not created by the player, doing the same things they would have done if the player wasn't there, or if it was a different player, fighting bosses specifically designed to appear challenging but not really BE challenging. A tremendously long cartoon with amateurly drawn art and animation and amateur music and lots of reading that gives you the illusion of achievement and a sensation of thrill from doing basically nothing.

Western RPGs are sometimes different. They often have diverging plotlines, or at least areas where the player can effect things. Bioware and Obsidian and Black Isle and Bethesda, they let the player create a character and decide who they'll be and how they'll act. There are different things to do, different places to go, people will treat you differently depending on how you act. Even in the older western RPGs like Ultima you had this freedom, but somehow games like this feel emptier.

You jumped over that gorge! Your sense of timing allowed you to dodge that blow! You attacked his weak point for massive damage, aiming for the chink in his armour when his weapon is raised just for a second! It's exciting, yes, but the story feels weak. The characters are harder to empathize with. The more choice you have the less interesting the story becomes. Of course, even in Western RPGs enemies are designed to be beatable. The ideal is for them to be challenging and yet weak enough that the player will beat them on the first or second try, without having to strategize too much. The weaker enemies should have taught the player the right buttons to push in the right order to win. It's still just an illusion.

Computer RPGs take their roots from PnP RPGs. Bioware's best games were based on Dungeons and Dragons or D20, even Jade Empire was loosely based on D20 and it was an action RPG! The modern versions of DnD have something called a "Challenge Rating" which is basically the average level of a party of four adventurers (a warrior, mage, rogue and cleric) to fight that monster, or a group of that monster of a certain size and equipment... The idea is to have the players be challenged but emerge victorious. Of course, that's only in the hack-and-slash 'This is a GAME' type DnD, not the frilly fancy actual role-playing type where character development and creating a story with your friends is the goal.

The idea of levels and leveling up comes from DnD, though most JRPGs take it too far. in DnD the max level is 20, and a level 20 character would intimidate Hercules. There are rules for going above level 20 but then you start to become more like gods than adventurers. I've heard that the best situation is to accumulate experience over a campaign in DnD and level up afterwards, for the next campaign, having your characters stay the same level all the way through. Maybe that's just the adventure and not the campaign. Anyways I think that's a good idea. A person really shouldn't go from oafish town guard to legendary warrior in a week, a month, or even a year, yet many game campaigns are that short. You go into a dungeon at level 1, you come out at level 20... maybe not that high. Mostly you get to level 14-16 I think, but that's still more powerful than most NPCs are supposed to be.

In JRPGs you start out sometimes at level 1, but usually you start out around level 3-5, and maybe they introduce someone at level 1 later. Final Fantasy 4 did that, Cecil and Kain were like, level 5, and Rydia was level 1. You had to toughen her up in the desert before you went into the water cave. Maybe you didn't HAVE to, I always did... Anyways the levels go up and up and up. If I remember right you're supposed to be around level 60 when you fight the final boss. If you're even level 20 you can one-shot the early monsters with no problem, which is ridiculous.

Why would anyone ever become that much stronger? What do the poor people do to survive? Why are the monsters on continent B so much stronger than the monsters on continent A, when the people are just the same, and survive fine? The answer is that it's all an illusion. It's an illusion of progression. The monsters get stronger to match you getting stronger so that you're never so strong that you can easily beat them but you're stronger than you were before, and if you weren't stronger you couldn't beat them. As you fight them you get stronger and they die easier, presenting the illusion of progression. One serious disadvantage of this type of system is that as the player progresses they might be a power leveler, someone who fights extra monsters and gets extra strong early. Then they trounce the bosses like it was nothing, and it IS like nothing. You've cheated yourself out of that sense of victory and achievement, even illusory as it was, because what was meant to feel hard felt like a joke instead.

Some games use a different route. Instead of designing a linear game that will provide monsters and thus experience at a rate that will generally ensure a certain minimum level when you reach an enemy boss, they automatically level up monsters to match you. A couple of good examples of this are the Elder Scrolls games and Final Fantasy 8. This ensures that wherever you go, however much you level up, there will always be challenging-but-not-hard monsters, but it also throws in the question 'Why Bother Leveling?'. Oh-ho! I have achieved level 20! I have a sword that can cleave mountains, a bow that shoots shurikens and lightning, and armour that protects me from magic and swords! ... and now all the bandits have magic armour and swords, and the demon king has a sword that can cleave two mountains, a bow that shoots shurikens and lightning and kittens, and armour that protects him from magic, swords, shurikens and lightning! They seem to overcome this by placing a few static bosses that you have to level up to be strong enough to beat, but sometimes their minions will be more powerful than they are, because you got too far ahead of yourself.

