The Game Bay

Breaking serve.

2010-09-07T20:27:00.000-08:00

Oh Sony, you really did ask for it.

I've spread it to as many people as possible once I realized it had happened: the PS3 is hacked. Sure, it's old news, but not by much. Sony's response was characteristically quick, patching PS3's across the board with 3.42 to plug the leak. Normally, I wouldn't mind so much. I have a useless PSP and I haven't complained much since the Half Byte Loader project has allowed me to run what I'd like to run while avoiding ISO dumps of new PSP games. I still have my complaints, but that's only due to the fact that the PSP is generally useless as a piece of hardware.

While I understand that software companies have a legitimate stake in what happens with this exploit, I find it hard to put my backing behind them, and when it comes to Sony, all I can do is laugh. This was deserved. Sony was asking for it. Slap around a fanbase long enough and they will, rightfully, be pissed off. Why should a consumer like myself defend Sony? If you're out there, please answer this for me. You've done everything in your power to make the PS3 just as useless as the PSP. You've done everything in your power to avoid responsibility in stealing features that you promised. You have treated your fan base like they are all pirates. I said this before, and I'll say it again...Sony themselves have asked me to back the pirates.

So naturally, I am laughing at Sony for this one. Sign me up for a used, second-hand PS3 that offers no profit to Sony in any way just so that I may hack it and use it for my own purposes. They begged me to do it, and I will do just that.

As far as the software makers of the world, I would like to turn my attention to EA, Ubisoft, and Activision. If you honestly think that people should feel sorry for you in any way when you decide to bitch about pirates cutting into your profits, then please feel free to learn along with Sony about how not to treat your customers. Maybe when the PS4 gets hacked, we can fight this war again. Together, even, as allies.

Let's just get one rule out of the way before we have to do this again someday:

If you treat us like the enemy, if you act like we're the enemy, if you punish us because your enemy is beating you, and if you gouge us to fight the enemy...then we're clearly the enemy. It might actually be the better side to be on, because at least we know we'll be your top priority, for once.

Speaking of which,

www.ps3-hacks.com

Now, put a dollah in the box!

2010-08-30T19:07:00.000-08:00

This whole $10 mess is starting to get a little out of hand. First EA "pioneers" a system that was technically already in place. Then Ubisoft and THQ spoke up about agreeing that it needs to happen while bashing second-hand economics along the way. Activision openly plots of ways to gouge money out of their customers. Now Sony is thinking of joining the bandwagon, and while they have historically relieved themselves on the fans who buy their gaming products, it may be time for the community to stop relaying reports and start to speak up about it all. Nintendo's probably going to be the last to agree to this for several obvious reasons, but out of every other company out there, Sony may the biggest and last company that could reverse this trend.

I call out Nintendo for a number of reasons, but mainly because they are a shining example of how to treat a fanbase. They certainly have a tainted history, and no company can be considered "perfect", but Nintendo has come the closest to meeting customer expectations and this stance has reflected well in their game sales. Sony put out a mammoth, overpriced machine that was low on fun and high on maintenance. By maintenance, I mean ego. They were the gold digging company that wanted to charge you a high price just for the privilege of having a ride, and sure it looked nice, but Sony wasn't able to perform when it needed to. On top of that, they started asking more and more from you until things just started to go missing as if you never actually owned them to begin with. Let's face it, Sony has already broken up with you, they just won't tell you yet.

Nintendo, by contrast, put out a comparatively cheap product that inspired fun, at least for a little while. Their online service is going to be free for the forseeable future, everything costs less, and they haven't treated their customers like criminals. They also have had a decent track record in giving customers opportunities to open their wallet for a decent reason instead of greed. Sure, the games on the Virtual Console are intangible and sometimes overpriced, but a few companies have had IP's revived do to retro interest, and the costs involved aren't all that much. Would we have received a sequel to Final Fantasy IV without the VC? Debatable, but at least I'm not being charged what amounts to a $10 toll that assumes I'm a pirate or need to pay for the developer wasting their money when developing products.

Which brings us back to the point. What is the purpose of the $10 charge? The companies will tell you, and have told you, that they are doing this to combat the GameStop's of the world that they neither do business with (they do) or care about (they should).

Let's debunk that myth here and now. There is a basic economic principle that's called "supply and demand". The majority of people who have at least made it to high school have heard about it, and even the ones that don't understand this principle by practical application. If you print a million games, but no one wants them, then your demand is low while your supply is high. Instead, you print a lesser amount of games, much like Atlus does, charging only for games that you know will sell and reprinting when necessary. Those games move off the shelves, and maybe not all the way, but at least you know that you're meeting your demand and only spending the necessary amount of money to make that happen.

Now, what the companies are telling you is that used game sales enter into this problem. In a way, they could, but not as much as you would think. I'll side for the companies for one moment. Let's say that a million copies of Fallout: New Vegas were printed. A half a million fly off the shelves during the first week, but 200,000 of those people beat the game within a week, don't like it, or decide that they like the game enough but are more interested in making the switch to PlayStaion Move and need all the trade-in credit they can get. So, even though the expectation was that a million people were buying the game, only 800,000 copies were actually moved. Thus, sales are are culled by GameStop simply existing.

So what if GameStop didn't exist? What if those 200,000 people simply couldn't trade in their games for an obscenely tiny amount? Hell, GameStop is making money off of this without programming one line of code...why not the company who made the damn game? Fair point It's feasible that companies could meet their expected demand, and what's more, maybe those 200,000 people who bought the game second-hand turn into retail buyers, boosting the million mark to 1,200,000. It makes sense...

...until you start to get into what's really going on behind the scenes. Call of Duty: MW2 didn't originally force people into extra charges for their game, nor did they punish the second-hand buyer. In fact, people who had outlived their use of the game were able to trade it back for credit towards something else, providing a market for people who weren't there on day one to get into the MW2 scene. By having that used game market, you effectively bolster your own online community while giving gamers the choice of liking your game or not. If they don't like it, sales across the board will plummet. Look at Bionic Commando. I don't hear Capcom bitching that we need to be charged an extra $10 for the "opportunity" to play that game. The game sucked, and the $9.95 price WITHIN A YEAR OF RELEASE reflected that. Nobody wanted the game. MW2, however, still costs nearly full price. Hell, the original MW demands some big money for an old game. People still talk about playing MW, so a thriving online community is created who have positive word of mouth about it. If MW wasn't so cult-popular, then MW2 would not have had the explosive release than it did. Would you rather have a $60 customer that hates your company and your game and is stuck with a copy of that game? Wouldn't it make sense to have a fan who appreciates your game owning that copy, even if it is used, buying your DLC and hyping up Black Ops? I, for one, take the latter.

Also, take any EA sports franchise. EA truly treats their games like crap. The only way to justify $60 every year is if it is a truly different game each year. I understand that they have the license, and they do insane amounts of research in developing and maintaining their games. However, that's not the point. Imagine what they could do if Madden or FIFA was released every two years with a $25 update in the off years. Suddenly, you see that retail sales are huge. Second hand sales, and values, rise. That $25 update? It's now mandatory for any fan of the game to update their rosters and maintain themselves on the newest updates. Sure, a million people sold the game back because they didn't like it, but a million others take their place, you still sold the original copies, and the second-hand buyers will buy the DLC at a rate comparable or even HIGHER than the retail counterparts.

The supply and demand argument also helps when it comes to the quality of games. Sure, Bionic Commando retailed at $60. So did Uncharted 2. Which company spent it's money better? Do you ever hear Nintendo complaining about development costs? Yet, when Final Fantasy XIII came out, we were expected to pay $10 more for a game that literally wasted millions upon millions to end up with a sub-par attempt at a Final Fantasy game. They aren't even a company asking for the $10 "toll", either.

This is a topic I could write a thesis about. The "toll" doesn't work, and only serves to insult the customer and treat the best fans of a game like dirt. Some people just want to save a buck here and there, and if the developer can't be bothered to make their game that worth it, then why should good customers pay more? If Modern Warfare 2 costs $55 used and the game is that damned good, I'll just buy the retail game for $5 more. but I've bought FIFA a year late before. If it wasn't for EA telling me that they are going to punish people like me for discovering that their series is worth buying, then I won't buy FIFA 11 no matter how worth it the game may be. I've been shafted, I've been insulted, and the game's value will rest in EA's hands instead of my own. It's no different from owning a cartridge of Super Mario 3 or Super Tecmo Bowl. Imagine if you were told that, "Oh yeah, the game costs $15, but if you want to play the last level, you gotta call Nintendo and spoon out $10."

Sure, it would make money, but I don't think many people would view those series as having any future value ever again. Sony, you have to put a stop to this. Why are you always the one I'm preaching customer service to? Why are you the last one to listen to the fans? Why are you the first in line to steal things from people? How the hell are you still in business? Save face, and bail out of this NOW. Otherwise, you're just one more formerly valuable brand that we can simply forget about.

No no no, you've got it all wrong.

2010-08-04T22:03:00.019-08:00

http://kotaku.com/5604223/the-game-that-wasnt-there

Click it, read it. I've got nothing but....OK, he's missing the point.

Why would I stand up and criticize someone who wants the exact same thing that I want? I dare to do so because the logic isn't there. There is a here and there argument that isn't made with him.

When you look back to the days of the vintage RPG, you can't help but recognize that there were a select few that stood out above the others. I grew up in the day when Wizardy was getting its start, but I will never be the person to tell you that there was ever a glory day, because there wasn't. First person RPG's were a difficult mess to get into, and WRPG's as a whole suffered from the same shortcomings. Playing Ultimate, no matter what Spoony may have said, was a chore.

I've delved into some pretty good first person dungeons, and I've been impressed when it's done right. I've also been lucky enough to experience when a good RPG shows up to change the game a bit, giving the player more options. This is where I can agree with Joel Haddock. The customization, the personal attachment, the building from absolute scratch, and the consequences of action...they just aren't present anymore, and that is something that we should all pine for. Just as my last article showed, it's quite possible to throw new life into a genre that has become so hung up on graphics and formula by going back to remember how a true classic was made when neither element existed. A good concept is a good concept, and it always pains me to see developers throwing too much into expanding a current staple rather than going back to something that actually worked 10-20 years ago.

Take Dragon Age. There is nothing that this game offers that hasn't been available for, in the experience of some gamers, their entire lives. I didn't buy Dragon Age because it just wasn't innovative enough, despite the fact that critics heralded it as something different. It was nothing but the same thing we've all come to know about WRPG's done in a more fashionable style.

So how does Haddock miss the point? Cause and effect. The WRPG market buried itself when games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest arrived on shelves. WRPG's wouldn't change. There was little innovation, and what the JRPG was telling gamers was that games could be done in a more intuitive fashion. People tend to cling to something they can wrap their heads and hands around. Fallout 3 was a terrific success, but only because it was a genuinely great game, but because everything clunky about Fallout was removed. I agree that there is a certain functionality to turn based RPG's that should never leave the genre, but WRPG's used to be archaic pieces of crap with a terrible learning curve for a newcomer. How can a player get inspired over a screen of pixeled dust while being able to control a party only with intimate knowledge of an entire keyboard's command bindings? The games were never paced well enough to attract gamers, and to be honest, the stories sucked.

Go out and kill the evil wizard, you are told. If that's ALL the game is about, then shouldn't JRPG's be proud of what they are? JRPG's tend to be 40 hour marathons, but at least there's a hint of substance in them. No matter how awesome your lvl 20 ninja is, there is no substituting that feeling of purpose and belonging within a game world. Final Fantasy VI allowed me to customize every single party member to my liking, and with the exception of a select few skills, everything was up for grabs no matter the character I chose. Now, it's not the perfect freedom that a seasoned RPG vet may want. In fact, the linear storyline may turn off some. However, it's the ease of use and engaging world that kept me, and most fans, in the game.

A title like Final Fantasy XIII throws all of that out the window, but it is the clear product of gamers wanting the "so easy I don't even have to play" setting. The truth is, gamers do want the experience of an old, freedom loving WRPG, but we're relearning our desire for it. The question isn't "if", it's when. When the original Final Fantasy came out, even WRPG fans heralded it for pretty much everything it was, despite the bare bones storyline and limited choice of character development. Once the basic formula was in place, Final Fantasy V and VI expanded on what you were able to do with the party while still maintaining the linear story. Later on, the series began to add in side-quests and random events that would make a linear world seem more eventful. It's simply a product of the rapid switch to a more gratifying storyline with an easier system of play. Gamers loved it, and the formula started to expand back to RPG roots no matter what series.

Even Fallout 3 can be used as a shining example of effort being put into this expansion of method. While not perfect and unlimited, the title re-introduced certain aspects of the WRPG without getting too complicated. On top of that, is boasted a FPS engine that would make the regular gamer feel right at home without the threat of being turned away by ungodly menus and button combinations. It played like a simple shooter, but carried quite a bit of RPG depth. When New Vegas comes, I wouldn't be surprised if the formula was expanded on in some way to encompass more choice in the player's quest.

It's simple....we made the move to intuitive...then we made the move to graphics. Many series are at least trying to get back the old charm by expanding a game's scope beyond just a pretty looking story. It'll happen eventually, and I'll admit, it's not happening fast enough...but it's around the corner. You'll get to recruit a mouse one day, Joel. Trust me.

Attn: Rockstar...a decade of failure

2010-08-01T16:32:00.001-08:00

It's high time we call out the sandbox genre for what it is. Don't get me wrong, sandbox games have put out some true gems, and it's history is starting to become lasting rather than some brief fling stumbled upon when developers figured out that rendering an entire city was possible. The genre is here to stay, but unfortunately for the players, it is one without direction or substance.

Just click on any Yahtzee review of a game with sandbox elements, and you get mostly the same complaints each round of bashing. The story has no immediate impact. Shop elements give you everything you need once you've reached a certain point. Story is sprinkled around freedom, and that freedom is so great that the rewards for lashing out within the sandbox don't make a player feel as mighty as they should feel when given that much to do with the world around them. Come on, you can fly attack choppers through a crowded downtown street destroying whatever you want. How did they manage to make this anything less than rewarding?

You can pick any game you want, and the same things are wrong with it. Grand Theft Auto has this problem in any game. Red Dead Redemption has the same problem. It's not even Rockstar that does it, it's everyone.

The trouble is that no one knows how to add weight to a sandboxed world. If you level a city block, you get nothing. If you die, nothing really happens except that you restart from a save point or a hospital. If you fail a mission, you can easily try it again. Once you get enough money in your wallet, you can do pretty much anything. There's no restriction to what you can do, so whipping out a rocket launcher and going to town isn't going to be fun when there's nothing to make you question your moral code. Of course, the whole point is that there is no moral code in these games.

There's one simple way to fix it all, but no developer seems to remember what it was. A while back, I reviewed Star Control II, which was a gimme A+ game that required no talent at all to evaluate. A race against time to save the galaxy from oppressive aliens, Star Control II offered quite a bit of freedom to meet the ultimate goal. In fact, the game had so much basic freedom that you could consider it a sandbox. It has all the qualities of a sandbox game. From the get-go, you could set a course for any star out of the hundreds available. If you met an alien, you didn't even have to talk with them; you could immediately choose to start a fight while skipping the chit-chat. The entire draw of SC2 was that you had SO much freedom, you had to be extremely careful of what you did. Your ship had extreme limitations, and going too far away from Earth could kill you unless you were prepared for everything the galaxy had to offer. You needed to learn your limitations, tread lightly, and spend 90% of your time playing the defensive side of things.

There is another huge difference, however, that ultimately shows off how badly the sandbox games have handled themselves. Star Control II ran on a time-clock. You only had a few years to achieve success, otherwise the enemy would steamroll through the galaxy with impunity. Events in the game were just plain going to happen unless you altered the course of time. It was a simple trick, but it changed the sandbox entirely. You couldn't spend a year of your game time screwing around and choosing when to approach every mission in the game, or the game would leave you behind.

