The Couch Preacher

A Very Important Message

2010-09-05T17:29:00.005+03:00

Hello, dear readers

Much of this message is truly relevant only if you're currently residing in the United States, but I strongly recommend that expatriates and non-Americans also take time to read up. This following message is from the website of Entertainment Consumers Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to the interest of gamers.

"For nearly two decades, elected officials have tried to regulate which video games you can buy, rent and play. Every single time they’ve passed a law, the federal courts have struck it down as unconstitutional. But this may change this fall.

The Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to hear the State of California’s infamous ‘violent video game case,’ Schwarzenegger v. EMA. That means that this year, or early next, the Court is going to decide whether to agree with the lower federal courts or not. Agreeing would mean that they believe that video games are, and should continue to be, First Amendment protected speech; just like books, movies and music. The court disagreeing would mean that they think video games should be treated differently. This could lead to new bills and laws curtailing video game access in states across the country.

It is no exaggeration to state that their hearing represents the single most important moment for gamers, and the pivotal issue for gaming, in the sector’s history.

Over this summer, we’ll be drafting and formally submitting our amicus brief, which will be included with the other official court documents related to the case. Separately, we will also attach a petition signed by you, the American public, which –by its very existence – will publicly define who the consumers of interactive entertainment are and why we care enough about the issue to take the time to make the effort to speak up and make our voices heard. The petition establishes an authoritative collective position which cannot be redefined by detractors nor co-opted by others. And it enshrines each and every signatory’s participation in the court documents and in the U.S. National Archives’ official records related to the case.

If you’re an American gamer, and you care about gaming and your rights, stand up and be counted; sign the petition today!"

The ECA's website can be found at www.theeca.com. There you can sign the Gamer Petition, wherein you attest to the fact that "We, the undersigned American video game consumers, purchase, rent and play video games the way we do other entertainment content such as movies and music. We respectfully request that you hold that video games are indeed free speech, protected under the First Amendment, like other entertainment media." If you are residing in the United States I strongly recommend you take action to make clear that video games should be considered free speech. It's unlikely, but if the option for non-Americans to help becomes available, take action.

Also to the segment of our audience residing outside of the United States: do not take this matter lightly. Especially in current times where much of what is related to the United States is held in ridicule it's easy to dismiss this as yet another piece of nonsense from the madhouse (a view I personally do not hold) and that you don't need to worry about it. Every country in the world has a political entity with conservative or at least anti-video game sentiments. Even if you can't actually do anything about the stuff going down in the States, I urge you to keep up to date. You may think that even if it goes through it only affects American gamers. That's true, but just for now.

If something like the United States Supreme Court says video games are not considered a form of free speech they are setting a precedent. For us gamers that is potentially a very dangerous precedent. Other countries may start seeing various political entities start taking similar steps. This is in the States now but it might be in your home country soon. Stay vigilant.

This is also related to the question of whether or not video games are art. In a world where a someone rapping about the possession of firearms or singing about banging people at nightclubs is considered art, where a movie like G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra is considered art, video games should be considered art as well. After any serious consideration it becomes blatantly obvious that this is nothing but political machinations. As a new artistic medium video games have been picked on for a good while now, especially by conservative factions.

A correlation between violent video games and violence is the usual song and the only argument in favor of that is that video games are the only truly interactive medium. However, despite numerous studies in favor of the aforementioned correlation, the Surgeon General of the United States in 2001 found that "...it was extremely difficult to distinguish between the relatively small long-term effects of exposure to media violence and those of other influences." Similarly, the FBI's report on school violence excluded the playing of violent video games as a factor indicating violent behaviour.

After reading stuff like this it becomes obvious that you can't really say that video games cause violent behaviour. I'm sure that everybody who's been playing shooters and who knows what else for who knows how many years can attest to that fact, too. Video games are just as harmful as any other medium, be it books or movies. The mentally disturbed and violence-inclined have killed in the name of books as well as movies as well as video games.

I leave you with these words. Again, if you can, do something to make your voice heard. If you can't, stay up to date and aware of what is happening.

Regards,

the Couch Preacher

I Can't Think Of Anything To Say, Except... I Think It's Marvellous!

2010-08-29T14:05:00.003+03:00

Hello, kids

I've spent the week coming down from a flu and spent this morning dealing with the hell that is account management at Xbox Live. This all means that the quality of this entry is suspect.

I've been replaying Fable II since playing BioShock 2. Fable III is two months away, and I'm plenty excited. Playing Fable II I realized again how utterly enjoyable this game is. Actually, the only bad thing about the game is the utter and complete lack of challenge. You can't die. It's that simple. If your health goes down to zero, instead of dying you just lose whatever experience is floating around (it "bursts" from defeated enemies) and get a scar. Then you jump up and can resume the killing. This would've worked much better if you were restored to a previous point instead of right then and there. That said, there are very few situations where you even come close to "dying", especially once you get the hang of the combat system. It's not quite as easy as Assassin's Creed II in these terms, but then again, few games are.

I'm fairly excited about the stuff we've been promised for Fable III. Also, at this point I'm not worried about Peter Molyneux's over-hyping, since he made good on his promises about Fable II. First off, what I'm really looking forward to is the ability to be the ruler of the land. Just like Lionhead has been saying, this is usually the point where the game would end. I'm happy as long as the game doesn't become Micromanagement Extraordinaire, but what I really want the most is some challenge.

The first to games took place on the continent of Albion but Fable III expands to also including a new continent, Aurora. Hopefully this means a lot more to do in the game. Not that Fable II was lacking, but the more the merrier. There's also a bunch of other kinds of innovation in terms of the user interface and menus. I was in no way unhappy with the existing old-school text menus, but it will be exciting to see new things being tried out.

There's plenty of other stuff coming out before Fable III hits the shelves. First up we've got Halo: Reach. There's not much I can say about Bungie's final crack at Halo. It's probably gonna be awesome. A little after that there's Sid Meier's Civilization V. I'm going to get this game at some point. Whether or not I get it at release depends on how busy I am at the time. The final game to be released between now and Fable III is Gothic 4. This is a game I have to get, and I'm pretty confident it'll be good. What I've seen of the game so far indicates that we're being served a genuine Gothic experience with a new look.

It's shaping up to be an exciting year.

Shocks Past, Present And Future

2010-08-22T15:03:00.004+03:00

Hello,

Sorry about missing last week's update. Today we talk about the Bioshock series, mainly Bioshock 2 and the recently announced third installment, Bioshock Infinite. Spoilers for Bioshock and Bioshock 2 are unavoidable, and what little I can spoil about Infinite I probably will. Also, I’ll deal with two very deep games worth of lore, so if you feel you’re in over your head, either go play Bioshock or read up on the BioShock Wikia.

I recently played through Bioshock for a possibly final time and then played through Bioshock 2 immediately thereafter. Now I'm going to try and compare these two games. If my understanding is correct, Bioshock is widely regarded as the superior game, but in my opinion Bioshock 2 is better. I will admit that in many ways Bioshock is the more memorable experience. When it comes to shooters I regard Bioshock very highly in that it dares to be different. While it does borrow heavily from its spiritual predecessor, System Shock, in the context of contemporary shooters it is highly original. Much of this originality stems from the setting. Taking place underwater is not that original, but an underwater steampunk vision of a 1950s city torn apart by a genetic arms race and socio-psychological deterioration is.

The city of Rapture was an excellent playground. Moreover, it was mysterious. Bioshock ran heavily on atmosphere and Rapture supplied that. Therein also lies perhaps the biggest drawback of Bioshock 2. The same sense of dread mixed with awe is gone now that we’ve already been on this ride once before. To its credit, Bioshock 2 isn’t even trying to bank on that. The narrative presented here is much more straightforward.

Now we enter major spoiler territory. In Bioshock you played Jack, a man who seemingly by chance crash-lands into the ocean smack-dab on top of Andrew Ryan’s underwater capitalist utopia, Rapture. We eventually learn that actually Jack’s return was just a part of a plot to make the power in Rapture change hands. The actual extent of this story twist is much more... uh, extensive, but let it suffice that this was the focal point of the plot.

Bioshock 2 does not attempt to tell a similar story. After Bioshock’s events power has again changed hands and Rapture is now controlled by psychiatrist Sofia Lamb. The player controls Subject Delta, one of the first Big Daddies ever created, as he tries to get back to his own Little Sister, who just happens to be Sofia Lamb’s daughter, Eleanor.

Bioshock is perhaps the most philosophical game franchise out there. The first game dealt in themes of choice and free will. Bioshock 2 on the other hand deals with the question of ultimate selflessness. Sofia Lamb believes that with the gene splicing made possible by ADAM she can create an individual who has no sense of self yet enough conscience to try and help others. The subject of this experiment is to be Eleanor.

The resulting story is in my mind much more touching and powerful than that of the first game. Make no mistake, Bioshock has a good story, but a story that is good by being unpredictable. However, I came to care much more about Bioshock 2’s characters, Eleanor and Subject Delta, than I did of anyone in Bioshock.

In terms of gameplay Bioshock 2 is also much better, as was expected. The main change is that instead of using either weapons or plasmid powers you wield both at the same time. This works very well. The Little Sisters are back. You still have to choose between either rescuing them or killing them, but there’s also the option to temporarily adopt them. This means you have to set them down on a corpse and defend them while they harvest ADAM. These sequences are intense like Bioshock never was.

The main palette of plasmid powers is largely the same. The weapon selection is pretty much completely revamped, but the new weapons fill the same jobs the old ones did. Still, no component of the game feels dated or worn. The hacking system is completely revamped, and that’s a good thing. The first game’s hacking sessions could get a little annoying if you had to hack several machines in a row. The new hacking game is less a puzzle and more a reflex test. It works a lot smoother and even adds to other gameplay in unexpected ways.

Bioshock 2 is shorter than Bioshock. I feel the ideal game length would be a little between these two games, as the first game drags out just a little bit, especially on later playthroughs, whereas the second could’ve run on just a little bit longer in my opinion. Well, now that I think about it, additional levels wouldn’t have worked as well in the confines of the current story, so maybe the shortness is a mixed blessing.

Just recently the announcement was made for Bioshock Infinite. Infinite doesn’t just reshuffle the deck, it changes the rules completely. The game takes place fifty years earlier and about ten miles higher. Instead of an underwater city we get a flying one. If any other developer presented this kind of development I’d be pissed. On paper it sounds like they’re trying to serve up the same meal in a different package. But these guys, I trust, are above that kind of re-treading.

It seems that Infinite has much to offer. The narrative will probably be highly different. Instead of a identity-less main character guided by people through glass walls and over the radio we’re promised a complete person, Booker DeWitt, who interacts with other full characters. Honestly, all I’m hoping for is that they add a new dimension to the existing ideas and themes of Bioshock.

Infinite’s development is in the middle stages, I believe, as the release date is currently set for 2012, so we’ve got a good long while to salivate over hype material. Personally, I look forward to it.

Skippie!

2010-08-15T23:34:00.000+03:00

Hey,

Sorry, no blog post this week. Apologies again.

Mainly Speaking And Of Roleplaying

2010-08-08T11:06:00.005+03:00

Hello,

We are once again on the dry side for updates this week. I am currently replaying BioShock and as soon as I'm done I'll sink my teeth into BioShock 2. I'm just trying to tide over until Halo: Reach hits the shelves. Mind you, I'm going to be terribly busy in a week and that'll last until late September. After that it's maybe two months max that I'm not that busy and after that I'm busy until March and after more or less busy until July. Why am I telling you this? Basically, there might be delays and missed entries, at worst a temporary hiatus. Maybe I'll get a guest entry, maybe not. Time will tell.

Ah, anyway, what can I talk about now? I figured whining about DLC is getting old by now. Hey, I know! I'll whine about main characters! Specifically the Blank-O-You template that has become pretty common nowadays. The first examples that spring to mind are Bethesda's game, that is to say Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3. What I mean by Blank-O-You is that the player character as such has no personality at all, hence "Blank". The reason for that is, at least in theory, that this allows the player to play any character that they want instead of having to do with fitting your ideal character within the confines of an existing character.

Some of you may have noticed that I stressed "in theory" back there. I did that because it doesn't really work in practice. Part of what I hated in the games mentioned above is that there's no real dialogue in the dialogue. You just choose a topic like Trouble and the character you're talking to reacts like you've said an entire sentence. This works so, at least I assume it does, because this lets the player imagine a sentence fitting their imagined character. This never worked for me in the least. Conversations just felt terribly one-sided. Considering how dialogue is defined as a conversation between two or more individuals that seems kind of like defeating a point.

The Blank-O-You seems to have become popular in conjunction with sandboxes and I guess they fit into the same theme. But just like sandboxes this trend ends up feeling bland. This would only work if you could actually craft your answers however you wanted, but that would require technology beyond current possibilities, either in terms of AI programming or computing power available to home systems. But in the current world it just doesn't work.

Nor do I really see a reason for it to work. Kind of like with sandboxes, I don't see the point. I'm happy to play a tightly constructed story, and I'm happy to play it through a tightly constructed character. The Witcher was and still is so enjoyable to me simply because we have Geralt, an existing character. In Mass Effect Shepard feels like a pretty full character mostly because we have voice acting for him/her. In Dragon Age and Knights of the Old Republic we had full dialogue written for the player but not voice-acted. This robs the dialogue experience of more or less half of its content.

Even though they're called role-playing games I've always had considerable difficulty playing a role. Even with a game like Dragon Age: Origins where you have a relatively vast amount of replies to choose from I could never fit them into either what I would do or what a personality I crafted for my character would do. Some people can and they do it well, whereas others take it to a frightening degree.

Well, that's that. Maybe kind of uninspired, but it's late and I'm sleepy. You make do with what you got. Next week, BioShock 2. Or something else. Cue Mr. Adderley.

2010-08-01T23:18:00.002+03:00

Hello, everyone!

Sorry about the temporary hiatus but I've been terribly busy moving between apartments. But that's all done now and I can update again. The thing is that I've nothing particularly special to update about. I guess I'll go with my later-than-late impressions on the Return to Ostagar DLC for Dragon Age: Origins. First off, BioWare as a game studio can honestly say that they have some of the best writing present in video gaming today. Mass Effect 2 is fantastically well written. And by writing I don't just mean the dialogue, I mean the entire handling of communicating things to the player.

In light of that fact, it's surprising that Dragon Age: Origins has such unmemorable writing. It's not necessarily bad, but certainly does not stand out like it does in Mass Effect 2. And Return to Ostagar is written insultingly badly. I guess that it's on par with the real average of the level of writing in video games, but compared even to DA:O's writing it just stands apart as awful. Basically, the thing about Return is that you titularly return to Ostagar, which is the site of a tragic battle early on in DA:O. The return is supposed to stir all kinds of strong feelings in the player. The problem here is that we don't have a chance to do that, because the game rushes to tell us that You're Feeling Strong Regret Over the Death of This Unimportant Yet Somehow Memorable Soldier's Whose Corpse You're Staring At Now. It's a slap in the face on both in terms of immersion and being disrespected as the receiver of the story.

They do this a few times and generally I felt pretty annoyed for the duration of this DLC. And while on the topic of DLC, there really is a ton of it for Mass Effect 2, but I just haven't bothered with any of it. At this point I dislike DLC partly out of principle. I like it as the option to add things the developers couldn't finish in time for the release date, but these days it seems more like there's a whole new department for people who think up DLCs to be released specifically after the game is released. It's a money-grubbing technique and I dislike it for what it is.

OK, that's about it for this week. Disgustingly weak, I know. I've just been very busy and this is all I could come up with. Ah, anyway, I'll try to have more meaningful content next week. Until then.

Convincing

2010-07-18T15:27:00.002+03:00

Hello

Today we do most verily discuss Splinter Cell: Conviction. Right off the bat, the game is excellent. I think it might just about be my favourite of the series so far. Granted, I haven't played the very first one, but still... Conviction was, is, an excellent ride. Let me walk you through it.

Gameplay-wise, this is the game that runs the smoothest and plays the best. It's not perfect, but it's not far. Definitely the biggest new gameplay feature is the Mark & Execute system. You can mark a chain of enemies and possibly objects in the environment and then take care of the lot of them at the press of a single button. The number of marks available varies per weapon, varying between one and four. Of course, to avoid utter and complete überness on part of the player, you can't Mark & Execute willy-nilly. Only once you've taken an enemy down by hand can you use Mark & Execute, and once you have you need to take down another enemy. Completely arbitrary, yes, but necessary to keep things balanced. There's one short bit at the end of one level where you do get to Mark & Execute as much as you want, and it's awesome while it lasts. Mark & Execute is tons of fun. It doesn't make the game too easy or disinteresting. The challenge becomes finding the position where you can use your marks to the biggest effect and vanish again before you are found.

The main campaign is regrettably short. Not short like Modern Warfare 2, but still short enough that you wished it would go on. But they make up for that. There's a terrific co-operative campaign. It's not the longest ride either, but just as much fun, if not more so. I had some great moments through that. And after I was done with those two, there was still Deniable Ops. Basically you get a few gameplay modes that are played in the maps of the co-op campaign and a few others. By yourself you can play Hunter and Last Stand. Hunter is very straightforward: go through the map and eliminate hostiles. Causing a stir will result in party crashers. It's a simple mode but thanks to the great gameplay it's tons of fun. Last Stand features you defending a single location against waves of enemies. What you defend is an EMP which the enemies will try to shoot into pieces. So far I've played this by myself and also in co-op, but it doesn't really sit right with me. It gets terribly hectic and doesn't fit that well into the Splinter Cell formula. Well, perhaps with time, understanding will come. But not so far. In Co-op you get also the Face-Off mode, but I haven't tried that yet.

The gameplay does have some issues. What first springs to mind is that the interact button gets a little too much responsibility. Basically, what the button does at any given moment depends on what you look at. Look at the bottom of a door, and you peek under it. Look at the middle and you open it. However, seeing as the game is in third person it can be at times a tad bit difficult to tell what you're looking at. And in situations where there are several possible interactions closely packed, it can end badly. One particular time springs to mind. I'm standing by a railing, a weapon at my feet and a light switch on the wall next to me. An enemy is approaching so I figure I'll jump off of the railing. However, I end up turning off the lights, because apparently I was looking just a little bit too much to the left. This doesn't happen too often, but happens nonetheless.

The most intriguing bit about Splinter Cell Conviction is the story. It's hard to describe, but I'll try. Basically, the basic ideas that make up the story are ridiculous, stupid and full of holes. One of them makes a mockery of everything that the previous game, the emotionally heavy Double Agent, was about. Despite that, the actual storytelling is excellent. Chronological progression is jumbled up, there are a few well-placed flashbacks and the writing is pretty good. The only explanation I have is that a complete idiot came up with the actual plot but they used someone much much more talented for the actual telling of the story. Kind of like transporting your shit around in an expensive jewelry case.

In retrospect, Conviction failed in fulfilling the promise that was made way back in Double Agent. Even then we were promised that Sam Fisher would have to be bereft of his trademark bevy of high-tech gadgets. It wasn't through then and it isn't true now. While there are a few levels where you aren't completely kitted out, most of the time you have enough gadgets to fill out every RadioShack in existence twice over. It doesn't hurt the game, but it's a bit annoying.

Another minor frustration comes with the conspicuous lack of the option to Restart Level. Your only option is to exit back to the main menu and load the level all over again. This wouldn't be so bad if the load times between the menu and the game weren't so damned long. If you're trying to succeed in the challenge to Complete A Level Without Being Detected And Without Retrying it's a bitch if you screw up early on and have to go through the menu rumba all over again. Why not have a restart level option? Mentioning that challenge, it's yet another minor annoyance that these instructions aren't clear enough. Is it enough that you don't raise any alarms? Sometimes you sneak up on a guy but he notices you and the Detected warning flashes for a millisecond before you smash his face into the wall. He doesn't even get a scream out, so he might as well never have seen you at all. Does this count as being detected? I have no idea.

OK. Enough nitpicking. As I said, Splinter Cell Conviction is a great game. It could be a worthy conclusion to the series, but I doubt we're that lucky...

Until next time.

First Fantasy, Part Three

2010-07-11T21:49:00.004+03:00

Hello Tonight we bring the Final Fantasy XIII series into a close. I'll be honest here: I did not actually finish the game yet. After spending some eight hours, if not more, just grinding Chapter 11 I got back on track until I hit a wall with Chapter 12's last boss. I've got Chapter 13 left but that's just a series of boss battles and I'm currently not too keen on going back to finish. Despite that I figure I have enough to go on to give you, my readers, the lowdown.

I like FFXIII. I like it a lot. It's a great game that has a few flaws ranging from minor to serious. The biggest problem here is pacing. This is something at which FFXIII fails spectacularly. Most of the game is smooth sailing. Some level here or there drags out a little bit but mostly you get through without a single gray hair. I'm not a complete stranger to JRPGs so I had prepared myself beforehand for several hours worth of level grinding. To my surprise that wasn't necessary for the most part. FFXIII lets you pick your battles and for the most part of the first nine chapters I took on all enemies I came across, hoping to cut back on future grinding. Towards the end of Chapter 9 when the plot started thickening I started skimping on fights as I yearned for the next plot point to drop. Despite that I handled even the last boss of Chapter 10 without any trouble. In fact I don't think I got stuck a single time throughout the game up to that point.

