Activision Terminates Fan Made Kings Quest Extension
Do I really need to say more?
Not too long ago, devoted fans of the Chrono series received a pretty douchy slap in the face when Squeenix told the creators to shove it. Now, King's Quest is receiving the same treatment by Activision. Funny, when you consider that no one has touched the franchise in 12 years. In addition, if I'm doing my research correctly, Activision had almost 2 years to do something with the license themselves. So no one was touching this IP.
What gets me the most from of all of these shutdowns, and especially this one, is that the major companies have the balls to say that the fans don't deserve to enjoy the IP that was created for them in the first place. There is no justified reason. Sure, a lawyer could spout off a million reasons, but 99% of them would be wrong and it really does the brand a disservice while making the company in charge of the IP look like a douchebag with nothing else to do than slap its own fans around. So, Activision, we're going to use you as a whipping boy right now, because you deserve it.
"That's our IP."
That's nice. Really, it wasn't. It was someone else's idea, and you bought them. You had nothing to do with this series at any point in time. It's not really about semantics, though, it's about the legal. You own the IP's rights and therefore have a legal obligation to defend that IP or you open yourself to losing it. Well, first of all, make a game, then. You have a pretty good history of making bad decisions with your franchises, so go ahead and make another game with another half assed effort. It's really not that hard to do. These games were popular in the day when text commands had weight, so is it really so hard that you get up off your asses and make a flash version so at least it looks like you're trying?
Regardless of what this means, it's not really a good legal retort, so we'll find a real one. Ah, yes, the "cover" response. Sure, you own the IP. You own every line made in those games. That's nice. However, just as any band can cover a hit song made popular last month, there's really nothing stopping the fans from getting a solid "cover" defense on their side. It's an interpretation. It's fan fiction. It's a cover song. Why do I still see the Punk Goes... series on shelves if this weren't allowed? As long as the work is done entirely by the fans with no sprite ripping, then there's really no way you can definitively say that, "No, you can't do that."
What do you have to gain with a decision like this? I mean, apart from pissing off the fan base to no end, you really don't have anything to gain but destroying free advertising. From a business standpoint, wouldn't you rather keep your fans interested in the series instead of letting it fade into obscurity? Are you really interested in maintaining a legacy of controversy over your IP than to start off on a positive note with some momentum? Don't you want that fan base to stick around so that they actually buy your games when you decide to finally make a King's Quest game?
Really, I'd like to open up the debate, but apart from this being a stupid move on Activision, it's probably not even legally sound. Either way, Activision, you're a load of douchebags.
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February 28, 2010
February 25, 2010
Everything old is expensive again.
Oooook. So, the Dragon Age DLC didn't alarm me so much because there was no way I was ever playing that game. Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, JUST began its run on store shelves. It already has DLC. It costs 1200 Microsoft points, but only if you're buying the game used.
I wouldn't go so far to call this promotional material. Promotional material is...something else. It's early access to something in the game, a poster, a strategy guide, or a lunchbox. It's not a DLC. This is getting out of hand. They're saying that this game, right now, costs MORE to buy the currently complete experience if you buy it used. As in used, less than optimal value, second hand, depreciated...used.
Am I missing something here? Oh wait, that's right. Developers are greedy bastards. At least some of them are.
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Why I need to start a gaming company.
Just looking through everything that is retro, I get a little disappointed that we have to replace everything we started loving games for. Don't get me wrong, it's important to evolve. Would you rather play your FPS games Doom-style, using only a keyboard? Do you feel the need to constantly type out instructions for your RPG character to follow? Is DOS something you think never should have died out? Things have to change for us to get a new experience in gaming, but that doesn't mean there was anything wrong with what used to drive games in the past.
It's hard to go backwards with everything we've been introduced to, but is it really? Have the concepts become so outdated that we can't try them again with new uses? I'm not so sure. The reason for the title of my article is that I believe that older concepts can be reused to amazing results, and the technology needed to drive games like this isn't much at all. We tend to get caught up in the latest and greatest things, where graphics are a premium and the console reigns supreme. It's bothersome when we reach a point where we finally figure out how to use what we have in so many innovative ways only to have that lesson taught to us at a time when we have to adopt a new graphical standard and start all over again.
Take a look at the state of PC gaming. Many people have complained that the reason for PC gaming's downfall as a standard is due to a few "obvious" factors, including consoles, cost, and piracy. To be honest, none of this is true. The reason why the PC has fell out of favor for anything outside of competitive FPS, RTS, and MMO gaming is that no one is actually taking advantage of what the PC is capable of. To be fair, most of the concepts are available on any console as it stands, but the PC is so entrenched in our everyday lives that it's impossible to ignore the flexibility it has as a platform.
I've often wished that there was a really good game that returned to the cyberpunk influence, and there have been some glimmers of hope in the past. Unfortunately, may of these games are so outdated that it's difficult for a gamer to get the feel of decent gameplay. Clunky GUIs, if any at all, too much immediate freedom, and an unforgiving learning curve set most of these games back, so it's understandable that a console-fed gamer would shun returning to the PC roots of the genre. We've reached a point, however, where everything that was introduced before 2000 has been perfected to the point where none of these shortcomings should matter anymore. Yet, we continue to ignore that this is the truth, and we come up with new things to play with.
I mentioned in the last article that Star Control II still holds a great deal of influence in gaming, regardless of the platform it's played on. As a game, it is solid and still holds weight, and it was made in 1992. Cleaning the game up, adding content, and making it more user friendly doesn't demand 2010 graphics. All it demands is a little refinement, and we're at the point where hobbyists can blow that refinement out of the water in the span of a weekend if they really tried. Bluntly put, we have the technology capable of reviving this game sitting in front of us on our netbooks, but we never looked back and thought of doing it.
So, back to the cyberpunk game. Does it need to be 3-D? Maybe yes, maybe no. What matters more is that the game be fun, enjoyable, and provide a large amount of atmosphere. What it does not necessarily demand is million-dollar cutscenes. People were quite happy playing a good cyberpunk adventure on DOS, and I would imagine that as long as the game is good, no one would actually care if the player character appeared like a non-jagged version of Leon from RE2. Hell, we can throw characters of that quality into a game a a hundred times over and never stress our video cards. So let's say, for the sake of argument, that we are going to deal with a game using a cleaner, higher resolution version of RE2's graphical style. Even if we went "all-out" on graphics for a game of this style, we would really only need to beef the graphics up to the level of the RE1 remake for the GameCube, which was made in 2002. So screw it, for the sake of argument, we only need 2002 graphics for this game at most.
Music is easy. We're far beyond the days of needing a sound-synthesizer on our computers. No more SoundBlaster, AdLib, or Soundscape. MP3's are the easiest things in the world to incorporate, and that's why we made them in the first place.
As far as interface goes, and this is really what I'm getting at, we would return the old days to prominence. The cyberpunk ideals are ideally suited for reviving retro concepts. Flying a hovercar with the old joystick could be a lot of fun, too, but that's not really necessary. Developers are so concerned with a style of play that revolves around a single control scheme that they forget how many resources everyone has to work with. We all have microphones that plug into a computer, and we are all certainly using keyboards. The game should use everything at the user's disposal.
Let's say that you're an investigator working on busting a syndicate. You have discovered a dead body, so you decide to go check out the home of the victim. You walk into a room using your controller to guide the character through an apartment complex. Once in the room, you could use the mouse to investigate around to see objects of importance. Underneath a bed, you find a data disc, which you take over to the computer. You could either use your mouse to access your inventory, or just tell the character through your mic to take out the disc for fun. Putting the disk into the computer, you find yourself rummaging through his files with your mouse and come across a document with some importance to it. You uncover a PIN number and a few key words that are necessary to access his job-files. Taking this information with you, you wander off to his workplace and get a seat at his computer terminal. You find a safe underneath the desk, and you use the keypad to enter the PIN to unlock it. Turning to the computer, you use your keyboard to navigate through a DOS-like interface where you find the programs that respond to your key words.
It doesn't seem like much at first, but take into consideration that the user is more immersed in the game and is using all of the tools that any PC user has to expand the usability and believability of the experience. There was something concrete about using text commands in King's Quest, but even though that style has long been rendered obsolete, the tangible nature of the keyboard allows a little bit better roleplay. Being able to "think" out loud and have the game respond is something that games usually do for you, but a microphone could encourage players to get into the mindset of their character while also removing an inventory system altogether. Speech recognition could even be incorporated into dialogues, especially when clever use of known information can uncover information not on a designated list of topics to choose from. The mouse, as well, has become a control scheme on its own, but apart from the FPS genre, it was always used best as an investigation tool for adventure games. Many players feel comfortable controlling characters with a controller, so to give them their usual choice of control and add the tools already at their disposal removes almost any need for in-game menus, and it serves to dramatically increase the flexibility of a game while, in turn, actually simplifying the gameplay. If every tool at your disposal has a clear use, and those elements are clearly reflected in gameplay, then there is no need to have a few dozen hotkeys or strange and convoluted controller schemes.
It's not a revolutionary idea by any stretch, but these are the most basic gaming devices that have been around for 20-30 years. We never use them like this, and we're always trying to replace them with the newest toy. If we could stop for a couple of minutes and realize that we could make great use of what's staring us in the face every day when we check out e-mail, then PC gaming would have a good game like this to call its own. It wouldn't even have to be a powerhouse of a game to be legendary. For the amount of time we spend counting gigs for every new game that comes out, is it so hard to imagine that a game the size of a CD with pre-2002 graphics could be massive, replayable, fun, and superbly interactive? Unfortunately, I don't have the money to front in order to make this kind of game possible, so I guess imagining is all I can do for now. But one day, you never know. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
It's hard to go backwards with everything we've been introduced to, but is it really? Have the concepts become so outdated that we can't try them again with new uses? I'm not so sure. The reason for the title of my article is that I believe that older concepts can be reused to amazing results, and the technology needed to drive games like this isn't much at all. We tend to get caught up in the latest and greatest things, where graphics are a premium and the console reigns supreme. It's bothersome when we reach a point where we finally figure out how to use what we have in so many innovative ways only to have that lesson taught to us at a time when we have to adopt a new graphical standard and start all over again.
Take a look at the state of PC gaming. Many people have complained that the reason for PC gaming's downfall as a standard is due to a few "obvious" factors, including consoles, cost, and piracy. To be honest, none of this is true. The reason why the PC has fell out of favor for anything outside of competitive FPS, RTS, and MMO gaming is that no one is actually taking advantage of what the PC is capable of. To be fair, most of the concepts are available on any console as it stands, but the PC is so entrenched in our everyday lives that it's impossible to ignore the flexibility it has as a platform.
I've often wished that there was a really good game that returned to the cyberpunk influence, and there have been some glimmers of hope in the past. Unfortunately, may of these games are so outdated that it's difficult for a gamer to get the feel of decent gameplay. Clunky GUIs, if any at all, too much immediate freedom, and an unforgiving learning curve set most of these games back, so it's understandable that a console-fed gamer would shun returning to the PC roots of the genre. We've reached a point, however, where everything that was introduced before 2000 has been perfected to the point where none of these shortcomings should matter anymore. Yet, we continue to ignore that this is the truth, and we come up with new things to play with.
I mentioned in the last article that Star Control II still holds a great deal of influence in gaming, regardless of the platform it's played on. As a game, it is solid and still holds weight, and it was made in 1992. Cleaning the game up, adding content, and making it more user friendly doesn't demand 2010 graphics. All it demands is a little refinement, and we're at the point where hobbyists can blow that refinement out of the water in the span of a weekend if they really tried. Bluntly put, we have the technology capable of reviving this game sitting in front of us on our netbooks, but we never looked back and thought of doing it.
So, back to the cyberpunk game. Does it need to be 3-D? Maybe yes, maybe no. What matters more is that the game be fun, enjoyable, and provide a large amount of atmosphere. What it does not necessarily demand is million-dollar cutscenes. People were quite happy playing a good cyberpunk adventure on DOS, and I would imagine that as long as the game is good, no one would actually care if the player character appeared like a non-jagged version of Leon from RE2. Hell, we can throw characters of that quality into a game a a hundred times over and never stress our video cards. So let's say, for the sake of argument, that we are going to deal with a game using a cleaner, higher resolution version of RE2's graphical style. Even if we went "all-out" on graphics for a game of this style, we would really only need to beef the graphics up to the level of the RE1 remake for the GameCube, which was made in 2002. So screw it, for the sake of argument, we only need 2002 graphics for this game at most.
Music is easy. We're far beyond the days of needing a sound-synthesizer on our computers. No more SoundBlaster, AdLib, or Soundscape. MP3's are the easiest things in the world to incorporate, and that's why we made them in the first place.
As far as interface goes, and this is really what I'm getting at, we would return the old days to prominence. The cyberpunk ideals are ideally suited for reviving retro concepts. Flying a hovercar with the old joystick could be a lot of fun, too, but that's not really necessary. Developers are so concerned with a style of play that revolves around a single control scheme that they forget how many resources everyone has to work with. We all have microphones that plug into a computer, and we are all certainly using keyboards. The game should use everything at the user's disposal.
Let's say that you're an investigator working on busting a syndicate. You have discovered a dead body, so you decide to go check out the home of the victim. You walk into a room using your controller to guide the character through an apartment complex. Once in the room, you could use the mouse to investigate around to see objects of importance. Underneath a bed, you find a data disc, which you take over to the computer. You could either use your mouse to access your inventory, or just tell the character through your mic to take out the disc for fun. Putting the disk into the computer, you find yourself rummaging through his files with your mouse and come across a document with some importance to it. You uncover a PIN number and a few key words that are necessary to access his job-files. Taking this information with you, you wander off to his workplace and get a seat at his computer terminal. You find a safe underneath the desk, and you use the keypad to enter the PIN to unlock it. Turning to the computer, you use your keyboard to navigate through a DOS-like interface where you find the programs that respond to your key words.
It doesn't seem like much at first, but take into consideration that the user is more immersed in the game and is using all of the tools that any PC user has to expand the usability and believability of the experience. There was something concrete about using text commands in King's Quest, but even though that style has long been rendered obsolete, the tangible nature of the keyboard allows a little bit better roleplay. Being able to "think" out loud and have the game respond is something that games usually do for you, but a microphone could encourage players to get into the mindset of their character while also removing an inventory system altogether. Speech recognition could even be incorporated into dialogues, especially when clever use of known information can uncover information not on a designated list of topics to choose from. The mouse, as well, has become a control scheme on its own, but apart from the FPS genre, it was always used best as an investigation tool for adventure games. Many players feel comfortable controlling characters with a controller, so to give them their usual choice of control and add the tools already at their disposal removes almost any need for in-game menus, and it serves to dramatically increase the flexibility of a game while, in turn, actually simplifying the gameplay. If every tool at your disposal has a clear use, and those elements are clearly reflected in gameplay, then there is no need to have a few dozen hotkeys or strange and convoluted controller schemes.
It's not a revolutionary idea by any stretch, but these are the most basic gaming devices that have been around for 20-30 years. We never use them like this, and we're always trying to replace them with the newest toy. If we could stop for a couple of minutes and realize that we could make great use of what's staring us in the face every day when we check out e-mail, then PC gaming would have a good game like this to call its own. It wouldn't even have to be a powerhouse of a game to be legendary. For the amount of time we spend counting gigs for every new game that comes out, is it so hard to imagine that a game the size of a CD with pre-2002 graphics could be massive, replayable, fun, and superbly interactive? Unfortunately, I don't have the money to front in order to make this kind of game possible, so I guess imagining is all I can do for now. But one day, you never know. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
February 24, 2010
And you thought I hated X...
So by now, I've made it clear how much I hate Final Fantasy X. I know I've been on a Final Fantasy bashing spree, and there's good reason for it. The series has taken an utter dive after VI.
Let me repeat that. The series has tried everything in its power to become unplayable after VI. I'll be fair, Final Fantasy VII wasn't exactly the game I really wanted. I beat it once and took a lot of great things with me, but some equally bad ones. It's sad when I look back on the game and recall how bad the characters were, and then immediately go on to say, "Well, Cid was a pimp. Barret was Mr. T so that has to be awesome. Then there was Yuffie. Vincent was cool. Red rocked. Tifa was a kickass chick...."