A sandbox could benefit from this simple innovation that time forgot. What would happen if events in Liberty City happened with or without you being there?

The game begins. You go through your tutorial, break out of jail, and now you're a free man. You take your time to meet your associate who has agreed to house you until you get on your feet. He gives you the keys to a beat up car, and then the clock starts. Miles away, someone is making plans to murder your new friend. Just a block down from that, a millionaire is planning on bombing his rival's safehouse. In 2 months, a boat will land, stay for a month, and then leave...and that boat happens to be the only access you'll ever have to a high-class gang that could change the entire course of the game if you chose to join it. A serial killer roams the city, and each month, he kills someone, and who he is ties directly into the main story line in a way you would never know if you ignored him. A shootout will go wrong in month 5, and if you can be there before the cops arrive, you will find a suitcase filled with $5 million that is free for the taking.

Suddenly, the game really changes. Stories become more important, and your choice on which plots to follow can dramatically affect not only the way you play the game, but the way you perceive the story. That's just in a Rockstar game. Imagine if Resident Evil or Alone in the Dark gave you loads more freedom, but also paired up with a time clock.

This is something that could change games for good. Having a hundred different subplots, a hundred different NPC's that can be a part of your experience, several endings depending on your choices and when you made them....it's unreal the type of game that could happen, and it gives much more weight to what a player chooses to do in their playtime. Sure, you could grab a car and run zombies over for an hour. You may even get a tank to play with. Yet, it's much more satisfying to know that everything you do, every action you take, and every friend you make will have a profound influence on the way the story plays out. Your ultimate goal may be to unleash an airborne retro-virus to kill an undead horde, but any game offers this. What they don't offer is a way to uncover the truths or events that happen on your way to do it. If events go on in the background, with or without you, the player would have to pick and choose their approach. Maybe you end up rescuing a competent engineer that can jump start any car, break any security, and easily create the circumstances that beat the game. Yet, in doing so, you forgot to pick up the phone in someone's house that led you to the origin of the virus. Maybe the love of your life (game) dies at a certain point unless you are there to stop it from happening. Maybe a different danger is going on in the background that dwarfs the fight you're in, making you wonder why your ending is always depressing even when you kill the undead. Suddenly, just like in Star Control II, you're exploring and playing it safe, or taking a risk to make an ally that changes everything.

Learn from this, Rockstar. I've never been impressed with the open world, but if you can pull off a narrative that plays to the strengths of the sandbox, then I'm on that bandwagon.

In defense of LeBron

2010-07-10T22:06:00.000-08:00

I've been a fan for LeBron James for a long time. It has very little to do with being a Cavaliers fan. Throughout my entire life, Cleveland has been a big part of my sports upbringing. I grew up loving Mark Price, that incredible Indians lineup in the mid-to-late nineties, and Michigan will always be looked down upon. Yet, I've never been that serious about my Ohio roots. It bothered me when Art Modell uprooted the Browns and left, but we got the team back and it's not as if they ever managed to produce anything outside of Bernie Kozar. The Indians still haven't won a thing for over 50 years. I don't even hate Michigan fans, and it's just a funny joke to me.

When LeBron came to Cleveland, I was excited. It was a great story in the making for fans of basketball and Ohio natives. A hometown kid getting drafted by the Cavaliers, LeBron was a gift to Ohio. He came into the league and immediately became one of the most watchable players in league history, and he seemed to enjoy himself while doing it. Nobody particularly likes the "killer instinct" versions of Jordan and Kobe. As a sports fan, I can get behind a player who truly loves what he is doing on the court or on the field. I always liked Magic better than MJ. Kirby Puckett and Ken Griffey Jr. had those infectious smiles that you could identify with. Those are the players I love to watch, and to be honest, that's why I got behind LeBron to begin with.

He gave Cleveland 7 years of his life and put himself through more hell than 99% of the league's players while still being expected to do more. The very second he left, you could see what appreciation the state had for the likes of him. He is public enemy #1 in Ohio, and the reasons are difficult to justify when you consider what he had already brought to the state. He single-handedly turned the Cavaliers, an absolute joke of a franchise, into an immediate contender. The team value shot up over $100 million, and he did everything by Ohio committee. He brought Shaq in, who never would have came to Cleveland under a different circumstance. He even pushed to keep Z, who was effectively slowing the franchise down no matter how much we loved the guy and wanted him to succeed. He claimed the league's best record. He claimed MVP honors.

No, he didn't bring the title home...but when you make all the right decisions only to turn to Mo Williams and realize that not one person on that team outside of Shaq was capable of elevating their game, can you really blame him? Let's be real for a moment. By getting LeBron, you effectively guarantee yourself a title so long as you have players willing to take it. LeBron didn't have anyone like that. Even Shaq was capable of only really doing that in a game or two of the last playoffs. Even if LeBron did quit on his team in the playoffs this year, how much of the blame goes to him for doing so?

That's really where the defense breaks down. If LeBron had finished strong in the postseason, and we still don't know just how hurt he really was, do we still bring the hate to his doorstep? I don't think we do as much. We really don't know if he did quit, either, so we can't hate him for just that. It's also unfair to say that he needed to be loyal to Cleveland. After 7 years, he clearly did not need to be loyal to them any more than he already proved himself to be. When Bret Favre left Green Bay, Green Bay told him to hit the road because they were not going to play his game. What Bret Favre wanted to do was hold a franchise at gunpoint while he took his sweet time in deciding. The only person to blame for the Cavaliers being held at gunpoint is the very same owner slamming LeBron in the media right now.

Dan Gilbert basically bent himself over and tossed LeBron the lube this offseason. Gilbert deserved what he got, and anyone in Cleveland knew it. Cleveland didn't go sign a free agent, didn't get creative, and didn't make the effort for LeBron anyway. If LeBron was the last key piece to fall in the market, then what was Cleveland doing the entire time? You really expect LeBron to be enticed by another postseason of Mo Williams? You really think Shaq is going to be better next year? Gilbert caused the Cavs to be held hostage, not LeBron.

LeBron was a little...ok, a lot...narcissistic when announcing his plans, but the plans itself is nothing to get fussed about. Say you and your three best pals grew up playing Goldeneye and Halo together for the past decade. You always have a blast playing together, and sometimes another opposing household comes over for a 4 on 4 match and you smoke them every time. You also all play in a gaming league, with each friend being on a separate team. The opportunity comes up the next year to enroll all of your friends on the same team, knowing that you'll have an incredible time doing it while also being encouraged by the potential league domination you could do. Do you say no to that just because some sniveling brat that goes 3-25 each map brings the donuts and Dew to the games wants you to stay? Effectively, that's what Gilbert is in all of this. He's the one crying "YOU DIDN'T SEE ME! YOU'RE HACKING!" while his hands are covered in Cheeto-stains, and the second he doesn't get his way, he cries in a corner.

So, before you go burning your LeBron jersey, just remember...he may no longer be allowed, by default, to be the best player in the history of the game. Provided something massive doesn't happen in the next couple years, there's no way that he gets compared to MJ.

But, it was either that, or become KG. For all the loyalty that guy had to his team, franchise, and fanbase, it took an incredible toll on his mind and body to work through it all and come up with nothing. I don't know a single Minnesotan that hates KG for anything he did. He deserved to jump ship and get his title. No one faults him for it. It only makes sense that it was KG that gave the little piece of advice to LeBron right after his playoff exit.

Loyalty only gets you so far. If you have an opportunity to do what you want to do, go get it.

He did.

We sittin' here talkin' 'bout practice...again.

2010-07-02T01:47:00.000-08:00

I've been out of practice with this blog. I'll be honest, I've had a ton to write about, but can't seem to get back into the rhythm of typing is all out. So this may just be a throwaway article, but who knows, maybe you can help make something of the idea behind it.

Having just checked out a Smash Bros. Melee video via Kotaku and GameTrailers, I immediately wanted to stand up and applaud. For a couple of years, I've often wondered what secrets are still out there in our games that have yet to be discovered. Apparently, in 2008, someone figured out how to play as Master Hand through a glitch at the character select. That's seven years after the game was released, which is astonishing, especially when you consider just how fanatical fans of the game are.

How many more secrets are out there? Sure, Aeris isn't coming back, but that's only because we've intentionally butchered that game in order to find a way and forced Squeenix to make sure that they gave us answers. That's one in a million cases where we can honestly say that something just isn't in the game without the use of outside help like a GameShark. For the rest, gamers are usually left in the dark about what is and isn't there.

To be clear, I'm not talking about glitches, though the Smash Bros. glitch suggests that there is definitely gold in the results. No, I mean actual secrets that we just haven't discovered. If someone found a hidden revelation in the plot of Final Fantasy VI, there would be a HUGE response. What if there was a stage in the original Super Mario Bros. that no one ever found? What if there was a hidden room in Super Metroid, and someone turns up tomorrow and shows the world how to find it? What if someone managed to sneak Mega Man into Super Street Fighter II?

These are all quite specific, and largely implausible, but you see where I'm going with this. All of those examples can be disproved by means of ROM utilities, and the bigger the game, the more you can bet that several people have wasted nights upon nights digging through the sprites, texts, and maps of each game. Trust me, it happens all the time. Some genius took the time to discover an empty room in Final Fantasy VII that was never seen in the game. The problem was that the room couldn't be accessed within the game, and nothing was ever scripted to happen there. It was just a floating room within the code that never got used. People do search for this stuff, and people have ever offered cash rewards for it as well, which is another topic I've previously mentioned.

The unfortunate part is that because of these methods, we sort of already know what isn't in games that we really want. We kind of eliminated that on our own through technology. If we can break into a game, we will. There will be no extra, undiscovered scene from Persona 3 because someone's already dug through the entire audio and text of the game just because.

But what if? What if a game we've loved for years had one last thing it was hiding from the whole world? Wouldn't that be something? I'd love to see it happen, even if the odds are very slim.

I brake for Zelda.

2010-07-02T01:21:00.000-08:00

A while back, I focused on the Legend of Zelda franchise and how it may be better off to go back to the basics. After E3, I digested the videos that Nintendo gave us when revealing Skyward Sword, not quite sure how to approach the topic. Zelda is loved by nearly every one, and that's not a statement I make lightly. Nearly every gamer, even the casual ones, have either put their hands to work for Link for at least five minutes or have watched someone play for at least an hour. I'm almost sure that my parents, who are strictly the non-gaming types, know at least something about the series. That said, it's difficult to say something ballsy about the franchise that made many of us fall in love with games in the first place.

It needs to be said, though; things aren't looking promising.

Even though they may have started the downhill trend, there's nothing flawed about A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, or Ocarina of Time. Nintendo knew that fresh gimmicks were needed to keep Zelda shiny for the gamers, so the introduction of musical instruments, time travel, and parallel worlds weren't considered to be a hindrance. The games were perfection on whatever system they graced, so it never truly bothered us that we had already strayed from the original titles. No one will argue that these gimmicks weren't a good thing, because they never felt like gimmicks in the way we associate them with other games.

Let's list a handful more Zelda titles that came afterwards.

Majora's Mask
Wind Waker
Twilight Princess
Skyward Sword
Minish Cap
Spirit Tracks
Oracle of Seasons/Ages

The common thread is that every title implies that there is a gimmick involved, and it's not so much an implication when the facts are in our gaming collections. Are they bad games? Not by a long shot. You're guaranteed that every game in the series is going to be good, except for those who happened to purchase a CD-I. If anyone wants to send me a CD-I gamepad in an attempt to change my mind, I'll be open to a neutral re-review, but I'm still not quite sure how that's going to change anything.

The problem lies with the reliance on gimmicks as a rule. With each new Zelda, a new mechanic is heralded for gamers to try. Sometimes, Nintendo just wants to try something new and show it off in the perfect way. Other times, they want to show off what their tech can do with a familiar face and a neat premise to mix things up. Unfortunately, this approach is really backwards. No one in Nintendo seems to want to make a great Zelda game that has a good gimmick. They seem to be more occupied with making a good gimmick and then turning it into a Zelda game.

That's a really uneducated thing to say, really, because we all know that statement isn't very accurate, but it certainly feels that way. We're getting great games with good gimmicks, so we really shouldn't have anything to complain about, but when you watch the videos to Skyward Sword, you begin to realize that we lost the magic somewhere. We're getting Zelda games built around the Wiimote and the DS, and we really aren't getting the next legendary Zelda game.

I've already mapped out what needs to be done to get back that feeling, so I won't retread about it here, but I will say this: Skyward Sword looks boring. I'm tired of z-locking in battle. I'm tired of using the stylus and Wiimote. I'm tired of having to deal with the gimmicks. I'm tired of dealing with "themes". Skyward Sword looks good, maybe great, as a regular game...but it feels like it's going to be just another Zelda game with a twist. The twist seems to be just an overall usage of motion controls, which is perfectly fine...but something is missing. It feels like Nintendo wanted to make a Zelda game that showed off their motion controls and not the best Zelda game they could make that just happened to have motion control.

Handing out the hardware.

2010-06-18T22:20:00.000-08:00

E3 is underway and still going strong, but a few days into the expo and we're already coming away with prime information about what the Big 3 intend to do in the next year. This year is a little different from most. It lacks a new console unveil, but it has captured that very feeling of "new". With Microsoft and Sony each taking their official stab into the motion control game, as well as the expectation for Nintendo to update its current offering in some way, its tough to read the news without feeling as if the new generation of consoles is right here and now.

There is a lot of importance to this feeling, as Microsoft and Sony have plans to maintain their systems for another five years. Every company went into the fight years ago with their hardware of choice, but with so much innovation on the horizon, this is a battle of identity more than anything else. We, as consumers, are actually seeing new consoles materialize before our eyes due to the fact that the companies are willing to make such a shift in strategy. When Nintendo introduced their "revolution", they anticipated that we would perceive gaming in a completely different way while changing the industry at its core. There is no arguing that they have succeeded in doing so.

That said, each camp had an agenda that they absolutely had to stick to in order to come out of E3 with a "victory". With each year, there is a growing sense of competition. Much like the NBA Finals going on right now, each team has keys to victory and a game plan that must be followed, and there will be an MVP.

The Big 3 have spoken. Their plans are no longer secret. The names or their projects are final. Let's see how they did.

Microsoft

Project Natal -

Much like the Revolution, we can dispense with the daring and alluring name and start calling it something family-friendly and boring. Kinect is the final name of the 360's add-on, and it's looking a lot sleeker than we've come to expect.

I'll give it this. It is what everyone expected it to be. However, Microsoft actually managed to play this remarkable technology down to the point where I'm wondering why I still bother remaining interested. Voice commands, there. Hands-free, there and effective. Integration with Windows apps, there. Ripping off Wii Sports, there.

What follows is a list of failures. Where's the software? By this time, we all know what Project Natal was supposed to be, and what we're seeing now is a dumbed down version of everything we imagined. It can do a hands-free, voice activated video chat with an MSN friend while tracking your movements to keep the camera centered. That's fine. Where is the virtual wardrobe? Why does Wii Spo-...ahem, Kinect Sports look like it's gesture based at times? Sure you can activate keypads via Minority Report hand motions, but those motions are linked to useless applications. I always said that those hand motions could potentially be a huge part of gaming, but what Microsoft presented at E3 was a retread of already existing concepts at its simplest level, and this is the opposite of what Natal was supposed to achieve.
Sure, it's great that you can have a virtual pet that recognizes you, but Microsoft absolutely needed to show that their tech was serious business. There were hundreds of advanced applications, such as the previously mentioned virtual wardrobe, that absolutely could have been shown off. That, and I still didn't get to see a game that would show off my batting stance or anything close to it. Look no further than the Kinect Star Wars trailer to see why Microsoft flushed their golden opportunity down the toilet.
As a final note, I would just like to throw it out there how terrible a business practice this is. If you're going to "change the game", then you need to make waves. When the PS3 and Wii came out, we railed on their inability to implement their game plan for the next 3 years. The PS3 was too complex and too expensive at first, but a few years later, and we finally ended up receiving games that were representative of what we expected. The Wii came out with rudimentary motion controls, but it's low price and accessibility carried it in a huge way. Yet, it still took a few years for us to see the fruits of their efforts through Wii Motion Plus, and by that time, the Wii wasn't taken so seriously with everyone capable of putting out the very same tech with similar quality, and the graphics haven't improved much either.
For Microsoft, this was the perfect opportunity to separate themselves from the pack. They had Natal in their deck for about a year, which was plenty of time to cook up some worthy apps for it. What you don't do in this situation is hope that the public will wait for the software to catch up. It DOES NOT take millions of dollars to create some magical programs for users. Microsoft needed to put together a small package of products that would make us truly turn our heads and go "wow". They had the money. They had the time. They certainly had the potential sitting on their lap, and it was not expensive to create. Now, we look at a console that's sitting much like the competition did at their own launches. Completely undeveloped and begging for us to be patient.