I mentioned Jade Empire. That game was an action RPG and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was also challenging, truly challenging. There was a fight late in the game where I died several times. Leveling up wouldn't help me in that fight, it was all about skill, and strategy. Many of the fights were truly challenging and if I let down my guard, even against the weak enemies, they would eat me alive. It had leveling up, but it was used as a mechanic to unlock new abilities and skills, a representative of your character's growth as a martial artist. Basically, it was actually uesd to chart experience and skill and tiers of accomplishment, instead of an arbitrary amount of strength at some point in the game. Using the Jade Empire style could work, but then, as I already said, difficulty is considered a bad thing.

Action-adventure games like The Legend of Zelda 3 or 4, or Okami, also tell a rich linear story, but they are more about the game and the challenge. You personally have to guide your hero through the labyrinth, facing physical obstacles, puzzles, traps, and fighting enemies. The puzzles are usually pretty easy and the enemies are designed with predictable patterns you can learn, but that's the game. It's a challenge and you learn skills and you apply them to win. If you don't learn, you don't win, and you don't progress, but then you don't get the story, going back to that everlasting problem.

If you want to write a story, write a story, if you want to make a cartoon, make a cartoon, except the enjoyment of an RPG is greater than either. It combines what makes them good with powerful illusions of progress and achievement. It's a beautiful lie. It's theater, in a way. I don't fully understand my problem with the situation either. Theater has a long history of working to evoke emotions through brilliant illusions of performance, effectively beautiful lies they tell to the audience that give them a thrill or bring them to tears. Why am I so reluctant to produce this sort of art, why am I so insistant on challenge and difficulty and skill?

It's a key to remember the difference between hard and challenging. Something that is hard will frustrate someone, and something that is challenging will excite someone. Ideally you must skirt the boundary, so difficult that it is challenging, almost hard, but not quite. That gives the greatest feeling of accomplishment. But, that's also a cultural thing. There are plenty of games that are hard or do arbitrarily difficult things, and people here in the west, my friends, and even myself, would say 'That is a bad game design. The game fails.' but at the same time, we accepted the challenge and didn't succeed. In our own way, we fail and blame the game. It's stupid and frustrating and we don't want to anymore, and it's sort of childish, but playing games is childish to begin with isn't it? Certainly, I do it too, but what about people who don't give up?

I read an article a while back, and I linked it here on LiveJournal before, but I'll link it again. Game Design Essentials: 20 Difficult Games by John Harris. In this article he compares western gamers to eastern gamers, and it's quite interesting. As a comparrison, I think all or most of us are familiar with Castlevania 2 and the Red Crystal that summons the tornado, you might have seen it on The Angry Video Game Nerd; he is the perfect example of this childish "The Game Fails" thing I'm talking about. You reach a point in the game where you have this crystal in your bag and you don't know what to do with it, and you can't go on, so you give up. Eastern gamers instead would realize that there must be a solution, and would begin searching for it. Their friends all have the game too, and they set up search patterns, each one doing everything possible to try to find and unlock secrets. They form a network with other groups of friends, sharing information as they do things like kneeling down for periods of time in every area to see if that works... and then it does! That's their idea of challenge, and my idea of fricking insane. At once, doing that doesn't sound fun, and yet it's interesting because you're getting so many people working together to unlock the secrets of the game... and then turning it around again, the game isn't really that important. It's not worth that effort, is it? I'm saying all of this for comparrison, not because I think either east or west is right. I'd say everybody is crazy, especially me.

As a counterpoint to all of that, I found this article on Gamasutra while I was looking up the other. Link. Just figure I should share it.

So at the core of it, I still love RPGs, I love the grand illusion, the beautiful lie, but I feel dirty in creating it. What am I to do? I guess I'll just have to make an action-adventure game, or maybe a regular old adventure game? I'd rather have some action parts though. What's the point of having giant space hamsters with rayguns if there's no shooting parts?