So basically, with Cait Sith being the clearly forgettable link, the memory of Cloud actually tainted my opinion of the entire roster as a whole. Anyway, there was a lot of mood and atmosphere going on that left a positive impression, and I actually liked the materia system put in place. What I didn't like was how random-ass the quests were to get some of these, and if anybody finished the gold chocobo quest, you should have shot yourself in the face long ago. I actually tried to help a friend get through it, and by the time I was halfway through, I realized how stupid the concept was and just told him to go ahead and beat the game since he was powerful enough anyway. The story itself was pretty good, but once again, Cloud pretty much mood-killed everything to the point where I didn't care by the end of the game what was going on at all. I won't say it's a bad game, because it's not, but it's not a game I want to play again. I've tried, and get disinterested about a third of the way through every time.
XII didn't really bother me for some weird reason, but it's not something I could play a second time either. XI wasn't Final Fantasy, X was a joke, IX was OK, and XIII is looking worse all the time. Yet, the biggest offender is the one I haven't covered yet, because the rest of this article is going to explain just how bad the game is. Of course, I'm talking about Final Fantasy VIII.
Before you think that I'm one of "them" who bashes this game for no reason, or if you think that I'm just looking for things to hate, I'll give you a little bit of my pride. This game isn't 100% shit-tastic. When I first picked the game up on release, I was so impressed with what was done with the first disc that I never even paid attention to all of the glaring shortcomings. The game boasted insane graphics for the time, an impressive musical score that wasn't immediately memorable but carried oomph, and it kept the player involved with what appeared to be an unfolding plotline of epic proportions. I mean, at the end of the first disc, you're sent to assassinate a super-evil world dominatrix who is capable of controlling the planet within a few days. How is that not cool? The junction system also looked to have promise, as the amount of character customization was seemingly endless. I was also particularly impressed with the mood I was getting, and I'll admit that I still get a nice little mood tingle every now and then when I think about floating an entire military academy across the face of the planet. It's a little tough to explain, but this world seemed at times to be a living National Geographic highlight reel at every corner, and having the freedom to traverse it with your magic schoolboat gives your brain a lot of imagery to work with. It seemed clean, magical, and modern....and it may not have given Final Fantasy VII's old, tattered steam/cyberpunk laced world any competition, but it left a mark nonetheless.
So that's it, I'm done with that. There are no more good qualities to this game. Let's dive right in with what we mostly play RPG's for in the first place, and that's the story. Forget about deciphering the whole thing, because if you can actually "solve" the mystery of what Final Fantasy VIII is supposed to be about, someone from Squeenix will come to your house and take you away forever. At first, the game seems to be pretty standard. Take out the evil sorceress and save the world. Easy enough. The best plan anyone can come up with is to send a team of relative rookies into the field, and it shows, because the team can't seem to do anything right. I always hate Squall, but for some reason, his pessimism sums up whatever the player could possibly be thinking about. If you think it's a dumb plan, he's thinking it, too, which makes me hate Squall even more because he tends to lampshade every plot hole in the game this way.
Plot points get thrown all over the place with no rhyme or reason. It literally feels as if there was a chalkboard of things that the CGI team had already completed sitting on the sideline while a group of interns played darts with plot points stolen from soap operas and television sci-fi to fill in the gaps. I'll let The Spoony One explain all about the prison/missle base disaster, but right after that you run back to save your base only to discover there was this evil bastard sitting in the basement the whole time who you'd never heard of before, and right before you fight him he throws it up in the air that the one giving you your orders has been married to the evil sorceress the whole time. It comes out of nowhere, and that's what the game is like. For no rhyme or reason, things just get thrown at you with no explanation. When someone tries to explain things, they usually say something like, "Yeah. That's about right. Weird, huh? Oh well, moving on."
To some up the rest of the game, the sorceress isn't evil, but there's another evil sorceress that possessed her, so the mission hasn't really changed but things get a lot more confusing just to mess with your head. In order to stop bad things from happening, you come in contact with some people that you've been seeing in your dreams since the missions began. Turns out that these people weren't imagined, and your team had actually been looking into the past watching the lives of others. These dream people help you set yourself up to fight the sorceress, whose master plan is to create a time-loop that would basically destroy everything. I think. It's not really clear.
If my "simple" explanation sounds weird, that's because there's no good way of summing the plot up. It just doesn't make sense, and it's so bad that fans of the game have come up with theories. These theories are supposed to explain a couple of plot holes meant for interpretation, and sometimes they go so far as adding in another layer to the plot. Spoony explained that someone wrote to him about a theory that at a certain point in the game, Squall died and the nonsense that happens after it is his broken limbo. I pretty much agreed with his retort, which you can check out on his site, but the point is that even fans of the game are trying to explain something that even they don't understand. Here's just a few other theories about what is actually going on in the game.
The time-loop already happened before you picked up a controller. According to this theory, a few hints in the game such as the global radio interference, strange technological peaks and valleys across the planet, memory loss, the blackouts, and the crazy amount of coincidence suggest that time had already crunched. The world you explore during the course of the game is actually an entire span of time rolled up into one world.
Rinoa is Ultimecia. If I'm getting this right, because it's been a while since I've heard this, either Squall dies or Rinoa gets near death, or something about the space scene doesn't go right, and Rinoa basically unleashes her inner beast at that moment to become Ultimecia. There's certain clues in the game to support this, but you have to be trying really hard to find them. One of the "giveaways" is that the ending makes it a point to wipe Rinoa out of existence in every way possible after you succeed. Or,
Squall, Laguna, and Cid are all the same person, and by extension, Rinoa, Edea, and Ultimecia are all the same, too. There's actually a lot of these possibilities in the game, especially when people try to throw Raine and Ellone into the mix. It's a true clusterf***.
Someone is dead, but no one actually knows who. This includes the Squall is dead theory. So maybe Squall didn't die at the end of disc 1, but instead, he dies at the end of the game. Or, Rinoa really is Ultimecia, and she dies at the end of the game and takes everyone with her. Or, the multiverse died but Rinoa was able to save one sole universe. OR, the multiverse didn't die, but Squall and Ultimecia seem to be strangely immune to everything, and while Squall died in one universe, another took up the task until he finally succeeded in at least one universe in what was basically a suicide mission, so that ending is actually his life flashing before his eyes in multiple universes. Don't ask. I could sit here and explain everything for hours and get nowhere, but people have come up with theories like this. Some make sense. Some make better sense than the story. Some make less sense but are more interesting. This is one of those that covers the whole gamut.
Dear god, there's more, but I can't even go into it all. What started this whole theory craze was the fact that the story itself was extremely disjointed and utter nonsense. Squall gets a 4 foot ice spear lodged into his torso and survives without a scratch. The ending shows Rinoa either blinking out of existence, or something is happening with Squall, but you don't know what. Rinoa is shown dying in space in the ending, but she shows up again later as if nothing happened. Squall apparently dies at the end, but he comes back too. Too much of the game is based on memories, yet the references to why memories are important don't offer any explanation. People do things for no rhyme or reason, and stories get brought up in much the same way, so the fans made up their own ways to explain it all.
Bottom line, the story sucked and was broken beyond repair. I say we get a few guys with guns, kidnap the SOB that wrote it, and sit him down in a padded room until he explains what the hell he was trying to do.
The story issues go on for pages. A graduate student could probably develop a thesis around what the plot of Final Fantasy VIII is actually about and still not get any real answers, but at least the blame isn't entirely on the game's writer. Outside of the plot, there are a zillion sidequests that are even more random than the ones found in Final Fantasy VII. The single, most notorious piece of crap in this game is the Triple Triad game. Normally, I would find this game to be addictive and fun, except that it's not fun, and the amount of hell that you have to go through in order to just BEGIN on this quest is a special torture all on its own. Even the card players themselves don't make sense, as you will find yourself in the middle of saving your home base from a missile strike while at the same time fighting an in-house war, then turning to one of the people in the midst of this chaos and asking them to play cards. They couldn't be more delighted.
The card game has a lot of rules that are impossible to keep track off due to the fact that they are regional and always changing. This would be fine, except that this really puts a hamper on actually getting anywhere in the grand scheme of things. You start out with a set of terrible cards, and through diligence, that deck can be expanded to include a few powerful ones pretty early in the game. You absolutely have to get some of the early special cards, or you have zero chance at getting good cards from other players. You never know if you're challenging a guy that carries the most dangerous Magic deck in the history of gaming or a guy who has a fistful of crap. That said, it's dangerous to even play anyone, because if you feel like casually playing a game of cards and throw in a good card just to make sure you have a little insurance, you'll get three high powered cards thrown in your direction just because you didn't save and the game hates you. Changing these rules and getting certain cards can be an absolute pain in the ass in what can only be described as a guide dang it moment, because in some cases you are forced to lose cards you would never purposely lose in order for an opponent to place his rare card on the board. You would never know this. Even if someone told you, "That Bob dude drops Bahamut," then you would still be wasting hours on Bob because who in the hell purposely loses their rare cards? There's no way to know without using a guide. You're just wasting the player's time at that point, because if you were going to be sneaky and make acquiring that card a huge secret, then why the hell would you immediately release the information to a guide maker? No one would actually find the card except by sheer accident or dumb luck, and for 99.9% of gamers who were looking to get that card, you basically told them that the card isn't secret enough to keep a secret, but we're going to keep all the BS of the secret intact so you have to waste 3 hours getting what you want.
I never, ever played the card game, because it was fun as a game, but it was not fun as part of Final Fantasy VIII. You were encouraged to get these cards to refine them into spells and items as if it was an integral part of the game, so it was a campaign of its own.
Then there was magic junctioning. Great idea....at first. Lots of gamers were straight up confused by all of the junctioning information thrown at them, and it was pretty necessary to learn it, because enemies leveled up in the game as you did. This was neat, at first (you'll be hearing this a lot), because regular enemies would keep up with you as far as the magic and item drops they would leave behind. Once you were at level 30, however, you did not want to gain ANY experience if you could help it. That would leave everyone in the game set to take on your level 30 guys while you accumulated enough magic junctions and weapons to take on the entire Greek pantheon all at once. This took forever to do, because you could either play the card game, draw the magic by hand, or collect items to refine into spells. This alone wasn't the deal breaker, as it allowed for a lot of options when it came to customizing your characters. No longer did you have to choose between the ice or flame armor set, because you could change everything down to the percentage point if you played around enough. Even better was seeing the visible results of drawing magic, as walking into a crowd of baddies and using your Cura-to-HP junctioned ally to siphon more Curas would cause your max HP to double or triple by the time you finished the dungeon.
It just took so much work, and it was absolutely necessary to take a large amount of time outside of the game to set everything up correctly. You were spending half the time just switching things around in between your allies, and the other half was spent getting the spells to junction in the first place. That involves going into dungeons and potentially gaining levels, not to mention the fact that fights take forever to resolve, which would be great if you had a few sidequests to do.
I mentioned that the card game was an annoying sidequest, but every sidequest is annoying, period. Between the dumber sidequests that involve UFO hunting and picking up rocks for someone's statue, you're given many sidequests that give you your basic endgame equipment. Through these sidequests, you will gain summons, powerful spells, and items that you don't really need, but probably want. First of all, good luck finding them. You get a little bit of freedom in disc 1, so you better use that time to talk to everybody under the sun. Do it twice for good measure, because one you ditch an area in the early game, you are never seeing it again. Not only will you be locked into the plot-event once you start it, but you will also have to follow it up hours upon hours of terrible story before you're even allowed to set foot outside a town. Once outside a town, the game nudges you pretty hard to finish with what you're doing.
"Hey, you just escaped from prison. The bad guys are going to fire missiles at your home base in a few hours, so time is of the essence. To make it convenient for you, the missile base you need to go to is within spitting distance. Really, it's OK, just finish THIS part and you'll be free."
But you're not! Don't EVER listen to this game when it tells you anything! If the game tells you that a HUEG emergency is happening ten feet away and that you REALLY need to go there without ignoring it, ignore it! Run away, far away, and never come back until you've done what you want to do. Lord knows that if you so much as fetch a little boy a lollipop, you will be sucked into the story plot for the next twenty hours with no hope of escaping. There are literally about three openings you get to explore the accessible world in the first disc and a half, and that's it. Finally, when you get the ability to float across the globe, you can barely do anything interesting except catch a chocobo, make a statue, and get your ass kicked by tonberries. The world is so barren that there are only about three or four towns you can access, and you're completely afraid to go to any of them for fear of getting sucked into the storyline again. What's worse is that most of the guides out there are suggesting that the very second I DO rejoin the plot, I will never be able to get to these quests again. I may just be reading that wrong, but the way the game works, it would not surprise me.
Then, there are the characters. After the casting of IV, VI, and VII, you would think that these characters would be memorable, but they are not. Every single character is annoying and forgettable. About the only thing people have to say about the characters of this game is that Squall is emo and that Quistis was the hottest one. Name one person that has brought up Selphie or Irvine in a conversation that wasn't about annoying Final Fantasy characters. You can't.
Which brings me to my last point I need to make before my head explodes from hatred. You can't f*** Quistis. Rinoa is the love interest, and you will never be able to change that. Even when Quistis decides that she's gonna love your nuts. Even when she's smarter, hotter, and better than Rinoa in every way possible. Even with Rinoa running around acting like an irritating 12-year old with Rockstar for blood. Even with Rinoa looking like an irritating 12-year old, you can never escape that you will never bag Quistis, nor will you get a choice in the matter. Of all of the worst decisions ever in a video game, Square decided at the time that it would be best if you were shown one of the few women in video game history that men would drool over and want to take home to mom, yet still force you to take the average looking dunce from junior high. That's a kick in the balls.
Really, there's nothing to love about this game. Take what you will away from the experience, but playing the game is not fun, and wrapping your head around the insanity is only funny when you're making colorful insults about it to someone who knows what you're talking about. Otherwise, it's masochism. Not one character in the game makes a smart decision unless you make the stupid decision first, and not one action in the game makes sense. Spoony commented in his playthrough that there wasn't one screen in the game that he couldn't hate for some reason, and I thought that he might be only slightly overestimating things. I mean, I knew it was bad, but there had to be something decent, right? No, there's not. Ever. I walked into the very screen that would take place after Spoony cut his cam when entering the missile base, and it hit me that he was absolutely right. Not one screen of this game is completely immune. Even the music is boring for the most part.
So, there you have it. The worst Final Fantasy game ever. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
Let me repeat that. The series has tried everything in its power to become unplayable after VI. I'll be fair, Final Fantasy VII wasn't exactly the game I really wanted. I beat it once and took a lot of great things with me, but some equally bad ones. It's sad when I look back on the game and recall how bad the characters were, and then immediately go on to say, "Well, Cid was a pimp. Barret was Mr. T so that has to be awesome. Then there was Yuffie. Vincent was cool. Red rocked. Tifa was a kickass chick...."
So basically, with Cait Sith being the clearly forgettable link, the memory of Cloud actually tainted my opinion of the entire roster as a whole. Anyway, there was a lot of mood and atmosphere going on that left a positive impression, and I actually liked the materia system put in place. What I didn't like was how random-ass the quests were to get some of these, and if anybody finished the gold chocobo quest, you should have shot yourself in the face long ago. I actually tried to help a friend get through it, and by the time I was halfway through, I realized how stupid the concept was and just told him to go ahead and beat the game since he was powerful enough anyway. The story itself was pretty good, but once again, Cloud pretty much mood-killed everything to the point where I didn't care by the end of the game what was going on at all. I won't say it's a bad game, because it's not, but it's not a game I want to play again. I've tried, and get disinterested about a third of the way through every time.
XII didn't really bother me for some weird reason, but it's not something I could play a second time either. XI wasn't Final Fantasy, X was a joke, IX was OK, and XIII is looking worse all the time. Yet, the biggest offender is the one I haven't covered yet, because the rest of this article is going to explain just how bad the game is. Of course, I'm talking about Final Fantasy VIII.