Chapter 11 throws all that out of the window. This is the point where the game becomes nonlinear. You have a set of vast plains inhabited by monsters and at long last sidequests. I figure I'd spend a few hours grinding and then be on my way, seeing as I'd been doing so well so far. In the end I spend eight or nine hours just grinding. Some grizzled old RPG veteran might laugh at me now, whining about measly eight hours of grinding and I take offense at that. Despite my lack of familiarity with JRPGs I am no stranger to grinding itself. My average playthrough of Gothic 2 takes 30 hours and I'm fairly sure at least 10 hours out of that is spent grinding. No, the issue here is that in FFXIII all of the grinding has been shoved into one big pile. If Gothic 2 forced me to grind for 10 hours in a row I would probably call bullshit even on that one of most hallowed of games as it currently stands. I swallowed my pride and hard did I grind. That isn't the final insult here. No, the final insult is that I spent eight hours in a row grinding and it wasn't enough. As I said, I'm stuck. This one boss just keeps wiping me out. Apparently I really should've gone and spent four hours more.

I'll be positive for a moment. Chapter 11, Grind Central, does make grinding very easy. There are several monster types around and there's plenty of all of them. Moreover, you get the set of 55 sidequests, ranging from tough to balls-out frightening. This gives your grinding some direction since you can work your way up a list. But this is still an issue because it makes the game terribly uneven. All action plot-wise halts completely. This is not smart design. I should point out that the pacing isn't the only uneven thing about Chapter 11. Difficulty is another, and in more ways than one. As I said, I handled the final boss of Chapter 10 without any sort of difficulty at all and that was before I had to refine my playing strategy. And supposing that this particular boss is a fluke, I didn't have any trouble earlier either. Yet with Chapter 11 I was getting my ass handed to me by some of the most basic enemies around. This whole Chapter stinks of uneven design because the monsters running across the field are completely mixed. The weak foes run with the tough. And even though the sidequests are supposedly ordered around some semblance of slowly building difficulty curve, it gets terribly uneven at times. The first sidequest is easy as pie but I had to spend a good few hours grinding before finally getting through the second one. And later on they get just crazy...

OK, I think I've made my case: Chapter 11 sucks. The rest of the chapter is spent running around mildly disinteresting dungeons. Chapter 12 opened with panache and style and with a pace that belied how bogged down the rest of the chapter gets with you basically running into random boss fights along the street. This is the endgame when all the threads finally join together but it takes you an hour to get down a single street because every enemy is a demigod. Pacing fails once again.

Ah, hell, I'll try to be positive again. Yes, Final Fantasy XIII is definitely a good game. I enjoyed playing it immensely. As frustrating as the grinding was because it prevented me from enjoying the plot, I still had fun playing. The major design choice of the combat gameplay, taking the emphasis off of choosing which moves you're taking that turn and putting it instead on the Paradigms, controlling what your characters can do, paid out very well. I imagine that for someone more experienced with JRPGs it's a great change of pace, unless you're the sort of jaded old bastard that hates changes utterly and completely, just the kind person who burned all their Genesis records when they made Phil Collins the lead singer. This is new and it is good, I say.

At times a little more control over your teammates would have been very welcome. The biggest punch you can pull with your character is summoning a magical creature called an Eidolon to fight alongside you. As an idea it's not terribly original but it worked like it was supposed to and was good fun. But it was kind of dull that you can only use the Eidolon of the party leader. There were a few Eidolons I never got around to using because I never used those characters as my party leader. Looking at this from a 'realistic' angle, what's stopping the other two party members from summoning their Eidolons? Actually nothing, because in the relatively awesome cutscene that opens Chapter 12 we get to see all the Eidolons together, wreaking havoc. And another minor annoyance: if the party leader falls in battle, it's game over. This again doesn't make sense from a practical point of view. If your current party has a member capable of healing, why not allow the party leader to be resurrected, something that can be done to other party members. Or if you have the resurrecting item, Phoenix Down, in your inventory. Why not automatically remove one Phoenix Down from your inventory and get on with the show? This is never explained and is annoying mostly for being so stupid.

Despite my praise, I do understand the sentiments of the "Any Final Fantasy made after VII is bad" -camp. I would rather die than play thirteen of these games. I doubt that Final Fantasy XIII or Final Fantasy XII is much worse that the hallowed Final Fantasy VII. It's just that they're all pretty similar from where I stand. But I suppose that I'd have to play all the games to make that judgment and I am never going to do that. At all. That's my final verdict. Final Fantasy XIII is a good and enjoyable game. If that changes because you've seen it all before, tough noogie, but I understand where you're coming from.

That's that. If I do get around to really finishing the game I'll drop any important thoughts by you. If not, we have Splinter Cell: Conviction and some nice topical topics lined up. Good times.

Almost Equatorial

2010-07-03T12:50:00.006+03:00

Greetings, young ones

Sorry about missing last week's update, it couldn't be helped. But hey, you did get an extra entry to balance all that out. I guess I'm really, really late on getting onto the train, but here are my thoughts on Assassin's Creed II.

Well, let's start by saying that it's definitely a good game. It's vastly superior to its predecessor but still has some great flaws. The first Assassin's Creed was much criticized for being too repetitive and Creed II mixed things up nice and proper. There's a great deal of variety to the game and, quite simply, it's a wonderful game to play.

While Creed II rises above the first game for the most part, where it fails is by being in many ways simply too easy. There are several mechanics to make the game more difficult. No more can you blend in with the crowd with the press of a button, should you accrue enough infamy. New types of enemies present new challenges. This is all very nice and grand, but where the game is too easy is the combat. Instead of going in, I'll just give a single example. So I'm conducting an assassination and I have a grandiose plan. It, being a little more grandiose than necessary, fails and I end up shot at by archers, falling down a considerable distance and generally coming within inches of death. In terms of gameplay, I am two successful attacks away from death. I don't have the opportunity to slink away and try again, but just as I get up I am surrounded by several armed and armoured guards. I figure that instead of putting up a real fight I'll just get killed so I can reattempt my grandiose plan. I don't draw my sword. It's time for fisticuffs.

So, for dramatic effect, I repeat: there I am, two hits away from death, surrounded by six guards with weapons and heavy armour where as I only hold up my fists in defiance. I plan to die, so I don't even fight with strategy. I just hit the attack button at slow, steady intervals. One... Two... Three... Four... So forth. Five minutes later, what do you know? One man standing. Me. Armed still with only my fists. I killed six guards without being hit twice in succession by only attacking steadily, slowly. There. Is. No. Challenge. Here. At all. I said Fable II had easy combat but Creed II takes that to a whole new level.

Beyond that the game works like a charm. The conclusion of the game comes as a surprise and some might find it off-putting but I'm perfectly fine with it. It's terribly interesting. Also, there's a lot of mechanics to the game that are very nice in itself but they seem to be there to help the player survive the challenges of the game. By now I've pointed out that there are no challenges*, making them seem superficial despite best intentions.

Seeing as the upcoming Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is such a direct sequel I hope they'll focus on trying to fix the combat above all else. As I pointed out when discussing E3, one big point of Brotherhood is the Brotherhood. In theory it's a cool idea, but when I imagine it translating into practice it's making easy combat easier. Thus I hope all the more that they make the combat more challenging in that game.

But back to Creed II. Actually I'm reluctant to get in depth here since the game has been out for so terribly long. It's a terrific game with a few flaws. Hopefully they'll be rectified in future releases. If Assassin's Creed had you on the fence then I'm pretty sure that Creed II will tip you over to the side.

I also want to talk a bit about the recent Prince of Persia movie. I know that this is not a movie blog, but Prince of Persia is based on a game, so I feel inclined to comment. Okay, let's look at this from a moviegoer's point of view. What do I look for when I go to see a movie? Entertainment. Was I entertained by this movie? Definitely. It's a very enjoyable movie. That said, it's nothing special. There is nothing transcendental about this movie, but then if I only appreciated movies of earth-shaking achievements, I'd end up with a very small collection of movies. And those earth-shaking movies are not something you can watch too often without them losing their significance. This kind of silly-but-fun (silly in the sense of not serious) movies are ones you can enjoy casually.

Now to look at this from the point of view of a fan of the video games. I got what I wanted. Despite carrying the moniker of the first game of the Sands trilogy the movie is its own creation. We lack the Sand monsters, true, but the Sands trilogy, what I consider to be the real Prince of Persia, has always been about the Prince and the Sands. That we get and in ample amounts. This praise given, I do have to point out one massive inconsistency between the movie and the source material.

For some reason in this movie the Prince is not of royal blood, but a street orphan, adopted at young age by the Persian king when he saw the boy's bravery. I would be willing to let this slide if it served some purpose for the movie, but they don't do anything with this new dimension to the character. There are a few throwaway lines of dialogue about the Prince having something to prove, etc. but those could've been perfectly well made to work based on the Prince being the youngest of his brothers which would fit into canon perfectly. But as the movie stands the whole orphan thing is pretty much completely pointless.

This is a big shot in the dark, a wild theory, but I figure that it's because of Disney. I feel the movie would've been a lot better if it had stayed the hell away from Disney. Anyway, this kind of rising from rags to riches stuff and how the Prince is of noble spirit even if he isn't of noble blood is right up Disney's alley and the movie suffers from it. Also, the love story between the Prince and the princess was one of the best things about the Sands of Time game but here we get the typical Disney (well, also typical Hollywood, but I'm blaming Disney here)" We Fall In Love Because We're the Male and the Female Leads" kind of love story. Annoying.

But hey, it's the best video game movie I've ever seen and I have seen Spirits Within. Go Prince of Persia.

Whoo.

*P.S.: I actually take that back. There is one kind of challenge that presents itself a few times, and that is an imposed time limit. I don't recall this showing up during the main quests of the game, but if you decide to delve into the numerous and certainly entertaining Assassination side quests you'll run into it a few times. You're told to take care of X number of people, and you're given a time limit in which to do so. This time limit is usually between five to three minutes, and my main issue here is how it's pretty much arbitrary and pointless every time. Sure, every now and then you get an explanation like "kill them quickly so they don't have time to be alerted" but when those people are spread across the city and you get five minutes that explanation makes sense the more you think about it. But as I said, there's none of this during the main quest. Big relief.

E3: The World of Tomorrow... Some Time Over the Next 12 Months!

2010-06-23T18:48:00.002+03:00

Hello,

As promised I'm making an extra entry here to cover the games at E3. I won't cover them all, naturally, but rather the ones that I have any interest in or sparked some thoughts. Also, I will refrain whom whining about the things I covered in my previous E3 entry. This entry won't as such replace this week's "real" entry, but for other reasons I might end up missing that update. Not that I'm planning on it, mind you. But here we go: the games of E3.

Assassin's Creed II: Brotherhood

It's hard for me to be unbiased here because this game pisses me off by existing. I loved Assassin's Creed II and I will be posting my thoughts on it in the near future. However, I would much rather that the AC team worked on Assassin's Creed III rather than II.5. But I try to keep an open mind.

Now, the big thing about Brotherhood is bringing a multiplayer aspect to what has essentially been a single player experience. The multiplayer is a separate entity from the single player both in terms of gameplay and, for the first time that I've seen, how it actually fits into the story's canon.

I can't comment on the multiplayer much yet, but the single player has me suspicious. It seems very, very similar to Assassin's Creed II which I understand in the light of the fact that said game hasn't been out that long. Why release a new AC game so soon? Another matter entirely. Also, the whole Brotherhood aspect comes out as training and equipping your own Assassins who can eventually join you in battle. It's a cool idea in theory, but I don't see the point. You could already hire allies in AC2, but I never did need them for combat. I'm not opposed to the idea, but I'm not sure if it will really pay out.

Civilization V

Now, I'm a big fan of Civilization IV. I'm not very vocal about it because I do quite massively suck at the game, even if that doesn't stop me from playing it. The new game features a lot of changes, especially in terms of combat which has been pretty much completely revamped. I'm a very peaceful player in Civilization, mostly because I was put off by the "stack gameplay" the combat was built around where you massed into a single group as many military units you could and then sent them to your chosen destination.

There are no more stacks in Civ5, but rather a war front from what I understand. If this plays out according to plan it may be incredibly awesome. There are other changes, too, notably changing the land tiles from squares to hexagons, which I suspect is an improvement. But still, the new combat is what interests me the most right now.

Fable III

On surface, Fable III seems like Fable II with a lot of shiny stuff tacked on it. While Fable and Fable II were obviously two different games, and had four years between their releases, Fables II and III look remarkably similar, perhaps because of just the two years of development time. Fable III apparently runs on Fable II's engine. On a side note, that seems to be a common trend this E3: new games on old engines. I realize that massive amounts of time and money go into creating a new engine, but we should be careful not to become complacent...

Ah, anyway, Fable III actually promises quite a lot of new features, especially the ability to rule your own kingdom. This, again, could be either good or a bad thing depending on how it plays out in practice. From a Fable game I expect whimsical adventuring throughout a twistedly British landscape, so if I end up with Micromanagement Extraordinaire, I shall be annoyed.

Peter Molyneux is talking a lot cool little additions and making the game accessible to new gamers. While I do support welcoming new gamers into the fold, I hate for it to become a problem for me. What do I mean? Fable II was laughably easy and not challenging in the least and this was something I hoped to change in Fable III, but if the game engine is the same, I doubt it. Hey, all my bitching aside, the previous Fables were great fun despite their flaws and I except Fable III will follow suit.

Fallout: New Vegas

I am most unhappy with New Vegas. I knew long ago that New Vegas would run on Fallout 3's platform and that made me very suspicious. Then I found out that the game also had a new developer and my hopes were up again: maybe the stark lack of Bethesda would cure Fallout 3's problems. From what I've seen so far, it seems this isn't the case. New Vegas is nothing more than a glorified map pack with a few minor gameplay tweaks that could just as well be contained a slightly larger than usual patch for Fallout 3.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II

I'm actually pretty surprised that this game exists. To my knowledge TFU was no huge success despite being entertaining enough. I liked it but then I'm a Star Wars nerd. Well, if TFU2 is coming out, I hope they can improve on the flaws of the first game. Mainly TFU lacked impact. Slightly reminiscent of MW2, it was so spectacular that it failed to make any strong connection. We haven't been told much yet, and I'll mention any big things should they come our way.

Gears of War 3

Well, isn't this terribly interesting. And I do mean that literally. Gears of War was a great game but it had its flaws. Gears of War 2 did a good job of improving on that and turned out excellently. I declared it to be the Best Sequel Ever and I stand by that. But what are we going to do with Gears of War 3? I don't have the answer and if Epic Studios does, they didn't give it away quite yet.

We've seen some gameplay demonstration now. As the first thing I will point out the art direction. While as such visually impressive, the first Gears of War had a very drab colour palette. The second game did a little better and the third seems to be doing better still. The art direction intermingles with a measure of gameplay innovation with the new enemies, the Lambent who can apparently mutate into wholly new forms in the middle of combat. Otherwise things looked very familiar. No matter how much I enjoy the game, I will condemn it should it fail to bring anything new of substance to the series.

Halo: Reach

Well, it's a little redundant for me to be talking about this. What I've seen and played so far Reach seems very promising as the gameplay experience feels familiar without feeling dated, as it did with MW2 (yes, I intend to keep ragging on this game for quite a bit if I only can). I definitely like the fact that this is the last Halo game Bungie is working on. After that Halo is in Microsoft's eminently incapable hands. Bungie is free to do new great things and MSoft is free to take a money-hungry shit on a beloved game franchise... Well, we're not there yet and Reach seems terribly nice. The single player experience will be something of a darling and the features they're promising for the new version of ODST's firefight is lovely. What else can I say?

Music games in general

I'm doing this category entry because of a strange little phenomenon I want to discuss with you, meine Wunderkinder. I don't actually mean to talk about the games themselves but rather the controllers for these games. A game called PowerGig: Rise of the Sixth String brought out a new kind of guitar controller, one that was basically a real guitar, featuring strings and frets and whatnot. On an interesting sidenote, also displayed at E3 was something called YouRock Guitar which to my knowledge is an actual digital/MIDI guitar and not a game controller. Little unsure on that currently...

Anyway, PowerGig basically brought out a real guitar and on the other hand Rock Band 3 basically brought out a real keyboard. And I find this kind of weird. First off, I am an actual musician, mainly playing jazz on my piano but I dabble in guitar on the side. That said I have a hard time approaching these new controllers. Not hard in the sense that I have some unreasoning hatred, but hard because I don't really understand.

I thought that the point of games like Guitar Hero was to, like virtually all games, provide a simulation of a real activity. Guitar Hero was make-believe guitar playing just the same as sports games are make-believe sport, Modern Warfare is make-believe warfighting. What is the point of having a simulation that's not really a simulation?

The developers had the idea, at least with PowerGig, to allow players via their game to pick up skills enabling them to actually play guitar. Hey, I'm all for that and I think it's, as such, a good idea, but is this really going to work? If you want to learn to play guitar, go learn to play guitar. OK, maybe there's some feature as to how the guitar controller works that makes it accessible, but I really don't know. And as for the keyboard controller, it basically is a two-octave keyboard, that is to say it has 25 keys. There actually are real keyboards out that are this size, mainly used in music based heavily on sampling and manipulating sounds. But from what I saw of this thing in action it works like a real keyboard. There is no simulation here, so I'm really having trouble getting the point.

And while we're talking about music games I might spend a few lines mocking the next Guitar Hero game, the sixth game entitled Warriors of Rock. What I want to mock is how the developers apparently describe the game as being "more focused on rock'n'roll" yet the set list still features tracks by the likes of My Chemical Romance. If they'd just said "focused on rock" it would've been merely quaint but now that they decided to add "'n'roll" it's just hilarious. To me, at least.

Shogun 2: Total War

Not much to say as much hasn't been told, but apparently this next instalment in the Total War franchise plans to make the game simpler and thus easier to manage without making it any less rich in the good kind of complexity. The statement may seem paradoxical and could perhaps be phrased better, but I believe it's possible. More on this as the situation develops.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Strangely enough, W2 was listed as having been featured at E3 but I haven't seen any media of any sort about it. I'll update this little corner if I do finally stumble onto something.

OK, that's all, folks. If it seems that there isn't much of substance here, then all I can say is that there wasn't much of substance at E3, for me at least. I was not impressed. Quite the opposite. Now we return to our regular blogging schedule. What do we have in store? My conclusion to Final Fantasy XIII. My reviews of Splinter Cell: Conviction and Assassin's Creed II. Some other interesting tidbits, concerning vehicle sections and Insert Yourself Here characters. Until then.

E3 Coverage: Looking To the (Crappy) Future

2010-06-15T10:57:00.009+03:00

Hello, kids

I've been made a liar again and this time by our very own Electronic Entertainment Expo. Yes, I'd completely forgotten that E3 was around the corner, which is saying something about the level to which the event has sunk. Ah, enough of that, let's try and be open-minded. Today we discuss E3 of 2010.

OK, a bunch of games are coming out that I'm interested in. And that actually annoys me, because they're all sequels. Ah, yes, I'm a fan, so I'm kind of excited, but I do realize that it's quite tragic. Endless rehashing of existing IPs is not a good thing. There should be new ideas and innovation. Oh, but there was plenty of innovation at E3, and that's part of the problem.

Let's tackle the bad stuff first. I already mentioned the amount of sequels. I counted there being around 140 games present at E3 this year. I then counted that around 93 of these games were sequels, re-imaginings or continuations of franchises. I could actually fit a few more titles under the "no new IP" umbrella, but I don't have the heart.

This is, of course, understandable. These days video games are a big business (I refuse to say 'serious business'), and from the money-making point of view it's a safer decision, financially speaking, to release a title that has an existing fan base, or in other words, is guaranteed to sell. One should also note that we the players are allowing this behaviour to continue and be profitable since we will buy those sequels and re-imaginings and new instalments with fervour. I admit that I'm a fan and seeing new stuff about titles I already like is fun. Also, in favour of sequels, their chances of becoming the Perfect Game are (though still non-existent) better than those of a completely new title, because the developers know what to fix with an existing product.

But I'm also in favour of new ideas. We haven't seen much of that lately. I could add a lot more titles to 93 over there if I called 'bullshit' on every game featuring bland, faceless military macho-men, even if the franchise was, as such, new. I wouldn't be this worried about there being lots of sequels if those sequels were treated as new games instead of new versions of old games. For example, the Call of Duty series gets its seventh or eighth outing with the "new" title (yes, emphasis for delicious irony) Black Ops. I would not mind at all if the series continued, and apparently Black Ops is something of a story-sequel to World At War, if only they actually did something new and refreshing. Currently there is absolutely nothing interesting about Black Ops. It's the same shooter we've playing at least since Modern Warfare, if not even before that. At this point the experience is bland and pointless through repetition.