Sony

PlayStation Move -
This is why I have a hard time listening to outlets like IGN. The PlayStation Move had a very specific way of performing its function, and no one really had a concrete idea as to how the PlayStation Eye was going to help combat against Natal. Basically, it nothing more than a different way of doing what the Wii already does. Where Natal had nearly unlimited potential, the Move only seemed to have tangible controllers going for it. It may sound like the status quo, but gamers aren't quite ready to ditch the controllers completely. So, looking at a peripheral that seemed ripped off and nothing more, Sony needed to convince us that this setup would be different and better than the other two companies.
Once again, Sony proved how little identity is involved in their decision making. I mentioned before that Sony has no idea what it's doing, and this year's E3 only proved that. While IGN was dirtying their pants over the Move, I looked at the videos and was anything but impressed. As a matter of fact, any hope I had for the peripheral was quickly flushed. I haven't delved too deep into finding out what their plans are, but Sony seemed more inclined to tell us what we could do with the Move than what was possible, and much like Microsoft, they didn't bring any software that would make us think too hard about the evolution. It was not neat to see a robot whip out Wolverine claws. The Wii can do that if you were to plug a webcam into it, I'm sure. This was a big chance to do what Microsoft wouldn't do, and instead, they only proved that they were capable of stealing other people's concepts and doing things just differently enough to put up and argument that they weren't a carbon copy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that there's more potential in this device than Sony is letting on, but I'm not sure if they have a clue as to what that may be. I can think of a hundred applications for the Move that would help their cause, but they seemed to be too interested in copying Nintendo to notice.

Nintendo

Why you should even care anymore -
Nintendo was in a difficult position. They had a gimmicky system that has worked well for them, but interest in their console is waning and the competition is out to get them on their home court. The Wii changed everything, and E3 proved that, but they desperately needed to get people to care about their system in some way that would divert attention away from Sony and Microsoft. They needed to get serious about their games and give the people what they wanted, and they needed to figure out how they would compete with new hardware. There was a rumor going around that the "Wii HD" would be announced in some way, but nothing has come of that
Now, we all remember the awkward presentations from the past few years. The Wii's naming was an instant buzzkill, the Wii Music thing was...yikes, and Cammie Dunaway should never be allowed on a stage again. Somewhere...somehow...Nintendo learned, and gave the biggest middle finger to the competition that I could have imagined. They dodged the hardware battle entirely, and look spectacular for doing so. I don't know if they planned on it, but with Microsoft and Sony underperforming, Nintendo popped up and showed its hand of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Kid Icarus, Pilotwings, Star Fox, Mario Kart, and Metroid. I know I'm missing some titles because there were just too many, but Nintendo threw nearly every IP that wasn't Mario into the E3 arena. Even after all of that, they still had the 3DS to show off.
In what was a ballsy backhand to Sony, Nintendo decided to flaunt its new 3D handheld, which we already know doesn't require glasses to enjoy. With the promise of 3D movies being watchable on this hardware as well as some inspired ports, the 3DS is looking more attractive by the day. Even if the handheld costs nearly $300 to purchase (it shouldn't), it would still be worth the time for most consumers. The DS is still immensely popular, and by giving the raw power boost to that rather than the Wii, Nintendo scored big. If everyone is going to copy the Wii, why bother giving it an upgrade until next year? The 3DS has many possibilities, and already its launch has one of the most potent and vast lineups of any console in history. You can't help but be impressed by the amount of software that's going to support it. If there's one complaint that I have, its that there has been little mention of turning this handheld into something a little more useful than its predecessor. It's even hard to complain about that, because with the promise of 3D movies, the inclusion of a 3D camera and SD card for personal use, and the hints Nintendo is giving that they have ideas on what they would include in the 3DS's store, it seems as if they are putting themselves into a position to include PDA and iPhone-type features without the need for a service provider.

In my mind, Nintendo "won" E3 hands down. Sony and Microsoft were bringing new, exciting tech to the table, but neither one of them made it seem like they were serious about what they were planning on doing. I understand that Natal should eventually grow into something useful and game-changing, but now I have to say "should" instead of "will". They literally went out of their way during E3 to make sure I doubted them. Same with Sony. If it looks like a ripoff gimmick, sounds like a ripoff gimmick, and the company offering it can't prove that it's not a ripoff gimmick with any software that could be seen as having potential, then what are consumers left to assume? Nintendo brought out the big guns from their software side of the market and rolled out a handheld that immediately had a focus, purpose, and cool factor. I can't believe I'm saying this, but after years of being the laughing stock of E3, Nintendo impressed me more than anyone else.

There's still a way to go for 2010's E3, so I'm sure I'll have more to come, but the Big 3 have had their say and I've had mine.

All wings report in.

2010-05-20T16:01:00.000-08:00

It';s been just over a decade. What happened? Where did the genre go?

Whether it was Christopher Blair or a pilot in the Rebel Alliance, the 90's always had some place for you to go in order to get your space-flight fix. It was a great concept when done right. I was never a Wing Commander fan because I never played the games. I was of the X-Wing camp. The last game I played in that series was X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, but nothing worthwhile has come up since. I think the timing is now perfect for a return.

I feel a rant coming on, so let me organize myself by starting at the beginning. Star Raiders was really the first of the genre, and the Atari release had the wow-factor going for it in being the first of its kind. Largely forgotten by the majority of gamers, it would be forgotten for almost fifteen years. In its stead, computers would show off their capabilities through real-world flight sims and jet-fighter games. If you were buying an Apple II, PC, Amiga, or whatever your box choice was, you were bound to be given a joystick for the purpose of flying a 747 or bush-plane. Don't get me wrong, it was astounding to see at the time. Those were amazing graphics, long before we even had the imagination to dream up the Half-Life engine.

Yet, in 1990, Wing Commander was released, to be followed by X-Wing 4 years later. These games changed everything we expected from our PC games. They were high and above the software available at the time because of the way they used things that were already available. In other words, while Mode 7 was still in its infancy, gamers could plop themselves into deep space in relative 3-D and enjoy themselves thoroughly.

We need these games back. It's been quite a long time since anything worthy of X-Wing's reign has come along, and even the genre itself has changed to be more of a console experience. Star Wars : Shadows of the Empire didn't get the magic down, and Rogue Squadron borrowed more from Rebel Assault than anything else. Even away from space and galaxies far far away, we get games like Crimson Skies for flight-combat. Nothing has stepped up. X-Wing was captivating, Wing Commander had a huge following, and nothing else has really ever touched them.

Do we need the style to return? I think it's time to consider it. Every controller is already packed with the ability to, at the very least, fake a flight-stick. Whether it's motion control or the analog sticks, we don't have to go out and buy the hardware just to enjoy the genre, though it's way more rewarding to get behind the real thing.

The games are well suited for the modern gaming climate, flexible to fit into anyone's schedule. The amount of missions available in these games were addictive enough to sucker a gamer in for hours, and with missions of varying depth, a gamer could choose between 10-30 minute battles depending on their schedule. On top of that, we already have the tools that we wanted available back then on our systems now. We all wanted multiplayer as well as headsets, and there's nothing better to fix the Rambo, score-stacking culture than to force players to cooperate and coordinate with their wingmen. Without a wingman, you're dead from the second you leave the fighter bay, and that's exactly what's needed to bring random players together now.

One thing that could be incredibly innovative is to borrow the idea of medals from the original games. By having teammates vote for your ability in flight, players could have their say in determining whether or not somebody just went Leeroy, leaving your team in the dust for personal glory.So, award medal-credits to fellow players. If a pilot does a damn good job at saving teammates, voting him points will literally leave him decorated as a good teammate for the world to see. Clans are replaced with squadrons, an online/offline game of galactic dominance could be a year-long game of Risk....the possibilities are endless. Sure, these ideas could be used in FPS games, but I think this generation forgot how gripping space combat was.

To Kyle Kulyk

2010-05-13T02:31:00.000-08:00

Read your article, and I would like to announce to the world some very good news.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Now, before you start drooling in rage, let me rationally let you and the rest of the world know exactly what I mean by "good news". Owners of systems don't have to worry about their systems being broken, antiquated pieces of crap a week after release. If something is broken, Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft will fix it, and even better, they will keep adding to the pile of goodies that you can expect with your purchased consoles.

What Mr. Kulyk is trying to say is that because the EULA, which is historically proven to mean very little when it comes to legally protecting anything, would become a one way street. Since you can't remove a feature, you couldn't possibly add one without suffering the same legal backlash. Well....no. That's not what it means at all.

The EULA, TOS, or whatever you want to call it, is generally considered to be a "cover your ass" method of displaying the rules you intend to follow in relation to the law. If Sony were to include a paragraph prohibiting the use of pornographic images as avatars, they could do this. Their servers are a privilege, and for a person to get online flashing junk everywhere is in violation of the standards Sony would like to set for themselves. Legally, Sony may set standards above and beyond what is lawful in a public place, just like private property. If someone sues Sony to allow their junk to be an avatar, they can't cite free speech as a defense, and Sony wins easily.

What those agreements can't do is break an already existing law. You may absolutely state that you have a higher expectation of a consumer than a law will allow, but you absolutely cannot break the law while doing so. Removal of a purchased feature is like an auto-maker saying that they have the right to come and strip the paint off your car. Certain things are illegal. Theft is illegal. Now, the question is whether or not Other OS was an advertised feature, and that argument is one that Sony is probably going to lose. The reason is that Sony made a profit using these unique feature to separate themselves from the XBox 360. If one person purchases a PS3 knowing that the Other OS was a feature, then Sony made money off that.

What bothers me is that the suing seems amateur. I read the dates that someone wants compensation for, March 27th 2010, I think, was the closing date. Slim PS3's that have been on the shelf for months have never had the Other OS feature, and should not be a part of the lawsuit at all. Trying to make the argument that gamers are intelligent about their purchases while not being intelligent about what systems are in the mix doesn't sound like a great place to start building a reputation.

So, Kyle Kulyk, you are wrong. The lawsuits are there to protect you, not take things away from you. The EULA is something that needs to be fought against. It's called precedent. If they take away features now and no one legally stops them, then they COULD, in theory, take away the Blu-Ray player that came with the system by locking it out. If there was a security hole in the Other OS, that's what needed to be fixed. The hole. An EULA can never, ever break an already existing law. Theft is against the law, and Sony is guilty of that. They are absolutely allowed to modify, add, and remove things, but a paid feature being removed is theft. If they took Facebook away, they are allowed to. If they add Twitter, they are allowed to. You're saying that if they can't remove Other OS then they can't add Twitter or update their Facebook functionality, and I'm sorry to say that you're completely mis-informed. Please don't post anything on this topic again. It's all wrong.

Summertime.

2010-05-12T18:14:00.000-08:00

Contrary to what the blog suggests, I do have a summertime life that is quite different from how I live in the winter. Living in Alaska, it's a cycle of polarity. You're either outside soaking in as much as possible, or you're inside hiding from the cold and entertaining yourself with anything electronic. At least that's how is is for the majority of the people I know, because unless snowboarding gets brought up, there's really no reason for a human being to subject themselves to -30 and worse on a daily basis.

So that means I don't play games nearly as much as I used to, and with the exception of firing up a freeware copy of Privateer, there hasn't been much gaming going on here. A $20 used purchase of Farcry 2 was so disappointing that it's a wonder I even bother trying to get back into the swing of things. All that will change later when I pick up 3D Dot Game Heroes, because I have little doubt that there will be entertainment value in that title.

Many articles have sprung up in my mind, but sadly, I have to resort to an opinion piece on the direction EA has decided to go with their Ten Dollar business model. It's been mentioned before in the blog, but never head-on, and my recent decision to blacklist EA products from anything I may buy in the future makes me feel as if I need to justify my decision in length.

The Ten Dollar model that EA rolled out in the past few months is a response to used game sales, or at least that's the way it feels. There are rising costs all across the board when it comes to gaming, but that's not really any gamer's fault, so I'm hesitant to say that EA has any reason whatsoever to be pushing this revenue plan for any other reason. When a game is published, such as the latest Madden title, it's purchased at full price by...we'll go with a million people $60 has been pushed out the door, but a hundred thousand people aren't happy with their purchase or have had their fill, so they send it back to Gamestop and get some store credit for it. Gamestop turns and sells that game back to players for $45 a pop, so $4.5 million is on the table that EA gets no part of. EA wants to make some sort of profit on that turnover, especially when those people will be using servers to play online or benefiting from roster updates. They also understand that there is zero value in their game after a year goes by, and a trip to Gamestop will show you a Madden lineup full of $7 or less titles.

Also, say that you owned Madden 11 and your friend wanted to "share" the copy with you, using her/her own profile to take on other players without sullying your record. In fact, this is quite common with roommates and college students. Money is tight, and there's no reason to have two copies of something that already includes local multiplayer. Well, EA wants each person in those situations to purchase a $10 pass that will allow them to use the online components, too. Basically, it's a one time MMO character fee.

There are benefits to this, but I'm not sure if EA and I are on the same page when I say that. If a person is to pay the extra $10 fee to get into this online "club", then it damn sure better be a club. It would be akin to joining a fantasy baseball team and paying the entry fee to reward the winner and buy the physical goods needed to run it. So if EA is asking me to pay $10 to join this club, then I expect a world of extra content outside of the basics. Everything that has ever been in a Madden game should be available from the very get go. Rosters should be up to date as soon as opening kickoff at no cost to the consumer. Online play should be a function.

Outside of that, the extra costs should involve detailed league creators and maintenance tools and uncharged extra content such as special teams, players, and rosters. The kind of things that you would dump an extra $10 on in the way of bonus DLC should be included in the pass. It would be like getting a VIP pass to an amusement park. You pay a little more, but you get a lot of little extra bonuses that make it worth your time. For a Madden 11 fan, this might make that title worth it and valuable to them until Madden 13 comes out. The pass should also include guest privileges that you can include in the pass, instantly covering your roommates, friends, or fans who would never buy the game. It would help EA, because that would give incentive for newcomers to try out the game with a world of new content that they would receive when they buy into the EA pass.

So it could very well be a benefit. But it won't be.

EA is supposed to be a company of artists, hence the name, Electronic Arts. If you only have so much money to work with, then put the money you have to the best and most artistic uses possible. There is zero justification for a $10 extra charge on top of the full sticker price that never seems to drop year to year for the same old Madden bag of crap. You're paying $70 a year for what 2K Games has proven is only worth $20-30. Suckering more money out of people because you can't think of better ways to flush your Madden budget undermines the development skill you're supposed to have. You're not doing your job. You're not creatin a game, you're creating a self-described black hole for cash.

It doesn't stop at Madden, either. Mass Effect 2 came out with an extra packed into the game only available to people who originally bought the game, or else they would be subjected to spending the extra $10 to acquire said content. Granted, the content wasn't an integral part of the game and could be subject to the "pre-order bonus" that retailers love so much. I'm a firm believer that a game should be complete on release. Even if you're going to throw down on some DLC, I think that it should not be integral to the experience. In EA's case, they are treading that line. The Cerberus Network was on the disk. It should have been part of the product.