Before you think that I'm one of "them" who bashes this game for no reason, or if you think that I'm just looking for things to hate, I'll give you a little bit of my pride. This game isn't 100% shit-tastic. When I first picked the game up on release, I was so impressed with what was done with the first disc that I never even paid attention to all of the glaring shortcomings. The game boasted insane graphics for the time, an impressive musical score that wasn't immediately memorable but carried oomph, and it kept the player involved with what appeared to be an unfolding plotline of epic proportions. I mean, at the end of the first disc, you're sent to assassinate a super-evil world dominatrix who is capable of controlling the planet within a few days. How is that not cool? The junction system also looked to have promise, as the amount of character customization was seemingly endless. I was also particularly impressed with the mood I was getting, and I'll admit that I still get a nice little mood tingle every now and then when I think about floating an entire military academy across the face of the planet. It's a little tough to explain, but this world seemed at times to be a living National Geographic highlight reel at every corner, and having the freedom to traverse it with your magic schoolboat gives your brain a lot of imagery to work with. It seemed clean, magical, and modern....and it may not have given Final Fantasy VII's old, tattered steam/cyberpunk laced world any competition, but it left a mark nonetheless.
So that's it, I'm done with that. There are no more good qualities to this game. Let's dive right in with what we mostly play RPG's for in the first place, and that's the story. Forget about deciphering the whole thing, because if you can actually "solve" the mystery of what Final Fantasy VIII is supposed to be about, someone from Squeenix will come to your house and take you away forever. At first, the game seems to be pretty standard. Take out the evil sorceress and save the world. Easy enough. The best plan anyone can come up with is to send a team of relative rookies into the field, and it shows, because the team can't seem to do anything right. I always hate Squall, but for some reason, his pessimism sums up whatever the player could possibly be thinking about. If you think it's a dumb plan, he's thinking it, too, which makes me hate Squall even more because he tends to lampshade every plot hole in the game this way.
Plot points get thrown all over the place with no rhyme or reason. It literally feels as if there was a chalkboard of things that the CGI team had already completed sitting on the sideline while a group of interns played darts with plot points stolen from soap operas and television sci-fi to fill in the gaps. I'll let The Spoony One explain all about the prison/missle base disaster, but right after that you run back to save your base only to discover there was this evil bastard sitting in the basement the whole time who you'd never heard of before, and right before you fight him he throws it up in the air that the one giving you your orders has been married to the evil sorceress the whole time. It comes out of nowhere, and that's what the game is like. For no rhyme or reason, things just get thrown at you with no explanation. When someone tries to explain things, they usually say something like, "Yeah. That's about right. Weird, huh? Oh well, moving on."
To some up the rest of the game, the sorceress isn't evil, but there's another evil sorceress that possessed her, so the mission hasn't really changed but things get a lot more confusing just to mess with your head. In order to stop bad things from happening, you come in contact with some people that you've been seeing in your dreams since the missions began. Turns out that these people weren't imagined, and your team had actually been looking into the past watching the lives of others. These dream people help you set yourself up to fight the sorceress, whose master plan is to create a time-loop that would basically destroy everything. I think. It's not really clear.
If my "simple" explanation sounds weird, that's because there's no good way of summing the plot up. It just doesn't make sense, and it's so bad that fans of the game have come up with theories. These theories are supposed to explain a couple of plot holes meant for interpretation, and sometimes they go so far as adding in another layer to the plot. Spoony explained that someone wrote to him about a theory that at a certain point in the game, Squall died and the nonsense that happens after it is his broken limbo. I pretty much agreed with his retort, which you can check out on his site, but the point is that even fans of the game are trying to explain something that even they don't understand. Here's just a few other theories about what is actually going on in the game.
The time-loop already happened before you picked up a controller. According to this theory, a few hints in the game such as the global radio interference, strange technological peaks and valleys across the planet, memory loss, the blackouts, and the crazy amount of coincidence suggest that time had already crunched. The world you explore during the course of the game is actually an entire span of time rolled up into one world.
Rinoa is Ultimecia. If I'm getting this right, because it's been a while since I've heard this, either Squall dies or Rinoa gets near death, or something about the space scene doesn't go right, and Rinoa basically unleashes her inner beast at that moment to become Ultimecia. There's certain clues in the game to support this, but you have to be trying really hard to find them. One of the "giveaways" is that the ending makes it a point to wipe Rinoa out of existence in every way possible after you succeed. Or,
Squall, Laguna, and Cid are all the same person, and by extension, Rinoa, Edea, and Ultimecia are all the same, too. There's actually a lot of these possibilities in the game, especially when people try to throw Raine and Ellone into the mix. It's a true clusterf***.
Someone is dead, but no one actually knows who. This includes the Squall is dead theory. So maybe Squall didn't die at the end of disc 1, but instead, he dies at the end of the game. Or, Rinoa really is Ultimecia, and she dies at the end of the game and takes everyone with her. Or, the multiverse died but Rinoa was able to save one sole universe. OR, the multiverse didn't die, but Squall and Ultimecia seem to be strangely immune to everything, and while Squall died in one universe, another took up the task until he finally succeeded in at least one universe in what was basically a suicide mission, so that ending is actually his life flashing before his eyes in multiple universes. Don't ask. I could sit here and explain everything for hours and get nowhere, but people have come up with theories like this. Some make sense. Some make better sense than the story. Some make less sense but are more interesting. This is one of those that covers the whole gamut.
Dear god, there's more, but I can't even go into it all. What started this whole theory craze was the fact that the story itself was extremely disjointed and utter nonsense. Squall gets a 4 foot ice spear lodged into his torso and survives without a scratch. The ending shows Rinoa either blinking out of existence, or something is happening with Squall, but you don't know what. Rinoa is shown dying in space in the ending, but she shows up again later as if nothing happened. Squall apparently dies at the end, but he comes back too. Too much of the game is based on memories, yet the references to why memories are important don't offer any explanation. People do things for no rhyme or reason, and stories get brought up in much the same way, so the fans made up their own ways to explain it all.
Bottom line, the story sucked and was broken beyond repair. I say we get a few guys with guns, kidnap the SOB that wrote it, and sit him down in a padded room until he explains what the hell he was trying to do.
The story issues go on for pages. A graduate student could probably develop a thesis around what the plot of Final Fantasy VIII is actually about and still not get any real answers, but at least the blame isn't entirely on the game's writer. Outside of the plot, there are a zillion sidequests that are even more random than the ones found in Final Fantasy VII. The single, most notorious piece of crap in this game is the Triple Triad game. Normally, I would find this game to be addictive and fun, except that it's not fun, and the amount of hell that you have to go through in order to just BEGIN on this quest is a special torture all on its own. Even the card players themselves don't make sense, as you will find yourself in the middle of saving your home base from a missile strike while at the same time fighting an in-house war, then turning to one of the people in the midst of this chaos and asking them to play cards. They couldn't be more delighted.
The card game has a lot of rules that are impossible to keep track off due to the fact that they are regional and always changing. This would be fine, except that this really puts a hamper on actually getting anywhere in the grand scheme of things. You start out with a set of terrible cards, and through diligence, that deck can be expanded to include a few powerful ones pretty early in the game. You absolutely have to get some of the early special cards, or you have zero chance at getting good cards from other players. You never know if you're challenging a guy that carries the most dangerous Magic deck in the history of gaming or a guy who has a fistful of crap. That said, it's dangerous to even play anyone, because if you feel like casually playing a game of cards and throw in a good card just to make sure you have a little insurance, you'll get three high powered cards thrown in your direction just because you didn't save and the game hates you. Changing these rules and getting certain cards can be an absolute pain in the ass in what can only be described as a guide dang it moment, because in some cases you are forced to lose cards you would never purposely lose in order for an opponent to place his rare card on the board. You would never know this. Even if someone told you, "That Bob dude drops Bahamut," then you would still be wasting hours on Bob because who in the hell purposely loses their rare cards? There's no way to know without using a guide. You're just wasting the player's time at that point, because if you were going to be sneaky and make acquiring that card a huge secret, then why the hell would you immediately release the information to a guide maker? No one would actually find the card except by sheer accident or dumb luck, and for 99.9% of gamers who were looking to get that card, you basically told them that the card isn't secret enough to keep a secret, but we're going to keep all the BS of the secret intact so you have to waste 3 hours getting what you want.
I never, ever played the card game, because it was fun as a game, but it was not fun as part of Final Fantasy VIII. You were encouraged to get these cards to refine them into spells and items as if it was an integral part of the game, so it was a campaign of its own.
Then there was magic junctioning. Great idea....at first. Lots of gamers were straight up confused by all of the junctioning information thrown at them, and it was pretty necessary to learn it, because enemies leveled up in the game as you did. This was neat, at first (you'll be hearing this a lot), because regular enemies would keep up with you as far as the magic and item drops they would leave behind. Once you were at level 30, however, you did not want to gain ANY experience if you could help it. That would leave everyone in the game set to take on your level 30 guys while you accumulated enough magic junctions and weapons to take on the entire Greek pantheon all at once. This took forever to do, because you could either play the card game, draw the magic by hand, or collect items to refine into spells. This alone wasn't the deal breaker, as it allowed for a lot of options when it came to customizing your characters. No longer did you have to choose between the ice or flame armor set, because you could change everything down to the percentage point if you played around enough. Even better was seeing the visible results of drawing magic, as walking into a crowd of baddies and using your Cura-to-HP junctioned ally to siphon more Curas would cause your max HP to double or triple by the time you finished the dungeon.
It just took so much work, and it was absolutely necessary to take a large amount of time outside of the game to set everything up correctly. You were spending half the time just switching things around in between your allies, and the other half was spent getting the spells to junction in the first place. That involves going into dungeons and potentially gaining levels, not to mention the fact that fights take forever to resolve, which would be great if you had a few sidequests to do.
I mentioned that the card game was an annoying sidequest, but every sidequest is annoying, period. Between the dumber sidequests that involve UFO hunting and picking up rocks for someone's statue, you're given many sidequests that give you your basic endgame equipment. Through these sidequests, you will gain summons, powerful spells, and items that you don't really need, but probably want. First of all, good luck finding them. You get a little bit of freedom in disc 1, so you better use that time to talk to everybody under the sun. Do it twice for good measure, because one you ditch an area in the early game, you are never seeing it again. Not only will you be locked into the plot-event once you start it, but you will also have to follow it up hours upon hours of terrible story before you're even allowed to set foot outside a town. Once outside a town, the game nudges you pretty hard to finish with what you're doing.
"Hey, you just escaped from prison. The bad guys are going to fire missiles at your home base in a few hours, so time is of the essence. To make it convenient for you, the missile base you need to go to is within spitting distance. Really, it's OK, just finish THIS part and you'll be free."
But you're not! Don't EVER listen to this game when it tells you anything! If the game tells you that a HUEG emergency is happening ten feet away and that you REALLY need to go there without ignoring it, ignore it! Run away, far away, and never come back until you've done what you want to do. Lord knows that if you so much as fetch a little boy a lollipop, you will be sucked into the story plot for the next twenty hours with no hope of escaping. There are literally about three openings you get to explore the accessible world in the first disc and a half, and that's it. Finally, when you get the ability to float across the globe, you can barely do anything interesting except catch a chocobo, make a statue, and get your ass kicked by tonberries. The world is so barren that there are only about three or four towns you can access, and you're completely afraid to go to any of them for fear of getting sucked into the storyline again. What's worse is that most of the guides out there are suggesting that the very second I DO rejoin the plot, I will never be able to get to these quests again. I may just be reading that wrong, but the way the game works, it would not surprise me.
Then, there are the characters. After the casting of IV, VI, and VII, you would think that these characters would be memorable, but they are not. Every single character is annoying and forgettable. About the only thing people have to say about the characters of this game is that Squall is emo and that Quistis was the hottest one. Name one person that has brought up Selphie or Irvine in a conversation that wasn't about annoying Final Fantasy characters. You can't.
Which brings me to my last point I need to make before my head explodes from hatred. You can't f*** Quistis. Rinoa is the love interest, and you will never be able to change that. Even when Quistis decides that she's gonna love your nuts. Even when she's smarter, hotter, and better than Rinoa in every way possible. Even with Rinoa running around acting like an irritating 12-year old with Rockstar for blood. Even with Rinoa looking like an irritating 12-year old, you can never escape that you will never bag Quistis, nor will you get a choice in the matter. Of all of the worst decisions ever in a video game, Square decided at the time that it would be best if you were shown one of the few women in video game history that men would drool over and want to take home to mom, yet still force you to take the average looking dunce from junior high. That's a kick in the balls.
Really, there's nothing to love about this game. Take what you will away from the experience, but playing the game is not fun, and wrapping your head around the insanity is only funny when you're making colorful insults about it to someone who knows what you're talking about. Otherwise, it's masochism. Not one character in the game makes a smart decision unless you make the stupid decision first, and not one action in the game makes sense. Spoony commented in his playthrough that there wasn't one screen in the game that he couldn't hate for some reason, and I thought that he might be only slightly overestimating things. I mean, I knew it was bad, but there had to be something decent, right? No, there's not. Ever. I walked into the very screen that would take place after Spoony cut his cam when entering the missile base, and it hit me that he was absolutely right. Not one screen of this game is completely immune. Even the music is boring for the most part.
So, there you have it. The worst Final Fantasy game ever. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
Heavy Rain impressions.
I've had my hands on Heavy Rain for a few hours now, and while I'm not looking to blow through it overnight, I'm hooked enough to where I plan to give it some good time before my own personal weekend is over. A good reason why I'm not trying to speed my way through is that there are two parts to this game. One part is meant to be played, as the person behind the controller has sort of defines what's going to be on the screen. It's rewarding for a person to be alone and play this game expecting a thrilling interactive movie, but that brings me to my second point, which is that this game is also meant to be watched. Even if a friend, girlfriend, or family member guiding the game, it's absolutely watchable because you're going to see something a little different each time. Even failures look good and don't really hinder progress of the story. Basically, it's not necessarily a game that's desirable to play on your own, and I'm in no particular rush to beat this game without a friend around to experience it with.
I'm getting ahead of myself, though. To begin, let's get all of the immediate questions out of the way. Everything you've seen and heard it true. All of it. The game looks amazing and is arguably the most realistic looking game on the market. The developers have tried very, very hard to make everything that happens in the game seamless and presented in a way that would put a good movie director to shame. Even in chaotic moments, everything in the game looks amazing and is accessible to the eye. It's really interesting to think that this is a style of game that could work in the way that FMV titles never did. To imagine that there could be a Bourne game in this style almost makes my head pop when it comes to the overload of awesome possible. So yes, it's realistic, yes it always looks amazing, and yes, it's very accessible. I'm playing the game on hard, and think that I'm probably having more fun that way, so I could only imagine what the easiest setting would be like.
I'm not too sure yet about the extent of interactivity in the main storyline. There have been a few moments where I've completely failed what I was supposed to do on purpose, and while that particular event path was different, the ultimate outcome remained the same. It's an extremely forgiving way to do things, and I think that it encourages players to focus on the experience rather than getting a "high score". It's a very relaxing way of doing things, but I wonder what will actually be different in my second playthrough. The potential for hidden goodies and secret paths is very high, and I'm still not sure what all is hidden just out of view. Maybe there's nothing, and that the game is just a lot of events that happen regardless of what you do, but they might just look a little different if you have a good or bad gaming session.
The controls can be, on occasion, wonky. Walking takes a lot of getting used to, especially when switching between camera angles. You have to, basically, learn to walk correctly for this specific game, because if you start to remember how you played any other game, you might spin around looking very drunk. The QTE's all work perfectly except one subset of actions belonging to motion controls. It works, don't get me wrong, but it's almost as if the game is asking you to have your controller in a very specific orientation, because things don't work sometimes. I found that when you're supposed to shake the Dual Shock up and down or left and right, it works half the time, and just when you think that you've figured it out, you run into a GTE fest and will never be holding the controller in a way that you know works. It's sometimes hit and miss, but the only suggestion I can give you is to shake faster instead of more deliberately when asked to do so.