To be fair, I find myself again bombarding Call of Duty with criticisms that could well be directed at Halo. Reach doesn't seem to be doing anything new. Yes, there are promises of more emphasis on open environments and there's been a very conspicuous appearance by flight simulator section, but we'll see.

Ah, well, time to move past the sequel issue. What's the real problem I have with E3 this year? We're still riding the goddamned motion control train. That said, we've been riding it since the Wii came out in '06. For some inexplicable reason Sony is just now releasing a PS3 version of the Wiimote called PlayStation Move. Why now? Why not four years ago? Why now when the motion control of the Wiimote has been derided in every other game it's used in that is not built around the motion control gimmick?

Microsoft is trying to step up the game with Kinect, the new title of Project Natal. Really the folly here is even greater than with Move. To quickly recap, the technology of Kinect allows you to use your entire body as a controller, in theory putting you into the game world. In theory. I want to describe this matter via a colourful metaphor. This is like the gradual development of flight technology. The problem is that people think that Kinect is the equivalent of the Wright brothers' glider, whereas we're actually still at Leonardo Da Vinci's flying machine; if you try to jump off and fly with it you will crash, die very painfully and be for centuries to come held as a warning example.

I get that this is the work of the technology high. Hubris. We're caught up in the excitement of what technology like Kinect is capable of doing: essentially putting us in the game world. Except that it doesn't. I point out again the obvious limitations of Kinect. I quite simply do not believe that this technology is capable of being used in any meaningful way. What do I mean by that? They showcased the technology this time with Kincetimals. The animals are on the screen and you can use Kinect to pet them and other really cutesy stuff. This game is just a hyper-advanced Tamagotchi! All this game is about is "bonding with five different adorable animal friends". This is ridiculous. Not because of the concept, I get that it's a cool idea that especially younger kids might like. No, it's ridiculous because you're spending $249.99 on an Xbox 360 console and $150 for Kinect and a few bucks more for the game itself. Would you spend almost $500 on a Tamagotchi?

I will briefly repeat my now year-old concerns (happy birthday!) about Kinect's functionality in games with actual content. That is to say, there isn't any. It's limited to sports games, from golf to driving, because all these are essentially based around a few simple movements. Anything more complex than that and the whole thing just falls on its highly overrated ass. Why? Because you can't move.

Sure, cars move by themselves and you just have to steer, but what about RPGs and adventure games and shooters where you actually have to move yourself somewhere! What then, Kinect? Should I lean forward like some kind of earthbound Superman? Damn you, I don't want to! I want it all or I want nothing! Give me a cyber-reality where my consciousness is inserted into a game world, not fancy tricks that only pretend to do that! As they so very colourfully say, don't piss in my ear and tell me it's raining.

I guess I've railed on E3's issues long enough. I'll make a separate entry, hopefully before the weekend, to give my considerations on the games without being bogged down by the problems discussed here. Until then.

It's Ranting Time: Modern Warfare 2

2010-06-12T00:36:00.004+03:00

Hello, and welcome back to the Couch Preacher show

I don't have much of substance to say this time around. That's a sure sign of the summer, don't you think? No, really, this is just a mix of laziness and lack of things to say. The one thing I could actually talk about is Assassin's Creed II, but as I said, I'm feeling lazy (and tired, too, really) so I'm saving that for later. I'm still working my way through Final Fantasy XIII. I'm actually up to Chapter 11 out of thirteen chapters. This also happens to be the grind-tastic portion of the game, so this might take a while. I'm hoping to get through the game over the next week, or at the very least get done grinding.

So what do I have to blither about? I finally managed to man up and finish Modern Warfare 2's single player campaign. I adamantly can't be bothered to touch the multiplayer, 'cause we all know what it's like. However, the campaign's finale raised some... particular feelings. As an overall experience the game simply failed to make any sort of impression. Fairly impressive and well-crafted military action rolled past my eyes but at very few points did I manage to get into it in any way at all. Some of the tighter moments I could almost connect with, mostly because I just didn't want to die again.

A little warning here. The rest of this post will be spent discussing the late-mid to final moments of Modern Warfare 2, so if you for some odd reason really don't want to spoil yourself the fabulous ending of Modern Warfare 2, stop reading now. And get help. You have issues. Furthermore, this will be ranting. Well thought-out, interesting ranting, yes, but ranting nonetheless. You have been warned.

Seeing as I'd already played the game a little past the midway point, I returned to the game just in time for the bad stuff to begin. You see, the bullshit starts piling up at this point. There are two main sources of utter, complete bullshit. The first Modern Warfare had a rather thrilling moment where your character died for real. This was rather fresh in the world of western entertainment, where heroes very, very rarely die despite most of dramatic tension being built around them being in mortal jeopardy.

Now, MW2 pulls this two times. That didn't annoy me half as much as the amount of times MW2 pulls this halfway. "You Just Almost Died" happens constantly, and means either that the screen temporarily goes black or the game plays the same sound effect as when you die. This is designed to give you the impression that you died. And this happens again and again and again. There's a final fight scene that really, really drags out because it pulls this gimmick about five times, that in addition to the 40 times it's been pulled in previous levels. This is merely mildly annoying and a sign of bad taste. In addition to getting worn out by repetition, this gimmick also suffers from the fact that it doesn't really work, or at least it didn't for me. It was just disorienting. I didn't go "OMFG I DIED WHAT DO I DO NOW?!" like I assume I was intended, but more like "What? I died again? Oh, well, respawn time. Wait, I didn't die? What the hell? Ah, well, moving on". And then it's done a hundred times more. Yes, I'm emphasizing that.

The real shit comes in the form of plot twists. Yes, apparently MW2's writing team decided that their award-winning franchise is above mediocre stories that are predictable and dull and, you know, make sense. In the closing hours of the game there are two twists that make absolutely no sense at all. The first is prisoner 627. We've found out that this prisoner is somebody that the bad guy, Makarov, really wants to see dead, so the British dedicate their resources to breaking 627 out of a Russian gulag.

So since we keep referring to him ambiguously as 627, it's obvious that his identity is going to be a big shocker. And it is, too, because prisoner 627 is none other than Captain Price. Why is it a shock? Because like everyone who ever finished the first Modern Warfare knows, Captain Price is dead! As a matter of fact the closing moments of MW were dedicated to watching Price and a bunch of other comrades die, followed by a rescue by friendly forces. So exactly how does this dead man, his body probably recovered by Allied forces, end up being alive at a Russian prison at the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula? And to add insult to injury, they don't even try to explain this. Everybody just takes Price return in their stride. Also, seeing as we were repeatedly told how Makarov really, really, really wants to get this guy, I wanted to know what Makarov wanted with Price. However, this aspect is dropped completely and Price just becomes a glorified military strategy consultant.

OK, whatever, forget Price for the moment. Let's take a gander at the second ridiculous twist. There's this American general named Shepherd who turns out to be the bad guy by betraying everybody, the good guys and other bad guys alike. And let me do a little summarizing statement here: everything about this Shepherd twist suffers from not being explained. Shepherd starts his betrayal by killing the guys he was supposed to be picking up and stealing the information these guys had stolen from Makarov's safe house. But apparently losing this information (what information was it anyway?) doesn't hinder our heroes in the least, and they proceed completely unfazed.

The biggest unexplained thing here is why Shepherd betrays the good guys. He does give some tirade about watching his men get killed some years ago, and apparently his endgame was to get the U.S. government to give him funds to make war on... somebody. But no, we never get a straight answer as to why he turned coat and what he hopes to achieve! But this twist is also annoying by its very nature, because it comes out of nowhere. It would have been just as feasible for a random helicopter pilot to declare himself the evil mastermind, and that's not very feasible!

Hey, I get wanting to have plot twists, and it's good, because it's fun and exciting, but only if they're done well! In my opinion any good plot twist is preceded by clues. This is not to allow the audience to guess the twits beforehand, but to show why it happened. You can repair the damage by explaining things later, but the best case scenario means that you can go through the story again and see, a-ha, this little bit here is foreshadowing the twist and I see that now that I know what the twist is! Resurrecting a dead man and making a completely normal good guy suddenly turn out to be the bad guy do not do this! And as I've already pointed out and I now point out yet again, neither twist is explained later on, either! I guess the game's writer just went "you know, screw this, I can't think of any exciting plot twists and these two are so nuts you couldn't explain them if you tried, why attempt to salvage anything".

There actually are, as such, some pretty cool moments in the final hand-to-hand showdown with General Shepherd, but the game pulls the goddamned Ha, You're Dead, Wait, No, You're Not something like half a dozen times in under five minutes, robbing the scene of all immediacy and impact. You know what the absolute worst part is in all this? They hint at a third game.

I find that Modern Warfare 2 is at the same time an excellent game, yet also a god-awful game. It's excellent in the sense that the gameplay mechanics work extremely well, but then again, those mechanics are the exact same as they were in the first Modern Warfare. To borrow another reviewer's example (of another game, though, but it fits here) you probably could switch MW2's game disc with that of MW1 and the player wouldn't notice. I'm told the graphics and enemy AI were improved upon, but the campaign is so hectic and frantic and fast-paced that you never have a chance to appreciate that.

What makes the game bad is simply the bad writing and utter, complete lack of gameplay innovation! And by bad writing I don't only mean these absurd plot twists and repeated use of the same gimmick that didn't really work in the first place. Unlike the first Modern Warfare, this game does not pull you in in any way at all. You're disconnected from the entire experience, unless, of course, you're in a highly suggestible state, like, say, drunk, stoned or extremely sleep-deprived. Or just being your average Call of Duty fan.

Having said that, I do realize that I may in fact just be going through what CoD fans go through when they play Halo. I readily admit not to being infallible. But just so you know, Halo 2 had a hell of a lot of innovation and Halo 3 at least tried to do something new, instead of just cashing on Halo 2's format by making a glorified map-pack and campaign extension. But that's beside the point. The point here is that really, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is in many ways a bad game. The only reason to get it is the multiplayer, because that's a good, functioning experience and got some improvements. But really, if you already have CoD 4, the first Modern Warfare, you should not buy this game, even though you probably already have, you mindless follower of military machismo.

Yeah, just like me. Ah, hell.

Good night, kids. Next time I will talk about Assassin's Creed II or rant about how much I hate grinding.

Once Upon A Time...

2010-06-07T00:47:00.004+03:00

Hello, kids

It's time for me to talk about Dragon Age: Origins and its unsightly cancerous growth, Awakening. That's not to say I don't like Dragon Age. In fact I do, because there's a lot to like. It seems we should dive right in. Shall we?

Well, let's get the good stuff out of the way. Dragon Age is good because... Well, I don't know, really. It's safe and regular and does it well for the most part. And that's also what's so bad about the game. Dragon Age suffers from the two same problems as Fable, or rather the same two-faceted problem. What I'm saying is that both games made a lot of grandiose promises but only fulfilled some of them, like they ran out of steam (or money...) in the middle of development.

To further explain what I mean, Dragon Age promised it was a fresh, more mature take on the traditional fantasy world, and also the option to play the game through six different perspectives, this through six different origins, hence the title. Now, the problem is that both of these claims are evident only in the first 90-120 minutes of the game. After that the game seems to give up on these ideas. If we discount said first hours of the game, all your chosen Origin affects is a few lines of dialogue. Characters from I think all the Origin stories pop up along the main quest, but even if your character knows them there is no effect besides a few lines of dialogue. This hardly provides an incentive to play through this considerably long game six times.

The "fresh, mature take" goes over even worse. The very worst part is how it affects the visual presentation. One big thing is the blood. While on paper the idea that engaging in battle, where blood is spilled, leaves bloodstains on the character models in the game is interesting, herein the idea is put to practice horribly. As soon as the character strikes the very first blow that model is now covered in small blood spatters from head to toe. The visual effect, going from zero to one hundred in no seconds flat, is quite jarring.

The take on the fantasy world is a little bit fresh here and there but not really mature in any way. Once again, in the Origin stories we see (here and there) some more mature ideas. For example, if you play as an elf living in a human city, what happens is that a local lordling's son interrupts your wedding and steals your women with intent to rape them (this would be the short version). Yes, this is more mature compared to what we see in contemporary video game stories. But once again the main part of the game doesn't really have anything that comes across as particularly fresh or mature.

Overall, Dragon Age is just so very standard. It wouldn't be a bad thing but for the game's advertising. The elves are again a dying race that once had its days of glory; this is very typical. But now they're second-class citizens in the human kingdom; this is much more interesting. But the freshness really ends about here. Beyond that Dragon Age is your typical fantasy world with a few cosmetic changes here and there.

It's a shame that the game suffers from something as irrelevant as advertising, because at its core it is a good game. The gameplay works for the most part, the dialogue is relatively well-acted and not at all painful to follow and you want to keep following the story. There's not much I can complain about here. There is some, though, for example combat. It is made apparent from very early on that combat in Dragon Age is based on being overwhelmed. There really is no such thing as a fair encounter in this game, from a numerical point of view. Yes, your party of up to four characters is mighty and powerful, so the fights are rarely impossible.

Refreshingly, Dragon Age is a relatively difficult game, combat-wise. I was completely hopeless for most of my first playthrough. The challenge of the combat lies in smart crowd control, seeing as most of the time you're hopelessly outnumbered, but eventually you come up with that winning strategy and you can use it to breeze through the rest of the game. This happened to me with every character/party setup sooner or later. After that combat becomes relatively dull, because you're just going through the motions. If that point happens to you very early on in the game, the rest is going to pretty dull since it's mostly made up of combat.

The game actually does lend you a big helping hand in terms of micro-management. It allows you through a relatively easy-to-use interface called Tactics to script the behaviour of your characters. That is not to say that friendly AI works perfectly. Though it functions well for the most part, it has some very frustrating quirks. Yes, you can make it so that your mage casts a group healing spell every time that any character's health falls below 50%. But when push comes to shove that mage might be all too busy casting other spells to cast that particular life-saver.

So, to recap, Dragon Age: Origins is a game that functions well and is interesting, but seems bland and unimpressive in comparison to what the developers said it would be. If you still want a game that has a "fresh, mature take" on the standard fantasy setting, go play the Witcher.

And a few short statements about Dragon Age's add-on, Awakening. It's much the same as Dragon Age and thus its faults and virtues are by and large identical. If you like Dragon Age and want more, sure, go get Awakening. The overall feel of the game, however, suffers from lack of trying. It seems to me that the developers thought "hey, this is just a short add-on to the real game, we don't need to lavish this with attention". Whether or not this really is the case, that's how it feels. It's like Dragon Age, but with less effort. Considering that the main game, in comparison to its hype, already felt like the ideal Dragon Age, but with less effort, I have to wonder where the series is going to go from here.

So, those were my thoughts on Dragon Age. I'm now working on completing Final Fantasy XIII, but again, I have no idea how long that will take. In the likely event that I don't have it finished by the weekend I'll tide myself over by writing up my thoughts on Assassin's Creed II.

Until next time.

My Favorite Things, Part III

2010-05-29T13:35:00.007+03:00

Hello, dear sheep

(and I say that with all the love in the world)

Today we bring to a close the My Favorite Things series. I discuss my two favourite games, I suppose, once again in no order of favourite-ness.

Gothic II

Well, I expect my long-time readers, along with minotaurs, pixies and honest politicians, saw this coming. I've dropped several remarks about Gothic II along my blogging career and written one actual article about it. Tragically, this is the only game I've included that is in fact a single game, not a complete series. That's because I never played the first Gothic and Gothic 3 just I didn't like that much. Yes, I've played through it pretty exhaustively, but I that's mostly to get my Gothic fix and less because it's in itself that great a game. It's good, but not great.

Anyway, Gothic II is pretty awesome. I won't call it the best because it is incredibly flawed in the sense that it's filled to the brim with sometimes game-breaking glitches and bugs. For the details see my entry from June 18th 2009, I won't go into them now. I got the game at more or less random. I had just been introduced proper to RPGs by KotOR and I was in a store looking for more, and picked out Gothic II.

What sets Gothic II apart from other games is... Well, actually I don't know. There's not a single thing I can point to and say "this is the main ingredient". As a whole I find Gothic II immensely immersive and enjoyable (except for when the bugs come calling). There's something about the way the game world is crafted that just pulls you in. For what it's worth G2 doesn't buy into the most standard of fantasy cliches and tries to be fresh while remaining 'safe', I suppose. I at least find the world of Gothic quite refreshing, at least because of the hostile and unapproachable denizens. In several ways the world of Gothic feels alive, very much alive, an illusion that is rarely achieved in video games.

When it comes down to it I just enjoy Gothic II. Very simple reasoning, yes? I can't help it. Gothic II works for me and I hold it to be the highest standard RPGs can aspire to, except in terms of gameplay testing, where it's probably pretty close to the lowest possible standard. You might hate it or you might love it.

Halo
You probably saw this coming, too, right? Once again, I'm not referring to the single game Halo: Combat Evolved, but what I suppose I'd now call the main trilogy or the Master Chief trilogy. All the games have their own flaws and virtues and I again fail utterly at picking a single title above the others. I consider each of these games to be an exemplary shooter.

Now, Halo gets a lot of bad rap and some of it is justified. At its core the Master Chief is just a bland, faceless space marine. This whole trend of bland main characters (created as such so the player can better imprint him/herself on the character) really ticks me off. I suppose I'll have to blog about it sometime. There isn't much surprising about the plot save for the big twist of the first game. I never said Halo has the best plot out there. It's just that Halo does one of the best jobs of telling the story that it does have to tell. That I find an excellent bonus.

But this is a game, and what it comes down to is gameplay. This is another area where Halo is ragged upon, but here I feel it is less justified. Most of the complaints towards Halo's actual gameplay go along the lines that it's unrealistic, to which I can only reply that of course it bloody is unrealistic. It was designed that way. Would you go out, buy a Spherical Object X and then complain that it isn't conical? On the other hand a lot of people just don't like Halo and that I can put up with. Not everybody likes everything. Some people dislike Halo merely because a lot of people do like Halo, and that's just their problem.

You can't talk about Halo without talking about innovation. As far as I know, and I might be mistaken, the Halo series pioneered the regenerating health system. Sadly, while this worked in Halo with Master Chief's recharging energy shields, in regular games with the regular soldier's regenerating human body, it gets a little implausible. I honestly feel that so many games should not have jumped on this bandwagon. We've missed out on over half a decade of potential innovations in terms of health systems because developers were content to use either the health bar or regenerating health.

Every game tried to add and improve upon the old, and in terms of R&D Halo 2 comes out on top. Then again it's for that selfsame reason that Halo 3 didn't innovate and improve as much; it didn't really need to. Sure, we got the Equipment or whatever they were called, but those didn't go over so well, and perhaps could've been left out entirely. But then, Halo 3 introduced Forge and the Theater, creating whole new dimensions of fun. Now Halo: Reach seems to be trying to perfect the free-roaming shooter formula that some of Halo's levels toyed with and Halo 3: ODST experimented with.

As with Gothic II, what Halo boils down to is sheer enjoyment. I can pick this game up virtually any time and enjoy myself to some degree, usually a considerable one. I've yet to find another game that does that, even Gothic II. That doesn't mean that I call Halo the best game (series) ever. It's just one of my favorite things.

The Break

2010-05-23T15:36:00.003+03:00

Hello,

Sadly, this week's update will be very thin, I would even say wafer-thin, and will not be the conclusion to the My Favorite Things series. The fact of the matter here is that I spent most of my weekend organizing, playing at and cleaning up after a certain gig, and am now faced with a plethora of other tasks to perform. I'll bring you this small update in between crises.

I had a brief foray with the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta. I managed to play a grand total of four games, I think. I would've focused on playing more if I had known that the beta would be a scant few weeks short, opening on May 3rd and closing recently on the 20th. What I did manage to experience I definitely liked. I only played a few games of Team Slayer and the gameplay felt familiar without feeling worn. However, it had been months since I even touched an FPS game and thus there was some initial uncertainty.

The new weapons felt good, the new feature of armour powers worked well and the return of the health bar caused no trouble. Overall it felt good. It didn't revolutionize the Halo multiplayer experience just yet, but then again, the beta was in itself a limited serving, a sample platter, of what Reach has to offer, and I sampled an even narrower selection from the platter. I feel confident and good about this game.

The first reviews for Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands arrived, and I feel disappointed. It sounds like a return to some of the flaws of the first Sands of Time game. I don't think I'll be getting this title. Likewise Alan Wake has arrived, and I am feeling unsure about the game. From the little that I've heard so far it seems that the game is banking a little too hard on additional episodes to be purchased after the game itself. Seeing as I'm already paying full price for a game I don't like the idea of having to purchase expensive add-on episodes. My main problem here is that these episodes are less add-ons, that is to say external additions, and more "continue-ons, that is to say extensions of the actual game itself, something that should've been part of the game to begin with. As more reliable reviews arrive and I become familiar with them I'll form my final opinion.

Until next time, kids.