My favorite leveling mechanic remains the one from the Legend of Zelda. Link starts off and all he's got is a wooden sword, or maybe it's a copper sword, that makes more sense. He has the skill to shoot energy bullets out of his sword too, which is kind of cool, but only when he's at top fighting condition. If he stubs his toe or something, he can't do it anymore. That was kind of silly actually, but whatever. In most of the later games he can't shoot energy bullets out of his sword anymore. He starts going into dungeons and he finds tools to help him overcome obstacles and enemies and solve puzzles, and he finds heart containers that mean he can take more hits before collapsing, representing how he's toughened up. Later monsters, of course, do several hearts worth of damage, but link finds a magic ring that halves all damage, making him much tougher. He also finds a nice metal sword that can do a lot more damage than that silly old wood/copper thing. Later he finds a red ring that quarters the damage he takes, and a magic sword that does even more damage, and he gets a whole mess of heart containers, he's at his absolute strongest then, but still, he has to fight against weaker enemies. They don't just explode from his magnificence. The player's skill and the character's strength combined make the enemies weak, not just the latter. Enemies are often difficult because they fight in different ways, not just because they do more damage and take more hits to die, so you don't have to fill the world with gradually more poewrful enemies, just different ones. Link is powerful but he's only so much more powerful than an ordinary person, so you can believe that the regular folks are able to work together and hold back the monsters.

Wandering monsters are another thing that always bothered me. I'm pretty sure they started with the random encounter table from DnD. The idea was that when the players were traveling from town to the dungeon, or town to town, they might have a random encounter or two. Maybe it's a monster or some demihumans or a caravan or a pirate ship or whatever. In CRPGs they took this and ran with it, east or west. You fight monster after monster after monster. The first couple of RPGs had you wandering a world map and the monsters would just sort of appear, and then later ones had things more to scale but they would still just 'appear'. I always treasured Chrono Trigger because the monsters were either on the screen to start with, or they clearly appeared from somewhere, and you fought them on the same terrain you encountered them on, not some generic field. Western RPGs tend to avoid the 'generic field' as well, and they also tend towards the action-rpg style.

The story element of random encounters is the problem for me. How many people did you kill to get from point A to point B? Thirty? Fourty? How many dragons did you slay in the mountains? How many ghosts did you bust? How many wild dogs did you explode? Do normal people have to deal with this? I'm going to the corner store! I'm going to fight a dozen random encounters on the trip there and back!

If you compare it with reality, well, how often have you been forced to fight for your life? How many times have you been attacked by a wild animal? How many times have you been mugged? I'll admit we're not in the most dangerous part of the world, but there are snakes and bears and crocodiles and lions and stuff out there, and plenty of muggers and gangsters and things like that too. Even in the dangerous parts of the world, I doubt that life-or-death battles are something that happens so many times a day you don't even care.

Comparing it with fiction, how many fight scenes were there in the Lord of the Rings? There were some war scenes, but most of the actual fight scenes were "Supposed to Lose Fights" where somebody gets rescued by Gandalf or whoever. This is all a CRPG thing, there's no other stories where you see this kind of thing.

It's also messed up when you consider the quantities of monsters out there for them to be constantly attacking you. Every town ought to be besieged and surrounded by walls and pallisades and stuff, but they just wander around saying "Welcome to Corneria!" or whatever and doing their daily business because monsters never come into town or attack vital trade caravans or shipping routes unless there's a group of adventurers traveling with them.

Of course, it would be a pretty short game if there weren't fight scenes, and if you only had boss encounters, the player wouldn't have much chance to learn how to play, but it still ends up being terribly silly.

Anyways I think that's all I needed to say. Thanks for reading if you made it this far!


In case anybody is wondering where I found the time to write all of this at the Goodwill, I've been monitoring a computer as it installs and updates Windows for the last three hours and I'm writing this on my laptop set up right next to it. I kind of wish I could have written something more fictional, or worked on my projects, but that rant has been bouncing around my head for months and I finally started writing it down and then I couldn't stop.

Still, the point was to talk about the Ham-stars, so if you've forgotten that by the time you reached the end, what do you think of them?