So EA now joins Activision and Ubisoft as developers I will not buy from due to bad business decisions. They are trying to change the definition of what a game is into something that I just can't appreciate. It's like knowing a mechanic that will not see you as a well of money and as a genuine customer. These are not those type of businesses. They are the ones that see you as a paycheck and nothing more. Sony is also on this list due to their ineptness in handling their consumer base. They had ample opportunity to build that relationship, and they spat on the customers every chance they got.

There's no crying in baseball!

2010-05-02T03:41:00.000-08:00

You won't find me buying sports games brand new off the shelf every year like most people, but I like to have a game or two in my possession at any given time. It's all about imagination for me. Being able to experience the biggest moments in sports from the comfort of my living room has a lot to do with it, but influencing those moments is what sells it. It's not enough to just slap a league license onto a title and call it good, no matter how realistic that game may be. We're talking about video games, here, where anything is possible. So why are there no women in these games?

It all sounds a bit random at first, because with games like FIFA 10 and MLB: The Show '10 out, I can see why some people may think I'm nuts for complaining. So hear me out.

I picked up a copy of NBA 07 at Wal-Mart for $1. That's right, a dollar. Why? Well, my first thought is that a game with Kobe on the front is clearly a worthless piece of crap. My second thought was that selling an '07 version of any sports game is stupid to have lying on shelves in the first place. It made sense. I picked it up anyway since it was less than a Coke, and it would give me the opportunity to see what the Sony NBA line had to offer. With NBA2K and NBA Live taking the crown each year, I wonder if Sony could even hold a candle.

Much to my surprise, I found out that there was no create-a-player option. The first thing that I do in any game is create a player for fun, just to see what's possible and how easy it is to accomplish. Some games are way too complicated but heavy on detail, and some are way too simple and never respond quite the way you'd like them to. Realism is a completely different story, but I look for that, too. Nothing was to be found in this game, as far as I could tell, that would let me create a player. If there is, I'd love to know, because there's almost no way I'm going to bother playing the game without the option.

Yet, what bothered me the most was that after thinking long and hard about it, I don't remember a game that lets you create a woman to play the sport. I may be wrong here about EVERY game ignoring the gender entirely, but the vast majority don't allow it. That's....stupid.

I feel that I'm completely allowed to nitpick, because I'm not really nitpicking. Sure, no woman has ever played in the MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL, or EPL. If realism is the goal, then yes, shutting women out is realistic. However, making an 8 footer and maxing out all the stats pretty much makes for an impossible player in any league, doesn't it? We're in the world of video games, and while video games are starting to pride themselves in their realism, they seem to forget that that they are still video games. Video games are meant to be fantastical in some ways. Even if MLB: The Show '11 came out and was picture perfect, comparable to a TV broadcast (it isn't out of the question, either)...it would still miss some of the point.

What message is this sending to women who love sports? If you have a 7 year old daughter that is crazy about sports and follows a team religiously, why are we not sending a better message with our games? Even if there will never be a woman that can play the sport as well as the men (and I do not believe this at all), why are we not allowed to put that imagination into our games to allow for something to happen that otherwise wouldn't? I'm not 8 foot, nor do I sink 3-pointers 90% of the time, but I am allowed that fantasy in my video games. Why can't a woman get the same feeling?

The plunge

2010-04-13T02:16:00.000-08:00

To those out there that bought the iPad on first launch, I applaud you. You clearly have a much bigger dedication to your brand than anyone could hope to have, because to a regular consumer, that was a really stupid move to make. The announcement of the easily mocked iPad came as no surprise to the tech community, but even less of a surprise was that their competitors would soon follow suit, and if pushed hard enough, would also release their equivalent product at much cheaper prices.

Let's be honest here; the average iPad contains no more tech than your average netbook, except with the added cost of a touch screen. What avid computer users have known for years is that it doesn't take expensive parts to make a good tablet, and unfortunately, no one else knows this, because the iPad sold thousands upon thousands of units. I'll give Apple credit, because they turned a very quick profit based on an already existing tech (the iPhone) by doing nothing more than making it bigger and slapping their friendly logo on the shell. They didn't even wait a half a year to release the thing. The guys at Apple actually knew that this was one of the few times where excessive buildup was a bad thing, and by releasing it so closely to the announcement shows that Jobs and Co. are not idiots by a long shot. If anything, we should be heralding Jobs as a genius.

This launch was supposed to fail, and it was supposed to fail in the worst way possible. The iPad was a train wreck waiting to happen from day one, and Jobs knew it. It was an old tech that the masses literally had to be forced into wanting (see iPhone again). Microsoft had been pushing for this idea for years. The announcement itself was underwhelming, as the product resembled nothing more than a bigger iPhone or a souped up Kindle. So many features were missing that people began to wonder what the $500 was actually being spent on. When videos became available of the iPad being "gutted", I wondered myself what could possibly justify the price tag being attached to it, and the answer was "nothing". There is nothing in the iPad that is special in any way.

If we had time to simmer on the announcement, we would have quickly found that there were other companies out there willing to give us the tech we were finally ready for but with a different interface. I'm not talking Windows, either. The trouble with Microsoft's push towards a tablet PC was that Windows itself was the problem. XP and Vista were terrible operating systems for a tablet. Windows 7, on the other hand, it well suited to the medium, but the push came years ago and Apple reignited the torch when Microsoft stopped paying attention. In otherwords, six months would have hurt Apple immensely. A quick release would ensure that they got market penetration and pushed idiots into buying their tech first and at a premium.

Now, Google, Acer, Asus, Microsoft, and various other companies you've never heard of have stepped up their efforts to get a tablet on the market as soon as possible. This was predicted. In fact, that was pretty much a given. Apple's tablet announcement would make tablet's feasible for the rest of the industry, and competition would reign.

Why do I complain? Because a good tablet is only worth $300, and no one should be paying more. Tablets are netbooks, plain and simple. I said this years ago, and I'll say it again. Until tablets reach that $300 price point, don't even bother buying them. Wait for the big boys to duke it out, and then come out a winner a year from now when the prices are affordable and you know what's going to work best for your own personal needs. There is no killer-app for the iPad. There's no great need for an iPad. There's nothing you could do with an iPad that you couldn't do with an iPhone or a netbook. You can wait.

Hedgehogs and politics

2010-04-09T15:44:00.000-08:00

Forgive me on the long break, but there's been a sense of hatred towards gaming as a whole this past week. Just coming off of the Ubisoft DRM catastrophy, we were immediately greeted by Sony's middle finger in the form of firmware 3.21. Then I saw the Sonic 4 footage, and I actually quit playing games altogether because I was so...what's the word...pissed off.

For those behind the times, Sony's 3.21 firmware removed the OtherOS functionality, or Linux, from their old "fat" console models. It should have been a huge rage-storm, but instead the gaming community ended up raging at each other for the most part. Sony managed to make good customers turn to hackers, made potential script-kiddies drool at the thought of custom firmware finally within reach, and also made the community turn on itself in brainwash fashion. The vast majority of forums and postings dedicated to the announcement were filled with arguments over who was going to take the blame and whether or not people actually cared.

To set the record straight, you should care. What really hurt the gaming community on this particular issue was the community itself. This, along with the Ubisoft DRM, should have been the rallying point for gamers to turn to publishers and say, "No."

Instead, and even many websites posted this sentiment, the community acknowledged that they were willing to bend over and take it so long as they could still play games and Blu-Rays. Even worse, there were a few websites out there that put the blame for Sony's overreach on Geohot and not Sony themselves. Let's assume, for a moment, that every one of these people bought Ford Mustangs this year. In their own words, they would be very happy if Ford showed up at their house one day and swapped the Mustang engine with a Focus engine just because someone figured out a way to increase the original engine's horsepower. It makes no sense, and it only gives Sony and other companies more rights to steal what they wish.

When the initial shock from that announcement subsided, Sega release game footage for Sonic 4. Dear God. I knew that the game was going to suck, but at this point, it's almost looking as if Sega wants to kill off Sonic for good. Nothing about the game looks fun or inviting, and I wonder why the fan community has managed to do it right every now and then while Sega consistently fails. Some recent mine cart footage looked painful, though I suppose there are questions about the legitimacy of the video. Either way, it's not a good sign.

Then, if the week couldn't get any worse, the expected announcement of Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski's re-election campaign turned up in our local paper. She's not as notorious as Republican nut-jobs like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, but she occasionally comes close. The very first thing she was quoted on in the article was how President Obama was being too partisan in his politics, and I immediately laughed at her and put the paper down. I am not voting on a Senator that doesn't have...well, brains. I need that in a Senator. These are the people hired to craft the laws and policies of our country as well as representing American interests, so I think it's only fair that we get, at the very least, someone with more competence than a first grader.

Too partisan? Are you kidding me? You're telling me that a Republican such as yourself who has made stubborn partisanship a policy can honestly get up on stage and give a speech about how the President is playing to one side? Here's a tip, Lisa: You shouldn't run for re-election. That statement alone pretty much told me everything I need to know about your attention span, and I really don't think our state needs to spend money on that kind of ineptitude. Don't even get me started about how you got the position in the first place.

Speaking of all matters Alaskan, that crazy lady we disowned is making headlines yet again. Sarah Palin has somehow managed to exemplify everything that I've criticized her for in the past with one shot. It turns out that very recently, she went back to her old stomping grounds and managed to get caught up in some high school drama, getting her daughter Willow off the hook for tens of thousands in property damage. Basically, Palin got all the girls that were a part of the "I'm better than you" clique off the hook while all of the guys took the fall. Read it, let it sink in, then meet me at the next paragraph...

Remember that idiot girl in high school that was popular, except no one could figure out why? I mean, she was never capable of opening her mouth without saying something stupid, she never earned anything she had, and the only thing she was good at was being the communal "puts out" girl? OK, so that explains the popular part. Anyway, this was the type of girl that would say, "Sha! Who cares if you have a Mustang? I mean, you actually worked for that? What a waste of time! You're stupid!"

...only to immediately turn to her girlfriends and go, "Ohmigod! My boyfriend got a Mustang from his parents! OH MY GOD that's so cool!

That's Palin in a nutshell. She's the idiot who still thinks she's in high school who believes that everything is wrong unless it comes out of her mouth. Look it up, she does this all the time. Her double standard is laughable, and I really don't think she's ever had a talking point in her career that hasn't been stolen and horribly misinterpreted. Sarah Palin is an attention whore, and I think comedians have pretty much left her alone lately because she does the work for them. What's sad is that she doesn't have a clue. I won't say I feel bad for her, but look at her on a stage. She routinely mocks people she just doesn't like for BEING SMARTER THAN HER. It's hilarious!

"How's that hopey changey stuff workin' out for ya?"

Awesome. Thanks for asking, and thank you for making my political choices MUCH easier to make. I gotta hand it to you, Palin...you're the best thing the Democrats could have ever hoped for.

The great double standard

2010-03-31T04:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I noted Sony's lack of humor on the subject of Linux and April 1st, but it looks like they are turning into the abominable machine when it comes to going through with their plans. I don't normally go to this length on a topic, but this one deserves a little more than one post. After speaking with Sony technical support both on the phone and through e-mail, I got nothing more than a canned message saying that yes, they will be going through with it. From the sounds of it, they are even insulting the intelligence of their costumers by citing their own Terms of Service. Basically, Sony doesn't really care how many people comment, they're going to do what they want.

Why would we argue about a feature no one uses? Well, a lot of people do. Even if 99% of fat PS3 users didn't use the feature, that still leaves thousands of Linux users in the dust. I'm not one of the 1% myself, but I had plans to use that feature in the very near future when I beefed up my PS3's hard drive, so who's to say how many people were going to take advantage of that feature eventually?

It's like owning a copy of Watchmen. Maybe you bought it the second it came out on DVD, and it just didn't feel like something you were willing to devote 3 hours to. So, months later, you decide to pull it out and watch it again with your friends, only to find out that there's a note where your DVD used to be.

"You weren't using it, so I went ahead and removed it." - Warner Bros.

The Playstation 3 was advertised as having many features outside of gaming, something that made the black monolith something a lot different from other consoles. Even when the box was released, a lot of the dreamy expectations that even Sony had for it came true. The thing was decked out with Blu-Ray, SD card readers, HD support, Linux support, Bluetooth, and more USB ports than we would ever need. It came with more than we expected, and we certainly never heard the end of it. Linux support in itself was advertised as the one thing that would make users forget that they ever needed anything else in their entertainment unit. Yellow Dog Linux even sold for about $60, and was Sony supported.

It wasn't until the Slim came out that this feature would be removed, a move meant to put the PlayStation at the magical price point it needed to be in order to push systems out the door and keep profits in the black. Fans didn't necessarily like the removal of Linux, as there didn't seem to be much of a reason to remove it, but there wasn't much to complain about. We really didn't use the feature all that much, and at least we knew that this specific PS3 was not a computer.

With the fatty, we knew exactly what we were buying. A PS3, a Blu-Ray player, and a computer all in one. That was the advertising, it was on the box, it's in the manual, and Sony made money off of the claim. That's why people have a right to be a little crazy about the announcement, but just because we don't care about something or don't use this feature doesn't mean that we shouldn't be more crazy about what they are trying to say with this removal.

You make a funny joke!

2010-03-29T21:51:00.000-08:00

OK, Sony....we haven't had words in a while. It's about time we had one of "those" talks again.

As you see here, Sony has announced that they will be removing the Other OS feature found in pre-slim PS3 systems. To be fair, a large amount of people think that this is an April Fool's joke, as the removal will take place on April 1. So let's take a look at this from two perspectives.

If it's an April Fool's joke, then Sony has somehow managed to figure out what the opposite of "funny" is. It's a terrible joke, and a horrible thing to throw out at your fanbase. You can only do yourself harm by showing the public how willing you are to give them the finger and dance on your mountain of cash. The fact that this news is on the official blog and has been featured on every major gaming website BEFORE April 1 is also not how you set up a joke.

I'm just indulging at this point, because if you know anything about Sony, you would know that IT'S NOT A JOKE. Sony is the one company that goes out of their way to piss off gamers in the current generation. Their idea of good business is to convince you that the PS3's price will not be dropping under any circumstances, then to drop it anyway after you already bought it while replacing backwards compatibility with Facebook integration. Sony lies to customers all the time as if it's the company policy.

It all comes down to the company's trust in the consumer, of which they have none. There is no control over the hardware you buy from them. The PSP, for instance, was a terrific piece of hardware that would have benefited from mobile apps. I've seen people rig a GPS to these things, and the ability for gaming outside of what Sony approves is amazing. If there was any ability to make the PSP useful, Sony went out of their way to kill it off, despite having a great product on their hands. I probably would have bought one years ago if I imagined that it would be as useful as the hardware suggested, but instead I waste my money on a PSP-3000 that is basically a brick to me. It's useless except for the two games I wanted for it. All that hardware ended up being wasted, and I have to sit there and wait for the thing to be hacked again just so I can turn it into a tool worthy of my pocket.

The PS3 has it's Other OS, and given a little bit more control over the hardware, the open-source community would have gone nuts. Want a fully featured computer? Well, that's a two way street. If you're not a serious computer geek that absolutely needs features, you still have a computer on your hands that costs $300, doubles as a Blu-Ray player, has wireless capabilities, and will generally interface with your printers and similar devices. If I were sending a kid to college, then this is a terrific buy for a parent, as it gives their child everything they could possibly need in a gaming system as well as a computer for research and contact. Now, if you actually want to access the good hardware, you're out of luck. Sony has never allowed anyone to access the PS3's most powerful features.

Throw all that out the window, because it's going away. I was actually wanting to install an Other OS on the box the very second I purchased a bigger hard drive for it. There's a lot of practical use I can get out of it, and given that the PS3 has almost the exact same components in every box, the open source community has the ability to tailor make the best possible Linux for the hardware. Sony, in their infinite wisdom, is now telling me and the fans that this is impossible.