My Favorite Things, Part II

2010-05-15T22:45:00.005+03:00

Hello

Welcome to the second part of my top games entry. Last time around we discussed games that have been in some way significant in terms of my gaming career. This second entry won't be the final one, because I wound up producing a hell of a lot more text than I thought I would, so I decided to make this a three-entry deal. Today, we focus on two out of the four games that I just plain like (the most). I don't think I have any surprises in store, though. Again, these are in no particular order of favourite-ness.

Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time series

Yeah, I should point out right now that three of these four games are in fact game series, for reasons which I will explain. Also, I want to emphasize here that the series in question is just the Sands of Time series of Prince of Persia, not the generic Prince of Persia semi-series it was based on nor the strange new semi-series that is being based off of it.

The reason this entry is a series is because I can't pick a single game from the trilogy (the Sands of Time, Warrior Within and Two Thrones) is because they're really all equally good. None of them are perfect, because every time a new game improved on the old, it also screwed up in one way or another. The reason I'm including this entry is because, quite simply put, this is the best and most innovative platforming game I've played. The platforming is cool and works well and is actually augmented by the series' iconic control over time.

The first game I played in the series was Warrior Within because I got it along with my graphics card (along with Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, which incidentally also got me started into a new series). I really liked it. That is to say I freaking loved it. I have lost all recollection of how many times I've played that game through. In a way I was lucky to enter the series here, because I my enjoyment of the gameplay itself wasn't marred by the much-criticized change in the tone of the game. While The Sands of Time was, slightly exaggeratingly, a fairytale adventure, Warrior Within tried to be more serious and mature. Not only was the subsequent change in tone very drastic, Warrior Within also overdid it pretty badly. While even I found the over-the-top grittiness and mature-ity-ness of Warrior Within a bit annoying, I found the Prince of the first game equally annoying because he was just such a wet noodle I couldn't stand him.

As the last statement suggested, I did eventually go on to play the Sands of Time. I bought it, played through, had a good time and I've never touched it since. I kept hearing how the first game had stronger platforming but I honestly can't stand by that argument. Warrior Within stands pretty much shoulder to shoulder in terms of the platforming mechanics and in fact comes through as winner when it comes to what the game does with the platforming.

The biggest fault of Sands of Time was the combat. It was pretty functional as such, but the problem is with how the game treated it. Instead of having small-to-medium scale fights seasoning the platforming along the way like Warrior Within wisely had, Sands of Time had very clearly separate fighting and platforming sections. It was platforming, then fighting, then platforming and then fighting, as opposed to platforming and fighting together. And in the end, the combat in Sands of Time was cumbersome and unenjoyable.

The final game, Two Thrones, seemed to fix everything. It toned down the grittiness and found a pleasant middle-ground between the two previous games and took the best of both worlds. Well, that's what it looked like. In the end it felt a lot like a bland version of Warrior Within, because it played like Warrior Within, but was less angsty. Yes, that was what we had hoped for, but along with the angst the game lost what I can only call panache and style. There wasn't anything really wrong with it, but it didn't feel the same.

In the end this remains one of the best game series ever, because it knows what it's doing and does it well and tended to add in some innovation while it was at it.

Mass Effect series

Using the umbrella term 'series' might be a bit misleading since the third one isn't out yet. But what the hell, I'll do this anyway. Once again, I'm including the whole series because I can't pick one over the other one or the not-yet-existing one. Like with our previous entry, both games have made improvements that were balanced by... de-provements?

On with the show. While Mass Effect is a series of shooter/RPG games the series here does not represent the best in either category. The reason I love Mass Effect and call it one of my favourite game series is storytelling. Mass Effect does not have the best story, but it does have the best storytelling I've seen. The dialogue is good, the voice-acting is good and the visual telling of the story (cinematography in terms of video games). The dialogue system in Mass Effect is amazing. Also, I repeat as I have many times before that Mass Effect has good, strong characters, something I'm very unused to in video games.

I won't spend a lot of time here comparing Mass Effects 1 and 2, because I did that a few weeks back in the blog entry concerning Mass Effect 2. In short, I enjoy them in equal amounts but for different reasons. What didn't change between the two games was the quality of storytelling. And that's what sets Mass Effect apart.

OK, another entry done. Tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion!

My Favorite Things, Part I

2010-05-07T23:14:00.006+03:00

Hello there, my little congregation

Today, we have part one of our... top games topic. And couldn't really decide on a Top 10 list or anything so I just picked out eight games. The first four are the games that are in some ways the most significant for me rather than my favourite games. I've picked out my four favourite games for the second part, though they'll be in no particular order of favourite-ness. But so, now, first we have the four most significant games for me.

Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings

The Age of Empires series is considered to be one of the greatest real-time strategy game series ever. I never played the first one, but from what I can tell the Age of Kings, released in '99, really perfected the formula. I also got the third game released in '05, but that one didn't really do much for me. On the other hand, the spinoff game, Age of Mythology from '02, was just awesome, though I still thought Age of Kings to be better.

Age of Kings is quite simply seminal to my entire gaming career. It was a sort of gateway game into gaming itself for me, rather than to specific genres like two of the other games we have here. I was certainly into video games before Age of Kings, but with AoK I really became a video gamer.

As a geek I was very much into medieval European culture, knights and that sort of stuff. That was a big part of the charm for me. AoK had that as well as a wealth of information on the cultures of the era. The expansion set, Age of Conquerors was a great addition in that sense. Of course, the gameplay also functioned marvellously. It was easy to get into and offered plenty.

I haven't played AoK in years, and I probably wouldn't enjoy it nearly as much since I haven't been into RTS games in a long while. But as I've said, Age of Kings was a great place to start with an interesting setting and easy, approachable gameplay. My fascination with Age of Kings led on to...

Empire Earth II

Since I was into RTSs thanks to Age of Kings, it was easy to go on to Empire Earth II in 2005. From the gaming culture perspective, EE2 wasn't nearly as significant as Age of Kings. For me it was a huge step up just thanks to the bigger scale compared to AoK, taking place over the entirety of human history and went on into the future. What makes the game remarkable for me was how it introduced me to user-made content with its scenario editor. I spent years playing around with that scenario editor. That editor was also used for the game's campaigns, all of which were great. Anyway, when I discovered that I could add something to the games I played, whole new avenues were opened to me.

Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight & Jedi Knight: Jedi Outcast

Jedi Knight, released in '97, was a sequel to Dark Forces from '95. This was really my first first-person shooter and more or less got me started with the genre. Moreover, I only got into Jedi Knight because it was Star Wars and goddamnit, I love Star Wars. I'm one of those freaks who can actually honestly enjoy Episodes I through III as well. So yeah, playing at being a Jedi in Jedi Knight was pretty awesome.

Actually more significant than Jedi Knight was its sequel, Jedi Outcast, released in 2002. It took Jedi Knight's formula and, once again, smoothed it out. This was, once again, a game I spent years with. It improved on Jedi Knight in several ways. Firstly, Jedi Knight's gameplay wasn't all that impressive. What was impressive was the sheer scope, which in my book remains quite unparalleled for an FPS. Jedi Outcast, in comparison, wasn't quite as grand, but made up for that by doing just about everything else better. Force Powers really worked now. In Jedi Knight they were awkward and difficult to use, except for the very simplest powers. In Jedi Outcast they all worked marvellously.

The game wasn't perfect. There were some incredibly frustrating puzzles and the game suffered from starting out very slowly. Past that, you had a game that functioned well. Moreover, the story was really good and there were hints of character development along the way. Though I haven't gone back to the game, I still have a soft spot for it in my heart.

Knight of the Old Republic

This was my first role-playing game, unless you count Pokémon (which you could, I suppose, but I won't). Again, I was only interested in KotOR because it was a Star Wars game. If you're noticing a pattern with me into getting new genres just because they were Star Wars, there's a reason. I simply had no other way of approaching these genres. But yeah, it turned out that RPGs were just the genre for me, offering real replay value and story! KotOR really blew my mind away. Also, I got into modding thanks to KotOR and its active modding community.

KotOR was above all an experience. While Jedi Knight and Jedi Outcast were set in the Star Wars universe, they didn't really draw you in like KotOR did. In KotOR, you experienced the Star Wars universe. Moreover, one of the best things about KotOR was how it took a chance with its setting, which was, as the title suggests, the Old Republic, set thousands of years before the era of the Star Wars movies. This was a time period previously explored only in some of the Star Wars comic books. Using this setting, KotOR could usher in some new, fresh plot elements, compared to previous Star Wars games. The enemy wasn't the Galactic Empire or some obscure crime lord. This was a time when the real bad guys, of Star Wars, the Sith, were in full numbers and so were the Jedi.

The story was great, as I said. The big twist very well done and quite unexpected without being completely implausible. Characterization was still on the weaker side, but better than I was then used to. That said, characterization in Bioware games reached a new height with Mass Effect and later Mass Effect 2. I feel that KotOR was crucial to Bioware in getting there in terms of characterization in their games. It's a shame they pretty much forgot all about that with Dragon Age...

The sequel to KotOR was a bittersweet experience. It was superior in terms of gameplay and the mechanics of the game, but ultimately what it did with those, mainly the story and the setting, paled in comparison to the first game. Nevertheless, KotOR 2 had some beautiful moments and at times surprisingly deep subject matter.

OK! That was that kids. Tune in next week for my favourite four games! Until then.

First Fantasy, Part Two

2010-05-01T13:25:00.004+03:00

Hiya, kids

Sorry about missing last week's update. Couldn't be helped. Anyway, it's time to continue our Final Fantasy XIII experiment. I've made it to the third disc, and I actually got there a few weeks ago but haven't touched the game since. Not because I'm not loving it (I am, more on that shortly) but I've suddenly wanted to play a lot of other games, too, specifically Dragon Age and Assassin's Creed II. I'm going to return to FFXIII soon, but I'll be pretty busy the next few weeks (not too busy to update you folks, though) so I don't know when exactly 'soon' will be. Before that I'll probably write up something about AC2 and Dragon Age: Origins along with its add-on, Awakening.

So, anyway, Final Fantasy XIII. As I said, I love it. OK, love might be too strong a word, but I've certainly had tons of fun. One reason I've temporarily abandoned the game is that I'm (perhaps foolishly) afraid that it'll end too soon. If there is even a single FF veteran reading this who just almost choked on something when he/she read that, my work here is done.

The game has surprised me positively on several accounts. The characters aren't nearly as unbearable as I thought they would be, the story is quite good and there are actually some deep themes to it. To spoil you the first few hours of the game, our main characters wind up in a position where they suddenly become what are called Pulse L'Cie. These L'Cie are pretty much pure evil and are de facto enemies of our characters' home, or at least that's what these people have been raised up to believe. From this starting point there's a nice amount of pondering on this topic: are these things as evil as we've been led to believe? It's not a completely original idea, but I've certainly enjoyed the story.

The characters also came as a positive surprise in the sense that they aren't all quite as bad as I thought they would be. My idea of an average jRPG's main character (based on very little experience, granted) is that they're either a brooding, sullen character who always says "... Whatever" or that they're those peppy, hyped up 24/7 idealist kids who smile and grin all the goddamned time and always do the right thing because they're good and incorruptible inside. Well, there's also the much more western-influenced main character who has no personality at all so they player can supposedly put themselves in the character's position. This is honestly just a bad idea, and I may tell you some day why. Back on topic, while FFXIII has more of an ensemble cast rather than a single lead, none of the characters are quite as annoying as I'd feared. The "main character" as such is a woman called Lightning, and while she is relatively brooding and angry, we're given a good reason for why she behaves that way, and her behaviour changes over the course of the story.

OK, what about the gameplay? JRPGS traditionally have turn-based combat, but FFXIII mixes that up a little. The combat is at heart still turn-based, but looks much more real-timey and generally flows more smoothly. Unlike in most RPGS with multiple characters, here you only control one character at a time. There's a feature called Auto-Battle which automatically selects the computer's idea of an optimal set of actions for your turn. I admit, this sounds like quite a horrible idea, but this lets the player focus on other aspects of combat, most importantly the Paradigm system. In combat, each character has a handful of Roles, each of which grants a different set of abilities to use. A Paradigm is a set of Roles divided between the three characters you control at a time. You can set up multiple Paradigms beforehand. The combat then becomes a question of which Paradigm suits the current situation best, since Paradigms can be changed on the fly in combat.

The combat system, especially Auto-Battle, has still been criticized for essentially turning the player into nothing more than an observer, or at very best a project manager (the guy who tells you what to do, himself does nothing and still collects a bigger pay check than you). I can sympathize with this view, but I say the Paradigm system gives the combat plenty of depth. And moreover, using Auto-Battle is not mandatory. However, I do find a few faults with the combat system. My biggest gripe is that if your main character goes down in battle, it's game over. This is annoying when you have team mates conscious and capable of reviving you. There simply is no logical reason for forcing a game over here.

A few more things. For the first ten chapters of the game, the plot splits up and goes down several different avenues. While this is plot-wise very good, the gameplay suffers because your party gets split up along with the characters. You end up with two separate sets of two characters. This reduces the possibilities of the Paradigm system and gets on your nerves after a while. On a different track, there are no random encounters in this game. Traditionally in jRPGs you run around until suddenly a monster pops up from nowhere. No, this time around you actually see the enemies and combat is only initiated if you run into them. This grants exploration a new tactical facet, as you can avoid combat if you so wish. Additionally, attacking monsters before they see you grants you a bonus when the combat starts.

OK, that's what I've got so far on Final Fantasy XIII. I hope to get back to it soon, but I make no promises. Until next time, everybody.

Weekend 16

2010-04-22T23:40:00.002+03:00

I'm away for the weekend and I don't have the time to write up a filler entry, so, don't hold your breath this Saturday.

Child of Mass Effect

2010-04-18T23:37:00.007+03:00

Hello there, everyone.

Sorry for the late update, but I had a busy weekend. For those of you expecting a Final Fantasy entry, no avail. Today we handle Mass Effect 2.

What can I say about Mass Effect 2? It's a great game, as has been pointed out by pretty much everyone. I'm not going to contest that. Bioware cocked a kindly ear to the cries of the fans and addressed I think every issue raised. The problem here is that in some matters Bioware was a little overzealous. Let's tackle those issues.

Obviously one thing that received endless criticism was the vehicle sections. I definitely agree that driving MAKO around got very tedious very soon. In ME2 the MAKO is replaced by the mineral scanner. I think that the mineral scanner is even worse. It's fidgety, hard to use properly and I never felt I was actually doing anything. At least with the MAKO I was doing something, and it helped that I took pretty much every MAKO section as a personal challenge to flip the thing over on its top (I succeeded once and the game crashed). With the mineral scanner you're really just pushing buttons.

The inventory system in ME1 received a lot of criticism for being hard to manage due to a small view and a huge amount of items. In ME2 they really took the axe to that. There's just a few guns and just the one modifiable suit of armour with just a few upgrades. It's actually pretty hard to complain about this. If this was just a shooter with roleplaying elements it'd be a lot to choose from, but coming from a strong RPG background the lack of variety is kind of upsetting and the whole way the thing went from a hundred to zero in no seconds flat. Just reducing the number of upgrades (which was always the biggest pain for me) and crafting a more user-friendly interface would've sufficed.

A few other things I'd like to address. The shooting gameplay is a great deal smoother. I can't point out any major changes to the core mechanics but it works a hell of a lot better. Yes, there are changes like the removal of health bars, addition of clips, but the core seems the same, but a lot smoother. That said, the game feels incredibly shooty, so to speak.

What I refer to is the amount of shooting. I was doing a lot of side quests early on, and I soon noticed that a disproportionately large amount of quests seemed to consist of a shoot-out or a dozen. I think I remember one side quest that wasn't shooting. Actually, now that I think about it, I can't remember more than two from ME1 either, but it didn't bother me back then, so something is different. Yes, the shooting gameplay is just great. I love it. But when everything seemed to end in shooting, I was annoyed. What's the point of playing an empathic Paragon character when you still end up shooting everyone? And sometimes the reasons for said action sequences were really contrived and actually hurt the storytelling.

And a little about the story. For ME2's story I have nothing but praise. What I want to draw attention is the characters and how they're fleshed out. I pointed this out with ME1, too, but it's done even better this time around, as far as I'm concerned. But there's one thing about the story that bugs me (this discussions will spoil the arguably foreseeable conclusion for ME2/setting for ME3, so stop reading now if you want to be spared).

ME2 closes with a shot of the Reaper armada approaching Milky Way. We pretty much saw this coming ever since we learned that Reapers are legion way back in ME1. But I have a pretty bad feeling about how this will be resolved. I mean, the whole of the first game was spent trying to fight a single Reaper and our heroes came out just barely on top. So how are we expected to survive tens if not hundreds of thousands or more?

Well, the most predictable two solutions are as follows: The first is our heroes coming up with a weapon that just screws up the Reapers. Either we invent it or we discover something someone else invented. How could we invent something that much more advanced civilizations failed to come up with (unless we resort to a deus ex machine plot device)? Or the other option; why haven't the Reapers found it? They've been over the galaxy with a fine-toothed comb several times. There's no sensible reason for them having missed it, unless, again, deus ex machina. The second predictable solution is discovering some fatal weakness the Reapers have. This is marginally better than the scenarios described above, but I still want a proper reason why everybody else missed it thus far, instead of yet another deus ex machina explanation for discovering said weakness.

I may seem like I'm whining excessively about deus ex machina plot devices. What I want to avoid is ending up with a solution that makes me go, "wow, that was convenient". I'm okay, as such, with discovering a fatal weakness or something as long as there's adequate explanation for why the hell nobody else thought of it until now. I'm this worried about this because the ride has been stellar so far and I'd hate for the ending to be a letdown. It just seems that the men and women of the Mass Effect writing team have dug themselves a hole too deep to logically climb out of. But there's still hope.

So. Mass Effect 2. Great, but not perfect. Try again, Bioware.

Until next time, kids.

First Fantasy, Part One

2010-03-31T19:25:00.006+03:00

Hello, kiddies.

As the title suggests, we've entered Final Fantasy territory. I've always more or less liked Japanese RPGs (or JRPGS, here pronounced, mockingly, yarr-peg) but thanks to my choice of console I've had very little experience with them. I made a foray into the genre with Lost Odyssey, but I've never succeeded in completing the game. I don't know why, because I like it. But I've never managed to finish it. On a whim, I decided to decide to get Final Fantasy XIII. I usually only purchase games I'm pretty sure I'll like, but I'm really taking a leap into the dark with FFXIII.

To have something to write about I will be covering my first experience in a few parts. This first installment is the sum of my feeling before I played the game. I'll probably write one, possibly two, from the "middle" of the game and a final one after I'm done.

As I said, this is just a prelude, letting you know where I'm coming from. My so-called friends have already informed me that Final Fantasy XIII is bad, bad, bad, and via mathematical proof!

A="FFx>7 is the shit"?

B="Final Fantasy 13 is the shit"

P(A)=1

P(B | A) = (P(B and A))/(P(A))

(OK, I'm not a 100% sure about that, it's been a long time since I did probability.)

Unequivocally proving that FFXIII is the shit. Well, we'll see about that. Apparently Final Fantasy fans are split into two camps. The first think that anything involving Final Fantasy must be awesomeness incarnate and shower anything with "Final Fantasy" in the title with praise. At the other end of the curve we have the folks who steadfastly hold that Final Fantasy VII was the last worthwhile game and everything since has been the shit (see above).

What we have there is a perfect show case of anti-fan behavior. Anti-fans are as bad as normal fans and they're plenty more hateful. But I'm coming to the series free of virtually all bias, so you, my readers, can enjoy an honest opinion. Also, this message: Square Enix, FF anti-fans, I'm open to bribes!

So tune in next time to see what I think of FFXIII so far. I'm looking forward to it.

Settling In

2010-03-29T22:04:00.011+03:00

Here's a small status update. Since chickening out I've played Halo 3: ODST, Dragon Age: Origins, Assassin's Creed II and Modern Warfare 2 and Mass Effect 2. I'm looking forward to the new Splinter Cell game, coming out in a few weeks. On the fence about Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening, will comment as situation develops. Then, of course, there's the litany of titles coming out in autumn or early next year.

At least I'll have stuff to write about covering my backlog. These games have been out for a while, some whiles longer than others, so I won't be prioritizing those, but rather using them as fillers. I'll try and cover Splinter Cell: Conviction as soon as possible to get something fresh in here.

The first thing I'll get out of the way is Modern Warfare 2 (you remember, the Call of Duty game that isn't a Call of Duty game). I'm in a slightly uncomfortable and immensely ironic position with this game. For the uninformed, the game has become notorious for its single player campaign that is short. And apparently very short. I say 'apparently' because I haven't finished it. I've got a pretty good record on obstinately finishing campaigns and this is a terribly short campaign.

I just couldn't bring myself to finish it! I spent one afternoon with it and after the end of my few hours' session I just thought that I honestly could be doing something else. I haven't really gone back since, except for a brief thrill with the co-op mode. But the campaign really did nothing for me. I don't know exactly what the problem was, really. The gameplay was just as good and the missions were interesting, but I just... I couldn't go on. I was not interested.