To my surprise, the game came with a "feely" that I didn't even know was in the box. I'm kicking myself now for not just making a photocopy of it, because I know I should have. Someone is going to pay $100 just to have this game with an unused origami sheet in a couple of years, I just know it. Strangely enough, and thank you PSN for ruining my hope of a misprint, the game and the origami sheet do not match. Let me explain this from the start. The game comes with a little piece of paper that you don't really know is in your game box, because nobody reads instructions anymore. When you first pop the game into the system, it tells you that an installation is required, which would have pissed me off on so many levels any other day, but I was distracted by a prompt that told me to whip out a specific piece of paper. Well, now I'm intrigued, because I didn't know it was there to begin with, I now have something to do while waiting for installation, and this is the sort of thing that makes me feel like I'm in for something unique.
Problem is, about three steps into the origami, things stop making sense. To be clear, the first to steps were to make creases and return the paper to its normal, upright position, so in reality, this is the first actual fold you're going to make on this paper. So for arguments sake, we're calling this the first step. So on the FIRST STEP of the origami, the PS3 and paper don't agree. The visual cues in the form of tiny blood-splatters that are supposed to match what's on the screen just don't match. I showed the fold to my friend, redid it 3 times in front of him, and asked if I was an idiot for saying that the game is wrong. He took it, did the same thing, and I didn't even have to ask if I was right because he was staring at the fold with that "wtf?" look on his face. Now, we think that everything is folded right, because we took the leap of faith that the game was just full of crap, and we were able to finish the origami. Not that the game actually helped in doing that either, because it isn't the clearest description of making this figure, nor did the visual cues make a hell of a lot of sense. No, it wasn't hard to figure out what they were meaning to have you do, but I looked at the screen thinking that their intern made this tutorial with no idea what the paper was actually going to look like, and that he was probably colorblind in the first place. Anyway, the very second the words "copy protection....of the future!" came out of my mouth, I realized that I should have immediately scanned the paper before using it. I'll get around to it.
It ultimately comes down to whether or not this was the "wow" game everyone was hoping for, and I have to say yes. Everything about the way this game looks, feels, and sounds is fantastic. In the beginning, there was actually an amusing moment where the "action" had a musical score behind it, the camera angles were right on the money, and we were doing some horribly mundane task and realized that for a moment, a Lifetime movie could seem epic if presented in this manner on a games system. It was hilarious to think about at the time, and if you try the game, you'll know what I mean. Really, this is the perfect date movie. As long as your significant other has held a controller in their hands at some point in the past year, they will be capable of playing this game. The origami in the beginning gets a little involvement, and then the game itself plays out like you're watching a really good thriller. The discovery that passing the controller back and forth was not a problem sort of cemented it for me. You will enjoy yourself controlling things, and you will enjoy yourself watching it. It's the first true date game so far. I'm sure I will eat those words when the difficulty amps up in a couple of hours, but even then, I can't imagine that the one watching will mind all that much.
There's no excuse to do anything less than rent this game. Maybe you don't have to buy it, but this is a must-play title regardless of how you do it. Rent it once and never look at it again, but at least get your hands on it for a few days. You will not be disappointed.
Though, I should warn you that this this game can easily be made to contain terrible methods of personal hygiene. Choose the order of your actions well, or you may just disgust yourself. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
I'm getting ahead of myself, though. To begin, let's get all of the immediate questions out of the way. Everything you've seen and heard it true. All of it. The game looks amazing and is arguably the most realistic looking game on the market. The developers have tried very, very hard to make everything that happens in the game seamless and presented in a way that would put a good movie director to shame. Even in chaotic moments, everything in the game looks amazing and is accessible to the eye. It's really interesting to think that this is a style of game that could work in the way that FMV titles never did. To imagine that there could be a Bourne game in this style almost makes my head pop when it comes to the overload of awesome possible. So yes, it's realistic, yes it always looks amazing, and yes, it's very accessible. I'm playing the game on hard, and think that I'm probably having more fun that way, so I could only imagine what the easiest setting would be like.
I'm not too sure yet about the extent of interactivity in the main storyline. There have been a few moments where I've completely failed what I was supposed to do on purpose, and while that particular event path was different, the ultimate outcome remained the same. It's an extremely forgiving way to do things, and I think that it encourages players to focus on the experience rather than getting a "high score". It's a very relaxing way of doing things, but I wonder what will actually be different in my second playthrough. The potential for hidden goodies and secret paths is very high, and I'm still not sure what all is hidden just out of view. Maybe there's nothing, and that the game is just a lot of events that happen regardless of what you do, but they might just look a little different if you have a good or bad gaming session.
The controls can be, on occasion, wonky. Walking takes a lot of getting used to, especially when switching between camera angles. You have to, basically, learn to walk correctly for this specific game, because if you start to remember how you played any other game, you might spin around looking very drunk. The QTE's all work perfectly except one subset of actions belonging to motion controls. It works, don't get me wrong, but it's almost as if the game is asking you to have your controller in a very specific orientation, because things don't work sometimes. I found that when you're supposed to shake the Dual Shock up and down or left and right, it works half the time, and just when you think that you've figured it out, you run into a GTE fest and will never be holding the controller in a way that you know works. It's sometimes hit and miss, but the only suggestion I can give you is to shake faster instead of more deliberately when asked to do so.
To my surprise, the game came with a "feely" that I didn't even know was in the box. I'm kicking myself now for not just making a photocopy of it, because I know I should have. Someone is going to pay $100 just to have this game with an unused origami sheet in a couple of years, I just know it. Strangely enough, and thank you PSN for ruining my hope of a misprint, the game and the origami sheet do not match. Let me explain this from the start. The game comes with a little piece of paper that you don't really know is in your game box, because nobody reads instructions anymore. When you first pop the game into the system, it tells you that an installation is required, which would have pissed me off on so many levels any other day, but I was distracted by a prompt that told me to whip out a specific piece of paper. Well, now I'm intrigued, because I didn't know it was there to begin with, I now have something to do while waiting for installation, and this is the sort of thing that makes me feel like I'm in for something unique.
Problem is, about three steps into the origami, things stop making sense. To be clear, the first to steps were to make creases and return the paper to its normal, upright position, so in reality, this is the first actual fold you're going to make on this paper. So for arguments sake, we're calling this the first step. So on the FIRST STEP of the origami, the PS3 and paper don't agree. The visual cues in the form of tiny blood-splatters that are supposed to match what's on the screen just don't match. I showed the fold to my friend, redid it 3 times in front of him, and asked if I was an idiot for saying that the game is wrong. He took it, did the same thing, and I didn't even have to ask if I was right because he was staring at the fold with that "wtf?" look on his face. Now, we think that everything is folded right, because we took the leap of faith that the game was just full of crap, and we were able to finish the origami. Not that the game actually helped in doing that either, because it isn't the clearest description of making this figure, nor did the visual cues make a hell of a lot of sense. No, it wasn't hard to figure out what they were meaning to have you do, but I looked at the screen thinking that their intern made this tutorial with no idea what the paper was actually going to look like, and that he was probably colorblind in the first place. Anyway, the very second the words "copy protection....of the future!" came out of my mouth, I realized that I should have immediately scanned the paper before using it. I'll get around to it.
It ultimately comes down to whether or not this was the "wow" game everyone was hoping for, and I have to say yes. Everything about the way this game looks, feels, and sounds is fantastic. In the beginning, there was actually an amusing moment where the "action" had a musical score behind it, the camera angles were right on the money, and we were doing some horribly mundane task and realized that for a moment, a Lifetime movie could seem epic if presented in this manner on a games system. It was hilarious to think about at the time, and if you try the game, you'll know what I mean. Really, this is the perfect date movie. As long as your significant other has held a controller in their hands at some point in the past year, they will be capable of playing this game. The origami in the beginning gets a little involvement, and then the game itself plays out like you're watching a really good thriller. The discovery that passing the controller back and forth was not a problem sort of cemented it for me. You will enjoy yourself controlling things, and you will enjoy yourself watching it. It's the first true date game so far. I'm sure I will eat those words when the difficulty amps up in a couple of hours, but even then, I can't imagine that the one watching will mind all that much.
There's no excuse to do anything less than rent this game. Maybe you don't have to buy it, but this is a must-play title regardless of how you do it. Rent it once and never look at it again, but at least get your hands on it for a few days. You will not be disappointed.
Though, I should warn you that this this game can easily be made to contain terrible methods of personal hygiene. Choose the order of your actions well, or you may just disgust yourself. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
February 22, 2010
Mass Control 4
I haven't played Mass Effect or its sequel, and I'm not entirely sure that I want to. Everyone has had their moment of commentary, telling me why I need to be playing these games before anything else, and I can respect that. The game looks as if it has a lot to offer, and I'm particularly interested to see how the game put "choice" into a function of gameplay. Yet, I still have my doubts that this is really a series I want to get into. For as good as the game looks, I just don't think it's the style of play I'm looking for, and with the reviews coming in lately, it's starting to sound like BioWare is trying to sneak into the space that Star Control once resided.
To be fair, these are entirely different series, but it got me thinking what a truly epic game would be like. Mass Effect doesn't so much put you in the driver's seat so much as his/her eyes. There's a much more personal aspect to that game than anything else, and while you're making decisions that have a pretty good impact on the universe, it's hard to forget that there is a big story that needs to be told. No amount of tweaking was going to change what the story was ultimately going to be about.
Yet, I can't say that Star Control is much different. There are different outcomes to be found and you do affect the universe you're in with your decisions, but everything is a little bit too general. Sure, you're given immense freedom, but when it comes down to it, telling an alien to "go shoot that guy" as opposed to hailing an alien race and telling them to "go shoot those guys" isn't exactly different. The mood is what is different.
Each game was inspiring in its own way, but think about what is inspirational about each game. A good portion of what each gamer took with them after playing those games wasn't actually in the discs at all. Mass Effect gave the impression that those ripples you caused were part of a grander, interpersonal scheme, yet the ripples never REALLY took fruition and the scenarios arising from those decisions were really like a combination lock for a murder or sex scene. Star Control II gave this sense of vastness, with decisions affecting MASSIVE areas of space, and an equally massive span of new things to discover and interact with. Yet, there weren't REALLY that many different things out there, and you were still just really trying to accomplish one single thing.
We got the impression, however, that we were taking part in something else entirely. Maybe that's the plus side of making space related media. All you have to do is make it good enough the first time around, and the possibilities thereafter are endless. Star Trek could feasibly go on forever if it wanted to, because there would always be a story that could be told. Space allows for this.
If a game turned up that capitalized on what was inspired, and not what was actually there, then you have one of the greatest games ever made, my friends.
They actually get the premise right, because the premise is only a vessel. You come up with a goal or an endpoint and then you come up with a handful of ways to make a definitive end based off of that goal. Simple enough.
So, the Death Star is just sitting there, almost completed. Do you start building a fleet to take it on? Do steal the plans? Do you build another weapon to destroy it? Do you sabotage it? Games generally allow things like this to happen all the time, but the trouble is that you're usually locked into one of those paths to achieve victory or you just need to explore until you find one of these solutions lying around. Let's start from there.
So you want to build a fleet to take it on. What if you aren't friends with any of these people to begin with, like in Star Control? You need to get some allies going, and you need to find the allies. Well, we've dealt with that before. Instead, let's assume that each race isn't one giant hivemind. You head to your allies in an attempt to send your best negotiator, which you recruited from a floating human cruiser that lost a battle and wasn't going to make it much longer. You have to find this guy early on in the game though, or you'll have to find a replacement for him or think of another way to achieve your goal, which is to convince those neutral neighbors of yours to start seeing things your way. On the way, you are exploring one of the thousands of worlds for resources when you notice that someone left some robot drones mining for something a little deeper than the surface. You investigate, and you discover that they are searching for an element you've never heard of before, which actually ends up being the key component of a weapon capable of breaking shields, allowing you to cut up the enemy fleet before making your direct attack against the Death Star.
So do you steal the plans? Well, you may not have thought this through, because the pilots of the Death Star are the squishy and slimy variety of alien, so spying on them with fleshy humans probably isn't going to work out too well. Yet, as you explore space, you begin to realize that, like the Ur Quan, these guys love their slaves. You happen to come across a small fleet of war-like people that were once enslaved by the baddies, only these guys are free and are at least willing to listen to the prospect of fighting the one species that's more violent than they are. So, just like the Ur Quan, you find that the enslaved portion of that race was free to fight alongside them for the greater cause of dominance. Using this to your advantage, you get them to throw away one ship to surrender to the enemy in the chance that they will come across the plans. You go about your business for a couple of years, thinking that it was a lost cause while you beef up your fleet. You figure that these new allies are the best ones to lead the attack, so you equip them with the new super-weapon you found with the drones. Suddenly, you get a text from that ship you sent out with a request to ambush the enemy at a set of coordinates. You ambush the baddies, rescue your ally, and walk away with the plans. Now you know the Death Star's weak point! But, you gave those "buddies" of yours the super-weapon, so the second you toast the Death Star, these guys rebuild and stomp you with a new, unstoppable version of the weapon you handed over to them. Nice going.
Maybe you decide that a giant laser cannon would do the trick, using the tactic of fighting fire with fire. Well, that blew a hole in the galaxy when you stuck a warp engine to it. You could have found a way to stabilize all that energy if you talked to those peace-loving supergenius hermits. Of course, you would have had to find them first, which is hard enough considering that they're practically invisible unless you know what you're looking for. Then you thought nanobots would work despite common sense telling you that no, that's clearly not the path for survival. Well, you did it anyway, and overnight the nanobots constructed a fleet out of the Death Star, and you can imagine how many ships that would be.
While you were coming up with ways to blow it out of the sky with one shot, you happen across an outpost inhabited by a race you're familiar with. Being friendly, you approach them, only to find out that they are also being enslaved. Only problem is that they are being enslaved by their own race for reasons that are clearly low on the moral scale. You didn't realize that your allies were completely off your rocker, so you adopt these people and continue to work up plans to sabotage the Death Star. You seem to be making headway, as one of the enemies actually defects to you when you rush to the defense of another set of allies and kill everything in the sky. Amazing, now you might just have a lead on how to stop that thing.
The allied race mentioned before checks on their slave colony and finds out what you've been up to. In what really turns out to be a day that messed up your grand scheme, they stand their ground and refuse to participate on the plan until you return their prisoners. You refuse, and they break off ties with you completely and go work on their own survival schemes. Great, now you have a new faction to deal with, and it's going to take you forever to come up with a replacement for the ships they invested in your plan. Well, a year later, and the Death Star activates and there's little you can do to stop it since your plan was essentially flushed at that very moment. On top of that, and now you're fighting two wars. Maybe that probe you sent out into the distance reached someone of even greater power, saw the violence, and blew everyone up at the same time. Who knows.
This is just a picture of what's possible, but imagine what else could be possible if someone really put their mind to it. If something you decide has an effect, those things in turn should also have effects, and if the game is more like Star Control, then you can forget the linear limitations of a game like Mass Effect. It's not even that difficult, because the only thing that a creator would have to do is come up with a master timeline in which basic things happen. The foundation of those two games are quite correct in the way they do things, but in order to bring out true promise, there just needs to be more complexity in the way its done.
First, I think that having a preset timeline is one of the best ideas in gaming that's almost never used. Sure, we have linearity, and we have time limits, but Star Control was truly unique in that events would take place with or without you. It was simply your choice as to when and where you would enter the heart of the action. I've often thought that there is a good survival horror story waiting to be told in this manner. A set timeline is great when it comes to storytelling, because it's extremely difficult to give weight to a million different actions that could predictably happen. If you have a fully fleshed story happen over the course of time, then you can really put some storytelling muscle behind the narrative. The object shouldn't be to make a storyline so adaptable that it becomes flimsy, because that turns a game into something else. There has to be a story, otherwise you are playing a simulation of something lifeless with no oomph to it, like Civilization. This is also why I love how Star Control never randomized where species would be or where items would be. That, to me, breaks a game, because balance is just as important to a game as it is real life. It's great for quick battles of Starcraft (and even then, it's still iffy), but it's not good to mess with the identity of a universe that needs to remain as strong as possible.
