Trade-in valu...yeah, I can't finish that phrase either

Two things all trade-in prospectors already know.

GameStop will screw you.

The industry wants a piece of it.

Lately, the gaming circle has been talking a lot about used video games and how the publishers aren't getting any moolah for those transactions. That's fine, because they shouldn't and there are a zillion perfectly obvious reasons why. It's almost pathetic that bloggers are having to list them, but if you are a publisher out there and you really need it spelled out for you, let's have a basic economy lesson.

You already sold the game.

That's it. Done. You've sold it. You can't sell it again, and it's someone else's right to sell it if they don't want it either. If you want it to reach more people and want a piece of that, then lower the price to increase supply and hope that the demand covers the price cut by adding a few more gamers. Which brings me to...

You will make your community suffer for supporting you.

If I want to play a game of Battlefield, I damn sure hope that there are enough people playing to fill a server. If a million people buy a game, and half of them decide they won't play the game anymore because they didn't like it, then if they can't exactly trade their games in without it being a royal worthless pain, then statistically, only the half that do like it will end up still playing your game. Now, if you allow those people to trade in their games, then at zero cost to you, you have allowed the gamers to work out for themselves how to make your community stronger by turning those players who didn't like it into players that do like it.

Simple math formula, and we'll use approval ratings.

EA will be releasing FIFA 2010. They sell one million copies, and half of them don't like it. You have a 50% customer approval rating. Giving all incentive for the people who don't like it to trade it in for something they do like raises the likelyhood that you can turn that number around. Say there was a group of gamers that couldn't afford it, but they can definitely afford the used price. No matter what, you only get better numbers than 50% approval. 75% of your game-owning audience approves of the game, and you didn't have to raise a finger to change it. Those people will talk about your game and pass it on to their friends, your servers are filled, your tournaments are more competitive, etc.

NOT giving incentive to the 50% disapproving of the game will find you fending off thousands of gamers eager to passionately light your collective asses up. Servers will be harder to come by. Burnout Paradise, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and even Counter-Strike are more than a year old, and you know what? Trade-ins keep those games thriving, and probably will keep those games in focus for a while longer.

You are only proving that you are too lazy.

You want to make money? Earn it. Offer a DLC. Offer bonus content. Do something useful. You sold your game already, and the only logical reason to ask for more money from those same gamers is because you are greedy and you have run out of ways to get more money from that game. Be inventive. Create something new for us. The Playstation Shop has hundreds of add-ons available for their games, and some of them cost money, but gamers who care about your game might just buy them.

It's your fault for putting out crappy games.

Ever wonder why a game like Bionic Commando plummets to $20 within a month or two of release? It's because the game wasn't worth the $60 you were asking. This is basic economy, and if you argue about this, you need to be fired. Now. You shouldn't be allowed to manage your own bank account, let alone part of a company. If you supplied a million games, and gamers didn't like it, the demand for that game is low. Having all that supply means you need to lower the price to increase demand.

This has nothing to do with used games. It isn't hurting your sales at all. Sure, I could have gone out and bought Bionic Commando for $45 instead of $60, but that doesn't reduce the value of your game. Crap is crap, and finding a way to turn crap into something else is just plain common sense. Would you rather your gamers hate you for being handed a bun with your greed-juices in it, or would you rather that they be allowed to at least get something positive out of the transaction?

GameStop

In case you didn't notice, GameStop is already screwing the trader over anyway. Not that the publishers have a right to complain, because they don't. I won't even get into invasion of privacy, but I'll just say that the government doesn't send IRS agents to garage sales, so get the hell out of my business. I've traded in stuff before at GameStop, and as a rule, if you don't go in there when an awesome deal isn't going on, or you aren't trading to get anything specific back, you just don't do it. A game that sells for $17.99 might net you $3.50. The fact that new GameStop's are popping up everywhere means that business is booming on that front, so you know they are purposely screwing you out of your cash.

The Madden's and the Hello Kitty games, I completely understand, but giving gamers more value to their trade-in will only get them in the store to try new games. If you're putting out crap, then you're only complaining because you're afraid. If you're proud of your product, then you should be encouraging GameStop to be helping the gamer out more. If I get $50 for two games rather than $20, then it's pretty obvious that I'm going to try out more games with the extra $30. I might just stumble across a game I never would've tried without that flexibility, and might buy the sequel or more from that company. I liked Odin Sphere, and I never would have tried that game if not for the trade-in system. Atlus might've just sold me a brand new game someday because I had that opportunity.

The entire argument is pretty straightforward, but hopefully these few examples make it into some iteration of the Idiot's Guide to Running A Game Company. From the sounds of it, it would sell well. I should look into this...

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What developers need to realize

Gaming developers have a challenge before them every single time they decide to go out and invent a control scheme appropriate for their game. Sometimes, it works without fail. I have never once played Resident Evil 4 and thought that a part of the control scheme could be tweaked, despite the obvious lack of running while gunning or on-the-move reloading. Sometimes, there are little bits of annoying parts in otherwise shining examples of awesome, such as the Vista-eqsue "Are you sure you would like to discard this item?" problem in The Mercinaries.

As a side note, the latter isn't a problem in the main game at all. It only becomes a problem in that specific game mode where the player must haul as much ass as possible on a fixed health budget with time ticking away, and 99% of the game mode involves a hoarde of monsters fixed on your position. When faced with a good sized group of said monsters, the game wants to make sure that you want to drop that poisonous rotten egg you picked up while trying to pick up the first-aid spray sitting right next to it. Problem is that when you hit "discard" after wasting a precious split second in the menu, you want to get back to the hauling part and instinctively get ready to line up your crowd-pleaser. Yet, the ever so annoying question remains, "Are you sure?"

You are then whacked in the head with a beer bottle, or promptly killed by whatever insta-kill a mini-boss felt like doing to you. It's not that I don't understand the reasoning behind it (you don't want to just drop that magnum into space now, do you?), but it should have been taken out of The Mercinaries for the sheer fact that one mistake sends you to restart hell anyway. If you drop your gun, you do what you always do and restart. If there's a minute left, the S score is on the line, and you only need to heal up once before victory, you probably wouldn't mind dropping a gun and you probably don't want to sit there like a retard staring at your pockets.

Prototype had the same problem. There were zillions of options when it came to you killing things, but I thought the menu for choosing from those could have been different. I don't have a good idea how to make it better, and it wasn't game changing, so I can forgive that. What I did not forgive was mapping twelve skills that do different things to one button. That ruins things, like, say....challenges meant to be beat with those specific skills.

Seriously, did not one game tester unlodge whatever it was lodged in their throats and tell their bosses that a challenge involving the use of all five skills that were mapped to the X button and nothing else was just stupid? You have to jump and charge your jump with the X and R1 buttons, but you also air-dash and double jump with those buttons, but you also glide by tapping the jump button twice, but if you've already air-dashed twice then you do something completely different making you look like a drunk pigeon about to crash land in the middle of Times Square. Forget fighting an air battle, because while it's cool to perform once you do it, you will fail and fall off buildings a lot. It's not a game-killer because you are a superhuman so falling doesn't mean death, but it is very annoying to try to do anything with pinpoint accuracy. At least that's the way it is on the PS3, because the developers also managed to forget that "accuracy" on the DualShock is just a bad thing to strive for. Too many games have I played where if I get relaxed and hold the controller comfortably, pressing up is actually pressing a little to the right. So if air-dashing sends you flying in the direction you don't want to go then you're stuck re-dashing to compensate, and it's all your fault when that fails too because you happened to be relaxing and enjoying your game instead of trying to snyc yourself in robot fashion to hold the controller the way they want you to.