Now, some of you might cry out in despair, "what about the multiplayer?". I haven't touched it. I pretty much know I'll be sucked in, because it'll probably be just like the previous game's multiplayer. Hell, they might've even improved it. But so far I haven't tried it. I did try out the cooperative mode, and I like it. It features missions from both this game and the previous Modern Warfare translated from single to multiplayer mode. Some missions are kind of annoying and maybe I just can't get the idea. There was this one where you have to breach a door and then proceed down this corridor with everybody shooting at you from all sides! I dunno, maybe myself and my compatriot didn't get the idea, but we ended up skipping that mission. One mission from the previous game where you're a sniper sneaking through wasteland near the ruins of Chernobyl. The co-op version is different and actually pretty difficult since you've got enemy snipers to handle as well. Very cool experience.

I guess it's just that MW2 is too much like MW1. But I don't know if it's that, 'cause I still had tons of fun with MW1's single player campaign. I will not say anything definitive on MW2 yet, except that yes, it's streamlined and runs well and everything else than rang true for MW1. If I do go back, I'll give you the full rundown. But until then, this is all I have.

That's it for now. Yes, I'm being a huge cheat by lumping this together with that return announcement, but I figured I might as well get this out of the way. Next week I'll have something more substantial, I promise.

Back to the Future

2010-03-29T18:48:00.015+03:00

Well...

Hi there, kids.

This is awkward.

I figure this is maybe kinda like the return of an estranged parent after years of absence. OK, it's only been six months, but it has felt like a much longer time for me for several reasons I will not go into. But I stand by the metaphor. There's the catching-up with everything that's happened in the time I was gone, the disinclination to make eye contact and the conflicting emotions of either being happy about the reunion or being angry that I dared come back. So yeah. Awkward...

I will hasten to say that I have missed this on some level. I kept coming back, almost regularly, to try and take up the task again. I once even managed to write 250 words of something before going "screw it" and doing something much more disinteresting. In the name of honesty I will also explain the entire breadth of my motives here. I'm coming back to write just to see if I can get back to the rhythm of writing for a blog now that a lot of my spare time has come back to me. But I'm not so sure if I want to keep writing about video games. I still love video games, even if I've spent a lot less time with them over the last six months than usually, mostly due to being so busy. But I'm not sure if I want to write about video games. I might enjoy this immensely and keep at it for years to come, but I might just as well drop the thing again without warning, either for another blog or just because I can't be bothered.

I am back, though, if only for now. I've got a small backlog of games to comment on, even if that's a bit redundant, and a grand total of... Huh, just one game to look forward to. I still urge my reader(s) to contact me with topics they'd like me to discuss. Asking for particular game reviews is a bit iffy, since I'd actually have to get the game assuming I don't have it. But general topics, game demos, sure. I'm up for it. Either leave something in the comments box or send mail to couchpreacher@gmail.com

The new schedule will aim for weekends, Saturday to be precise. It might swing anywhere from Friday to Monday, but if it's Tuesday I'll just leave it 'till next week.

Hiatus

2009-10-08T13:34:00.002+03:00

Two years, three months and twenty-five days. That adds up to 848 days. That's how long this blog has been "up", including the previous incarnation at GameTrailers.Com.

Fifty-eight entries. 56 583 words.

I have to admit I'm proud of myself.

Zero feedback.

Yeah, not so much.

At this point I'm shelving this whole blog. I've been finding it hard enough to write about interesting stuff now that I have a schedule, and I'm finding it hard to be motivated. So for now the Couch Preacher will stop writing. Well, writing for this blog, anyway. If any other textual projects come up I'll announce it here.

I may come back some day to write again. For those who feel this should happen sooner rather than later, feel free to take initiative in making me interested. The contact info is all there.

Until later.

Guest Entry: the Land of VMA

2009-09-27T15:37:00.002+03:00

Hi, kids.

Apologies that this entry is a day late. Yesterday was very hectic. This week you get to enjoy a guest entry written by a person currently using the moniker Virtual Martial Artist. I'll be back next week to give you the lowdown on Halo 3: ODST. But now, enjoy our guest.

Good morning fellow gamers.

I'm here to talk about beat 'em up and fighting games, especially from a martial artist's point of view. As you probably know, beat 'em ups are games that revolve around fighting armies of enemies with or without weapons. Weapons lean towards hack and slash games, but for example the Devil May Cry series is a beat 'em up as much as Double Dragon. Fighting games just consist of less contestants, for example Soul Calibur usually has only two characters fighting against each other at the same time.

So there are perhaps two main game types, but that's not all. You can also divide games into two main categories according to ”realism”; the very unrealistic ones (Guilty Gear) and the so called realistic ones (UFC 2009 Undisputed). As the names imply, unrealistic games tend to have combat that has very little to do with reality and realistic games try to give player a good time while trying to achieve relatively realistic combat.

First up are my personal favourites, the games that don't even try to simulate real fights on any level. Why should they? Guilty Gear, Rival Schools and Bloody Roar seem to work just as well even if they defy laws of physics every now and then. Double dashes or transformations just create more entertainment, add depth to gameplay and make things more interesting than characters crawling on the ground. And when the games work withing their own worlds and laws, there's nothing to complain when it comes to realism. You just have to deal with it. Immersion with friends is quite guaranteed more often than not. I'll get back to these later on.

Then some thoughts on ”real world simulations”. First of all I'd like to ask: why are you playing a game if you want to train or have a match? I'm quite sure you could do that yourself. Do you want safety or what? Too lazy or don't you have the patience to train? Truth to be told, I'm awfully curious.

So you have a game that supposedly has combat not unlike the real thing. I admit that these games usually have at least decently animated moves that are quite realistic in basic motion. The thing is, a punch or a kick makes only a small portion of fighting. Most of the fighting is in the style, which consists of many different things, such as movement, the way the power is generated, the eye hand coordination of each fighter, especially the eyes are very important (how did you think fighters dodge and control the distance?). These are the things that can't be simulated, because there are too many unknown factors in every fight.

Then we get to the element that is very often claimed to be the common factor: real world martial arts or styles, whichever you prefer. Not counting wrestling, MMA or general (kick)boxing, games such as Tekken claim to have even real fighting styles. The fighters are said to fight similarily to some martial artists. Truth to be told, the fighters don't usually have good styles since the games themselves are all about flashiness. Real down to earth fighting doesn't look that flashy to your average Joe, does it now?

So why do I prefer extraterrestrial combat? It doesn't even try to simulate those unknown factors but works in its own way. This leaves the gameplay to the player in the fullest. There are moves and some things you have to work out, but all outside that is up to the player. It makes the fighting more fun and in some perspectives it relates to real fighting; you have a style and the eye-hand coordination with right timing gets certain results.

I thank you for your time. Remember, if you really want to play realistic games that involve fighting, you might just as well start practising martial arts instead and have a good time playing Soul Calibur or BlazBlue.

What Game Am I Sinking About?

2009-09-19T21:46:00.001+03:00

OK, kids. Nice to see you again, too. We’re eagerly awaiting Halo 3: ODST (hey, that rhymes!) here and we’ll be talking about that and a few other things today. Detailed analysis and defamation of hype is the name of the game (damnit… I lost the game).

I mentioned Modern Warfare 2 in passing last week. I promised to look into the game’s hype to see what’s what. On the whole the game does seem the same. The graphics engine has reportedly been improved – interesting if true. More interesting is the talk going about the AI. If the developers can actually come through with what they’ve promised, it’ll be amazing. Essentially they’re claiming that the AI in MW2 will dynamically react to the environment and the player, essentially meaning that no two fights will be the same. If you die and respawn the enemies will be in different locations. This sounds unlikely to me, but would of course be awesome if true.

Otherwise MW2 seems to be very similar to CoD4 (those of you who are confused now did not read last week’s entry – repent). Not in itself a bad thing; CoD4 is a very good game. I’m more concerned about the lack of innovation, something I discussed earlier. I definitely believe in the ”don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” school of thought, but I also believe in the ”if you can’t add anything to the concept stop re-releasing it under false pretenses of innovation” school of thought. I’ll see if I’m interested enough to get it at the release or if I’ll once again wait a few months.

A few lines about ODST, now. I actually think that right now the two things I’m the most interested in are the mix of free-roaming gameplay and linear gameplay and the return of the formerly ubiquitous health meter. The form of gameplay interests me because it’s very different. Except for some areas of the Xbox Ninja Gaiden I haven’t really played any games that mix linear and non-linear gameplay. The Zelda games might have, but I honestly don’t know.

Anyway, onto the point. A nonlinear shooter most likely suffers from uneven pacing and a linear shooters suffers from… well, being linear, really. ODST’s design of slow-paced, stealthy free-roaming gameplay intersped with shorter, separate spurts of fast action seems like a match made in heaven and I certainly hope it’s been pulled off well. It sounds like a concept other games might benefit from, provided more solutions as to why are found than ODST’s storyline flashbacks.

The return of the health bar is also interesting, and I seriously need to come up with a new adjective to describe the state of being interested (I’m going to subsitute ”hoopy” from now on). Anyway, I talked about the health bar versus recharging health a while back. When it comes to both realism and playability they have their pros and cons. However, the health bar has been more or less completely absent since Halo 2 did away with it. My pet peeve with the health bar is the whole ”one scrape between death and perfect health” situation. I think that the way to go is a partially recharging health bar with direct effects on gameplay even before death. Anyway, it’ll be hoopy to play a shooter with the health bar. I’ll be sure to find some stories to bring back and use them to point out the uselessness of the health bar.

The most important thing for ODST, in my opinion, is to have enough distance from Halo 3. After all, in Halos one through three you play as a superhuman soldier clad in the finest gear mankind can afford. In ODST you’re just another grunt. If I can pull the same crazy shit as the Rookie as I can as the Master Chief something has gone wrong. It won’t detract from the gameplay, just from the experience.

A few lines before signing off… I do hope that the gaming scene will pick up before my blog entries descend into bitching about the Guitar Hero franchise. The summer, as always, is a dry season and the gaming season is just kicking off. Next week I of course hope to have an entry cobbled together on Halo 3: ODST, but there’s no way to tell. My copy might arrive late, my Xbox might explode or I might just not have the time to play enough of the game for a proper entry. Regardless, I promise to shut up about hype for a week, maybe even two or three, unless something monumentary happens. For now, nightie night. Until next week.

Status Check

2009-09-12T22:11:00.000+03:00

Hello, world.

No Games Revisited installment this week. As I said, all I had was Ninja Gaiden 2 lined up, and it wouldn’t be much fun. It’ll still be three weeks until my spare time looks up again. For this week, I’ll settle on re-reviewing the current hype.

So, bad news first, such as they are. I’m rapidly losing interest in Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins. While as such I’d like a proper fake medieval RPG right about soon there are currently too many irritating aspects to DA:O. Granted, once the first reviews come out I might change my mind, but right now I’m not feeling too optimistic about it. In other bad news, the new Splinter Cell was bumped up into 2010. Eh.

In other news, I’m feeling pretty good about Halo 3: ODST and Borderlands. Well, I was never feeling bad about ODST, but the release date being inside of two weeks has a slight effect. Borderlands has, in turn, had me alternating between both sides of the fence. Right now I’m more optimistic again. It’s still a ways away, so more on that as hype increases.

Assassin’s Creed 2’s hype has been going up again, and the latest gameplay trailer was very promising. Then again, the case with AC2 is much the same as with ODST, meaning that I’ve never felt anything but good about it. Logic heavily mixed with optimism would dictate that the only direction is forward, but Ubisoft has made fools of us all in the past. Consider the Prince of Persia series, where each game improved something but lacked something that was there in the previous game. Then again, Splinter Cells tended to get better and better each time. Double Agent was pretty awesome and Conviction seems very awesome.

With my recent replaying of Call of Duty 4, the sequel (Call of Duty 6, except that they dropped the series and just called it Modern Warfare 2, except, again, in the box art) made its way into my radar. I’d previously been less interested mostly because it was sandwiched between various more interesting titles. Now that I was reminded of how slick CoD’s action is I regained interest. I haven’t really immersed myself in the hype yet, so I’ll comment more on that once I have. The make or break here will probably be whether or not the gameplay has evolved and by how much so if it has.

On the Mass Effect 2 front things have been pretty quiet. Understandable, considering the game might at most be still more than six months away, and that’s just the current schedule (Q1 2010). Actually I might be happier with a March release, since I’ll again be terribly busy both before and after the New Year comes calling.

OK, that’s the deal for today. Next week, I’ll think of something, but the week after that – Halo: ODST! Until then, kids.

Games Revisited: Call of Duty 4

2009-09-05T22:37:00.000+03:00

Hello, children.

Today we begin our revisitational journey into games of old. Probably not that old, though. First off the bat is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. For a change, instead of focusing on the multiplayer I replayed the campaign, this time on the highest difficulty setting. I actually had a lot of fun and ran into surprisingly few spots where I was stuck for a longer span of time. Towards the end there were a few spots that were quite annoying, and through that I'll transition to my first piece of irate criticism.

I recall CoD4 being hyped (in part) with the idea that you're just another soldier. Essentially this meant that events progress without the player doing anything, even just sitting in a corner. This is actually true, but just for the first few levels. Towards the end (straight away after the first few levels) the player is elevated to the central role of the center of the universe. One particularly irksome spot was where you have to find cover from an overhead helicopter spraying lead into you and your mates. Curiously enough, no matter where you hide or what you do while your AI buddies shoot the living daylights out of enemy forces, the helicopter will always circle around you and shoot at only you. Annoying in itself, yes, but more so when you recall the whole “just another spent solider” thing. This also happens with stuff like being ordered to blow up this bridge of something, and these cases I understand. But that helicopter thing was just vengeful.

I developed two more pet peeves during the experience. The first of these is actually an old one I rediscovered. That is the enemies' use of grenades, which is immense in quantity and ridiculous in accuracy. There are a few YouTube videos showcasing this: hide in a coop while there are enemies advancing on you and you'll spend three minutes being surrounded by even five grenades at once. Dovetailing into that previous thing about the helicopter, there was an ally of mine nearby who went almost totally unnoticed. The second pet peeve, probably a new one, is that enemies can shoot from cover while you, the player, can't. It isn't usually a problem, but in a few sections requiring fine tuning it irks.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare remains an immensely entertaining game. The shooting itself works perfectly well. The few adjustments the gameplay needs are more than doable, and I'm slightly interested in Modern Warfare 2. I'd say I like it as much now as I did before. More importantly I focused more on single player this time rather than multiplayer.

OK, so much for the first Game Revisited. Not as juicy as I thought. However, I've been short on time recently and will remain short on time for at least a few weeks more. Next up in GaRe (lame name, yes) is Ninja Gaiden II, which will be even drier to re-review than CoD in all likelihood. Ah, well. Still got that guest writing thing.

Until later.

Atmospheric

2009-08-29T21:01:00.000+03:00

Here we are again.

I reiterate, the blog now updates only on Saturdays. Couldn't be helped. But hey wahey – I'm here now. Gonna talk a bit about the new Batman game, Arkham Asylum. No, I didn’t actually get it. I’ve just been passively observing it and I thought it prudent to make a few comments.

The feedback AA has been getting has been very positive, which is only natural, as their program helps thousands of people each year. OK, I won’t make that joke again. Arkham Asylum is being hailed as the best Batman game ever. Apparently not without reason, either. From what I’ve seen that praise is certainly deserved. Gameplay seems smooth and uncluttered. The game is also undoubtedly Batman. What I find particularly refreshing is the tone of the game. It’s more in the vein of the original comics and cartoon rather than the more recent ones, but it’s also a little bit more mature than the source material but without being dark like Batman Begins and its sequel.

I doubt I’ll get the game any time soon, if I get it at all. In addition to being lower on funds than I’d like to be, I’m not that interested in a Batman game because I’m not that interested in Batman. Sure, you might argue that Halo isn’t a Master Chief game. I’m not interested in a Master Chief game, I’m interested in a Halo game. So what’s the problem? Well, when a franchise is built around a single persona like the Batman the game’s tend to be about Batman – that’s the novelty of it.

Onto the main topic today: atmosphere. What, why and like what will be the questions answered today. So what is atmosphere? It’s the mood or feeling in a situation. Every game creates some kind of atmosphere, while the emphasis varies. A tactical shooter is rarely about atmosphere and banks more heavily on immersion. The line between the two is very thin, but discernible. Horror games, a genre with which I’m not familiar, is traditionally all about atmosphere. Since I’m a snob who likes reminiscing about the good old times (mostly because I’m bitter about having missed them) I’ll point out that recent horror games are more about holy crap a monster just jumped out of that closet! rather than actual atmosphere.

Returning briefly to an earlier topic, immersion, atmosphere is a key part. Thief 3’s infamous (to me, at least) horror-esque sequence, the Shalebridge Cradle, was immensely atmospheric and suckered me in like a… tear in the hull of a spacecraft. If it wasn’t obvious, I was immersed so strongly because the atmosphere was so strong.

Atmosphere isn’t necessarily born of intensity, like in a shooter or a horror game. Atmosphere can be relaxed. Regular, slow-paced RPGs like Gothic and even Oblivion are very atmospheric at times. Fallout 3 had extremely atmospheric moments. Through these three examples, we can explore one key part of atmosphere: the world.

The game world is a key part of RPGs. The more interesting, well-crafted and thoughtful a world is, the stronger atmosphere it creates. Fallout 3 banks heavily on the setting, legacy from the olden days of Fallout. A dystopian, ruined version of our world is inherently interesting and Fallout created that future very well. Emerging from an underground Vault for the first time to look over the nuclear Wasteland is a unique sensation. Yes, by now pretty much every review of Fallout 3 has quoted that same moment from the game, but there’s a reason for it. It’s an incredibly strong, atmospheric moment. It probably stuck with more than anything else in the game.

Oblivion has it’s own moments of atmosphere, though they’re less intentionally crafted than in the aforementioned example. I remember one moment in particular, climbing over a hill to see the sunrise. It showcased Oblivion's graphics very well. It was very atmospheric as well and kept me immersed for hours.

In an interesting display of irony, I have no singular memories of Gothic pertaining to atmosphere. The design philosophy of the game is different, but doesn’t particularly suffer from it. And yes, Gothic also has strong atmosphere, this time born out of routine and familiarity with the game. The closest analogue I can think of is returning to something familiar. It was a strong moment, and once again contributed immensely to immersion.

I think that real-time strategy games have the least atmosphere, mostly because the gameplay makes a point of being detached from the action and the atmosphere-creating factors. Immersion in the RTS genre is of another kind, a kind much of its own. However, atmosphere is certainly not tied to genre. Shooters aren’t about atmosphere, as I think I already established, but BioShock, in terms of gameplay undoubtedly a shooter, runs purely on atmosphere and does it incredibly well.

Atmosphere is tied to creating immersion and shares much of the same characteristics in being the saving grace of even a weakly produced game, like Fallout 3 to exaggerate slightly. It’s also a very intangible concept that has no real formula behind it. Most importantly, when a game has a strong atmosphere it suckers you in like a… tear in the hull of a spacecraft.

That’ll be the extent of my ruminations on atmosphere. Now I want to impart a genius idea I’ve had concerning the content of future entries. While the end of the summer drought, heralded by an onslaught of hype, marked by the release of Halo 3: ODST, will provide a lot to talk about, otherwise I have an excellent idea: Games Revisited. I’ll replay some game I haven’t played in a long enough while, reassess my opinions about it and, if there’s enough friction, compare this new assessment with my previous ideas.

Until then.

Maintenance Again

2009-08-27T20:52:00.002+03:00

Hello, kids.

It appears that another schedule change must be made. For the time being, updates are limited to Saturdays only. Yes, I imagine you're disappointed. However, as it stands, this blog is not a major source of income. Rather, it is a hobby based on a number of delusions, all well documented in certain circles. But yes, Saturdays only for the time being. If I can make room for more and feel that my creative persona is up to the ask, I'll up the tempo. Until Saturday.

Regards,

I Don't Know

2009-08-23T17:29:00.002+03:00

Hello, kids.

I don't have a writing vibe going, in large parts due to having suffered from congestion for five days and less plausibly because I already directed all my creative powers at music. I've got one topic in reserve to write about, but I'm gonna save it for when I'm in a more creative mood. So I figured, I'm gonna wing this. I'm seriously going to write down whatever almost-relevant stuff comes to mind. Excuse me while I get something to drink (so much for almost-relevant) (I also have a headache).

So now with a cold, non-alcoholic beverage on my table and a Tom Waits concert ripped from YouTube playing in my ears, let's get down to business.

…

Damnit. I totally had something a sec ago.

Hey, I know. Let's [hear me] talk about video game music, soundtracks. I'm going to ignore Guitar Hero and it's demonic spawn because I'm waiting for Saxophone Hero: John Coltrane. So yeah, game music. To start from the bottom, first there were those horrible NES-era songs that are remembered fondly only because they've been ingrained into the public consciousness. I'm going to seriously start from the era that games actually had real music. Actually, no. I'll just skip straight to the good ones.