Second, because a set timeline limits what is possible for you to do to complete the game, you get comfortable with that fact. Whether you nuke, zap, or self-destruct your enemy, you're still blowing them up when the game ends. There only needs to be a handful of ways to beat (or lose) a game like this. The endgame really isn't the most important thing. What's more fun is the experience getting there, and that's where Mass Effect really shines. Sure, you're not finding the supreme beings of the universe because you drove WAY off course for no reason whatsoever, but you are making key decisions on the smaller scale all the time. Star Control gave the sense of things being vast, but in reality, there was only so much to find and do. Filling in those gaps with thousands of smaller things do to goes a long way into making the "how" part of the game entertaining. If you ally with one race over another, there doesn't have to be a huge story attached to each one as long as their roles are interchangable. As long as the circumstances are different in how you get each one on your side, that's enough. Lots of small decisions are always a great thing, and as long as you keep these small decisions separate from the main story, then you can throw in thousands of them without having to render a different CGI scene for each one. You need an ally that will team up with you to blow up the bad guy, and that's really it.
Finally, flags. Flags are great and terrible at the same time. Flags are often used as a description for unlocking the plot combination, as I mentioned above. If you talk to person A while holding a certain item, then a flag is raised that makes person B appear. This is a good, because it is the foundation of game interaction. If there's a timid alien race out there, it makes sense that making good with their friends will give them a little more incentive to stick around and listen to you rather than running away. What it isn't good for is determining time. If person B magically appears back from his vacation because you waved a carrot at person A, then that's not a good use of flags. A game like this should let things happen regardless of whether you're ready for it. Let's say that there's a planet that could explode in the game. It makes sense that you can make a decision that would save it. It would also make sense that a planet could blow up because of a decision you make. It would even make sense that the planet could blow up earlier or later based off of what you say in the game. What would not make sense is if the enemy had a bomb on that planet and was only waiting to advance the story until after you talked to three specific alien races, unless that was an optional event. Ideally, a good game of this nature would have the good kind of flags every single place you went, because it would make things happen outside of the main story without ever needing to directly interact with it.
It's not that either game failed in any way. Mass Effect is considered to be a great, if a little predictable, series at times. Star Control II is considered to be a classic even if it is a little empty and flat at times. Neither game has the filler that would really put a good space series over the top. If Mass Effect was more expansive or if Star Control gave you more decisions to make, then I wouldn't be wishing for more. One look at Heavy Rain, and I get the impression that developers out there think that everything either has to be flat and addictive or pristine and movie-like, and that's just not the case. It's relatively easy to put in boatloads of content into a good game if they approach it the right way. I don't need every decision I ever made in a game to be voiced over and rendered picture perfect to know that I did it and had fun doing it, nor do I expect to be given absolute freedom with nothing to do. There's an excellent game in between these franchises. With any luck, if Star Control ever gets revived, it will deliver that experience. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
To be fair, these are entirely different series, but it got me thinking what a truly epic game would be like. Mass Effect doesn't so much put you in the driver's seat so much as his/her eyes. There's a much more personal aspect to that game than anything else, and while you're making decisions that have a pretty good impact on the universe, it's hard to forget that there is a big story that needs to be told. No amount of tweaking was going to change what the story was ultimately going to be about.
Yet, I can't say that Star Control is much different. There are different outcomes to be found and you do affect the universe you're in with your decisions, but everything is a little bit too general. Sure, you're given immense freedom, but when it comes down to it, telling an alien to "go shoot that guy" as opposed to hailing an alien race and telling them to "go shoot those guys" isn't exactly different. The mood is what is different.
Each game was inspiring in its own way, but think about what is inspirational about each game. A good portion of what each gamer took with them after playing those games wasn't actually in the discs at all. Mass Effect gave the impression that those ripples you caused were part of a grander, interpersonal scheme, yet the ripples never REALLY took fruition and the scenarios arising from those decisions were really like a combination lock for a murder or sex scene. Star Control II gave this sense of vastness, with decisions affecting MASSIVE areas of space, and an equally massive span of new things to discover and interact with. Yet, there weren't REALLY that many different things out there, and you were still just really trying to accomplish one single thing.
We got the impression, however, that we were taking part in something else entirely. Maybe that's the plus side of making space related media. All you have to do is make it good enough the first time around, and the possibilities thereafter are endless. Star Trek could feasibly go on forever if it wanted to, because there would always be a story that could be told. Space allows for this.
If a game turned up that capitalized on what was inspired, and not what was actually there, then you have one of the greatest games ever made, my friends.
They actually get the premise right, because the premise is only a vessel. You come up with a goal or an endpoint and then you come up with a handful of ways to make a definitive end based off of that goal. Simple enough.
So, the Death Star is just sitting there, almost completed. Do you start building a fleet to take it on? Do steal the plans? Do you build another weapon to destroy it? Do you sabotage it? Games generally allow things like this to happen all the time, but the trouble is that you're usually locked into one of those paths to achieve victory or you just need to explore until you find one of these solutions lying around. Let's start from there.
So you want to build a fleet to take it on. What if you aren't friends with any of these people to begin with, like in Star Control? You need to get some allies going, and you need to find the allies. Well, we've dealt with that before. Instead, let's assume that each race isn't one giant hivemind. You head to your allies in an attempt to send your best negotiator, which you recruited from a floating human cruiser that lost a battle and wasn't going to make it much longer. You have to find this guy early on in the game though, or you'll have to find a replacement for him or think of another way to achieve your goal, which is to convince those neutral neighbors of yours to start seeing things your way. On the way, you are exploring one of the thousands of worlds for resources when you notice that someone left some robot drones mining for something a little deeper than the surface. You investigate, and you discover that they are searching for an element you've never heard of before, which actually ends up being the key component of a weapon capable of breaking shields, allowing you to cut up the enemy fleet before making your direct attack against the Death Star.
So do you steal the plans? Well, you may not have thought this through, because the pilots of the Death Star are the squishy and slimy variety of alien, so spying on them with fleshy humans probably isn't going to work out too well. Yet, as you explore space, you begin to realize that, like the Ur Quan, these guys love their slaves. You happen to come across a small fleet of war-like people that were once enslaved by the baddies, only these guys are free and are at least willing to listen to the prospect of fighting the one species that's more violent than they are. So, just like the Ur Quan, you find that the enslaved portion of that race was free to fight alongside them for the greater cause of dominance. Using this to your advantage, you get them to throw away one ship to surrender to the enemy in the chance that they will come across the plans. You go about your business for a couple of years, thinking that it was a lost cause while you beef up your fleet. You figure that these new allies are the best ones to lead the attack, so you equip them with the new super-weapon you found with the drones. Suddenly, you get a text from that ship you sent out with a request to ambush the enemy at a set of coordinates. You ambush the baddies, rescue your ally, and walk away with the plans. Now you know the Death Star's weak point! But, you gave those "buddies" of yours the super-weapon, so the second you toast the Death Star, these guys rebuild and stomp you with a new, unstoppable version of the weapon you handed over to them. Nice going.
Maybe you decide that a giant laser cannon would do the trick, using the tactic of fighting fire with fire. Well, that blew a hole in the galaxy when you stuck a warp engine to it. You could have found a way to stabilize all that energy if you talked to those peace-loving supergenius hermits. Of course, you would have had to find them first, which is hard enough considering that they're practically invisible unless you know what you're looking for. Then you thought nanobots would work despite common sense telling you that no, that's clearly not the path for survival. Well, you did it anyway, and overnight the nanobots constructed a fleet out of the Death Star, and you can imagine how many ships that would be.
While you were coming up with ways to blow it out of the sky with one shot, you happen across an outpost inhabited by a race you're familiar with. Being friendly, you approach them, only to find out that they are also being enslaved. Only problem is that they are being enslaved by their own race for reasons that are clearly low on the moral scale. You didn't realize that your allies were completely off your rocker, so you adopt these people and continue to work up plans to sabotage the Death Star. You seem to be making headway, as one of the enemies actually defects to you when you rush to the defense of another set of allies and kill everything in the sky. Amazing, now you might just have a lead on how to stop that thing.
The allied race mentioned before checks on their slave colony and finds out what you've been up to. In what really turns out to be a day that messed up your grand scheme, they stand their ground and refuse to participate on the plan until you return their prisoners. You refuse, and they break off ties with you completely and go work on their own survival schemes. Great, now you have a new faction to deal with, and it's going to take you forever to come up with a replacement for the ships they invested in your plan. Well, a year later, and the Death Star activates and there's little you can do to stop it since your plan was essentially flushed at that very moment. On top of that, and now you're fighting two wars. Maybe that probe you sent out into the distance reached someone of even greater power, saw the violence, and blew everyone up at the same time. Who knows.
This is just a picture of what's possible, but imagine what else could be possible if someone really put their mind to it. If something you decide has an effect, those things in turn should also have effects, and if the game is more like Star Control, then you can forget the linear limitations of a game like Mass Effect. It's not even that difficult, because the only thing that a creator would have to do is come up with a master timeline in which basic things happen. The foundation of those two games are quite correct in the way they do things, but in order to bring out true promise, there just needs to be more complexity in the way its done.
First, I think that having a preset timeline is one of the best ideas in gaming that's almost never used. Sure, we have linearity, and we have time limits, but Star Control was truly unique in that events would take place with or without you. It was simply your choice as to when and where you would enter the heart of the action. I've often thought that there is a good survival horror story waiting to be told in this manner. A set timeline is great when it comes to storytelling, because it's extremely difficult to give weight to a million different actions that could predictably happen. If you have a fully fleshed story happen over the course of time, then you can really put some storytelling muscle behind the narrative. The object shouldn't be to make a storyline so adaptable that it becomes flimsy, because that turns a game into something else. There has to be a story, otherwise you are playing a simulation of something lifeless with no oomph to it, like Civilization. This is also why I love how Star Control never randomized where species would be or where items would be. That, to me, breaks a game, because balance is just as important to a game as it is real life. It's great for quick battles of Starcraft (and even then, it's still iffy), but it's not good to mess with the identity of a universe that needs to remain as strong as possible.
Second, because a set timeline limits what is possible for you to do to complete the game, you get comfortable with that fact. Whether you nuke, zap, or self-destruct your enemy, you're still blowing them up when the game ends. There only needs to be a handful of ways to beat (or lose) a game like this. The endgame really isn't the most important thing. What's more fun is the experience getting there, and that's where Mass Effect really shines. Sure, you're not finding the supreme beings of the universe because you drove WAY off course for no reason whatsoever, but you are making key decisions on the smaller scale all the time. Star Control gave the sense of things being vast, but in reality, there was only so much to find and do. Filling in those gaps with thousands of smaller things do to goes a long way into making the "how" part of the game entertaining. If you ally with one race over another, there doesn't have to be a huge story attached to each one as long as their roles are interchangable. As long as the circumstances are different in how you get each one on your side, that's enough. Lots of small decisions are always a great thing, and as long as you keep these small decisions separate from the main story, then you can throw in thousands of them without having to render a different CGI scene for each one. You need an ally that will team up with you to blow up the bad guy, and that's really it.
Finally, flags. Flags are great and terrible at the same time. Flags are often used as a description for unlocking the plot combination, as I mentioned above. If you talk to person A while holding a certain item, then a flag is raised that makes person B appear. This is a good, because it is the foundation of game interaction. If there's a timid alien race out there, it makes sense that making good with their friends will give them a little more incentive to stick around and listen to you rather than running away. What it isn't good for is determining time. If person B magically appears back from his vacation because you waved a carrot at person A, then that's not a good use of flags. A game like this should let things happen regardless of whether you're ready for it. Let's say that there's a planet that could explode in the game. It makes sense that you can make a decision that would save it. It would also make sense that a planet could blow up because of a decision you make. It would even make sense that the planet could blow up earlier or later based off of what you say in the game. What would not make sense is if the enemy had a bomb on that planet and was only waiting to advance the story until after you talked to three specific alien races, unless that was an optional event. Ideally, a good game of this nature would have the good kind of flags every single place you went, because it would make things happen outside of the main story without ever needing to directly interact with it.
It's not that either game failed in any way. Mass Effect is considered to be a great, if a little predictable, series at times. Star Control II is considered to be a classic even if it is a little empty and flat at times. Neither game has the filler that would really put a good space series over the top. If Mass Effect was more expansive or if Star Control gave you more decisions to make, then I wouldn't be wishing for more. One look at Heavy Rain, and I get the impression that developers out there think that everything either has to be flat and addictive or pristine and movie-like, and that's just not the case. It's relatively easy to put in boatloads of content into a good game if they approach it the right way. I don't need every decision I ever made in a game to be voiced over and rendered picture perfect to know that I did it and had fun doing it, nor do I expect to be given absolute freedom with nothing to do. There's an excellent game in between these franchises. With any luck, if Star Control ever gets revived, it will deliver that experience. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
Choose your burner.
It's no secret that Burnout is one of my all-time favorite series. I haven't played it much because mastery has already come to most of the games in the series, and it really takes a couple of buddies and a case of beer to get started on one of those games. That's not to say you need to be inebriated to enjoy them, but you need to amp up interest and make an event out of it when going on a Burnout campaign.
The strangest thing happened the other day, however, after several bottles of wine and a Modern Warfare 2 fest which, oddly, burnt me out on the hit shooter. I picked up Burnout Dominator, jumped into the game from exactly where I left off, and realized that there was no hope of me beating the stage I was on because I had lost all the skills I used to have. Then I realized that this was Dominator we're talking about here, and thus, I am here to tell you all you need to know about the Burnout series.
If you need a quick primer, then it's not a bad idea to start from the series roots. The game I began on was Burnout 2, and it's an excellent starting point for anyone looking to get a feel for the series. Even now, it's not outdated. Sure, the graphics could use a little bit of a nudge, but the game still feels smooth and carries primitive versions of the trademark systems every other game would use after that point. I never played the first, but really, with the second game around, there's no real reason to except to give yourself the sense of nostalgia when tracks get revisited later on. 2 is still a challenge, and possesses all of the game modes that remain popular to this day, including cops and robbers and the better version of crash mode. The speed is there, and maybe it doesn't quite reach warp speed like other games in the series end up doing, but that's part of the reason why I would recommend this one as a good starting point for the addiction.
Burnout 3 is where it all came together, and while I absolutely hated its version of crash mode, the campaign is simply perfect. Everything is a challenge and the series really hit the perfect balance between speed and control, as well as introducing the ability to put forceful "takedowns" on opponents to get them out of your way. Progressing through the game really demands excellence on your part if you want to get gold every time, and one mistake will put you right back in last place if you didn't make sure to take someone with you. On top of being a very good racer on its own, this game really introduced everything explosive and crazy in the series. Pair that up with the excellent presentation, and you can see why this game is still considered the very best the series has to offer.
Then came Burnout: Revenge, which ditched the number system entirely and began the cash in on 3's classic status. That's not to say that the series went downhill, because it really didn't. Revenge was the most accessible game in the series due to the fact that half of the traffic was no longer a danger to you. Speeds remained insane and the game was not easy by any stretch, but players were encouraged to use a little more of the road by allowing the use of same-direction traffic as guided missiles. Ram into the back of a car that wasn't a semi-truck, and you could send that car flying right into the opponent that taking your place. Better yet, even if you missed, that guy who wanted to edge you out may catch that car in the face. This made the game a psychotic joy to play, and the crash mode was brought back to its roots along with a few more options for multiple people who enjoy wrecking intersections up. The challenge slipped a bit and the game was over the top at times, but that never stopped this game from being extremely fun. What's more, the presentation ditched the running commentary by DJ Stryker and still managed to ramp up the presentation side of the series.
Burnout: Dominator is when the series took a bit of a slip, trying to combine many elements of the different games into one. It turned into to be sort of an incoherent mess, not really resembling what fans came to expect from the series. The soundtrack remained memorable and amped up, but that's about the only thing consistent with the excellence of 3. The presentation really took a dive, the game didn't feel as natural, and there was an insane amount of Nintendo hard difficulty within the game. Not only did you have to be perfect, but some stages were absolutely unforgiving, and it seemed that any slack previous games gave you for tiny mistakes was left behind in favor of torturing the player. You really had to be an expect at Burnout games, and while this game puts out the highest challenge of any of the games so far, it really lost a lot of the fun. It was largely forgettable, and most people who are fans of the game really didn't consider it to be a complete effort anyway.