The thing I wonder is...can there be a lawsuit involved? The company straight-up lied! In competing with Microsoft and Nintendo, one major thing that Sony could hold over their head was that they offered a practical computing solution for their consumers. People were buying these things in clusters for supercomputing. Now, I don't think that Sony is going to leave those people high and dry, but giving a 3-4 day notice for everybody doing real work with the consoles needed to avoid the internet like the plague while they backed up their data is kind of a douche move. Trust me, it's a plague. If you've ever used a PSP or a PS3, you know that there are certain kinds of walls when it comes to updating the system. If you're plugged into the internet, you can't even play some games without being forced to download a patch. The simple trick is to just unplug the cord and be done with it, but I can only imagine how annoying that sort of thing has to be for people with a slow wireless connection.

Joke or not, I'm actually considering giving my own finger to Sony, not just selling the system, but making a profit off of it. All I'd have to do is avoid updating the system at all and selling it on eBay when the cracking is done, much like the PSP. This is getting beyond stupid. There are some of us that just don't pirate these games and would like the opportunity to use the hardware that we paid for. I don't give a rats ass about annoying people on Facebook every time I switch games. For those who paid the premium to get the first couple of PS3 generations, they should get what they paid for. I understand that Sony can do whatever they want in the XMB because there's nothing forcing them to provide the Other OS option, but this constant downgrading is just plain insulting.

It only underlines the fact that there is no trust when it comes to Sony. They put out a way overpriced, unnecessary system to begin with, then they remove backwards compatibility, then they made the false claim that their $399 price tag would remain for the distant future, then they lie about keeping the Other OS option, and now this. Really, even if they were joking, Sony is pissing all over the people that bought their hardware. I don't care if I'm using the options or not. I bought the hardware, I was promised certain things from it, and this is no longer the system I paid for. You should have just put out a next-gen gaming/Blu-Ray system, but promising "everything" is turning out to be the real joke here.

Shoot me now. I'm about to defend EA.

2010-03-23T06:57:00.000-08:00

EA is no stranger to the wrath of the gaming community.

Wait, I'm sorry, I'm just being told that the community doesn't have the balls to make EA sweat one drop. Scratch that last comment.

There's a world of dislike waiting to be unleashed on EA one of these days, and while it's never going to happen because people won't stop buying the games in order to send a message, the publisher/developer is continuing its experiments to mine their customers for more money in unexpected places. That doesn't mean that gamers have to sleep with their asses to the wall just yet, though, as EA is focusing more on how to expand their digital catalog through DLC and "premium" downloads.

It always bothers me when "premium" gets used to describe anything. Premium is a scary, misleading word that seems to imply that the product attached to it isn't going to be utter crap. Just remember that the Nintendo Seal of Approval gave us Friday the 13th, stale Starbucks coffee is marked up all the time due to the label, and when I think of a premium sandwich, I think McDonalds. It's a contrived term used to justify a mark up in prices or somehow make a product more legitimate while still managing to be piss-poor. Premium means expensive, and that is all.

When EA rolled out its cheap tactic for conning gamers into paying for something they should already own, I rolled my eyes and remembered why I don't buy anything from that company if I can avoid it. The games were crap, I don't like Madden, and any EA Games entry can be purchased on the cheap later on in the year. It used to be that Electronic Arts would try out new things, sign new developers, and break a few molds, but for about a decade they rested on the success of their sports franchises and did little to improve their other IPs. Seriously, after Goldeneye, the company tried its best to run the Bond franchise into the ground, so you know they weren't focused on the customer. That is, until EA's recent push to, gulp, return to innovation. It's slow and you would barely notice, but there are signs that things may change. Unfortunately, this is going to come at a cost to the consumers. If EA wasn't already rolling in dough, they've practically admitted that they are afraid to try anything new because unless a franchise is established they can't make bucketloads.

This is where you come in. EA's Mass Effect 2 tactic already pissed me off, but then they rolled out something else. Now, you will be asked to pay for something that's more than a demo, but not quite a game. I'm not sure if I see this as a bad thing, though.

Here on IGN, the news from EA is that they will pursue a different sales model that focuses on getting full but feature lacking titles such as Battlefield 1943 onto the marketplace. Right after the initial article that made it sound as if they were going to charge for game demos, they made a quick effort to clarify that this was not the case. Basically, EA is officially in the PSN/XBLA/WiiWare market, now.

At least, that's what it sounds like. It's not entirely accurate, and while it's clear that EA has severe ego problems at this point, I'm actually going to defend them on this one.

It's one thing if you are asked to pay $15 for 3 original maps in a DLC. That's...hilariously stupid. I sold back Modern Warfare 2 for that insult, Activision, and I thank you for helping me make that decision. It's quite another, however, to package up working game engines as a complete experience minus all the frills you'd find in a retail game. The obvious example would be Battlefield, but take Fat Princess into account as well. The simple, addictive, and minimalistic game was absolutely worth the $15 price tag. It was a complete experience in itself and provided the absolute minimum needed to get a sprawling community of players onto the PSN. If the company decided that it needed to go retail and package it up with extra single-player campaigns, it wouldn't be worth the price tag.

Think of FPS deathmatch modes, for example. While it's true Halo and Modern Warfare have proven that multiplayer will sell a $60 game, there are some games out there that don't interest us as a complete product. If the Conduit, for instance, allowed a $15 download that was simply an elaborate deathmatch lobby without the single player, even a year after release it would be a rousing success. Some games just don't need a campaign, and if the engine and gameplay is up to spec, the developers shouldn't force themselves to waste time and money just so they can print a full retail game. More development teams could spend time creating small, single purpose games that don't require the $60 price tag, are insanely fun, and will encourage creativity. If development costs are getting so high, it only makes sense that new ideas could be tested out in this way with minimal risk to the developer and the consumer.

In reality, this announcement is just a way of making EA's entry into the online marketplace visible. Many people have already taken this the wrong way, and while I'll be the first one to call out EA as uncreative and greedy, I really don't think that this means they will literally try to charge for demos. That doesn't mean I don't have doubts. They say that this can be a great way to beta-test games, and I'm sorry, but that means that they will be asking people to pay for incomplete titles. Hopefully, EA will use this as an opportunity to listen to the fanbase and create good titles worthy of $60 out of this arrangement while keeping the $15 multiplayer cheap and supported. If that isn't the case, then this is absolutely what it sounds like. Wait and see, but at first glance, it's not as bad as it seems. The time may be right to tone back on bigger-budget games until some good concepts make it to our consoles, first.

Yes, I am your father

2010-03-23T06:07:00.000-08:00

I certainly not one of those people that says, "back in my day...", but this is something way over overdue. I own an HD set. Huge, even, at 52 inches, and I look upon this mammoth sized shiny piece of hugeness, I still bitch and moan that it's not 120hz. I'm that much of a tech geek, and the thing serves not only as a testament to how manly I am, but also how often I have friends playing offline multiplayer games. And at 1080p, the set is finally good enough to serve as a PC monitor, making the terabytes of porn on my computer absolutely worth it.

It is undeniably awesome, but it is too much?

It really isn't a question about quality, so you can't flame me for complaining about that. A few films these days have a different look about them, and the future is clear. More details, more realistic special effects, and a much cleaner appearance made the manufactured HDTV symbol a shiny, must-have label for millions of Americans these past couple of years. Watching 300 in that the best quality is a terrific experience, and the Blu-Ray translation of Blade Runner is arguably the best thank-you note to sci-fi fans ever. On the next couple of years, film-making will undergo a massive format change on numerous levels. 3-D will have been noted as a great idea done years too soon (again), the web community will make its first real stab into the studios, and the digital shift will be all but through.

3-D is a gimmick, another test run for an idea used to for cheap cash as novelty. It's no secret that this is a format that cannot last, no matter how good it looks now, because it's not good enough to stick around and moviegoers are going to see it for what it is. It's not a bad idea, but it's clearly not "done", and the last time the industry gave something this radical a shot was when Jason was only just failing as a cool movie character. The quality in technology has gone up, so 3-D movies as we know it won't die out immediately, but the overall rise in every film will let everyone know how much more 3-D could be giving them. It will die, but only until the cost of the stereoscopic method has been made to cost $15. You think they won't charge you that much? They will. Even by then, a much cheaper method may be conceived that could surpass that or ditch the glasses altogether, and then the 10 year cycle begins again only in the name of ditching the glasses.

Fans are also getting very creative about content available for cheap, or nothing at all, on the web. IGN put out a fake movie trailer for Zelda. Content like Homestar Runner, Red vs. Blue, Zero Punctuation, The Spoony Experiment, the Nostalgia Critic, Mayne Street, and Hulu exist. Magazined have shifted to reputable websites that emulate their purpose, only much more annotated in the name of convenience. It's all for free. and I've already stumbled across a few websites that I've turned to as weekly rituals, just as Lost is to some people. The eventual replacement is getting closer. Bandwidths are only going to get higher, as well as the ability for the average talented person to try their shot.

The most important factor, however, is the film format as a prop. A tangible object, the film format is only a step away from being outed as the elephant in the room. If the quality in film needs to be higher, then there's only one place left to go in order to make the transition [possible. Someone else will complain about it later, but I will first. I'm siding with celluloid in the coming war.

At least, I am going to ask that it be spared. When the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in theatres, I became a little confused about how I felt about the special effects used to render the gigantic creatures that needed to be in Tolkien's epic. At first, I was struck with how it managed to work without intruding on immersion. Those were good effects by our standards, and Peter Jackson should be lauded as a director that managed to bring believably to a world of fake. Which brings me to my second point. Everything in that movie was obviously CG, and there was something wrong going on. No matter how good the creations were, they contrasted the real actors and objects because they weren't tangible. Watching the DVD, I wanted to record it onto a tape at medium quality and watch it again just so I could see the movie as an old classic. Why? To make it blend.

So while technology soars forward, should we really be ditching a tangible format that we consider obsolete? No, because it's not. We've all seen what happens when a better "quality" format takes the place of film. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull proves this, as the film "grunge" that made the real trilogy so great just disappeared. There's something about the grainy image we see on screens that turn ideas into art. Would the upgrade have worked for Independence Day? Of course. Now think about Willow, Star Wars, The Princess Bride, and other classics that we saw even before the idea of going digital was first thought up. These films wouldn't look right and an "upgrade" would only serve to disrupt any immersion the audience might have.

It's not random thought, it's the truth. The prop of actual film is dying out, and it's time to start paying attention to what that medium has to offer before it goes away for good.

Final Fantasy XIII Review

2010-03-17T02:15:00.000-08:00

It's been a long week, but the game is finally beaten. I promised that I would stick with it as long as it took to get to the end, since first impressions can be a tricky thing. One could easily walk away from Chrono Trigger without getting too far into it, because that game looked a bit on the childish side and played out a bit innocently in the first several hours. Sometimes sticking with a game is just something you do, especially when it comes to the Final Fantasy series. This is a franchise that earned its respect with incredible games that have historical significance even right now. Final Fantasy VII practically made the PlayStation a brand, justified the CD medium, began the legitimate talk of gaming belonging next to movies in credibility, and blew the JRPG scene wide open to Americans. That was all one game. People are serious about their numbered Final Fantasy games for a reason, and it's for that reason that I always play them through until the end.

So was it worth it?

Coming off of Final Fantasy XII, it was fairly obvious that Squeenix wanted their flagship series to evolve beyond what we've all come to expect from the brand. That entry streamlined many of the RPG conventions we all recognize today, including character leveling, a reduced need for in-battle menus, and party members that would remain active instead of waiting for your specific orders. Final Fantasy XIII is the direct result of this evolution, and the vast majority of the game is tied to that aspect alone.

XIII begins within the floating, moon-like colony of Cocoon, where humanity lives within the confines of a protective shell meant to shield them from the outside world. Pulse, the planet that Cocoon hovers above, is considered to be an evil place, and this belief is hardly ever questioned by the inhabitants. The reason for this is that the fal'Cie, beings that are seen as deities by humanity, have had a hand in influencing the population for as long as anyone really remembers. Fal'Cie make themselves known and achieve their goals by marking individuals and giving them a "focus" to carry out in the name of their appropriate fal'Cie. If the focus is failed, then the bearer of the mark becomes a wandering fiend. If the marked one succeeds, then they turn into a crystal. It's pretty lose-lose when it comes to getting marked.

When one particular girl/woman (she looks 16), Sarah, gets the mark, it sets in motion a series of events that brings the main characters together. Snow, a rebel who leads a group called NORA against the governing body of Cocoon, is fighting on behalf of Cocoon's inhabitants who are routinely "purged" from it when all things Pulse related turn up. Lighting is Sarah's sister, and gives up her post as a government soldier in order to face the fal'Cie in person in order to get answers. Sazh, the guy who carries a chocobo in his afro, joins Lighting for a similar reason, only it is his son who has been marked. Hope, a young whiny boy, loses his mother early on in the story when the government troops and NORA clash together on a bridge. Vanille.....I wasn't paying attention when she first showed up. She just walked onto the screen and became really annoying, so I pretty much tuned her out for the first half of the game.

All of these characters wind up in front of Anima, a Pulse l'Cie, all looking for some sort of resolution. Soon enough, they are all branded as a Pulse l'Cie. There's a difference between the l'Cie of Cocoon and Pulse, though to be honest, you'll hear the terms being thrown around so much that you may not know that there is one at all. Since all things Pulse must be eliminated, the group finds itself on the run and looking for direction. Of course, since the characters barely know each other, this leads to quite a bit of strife, but that's your intro.

So now that we've got the story out of the way, the technical details should be the easiest thing to get out of the way. After all, it's Final Fantasy, so we can just give an A+ for the music, presentation, and graphics. Right?

Not quite.

Look, a lot of reviewers out there have been glossing over the game as if it truly had the complete package as far as the technical details are concerned. That's simply not true. One concern that, out of fairness, is addressed quite a bit is the overall setting of the game world. At first, it looks amazing, especially on an HDTV. On the PS3, at least, the game looks fantastic, crisp, smooth, and detailed for what seems to be miles off into the distance in some cases. Unfortunately, that drooling ends when you discover that the first panoramic shot of a given area is all that there is to see. Very few areas in the game seem lively and fresh, and the vast majority of the game is completely uninspired. The setting becomes boring fast, as many areas are recycled and offer nothing more than a major set piece to gawk at followed by a lot of filler.

I will admit that there are a few areas that look fantastic. Snowfields have never looked better, horizon shots can be breathtaking (but only in one area of the game), and there are three particular areas during the endgame that caught my eye as being well crafted or well imagined. The character models are done quite well, too, and if you can fight the camera and win, there are some good still shots that compare to something you would see out of Advent Children. There is also little question that the Crystal Tools engine works well, as the in-game scenes are obscenely close in quality to the rendered ones. The menu screens are also a pleasure to look at, with a clean interface and the appropriate, integrated use of "shinies".

That said, a couple of hours into the game and the graphics didn't seem all that impressive. There were far too many things that reminded me of an overpolished PS2 game rather than something a PS3 should be putting out. Some area effects felt out of place. Enemy design is extremely limited in scope, didn't impress me, and looked cheap at times. Some spells look terrific when casted, and others are underwhelming. The game camera does a terrific job lining up shots, but only if you're moving in a relatively straight line. Otherwise, it can be a pain to lasso the viewpoint to point to the things you want to look at, and not only that, it's slow and cumbersome.

Squeenix did, however, do a terrific job on load times. Except in between major areas of the game, there are rarely, if any, load screens or noticeable wait times. Those hoping for a zero transition field-to-battle style will only be disappointed for a few battles, because even though the transition remains, it's so quick that it doesn't make a difference.

I admit, I just heaped a lot of praise amidst the complaints, but I'm not finished yet.