So as far as I'm concerned the best game soundtracks ever are those of the Halo games. Composed by Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori, that stuff is just pure genius. In addition to having high quality, Halo music also comes in high quantity. Quantity may be even more important that quality, as far as I'm concerned, within reasonable limits at least. To take Gothic 2 for example, all the tracks were pretty good, but there were very few of them. Before long you wound up listening to the same song for the umpteenth time.

I suppose the repetition problem is the severest with RPGs. Shooters can piece the gameplay into sections and assign music to those sections, whereas in RPGs the game can't be subdivided and thus usually music changes with triggers like a combat situation or a certain area. A prime example of this is Oblivion (which had OK music). Funnily enough, the music ruined any surprise element in combat. If any enemy caught you unawares, the “battle music” would start before their first attack, meaning that you could predict any attacks. As long as we're on the topic of RPGs, Fable probably has my favourite RPG music, though I never bothered buying the soundtrack.

Very few games have excellent soundtracks, but several have mediocre ones. I find that usually a soundtrack suffers, for lack of a better expression, from not leaving an impression. To name names, Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six: Vegas and Ninja Gaiden. I honestly have no recollection of what the music is like in these games. However, this is better than having music that is annoying. I can't really name any examples, but there probably are a few.

So what's important about music in video games? Eh, not much, necessarily, but they do play a big part in creating the atmosphere (again, the subject for a later entry). In a similar vein, music also defines the tone of a situation. This could be used for ironic effect, but I've yet to see a proper example (unless you count the whole concept of Fable). I, for one, campaign for better music in video games, though I campaign very lazily (this entry is the sum of my activities). I also campaign for more interesting music in both video games and the film industry. I'm tired of the “orchestra backed by Gregorian choir”-thing, since it's been done to death, and rarely with particularly good results. Seriously, let's have a whole game's soundtrack recorded by a jazz fusion band. That'd be interesting.

Sequentially

2009-08-20T20:20:00.000+03:00

Tidings, totters.

So. They announced Fable 3. We only know the rough outline of the story right now. It takes place five years after Fable 2, with you playing as the child of Fable 2's protagonist. Also, it's coming out in late 2010. You will be able to rule Albion, and as such affect it's fate. Sounds very nice, more on that as news trickle out to the public.

Seeing as I'm desperate beyond description for topics to write about, I'll write about something as abstract as sequels (you made me do this, you only have yourselves to blame). However, the topic is somewhat prudent, as there are only two titles in the near future that I'm looking forward to that aren't sequels (those two being Dragon Age: Origins and Borderlands). So yeah, let's talk about sequels. Especially lately they've become much more popular and even western games are turning into longer serieses, following suit with Japanese game developers, to whom innovation is a more or less dead concept (more on that shortly).

First, let's see how sequels are good. Well, as is becoming apparent with Mass Effect 2 and Assassin's Creed II, they allow developers to take what was wrong with the first game and fix it. However, it's pretty rare for developers to really listen to critique, and when they do, they might screw up like Prince of Persia's developers did and, to quote a smarter man than I, take two steps back for every single step forward. But if they do fix it up, it's good. Other good things? Ehh, gets difficult. Sure, it's often fun to see loved characters continue their adventures, possibly with added features to gameplay.

Yeah, it's kinda then when you think about it like that. Not that I mind that much. So what's bad about sequels, since I'm talking about it. Well, it's something of an anathema to innovation. Sure, we might get a few new features with the sequel, but the game's not gonna get reinvented, because purists would hate it (see career of Miles Davis for examples). As long as we can push out barely updated revisions of games, games won't develop as an artform. In that sense, sequels are bad.

There are some funny trends with sequels. The second game (this also applies to movies) will often be darker, grittier and more realistic. Mass Effect 2, Gears of War 2 and Prince of Persia 2 are all examples. There are probably others I can't think/know of. This is not necessarily a bad development. In GoW 2 the results were exemplary. In PoP 2 it was... well, kinda funny, kinda laughable. Mass Effect 2's use of the license seems promising for now, but only time will tell (another matter is Bioware's laughable approach to adult themes).

That's that, I'm afraid. As I said, I'm sorely running out of topics to write about. Soon I'll be reduced to recounting tales of Ninja Gaiden 2 or bitching about Call of Duty 4. If you want to help, leave comment (by clicking on the “0 comments” text below) and drop a few lines about what you'd want to hear. Until Sunday, little ones.

Schedule Change & Tidbits

2009-08-19T22:48:00.003+03:00

Hello, kids.

Yes, it's become very apparent that the times demand a change in update times. From now on, we're returning to the Thursdays & Sundays schedule. Actually, I could keep updating on Saturdays, but that would leave one day between updates, and too much sweet sauce is bad for you.

Also, if anyone's wondering, I would love feedback. In addition to giving tangible proof I have a loving readerbase (as opposed to the deranged imaginings of my even deranged-er mind) you might drop a line about any topic you would love to hear about. Also, I've apparently secured a guest writer, so there hopefully will be zero missed updates (excepting out-of-town vacations).

Until tomorrow, then.

Life As a Tube

2009-08-15T16:01:00.002+03:00

Hiya, kids.

Short talk about game hype before diving into the topic of linearity. Dragon Age: Origins I've been kepeing an eye on, and now I have very mixed feelings. Mostly it seems good, I can even put up with Bioware's ridiculous idea of “adult themes”. The deciding factor right now, for me, is combat. I looked at the latest video and I practically had shivers running down my spine. I don't know what the problem was exactly, but it bothered me.

Assassin's Creed II has me very excited, though. The interesting point here is why I'm excited. Basically, I've been listening to the developers talk about all the stuff that they realized were wrong with the first game, and how they're gonna fix it for AC2. I'm not näive enough to believe every word they say, but the prospect that they fixed repetitive gameplay, ridiculously easy gameplay, stupid AI, the magical ninja guardsmen and added stuff like the economy and notoriety systems... If this all comes true and comes true in a good way, we're in for a treat. The fact that it could be that good is what has me so excited.

Anyway, into the subject matter at hand, which is linearity in gaming. Linearity, essentially meaning the state of being straight, in a single, uncurving line, can mean a variety of things, but when I talk about linearity in gaming I talk about linear level design. To re-tackle some of the basics, the two archetypes of level design: the classical linear type was popularized by shooters like Doom and Jove knows what else. The game takes place in a series of corridors, tubes if you will, with no deviation possible. The second archetype and opposite extreme is the sandbox, whereupon the whole game world is accessible, there are no off-limits areas; you can go whereever your heart yearns. This has become very popular in recent years. As a side note, there are several games which lie somewhere between tube and sandbox. RPGs like the Witcher and Knights of the Old Republic both feature large, but limited areas.

As I said, the sandbox has become very popular in recent years, and subsequently there's been a lot of bad rap about linear games. While shooters have mostly stuck with linearity, even some of them are branching into non-linear levels. Far Cry, from what I've heard, is an example of this, though it does bend towards the “shooter combined with RPG” territory, which is a whole 'nuther can of worms.

My opinion about linearity varies greatly, but here's the bottom line: “a good sandbox is better than a good collection of tubes, but since there are so few good sandboxes we might as well stick with tubes for the time being”. My reasoning here is based on the fact that there are currently more good tubes than bad tubes, which because we've spent such a long time making these fairly simple constructs. I figure that with experience even the sandboxes will get better, but for example technology is still slightly in the way of proper sandboxes.

Tubes are good as long as they don't get in the way of good gameplay. As long as we stay in interiors things remain good, but levels taking place outside invariably have to deal with ways to build the walls of the tube. Call of Duty 4, for example, did this with impassable fences. It's good enough until the situation where getting behind that little fence would be a perfect fit to your strategy, and then you notice you can't, because. It's kinda like building the scenery out of cardboard: it may look good even up close, but getting close will reveal that despite appearances, it's flimsy.

The Halo series has traditionally had a bunch of big outdoor levels that are navigated with vehicles. Halo manages to keep it 'tubed' but only passably. The tube is maintained with near-vertical walls and incredibly huge drops down to nothingness. I won't bitch too much about it, but the problem is essentially the same as in CoD, but instead of buggering with gameplay becomes a part of it.

Still, linearity is more at home in shooters than RPGs. This is mostly because of pace. Things roll along swiftly in shooters and momentum is crucial to the atmosphere. When you have to start wondering “where am I supposed to go?” the moment is ruined. Linearity is a natural option and keeps the action nicely concentrated. In an RPG the pace is slower, more languid and relaxed. The action is spread over a larger area. On the whole the experience is considerably different from that of a shooter, explaining the huge rift between trigger-happy, reflex-driven, easily bored shooter fans and lazier, more controlled story-fetishist RPG players.

That's the somewhat short rap for this week. Get back to you... not necessarily Wednesday. As I mentioned before, there may be changes coming to the update schedule. The days may change and I may reduce the whole thing to a once-a-week affair. Any need for changes will probably become apparent over the next two weeks.

Bye now.

Immaculate Immersion

2009-08-12T20:16:00.004+03:00

Hiya, children.

Sorry the update is so late, but it couldn't really be helped. Since it's summer and there's nothing going in the gaming industry I'll get to the point very quickly. Today we consider the Holy Grail of video game design, the one thing that can save almost any game from being a load of crap. I naturally speak of a little thing called immersion. We'll consider what immersion is, why it's important and how it's created.

The word immerse means to involve deeply and immersion means being immersed. When we talk about a game's immersion or say that a game is immersive we talk about how good that game is in convincing you that you are in the game (poetically put) or rather, how good the game is at cutting you off from the world around you. Now, before you go off rambling about World of Warcraft-esque situations where people's lives revolve around a silly thing like a video game, stop, drop and listen. Immersive isn't addictive. When you're addicted to a game you don't eat because you're too busy playing. When you're immersed you don't eat because you forgot to, so engrossed in the game as you were.

Another side of immersion is not reminding the player they're playing a game, for lack of a better description. For example, unrealistic gameplay breaks immersion, because no matter how sucked in you are, when something completely ridiculous happens it breaks flow and thus breaks immersion. One way to describe this side of immersion would be the difference between playing a game and experiencing a game.

Based on my own experience, an immersive game cannot be bad. Games are, to me, supposed to be a fun way to pass time (or distract me from reality), so any game that makes me oblivious to time passing (or reality happening) is pretty well on the mark. The Witcher is one of my favourite games and is at times very immersive. The first time I started playing the Witcher I started during daylight hours and when I took my gaze away from the screen (there was a noise behind me or something) I noticed that it was dark outside. Games like these tend to come along rarely, but are quite memorable when they do.

Immersion is one of those things that can't be intentionally, purposefully created as such. First of all, it's a combination of lots of little things, and even then more than half is up to the player, and of that half a part has to do with any given conditions on any given day. I'd say a smooth gameplay experience is crucial to immersion, going back to the flow-breaking mentioned in the third paragraph. Now, smooth can mean lots of things. Even if you get stuck in place or are frustrated you can remain immersed. Assuming the challenge which has you so challenged is interesting and/or realistic, logical, you can remain immersed, easily. A situation where the problem defies all logic will probably send the player as far as away from immersion as possible.

Boredom is another deterrent to immersion. While perhaps the most difficult thing for developers to tackle, so varied are people's propensities to being bored, but it might well be the biggest no-no here. Even if the game is realistic/logical with reasonable boundaries, works well and plays smoothly, if you're bored chances are you won't be immersed, ever. Boredom does not equal unimmersive, though. You can be bored and remain immersed. My point was more that when you are bored you are more prone to lose immersion.

Well, the answer to boredom is obviously keeping the player occupied. An interesting, intense plot is a great way to do that, even if it only works while the plot is unknown. Such a plot is a very rare sight these days, which is a shame. In addition to plot, some other form of anticipation works. Promising something for the players to look forward to will keep them immersed. In the end, a good way to avoid boredom is to give the player something meaningful and fun to do (strong emphasis on those two words).

Let's take a real-life example: Mass Effect 2. A brief recap; Mass Effect featured space travel. This meant using an animated menu to click on destinations. Essentially it could've been done with a few text-based drop-down menus. This would've been more convenient in more than one way, but by adding a visual representation of space travel the experience is much more immersive than text-based menus. Mass Effect 2 promises a much more involving space travel experience. I don't recall the details, but it involved fuel and spaceship upgrades in terms of interstellar travel. Interacting with planets is also promised to be more immersive.

It all sounds good, right? It's something more to do than “Press A To Go To X”, which is good. The problem is that it also needs to be meaningful and fun. Meaningful here refers to not arbitrary. The player needs to understand and know why they are doing it, as opposed to doing it because they're told to. It also needs to be fun, because otherwise it isn't fun; it'll be a chore! The one example I can think of is from Bethesda's Oblivion. There was a system of persuasion in which you tried to make people like you. I won't describe it in detail, but suffice is to say that I found it unintuitive and frustrating. I did understand why I was doing it, gameplay-wise, so this is a prime example of meaning without fun. To consider the opposite, fun but meaningless... It's a tough nut to crack. As long as it's fun it's probably OK, but the lifespan depends on how fun it is. Meaning adds motivations adds lifespan.

A short stint back to realism and it's effect on immersion. Realistic games are often more immersive because it doesn't break immersion. Realism doesn't necessarily contribute directly to immersion, since the less you notice how realistic the game is the better you're immersed. As I said earlier, realism is important because it keeps you in the game. Shooter games usually immerse via intensity (back to that shortly) above all else.

Shooters are traditionally very unrealistic in some aspects of game design. First and foremost they're usually very linear. Linearity in itself isn't unimmersive, but when linearity becomes unrealistic linearity becomes a problem. Traditional examples include invisible walls and unrealistically impassable obstacles (it's when you can't jump over a shrub fence). Usually a situation like this pulls you away from the game. In RPGs realism needs to be present in areas like the behaviour of other characters and the feel of the game world as a whole.

Finally a few lines about the aforementioned intensity, also concentration. Intensity is providing such an intense experience, be it fast-paced or just very captivating, that the player doesn't think of anything else and thus becomes immersed. The shooter genre makes heavy use of intensity, much like the action movie genre. This happens mostly via atmosphere, a topic for a later blogpost. Intensity is a useful and effective way to create immersion because it tends to gloss over several problems. Running and gunning for your life will probably mean that you won't notice the shrub fences lining your path and at best even running into an invisible wall will be a minor, momentary distraction.

Intensity is often created via pace, specifically a fast one. When things happen quick and you need to react even quicker you easily get inside the game. A fast pace isn't the only option available, though. Tactical shooters like Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six have a pace more akin to spurts. Movement on the whole is slow, careful and methodical. Even combat can be mostly slow, but fettered with fast spurts of reaction. In this spurt pace immersion is once again created via the level of necessary concentration. While the overall pace is slower, the fast bits are so fast and come up so fast that you have to be alert at all times. This requires concentration and concentration immerses.

So, brief recap of what might make a game immersive:

- smooth, intuitive gameplay

- absence of boredom/keeping the player occupied

- realism

- intense experience

- a required high level of concentration

These are at least the factors that developers can at least partially affect. Much of an immersive experience is up to the player and whatever situation they are in.

That's it for today. I apologize for being so late, and that this turned out so long in the end. I'll be back soon with talk about atmosphere, in all likelihood.

Maintenance Call

2009-08-09T19:11:00.003+03:00

Hello, children.

A few announcements to be made. First of all, I apologize for having missed the updates for this week. The initial problem on limited time could've been handled, but regrettably it ganged up with writer's block. I figured that instead of giving you a single half-assed update I'll just hold off and give two half-assed updates next week (which should, according to my calculations, amount to a whole-assed update, which is good in terms of balance).

There have been some changes to the blog's layout, and for the time being this is the final design. More changes will be affected if necessary.

Also, in the near future the blog's update schedule may be limited to once a week. This has more or less been my plan until now. This twice a week schedule was mainly used to set the new blog off to a good start, and also to prove that I can after my incorrigible update pace over the last two years. Considering how the summer is the driest of the dry seasons I'm frankly flabbergasted that I managed to accomplish all this. Rest assured I'll be trying to talk about more than the latest hype even if we are approached by several tantalizing release dates.

I will, however, keep trying to keep up with the current schedule. If I can't or I find that the quality of my writing suffers from the pressure, I'll switch to the other schedule. Also, in case of repeat performances of this week, I do have guest writers more or less ready. If all goes well they'll be able to fill in for me should I fail to make the date.

Regards, PJ, the Couch Preacher

The Desert of the Real(ism)

2009-08-02T00:00:00.002+03:00

Hello.

This time I'll get to the bottom of the matter right away, which is realism (I deeply apologize for the lame Slavoj Žižek reference in the title). I mentioned this in the previous blogpost when I talked about the latest Fallout 3 add-on. As I like to do, we'll start from the ground up. In video games, what do we refer to when we talk about realism? Realism is in this case simulating reality, essentially avoiding situations where the player can say “that's should've worked” or “that's completely ridiculous”.

The most basic stuff of realism like the three dimension and rudimentary physics for moving objects have been around for some time. These are requirements for pretty much all games around these days – the very basics. But just how realistic and realistic in which areas vary from game to game. For example, shooter games have recently spent a lot of time on realism in terms of damage to player characters. Ever since Doom hit the market shooters stuck to health bars like pretty much everyone else. To the best of my knowledge (I'm in no way sure about this) Halo was the first shooter to use the regenerating health bar (in the form of a recharging shield) even though the first Halo also included a health bar system in conjunction with the shield. Ever since then regenerating but limited health has been commonplace.

I won't dedicate much space for comparing health bars and health regeneration. Both have their pros and cons in terms of realism. In short: the problem with regen is that you can take in limitless amounts of lead assuming you catch a breather every now and then. The problem with a health bar is that the difference between being alive and dead is a bullet that brushes your toe. Essentially a truly realistic health/damage system would include a full set of organs and each bullet (when dealing with shooters) would need to have it's trajectory calculated and the relevant damage measured.

Other genres of gaming have never really taken up the regenerating health system. RPGs have long dealt only in health bars, a problem that will soon become apparent as I start ragging on Fallout 3 and Oblivion. Strategy games have never stopped using health bars, and I admit that on that scale it probably wouldn't be practical.

The question with realism in games is that does there have to realism in games? It's a tough one. To repeat myself, avoiding situations where the player can say “that's should've worked” or “that's completely ridiculous” is important. This was my problem with Fallout 3's Point Lookout DLC: my futuristic metal super-armor was defeated by frigging axes. Problems like these are commonplace in RPGs, even in my beloved Gothic. But this was the first time it has bothered me that much.

In terms of critical damage, shooters have long since adapted the headshot, as it's lovingly referred to. Essentially, nailing someone on the head means they're dead (except if they're using protection). A good concept, since it's very realistic. So when a shooter and an RPG join together, the problems become apparent. In Fallout 3, for example, headshots cause more damage as opposed to killing automatically. True enough, as long as the target is weak enough headshots can be deadly, but especially in Point Lookout you could spend a lot of time unloading double-barreled shotguns into bare heads. This is one reason shooters and RPGs don't mix. But I must shoulder some more blame onto RPGs, as in fantasy RPGs it has always irked me that when you swing your huge axe at a guy dressed in his underwear and he can take hits aplenty if he's strong enough. In this respect I'd like to see a “realistic” RPG just to see the concept in practice.

However, I digress. I asked if games need to be realistic, and failed to really answer that. Essentially games should, in my mind, aim for fun realism. For example, the excision of waste evacuation from video games (except Sims, by Jove) is a good decision, because it wouldn't really add anything. Hunger is another cut (except in, again, Sims) but I'm not as sure if it's a good decision. In shooters, yes, but in an RPG it could be implemented somehow. There were several “hunger mods” for Oblivion, but I never really got into them, because mostly they worked with Oblivion's fatigue system, which already a complete disaster in my opinion.

Games are in essence another answer to escapism, and as such complete realism would more or less defeat the point. The Sims is an example of this, as all my Sims games where I tried to play properly rather than screw around with my avatars became incredibly dreary, mostly because of the game's approximation of real life, whereupon one minute lasts one second. A good idea so that the game doesn't last forever, but bad because the Sims move and act in real time (so essentially a 24-second “I wanna sleep s'more” tantrum became a 24-minute tantrum).

The two areas that I think need more realism are physics, damage and AI. Physics are making good headway, but there are lotsa problems, kids. Character models are good enough, but other stuff (props, basically) are in bad shape. Probably the most common physics engine is Havok (as far as I know) which mostly does good work. Oblivion had pretty good physics, but there were some glaring issues. All small objects lying on surfaces float a few inches above the surface they're “resting on”. Another popular engine is PhysX by Ageia. Very good, as seen in Gears of War, for example, but one consistent problem is that there's in no concept of weight. Everything is equally easy to move, which leads to interesting situations.

Yes, I return to the damage issue. I think that developers tend to be too satisfied with just health bar or regenerating health. New concepts should be thought of. The new Assassin's Creed features health “regenerating up to a point” which sounds similar to what Ninja Gaiden II did, but hopefully it'll be less confusing than that of NG2. Also, I think that damage to the extremities should be realized somehow. Fallout 3 did something to this effect, but I never thought of it as particularly effective.