There's more to that story, but the ire of today is directed squarely at Street Fighter IV. I should have rented this game first, but GameStop dropped the price to $20 and I could hardly resist. Capcom never gets it wrong with these series, except for maybe the slightly-too-obvious EX series that wasn't as terrible as people said it was. It was an experiment in 3-D, and not every one of those mid-to-late 90's experiments went according to plan. I can forgive that. Yet, Street Fighter dominated the fighting genre, was as balanced as ever, and never apologized for what it was. Sure, people could get to be experts at the game and know how to do everything the average person didn't have a clue how to do, but the game wasn't considered "technical". Street Fighter Alpha 3 is still considered a behemoth of a fighter because of its speed, offense, simplisity, and intensity. You pick it up and can put up a fight if you know the basics, and you figure out everything else as you go.

Hearing Capcom talk about Street Fighter IV was like hearing a hot celebrity tell you exactly what you want to hear. They claimed that the game wouldn't be about learning the moves, but instinctively pulling them off. They said that it would be an offensive game first, focusing on balance from there. The game's graphics looked great and with the history there, nothing could go horribly wrong. Right?

Well, just when you think that there are at least a few franchises you can trust, Street Fighter IV goes back on every promise made before it launched. Yes, I'm late to the party by a long shot, but the game astounded me at how absolutely terrible it was. This was a nightmare of design. I'll be honest; I own the PS3 version. Maybe this might just be on my end, but I cannot see how. I also didn't play multiplayer in any fashion, so there is a certain element of cheapness involved no matter what, but the game is still fundamentally broken and Arcade mode is not an excuse for that.

The first major problem with the game is that Capcom purposefully sabotaged the game controls for anyone without an arcade stick, though I seriously doubt that would save it. First, moves simply do not work. Fireball forward, for example, actually does a fireball a low percentage of the time. Depending on what you were doing, you either dragon punch up into "juggle me" land, punch aimlessly into nothing, or just stand there like a dolt. To test this theory, I whipped out the old SNK games, Street Fighter Alpha 3, and Soul Calibur IV. In every single game, a simple quarter-circle forward move would work perfectly fine. Soul Calibur had slightly less success being that it's 3-D and that every move can be followed, so whatever you were doing before has some significance as to what that quarter-circle is going to do. Yet, that was still remarkable accurate and was totally attributed to me: the user.

I decided that since I'm fighting in Arcade mode, the computer must be handing it to me because it's cheap and evil, causing me to be frustrated and pulling off the moves wrong. Not so. The fireballs still didn't work (I'm using Ryu, by the way). So I switched to another character, Crimson Viper. She has two moves that involve quarter circles; one forward, one backwards. The quarter circle forward move worked a couple of times, and then I decided that I must have been doing something wrong with Ryu, until the problems started happening again. Finally, training mode asked me to perform a basic combination. So I did it, and it didn't work. I tried it again, and it didn't work. On the fifth or sixth attempt, without any rhyme, reason, or sense, the computer decided that I was obviously using the quarter circle backward move in the middle of my combo. I double checked this, and the combo does not call for anything to go backwards, so I didn't make a mistake, but I still guessed that I must have done something wrong. The sad part? The experiment was repeatable, and she does in fact do the wrong move randomly. I've played a lot of fighting games in my life, and never has this happened, and I am not that bad at fighting games at all. Let that settle in, that Street Fighter IV doesn't even read your moves correctly. This leads directly into the second major sign that nobody gave a crap about the controls.

It's Virtua Fighter all over again. I could not play Virtua Fighter 4 because frankly, that is definitely a game I am no good at. To me, there is no rhyme or reason to how some of the combos work in the end. It's too technical for my tastes, and I couldn't quite figure out why some things just did not work as advertised. I once agonized for fifteen minutes trying to figure out why a certain training combo just wouldn't pull itself off, but I still couldn't manage to do it. Yet, I got some enjoyment out of the game and I wasn't useless at it. I'll just never be good at it.

Street Fighter IV takes this to a whole new level. First, what the game and manual tell you to do just doesn't work half the time. At least, not for someone actually trying to learn the move in question. If there are certain parts of the game that are just meant for really good players with experience to figure out, that's all well and good, but building this into the standards of the game and then botching it is just stupid. High kick then super fireball move sounds simple enough, right? There's nothing complicated about it, and it is training mode after all, so you should be learning how to do this.

High kick...then a punch. High kick...then a dragon punch. High kick then a fireball. High kick then a lot of standing there. High kick then...it actually happens! Now, if only he shot the fireball this century, I might have cleared that bit. No matter what, the fireball is delayed a long time if it feels like working.

Look, I can pull off the Buster Wolf with the snap of a finger, and even the crappy 3-D King of Fighters games got that right with no trouble, every time. I know how to rip off a move before I've even landed so that my fighter unleashes the second he or she hits the ground. This is foreign to Street Fighter IV. If there is a trick to pulling these moves off, then why the hell is it a f***ing secret? Even if it wasn't, none of them even work properly!

When you do manage to pull one of these moves off, it doesn't matter in the end anyway. You're just going to be grabbed and thrown. After rigorous testing of the theory and several witnesses, I proved without any doubts that the hit detection of this game is one of the worst in fighting game history. Say that you felt like kicking M. Bison in the junk. Well, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to realize that if your boot has made it's way halfway through his bladder, then I think you have succeeded in doing your job. Well, that common sense hasn't made it's way to Capcom. If only you know in your last barfight that as long as you put a hand on the guy doing the pinata bashing, you were God at that moment, could remove the foot with no pain, and simply fling him into the bartender.

That is how the game works, no matter what a fighter connects with. Your teeth could be in your windpipe, and all you have to do is grab the guy in front of you and nothing will have happened. A good part of my first two playthroughs in Arcade was spent trying to figure out what the physics were and how to score hits and defend like the computer was doing. Nothing was consistent, nothing made sense, and while normally I have a great deal of patience with fighting games because each one has a distinct rhythm you have to get the hang of, this didn't seem to have one at all.

It's sad, really, because there was no way this game should have failed. Yet, it did. Massively. I have never played a fighting game that I can remember that was botched this badly, except for those digital scan games that tried to copy Mortal Kombat. Rise of the Robots wasn't that good either...but that's beside the point because it was boring and had nothing to it anyway. This game has all the flair of an A+ title and no control system to speak of, and my God, it's Street Fighter. How the hell do you screw that up, Capcom? You somehow managed, and while I tried to like it, it was my second playthrough that killed it for me.

Ryu vs. Abel. Abel spends 90% of his time rolling back and forth around me until he feels like grabbing me. I try to break the grab, but that never works. So I get thrown, I get back up and try to grab him since he's right there. My hand passes through his head and he's not even moving a muscle to stop me, but for some reason I'm flying across the stage again. I land again, and he hits me with some unbreakable move that leaves me open again. So I crouch and defend. He throws me again. I get up, and he's rolling at me three times straight, and whip out a nice mean heavy kick to the face. His head is covered by my foot, and he just sticks his face into it and grabs me again. I get up, wait for him, punch him towards the face...and he ducks. So what the hell, he did it to me, right? I reach to grab him, and he's sitting pretty. Nothing happened. I charge up my gut-buster because I'm ticked off at this point, and I let it fly the second he stands up. He's not defending, my hand is buried in his stomach, and I'm flying again.

I pause.

"Did you see that?"

"Yes, I did."

"My fist was in his spine, right?"

"Yes, it was."

"F*** this game."