Musically, I wouldn't rate Final Fantasy XIII as complete garbage, but it's close considering what we expect from the series. Every single track in this game is forgettable filler music, and that is not an exaggeration. The music is done well for what it is, but no track stands out. The boss music at its most intense it still below the most ho-hum of the Final Fantasy XII boss tracks. In fact, if you were to package together the most boring tracks from the entirety of the series, they would still sound better than anything Final Fantasy XIII has to offer. Music has always been a hallmark of the series, but this title was a serious miscue. Also, there's none of the Final Fantasy fanfares. You can forget the victory theme. If they are in the game, I didn't find them, and I did quite a few sidequests.

Finally, the voice acting is really hit and miss. While Sazh, Snow, and Fang are perfectly fine, your other three party members are only given a voice to annoy you. You will want to bitch-slap Hope several times throughout the game, and Lightning is barely passable. Vanille is another story. I always joke that the voice for FFX's Yuna sounded like a sniveling whelp that was, in all probability, "enjoying herself" in the recording booth. Vanille is ten times more suspect of this, and on top of that, she never decides on an accent during the entire game. She also sounds completely psychotic.

I've already commented about the battle system fully in a previous post if you're looking for the complete rundown, but to sum it up, it's terrible. Some people will love it because it streamlines the entire battle process, and for those players, it may be a great thing that that attracts the non-RPG gamer. It does this by trivializing everything you've ever done in an RPG before this game. Many reviewers claimed that it broke up the monotony of the grind, but I found that it had the opposite effect, encouraging the player to get bored with pressing X repeatedly or switching between the same routine "paradigms" over and over again. Grinding is never fun, but this game sucks the life out of you when you do it.

Just to make my point clear, I'll just relay the point my friend made while watching me fight a series of endgame battles. I was walking down a street filled with baddies, and it was clear that I had three unavoidable fights on my hands. I walked into the first fight, then got up and went into the kitchen to make myself some food. In battle, you fight with "paradigms", which are preset party configurations that you choose based on what roles the party members are capable of taking. While in the kitchen, I fought an entire battle without even hearing what was going on by simply going through the laughable routine of pressing the same buttons over and over again and switching paradigms after a set amount of time went by. I turned the corner when I thought the battle would be over, walked into the next battle, and did the same thing again. Then again. When I returned, my friend had decided that something was completely wrong with this battle system, since I wasn't exactly fighting against little peons. It's that bad.

Finally, there's the story. For all of those concerns that the game is too linear, then you'll be unhappy to know that no matter what the big boys tell you, all of the concerns are absolutely correct. For the first 20-30 hours of the game, you literally walk a straight and narrow road until you reach a point where the game opens up to you. I use the term "opens up" loosely, because there's nothing for you to explore. What follows is the exact description of what you open up:

You land in a clearing that connects to a path. That path has one sidepath, but otherwise leads to one giant grassy field that you're expected to do half of your sidequests in. You have three paths you may take from there. One VERY short path leads to a small lake with chocobos. The second path is relatively short, linear path that leads you to the site where you complete whatever sidequests are left over after you've cleared everything else. The third path takes you in, you guessed it, a straight line forward until the end of the game. That's it.

Once again, I have to write down a reminder that this is not an exaggeration. The game doesn't open up. There are no sidequests, only monster hunts. The lack of towns didn't bother me. The lack of a game world does. There just isn't one. If someone told you that you would be spending half of your game doing windsprints back and forth across Hyrule Field, you probably wouldn't be interested, but that's exactly what happens in Final Fantasy XIII.

With all of that wasted space in between, you would expect the linear parts to be absolutely epic, worthy of every kind of praise there is. Sadly, the plot is an elaborate, ill written joke. You will hear the lines "I swore that I would....", "I promised that I would...", and "I made a promise...." a million times. You will hear every cliche in the book. The plot itself doesn't make any sense and the characters say things that make even less sense. Some of the things are downright MST3K material waiting to happen.

Tale Lightning, for instance, who after torching dozens of military troopers and monsters with the power of lightning magic, after being branded by a godlike being with a tattoo and superpowers, and after fighting Odin and taming him to fight and cast magic for her....she calls out magic as "mumbo jumbo".

That's just one example, but there are at least a hundred more. What's more, the characters are all forced to run away after the opening sequence, and before anybody knows what exactly is going on, they have all decided that they are going to save the world. Together. Only not together, because they immediately argue and split up, and then they continue to have dialogue that explains how have no idea what options they have in the first place or what their ultimate goal is. When you're spouting off lines about saving the world before you even realize that the world actually needs saving, then you have a serious writing problem on your hands. The ending takes all of these problems with the writing and cliches and manages to break the expectations of mediocrity.

It's actually hard to make a concrete statement about why the story sucks. There's just too many things. This may seem like prattling off....but, the story is the worst in the series, and that's saying something when VIII and X are floating around out there. The ultimate bad guy is the weakest the series has ever had, and actually left me wishing for the days of Judges, Sin, and sorceresses. The cast is arguably the weakest one ever assembled. Motivations for half of the party are very unclear, character development is kept to a minimum, and the exact second each one of them hits their stride they begin to spout nothing but cliches. The "crowning moment of badass" in the game is something I actually laughed out loud about. Every idea in the story seems as if it was literally picked up from a pile of ideas sitting on a desk somewhere and included in the game at random without any rhyme or reason. Also, I looked online to see if I was missing requirements for a second ending, because I simply couldn't believe that the actual ending would be that bad.

Overall, the game hits some high points in its presentation and is specifically meant for those looking for a shiny experience for their HDTV's. There are some amazing pictures to be seen and everything is right about this game when it comes to the overall speed and fluidness of the experience, but it's empty, boring, underwhelming, and not very captivating of a place. The music is the worst in the series by a long shot, the story is as bad, and it's hard to like most of the characters. The battle system introduces a great way of approaching fast paced, real time combat that could be emulated in the future provided that someone takes the time to fix the other 90% of this terrible system. It is the opposite of epic, and by the time the game ends, you will wonder why the game bothered to carry the Final Fantasy name in the first place. Maybe I wouldn't be so harsh if it just had a different name, but there are expectations. Squeenix didn't bother to step up and meet any of them outside of updating the menu system and increasing their screen resolution.

If you're new to the Final Fantasy series, have at it, but realize that this has nothing to do with the games we enjoy. If you're one of those hoping that this game will save the series in any way, sorry, but this will have you reaching for the shovel to bury your nostalgic dreams with. We've gone from three epic games with Kain, Shinra, and Kefka to Tidus' beach paradise, Balamb Garden 90210, and now this. Can we stop putting the series on a pedestal now? It doesn't deserve it anymore.

Final Fantasy XIII - Battle system

2010-03-12T06:55:00.000-09:00

If there's one thing that I can rightly comment on about Final Fantasy XIII, it would be the battle system. A lot of talk has gone into how this system has made battles more fast paced, fun, and at the same time breaking down the tedium of random battles. After playing this game for over a day, I can honestly say that I don't agree with any of it. This is, of course, my opinion, and I have to look at it from the viewpoint of two separate gamers that live inside my head. It's important to think about, I think, because this game really marks a strange bit of RPG evolution that may or may not be good in the future.

The whole idea really seemed to come from the monotony of the grind, and how to make that more accessible to the common gamer. Squeenix was really hoping for newcomers to the series, and you can tell in the way the battles are structured. It really comes across as some mix between Xenogears/Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X-2, and Final Fantasy : Dissidia. Three characters fight in each battle, and because the action is so heavy and lightning fast, the system put in place was one that charged up the ATB to provide more than one action at a time. Instead of throwing one attack into the air, the character would have a queue of attacks to unleash in a string. You only control the main character, so it's not the most complicated thing in the world. It's not even all that different from a regular RPG, because even though you have this series of attacks, you're still just pressing the auto attack button as one single attack command. Nothing really changed much when you break it all down, but it's so fast paced that the illusion of change is there.

In order to fight effectively, you need to use your "paradigms" carefully. These are set roles that a party member can play, and there are six to choose from. The Medic is self-explanatory, the Sentinel is basically a defense heavy tank that soaks up damage and draws fire away from the more fragile members of the party, the Saboteur and Synergist are roles that focus on enemy debuffs and ally buffs, and the Commando and Ravager complete the list as offense heavy roles. When going into a boss batttle, for example, you would set your party as a Sentinel/Medic, Synergist, and Saboteur to make sure that you're in no immediate danger while throwing out all of your status buffs while weakening the enemy at the same time. When all of the pieces are in place, you perform a paradigm hotswap towards the offensive side of the spectrum. Each fight needs a different strategy.

One fight, for example, had me fighting a gunship that all but required me to use a Medic/Sentinel/Commando group with extremely limited offensive output. The reason was that there were about 5 turrents unleashing attacks on me every second, and I needed to make sure that there was a huge amount of defense preventing me from dying. Lightning, my hardest hitting character, needed to take out a couple of guns to take the overwhelming heat off of me by herself. It took time, but as the guns went down I was able to occasionally hotswap a little more firepower for a turn at a time, then immediately switch back to keeping characters alive. There is strategy to it, and each battle remains different, yet completely the same.

I mention Dissidia as a clear influence on this game because of the "stagger" mechanic that's incorporated into every fight. Your Commando role bases itself off the strength stat, and while your character could have excessively too much strength, running in and stabbing people doesn't do the damage you would expect it to. The role isn't useless at all, but unless you're facing enemy cannon fodder, you won't actually do any damage. This is where the chain system comes into play. By stringing together attacks and keeping up the assault, the chain meter goes up in percentage-like fashion. Hit an enemy with a sword, and the chain meter goes up VERY slowly, but also has the effect on solidifying chain-decay. The chain-gauge is always decaying as time passes in between blows, and only a few things will slow that time down. The two most effective ways of doing it is with a stop spell or getting hit by the commando.

Trouble is, a commando will never get that meter to go up in any way. The only way to get that meter to go up is with magical attacks, which significantly increases the amount of chain bonuses you get, but also decays in a hurry. So the tactic you're always using is to mix magical and physical attacks to get the meter leaping forward while putting enough of a physical beating on the opponent to make sure that gauge stays slow to decay. Also, I mentioned percentages. If you just slash the opponent, then a meter beginning at 100% will rise anywhere from .0 to .3 with each hit. A magical blast will make that meter rise 3-10%, and maybe more, depending on how effective your magic is. As the percentage rises, so does the damage. A 250 HP strike from your commando will suddenly leap forward to doing over 9000 pretty damn quick, and this is in the first 12 hours of the game. What's more, there's a break point for each enemy that, once reaches, staggers the enemy and immediately doubles your percentage, allowing you to string criticals like mad. What's more is that your magic attackers get a HUGE boost in the percentage points they can deal, so if you persist a little longer on the magic assault, not only will you break the opponent, but you will drastically boost the damage your Commando can do. It sound complicated, but it isn't, and hotswapping the paradigms can lead to laughably huge damage numbers flying everywhere in the screen.

This is where the criticism really starts to fly. Someone decided that since Final Fantasy is now on the PS3, everything needed to be bigger. I'm commonly causing damage in the 10-20,000 range and I'm not even close to beating this game, which sounds insane on its own, but that kind of damage is usually seen within a string of 20 hits in a mere second, so you can imagine how many numbers are being bounced around at any given time. It's really difficult to make this adjustment. Just think Cloud's meteor rain attack and make that every mundane action in the game. At first, you don't know who's causing the damage or how much damage is even being done to you. The numbers seem practically useless because for the first time, you're really not looking at how much damage is being dealt as much as you are checking every health bar you can see. If your health bar drops in a hurry, then you know you're being hit hard regardless of what the red number says, and it's time to heal. Same with the enemies. If their health bar is going down fast, then you know to keep up the pace. If it's taking too long to drop, then you know you need to hit them with magic spells to cripple them, then assault them until you see results on the bar. The HP numbers just aren't important anymore, and every number in the game is already huge that it would be excessive to do number crunching in this game unless you're a masochist. Does the bar go down? Good. You could be hitting for 50,000 HP a strike, and it would not be impressive in the least unless that bar moves. Even the statistics are exceedingly crazy. My main striker at the moment has 690 for her strength stat, and my main nuker has a magic stat of about 605. Every number in this game is big. The only number I can see staying with convention is the party HP which seems to be set at a maximum of 9,999 as per tradition.

So how do the battles actually feel? Well, it's a twitch fest. If you don't twitch paradigms as fast as humanely possible, you will die. If you do not take advantage of your 2 seconds of full health to launch a massive attack, you will make no progress and probably die. I fought the exact same battle three times, and the first two times I just spammed magic and crushed everyone in 30 seconds flat. The third time, I didn't open immediately with a flurry and the enemies crushed ME because I have them two seconds to open up their own barrage of hate. Once that happened, and I really don't know how, I could not deal any damage to them like I was in the first two fights and they seemed to be twice as strong, too. I don't really get it, but apparently, the lesson is that twitching is important. You can, and will, switch paradigms so often that 5 seconds can actually mean 5 different setups. The action happens so fast that you absolutely cannot even think about what you should do for strategy. Remember when you would think for a couple of seconds about what spell you should use on an enemy in any other RPG, just to get your head straight about how the battle is going to go down? Well, stutter on the controls ONCE and get yourself off course, and you will think for one single second about what paradigm you should use to turn the tide of battle. Once that second is over, you will find yourself staring at a Game Over screen because you were just gangbanged. I am not kidding.

In what comes across as the blatant acknowledgement of twitch based button mashing in an RPG, save points are no longer an issue, because you can retry EVERY battle you fight. Even in the middle of battle, you can pause the game and hit a retry button if you think your strategy sucked. Yes, Squeenix knows that you are going to think for a split second and die from it, so in order to make sure that controllers aren't put through TV's everywhere, they made sure that you absolutely cannot lose any progress in your game no matter what mistakes you make. You never had to go far for a save point in the first place, as you can easily walk from a room with a save point, through a door, and into another room with a save point pretty much everywhere in the game. Now, you get to retry battles, too. It's so cheapened, but then again, the battles can be so random at times that it's absolutely necessary.

To illustrate how dumbed down this battle system is, the prime example would be how you cast magic. Once you learn a spell, a character is able to add it to the attack string without any user configuration. A character will throw out a thunder, blizzard, thunder, blizzard string automatically so long as they are in the role of a magic user. This leads to a HUGE number of complaints. If a character knows cure but is set in the magic user (Ravager) role, then why aren't they able to heal anyone else? Also, the casting requires absolutely no thought process from the user. You don't have to spend any brain power whatsoever on determining what spells to cast, because the computer launches attacks based on the enemies weaknesses on its own. Why even bother having weaknesses to begin with? You're not exploiting anything, you're just throwing out a generic magic spell.

Even buffs and debuffs work in this way. If there's an enemy that has protect and shell turned on, has just poisoned you, and is hitting you for ungodly amounts of damage, switching your party to a Medic/Synergist/Saboteur will erase all of those problems in 5 seconds flat. Why? Because the Saboteur will immediately string together deprotect, deshell, and everything else in the debuff book in one turn. You don't even have to prioritize, because they do it automatically. Your medic will immediately cast esuna on everyone, effectively giving you the ability to null a marlboro status bomb with the push of a button. And, of course, the Synergist will start flinging out protect spells to everyone, though this takes surprisingly longer to do. Though, if the enemy is a fire breathing bastard, the computer will actually reorder the casting on its own to make sure you have a fire buff, then shell, THEN protect. All of this happens by pressing L1 then X, requiring no thought from you.

So, all of this makes me extremely torn, and I really have to think of this in two distinct ways.