AI is a big problem here. I don't mean just combat AI, but rather the AI in RPGs, in situations where they aren't fighting, but living. Actually, I don't mean AI (which is in itself an incorrect word for what we call AI) because as far as I know most of behaviour simulating activities is much more scripting than AI programming. Mostly AI behaviour in games like Oblivion (and Gothic, I'll admit it) is more or less awful.

In the end, how realistic a game should be depends on the minds behind the game. If you market a game as “realistic” at least I expect more realism from that game than a game that didn't mention the word “realism” in its hype. And you could always make a point out of irrealism in your game. I'm not sure if something to this vein has already been done.

Yeah, that's it for today. Bye now.

Popping By To Say Hi

2009-07-29T16:50:00.001+03:00

Hiya.

Yeah, I missed the promised Saturday/Sunday update, but it wasn't my fault, as there was a change in schedule. I'm here now, so please be seated and hear the Word (actually, multiple words, and you won't actually be hearing them, but yeah, on with the show).

Things are still dry in the summer season (no surprises there). I actually haven't been playing that much (doing other stuff) but I did recently have a brief spell with Pokemon FireRed of all games. The Pokemon game series in my mind has a few bits and pieces of very good design philosophy in addition to a fair bunch of new innovation per game (rather than just releasing almost the exact same game with no real change in content – I'm looking at you, Fallout: New Vegas).

Pokemon's “Type A beats Type B but falls prey to Type C” combat system works well, but I feel that it's too easy to abuse. Considering how pretty much all the opponent trainers in the games devote their attention to only one or two types, being the only one to use multiple types puts you at the top of the hill pretty fast. If opponents were more expansive in their taste and technique the games would provide a much more exciting and varied experience.

There are two things that I don't like that much outside of gameplay. The first and lighter thing is that I find annoying how the games don't follow their own, internal logic. This nitpicking so I won't delve into it. But the thing that really, really irks me about the Pokemon series is the whole two halves thing. Each of the four generations of games has had two games to start with. Blue and Red, Gold and Silver, Ruby and Sapphire and finally Diamond and Pearl. To complete the ultimate goal of collecting all the Pokemon in the game you need at least two game cartridges (sold separately, by Jove) and multiple save games, because some Pokemon are only found in either one of the two games and a few Pokemon force you to choose between several.

Finally, you need some kind of peripheral for the hand-held game of choice in order to transfer those unobtainable Pokemon to your own game. It's a brilliant marketing strategy and makes good money, but it's still unabashedly commercial and greedy. And that kinda ticks me off. Rest assured, I never got all the Pokemons in any game.

A little talk now about Mass Effect 2 and Borderlands. First, in short, stuff about ME2. One interview I watched showed Bioware showing a surprising learning curve. In similar vein to Bethesda's Oblivion, Mass Effect's content outside of the main content was cruising around random planets in the universe. Yes, there was plenty to do, but to be somewhat cruel, there's also plenty to do in eating a brick wall. As I said, that's cruel. The exploration was mostly fun enough, but it certainly could've been more fun. One big gripe on my part is that all the planets feel the same, even if there are cosmetic differences. Reportedly Bioware is making the planets more unique this time around. One can only hope.

There have also been changes to the navigation system. In ME all you did was select destinations, so in essence it was just a very, very elaborate list of a few destinations. This time there's actual gameplay when navigating the universe, which sounds promising. Being a skeptic, I must point out here that there's a dangerous that the navigation will start feeling too much like a chore.

In a stunning stunt of innovation, ME2's project director reported that one possible outcome (ending) of the game is one where the player character dies. This is to me very exciting, because at the TV screen I'm always the guy saying “that guy should've died” or at the very least “that guy shouldn't have survived all that”. The game series has promised continuity (one save game carrying over to the next). I would find it very exciting that you could kill of the player character in ME2 and still play ME3 somehow. But I doubt that. Nonetheless, I'm satisfied that my avatar can finally die in a plot environment.

OK, I'll talk about Borderlands before I sign off. I don't think I've mentioned it before. Basically, it's another attempt at blending shooters and role-playing games. It takes place on a fictional planet where people are shipping to in search of a better life. Think sci-fi gold rush. The planet turns out to be a monster-infested hellhole. This all ties into a mysterious vault, purportedly containing vast amounts of unseen alien tech.

The story may be a mystery, but some gameplay stuff is known. The game makes a big point out of randomization. Weapons, enemies and parts of the terrain are randomized. While I don't know how good an idea terrain randomization is, weapons randomization seems nice. Reportedly there are well over a million different weapons in the game, manufactured by the AI. There are lots of content in store, it all seems very promising. Replay value comes from the player character. There are four different characters to play and all should be suitably different to provide a new experience for the player each time. I'll talk more about Borderlands as more becomes known.

That's it for today. I was going to talk about realism, but I managed to get enough text about rumour-mongering to leave that topic for the next time. Until Saturday, then.

Outlook And Hell

2009-07-08T18:28:00.007+03:00

Hello

It's time again for the Couch Preacher blogpost. I think that I shall be sticking to this new schedule. I apologize for the incredibly lame title, but yeah, today's topics are Fallout 3: Point Lookout and Dante's Inferno. In other news, there won't be any new blogposts until the 25th of July, as I'll be on vacation.

Anyway, Point Lookout, the fourth add-on for Fallout 3. Bethesda has really jumped onto this bandwagon as far as I'm concerned, but it doesn't concern me that much. The first three add-ons were fun enough, but I don't think any of them were released in a playable state, id est all of them featured some game-breaking bug upon release. Point Lookout gains points for being released in a finished state.

The add-on, probably the biggest so far in terms of content, takes place outside of the Washington D.C. nuclear wasteland, which was the setting up 'till now. As the name suggests, the location is the Point Lookout State Park in Maryland. In-game, it's a huge swamp, and as such provides a delightful contrast to the Wasteland's urban rubble and lifeless desert. Nonetheless, I must say that the foggy swamp could've benefited from some additional vibrancy without fear of compromising the game's tone. While it's certainly different from the Wasteland, it ends up being another variety of bland.

There's plenty to do, even though an exhaustive playthrough is possible over the weekend, even without particularly intensive sessions. What the add-on most certainly succeeds in delivering is a challenge. It's the hardest part of Fallout 3 so far, even with a top-level character. However, the challenge is 98% of the brick wall variety (entry from 14/6/09) and delivers immersion a nasty punch to the lower ribs and kicks it when its down. As I, clad in energized, steel-plated armor, wielding a godforsaken double-barreled shotgun, was moved down by natives, clad in light hemp clothing, wielding axes, I had to stop and ask myself: does this make any kind of sense at all?

Realism and immersion are subjects for future blogposts. For now, sticking to Point Lookout. The enemies in the add-on's story consist of Tribals, a hostile semi-Voodoo sect, but when simply exploring the area you'll mostly run into Swampfolk, stereotypical hillbillies and hicks rendered into misshapen, deformed, territorial and irate monsters apparently via nuclear fallout and generations of inbreeding. The Swampfolk are just as tough as the Tribals, but at least they're semi-human at this point.

As I said, there's plenty to do in the add-on, but it's done pretty quickly. The main quest can easily be completed in a few hours and the rest doesn't take too long. The storytelling, writing and voice acting are on the same level as the main game (not that high), but what can you do. It's an enjoyable experience for the Fallout fan. Whether or not it's your money's worth, only you can tell. Obvious pros compared to previous add-ons include the amount of new content and the less-rigid, more free-roaming gameplay experience. Overall, it doesn't bring anything really new into the mix, but what the hell - it's fun, and that's what you are/should be after.

I have to say I'm slightly skeptical about Bethesda's fixation on releasing DLC (DownLoadable Content). Ostensibly yes, they're supporting the game after it's release, but they're being dishonestly greedy about it. Compared to the amount of content they cost quite a lot. Additionally, they're all these little on-the-side romps and, as far as I'm concerned, have no real content as such, except for Broken Steel which continued the main story, providing some closure, and increased the level cap to 3o instead of 20. Even more suspicious in my mind is the Fallout: New Vegas project. Being developed by Obsidian Entertainment, it's a new game, but one that fully utilizes the Fallout 3 engine. This stinks of being essentially a huge add-on, if there are no gameplay innovations. All we can hope for in Bethesda's blissful absence is better production values.

Before I sign off, a short soliloquy on Dante's Inferno. It's an action/adventure game in the vein of God of War, Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden, essentially meaning that you journey across a bunch of levels killing enemies in a visceral manner in melee combat. Good enough, but what's remarkable is the setting. The game is based on Dante Alighieri's poem The Divine Comedy, in which Dante journeys through the nine circles of Hell with the aid of the deceased Roman poet, Virgil. In the game's version of events, Dante is a Crusader returning home only to watch his beloved Beatrice be dragged into hell. Like any man worth his weight he goes after her.

All very good and interesting. Fairly little gameplay content has been released, so right now my attention is mostly held by the setting, seeing as I'm a self-described "games should be art but most of them aren't and the ones that are are also way too pretentious for their own good" hippie. All the gameplay videos depicted the Grim Reaper's scythe as Dante's weapon of choice. I'm not too thrilled about this, but I'll live. Anyway, more info on Dante's Inferno as it dribbles by.

That's that for today. To reiterate, I'll be on vacation, so you won't get a new blogpost until the 25th (and on second thought, maybe not even on then, depending on how early I'll be back, but the 26th at the latest, worry not).

Casual Consideration

2009-07-04T23:41:00.004+03:00

Good evening. It's still Saturday, so I'm on schedule. Today we talk about casual gaming.

What is casual gaming? Is the opposite of casual gaming professional gaming? What's going on here? Casual gaming is a phenomenon of a relatively recent nature, and basically refers to games played by casual gamers. Casual gamers are people who aren't into games but still play them at times. They are usually drawn into simple games that are easy to pick up and require little commitment. These usually take the form of browser-based flash games (for those unfamiliar with jargon, games played on websites). Recently, however, casual games are also appearing on consoles. On the Xbox, for example, several casual games are available to download from Xbox Live. I assume these are casual games directed at core gamers (hardcore gamers, or rather people who actively play video games, and aren't necessarily involved in this “I'm hardcore” stupidity) because buying a video game console to play casual games seems very contradictory.

Anyway, casual gaming. So what's the deal? It's lately been the focus of some attention. I don't understand what the big deal is, but I'll take any topic to write about. Apparently some people think that the rise in popularity that has befallen casual gaming is a threat to core gaming. Also, it is thought that casual gaming itself is suffering from the few big names in casual games, for example the company PopCap Games, which has been very successful.

Being well-off enough to afford video games I've never gotten into browser gaming of any sort. I do hold some slight distaste for some browser games, mostly the really popular ones, because they seem to revolve around cheap gimmicks and addictiveness. My personal feelings aside, so why do people think that casual gaming is harming core gaming. Well, I don't think it is. If you can't afford video games so you play browser games, then you wouldn't be a part of gaming anyway. If you can honestly be content with playing a game as simple and flimsy as most browser games, good for you (and on a personal note from me, you'd probably never have the patience for any kind of core game).

OK, I can see one way in which casual gaming could harm core gaming. I hinted toward this in my last blogpost. Since casual games can nowadays make incredible amounts of money with relatively cheap production costs (especially when compared with big games) big production companies (and development companies) are turning to that for the big bucks. At worst, as unlikely as it is, serious video games won't get any funding and slowly become obsolete (and to make a Ray Bradbury reference, become in fact illegal for being so complex and exposing the stupidity of people who can't figure them out). As I said, this is unlikely. More likely is that the focus will shift partially away from core gaming to casual gaming. However, since core games are still way more expensive than casual games and at best sell millions of copies, I doubt there will be any real problem.

If my lackluster writing hasn't made it totally clear, I don't have particularly strong feelings on casual gaming. I never really played any casual games, since I consider them to be the video game equivalent of severely addictive drugs, and I don't think they present any kind of threat to core gaming. End of story.

That's it for today. I've got a few topics ready, so if things go as planned I won't have any trouble making the Wednesday update. Bye now, kids.

Past the Temporal Curtain

2009-07-01T14:51:00.004+03:00

Hello again.

Yes, I'm posting even though it's just Wednesday. That's because I'm temporarily trying out a Wed/Sat schedule. Even though overcoming the problem of having time to write these blogposts is simple, a bigger issue lies in what to write about. I suppose the summer is the worst possible time for this thing, seeing as no big games are released during the summer. Ah, well, onto the task at hand. Today's topic is the technology of tomorrow, today! Even though motion detection has been around for a while, I'll comment on it shortly, before moving on to consider Project Natal.

So yeah, motion detection first. Being a 360 gamer as opposed to playing a Wii or a PS3 I have limited (read: zero) experience with motion detection, but to you, the audience, I, the I, will relate what I've heard. Motion detection was the major selling point of the WiiMote controller and a feature of the SixAxis controller. In terms of utilizing this feature well I take it that the Wii currently has a better track record. This is better explained if I first explain what is usually wrong with the use of motion detection. Especially in PS3 games it's used a gimmick added on as an afterthought, rather than an integrated and thought-out element of the gameplay. The end result is unanimous hatred towards the gimmick in question. Come to think of it, I can't think of a single positive reaction to one of these things.

The Wii, as I said, has a slightly better track record, mostly because motion detection is a major deal to the console. Thanks to that games developed for the Wii can effectively utilize the WiiMote's capabilities. However, games imported to the Wii, developed for other consoles, tend to suffer from gimmicky use of the WiiMote. The problem with these gimmicks is that they use motion detection because they have to, rather than because they'd benefit from it. PS3 is set to receive it's own motion controller, similar in idea to the WiiMote, which may improve the gimmick situation.

OK, Project Natal. How do I describe this? Basically, it's a little, horizontal black bar (see image on top of post) that acts as a full-body motion sensor, meaning your body is the controller for the game. Nice idea in theory, but I foresee problems: a) it's dumb, b) it's a gimmick, c) it won't work with real games, leading onto d) it probably won't work for the core gamers. Well, the statement is a little antagonizing, but I did that on purpose. Let's analyze these points a little.

What I mean here is that I doubt the idea will translate well into real games, because it is a gimmick above all else. While the demo at E3 did showcase a bunch of gameplay demos that did a smart enough job of utilizing the capabilities of Natal, these were all one trick ponies, the sort of games that keep you occupied for two hours before you realize that this is a waste of time. I admit that it's the perfect toy for casual games, which make a point out of being addictive gimmick-fests.

Despite the developers' claims, I just can't see this working with a proper video games. You look at something like Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry – there is no way this will work. The whole point of these games is that the player-controlled character has superhuman abilities, impossible to any living person. And even if we make a little leeway so that a small jump of your real body approximates the super-jump in the video game, stamina comes into question. Eventually physical exhaustion will get in the way of enjoying the game. Like Zero Punctuation said, the point in video games is to help us unwind, and I doubt jumping around like a monkey on fire can help us relax.

Before I sign off, a short statement on Sony's EyePet. Basically it's a piece of software that takes a live feed of what the PS3 webcam sees (your living room), puts that on the TV screen and then puts a cute little simian to play “in the room”, as it were. It will react to things in the real world, transmitted via the webcam. One trailer showcased the monkey playing with a shoelace being dragged across the floor. So what do I think about this? In terms of video games, I don't. This is a toy, and this ain't a blog about toys. The technology is interesting, but that's the end of that.

Getting rid of controllers seems to be a big deal for the console developers, and frankly I don't get the point. Until virtual reality, controllers are the only satisfactory way to do impossible things. Besides, EyePet and Project Natal both seem to me to be cheap tricks, momentary distractions. I get that the developers are money-hungry (who wouldn't be) and the Wii proved that turning into a, to quote Zero Punctuation, “hyper-advanced Etch-A-Sketch”, is incredibly profitable. I don't care that much, and I even see it is as a nice way to bring people over to real video games, but I can't help but fear that this focus on non-game-gaming will be at the expense of proper video games.

That's the rap for now. I'll be making a return on Saturday with the topic of casual gaming. Don't hold yer breath.

If I hear the words "friendly", "family" or "fun" in conjunction with Natal ever again I'm going to get violent

Retrospective: On People

2009-06-28T23:37:00.002+03:00

Hello, kids

Retrospective time again. I find myself at a shortage of time again (maybe Sunday isn't such a great update day) so you'll be treated to a retrospective piece of cake from September 2007. Bon appétit.

But on to the matter at hand: people. These days when I watch a video here at Gametrailers, I tend to check out the comments as well and leave a few of my own. It simply infuriates me to watch the users here attack each other like rabid, starving dogs. I can't remember where, but I left this comment.

It's amazing how the Internet makes people dumb. If even a single person states any kind of personal opinion, we immediately get hordes of people with differing opinions imposing theirs as better in uncivil manner. When someone says "I like this game", there actually is the option to say "OK, but I don't for reasons not disclosed", as opposed to "you fucking retard, youre such an asshumper youre stupid this game sucks balls and eats shit WTF"

Despite the narcissism, I am rather proud of this comment. Just now I watched the review for Heavenly Sword for the PS3, and looked once again at the comments, and my heart bled. We get all the "GT sucks up to Microsoft", "GT is biased", "PS3 sucks" and "Xbox sucks your fucking retard" comments. I mean, what's the point? Why can't anyone behave in a civil manner? I know very well what creatures people can be, but still. It's not an excuse. "WTF eat shit" doesn't mean anything; it just annoys people, who reply equally moronically. As I said earlier, you can just say "OK, I don't think so". Why, oh why, must people use all the stupid abbreviations and comments they can? What does that achieve?

And once again, the same old "no, actually my console can kick your console's ass while whistling Auld Lang Syne". I would love a definitive answer as to why the hell it matters. It's a lifestyle choice if nothing else. A personal opinion. So why exactly do other people have to steamroll over others to prove their console is better? What does that achieve? I've said this in here before I seem to recall, but if anyone ever proved somehow that PS3 is ultimately the better console, I wouldn't give a damn. So what? Does it have Halo 3? Does it have Mass Effect? Does it do your tax returns? Feed your cat? Fetch your slippers? I really couldn't care less. So, once again, what kind of sick, masochistic pleasure do people get when they prove the console they use is better?

I realize how futile this kind of tirade is. No formal address, chief of state, religious prophet or commercial product can ever change the obtuse, inefficient and ultimately insulting way in which some people present themselves and their opinions. I'm just wenting out frustration here. Not because I'm angry, but because I'm to some extent saddened, and moreover disappointed.

Divisions, divisions, divisions. Hardcore gamers and leisure gamers. Microsoft fans and Sony fans. RPG gamers and FPS gamers. Idiots and morons. Dogs and hounds. How much is there different? How much is there common ground? That question is yours to answer.

Mindless Mayhem

2009-06-25T23:12:00.004+03:00

Hello

Last time around my retrospective rhetoric and repartee made a point of how important, critical and difficult proper storytelling is, and I also mentioned how I feel it's crucial for an enjoyable experience. I may have to take that back, as today's topic is the wonderful world of gameplay.

A few games here and there, mostly shooters, include some form of gameplay where you can play by yourself against the computer without playing the so-called story mode. This puts the focus entirely on gameplay. First to mind spring Rainbow Six's Terrorist hunt and Gears of War 2's Horde mode. Strip away redeeming or condemning qualities like story progression via cut scenes and scripted events, music, leave only behind the sheer, pure core gameplay. Both Terrorist hunt and Horde pit the player (possibly with teammates) against a group of enemies on a multiplayer map. Seeing as the only objective is survival, the saving grace of the game boils down to How Fun Is It Really To Kill The Other Guy?

To review those two features a little, Terrorist Hunt was fun in the first Rainbow Six Vegas, suffering from glitches, lack of variety and suicidal AI. Vegas 2 had less glitches, more variety, but the AI department screwed up royally. Whereas in the first game the enemies were spread out and you had to find them, hunt them down, in the second game all enemies around will (most of the time) converge on the one spot (you are here). Suddenly hunting terrorists turned into hunkering down to avoid being killed by converging terrorists. While the experience wasn't bad in itself, the problem was how it felt so different from the previous game.

Horde mode on the other hand is very well executed. 50 waves of enemies, each 10 waves repeating with the enemies receiving bonuses to health, damage and accuracy. Players ranging from one to five in number survive as long as they can. It's fun and at times intense – altogether it's entertaining. I do have a few gripes, naturally enough. Sometimes the pace goes a bit off. In most cases the safest option is in my mind to bunker down and wait for the enemy to come to you, but whether or not the enemy does that varies greatly. Flying around in camera mode during the match (which the dead players can do) shows that a lot of the time enemies will run back and forth over a distance of a few meters.

Towards the end of the 10-wave spectrum the emphasis in the type of enemies switches more towards the big and heavy type (to those familiar with the game, I mean all the Boomer variants). I would've preferred more action with the regular-sized enemies, if only to maintain the atmosphere. Also, there are some glitches with enemies disappearing or getting stuck in walls.