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It's good to be the king

Today marks the release of the King of Fighters XII, as many hardcore fighting fans out there already know. I'm hesitant to go out and grab the thing today because it costs $60 and I'm not exactly thrilled to go drop that kind of cash on it. I know it's petty because I have loved and backed the SNK brand ever since I played Art of Fighting because there's just a lot in that little universe they've created to love. Later on as the King of Fighters series progressed, especially '96 and beyond, SNK was all about tight refinements that worked well for them.

By the way, if you were looking for this game to be on GameStop's website, for some reason I had to dig three menus in just to find it while double checking the price. It's quite obvious they are trying to hide this game because I see ads for BlazBlue and even Street Fighter IV, but I can't even find KoF on today's release list or on the upcoming release list. The ads are paid, I get it, but they aren't even trying to disguise themselves here.

Anyway, conspiracy theories aside, I think that this release just about kills the whole "dead of 2-D" idea. Let's face it, the greatest are still 2-D. BlazBlue, KoF, and Street Fighter reign supreme right now, and all I've received from the Tekken crowd were groans of misery. Sure, there's always going to be Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur, but those games have found themselves standing above a sea of crap. Real furious substance is hard to find, but the 2-D guys are still releasing well received updates. Street Fighter IV is definitely 2-D, by the way. Say all you want about sprites and hand-drawn games, but if you can have a game self-animate the 2-D for you, then it's still 2-D. Watch the comparison videos if you have doubts, because it's true and you know it.

Now, while I trust that KoF XII is going to be good, I hope this is the beginning of some real identity for them, because after '02, SNK Playmore got into a severe crisis about figuring out what their next game was going to be like going into the future. I doubt this is the end of the experiments, but '03 overhauled the system, Maximum Impact got off to a horrible start and mediocre finish and somehow got awarded a year title for it ('06), then XI came out started the roman numeral idea but went backwards into the old sprite bank...

I'm just confused. KoF XII better be the start of some new ground for them, or they aren't going to have much of a foundation left. I'll get my rental in soon, I'm sure, so I'll be dumping mini-reviews on Twitter eventually.

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Behold the Fargate

With much regret, I have to use the label SyFy for the first time. The accessibility, I can understand, but the Sci-Fi Channel name pretty much told you what you were going to get and there wasn't much changing that needed to be done. It doesn't sound cuter and doesn't make for good marketing, really.

Stargate Universe got a new trailer out, which you can see here on the website, and it's beginning to look a lot more like a plot I was hoping would actually be used in the Stargate...universe. The movie had the tease, SG-1 builded the foundation, and Atlantis almost took the leap, but Universe is the closest thing I can see to a live-action Robotech being developed with the right ideas in mind. Hear me out on this.

Robotech was mainly about humanity being given a technology they knew nothing about, uniting behind that technology, and then being harassed by aliens the second that they were about to use the stuff. There were a lot of themes in the original Robotech line that haven't been touched again with real intent, and it looks like Stargate Universe might actually deliver on those themes. While it may look like some bastard child of Galactica, Atlantis, and Voyager (even the suits worn in the trailer seem close to Halo), it might not be a complete mess in the end. There seems to be a good chance that this may combine the best each has to offer while sprinkling in that Robotech feel. I'm looking forward to it, though I am a little biased since anything carrying the Stargate tag gets my undivided attention. Except that cartoon series.

The trailer raises a lot of questions that I haven't done much research on, since I try to shy away from ruining the freshness of a good series by reading too much. The main question I had was to the identity of the kid who gets beamed up and what makes him so special? I guess I will have to wait, but knowing that Robert Carlyle's has been on board pretty much gives me faith that no plot of going to have off the chart stupidity involved.

Yes, I'm supposed to write about games, but I like other things too.

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The thing about Macs and space.

This will be the first post I ever compose from a Mac. It's one of their laptop versions, and while I would like to say it's a PowerBook or something like that, the truth is that I don't know or care. I'm not a Mac hater, but I don't like the things in the least. I've long said that a true geeks' relationship with their computers can be summed up by Han Solo and his Millennium Falcon. The thing is supposed to be a POS, yet it's thrown together in a way that only three people in the entire galaxy know how to properly use without painting themselves into the walls of any given Imperial rest stop.

Basically, Windows and PC users by extension have a clusterf*** of modability at their disposal that is just plain excessive. Mac just works, I got it. It's simple, it can do what Windows does, yata yata. Yet, there's so many ways to screw up a Windows PC with useless programs that it's worth the headache when it inevitably goes "kablooey". Luckily, Apple made damn sure to throw some useless programming love to their iPhone crowd, because only one out of ten apps seems to advance beyond anything more than a Facebook app. "App", by the way, has made a comeback in being a buzzword, and instead of being used to describe as an application is now just used by Apple people to describe anything with or without actual applications.

So, because Apple took the time to take a relatively common tech word and hand it over to the coffee snobs who use Macs, the rest of us can't use it anymore.

The one compliment I will give Apple is that I can type hideously fast on this keyboard. These things are great word processing tools. Useable from any angle with perfect accuracy and ease, these babies give me a reason to proudly put something of their brand on my table. In this case, however, I'm simply using the laptop on a boredom loan, but the more I use it, the more I want to buy one for my PC.

I don't know how this brings me to Halo, but I have to get there somehow.

The guys at Bungie have decided to create an anime based on Halo, and while the success of the games might translate into success on screen, I sort of doubt that this will be the kind of success story they are hoping for. There is sort of a glaring problem in that Halo doesn't have much of a story. A few friends described it to me, and they are the kind that will actually read the books to figure this stuff out, and as best as I can tell, there still isn't much more beyond what is fleshed out in the games. Rings are old as dirt and will explode, the Flood are around, and...I think the ships got named in there somewhere. Either way, there's nothing to tell. The games had a pretty boring storyline as well, and gamers actually got pissed when they couldn't finish Halo 2 with Master Chief. I'm only guessing this is because no gamer cares about the story so much as they enjoy blowing things up with Master Chief.

At first, I was willing to give a little bit of credit to the Halo movie, but I even decided that was going to be a lame waste of time. If you look at the Halo games, there's one thing you could see as having potential, and that is the mood of the game at times. It's sparse, I know, and that's exactly why a movie translation wouldn't work. There is a mood sneaking in there based on the expanse of space and the little-ness of all the pawns and how space is older than dirt and these races seem to be way over their heads and playing rampant catch up to all the truth...and then the guns come out and you forget all about that and you play the same colored stages with repeating rooms of the same design over and over again until you've forgotten which way "forward" actually is and if they make you play as the lame Arbiter again that you'll be pissed and will fling the controller unless your friends want to get together for some 16 player teabagging action and....

See my point? There is no plot, and even if there was, the game sure didn't make anyone give a shit about it. An anime is not going to help, and if it is successful, then I'm not entirely sure I want to be around the crowd that would actually watch it.

This week's delay, I should mention, was due to an entire lack of computer time. It shouldn't happen much in the future, and if it does, you will have warning. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit

Tournament edition

OK, this is cool.

Now, I may not be the best at the old-school variety of gaming, but I can appreciate it just as much as this guy. Trouble is, having several thousand dollars to buy a cartridge is just a little beyond my scope of sanity. The guy has the money though, and to be honest, if I had that kind of money, I would probably do the same thing. It's the epithome of gaming awesome to know that somebody out there has the cash to dole out on not just his fantasy game cravings, but also for you.

Which reminds me, gaming is about sharing. No matter how you put it, gaming is worth nothing unless you share it. It's like being able to hit a baseball 600 feet. If you show up everyone that's likely to see it, nobody's going to talk about it. Everyone hates Alex Rodriguez, it's a sports fact. This guy is going to shatter most records unless he shatters his hip first (and most sports loving Americans are rooting for this outcome), and because the guy is a raving douchebag, nobody is going to laud him for anything. He could save thirty pregnant women from a burning building, and his reputation is still going to be filed under the "whatever" group in our heads. Same goes for gamers.