One part of me is thinking that all of the BS time wasting has been removed from games, and everything you wanted to do in the first place involves nothing more than deciding that a certain action needs to happen. Do you need to manually select each attack, buff, and spell and then choose what to use it on every single turn? You're going to figure out the enemies weakness anyway, and when you do, you're just repeating the same thing over and over again. How many times have we wished, as JRPG fans, that you could spend less time micromanaging your fights when you know it's just a rinse-and-repeat process anyway? Well, Final Fantasy XIII achieves this in ways I cannot describe. All you have to do is decide when things need to be done, and it all happens with minimal interaction from the user. Time to heal? Tell them to heal up and you're golden, without picking through menus. Time to just unleash? Well, you can do that by clicking a button, too, and the CPU will automatically determine which attacks you were going to want to use anyway. If you already know that you're going to span thunder because it's the bad guy's weakness, then why bother doing anything else?

The game does all of that for you, which means that anyone with fingers and average reflexes is capable of getting into a deep RPG, though the depth is highly debatable. It really just automates everything you already planned on doing. Basically there's just a bright blue "kill" button you hit repeatedly. It seems like an evolution, breaking down RPG's to ts most accessible level and streamlining everything possible.

On the flip side, there is virtually no interaction, no thought process, no experimentation, and no creativity involved in fighting a battle. Essentially, what you're doing is pressing X and L1 a million times and letting the computer play the game for you. You don't have to do any work in discovering weaknesses, and you certainly don't have any time to think about what you're doing at all. It took everything that made RPG's so involved to begin with and dumbed it down to its base level. It sometimes even reminds you that this is what you're doing the whole time in RPG's, just slower. Yet, you still don't feel involved with these characters at all. They don't even have skills that make them unique (yet), so as long as one person can fill a role, then upgrade that person's weapon and you will never have any need for their backup. The game even has a trophy/achievement that is given when you max out everyone's sphere grid, and since you have the ability at a certain point in the game to learn every single role, that sort of says, "here's a reward for making every character the same."

Even developing your characters outside of battle is linear in itself. Each character already has a set strength at first, so when it comes to getting the most out of your characters you are going to want to make sure that the things they do well, they do VERY well. All that means is that you're going to plunk down your experience points in a straight line down the job path without ever really giving that person any real diversity. Any other RPG would have you mixing abilities so that your tank can revive a downed mage, beefing your mage's HP to the max so that they don't die a lot, or simply finding every possible way to jack up the stats on certain characters to make sure that everything they do does twice the damage that they should ever be doing at a given point in a game. Squeenix even found a way to make that part automated. Now, I'm sure there are players out there who are already finding ways to exploit the system, but right now, I don't see how it would really be exploiting it. If you want Lightning to cause massive damage, then all you need to do is drive a straight line down the Commando path, and she will be absolutely decked....but you were meant to do that! There's nothing about this game that I've had to think about doing, and it's driving me insane. Rather than be exciting and innovative, the game has become bland, boring, and taken all the mental challenge of RPG's and replaced it with button mashing. To whatever idiot said that this system removed the monotony out of fighting, well, you're an idiot. I've found myself tapping X over and over and over while drinking a coke and holding a conversation with someone, not even looking at the screen. Seriously, it's boring, and is actually less entertaining since the battles require no thought outside of boss battles. Of course, buff- heal- rush-repeat is what all RPG boss battles are like, so in cyclical fashion, I wonder if this is evolution.

Well, Final Fantasy XIII has officially killed off the JRPG for good. They have finally made the entire genre pointless. You're not actually playing a game anymore, and it doesn't even feel like an RPG. You're doing absolutely nothing to shape the game when you play. Everything you do is a straight-lined path in any given direction. The battle system actually made me care less about the already difficult to accept plot, if you could call it that, because I simply look at this game as being all flash and no substance. It caters to the lowest common denominator of fans who just want to see numbers fly and get their rocks off with that and a slick sword-finisher. So really, what is the point of JRPG's anymore? It's all a movie now, and it has done that so well that all you're doing is playing an automated game that occasionally lets you watch a cutscene to tell you why you should be caring.

So thank you, Squeenix, for taking the fun out of JRPG's for good. You have come out and convinced even the JRPG fans how absolutely pointless the genre is. I was hoping that maybe you would try to return it to its former glory, but you really never cared. All you care about is that the player gets to see numbers fly while taking on shotguns with swords, because that's "cool". It's a complete mockery, and unless something absolutely earth shattering happens to change your direction, this is the absolute last Final Fantasy game I will ever play. You've finally managed to ruin it for me, and I truly feel like playing your games have been a complete waste of my time.

Of Metroid and Final Fantasy

2010-03-11T12:02:00.000-09:00

I'm not done with Final Fantasy XIII yet, so I can't leave final impressions out in the open. I'm 30 hours in and am sort of lost as to where I should be going. What I should have done was make sure I went out of my way to find teleport stones, but I only hit two of them and I feel stupid for following the game for this long without telling the story to go sit in a quiet corner somewhere. Something really doesn't sit right with me when it comes to this game's design, and I'm pretty sure I know why, but I did promise myself I would finish it before jotting down my final thoughts. At the very least, I'm actually playing it through and not completely hating it as much as VIII. It's very playable, and it's not going out of its way to tell me that I'm stupid for playing it.

The way that the series has changed in order to get to this point has to do with evolution, or a the very least, an attempt to see what else the series could become if a few experimental concepts were fleshed out completely. From the sounds of it, this is the way the new Metroid game is going to go, and it doesn't all have to do with Team Ninja. A recent Kotaku post revealed that we may be getting a different side of Metroid entirely, and its even more striking than Samus getting a real storyline.

Giving Samus more direction doesn't sit right with me, but it's not in the way you would think. I'm just worried that the way good franchises are being handled these days when it comes to writing, something bad is going to happen. We've already seen it in the last Prime entry, but story and Samus don't play well together. There's something outside of the heroine that makes the universe seem...cheap. Metroid, Super Metroid, and Prime established a very dangerous atmosphere that puts Samus on such a rare pedestal. It's not unlike Ellen Ripley. The galaxy is extremely dangerous, and by the time Super Metroid was over, the impression that the gamer leaves with is that of an adult galaxy where unknown things can be terrifying alongside the known and already deadly creatures. Samus stands out where others in the galaxy cannot, and it's for that reason that we're comfortable with her being alone during the ordeals. If anybody else took on what she has, then there would be a lot of dead bodies. Even in the Prime Trilogy, where things sort of lighten up and get a little more personable and colorful, there's still this sense of Pitch Black mythos flying around with the light and dark stuff.

It's hard to explain, but Metroid is a series that is sort of....bleak. The lack of story sort of goes alongside that, providing the harsh details while never giving the universe a personality outside of wonderful and hostile. When Samus shows up, it means things are screwed beyond repair. I just don't see a cinematic version of Samus being in the best interests of the series because you'd have to write it an awful lot like a cross between Alien and Riddick. Somebody is going to say something really stupid, or somebody is going to want to pull a Kojima and decide that some absolutely random ass version of Samus' background must be included.

On the other hand, this is something that Metroid also needs. Samus is the hero, and unlike Link, this is the exact same badass we've been following through every adventure. We know very little about her, yet at the same time, we know so much that tying some of it together is only natural. We're expecting to get an action packed blockbuster game that's meant to take advantage of Samus' draw and give her some character at the same time. That's something we need. We need Samus to be a tiny bit more of a character, and then she can go on her way as a silent protagonist once more.

So long as her character doesn't get trampled in the mud with bad writing, the changes made to the Metroid formula aren't going to kill the series. It can always go backward into the original formula. I read one reader response from the above article that called the idea, basically, frightening. Why? Is it a bad thing to explore what different kinds of action it can bring to the table? Even IF it was an on-rails shooter, as long as the game was a great rail-shooter, I don't see a problem with this. No one said that these changes would be permanent to the series, and trying out something new isn't going to ruin this franchise. It's possible that Team Ninja may try something out that becomes an excellent compliment to the main formula and remains for future games.

Basically, skip the game if you don't like it. It's one game in a franchise that isn't going to die out anytime soon. No one said anything about Metroid being changed for good, it's certainly a good thing to try a game out that may get newcomers on board with the series, and it looks like it's going to be an entertaining game so far. There are no downsides to this. The same argument was made when the series made it to 3D, and even then, 2D versions still manage to come out.

At the six hour mark...

2010-03-09T10:03:00.012-09:00

Screw it. "We'll do it live!"

I can't believe I just quoted Bill O'Reilly, even if it was in mockery.

10:04 AM - I'm sort of responding to my own post that preceded this, but I figure that it might be best to just go ahead and call it as I see it. I'm all set with the caffeine I need to make it through this. Green tea Amp is awesome, I should mention.

So we just got finished trampling soldiers with a power loader, bursting through several fences along the way. I've found about 5 save points in 15-20 minutes, which doesn't make any sense considering that you're given the option to retry battles if you mess up. I suppose that Squeenix has determined that the audience must have the same levels of ADD that their characters do. Oh yeah, they all decided to change their minds again. Sure, they've all decided they're going to save the world, but a little bit of resolution and organization might have helped the cause. Just a thought.

10:39 - "Magic and mumbo jumbo"

Really. You've only been casting magic through pretty much the entirety of the game and you're calling it a bunch of imagination. I bet those troopers you were torching earlier would agree with you that it was all just a dream. And your name is Lightning. And you just fought and captured Odin. And you've been cursed by a god-like being, or whatever the hell those things above are described as. No, really, I'm with you 100%.

Speaking of Odin, it has finally reached the point where life/progress bars are more important than the damage numbers flying around, which makes absolutely no sense, because it's one giant clusterf*** of numbers after another. If you're not supposed to be paying attention to them, why even bother? It makes no sense.

Also, I just realized how much XIII's battle system borrows from Dissidia at times.

10:55 - Well that didn't take long. First, it just has to be mentioned that Vanille is beyond the help of rehab. That girl has drugs in her system that would make Keith Richards drool with envy. Also, as if the story wasn't making any sense to begin with, her and Sazh are now discussing the possibility that Hope is on his way home, and they are happy with this thought. Immediately after they say this, they suddenly remember that they would most likely be lynched the second they came within site of "home", but can't seem to piece the two thoughts together.

"Yes, I hope he made it home. I mean, he'll totally get killed and all, but at least he's home."

11:01 - So I saved my game, watched a cutscene, and what do I find? A save point. This is getting ridiculous.

11:20 - It's been well over a hundred battles into the game, and I still can't figure out exactly what it is that IGN and the rest of them seem to like about this battle system. It seems completely the opposite of what intelligent design would suggest. Let me first say that despite my bias, I'm not actively looking for faults. I just haven't found anything particularly good to talk about. I'm going through a segment of the game with lounge/jazz music playing in the background, and the setting is pretty much the equivalent of a junkyard. I really don't get it. It doesn't make sense, and it doesn't sound good.

Anyway, back to the battle system.

So far, it's absolutely terrible. There seems to be this massive focus on micromanagement, but in reality, it all seems very...fake. In fact, I've sort of mulled around about how best to put this, and that's the best I can come up with. If you were to take Xenogears, Dissidia, and XII's battle systems and throw them all together, you get XIII. The reason why I scratch my head is that, yes, this sounds good on paper. In the board meeting, somebody obviously said, "let's take the best of all those battle systems and make a really good, all inclusive, fast paced way of fighting."

OK, great. Except it's just not that great. So far, I can't think of any part of this system that says, "You know what, this is the way RPG's should be." It's actually quite the opposite. It's not that the system is particularly jarring, even though it takes some getting used to. It's just that it all seems to be needlessly flashy, complicated, and stupidly simple at the same time....none of which are really good qualities in a battle system. I don't see how it is anything but pretentious. Sure, the reviewers don't have a real problem with the it, but I stopped and asked myself, "If this the best way to have gone about it?"

My answer was a definitive "no." It doesn't feel fun, and I'm sorry IGN, but you're full of shit when you say that this battle system breaks up the monotony of fighting.

12:13 - 8 hours into the game, and already, the love story has gone above and beyond what VIII managed to do with an entire game. So it's got that going for it. Which is nice.

12:44 - In the Whitewood, and just like the last....ok, just like every part of the game, it's just one long road in gauntlet fashion. I'm beginning to realize that this just isn't an RPG anymore.

1:16 - I'm going to catch hell for saying this later, but I'm not exactly sure how a couple things in this game actually work. I just stomped the shit out of a pretty beefy field enemy with some creative uses of my Paradigms, and it was a very efficient battle. I only healed once, and I exploited the enemies "stagger" point a couple of times. I got 3 out of 5 stars for that battle. The very next battle, I made some late decisions in a fight full of weaker enemies, wasn't efficient, had to heal a lot, and didn't own the fight. I got 5 out of 5 stars for it.

Second, the whole preemptive strike thing. I jumped a field enemy from behind without alerting him, and I don't get a free shot. I walk face first into an enemy that I alerted, and I get the first shot. It just didn't make sense.

I'm sure there are proper formulas for this, and I'm sure I'll figure out the trick later...so that's why I anticipate someone telling me that I'm just not doing something right. Also, I'm still walking on the exact same road I was walking on 30 minutes ago (granted, I had a couple 4 minute phone calls).

1:47 - Any minute now, Hope is going to turn to the dark side. He's got that teenage Anakin vibe at the moment....

7:19 - Fell asleep. What did you expect, being up for way over a day? Proceeding....

8:07 - So far, the "sphere grid" has been pretty, but useless. It's a manual level up system that, only so far at least, offers no choice. I turned around and "grinded" for all of four extra fights, and by doing that, I've maxed my grid out. It's a disturbing trend that I have to preface every complaint with, "at least in the beginning...". About the only thing that I really feel as if I am directly manipulating is the equipment upgrade system. So far.

8:18 - No, no, you can't be serious. We stumbled across an area filled with dead bad guys, and one of them dropped a recorder or something that we clearly see in the cutscene. The cutscene ends, and the bodies all disappear! Nevermind that the "area" we found them in looks exactly the same as everything else has for the last hour or so, but come on. At least force us to leave the area or something. Don't just show us this little piece of information then make it vanish.

1:19 - Friends visited and watched, and all of them decided that the game sucks. Saved someone from wasting $60 in the process, as he came to check out the game before heading over to Gamestop.

Really, at this point into the game, there's no way that I can say that things are going to get better. Over a dozen hours, and this battle system had proven itself to be absolutely horrid. Whoever reviewed this over at IGN needs to be fired immediately. It's not fun, and it it gets better later, well, that's still doesn't make a fun game. Whatever you've heard about this battle system is just plain wrong. This doesn't feel like an RPG, it feels like something you need ritalin to get through alive.

No one had anything good to say about this game, and this is coming from a pretty diverse group of RPG players. No more updates on this post.

Final Fantasy XIII - First impressions

2010-03-09T06:05:00.000-09:00

While I didn't buy the game, I was there to support a friend during the midnight launch. It was, at the very least, in my interests to see the first few hours of this game in action. After all, this is research we're talking about here, though I'm ashamed to say that I learned something the very moment I walked into Gamestop.

You people need to shower. Seriously. Myself and another friend had just finished working and sweating our balls off during a good 7 hour work shift, did not get a chance to shower, and came in through those doors smelling completely unoffensive. In fact, during a random smell check to make sure that we were not being hypocritical, a girl had said we still smelled damn good. Now, if only that sort of natural upkeep could be taught to the completely disgusting folk who spent an hour marinating the Gamestop in funk, then it may have been a pleasant launch. Instead, I felt completely sorry for the Gamestop employees who were forced to simmer in the stink. It was as if these nasty souls had made sure to only wipe themselves with the stale crusts of McDonald's cheeseburgers. I'm pretty sure that these people were doing something a superstitious athlete would do for the entire week before the Super Bowl, except instead of avoiding the razor, these guys avoided the shower stall. I get pretty defensive when people call gamers useless slobs, but in this case, I think I'm with "them" on this one. You people are disgusting. Learn what soap is.

OK, now that we have that out of the way, let's get to the game...

...whiiiiiich is about as disappointing as I feared. I came into this experience a little biased. Not only did I avoid buying the game, but I wasn't exactly thrilled to hear what design decisions were made. There are some plus marks to be given out, so I'm going to shortly focus on that.