To repeat the original idea, the focus is on gameplay. This means controls, game mechanics, artificial intelligence, map design: everything that falls under the act of playing the game. It's a very precarious thing, difficult to do well with that many variables. I've actually played very few games with bad controls, but that's just because I don't own a Wii nor a PS3, which traditionally have to abuse either the WiiMote or SixAxis respectively (for the uninitiated, those are both controllers featuring features that use motion detection). Very few games have actually used those controls well.

Game mechanics are difficult to talk about, since they're almost as varied as games. If we talk narrowly about shooters, to put it simply, shooting has to work. Depending a bit on which category of shooter is in question, the usual traits which at least I value are: enemies die after a reasonable amount of punishment has been inflicted (something in which Gears of War fails oh-so horribly), the guns have to be fun, the challenge mustn't be unreasonable (at least it has to be adjustable)... I could go on, but it would achieve little, so I won't

Artificial intelligence is a difficult category to excel in, mostly because it is damned complicated, I suspect. I also understand very little of it, so I'll refrain from ragging on the AI programmers too much. Ideally, the AI should be able to react to what the players are doing and surprise them. I also expect some simulation of natural behavior from the AI enemies. This was something Rainbow Six Vegas failed in, as all enemies were utterly and completely suicidal.

Some rudimentary simulation of the fight or flight instinct would be nice. This of course opens up a plethora of design choices concerning the world the game takes place in. To use a sci-fi setting, human enemies should have that instinct, whereas robotic enemies should stringently follow their programming and stand their ground. All in all AI is a subtle thing, so I suspect there are many efforts undertaken by the programmers that completely escape the player's notice. On that note I'll move on.

Finally map design, also known as level design. A topic I won't touch much upon as it's so connected to personal taste. For a few rules of thumb, level design should suit the gameplay. For a game emphasizing fast gameplay with lots of moving about, it would be annoying for the level to be full of obstacles that prevent that fast movement. Some obstacles, naturally, but not so much that it becomes a problem. And on the other end of the spectrum, a game focusing on staying put in one spot and bracing against waves of enemies, the map design should feature spots that are suitable for that.

And that ends this disjointed foray into analyzing gameplay. To summarize, gameplay is made up of a variety of variables, all of which need to work well together in order to create something entertaining. Well, that's all, folks. See you on Sunday

Retrospective: Characteristics

2009-06-21T23:27:00.004+03:00

Hi kids

Today's post is a retrospective. This is a blogpost I made earlier that I'm including on the new site in case of any new readers. It's a filler, I know, but I just didn't have the time to write up anything proper. I'll have real content for the Thursday update.

I think that aside from sheer gameplay, storyline is the most important thing in a game, because it answers the big question 'why'. While games such as Call of Duty 4 prove that this is not a requisite for having a good time, I still strongly maintain that a good storyline is important. Let's talk basics. A story(line) is a (re)telling of events. What makes a story good? That I can't answer definitively, but let's throw in some stuff like interesting story, interesting setting, unexpected twists and turns of the story and good characters tend to lend it some strength. Let's get some examples, shall we? From books, let's take American Gods by Neil Gaiman and Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. From games, we'll take Oblivion, Halo and Mass Effect. LotR is a very good book series. It shows that through good prose (or for our purposes, the telling of the story) and good and interesting characters even a story that has virtually no twists at all and can be pretty much guessed all the way can in fact be good. One more thing that works in LotR's favor is how the storyline divides into many paths that later converge. American Gods, however, has some very surprising twists that contribute to this already great book, which is great because of an interesting plot, setting, and characters and good prose.

Let's move on to the games. Oblivion has a pretty basic story. It can for the most part be guessed all the way, but then again, so can LotR. But LotR has many interesting characters, and the plot divides to many parts, whereas Oblivion's character are at best slightly memorable but not all that interesting and a plot that follows a pretty strict setting from the beginning to the end. Halo (1) had lots of surprises and twists and was because of that really good. 2 and 3 had much less surprises and the story was like in LotR very easy to anticipate, but good writing and good characters gave it strength. Halo 3's ending is the best video game ending I know. Nothing has touched me on that level in games. Finally, Mass Effect. It has a good story, which can't be guessed, is written well, and has for the first time people instead of just characters. Confused? As I start to explain this elaborate wordplay, we move on subtly from story to characters.

While Halo has memorable and unique characters, Mass Effect has people. Garrus the turian (alien) security officer hates the excessive rules and regulations and Wrex the krogan (alien) mercenary likes to keep things simple, often through violence. Ashley the human soldier has a troubled family past and is always on the lookout for what's best for humanity. While these don't sound all that convincing, more akin to cheap PR fluff, once you've played you'll see what I mean. These are actual people: they have personalities. You can anticipate what they’ll say in a situation, because you know them.

Let's ease up on the fanaticism a little. In movies, books and sometimes TV series you really start to like and care about some characters. When they die, you might get sad. I know some people who cry. While to some people crying over the fictional death of an equally fictional character may seem alien, bizarre, freakish, perverted or unhealthy, I understand perfectly. But my point here is that if books, movies and TV shows can do it, why can't games? Because in movies and TV there's real people there? No there aren't, they're just actors; the very same thing as pixels and polygons. Maybe there just isn't enough effort in the game industry.

Effort. A very good thing to consider here. It seems to me that first-person-shooters tend to have weak storylines and even weaker characters. Maybe this is true, but if the people making these weak stories and even weaker characters think "Hey, they're gonna hate this stuff anyway, why even try", they won't try. Call of Duty 4 is perfect example. I just ran along without really caring about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. The ending was really melodramatic, but was based much on you caring about your teammates. Here's a problem - when you only know them for the few hours the campaign takes, you don't really have time to start caring. Another example, Tom Clancy games. 95% of Clancy games have really weak stories, usually relating to some technological horror and a government secret only known to some section the government and hostile, foreign terrorists.

RPGs tend to have better stories, but this isn't always the case. Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind had such a weak and troublesome story a lot of people didn't even bother with it, and I don't blame them. KotORs had pretty good stories. The genre that usually has no stories at all is sport games. Strategy games usually have a really, really weak story.

There should be better stories, and it seems to be that if developers tried even a little more, asked some opinions, they could have great stories. Of course opinions differ. Some people say that Halo's story isn't fit to be called one, whereas I (and a lot of others) think they're the best ever, and none of that Microsoft suckup/employee/fanboy/idiot/bribed bitching.

Bugs And Glitches May Break My Gameplay Experience...

2009-06-18T13:10:00.004+03:00

Hello again.

I've been mentioning Gothic 2, my favourite RPG of all time, here and there over the past two years. Since it's a game that doesn't have such an incredibly wide following, I thought I'd shed some light on the matter. So here we go, introduction to Gothic 2.

Gothic 2 follows from Gothic 1, and is followed by Gothic 3, while Gothic 4 is still in development. The first three games were made by Piranha Bytes, a small German developer. Actually they did it quite well. They created their own fantasy world that doesn't suffer from all the clichés associated with fantasy worlds. Gothics 1 and 2 take place on the island of Khorinis. The first game is limited to the Valley of Mines (which is located on the same island). The second game expanded the world to the whole island, essentially doubling the game world.

One of the series' trademarks is a unified game world. While in most RPGs the world is broken into smaller pieces, often called modules, that need to be loaded separately, the Gothic games feature few if zero loading screens mid game. Gothic 1 had none, as far as I know (I've never found a copy to play), and Gothic 2 had one loading screen, when transitioning between the Valley and the rest of the island. Gothic 3 again had none, and an even bigger game world.

Let's stick to the gameplay elements. On his quest to save the island from the threat of dragons, the Nameless Hero (protagonist of the series) must gather allies and build his strength. Combat is done via melee, ranged and magic combat. I consider the melee combat to be one of the game's strong points. There are only four attacks, and one combo that needs only one button, but the fights are intense enough because you can't hold block.

Usually in games like these blocking just means holding the block button and thus creating an impenetrable shield of superiority, but in Gothic (the first and second game, at least) blocking means only one blocking movement, meaning you actually have to time your blocks. While it doesn't sound that exciting, it does make for the most fun melee combat I've ever had in an RPG. At first the combat can seem incredibly confusing and dumb, but it can open up with some small effort.

It's an RPG, so there is of course character development, though it's not very deep. The increasable attributes are strength, dexterity, mana and skill in one handed melee weapons, two handed melee weapons, crossbows and bows. There is a selection of skills that can be learned, most of which pertain to magic, but also include taking trophies from animals, lockpicking and forging swords. These are all increased (or learned) by using skill points, which you gain ten of every time you gain a level.

The game has three paths and three endings, though they're essentially all the same. In the first part of the game you choose whether you want to join the magicians, the mercenaries or the town militia. Mages are mages, mercenaries are mercenaries and the militia are eventually a cross between the two. The choice affects the plot slightly, though the end result is always the same. Some of the quests during the game are different depending on allegiance. The main difference is that you can't cross-class in this game, essentially meaning that you can't have the best of both worlds. In most games this is possible but unwise, whereas in Gothic (the first and second game, at least) it's not really possible.

The game world is relatively large and it refreshes four times with enemies and completely new quests. There are several quests to do and after several years and playthroughs I still haven't found all of them. The game is immersive, even though it's nothing special. It still does have it's moments. All in all the game is incredibly fun to play, and that's the clincher. It's fun and the fun doesn't run out.

I've painted a very attractive picture, haven't I? Sounding too good to be true. Actually, I haven't lied a bit, but there's something I've left out 'till now. Gothic 2 is probably the most glitch-ridden game I've ever played in my life. It's a shame, but there's do denying it: I haven't managed to play the game through once without running across some painful bug or glitch. In fact, many of them are game-breaking. I've had at least two savegames completely ruined by a glitch. At one point the game magically became completely unplayable until I switched computers.

This sounds pretty jarring, I imagine, especially after all the honey I was pouring in your ears at first. Hear me out, though. The worst glitches of them all are actually quite rare. As I said, my game has been completely broken three times, and that's over a period of almost six years. While there are legions of smaller bugs they don't make the game unplayable. The challenge is getting past the tough exterior to the heart of gold that lies inside the game. If you're a fan of RPGs, I heartily recommend Gothic 2.

The game might be difficult to get a hang of, so I'll say a few words about the much more recent Gothic 3. Simply put, it's similar to Gothic 2, but for every step the developers took forward, they took at least three backwards. There are improvements, but there are also lots of ideas that should never have been included. In the good improvements category, the game world is even bigger, has less loading times and has tons and tons of more to do.

In the bad ideas category, melee combat has been dumbed down an unhealthy amount (and in unpatched versions of the game there is a very serious glitch in the combat), the game is now completely nonlinear and the main plot is confusing. There are still tons of glitches. Thankfully, the fan community has released a series of unofficial patches which improve the game tremendously. I still recommend Gothic 3, but much more tentatively.

If the third game is the only choice available, go for it, but you'll probably be better off with the first two games. The fourth game is in development, and with a completely new developer. This is probably good, because of the amount of bad ideas in the third game and because of the amount of bugs in all the games. The release date is currently set in Winter 2009/2010. I'm looking forward to it.

Regards, PJ, the Couch Preacher.

Debut: And The Schizophrenia Sets In

2009-06-14T13:10:00.006+03:00

It's been just two years and already the schizophrenia sets in. Nice, huh? Yeah, it's anniversary time, but I won't hold a pompous speech like last time. There are some news, though. The blog has moved here, to Blogger. Please come here for all your video game blather needs. I will actually try and become again more regular in my updates by avoiding these thousand words plus-blogposts.

In a surprising bout of clarity the title says it all about this blogpost, though in retrospect not very clearly. Basically there is no major, overreaching topic here today, just a few rants on various subjects. Actually, in retrospect, these are all subjects that I've touched on before (mostly). So yeah, today's topic is retrospection.

I'll break that idea by first making a completely non-retrospective point. Children, for a moment, consider the incredible potential within Assassin's Creed II. ACI was riddled with bad design choices and lazy execution of good ideas. Despite all this it managed to be a very, very entertaining game. So, considering that Ubisoft has a reputation for being almost capable of learning from their mistakes, if all/most/a bushel/one or two of the problems problematizing the first game are fixed, ACII could be very great indeed. Think about that.

Also, a short non-retrospective consideration for Bioware's fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Origins. The developers are making a big deal about the shameless amount of violence, blood and sex within the game, and sadly this all happens alongside a ridiculously out-of-place Marilyn Manson song playing over every single trailer. Anyway, onto the point. I don't mind the sex and violence. I honestly don't care either way. Actually I think that games need to jump onto this band wagon with much more fervour.

Once we've got a proper bunch of games with sex scenes and violence, essentially putting us on the same level as the movie industry, people will finally stop being shocked by blood and titties, so we can drop the juvenile stuff and focus on using them intelligently. Right now, I'm still a little worried about DO:A's use of blood and titties, because I'm afraid the end result will be as pathetically laughable as the prostitutes in Fallout 3 (you can pay 'em to watch 'em sleep fully clothed in a non-suggestive pose).

To clarify, possibly to summarize, I want to get video games accepted. While gratuitous use of sex and violence isn't the optimal path to that, it's an effective tactic. “In olden days a glimpse of stocking/Was looked on as something shocking/Now heaven knows, anything goes” as Cole Porter sang. Once the immature games placate the unwashed masses the intelligent games will be home free.

Onto the retrospective stuff. Topics: moral systems and choices, sandbox games and difficulty. Moral systems and choices first. PS3's major exclusive game inFamous has gained a lot of criticism for featuring ridiculously contrasting moral choices. I once again say, this has got to stop. Playing almost any game with a moral system of being good or evil, choices are always between giving a beggar spare change or cutting off all of his limbs, ensuring he survives and then laughing at his misery. Since it's actually quite hard to be a sociopath of this level, it's impossible to relate to your character in any way at all.

I don't mind good/evil systems as such and they fit in well here and there. The problem is very much with the choices themselves. Moral ambiguity would be nice, as would some consideration for repercussions. Keep the player guessing. Instead of going black-and-white go for shades of grey, to use a completely worn out analogy. Also, less psychopathic evil choices. Sure, they have to be evil, but not quite as off the wall. Evil for the sake of evil isn't entertaining, it's bad writing. And have a situation where there are ostensibly only good choices, but a few of them have repercussions that are evil. Actually, on second thought that raises question of whether or not an action is evil based on the repercussions or based on the motive. Well, I'll have to dedicate another blog to solving philosophical questions.

Next up, sandbox games. A brief recap: most games are linear, meaning you can't freely roam around. The next step from this is to have a relatively linear story, but a game world you're free to explore. This is somewhat rare, because it's very strange and contradictory. Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox did something along these lines, and Bungie's Halo 3: ODST seems to head more or less in this direction. The final stage is having a complete sandbox. Essentially, you can do anything but you don't have to do anything. This is a big thing nowadays and everybody's doing it. I'm not convinced this a smart thing to do. In theory it's good that the player can make his or her own choices, but not in practice. In practice the end result is pretty much always that the game seriously lacks direction and pacing.

Developers seem to take “sandbox” as an excuse to make a big, grand Choose Your Own Adventure that in the end is neither big nor grand, at least not where it counts. Bethesda is very much evidence of this problem, as was Piranha Bytes, Gothic's developers, who were thankfully replaced after they bungled this aspect of Gothic 3. Gothic 2, relatively linear by RPG standards, was much more enjoyable than the sequel, where I finished the game without ever having a clear idea of what I was supposed to do and why I was doing it.

To take this further, another thing that's becoming more and more common and is often seen hanging out with sandbox gameplay (especially at Bethesda's) is Blank “Insert Yourself Here” Main Character. Game developers seem to have come up with this idea that players will have a better time relating to a character who does not have any personality at all, allowing the player to fill in the blanks and essentially create a character who is easier to relate to. This is once again a load of well-intended crap that works well in theory but does not translate well into practice.

The problem with the idea is that while it does allow players to form their own motivations, it does not allow players to express them. In Oblivion there are very few conversation choices that actually are sentences as opposed to words relating to some topic. If you want to say you want to save the world from the threat of world hunger, you choose the topic World Hunger and the NPCs react as if though you've said an actual sentence out loud. Great in theory, but in practice it makes conversations very disjointed. Only the most imaginationally active (no, not a real word, sadly) people can actually simulate these conversations in their heads in a convincing manner. For everyone else the experience just comes across as incredibly bland.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't like this any more than I like sandbox games. I don't mind watching and controlling a character whose motives are not my own – I still liken video games to movies more than anything else, and movies don't try and tell us “this is you” when it comes to the main character. This same applies to linearity. I don't mind having a linear main story. I'm okay and I even like being able to do the main story when I want, and being able to do other kinds of stuff first. But I don't like it when I'm told to make my own adventure. I paid for the game, and I paid for a story, I paid for content developed by professionals.

And finally a return to difficulty. I've previously expressed my views on the concept I call “brick wall difficulty”. This basically refers to the typical method in gaming to increase difficulty, whereupon there are more enemies, stronger enemies and the player is weaker. The reason I call this brick wall difficulty, is because it doesn't actually create a new challenge, it just makes the old one more tedious. To use the titular analogy, if you're told to break down a brick wall with your bare fists, it's not hard (save for the incredible amounts of pain), it's just tedious, because all you have to do is steadily punch the wall. Eventually it'll go down.

The point was that there's no actual challenge involved. And y'know, I can't right off the bat think of a single game that had done this right. Well, actually Civilization IV and Rome: Total War took steps in the right direction, but I suck too much at both of them to really admit that. I do admit that the whole thing is hard to tackle. There's no universal solution that would work with all game types. When it comes to shooters like Halo or Gears of War I don't really have any ideas. Having better AI on each difficulty level might work, but I don't know enough about programming to know whether or not this is viable.

In role-playing games the problem reaches a whole new level. In a shooter the only unknown for the developer in terms of challenge is player skill. In general linear games have only predictable situations. If a level designer says “I want this to be a tough spot”, the only thing he doesn't know is how good the player is, in terms of real world skill in controlling the game. In an RPG where the player has much more freedom there are many more unknowns. There are so many ways through which a player can improve their character that the developers can't really predict what the player characters will be like at a certain point in the game. And the further you get in the game the more varied the possibilities become.

There have been various solutions to this. Bethesda is on the forefront in terms of level-scaling. Basically everything gets adjusted according to player level. They blew it in Oblivion. The system totally broke immersion and plausibility of the world. Combat became dull and tedious. In Fallout 3 things start out much better, but the player character will soon advance to the point where there are no challenges. This same problem is evident in Fable and Mass Effect – any major deviation from the main quest to complete side quests will advance the character's level enough to considerably reduce the challenge at the end of the main quest.

This is of course a veritable tightrope. There is a very thin line between a dull challenge, no challenge and annoying challenge. Bethesda's Oblivion did one thing right: the combat is never too easy. While I do want to see results for improving my character, which Oblivion in turn failed in, I don't want to render the rest of the game dull because of that. It's very difficult to do right, but I like to think that Gothic 2, my favourite RPG of all time, succeeded in this. I'll be dedicating a blogpost at some time to analyze the faults and virtues of Gothic 2.

I'm definitely not saying I have all the answers when it comes to difficulty. I just wish developers would spend more time considering it. This has recently become an important topic to me, as I've really started feeling that games are too easy. I'm still just a casual gamer so my skill level is what it is. While I support easier games in terms of bringing more people into gaming, I still want more challenge from games.

Right now I'm even willing to settle for brick wall difficulty. Looking at games like Assassin's Creed and Fable II, there is virtually zero challenge throughout the whole game, except in a few situations where you're alone against a few dozen enemies. I support difficulty levels, as this allows players of various levels of skill enjoy a game equally. But for example AC and Fable don't feature any modifiers in terms of difficulty. As I said, it's all well and good that developers are taking new players into account, but it shouldn't be at the expense of core gamers.

Yeah, that's it. That's all I have. It's been another fun year. I'll get back to you in a week

The Preacher's Welcoming Sermon

2009-06-13T19:19:00.004+03:00

Hello, children

Please don't mind the patronizing tone or the disturbingly preaching-related verbal imagery. This is a blog about video games, and is a continuation of my work from GameTrailers.Com, where I'm known as Prtyjedi (please don't ask).

This here blog will consist of my opinions and observances on the video gaming world. I've been playing video games for quite a while and I've been writing a video game blog because it makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something and because some people actually think I make the occasional good point. I'll comment on upcoming games, events, so forth. I'll comment on what I'm playing so forth. I might occasionally wonder off topic and remark that Michael Connelly is a stunningly good writer.

While I'm supposed to update every two weeks or so I haven't been on schedule for quite a while. That may change in the future, but I doubt it. For those just now joining my array of readers, you can amuse yourselves by reading my past production over the last two years, accessible through this link. I'll also abuse my vast past archives by including some of the best bits in retrospective.

That's all for now. I'll be back very shortly (tomorrow) for my anniversary update.

I will always welcome any feedback and requests for topics to touch upon.

Regards, PJ, the Couch Preacher