J.J. Hendricks is doing us all a favor and showing the world that even though he had mad cash to spend on something that's realistically worthless, he is willing to share it. The concept is something that's embraced and shunned by gamers today. Most still cling to the "I have Prototype and it's awesome and you don't have it!" philosophy to try and be the cool kid on the block. Trouble is, these men are nearing 30 and want you to pay more attention to them than the experience of playing. More people need to be like Hendricks. He's even giving prizes away to simulate the original competition.

If this turns out to be a success, I hope that Hendricks takes this idea to the road. As a gamer, I would personally love the opportunity to get thrashed in such a competition. It would be a wonderful homage to the way we used to play, and I would love to see this go to charity.

Speaking of,, please check TheSpeedGamers out. Currently, they're in the middle of a Final Fantasy marathon, but these guys are doing it for charity and they're raising some serious cash.

Sharing is caring, people.

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Michael Bay may be a robot

Not to pour gasoline on Left 4 Dead 2, but it has something else working against the development team. It's easy to pick on them for churning out a quick sequel, but so long as it's adequately priced and provides a different playing experience than the first, then it wouldn't be too hard to compare it to a B-grade horror movie. You know, an homage. Unfortunately, all signs point to "no", which tells me that this whole "video game is art" argument may be a little premature for the majority of the industry.

Valve has a lot of clout in the gaming world, and certainly they could be considered one of the more artistic studios out there. Half-Life was brilliant in its storytelling and design, Counter-Strike could practically be considered a professional sport if we started keeping track of those things, Portal was considered for God only knows how many praises, and Half-Life 2 was able to capture nearly almost all of the magic the first had while at the same time visualising War of the Worlds. Even the original Left 4 Dead could be considered a historically important boon for the multiplayer community out there.

Yet, despite all of that, pumping out a quick sequel undermines their credibility in so many more ways than simply trying to make a quick buck. When Chet Faliszek explained in this interview to defend the sequel, I generally believed what he had to say. It's nice to know that Valve would support its employees to try new things and practice their own creative skills, and I firmly believe that the sequel won't be a huge ripoff. We all know it will even be a good game. However, that's where the praise ends.

Let's ignore the ripoff question, because I'm not entirely sure if I buy into that yet. Sure, we all know that game developers are money grubbing fiends that will screw you at every chance, but so many Valve games have been supported well after releasing new games that I sort of doubt this is the last time we'll be seeing significant updates to the original Left 4 Dead.

From an artistic standpoint, wouldn't it have made sense to embrace the quick sequel release as an homage or even an influence? I haven't delved too deep into the info, but the overall impression is that it will only be bloodier and gorier and slightly different in a few ways. It will offer a different game experience at first, but it will very quickly become more of the same. I'm sure I'm going to like this game, but I see it as a Left 4 Dead 1.5 instead of 2. If they announced that this would be the first in yearly episodic $20 campaigns that serve as "sequels", I'd be more embracing.

Tweaking the AI director is a great idea, but will ultimately become just as predictable as the first game. It really got me thinking about horror and thrills in gaming. I understand that Left 4 Dead is a fast paced team-shooter and that it's more about the tension than the scares, but many years of multiplayer gaming has taught me that if anything is controlled by a computer, there isn't much you can do to prevent it from becoming completely predictable. Even if you add in 50 extra subroutines for the AI director to deal with, the gamers will have it figured out in a couple of weeks without thinking twice. Yes, the music gave most of it away in the first game and that they aren't really trying to kill the player off. It's about keeping the campaigns different each time. I get that.

It just got me thinking about games in general and how it is ill suited for horror. It's great for the first playthrough. Resident Evil was scary as hell at first, but once a player killed a couple zombies, the zombies weren't scary anymore. It seems obvious, but once you know where you'll be scared, you just won't be scared again. It would be just like watching a scary movie, letting a scary part happen, then immediately chaptering back to watch it again.

To the credit of game developers everywhere, I give a lot of credit to the effort that has gone into trying to keep the scares alive, but it just never seems to work. In Doom 3, it was pretty easy to figure out when you were going to be attacked only a few minutes into the combat. It was as easy as looking for anything that glowed red, then get your shotgun out and have fun. The entire buildup was a giant tease of what could have been, then once you were attacked, all of that buildup went out the window. In Eternal Darkness, they did a great job of choosing a specific kind of freak-out that I'd love to see more of in games. You just can't play the game again without giggling a little instead of wondering if your GameCube is sentient.

For every randomization that games have thrown in, it's usually being pulled from the same bag of tricks that you already know. At least that's better than games with "scary" spawn points being in the same place every time.

Can it be solved right now? Well, yes and no. Let me illustrate just how hard it is to create a game that stays scary even after a couple of playthroughs. Sorry Chet, you will not be the first to solve it.

Unfortunately, you have to pull from a stable of preset options to begin with, otherwise there are no scares. If you walk into every room and there are just enemies or traps in random places, it's already broken and won't scare anyone. You have to define a certain set of hazards that can get the player unhinged.

So say that the team chose to have a set of player smashing walls, a leaping werewolf, a falling corpse, a swarm of zombies, and a chainsaw guy.

You have a set amount of rooms to place these traps in. Now, if you place each of these traps in the same place every time, it'll scare gamers the first time through, but not the second time. That's also assuming they survive. If they don't, then they are immediately pre-prepared for what's going to happen. If that werewolf lunges, then the gamer knows exactly when and were it's going to jump and have a gun on that position the entire time. If there's a chainsaw guy, they won't be unhinged at all and will focus more on the mechanics of taking it down then being freaked out at all. The squishy walls will simply be a retry puzzle rather than a panic room.

So say you decide to randomize the rooms. Well, gamers are mechanically intelligent for the most part, and while you may make the average 6 year old piss themselves, any other gamer will already know what's coming and have it all planned out. Jump into any game of Left 4 Dead, and a good group of gamers will immediately react the second the Tank music flips on by assuming whoop-ass positions or making a quick dash to the safe room. Sure, the other special zombies can make it difficult, but I've seen good groups make short work of what is supposed to be a frantic game-changer. Gamers know how your system works, and spend more time thinking about beating your system than living the "experience" than even they realize.

So if the player is prepared for whatever order or traps you throw at them, then your only other option is to randomize even more. Make the wolf jump from a multiple locations. make the ceiling collapse every now and then instead of going horizontal. Have the swarm of zombies alternate between coming in through one door and randomly pick how many doors will bring on the flood. Maybe the corpse will drop before one of these scares as a fake instead of the real scare.

In this case, you're still stuck with the player being prepared, because even though the locations are a bit more random, the strategy is basically the same.

In Left 4 Dead 2's case, add a few more tricks and this will be their spot on the chart. They have seen the strategies, and instead of really scaring the gamer, they are using counter-strategy which is more about challenging the gamer than putting them in a spot. Yes, a swarm will run at you while you're forced into the middle of some alarmed cars. That's still no different than the first game. The strategy will be the exact same, just a little different and more challenging. That's not thinking in the horror sense.

Yet, there's only so much randomization you can do before you have to come up with another system entirely. Say you took the above example a step further. That's when cheapness and glitches become more prevalent.

Say the werewolf doesn't have preset locations to leap from. It's then able to insta-kill you from behind, and most likely won't even scare the gamer. Instead, they will be staring at a red screen going "WTF?", and they'll probably be infuriated. Maybe the chainsaw guy will be on the far end of some room, giving you ample time to blow its brains out before it can get within ten yards of you. What if the zombies changed in numbers and either depleted your ammo completely or didn't let you even get a good fight in before you walked away victorious. What if corpses dropped too often or too obviously and just served to replace rain?