That's probably because Burnout: Paradise was on the way, the first free-roam entry in the series. Everything that made the other games in the series good were present and accounted for in the series' jump to the current generation. The open world aspect was a double edged sword in some respects, as Burnout was traditionally a game that skilled gamers could play without having to think too hard about what they were doing. Considering that the series' hallmark was reaching speeds that are usually reserved for jet fighters, the need to glance at a map or spend hours memorizing the terrain was a huge deal. On the plus side, the creative ones would be able to create a route to the finish that favored them. If you thought you could drift perfectly, you could take an alternate route that would pit your skill set against someone who was willing to give the traffic infested straight-line a shot. The freedom to choose was a big plus, and the game found multiple ways to incorporate rewards for exploration, skill, and destruction.
On the other hand, there were no walls or obvious markers on the road that would tell you where you needed to be going. If the player wasn't careful, they would find themselves thrown into a 5 mile stretch that took them away from the goal with no quick escape route to get back on track. Sure, if you missed an intersection, you could take the next one without chancing a crash with a late turn, but not always. Gamers that were hoping to use the town to create races were given that option, but customization was slim, and the hope was that the roads could be blocked off in some way. This wasn't a deal breaker, but many fans are hoping with the next installment that "mindless" will involve a little less map-reading.
Ranking the games is difficult, as everyone has their favorites, but as long as you love speed, destruction, and pure arcade racing, there is a game for you. This is my own personal list:
1. Burnout: Revenge
2. Burnout 3
3. Burnout Paradise
4. Burnout 2
5. Burnout Dominator
I was a huge fan of Revenge, but I feel that I have to justify why I put it ahead of 3. I simply had more fun with the title, and the crash mode was immensely better than the version found in 3. If I was going to pick a Burnout game to waste an hour on, that would be it. Crash mode and the removal of Styker alone made it better for me, and despite the weapons at your disposal, there was still challenge in that title even if it isn't as difficult as 3. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
The strangest thing happened the other day, however, after several bottles of wine and a Modern Warfare 2 fest which, oddly, burnt me out on the hit shooter. I picked up Burnout Dominator, jumped into the game from exactly where I left off, and realized that there was no hope of me beating the stage I was on because I had lost all the skills I used to have. Then I realized that this was Dominator we're talking about here, and thus, I am here to tell you all you need to know about the Burnout series.
If you need a quick primer, then it's not a bad idea to start from the series roots. The game I began on was Burnout 2, and it's an excellent starting point for anyone looking to get a feel for the series. Even now, it's not outdated. Sure, the graphics could use a little bit of a nudge, but the game still feels smooth and carries primitive versions of the trademark systems every other game would use after that point. I never played the first, but really, with the second game around, there's no real reason to except to give yourself the sense of nostalgia when tracks get revisited later on. 2 is still a challenge, and possesses all of the game modes that remain popular to this day, including cops and robbers and the better version of crash mode. The speed is there, and maybe it doesn't quite reach warp speed like other games in the series end up doing, but that's part of the reason why I would recommend this one as a good starting point for the addiction.
Burnout 3 is where it all came together, and while I absolutely hated its version of crash mode, the campaign is simply perfect. Everything is a challenge and the series really hit the perfect balance between speed and control, as well as introducing the ability to put forceful "takedowns" on opponents to get them out of your way. Progressing through the game really demands excellence on your part if you want to get gold every time, and one mistake will put you right back in last place if you didn't make sure to take someone with you. On top of being a very good racer on its own, this game really introduced everything explosive and crazy in the series. Pair that up with the excellent presentation, and you can see why this game is still considered the very best the series has to offer.
Then came Burnout: Revenge, which ditched the number system entirely and began the cash in on 3's classic status. That's not to say that the series went downhill, because it really didn't. Revenge was the most accessible game in the series due to the fact that half of the traffic was no longer a danger to you. Speeds remained insane and the game was not easy by any stretch, but players were encouraged to use a little more of the road by allowing the use of same-direction traffic as guided missiles. Ram into the back of a car that wasn't a semi-truck, and you could send that car flying right into the opponent that taking your place. Better yet, even if you missed, that guy who wanted to edge you out may catch that car in the face. This made the game a psychotic joy to play, and the crash mode was brought back to its roots along with a few more options for multiple people who enjoy wrecking intersections up. The challenge slipped a bit and the game was over the top at times, but that never stopped this game from being extremely fun. What's more, the presentation ditched the running commentary by DJ Stryker and still managed to ramp up the presentation side of the series.
Burnout: Dominator is when the series took a bit of a slip, trying to combine many elements of the different games into one. It turned into to be sort of an incoherent mess, not really resembling what fans came to expect from the series. The soundtrack remained memorable and amped up, but that's about the only thing consistent with the excellence of 3. The presentation really took a dive, the game didn't feel as natural, and there was an insane amount of Nintendo hard difficulty within the game. Not only did you have to be perfect, but some stages were absolutely unforgiving, and it seemed that any slack previous games gave you for tiny mistakes was left behind in favor of torturing the player. You really had to be an expect at Burnout games, and while this game puts out the highest challenge of any of the games so far, it really lost a lot of the fun. It was largely forgettable, and most people who are fans of the game really didn't consider it to be a complete effort anyway.
That's probably because Burnout: Paradise was on the way, the first free-roam entry in the series. Everything that made the other games in the series good were present and accounted for in the series' jump to the current generation. The open world aspect was a double edged sword in some respects, as Burnout was traditionally a game that skilled gamers could play without having to think too hard about what they were doing. Considering that the series' hallmark was reaching speeds that are usually reserved for jet fighters, the need to glance at a map or spend hours memorizing the terrain was a huge deal. On the plus side, the creative ones would be able to create a route to the finish that favored them. If you thought you could drift perfectly, you could take an alternate route that would pit your skill set against someone who was willing to give the traffic infested straight-line a shot. The freedom to choose was a big plus, and the game found multiple ways to incorporate rewards for exploration, skill, and destruction.
On the other hand, there were no walls or obvious markers on the road that would tell you where you needed to be going. If the player wasn't careful, they would find themselves thrown into a 5 mile stretch that took them away from the goal with no quick escape route to get back on track. Sure, if you missed an intersection, you could take the next one without chancing a crash with a late turn, but not always. Gamers that were hoping to use the town to create races were given that option, but customization was slim, and the hope was that the roads could be blocked off in some way. This wasn't a deal breaker, but many fans are hoping with the next installment that "mindless" will involve a little less map-reading.
Ranking the games is difficult, as everyone has their favorites, but as long as you love speed, destruction, and pure arcade racing, there is a game for you. This is my own personal list:
1. Burnout: Revenge
2. Burnout 3
3. Burnout Paradise
4. Burnout 2
5. Burnout Dominator
I was a huge fan of Revenge, but I feel that I have to justify why I put it ahead of 3. I simply had more fun with the title, and the crash mode was immensely better than the version found in 3. If I was going to pick a Burnout game to waste an hour on, that would be it. Crash mode and the removal of Styker alone made it better for me, and despite the weapons at your disposal, there was still challenge in that title even if it isn't as difficult as 3. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
February 21, 2010
But do you have the complete set?
Lots of posting in such little time, and yes, the quality is varying, but the thoughts need to come out when they are on the brain. As you know, I occasionally respond to announcements, review a game here and there, explain my dreams for a perfect game and in some cases a perfect world, or just plain ramble about possibilities. The Game Bay isn't dedicated to just bashing things or reviewing games, it's a window to the gaming world in a way that most people don't think about on a daily basis, even if they are one of the "hardcore."
Gaming is evolving at this point, and no one is really sure how it will turn out. It's really hard to see a point in the immediate future where gaming will become a completely non-physical medium, it's tough to predict the successes of the Wii or Natal when things like the Power Pad and the EyeToy have failed to make impacts in the past, and when people hail Demon's Souls as being wonderfully impossible, it's hard to imagine a time where the challenge will be gone forever. There are so many things going on, and the explanations could fill a novel. That's something I intend to try someday, I should mention. Speaking of which, I think my next post should be about the video game crash that could happen sooner than anyone expects.
For now, I'm going to stick with the state of the DLC, as a recent announcement has Squeenix backing off of that idea for Final Fantasy XIII. Nevermind the fact that I have no real intention of making this game anything more than a rental, but I have to give Squeenix props on this one. I understand that there are many, many people who would completely go for this kind of thing, and to be honest, I have my ideas as to how this could work to Squeenix's favor later on down the line, but I'll get to that later. The fact is that many of new RPG's are starting to buy into DLC's as being a completely viable way to maintain a game's popularity and expand the original scope. That's completely fair.
Fallout 3 has it. Borderlands has it. Dragon Age has it. Any Dungeons & Dragons that could slap an expansion on did so. Diablo 3 will most likely have it. MMORPG's are built off of it. Hell, even the old Ultima games would let you import characters to the next game. Historically, expanding an RPG has been a profitable and smart thing to do, especially when you consider the passion that role players put into their games. It doesn't necessarily have to be a DLC, it just has to expand the game somehow. One can't really fault the developers for putting what is essentially an expansion on the digital market, because it's really nothing new and it's proven to work well.
When it comes to an RPG with a strong narrative, however, DLC's don't always seem like a good idea. I don't mean that every game with a great story needs to forget the idea of incorporating a DLC, because that's not true. A good comparison would be in the movies. Stargate had a great concept that told one story that could have been part of many, so that's where it eventually went. Yet, imagine if Studio Ghibli decided to franchise out the Princess Mononoke concepts, and you can see where things might have gone downhill.
Final Fantasy is a bit like that for every game of the series. I can appreciate ideas such as Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Dissidia, but the credibility of the individual stories were somewhat sullied when things like Compilation of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy X-2 showed up. It's not that these games were terrible (though, that's a separate discussion on its own), it's just that they expanded on what was already an interesting, self-contained storyline. Final Fantasy games tell a story, and by the end of the game, that story is over with and closed off. There are always questions, but I never absolutely HAD to know if Gogo was Daryl all along. That's something that I'm supposed to take with me just like when I first wondered about Deckard's identity in Blade Runner.
This entire conversation is ultimately voided out by the fact that the Final Fantasy XIII world is already planned for expansion with Versus and the like, but the real reason I praise the lack of DLC is a different kind of what is hopefully creative integrity when it comes to the gaming medium. Games put down a pretty good investment on their games, and while I did bring up the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII as being expansions of the universe, they are also individual games. Never in the Final Fantasy series has their been a "tack on" download or an "expansion" download, because every single game ships out to be as complete as possible. Yes, there will be patches in Final Fantasy XIII because that's the state of the gaming world, but when you pick up a Final Fantasy disc or cart, you are always assured that you are getting the complete game. While I'm not exactly happy with the direction of the company, if I decided that I was going to get XIII I know that I would be getting the complete experience regardless of when I buy it.
I'm not ticked off at Bethesda for slapping on expansions to Fallout, because they are more than welcome to make that choice, people will buy it, and it adds more to an already good game. That's never a bad idea. Yet, I know that when I pick up a Bethesda game, there's a very good chance that I'm not going to get the complete experience. There's always going to be something more to get alongside what should have been a complete product. It's a double edged sword....you have the option of getting more of an already good thing, but the value of your disc as being a complete work is now gone.
So in response to Squeenix saying that they will lay off the DLC, I applaud them for it. You can be sure that your copy of Final Fantasy XIII is going to be a complete creative work that isn't open for modification. Even if I don't necessarily see myself liking the game, they are treating their game like a piece of artwork, and there's a certain amount of integrity maintained by accepting that their game is finished when it reaches store shelves and not open for modification. If I spent $20 adding summons and characters to Final Fantasy XII, then I would look back thinking that my disc wasn't finished and carries less creative value as a game.
Now I mentioned that there is a way to go around this, and this is mainly because I'm a little concerned about the economics of Squeenix. They are investing way too much money into their projects, and people are having higher and higher expectations for them with every sequel. This was fine back when people either loved or hated Final Fantasy VIII and IX, but they didn't invest nearly the amount of money as they did when they made X, XII, and XIII. I can see why they are making more "compilations" of each major sequel. One day, the money spent on the game is going to be too much, the expectations will be too much, and a Final Fantasy game might just fail in a very bad way. If the risk involved was high enough, this can spell doom for the franchise as it has with many other franchises before. Even Duke Nukem wasn't the blockbuster Final Fantasy was, but they threw so much money into the game, didn't have a good plan, and set the bar as high as the fan's were telling them to do. In the end, it was a bad idea.
Now Squeenix is intelligent enough to see something like this coming, and we're thankfully in a time where many of the most expensive games ever produced are within two years of the present day due to the high economic ceiling the games industry still hasn't reached. No one can possibly say that there's an end in sight to the expansion of the video game medium, because the end result is so freakishly cyberpunk that we can only begin to dream up the techniques necessary to make them possible. Yet, there's a lot of room to fail when the stakes are so high. In Squeenix's case, individual Final Fantasy games should be the product of good talent, storytelling, and innovation, but not the goal. The engine that Squeenix has made is invaluable to them at this point.
I've always bashed Square's romp into movie-making, and I continued to bash Advent Children because it was a bad movie with the occasionally awesome eye candy moment. Yet, we're seeing these graphics in games now. The next Final Fantasy movie doesn't actually need to be on the big screen, but rather a downloadable script and voice patch for a movie made with the XIII engine. This is one way they can re-use resources to maximize their profits.
The second way is to cater to the western crowd, something that Squeenix has tried to do in some ways but doesn't quite know how to master. There will always be a market for a good JRPG over here in North America, but there are millions of other people that cannot stand Final Fantasy because of what it is. Having the engine and the talent involved, they could create a side project that would make them some serious cash. DLC's involve adding onto a pre-existing game, but a module project would not. The funny part is that WRPG's do not demand nearly as much devotion to the end-product as JRPG's do, because JRPG's are all about a specific, elaborate narrative that usually demands as much presentation as possible. Having all those resources at their disposal, there's no reason to think that Squeenix can't try their shot at the D&D route be creating a minimal, difficult WRPG experience that is not intended to be a complete work and then expand that through the creative use of modules much like Neverwinter Nights did.
I've had this idea for a while, but all the signs are there for the company to actually do this within the next 5 years. Final Fantasy X got a sequel by reusing the engine of the original game, then Final Fantasy VII expanded into a series of games that were meant to make money off of the IP popularity rather than the quality of the games. Final Fantasy XI was an easy way to make money through the MMO structure, and it had its own expansion packs. Final Fantasy XII re-imagined a pre-existing Final Fantasy universe, and XIII already had a triad of games planned for its own. With the new MMO coming out in Final Fantasy XIV and a the cost of the main series, it's not hard to envision a create-a-Final Fantasy turning up within the decade, especially when you consider that Bethesda is really starting to show some genre dominance. And what's their game plan? Reuse an existing engine, give a great core game, and then expand them with modules. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
Gaming is evolving at this point, and no one is really sure how it will turn out. It's really hard to see a point in the immediate future where gaming will become a completely non-physical medium, it's tough to predict the successes of the Wii or Natal when things like the Power Pad and the EyeToy have failed to make impacts in the past, and when people hail Demon's Souls as being wonderfully impossible, it's hard to imagine a time where the challenge will be gone forever. There are so many things going on, and the explanations could fill a novel. That's something I intend to try someday, I should mention. Speaking of which, I think my next post should be about the video game crash that could happen sooner than anyone expects.
For now, I'm going to stick with the state of the DLC, as a recent announcement has Squeenix backing off of that idea for Final Fantasy XIII. Nevermind the fact that I have no real intention of making this game anything more than a rental, but I have to give Squeenix props on this one. I understand that there are many, many people who would completely go for this kind of thing, and to be honest, I have my ideas as to how this could work to Squeenix's favor later on down the line, but I'll get to that later. The fact is that many of new RPG's are starting to buy into DLC's as being a completely viable way to maintain a game's popularity and expand the original scope. That's completely fair.
Fallout 3 has it. Borderlands has it. Dragon Age has it. Any Dungeons & Dragons that could slap an expansion on did so. Diablo 3 will most likely have it. MMORPG's are built off of it. Hell, even the old Ultima games would let you import characters to the next game. Historically, expanding an RPG has been a profitable and smart thing to do, especially when you consider the passion that role players put into their games. It doesn't necessarily have to be a DLC, it just has to expand the game somehow. One can't really fault the developers for putting what is essentially an expansion on the digital market, because it's really nothing new and it's proven to work well.