If you want to solve this problem, you really have to pay more attention to how the movies pull it off. You can watch something only so many times before you become used to seeing limbs fly or having a cat fly onto the screen from seemingly nowhere. There are some games that have figured a certain part of this formula out. Resident Evil 4, for example, had one of the most signature sounds in gaming: the chainsaw rev. There were times in the middle of a tense firefight when that sound would go off and change everything. It's worse when you know what's coming, know how to prepare for it, but have no idea about the when and where. Remember Psycho? It was much more frightening to hear the footsteps at the end than to actually see Bates run into the room.

Don't be surprised if you see a little more unpredictability in Left 4 Dead 2 because of things like this. The car alarm worked for about 3 rounds in the first game, and it is an effective way to nail the party for being careless or frantic. In the sequel, if the gamers know the swarm is coming, then Valve will probably throw a few tricks at you. Maybe the zombies don't come at first, and the group is left sitting still ready to fight. Then the zombies come in from behind a few seconds after the party scratches their heads for a second.

Knowing what is coming without the necessary details works in gaming. Gaming developers, and Valve included, should understand this. You cannot pack a game with cheap scares or scripted behavior. It works the first time, but never again. Resident Evil, F.E.A.R., Dead Space, and even Left 4 Dead with its AI director have been entertaining and tense, but they haven't mastered keeping a game fresh with chills. They tweak it, but it never works.

If you're Valve and you're serious about this AI director thing, think about this for a second before you start propping the system up again. Personally, I think I know how to solve this little problem, but I'm not telling you because as much as I think that would love to play the game I have envisioned, I'm so not letting that idea fly without some cash and some input. Since that's not happening, the best I can tell you is this: find a way to keep the gamers looking over their shoulders. Make them worry, not empowered. Let them know what's coming, but don't give it to them. A game player is so unattached from the character they are controlling that they don't care if they lose in a firefight or get cheaply whacked by a flying car. Up the ante and make things more threatening and let the gamer dwell on it for a second. You have to draw the player into the drama somehow. Don't attack the character. Focus on attacking the gamer's brain. Eternal Darkness at least showed that it was willing to break walls just to get under the gamer's skin.

Yeah yeah, I know, then it won't be the game we're all used to, but I have to direct my rant somewhere, right?

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Qualifications

Recently, I made a shift in consoles.

I used to own a Wii, and I was quite happy with the purchase until Nintendo jumped off its own wagon and started its resell campaign. Remember when the Wii first came out? The promise of 1:1 control over your games, manipulated by the physical motion? Well, it took a few years before they began to repackage that one to sell us all over again. The first batch of games weren't all that impressive, either. Zelda was essentially a GameCube release plus motion control, and neither Metroid Prime 3 and Super Smash Bros.: Brawl offered a definitive leap beyond what already existed in the franchises. Super Mario Galaxy was fun, and to the N's credit, that's what it should be about. However, something was severely missing from the equasion.

This year's E3, the entire purpose behind starting the blog, was a complete loss for Nintendo. They didn't offer up anything new on the interactivity front and they allowed each of their competitors with more powerful systems to announce the same thing, if not better, than what Nintendo's entire selling point was. Sure, they brought out the new Metroid, but that only went to show that they needed another developer to handle their own franchise to keep themselves relevant. I was not excited for Super Mario Galaxy 2 in the least, because that was probably the only true-Nintendo announcement that promised anything new. While we've seen it work in the past, for some reason this new Mario game didn't work the same magic that it used to. It used to be, "we're having a lazy here, so here's a new Mario!" and it would work every time. This time, not so much.

Even delving into what was coming up for the system, I was hard pressed to find anything that would provide enough Viagra for the Wii to keep it relevant. They didn't make any third-party coups, which is something Microsoft seems to be doing every other month, and the best I could come up with is that they were getting No More Heroes 2 and The Conduit, both titles should make you roll your eyes more than anything. The Conduit looks like any other shooter out there, and a boring one at that, but it seemed to be a game that got the control scheme right. Beyond that, I play five-year-old PC shooters that look better than that. The announcement of No More Heroes 2 was immediately followed by this little gem by series creator Goichi Suda, which basically says, "we're so ditching the Wii after this game". Ouch.

So I jumped off the train immediately, and that's saying something, since I managed to get through this without wanting to shoot the system through a cannon in the direction of Redmond.

Enter the PS3.

Don't get me wrong, I was quite aware that Microsoft's console had better variety than this brick of a system, but at least it is a brick in the noun sense, as in "my PS3 looks like a brick" rather than a verb, as in "my Xbox 360 likes to brick itself".

It makes sense to buy into Sony now, or at least when their rumored price drop happens, because the system is starting to show that at least it is reliable and truly next-gen, even if no one has really figured out how to make games that truly take advantage of what's under the hood. That doesn't mean I have nothing bad to say about Sony, because it's on the verge of doing something extremely rare, which is both a good and bad thing all at the same time.

The Saturn sums this up. On paper, it should have dominated the Playstation. It wasn't superior in every way, but the up-side was supposed to be better than the PlayStation by a long shot. Turns out that nobody knew what to do with all of the junk in the Saturn. I figured that Sony would have learned from this and adjusted themselves, and to be honest, they are damned lucky to still be alive. The PS3 is capable of a lot more than we're seeing right now, and the only reason why we're not seeing it is because nobody is capable of it yet. There isn't a company out there that will sink millions more into a project of that size until the methods become easier. EA won't do it. Square won't do it.

On the plus side, the PS3 is not known for being difficult to program for, meaning that anything a 360 can run, a PS3 can run too and the translation from one to the other isn't terribly difficult. It was a huge gamble to send their system out, overpriced and overpowered, and hope that once developers became more comfortable with the system that there would be titles of better quality than the 360. Unfortunately, I think that they were a little optimistic on when this was going to happen. Right now it just isn't happening, and by the time that developers do figure out how to tap into that potential, Microsoft will probably have their answer planned and ready to go. Sony took a huge gamble on the namesake and trust that Sony offers, and if they manage to stand their ground for another year they'll pull it off. I slammed the PS3 for this in the beginning, and I still hold the same opinion, but you simply have to cut a corner somewhere to avoid having a $600 price tag as your launch price.

So that's why I got it. If the system didn't die this year then it was going to be alright. It also has Blu-Ray and didn't shoot itself in the head when Resident Evil 5 came out (ahem, Microsoft...).

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To follow up...

Check this out.

People seem more curious about the ambitions of Google and the costs involved. I also see revenue streams being added in as "considerations".

Here's the thing...you have to throw all that out the window. Just thinking in a business sense, Windows has cemented itself in the marketplace because of ubiquity and third party trust that the vast majority of users are going to be using it. Think of it this way. Windows was built around the PC hardware. This period of time is a critical turning point, because with Linux becoming a serious option to people, developing for hardware is not nearly as important as it used to be, because there are now multiple ways to approach how to speak with the hardware.

Microsoft is trying to do what it forgot to do years ago when Google snagged the foothold on Internet usability. Gmail was the killer. Microsoft had to play catchup and it took them years to do it. Google is working from the outside-in, and always has. Its focus has been on usability, and now it is just getting the hardware specs in place to cement it on a significant platform.

In basic, easy to understand terms for you tech bloggers/reporters/whatever, it goes like this:

Microsoft created the first viable OS. Apple tried to copy, Linux tried to copy, and the fact remains that a high percentage of users don't want to even bother with learning Linux no matter how easy you claim it to be. The average "Idiot's Guide To..." customer does not give the firmest of craps about how Linux can be learned. They want results, and quick. PC's have been around for God knows how long, and you'd think that Microsoft and Apple couldn't be the only answer to the average consumer. Seriously, "turn the power on and off" is STILL a commonly used tech support line. If that's the case, then when the hell is the "easy button" crowd going to bother with Linux?

So if Microsoft was really the only way to go, then who do you think nVidia is going to develop their drivers for? Who do you think Creative Labs is creating hardware for? What has every major PC game release been on and been on first? That's right. No matter what you say, Microsoft was king because it monopolised its Windows as being the only game in town. Everybody, and I mean everybody, has to follow if they are in the business for some revenue. Don't even bring up Apple because the fact is that they were able to pick and choose what hardware they went with almost every single time, so they can pay the money to get the support for what they decide they want to do since they didn't have to appease the entire industry to do it.

Google, on the other hand, did not have to go with hardware at all. Anything would bring up a Google page, so long as you had a dial up connection and a computer that ran anything other than MS-DOS. Now that Microsoft and the Linux community have done literally all the hardware work for them, its as easy as putting the idea out there and letting everyone come to them now that Microsoft is being challenged. Don't give me this "but Google Docs only does this..." crap. That does not matter. Gmail started as basic high-storage e-mail, and we've gained a lot more features since then. Click on the "more" part of the main Google page. How much of that was there ten years ago?

There are no "longterm viability" question. There are no "but Android" considerations. Google is not doing this because of Android. Did you ever suspect that maybe Google knows it is "Internet first" and it just going through the motions of building their way to the OS level? Hmm, first Internet, then phones, then netbooks...I wonder where they plan to go next?

They put the idea out there and they let it build over time. That's the way it has been. So for any of you wondering what Google's goal is, it's this: to compete with Microsoft on every level. That has always been the goal. A single marketplace cannot be dominated by one company forever. For every sector Microsoft has been a part of, Google has and will challenge every single piece of it go get a share of it. That's the goal, and it always has been.

No promises on it always being free, but for those of you actually believing they will charge $200 for the Chrome OS should straight up quit paying attention to tech news altogether because you simply don't get it.

All Google needs to do is provide the option. They've started low, and they'll build it from there. It's as simple as letting the idea marinate on people's netbooks for a while, then suddenly you'll wake up and realize that there is a full Google OS sitting there for download that everybody has access to for what's probably going to cost you nothing. Besides, revenue will be made mostly on the internet side of things in a few years anyway. The more Microsoft relies on products that are readily available for free online, the less they are selling, and that's the way the industry is shifting. Google is simply parking itself right at the shift.

A lot of entities are losing grip on their business because they haven't correctly adjusted for how content will be distrubuted in the future (see RIAA). Microsoft is potentially one of them, because Google will be sitting right at where Microsoft needs to be to make their money. Eventually, the standard OS will be available on the cheap or for free, and Google knows this. Microsoft doesn't. So what if Google doesn't make enough revenue right now? When the timecomes for Internet advertising to be dominant once and for all, it's Google that will be sitting there with an open bag just sitting there catching the bills.

Oh, and the Google OS will have an office suite. I think they'll call it OpenOffice.

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Painting your netbook Chrome

I hate to add to the flood of buzz surrounding the Google OS (I would say new, but it was only a matter of time), but it needs to be talked about. It didn't take a rocket scientist to predict this was going to happen or the style they chose to go with. Remember, Google is fortified in the internet and that is where their biggest strength lies, so it shouldn't surprise you when they say that they are borrowing the Linux code and slapping web apps on it for functionality. There are some concerns, but there is some serious potential here if they do this right.

First of all, there are warning signs everywhere for this to turn into something really bad. I have to admit that I generally trust Google with my information and unless things turn south in Washington in a hurry, your information is not going to be turned over or anything like that. This point isn't made to bring up conspiracy, but privacy is a huge concern to most web users as of late. While the individual might break into your information, whether in the home or over the air, it's when another entity has control over your information that things get bad.

Basically, what the Chrome OS means is that you will be even more connected to the "cloud". Draw your own conclusions on what that means to you and your privacy. The style of distribution they are going for is going to draw some comparisons to systems already in place on other OS's. Linux, for example, has their package managers in place for any given distro that make downloading an available program as easy as checking a box. The Chrome OS will probably do something similar, though I imagine that more of the simpler programs will be optional, as in they will never have to be installed on your computer. If you're a Windows user, click your Start/Windows button right now, and go through and list everything you are pretty sure you only use once or twice a year. The programs are installed, take up space, and just clutter up your computer. A netbook with a solid state drive may only have 4-20 gigs of hard drive space in place at any given moment, so the more you can get rid of, the better off you'll be.

A Chrome OS also comes with a vicious combination of potential strengths. Google has spent the majority of their time developing more and more additional services to their portfolio, making them arguably the second most recognisable name in computing. Microsoft's best chance for continuous success is their massive library of programs (useful or not), and the trust that third parties will always deliver. The only thing that could ever unseat this is a big name like Google. Now, the biggest flaw that Microsoft has, and Windows 7 will show just how committed they are to addressing it, is the huge glut of resources their OS's use. This is Linux's big strength, and Google's desire to use this is a huge blow to the big M. It will start up as quick as Linux, and potentially have the support of a lot of third party developers, AND the support of the open-source community. Effectively, you have the perfect combination of Linux and Microsoft.

Also, think of what Linux doesn't offer. Google will tell you that this is a netbook driven decision, and that's only part of the truth. Google is centralized, and that makes any OS better. If you have an issue with how Chome OS speaks to your system, Google will see it, answer it, and address it if it can. Linux can only achieve so much. If the kernel itself doesn't work well with a certain piece of hardware, it will be fixed. If the Linux OS has compatibility issues of its own, your OS won't crash, but the community will address it slowly. Anything else is left up to the open-source community to work out on their own. Remember getting nVidia cards to work perfectly on Linux? Exactly. Think Google would let that slide? Not a chance.

Expect this OS to be modestly featured at first, but this might just be the rallying point that the open-source community desires. Yes, your netbooks will run beautifully and offer you exactly what you bought them for in the first place, and it will be the option with the least amount of headache. I don't expect the OS to do much more than offer Linux-on-cloud at first, so it will be appropriate for a netbook and bringing older computers back from the grave. This will not be a viable option for power-computing in the first year. However, if the OS takes flight or does what the Chrome browser did and build a steady stream of happy converts, then you will see important announcement roll out very quick. If the OS will be released in 2010, then you can consider it a multi-year beta test for the real thing. All they will do is load the service with optional components until you won't even be able to tell it was built for a netbook. If I'm interpreting this right, then these guys have the very real potential of having a build-an-OS option, and for free. Don't be surprised if you start hearing announcements next year from big guns like nVidia that declare support for the idea. If that happens, Microsoft's dominance may officially be nearing an end.

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DEVO was already taken

The Linux movement has gathered a lot of steam lately, and rightfully so. With Microsoft slapping down heavy price tags on their operating systems, a free alternative is always welcome for users who just want the basics. If you are really one of those people who knows a bit about computing, then it becomes pretty powerful as well. However, the entire "war" gets stale at times. The strengths that both sides cling to sometimes sound flashy, but aren't nearly as clear-cut as they sound.

Microsoft is a brand, and therefore has third party backing and a wallet to buy what they don't already have going for it. Linux is free and will only go as far as the community will push it, and despite eliminating some of the biggest bottlenecks a Windows OS will have, that push isn't going to dethrone anything.