When it comes to an RPG with a strong narrative, however, DLC's don't always seem like a good idea. I don't mean that every game with a great story needs to forget the idea of incorporating a DLC, because that's not true. A good comparison would be in the movies. Stargate had a great concept that told one story that could have been part of many, so that's where it eventually went. Yet, imagine if Studio Ghibli decided to franchise out the Princess Mononoke concepts, and you can see where things might have gone downhill.
Final Fantasy is a bit like that for every game of the series. I can appreciate ideas such as Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Dissidia, but the credibility of the individual stories were somewhat sullied when things like Compilation of Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy X-2 showed up. It's not that these games were terrible (though, that's a separate discussion on its own), it's just that they expanded on what was already an interesting, self-contained storyline. Final Fantasy games tell a story, and by the end of the game, that story is over with and closed off. There are always questions, but I never absolutely HAD to know if Gogo was Daryl all along. That's something that I'm supposed to take with me just like when I first wondered about Deckard's identity in Blade Runner.
This entire conversation is ultimately voided out by the fact that the Final Fantasy XIII world is already planned for expansion with Versus and the like, but the real reason I praise the lack of DLC is a different kind of what is hopefully creative integrity when it comes to the gaming medium. Games put down a pretty good investment on their games, and while I did bring up the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII as being expansions of the universe, they are also individual games. Never in the Final Fantasy series has their been a "tack on" download or an "expansion" download, because every single game ships out to be as complete as possible. Yes, there will be patches in Final Fantasy XIII because that's the state of the gaming world, but when you pick up a Final Fantasy disc or cart, you are always assured that you are getting the complete game. While I'm not exactly happy with the direction of the company, if I decided that I was going to get XIII I know that I would be getting the complete experience regardless of when I buy it.
I'm not ticked off at Bethesda for slapping on expansions to Fallout, because they are more than welcome to make that choice, people will buy it, and it adds more to an already good game. That's never a bad idea. Yet, I know that when I pick up a Bethesda game, there's a very good chance that I'm not going to get the complete experience. There's always going to be something more to get alongside what should have been a complete product. It's a double edged sword....you have the option of getting more of an already good thing, but the value of your disc as being a complete work is now gone.
So in response to Squeenix saying that they will lay off the DLC, I applaud them for it. You can be sure that your copy of Final Fantasy XIII is going to be a complete creative work that isn't open for modification. Even if I don't necessarily see myself liking the game, they are treating their game like a piece of artwork, and there's a certain amount of integrity maintained by accepting that their game is finished when it reaches store shelves and not open for modification. If I spent $20 adding summons and characters to Final Fantasy XII, then I would look back thinking that my disc wasn't finished and carries less creative value as a game.
Now I mentioned that there is a way to go around this, and this is mainly because I'm a little concerned about the economics of Squeenix. They are investing way too much money into their projects, and people are having higher and higher expectations for them with every sequel. This was fine back when people either loved or hated Final Fantasy VIII and IX, but they didn't invest nearly the amount of money as they did when they made X, XII, and XIII. I can see why they are making more "compilations" of each major sequel. One day, the money spent on the game is going to be too much, the expectations will be too much, and a Final Fantasy game might just fail in a very bad way. If the risk involved was high enough, this can spell doom for the franchise as it has with many other franchises before. Even Duke Nukem wasn't the blockbuster Final Fantasy was, but they threw so much money into the game, didn't have a good plan, and set the bar as high as the fan's were telling them to do. In the end, it was a bad idea.
Now Squeenix is intelligent enough to see something like this coming, and we're thankfully in a time where many of the most expensive games ever produced are within two years of the present day due to the high economic ceiling the games industry still hasn't reached. No one can possibly say that there's an end in sight to the expansion of the video game medium, because the end result is so freakishly cyberpunk that we can only begin to dream up the techniques necessary to make them possible. Yet, there's a lot of room to fail when the stakes are so high. In Squeenix's case, individual Final Fantasy games should be the product of good talent, storytelling, and innovation, but not the goal. The engine that Squeenix has made is invaluable to them at this point.
I've always bashed Square's romp into movie-making, and I continued to bash Advent Children because it was a bad movie with the occasionally awesome eye candy moment. Yet, we're seeing these graphics in games now. The next Final Fantasy movie doesn't actually need to be on the big screen, but rather a downloadable script and voice patch for a movie made with the XIII engine. This is one way they can re-use resources to maximize their profits.
The second way is to cater to the western crowd, something that Squeenix has tried to do in some ways but doesn't quite know how to master. There will always be a market for a good JRPG over here in North America, but there are millions of other people that cannot stand Final Fantasy because of what it is. Having the engine and the talent involved, they could create a side project that would make them some serious cash. DLC's involve adding onto a pre-existing game, but a module project would not. The funny part is that WRPG's do not demand nearly as much devotion to the end-product as JRPG's do, because JRPG's are all about a specific, elaborate narrative that usually demands as much presentation as possible. Having all those resources at their disposal, there's no reason to think that Squeenix can't try their shot at the D&D route be creating a minimal, difficult WRPG experience that is not intended to be a complete work and then expand that through the creative use of modules much like Neverwinter Nights did.
I've had this idea for a while, but all the signs are there for the company to actually do this within the next 5 years. Final Fantasy X got a sequel by reusing the engine of the original game, then Final Fantasy VII expanded into a series of games that were meant to make money off of the IP popularity rather than the quality of the games. Final Fantasy XI was an easy way to make money through the MMO structure, and it had its own expansion packs. Final Fantasy XII re-imagined a pre-existing Final Fantasy universe, and XIII already had a triad of games planned for its own. With the new MMO coming out in Final Fantasy XIV and a the cost of the main series, it's not hard to envision a create-a-Final Fantasy turning up within the decade, especially when you consider that Bethesda is really starting to show some genre dominance. And what's their game plan? Reuse an existing engine, give a great core game, and then expand them with modules. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
February 20, 2010
Bands like it when you yell "Yar" at them.
I gotta admit, I've done my share of pirating when it came to PC games. Being young, the prospect of being able to try out games for free had an obvious allure to it, especially when Doom 3 came out and I was able to unleash the game onto my friends before they even had a chance to get into a store to buy it. Am I proud it it? Not necessarily, and I haven't really done it much since in the "I'm stealing this" sense. I was more likely to nab the game and give it a spin just to see if I liked it, especially when a game whose style I was unfamiliar with rolled around.
Neverwinter Nights was a game I bought and did not like, so you could imagine why I was hitting up the tubes to get a copy of the latest games on my computer. One example would be the time that I gave the 06 series of NBA and MLB offerings a download only to find that I completely hated the games. Could I have returned them? Could I have resold them? No, I couldn't, and demos for the games may be around somewhere but they weren't as easy to find as a true pirated copy. What did I do? I promptly deleted them and never touched them again, comforted with the knowledge that I didn't waste $100 just to find out how they weren't up to my standards.
When a game comes around that I genuinely enjoy, I've bought the game. Fallout 3 was easy to pirate, but I was there in the opening line for a basic copy of the game because I appreciated the direction that game was headed. Same with Ghostbusters: The Video Game, even though I am still furious about the DRM that no one knew was included in the game. Basically, the good work of a publisher should be rewarded, and by no means should they have their work stolen from them.
This method is a bit fuzzy when it comes to Crysis, however. I'll be honest to the guys at Crytek when I say that they are completely full of shit when they claim that the ungodly numbers they put up were honestly people who bought the game. Customer's are sometimes stupid, but they aren't ALL stupid. There were a list of requirements on the box, but no one could be certain that the game would run decently at all. People see pictures of a game, and they are thinking that there is a chance that they are going to get that very same game. Most computer gamers were smart enough to know that Crysis, specifically designed to be eye candy, might not be the visual orgasm they were hoping to get. Instead of shelling out the money and finding themselves with a game that would have a limited community by the time their computer was expensively upgraded to the point of running it, they pirated it for a test drive. I'm quite sure that a good percentage of those users deleted the game shortly after because they made the justified decision to take the game for a test drive before making the "I can run this" commitment.
This is a rare case, and in most cases, there's no real excuse for pirating. I'm sort of torn between the Penny Arcade argument which prompted me to write this and the morals of the pirating community. Companies like Infinity Ward, Sony, Blizzard, and Ubisoft have a right to protect themselves from rampant piracy, but what they should never be given the right to do is own the way you use your product. If there's an unlock to be done, most users found that they were happy to use Steam to do so, but to suddenly find that a game is unusable because your ISP went down for repairs or discovering that there is malicious software on your computer that you didn't know you were installing is basically a violation of privacy and trust. In many cases, this is flat out illegal. Usually, when you sign a contract with someone, you tend to fork over the money AFTER you have seen the fine print. The Securom, however, was announced after people bought the games that contained them without prior notice or warning. It's illegal, and a slap in the face. The game is ours.
So when pirates say, "Oh, hey, we're going to pirate Ghostbusters because of Securom", then I'm torn. I loved the game, and I know that I can just remove Securom and move on with my life. I love the creativity behind the game, and it was all worth the money. Yet, I also think that it's important to let the companies know when they are being complete pricks. In this case, there's a good argument for both sides. There's nothing legal or moral behind the pirates, but the idea that you can give the middle finger in a spot where it matters most to a company, it's wallet, is a powerful thing to have on your side. On the other hand, it's illegal and you're effectively supporting a game that you just didn't feel like paying for. Paralyzing a company with a flood of angry calls would have solved the issues immediately, and the intelligent gamers would find a way to rally and produce a class action lawsuit of some kind or at least convince the offending company that they could if they wanted to.
Yet, here we are. The pirates keep pirating, and the companies keep slapping down more DRM to the point where you have no idea what software you're actually installing on your computers. There has got to be a different rally call to the angry gamers out there, but unfortunately, the gamers aren't interested in finding out what that is. It's gotten to the point where it's just stealing, plain and simple. There are certain levels of theft, I admit, because anyone out there pirating a Blaster Master game on any system is not really taking money from anyone (the games aren't in print anymore), not winding up with anything valuable since it isn't a legitimate copy, and can only serve to renew interest in a series that's been dead for years. I'm not even entirely sold that pirating old school games actually drives down the value of those games, because let's face it, only a select few people are going to pay the grand for a mint copy of Chrono Trigger, and just because everybody in the world may actually have the game, I don't see them being dissuaded from competing amongst themselves at that price range for a perfect cartridge. Case in point would be the Family Fitness Stadium Events for the NES, because the game itself is not only free on the internet, but common as a Nintendo cart in the form of World Class Track Meet, and yet still fetches insane amounts of cash because of it's physical value as a recalled title.
Either way, the companies don't necessarily care if you get titles they don't even make anymore half the time. What they do expect is to get something for their work on a title. They are the ones spending the cash to try and entertain you, but by telling them that everything was awesome while not paying for it is only justifying their cause. It just needs to stop. There are other ways of letting them know, and the current way amounts to feeding a troll. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
Neverwinter Nights was a game I bought and did not like, so you could imagine why I was hitting up the tubes to get a copy of the latest games on my computer. One example would be the time that I gave the 06 series of NBA and MLB offerings a download only to find that I completely hated the games. Could I have returned them? Could I have resold them? No, I couldn't, and demos for the games may be around somewhere but they weren't as easy to find as a true pirated copy. What did I do? I promptly deleted them and never touched them again, comforted with the knowledge that I didn't waste $100 just to find out how they weren't up to my standards.
When a game comes around that I genuinely enjoy, I've bought the game. Fallout 3 was easy to pirate, but I was there in the opening line for a basic copy of the game because I appreciated the direction that game was headed. Same with Ghostbusters: The Video Game, even though I am still furious about the DRM that no one knew was included in the game. Basically, the good work of a publisher should be rewarded, and by no means should they have their work stolen from them.
This method is a bit fuzzy when it comes to Crysis, however. I'll be honest to the guys at Crytek when I say that they are completely full of shit when they claim that the ungodly numbers they put up were honestly people who bought the game. Customer's are sometimes stupid, but they aren't ALL stupid. There were a list of requirements on the box, but no one could be certain that the game would run decently at all. People see pictures of a game, and they are thinking that there is a chance that they are going to get that very same game. Most computer gamers were smart enough to know that Crysis, specifically designed to be eye candy, might not be the visual orgasm they were hoping to get. Instead of shelling out the money and finding themselves with a game that would have a limited community by the time their computer was expensively upgraded to the point of running it, they pirated it for a test drive. I'm quite sure that a good percentage of those users deleted the game shortly after because they made the justified decision to take the game for a test drive before making the "I can run this" commitment.
This is a rare case, and in most cases, there's no real excuse for pirating. I'm sort of torn between the Penny Arcade argument which prompted me to write this and the morals of the pirating community. Companies like Infinity Ward, Sony, Blizzard, and Ubisoft have a right to protect themselves from rampant piracy, but what they should never be given the right to do is own the way you use your product. If there's an unlock to be done, most users found that they were happy to use Steam to do so, but to suddenly find that a game is unusable because your ISP went down for repairs or discovering that there is malicious software on your computer that you didn't know you were installing is basically a violation of privacy and trust. In many cases, this is flat out illegal. Usually, when you sign a contract with someone, you tend to fork over the money AFTER you have seen the fine print. The Securom, however, was announced after people bought the games that contained them without prior notice or warning. It's illegal, and a slap in the face. The game is ours.
So when pirates say, "Oh, hey, we're going to pirate Ghostbusters because of Securom", then I'm torn. I loved the game, and I know that I can just remove Securom and move on with my life. I love the creativity behind the game, and it was all worth the money. Yet, I also think that it's important to let the companies know when they are being complete pricks. In this case, there's a good argument for both sides. There's nothing legal or moral behind the pirates, but the idea that you can give the middle finger in a spot where it matters most to a company, it's wallet, is a powerful thing to have on your side. On the other hand, it's illegal and you're effectively supporting a game that you just didn't feel like paying for. Paralyzing a company with a flood of angry calls would have solved the issues immediately, and the intelligent gamers would find a way to rally and produce a class action lawsuit of some kind or at least convince the offending company that they could if they wanted to.
Yet, here we are. The pirates keep pirating, and the companies keep slapping down more DRM to the point where you have no idea what software you're actually installing on your computers. There has got to be a different rally call to the angry gamers out there, but unfortunately, the gamers aren't interested in finding out what that is. It's gotten to the point where it's just stealing, plain and simple. There are certain levels of theft, I admit, because anyone out there pirating a Blaster Master game on any system is not really taking money from anyone (the games aren't in print anymore), not winding up with anything valuable since it isn't a legitimate copy, and can only serve to renew interest in a series that's been dead for years. I'm not even entirely sold that pirating old school games actually drives down the value of those games, because let's face it, only a select few people are going to pay the grand for a mint copy of Chrono Trigger, and just because everybody in the world may actually have the game, I don't see them being dissuaded from competing amongst themselves at that price range for a perfect cartridge. Case in point would be the Family Fitness Stadium Events for the NES, because the game itself is not only free on the internet, but common as a Nintendo cart in the form of World Class Track Meet, and yet still fetches insane amounts of cash because of it's physical value as a recalled title.
Either way, the companies don't necessarily care if you get titles they don't even make anymore half the time. What they do expect is to get something for their work on a title. They are the ones spending the cash to try and entertain you, but by telling them that everything was awesome while not paying for it is only justifying their cause. It just needs to stop. There are other ways of letting them know, and the current way amounts to feeding a troll. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
No, that doesn't come standard.
Last night I had the absolute WORST case of writer's block. Everything was upstairs, but nothing came out coherently. Maybe it was all those painkillers I downed when I watched Palin's war against "the R word" and realized she was still trying to run for office in 2012.
While hazily turning on my PS3 and plugging in my used $9 USB headset that works like a charm, I got to thinking how things used to be. Back in the dark ages we called the 90's when hardware did one thing and one thing only, the expansion of a consoles original capabilities were considered to be a huge deal. Remember when you saw a friend with a TV antenna attached to his Game Gear? Sure, no one ever used that piece of crap, but it was a tremendous step towards the future. For the longest time, people were actually using their CD-based consoles like the Playstation, Sega SC, and Saturn as an integral part of their sound system because they didn't have to fork over the extra cash to buy a CD deck for their rooms.