The sheer lunacy of some Linux fans can be summed up in one tangible object: the EVO. I read about this a while back, and there was some excitement on my part. It sounded like it was going to be a full-console version of the GP32 line. That would really get some people excited. A Linux-box with gaming architecture? If we could just harness this power for awesome...

Yet, looking at the spec sheet, it's just a computer. To be fair, what you will actually pay for is a Linux Media Center PC with bundled Logitech gaming devices (keyboard, mouse, and controller). The deal itself isn't too bad at $379, and you could do a lot worse.

I, however, am not a deal finder blog. I'm not here to find you a great tech steal. What I can do is bash this console thoroughly, and that's what I'm going to do.

First of all, this was supposed to be a console. The word itself has a pretty broad scope, but when I think of a gaming console, I think of an architecture that is not PC in nature. If someone actually took the time and effort to design even a low-spec Linux console with an open SDK available to the public, then gamers would have themselves a gem. To be able to toy around with the speed, efficiency, and capabilities a gaming console had to offer without having to hack the damned console into submission would get us all away from poking at our current gen setups and focus is on actually doing something new and uncharted.

The website selling the thing is actually making this claim:

"The amazing thing about EVO is that you can use your existing keyboard and mouse with the system. Insert your keyboard and mouse into the EVO USB ports and the system will instantly recognize your peripheral device."

This is clearly a futuristic concept.

In fact, many of the other claims are basically PC selling points made to sound as if there is actually something separating themselves from any other computer. To top it all off, in their list of appliances that can be substituted by having this miracle device in your living room, they list an HD DVD player. I don't hold a business degree, but I'm pretty sure that, in the middle of a recession, the last thing you want to do is embrace a technology that painfully died last year.

Now, despite Envizions clear attempts to sabotage themselves, they claim to have sold enough PC's to be optimistic. Trouble is, the whole idea isn't ready for prime time anyway, and the concept they are selling is doomed to fail. Even if they were selling a gaming console, the moderate-at-best success of the GP32 and its successors combined with the quick rise of portable gaming power spells bad news for an open source gaming console.

The reality is that the open source community is not a group you should rely upon to back a console. Even those who are actively developing in that scene will tell you that the crap far outweighs the quality. To even imagine that the open source community is going to put together a killer gaming app anytime soon is just plain nuts. The ideas are there, the concepts are great, and there's certainly some talented individuals in that sector, but you are ten times more likely to get fifty Quake clones in your first year of business than one single title that could compete with any decent last-gen game.

Besides, even if someone did, they'd get paid to make sure it ends up on a legitimate gaming console, or at least Steam.

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Today's Digg run

Despite my previous stance on blog bashing, Digg is definitely the first place I go for entertainment and news all rolled into one. Not surprisingly, the day after mentioning how much I wish game secrets would actually be secretive, this post turned up and pointed me in the direction of an easter egg site devoted to uncovering gaming secrets still undiscovered through the suggestions of the programmers.

It's definitely interesting, but none of the easter eggs were really interesting. Considering that some of the ones they did include were well known when we were all kids, I didn't exactly give the site much credibility. Also, most of the easter egg "hunts" were devoted to programmer initials and similar things that just made me wonder if the retro craze may just be going too far. It is a wonderful thing to appreciate old games, but when you start offering a cash reward for the rare appearance of initials on a game screen, then you may have crossed a line somewhere.

However, the approach used by the blogger, Don Hodges, is worth a mention. It's always interesting to me when someone is able to deconstruct game code and turn up results. Not only is the man smarter than me, but I can appreciate what he's trying to do. The method isn't restricted to uncovering hidden initials. It has been tried before with debug programs, hex editing, and other utilities common to programmers and emulation fans. Final Fantasy VII nuts went deep into the game and discovered a location not accessible anywhere in a legitimate playthrough. Many RPGs have hidden character sets or rooms that were set aside for a purpose never actually included in the game, or were cut out just as a director would axe a certain scene from a movie. Metroid was even given this treatment, and I do believe they actually uncovered extra rooms that wound up blocked off in the game. So there is merit to the method, even if the results are far from spectacular.

The Digg run also turned up yet another piece on the now ex-governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Alaskans rejoiced when she quit her job, and I can say that with some degree of accuracy because I happen to live there. I only mention her because politicians of her breed generally turn into the Jack Thompson type that won't take "no" for an answer and ultimately come up with some sort of crusade against common sense. In one fleeting month, she managed to turn her back on the job she was supposed to do, lie every chance she got, tried to act cute and folksy when it came time for her to deliver some knowledge on...I don't know...ANYTHING, embarrass the state of Alaska, and sully the women in politics who work their collective asses off to just get a chance to be in the positions she's been allowed to hold.

She will most likely turn this into a 2012 run rather than the porn career she's more suited for, which is a sad thing for all of us. If she wants to throw a tantrum, she can go ahead, but when it comes time to lead a country (oh wait, you have to effectively run a state first), throwing a fit whenever you don't get your way is how people get into wars (see Kim Jong-il) rather than out of them.

Back to gaming.

In an effort to whore myself out even more than I already am, The Game Bay is now on Twitter. It serves no useful purpose in life other than documenting what I may be playing at any given time.

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Hidden goods

GameStop will remind you every time you get a new game that you can save so much money by getting a strategy guide with the game. Now, generous as this may sound, the majority of you have discovered GameFAQs by now, or at least IGN Guides, so it's not really necessary to drop money down for this. It is nice, however, to have that information on your lap and in flippable form, because if there's one thing that computers haven't quite worked out yet, it's how to make text seem book-tangible.

Selling strategy guides doesn't bother me so much, though I will never buy one. What does bother me is that the complete game documentation is printed before the game is even released. Maybe not 100% complete, but complete enough. Doesn't that immediately defeat the purpose of game secrets? Many of you will immediately cling to a specific game secret that isn't in your strategy guide, but that's still not the point I'm trying to make.

I'm currently reviewing what the latest Fallout 3 DLC's, Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta, have to offer. It's exciting because Fallout 3 getting bigger is obviously a good thing. Unlike most people, however, I have not purchased any of the DLC's yet because I'm holding out for the disc-compilations. From the sounds of it I might not have to buy the PC version again in GOTY form. Eventually, I'll get around to playing these expansions as thoroughly as I've played the core game, but that's not going to happen for a while. Ghostbusters kept me indoors for a full three days, and I don't want to submit myself to Fallout addiction so soon after that.

My lack of DLC love might show through in this next statement, but I am increasingly faulting Bethesda for the lack of JRPG love shown in the DLC's.

Yes, I said JRPG.

If there's one thing that stopped me from pursuing the DLC's, it's that there was nothing particularly “extra” that I needed to find in the Capital Wasteland. Everything was an exterior add-on. Every single DLC sent you somewhere else, and with the exception of Broken Steel, nothing gave you much incentive to stay on the original map. I haven't trekked over to The Vault lately because I don't really like ruining the experience, but not one Bethesda person has said anything about a “surprise” in the Wasteland, and that's a shame.

This is where JRPG's tend to shine, and also immediately fail. There is a nice little niche in the JRPG community that involves completing the most frustrating challenges known to gamers. Whether it be one of Final Fantasy VII's Weapons or one of the recent Persona's trend of “ultimate” bosses, the JRPG developers seem to know that there is only so much a person can do with the main quest before they begin to want that extra something.

From a plot standpoint, this is a terrific opportunity to insert philosophy or bits of hidden information that will lead to outside the box thinking. There have been many people over the years that have had theories about what else might actually be in a game, or at the very least, suggested. Final Fantasy was notorious for having these extra bits in the VI-VIII series. In VI, which practically launched GameFAQs in the minds of most people, there were constant attempts to revive a certain NPC (before Aeris happened), discover the identity of a bonus character, and to get a little bit more information about yet another party member. In VII, there was the Aeris revival (and if I need to spoiler rig that, you really don't need to be reading this blog). In VIII, there was speculation that a boss character was intricately linked to an important party member on more than just mere circumstance.

Fallout 3 contains none of these little hidden extras. There is a bit, yes, but everything that could have been hidden in the Wasteland has been found and known about since day 1. So far, there have been five opportunities to really get the gamers chasing that extra challenge, and since a player can easily dominate this game once they've played Godzilla in D.C. for a while, it was sorely needed. Who cares if the level cap was changed to 30? That means very little to me if there's nothing to really go after. For a game this expansive, I was extremely impressed with the scope, but there was something missing once level 18 happened. Exploring became more of a chore than a search for truly hidden things. I enjoy the chase, and for the fans of the JRPG community, this was a great opportunity to draw them in. The only “man in black” that could have truly saved this game with an amazing, mysterious backstory was handed to the player on a silver platter in the first hour.

In the age of a strategy guide, this was something truly necessary to give the community a shot of intrigue. Ever since Final Fantasy VI kicked off the GameFAQs RPG conquest, every bit of every game has been known about since day one of its US release. If I could only remember who said this, I would quote that person, but a developer once said that the greatest success a developer could have with gameplay is knowing that the gamer feels like they have created a solution to the game on their own. That statement was made to solving a challenge within a game, but it also applies to the feeling of discovery. We are in a gaming age where we can now create worlds that demand square miles of real estate. You (developers) are telling me that there isn't anything else we can hide in there?

I searched for a while, and understandably I couldn't find a single game that had more secrets to offer after its first year of release. This is understandable, since you can't exactly drop a couple of hints on a half a million people and expect them to not notice. Still, why not? Why hasn't there been a game that still has secrets to this day? Why is there not a game out there with a little bit more to it than meets the eye?

In my mind, Fallout 3 really screwed up in this respect, and that's a strong opinion considering how much I love the game. With all that space, I am simply amazed they haven't inserted something into the background for the gamers to discover on their own without it already being in print somewhere. I don't see why this can't happen in the future. It's not so much to slam Bethesda, but come on. It can't hurt to stick a little extra in there to reward a gamer that really wants to discover something in a world they are supposed to be exploring in the first place.

As for strategy guides, I don't hate them because they are meant for the gamer who needs a little guidance. That's all well and good, but it's tough to have a unique experience when everything is already on the table. Strategy guides have babied us for a while, and it would be nice for a developer to shun that once and a while. The Dark Spire, for example, has no strategy guide that I know of. GameFAQs has tackled it already, of course, but at least someone is trying to give a throwback feel to RPG discovery. I hate to admit it, but I really do miss the days when you could be stuck on finding the solution to a main quest problem for a couple of days. There was a sense of discovery to that you simply don't find in current games. I tried playing King's Quest a month ago, and I was amazed at how frequently I visited GameFAQs for answers. It was embarrassing.

This actually tempts me to perform a little experiment. More on that later.

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Welcome to the Game Bay

Starting a blog is something I never thought I would do, so I feel that it is necessary to explain why this one exists to begin with. Of course, this is also for my own selfish desire to justify this to myself in writing.

Several years ago, there was LiveJournal, and if Maddox has taught us one thing in life, it's that people will post anything online regardless of whether anyone is reading it. Then MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and the “blogosphere” happened and I began to realize that there were almost as many post-birth abortion candidates responding to this material than were actually producing it. When it first started, I could see the potential of having a powerful piece of mass produced news, unrestricted in their scope and unrestrained by money, political affiliations, or corporate pressure. Yet, it was also obvious how this development was going to take the long respected news standard and flush it down the toilet.

Not too long ago, Adrian Beltre of the Seattle Mariners was subjected to scrutiny because some blogger with a baseless opinion of steroid use got picked up by the national media. Of course, having an opinion is all well and good and I personally agree with the critics who blame said media for even running the story, but this is what we've created for ourselves. We, the Internet, have graduated those LiveJournal hacks and given them national attention, because apparently anyone with a computer and half a brain can make money and garner attention from their useless opinions. All I have to do is cite the name Perez Hilton (gracias, will.i.am), and you begin to realize what we have created for ourselves.

The idea was good, but the results have been bad. Don't get me wrong, there are great blogs out there. The Cheapskate, for example, is a terrific little blog that serves a great purpose for techies like us, ticking off great online tech steals when they happen. Trent Reznor takes the time to use this technology to reach out to his fan base, and I'm all for artist interaction. If Shaq wants to use Twitter, I'm also all for it, so long as he stays entertaining.

When CNN, FOX, and MSNBC decide to let the Internet report for them on bad news days, it's gone too far, with the lone exception being the circumstances surrounding Iran and the lack of media coverage allowed in the country.

So I generally hate blogs, and yet I have one. Why, you ask?

Because I watched E3: 2009.

I have one colorful opinion when it comes to most things in the world, but when it comes to video gaming, I generally try to do my homework because I happen to enjoy the industry for the most part. Ever since I was a kid, trends were my interest in this new field of entertainment, and it wasn't long before my tiny brain could comprehend what gaming was going to become. Everything I projected would happen HAS happened or is going to happen in the next 10 years. Not that this took a genius to figure out, but I could have wrote a dissertation on the economic aspects of it all when I was twelve, and despite the fact that I would have been laughed at by my teachers, every bit of it turned out to be correct in some way or another.

Just for the record, I am not actually a master of video games. I have never “wavedashed” anyone to death. I have never posted a speedrun. I have never participated in any tournaments. I will never dominate an online Halo match. The longest I've held a WoW account was for a week long trial period, after which I refused to pick up the game again. I was a member of a thrown together clan on LOTRO for half the month I played, but I never participated or even came back to that game as much as I tried to enjoy it. I also suck at Madden.

The experience is there, though. I have racked up a few 32-4 runs in Counter-Strike. I always go for gold in Burnout. I never play games on easy, and I'm starting to think I should only play games on hard mode as a rule. I don't play Mario Kart, I dominate it and piss on the weak. I will always take Terry Bogard's brand over Ryu's. You may not like where I'm coming from, but at least you know I'm in the game.

When E3 happened, I was generally livid, because with the exception of the potential of Project Natal (and the general backdoor opinions stating that the demos actually worked as advertised), it was the worst E3 I can remember. I'll have to get back to you with some research on that statement, but if Sony spent their time making obvious attempts to rip off of Nintendo who was busy putting together a showcase making even last year's effort seem like gold, then you know there were problems.

That's what made me want to do this. I've seen enough speculation, reviews, and glowing acceptance of gaming as-is to sit by and watch the fans basically forget that their voice isn't being heard. I am an avid listener of ESPN Radio, and when things happen in the world of sports, there's a voice speaking out on performances, trades, and the like. We simply don't have an answer for that. If Sonic goes Nintendo, sure there's a cry of message board terror, but IGN, GameTrailers, and GameSpot will simply add it to their top 10 list of anticipation rather than get their editorial muscle moving. None of these sites really put the cross hairs on Nintendo over E3, and that's what got me moving towards this blog.

In this blog, you can expect me to treat the industry the way it should be treated, and it is my goal that at some point in the future at least one person in the industry reads just one article posted. If that happens, then this is a success to me. This exists only so that gamers can be heard, strong language and everything (provided Google doesn't shut me down for it). If there is mail sent my way, it will be read, and I will make an honest attempt to respond to as much as I can.

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