While hazily turning on my PS3 and plugging in my used $9 USB headset that works like a charm, I got to thinking how things used to be. Back in the dark ages we called the 90's when hardware did one thing and one thing only, the expansion of a consoles original capabilities were considered to be a huge deal. Remember when you saw a friend with a TV antenna attached to his Game Gear? Sure, no one ever used that piece of crap, but it was a tremendous step towards the future. For the longest time, people were actually using their CD-based consoles like the Playstation, Sega SC, and Saturn as an integral part of their sound system because they didn't have to fork over the extra cash to buy a CD deck for their rooms.
Behold, the future!
These days, we come to take for granted the things we can do with a cell phone or our PS3's. Now that there are hardware or software standards out in the open, we have expectations that we never used to have. A Game Gear was never designed to be a TV for obvious reasons, but now we expect YouTube to be accessible to any device with a screen. It's boggling, however, that some companies choose to forget that we're beyond the experimentation phase. Having gone through over 30 years of innovation, trial, and error, there are certain things that should just be accessible out of the box no matter what company you choose to support.
Now, I know that I slammed people for complaining that the iPad doesn't come with a camera, so there's going to be some hypocrisy on the way.
The fact is, we're living in 2010, and consoles just aren't meeting up to the basic standards we should be expecting out of our hardware. It's not that the Big 3 can't afford it, either. Each one of them is making enough money off of their investments these days to justify the extra $10-20 a console it would take to get some of the most basic functionality, and this is part of the reason why Microsoft is doing the happy dance right now.
First of all, a camera. Yes, there's the Playstation Eye, and Natal is on the way, but seriously, webcams have come an incredibly long way since the dawn of Skype. We tend to think of megapixels as a sign of quality, so let's put this into perspective. At Wal-Mart, Target, or Best Buy, you tend to see cameras in plastic cases that are deemed to be value cameras good for anyone just looking to take the occasional snap shot. Those cameras are 5 megapixels. That is over twice the quality in pixels of a single HDTV image, and it costs $30-40 to get. Even cheaper is a .3 megapixel camera, which costs $10 or under and is usually marketed to little kids. Did you know that .3 megapixels is exactly the quality of a still-shot from regular, pre-digital TV?
In other words, to incorporate a camera of decent quality into a gaming system would cost the Big 3 pennies, yet they don't. The Eye costs about $33, and Natal is rumored to cost about $200. While I'm not bashing Natal's potential capabilities, the point is that a camera should have been in the box years ago. The most basic idea of doing video chat on the internet and incorporating that into games is just common sense. Instead, we get those black "no camera" boxes when taking someone out in Burnout. Not only that, it's literally bottlenecking their own system's potential. A virtual dressing room should be one of the easiest things to incorporate into a system, and being able to pop bubbles on the screen with your child should really just be a $5 downloadable game. Instead, they are repackaging the idea of a camera and marking it up 1000% just so they can immediately forget about supporting it or the developers that could actually have done something with this 5 years ago. Seriously, telling your fan-base that your console "only does everything" and half-assedly trying to say that people can replace their computers with it is a joke. A camera, just a cheap $1 one that does basic TV-quality images, should be on every single gaming device known to man.
Next up would be the microphone, and this really goes without saying. It cost be $9 to get a USB headset used, and that's not breaking the bank, but it's completely unnecessary. If my iPod has a microphone, your console should have a microphone, and that's just common sense. Not only that, but these are gaming systems we're talking about here. If somebody truly wants a headset, they will get one because of their personal gaming style, but considering how many people play online games these days, it's a wonder why it's so impossible to slap a mute-toggle on a controller and either put the microphone there or in the box. Once again, we're talking about pennies here. A Playstation 3 controller is truly a beast, but it also costs $55, and you're telling me that you can't get a microphone onto it? Please. You could even overcharge by $4 and make them cost $60, and having the microphone incorporated into the design would actually sell a few extra controllers that weren't going to sell anyway because...well, they cost $55. Seriously.
Data storage is also a premium lately, and the finger is always pointed at Nintendo for failing in this regard. Yet, I'm not so quick to say that every device needs a hard drive, because they really don't. The trouble with this glut of hard drive space is that developers now feel like they need to use that space up, and it's becoming just as much of a problem for gamers as having small flash storage, but I digress. SD cards are an absolute must, and while I appreciate Sony's desire to end piracy, these things have to be functional in some way. Nintendo included an SD slot with their system, and while it's useful for the most basic of media, it works and you can move your downloaded games to and from the SD card if you need to. It's not the most practical way of doing things, and I understand that changes have gone on since I ditched my Wii, but it did work. As media gets bigger, so do the SD cards, and at the very least Nintendo games have the good graces to be small and to have patches to major games be even smaller.
For the other 2 guys, this is beyond a joke. SD cards are easy to carry around and to dump media on to, and flash readers are basically given away free with any PC purchase. Why could we not have kept the SD card? I understand that the USB flash sticks are just as effective and can be larger since physical size isn't the biggest deal, but the SD card's compact nature and the ability to fit into smaller devices makes it perfect for integrating into an entertainment setup. Once again pointing the finger at Sony, I wonder what lack of brilliance it was to decide that the Memory Stick Duo was going to be the trademark of the PSP, yet completely void in the post-slot PS3's. I also have to remind readers that I understand the reasoning behind removing the SD slot and I also understand that nobody really buys a PS3 expecting one, but it's 2010, SD slots are cheap, and why Microsoft and Sony don't have them is beyond me.
There's so many more options I would like to see included in hardware from the get go, and even some software ones, but I'm not entirely convinced that they are as "duh" as these three basic functions are. Sure, it would be nice to have a record button in every console so that no one has to go out and buy a capture device just to get their gameplay on file. It would also be be nice if consoles returned to having headphone jacks be a common thing. Many more options are available for me to list, but none really come across as being necessary.
I've had this conversation before, and for some reason, the livid reaction was that the costs would be passed on to the consumer or that the console makers would be losing money in some way, and I'm just not buying it. Say that 20% of Playstation owners bought an Eye, and that's a hugely generous number. I did the math, and all that Sony would have to do to make up the cost of their $1 camera in the console vs. selling the Eye at $33 would be to sell a couple of million mini-games for $5 over the PSN. That sounds like an insane number, but it's not. All it means is that instead of convincing a very tiny group of people to shell out insane amounts of money for some gimmick game that you need the game AND the Eye for, you get about 30% of the people who own PS3's to try one little $5 download since they already have the hardware sitting in the box. Same goes for the 360.
It's simple stuff, really, and the Big 3 don't seem to realize how much money they are flushing down the toilet just for not spending the extra $5 it would take to incorporate all of this technology. Everybody has voice chat. Everybody has access to a webcam, and if what Sony has been bragging about all along is true, then everyone has access to motion recognition (it's half true). People who don't know how to use their computer would easily be able to get on their consoles and do video chat and photo sharing right out of the box since the complexity would pretty much be limited to a couple of button presses. Remember, there are people out there that buy $400-1000 computers for three reasons: e-mail, internet, and pulling photos off their camera. Wouldn't you want to be the company that says "Hey, save a few bucks. Buy us, do all the stuff you were gonna do anyway, and make your kids happy at the same time." Not one company has really mastered this potential ease of use for the computer illiterate.
Finally, let's get back to the Natal thing really quick. I talk up Natal a lot, and that's because I'm excited about what it's going to offer for gamers. What I'm not excited about it the price tag and the knowledge that this is stuff we should have been doing 5 years ago. I mention voice and video chat and the ability to turn a gaming console into a hub of communication, as well as enhancing the way a gamer uses their system of choice.
If every console had a camera, then those bubble popping games wouldn't be a gimmick at all. They would be the cheap, downloadable application we buy for $5 off of the Marketplace, PSN, or Nintendo Store. Pictures would be implemented into every game that could feasibly use it. Yes, for the past 5 years, you could have been using your own face to make your create-a-player in Madden, because it would have been standard. Instead, it was a gimmick that no one wanted to support except a couple of companies who soon ditched the idea because no one used it.
If every console had a microphone built in, then games wouldn't be so reliant on controllers in the first place. Think of all the buttons you used press in Madden, which I will bring up one more time, just to pull off an audible. Think of how many times you wish you could have just said "retreat!" in an RTS battle. Think of how many times you wish that you could be screaming to a player on your Phantasy Star Online game to come heal you because you're about to die. This all could have been fixed years ago to the benefit of game design across the board.
These things could be changing games right now, but instead we're being given the marked up price of novelty that never seems to get the support it needs. It's 2010. We're spending hundreds of dollars on this hardware. We've made it to the point where we are manipulating movies in real time. There are microphones on the Famicom, and that was about 25 years ago. Get a clue, guys.
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February 19, 2010
Status update
Seeing as how I've been pretty slow on updating lately, I figure I should at least give mention to the things that are distracting me from putting any time into the blog.
Heavy Rain Demo - PS3
To say that the game looks amazing is redundant and an understatement. The visuals themselves are what you'd expect, but the real height of this game is the movement. This is the first game that, to my knowledge, has completely eliminated that annoying jitter in between movements. Seeing a character react to what's happening around him or her is just something you have to see to believe. You can forget this is a game while watching it, and it's due the terrific animation and visual techniques - not the graphics themselves.
Bayonetta - PS3
Haven't touched this since opening week since there's too much to play in my stash. I will probably return to it soon, since beating it is something I should do sooner than later, but mindless killing is something that's currently being taken up by...
Afro Samurai - PS3
As much as I praise Bayonetta, this has much more style to it. I love it, and I can't believe I've ignored it for this long. The presentation is probably the best I've seen in a game for a long time, and that's saying something with all the impressive efforts that have come out lately. Insanely fun and addictive, and very inspired in design.
Night Trap - 3DO/Sega CD
It's a rite of passage I never quite got the hang of until recently. I'm going FAQ-less to purposely get back into the old-school pre-internet mindset of "working" on a game rather than just being handed solutions on a silver-platter. Except for Megan. I keep trapping her for some reason, and I can't figure out why just yet. I might have to resort to Kega Fusion just so I don't have to keep replaying. More on this game later on, as I'm hoping to vlog the experience later on.
White Knight Chronicles - PS3
Got it on a whim as I craved an online game that wasn't Call of Duty or Burnout, but I'm not sure how to feel about it just yet. As per RPG standard, it takes a while to really pick up, but it's the gameplay transition that's really getting to me right now. I know I'll get comfortable with it later, but there was simply too much information thrown at me from the get-go. Adjusting is going to be a little difficult at first, but I'll see how it turns out.
Armored Core for answer - PS3
Also a whim, as I figured it was time to see what all the fuss was about. Thankfully it's not Gundam based, so I think I can deal with the mechs in this game. I hope it turns out the way I'm expecting it to, as this seems like something I could really get into. I'm not sold on the flight mechanics. They feel restrictive, unintuitive, and frustrating to pull off. Once again, this is also a case of too much information at once. My second mission into the game, and became clear that my loadout was just not up to the task, and while there's loads of customizations in the game, it's all very technical with very little assistance to a newbies understanding. I see lots of promise, though, but it'll really come down to how I adapt to the controls. I'll learn the technical side soon enough, but if I can't fly the thing smoothly, then there isn't much of a point. I'm hoping, though, so fingers crossed.
Psychic Detective - 3DO
So very promising, yet such a disappointment. I knew this, though, going in. It's actually funny to play this when Heavy Rain is coming out, because there's so much shared, yet they have nothing in common. The trouble is that everything about this game is vague, which is a pain in the ass when the endgame occurs. You have no idea what you're really doing, even if you pay attention to all of the asides going on . I have so much to rage about, but that's something for another article which I should get to soon about FMV's in general (yes, again).
Myst - CD-I
Don't ask. I just never played it. When I was little, the game ran slow on the PC, was boring, and went overboard on the intellectual part. Not that I was a stupid kid, I just didn't see the fun. So, I'm trying to get into it now.
Persona 3: FES - PS2
Played it, beat it, loved it. Replaying it so I can hopefully do something with the gameplay footage.
Batman: Arkham Asylum - PS3
I've had it for a couple months now, and it needs to be beaten.
Demon's Souls - PS3
Halfway through the game, just can't seem to bring myself back to the table with everything going on. It takes some devotion to succeed, and I just can't give it the time it deserves.
Oh, there's more. These are just the big ones at the very moment. As you can tell, a lot on the plate, but I'm trying to expand my horizons beyond what I usually play, and that means playing 20 games at once. Yikes is about right. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
Heavy Rain Demo - PS3
To say that the game looks amazing is redundant and an understatement. The visuals themselves are what you'd expect, but the real height of this game is the movement. This is the first game that, to my knowledge, has completely eliminated that annoying jitter in between movements. Seeing a character react to what's happening around him or her is just something you have to see to believe. You can forget this is a game while watching it, and it's due the terrific animation and visual techniques - not the graphics themselves.
Bayonetta - PS3
Haven't touched this since opening week since there's too much to play in my stash. I will probably return to it soon, since beating it is something I should do sooner than later, but mindless killing is something that's currently being taken up by...
Afro Samurai - PS3
As much as I praise Bayonetta, this has much more style to it. I love it, and I can't believe I've ignored it for this long. The presentation is probably the best I've seen in a game for a long time, and that's saying something with all the impressive efforts that have come out lately. Insanely fun and addictive, and very inspired in design.
Night Trap - 3DO/Sega CD
It's a rite of passage I never quite got the hang of until recently. I'm going FAQ-less to purposely get back into the old-school pre-internet mindset of "working" on a game rather than just being handed solutions on a silver-platter. Except for Megan. I keep trapping her for some reason, and I can't figure out why just yet. I might have to resort to Kega Fusion just so I don't have to keep replaying. More on this game later on, as I'm hoping to vlog the experience later on.
White Knight Chronicles - PS3
Got it on a whim as I craved an online game that wasn't Call of Duty or Burnout, but I'm not sure how to feel about it just yet. As per RPG standard, it takes a while to really pick up, but it's the gameplay transition that's really getting to me right now. I know I'll get comfortable with it later, but there was simply too much information thrown at me from the get-go. Adjusting is going to be a little difficult at first, but I'll see how it turns out.
Armored Core for answer - PS3
Also a whim, as I figured it was time to see what all the fuss was about. Thankfully it's not Gundam based, so I think I can deal with the mechs in this game. I hope it turns out the way I'm expecting it to, as this seems like something I could really get into. I'm not sold on the flight mechanics. They feel restrictive, unintuitive, and frustrating to pull off. Once again, this is also a case of too much information at once. My second mission into the game, and became clear that my loadout was just not up to the task, and while there's loads of customizations in the game, it's all very technical with very little assistance to a newbies understanding. I see lots of promise, though, but it'll really come down to how I adapt to the controls. I'll learn the technical side soon enough, but if I can't fly the thing smoothly, then there isn't much of a point. I'm hoping, though, so fingers crossed.
Psychic Detective - 3DO
So very promising, yet such a disappointment. I knew this, though, going in. It's actually funny to play this when Heavy Rain is coming out, because there's so much shared, yet they have nothing in common. The trouble is that everything about this game is vague, which is a pain in the ass when the endgame occurs. You have no idea what you're really doing, even if you pay attention to all of the asides going on . I have so much to rage about, but that's something for another article which I should get to soon about FMV's in general (yes, again).
Myst - CD-I
Don't ask. I just never played it. When I was little, the game ran slow on the PC, was boring, and went overboard on the intellectual part. Not that I was a stupid kid, I just didn't see the fun. So, I'm trying to get into it now.
Persona 3: FES - PS2
Played it, beat it, loved it. Replaying it so I can hopefully do something with the gameplay footage.
Batman: Arkham Asylum - PS3
I've had it for a couple months now, and it needs to be beaten.
Demon's Souls - PS3
Halfway through the game, just can't seem to bring myself back to the table with everything going on. It takes some devotion to succeed, and I just can't give it the time it deserves.
Oh, there's more. These are just the big ones at the very moment. As you can tell, a lot on the plate, but I'm trying to expand my horizons beyond what I usually play, and that means playing 20 games at once. Yikes is about right. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit
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