Final Fantasy XIII looks amazing, without a doubt. At times, it's as if you're actually playing an interactive Advent Children movie. Locales are stunning to look at, and if you have an eye for detail, there's a lot of little things to take in. This whole game is absolutely a reward for anyone owning an HD, though I can say that SD users are going to get a pretty nice upgrade from Final Fantasy XII. Even on the latter, it reeks of presentation. Even the status menu jumps out, as each character has a short, second-long video that acts like a moving baseball card. The frame rate is absolutely smooth, and everything has a strong polish to it.

Voice acting is done well, and I can see why, considering that I spent the majority of the first hour picking out where I had heard each voice actor from. It's a good list of people to have, for the most part. Yes, things go downhill from here.

When the voice acting is good, is carries the game, but when it's bad, it's REALLY bad. Half of your party spends the good majority of the first five hours doing nothing but moaning as if someone gave them an unwanted emotional reach-around in the recording booth. It's 10 times worse than Yuna EVER was. Also, every character is pretty annoying to begin with. Lightning can be summed up as the PMS'y version of Squall and Cloud wrapped together, complete with ellipses. Yes, you can hear the "..." and it is nothing short of ludicrous. Somebody dropped the ball here. The only character that isn't totally useless in personality is Snow, and maybe I'm only saying that because he's the least annoying of every party member. He just didn't grate at me the way every other person did.

The music is entirely forgettable, as well. While it sounds epic and intense at first, there is no point in this game, so far, that had me thinking that a music track was anything more than filler. Asking the friend who now owns the game what track she actually remembered, she gave me a blank look and said, "There were harmonicas, right?" I'm hoping that things get better.

The combat has finally reached the point where things are a bit too much. The battle system takes some time to get used to, but numbers will fly around so often that hit points have now become secondary to the health bar entirely. You're paying attention to so much else on the screen and the battle as a whole that you really only glance at the length and color of your health bar to figure out just which direction the battle is heading. The first couple hours of the game is also spent doing nothing but hitting X repeatedly, which felt as if I was being treated like a complete idiot. It was that insulting. The battle system expands later, but it doesn't feel right. I'm going to continue on and see how much thought I will need to put into things when the bigger bosses come up, but even watching my friend play, all I could think of was "X, X, X, X, X, X, L1 to turn the healer on, X, X, X, X, L1 to switch back to pummeling mode".

The story, so far, sucks. We actually spent more time making fun of the game in the first 2 hours, so we missed a lot of exposition, but we didn't seem to miss much. Snow hands out guns to children, then promptly gets everyone he's trying to save killed off. Lightning comes in kicking immense amounts of ass, much like Cloud, then ellipses her way out of the rest of the plot. The party goes around fighting anything it can, and naturally we piss off the wrong bad guy and wind up getting sucked into the real plot of the game, which suddenly turns into saving the world. I don't know exactly how we determined that we were saving the world that quickly into the game, but we did, though I think it has something to do with the "world" being not so much a world as a region. I'm sure we'll get to save the world later, because it's a Final Fantasy game, but it was so by the numbers it made an absolute joke of itself. Fight rebellion, begin love story, start saving world. It literally happens that fast, and I'm not entirely sure if the character have any idea if they knew they were going to save the world to begin with. I'm pretty sure they're rattling that off just because it's in the script. The fact that they don't even know which side their on sort of justifies this.

Look, I won't lie. I'm sure this is a great game, but it doesn't look like it's going to be a good Final Fantasy game, and it may even just turn out to be a basic eye-candy RPG. The game is almost a parody of itself, and that's sad. I've heard that the linearity opens up in the late game, but at this point, I'm almost not caring. This game has a lot of apologizing to do for itself, but I'm going to give it the chance to redeem itself. I'm going to persist and play it through as far as I can, but at this point, I'm guessing that this game is going to be the nail in the coffin for me when it comes to the series.

I will give it a chance, though, and my second/lasting impression will come soon.

Snatcher

2010-03-08T07:22:00.000-09:00

It's been a while since I've actually sat down and finished a game. I'm not the type of person that usually dives into a game nonstop until it's over, and that's something I've been hoping to fix in the near future. Apart from the whole Night Trap fiasco that went on last week, Persona 4 and Uncharted 2 were the only games I've made the effort to complete recently. I don't know if Modern Warfare 2 really counts, since it really had to be done before taking the experience online, but you can throw that in there, too. So yes, that means that despite getting Bayonetta, Demon's Souls, and Heavy Rain on the release dates, I haven't actually beaten them yet.

It's a lack of focus for me, really. It's not that I don't enjoy these games, but my mind is so ADD when it comes to games that I'm always trying new things, even if those things are completely outdated. So when a game manages to take me in and demand that I finish it, it's sort of eventful, even if there are better games out there. That's not to say I wasted my time with Snatcher, because there is a really good game in there, even if it isn't really a "game" and even if it isn't the end-all adventure you heard it was.

It all really starts with Hideo Kojima, who is pretty much allowed to do whatever he wants, no matter how ludicrous his ideas may sound on paper. Snatcher was his second major idea after Metal Gear, and plays out in a way that's completely opposite of those games. It's an interactive visual novel that invites the player to explore the cyberpunk future of Neo Kobe. You play as Gillian Seed, a newly assigned "junker" in the city who has amnesia and is really trying to solve two mysteries at once during the course of the game. You visit locales, dig up information, and try to piece together the clues to stop the Snatcher menace and save Neo Kobe. There's your plot and game style in a nutshell.

So you may have heard that this game is an unmissable classic that draws heavily on the intrigue of Blade Runner while also borrowing from several other classic sci-fi concept such as the Terminator. Well, there's the first problem, and also its greatest strength. The Blade Runner setting is borrowed from so heavily that it's hard not to scream "RIPOFF!" at the screen at times, but you never actually want to. That universe was so well done that it's difficult for anyone to say that they wouldn't like that world to be worked with more, and that's exactly the feeling that you get with Snatcher. For every blatant theft, and there's a million of them, you are left happy with the knowledge that someone creative put those beginnings to great use in an original story. Really, for all that is ripped off, it's more of an homage that happens to be unique and very capable of standing on its own. Kojima even rips himself off numerous times, sort of acknowledging that he's having a bit of fun throwing together concepts created elsewhere into something different. You are a "runner" that rides a spinner to hunt replicants that look like Terminators with your little robotic partner, Metal Gear. Yet, it still feels fresh.

Where the problems lie really depends on how much you value Kojima's story ideas. I'm all for Kojima getting free reign, but even in this early work of his I can't help but feel a little repulsed as to how much effort goes into a tremendous game-world only to have it trampled on by an extensive, plot-heavy movie sequence that comes across as if someone were playing the plot-dart game again. I can't spoil it for you, but 90% of this game is truly compelling and immersing, and the 10% that ruins it all happens to be the ending that you take no part in for a good fifteen minutes. The entire explanation for what's going on in every plot-line gets thrown on you like a ton of bricks, and the effect is nothing less than jarring. It's jarring because I expected better. Instead, I got another Bond-villain ranting away about his master plan, which logically makes sense, but is so conveniently bad.

How does this make the borrowing seem like a problem? Well, the ending alone erased anything subtle about the game's plot, and that's something that made Blade Runner great. Sure, that movie was a little slow paced, but even the deadest of moments carried a lot of weight while not shoving the plot down your throat. In Snatcher, you're given a chance to experience that world, but the ending makes the plot seem way too important and doesn't really give you anything to take with you. It really cheapens the whole experience.

When I finished the game, I went straight to a couple of fan-sites to see if there was anything tucked away in the corners of the game that I may have missed and needed to find. Come to find out, the game was rushed in its original development cycle, so Kojima and his gang had to throw together an ending at the last minute. Well, that made sense! It seemed like they just said, "F*** it! Let's tie up these plot lines on the fly!" and crammed it all into the game overnight. Even better, I read that the intended ending was included in later ports of the game!

Of course, my Sega CD version WAS one of those later ports, and Kojima meant to do that all along. Great. Really, if you think that the Metal Gear Solid universe can sometimes be a clusterf*** of nonsense, then you can pretty much guess why I didn't like Snatcher's ending.

The second complaint that I had, which I'm not entirely sure if I forgive, is that the game is kind of short. Snatcher is split up into 3 acts, the first being your introduction to the main plot and your very first case. This leads to Act 2, where you follow up on the major leads you get from your first investigation and go to take a crack at the bigger picture. The third and final act is the climax, half of which is a long ending cutscene. My final time was somewhere around the 9 and a half hour mark, which is about right if you balance bathroom/food breaks in game and time lost due to reloading. I think my A-button is wonky, which got me killed about 5 times in the closing act. For a talkie Sega CD game, that sounds about right, and since the adventure was pretty linear I can't expect for things to keep going to ages. Yet, with all of the times that I was forced to go on what was clearly the wrong path to follow what was clearly a bad lead, I sort of felt forced into wasting time. Sure, it was all entertaining, but when I got to the end of Act 2 I was expecting to at least go on one more broad investigation before things started to come to a close. So, one part of me commends this game for grabbing me by the throat and making me very interested, but another part of me really wanted more out of it before having to put the controller down.

OK, enough with the bad. As much as I've just harped on Snatcher, there's plenty to like, as well as many good reasons why it should be considered a classic.

Until the ending, the story and concept are good. Really good. It may sound like a boring text adventure, but it's anything but. Maybe it was the impressive voice acting or the familiar scenery, but everything you touch screams with personality. There's plenty of information to dig up, and while it's not all pertinent to the investigation, it's certainly worth discovering. The menu system is also dynamic in its own right, as simply going down the list won't help you advance the game in the least. Investigating is a puzzle in its own right, as you have to not only pay attention to the information you are given, but put it to use when determining how to act. Looking around a room may reveal a key item, which your characters understandably become drawn to. Looking around the room again after that will reveal something else that your character never got a chance to see. Likewise, talking to someone once will give you the expected natural response of that NPC. Persisting will get the NPC to think a little harder, revealing a minor clue that can be cued up afterwards for you to ask about. It makes perfect sense and never really gets annoying, and sometimes the game's design actually expects you to get a little stumped and try to backtrack a bit before giving you what you need.

Also, to the credit of the developers, this system works to divide up the glut of information into sections that feel very natural. If you're done with a section of the game, you are not asked to go back to that section again to uncover a key item or clue. The game teaches you early to be thorough and imaginative so that you know how to exhaust your possibilities in any given area, and it also forces you to solve the puzzles in front of you before even letting you move on sometimes. Act 2, for example, begins by cutting you off from certain items you've collected as well as locales you have discovered so that you're not hopping around aimlessly between areas for no reason. It's a very welcome method that keeps the player interested and focused while never really taking away from the exploration.

I mentioned that Snatcher has a lot of character, and I'm not putting that lightly. Almost everything that you can investigate in the game has a ton of information attached to it. In Gillian's HQ, there is a computer system that allows you to search up information on characters in the game and also an extensive history on Neo Kobe and the rest of the world. It's easy to waste an hour just reading everything article in the computer to learn about the setting. Snatcher isn't just filled with information, either. It's filled with charm, and a fan of any sci-fi work the game is based on will find themselves laughing out loud to many of the little jokes sprinkled within conversation.

Snatcher may just belong to a distinct handful of games that can call themselves "future-proof". There is no spectacular technology or innovation going on within it. It's just a really good visual novel, and that's the type of game that can be really hard to kill off. It can always remain interesting and fun regardless of the generation you play it in, and charm is something that just doesn't die off. Finally being able to devote more than an hour to it, I found myself engrossed in this world, addicted to the story and wanting to put off sleep to finish the experience. Sure, I wish there was more to do, but that doesn't stop me from recommending it to anyone else. Just ignore the ending. I see so many 9-10/10 reviews on fansites that I start to wonder how many of them actually beat the game. There's no way that I could give that much credit to a game with such a terrible ending, and it honestly ruined most of my impressions. This is a game that's all about story above all else, even if the little things are extremely entertaining. If story is the focus than the climax of that story shouldn't suck. Sorry, but 8/10 is the best I would ever give it. Extend the game a bit and throw out the ending for something a little more subtle, and you'd have your perfect score.

Spoiler below (to explain to Snatcher fans why I think the ending sucks):

It's way too convenient. Yes, clues are riddled throughout the entire game, but come on. Predictability isn't why I was bitching so much as that Bond-explanation in the end. Did all of the people in the game HAVE to be connected like that? This is why FFVIII's plot sucked. Not everything has to tie together perfectly. Sometimes, a character is just a character. It was a man behind the curtain that came out in the last moment and started saying that everyone was everyone's father while at the same time giving a reasonable, yet waaaaay out there explanation about how he did it all for love or wanting to be a God or some combination of the 10 worst cliches you can possibly get out of a bad villain. Really, I'm not apologizing for anything. The ending was terrible. Get over it.

Yet another status update...

2010-03-02T06:04:00.000-09:00

Sure, even I get tired of writing them sometimes, but they have to get thrown in here every now and then to either apologize about being on hiatus or to give some reason as to why I will soon disappear. I don't see a disappearance anytime soon, but I have a lot going on right now. Or, I could have a lot going on right now. I haven't exactly found myself lost in any of these projects, yet.

I'm attempting to hunt down some REALLY old hardware at the moment, and I may or may not have success in actually finding them. I know that I could get on eBay and find exactly what I'm looking for, but these things are so hideously old that I don't think they deserve money until I find myself truly desperate. I'm hoping that a quick tour of my old attic in May could turn up some of the parts that I need. Basically, I'm trying to get MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95/98 running authentically. I have this feeling that I'm going to run into a zillion-and-one problems trying to install any of these things on a computer that I might have lying around, and believe me, I have a lot. It's just that the lowest hardware specs that I have come from the P4 era, and I need to get older. Don't ask me why, this is just something I have to do. Yes, they were painful years...

Also, I'm possibly going to do one of two things. A) Start a livestream channel. B) Start a video series. C) Start both in conjunction with each other. The trouble is that these aren't projects I can see myself doing alone, and it's going to involve some dedication, as well as some serious motivation. I have an insane amount of tools at my disposal, except for a really good microphone and an HD camcorder, the latter of which I don't particularly need, but could come in handy. I have zero experience in video editing. Funny how I've always wanted to be a movie director, and yet I can't seem to bring myself to learn any reasonably powerful video software. I'm just not that smart when it comes to the stuff. Reading about everything is certainly interesting, but at a certain point I can't actually learn anything unless I'm physically doing it. I never thought I'd say this, but I think I need a tutor.

Of course, I'm also planning on creating a studio to facilitate these projects. Green screen room, recording studio, filming studio....just an amateur setup dedicated to working on these projects. As I said, this also means that I'm going to have to learn how to actually use most of it...

It's all Robert Kotick's fault

2010-03-02T03:18:00.000-09:00

I don't think I've had nearly as many infuriating days as I have this past month. Surprisingly, the PS3 brick issue wasn't at the top of the list, since I had a nearby friend with a slim-line available and loads of other systems to distract me. No, I still haven't returned to Night Trap. Yes, I will serve my time and finish it soon enough.

Mainly, it's been Activision. I'm not entirely sure what Robert Kotick's personal beef is with gamers and money, but whoever put him in charge of Activision should be put to sleep right next to the CEO himself. It's sad. One minute, the company is assailing fans who are literally doing work FOR them (King's Quest), and now I'm hearing that he felt like storming to gates at Infinity Ward and firing people left and right. I'll bet you I can figure out why he did it, too. They probably said something along the lines of what I would tell him.

"No, Mr. Kodick, you're no good at your job and your ideas suck."

No, I wasn't there, and I certainly don't know the reasoning behind every little detail, but to start firing the same crew that just made you historically massive profits in the span of ONE GAME is ignoring the creative immunity they are allowed to have. Of course, there's a certain amount of balance involved with immunity. Let the guys do whatever they want for years, and you end up with Peter Molyneux types running around spouting off whenever they get a chance. For whatever mistakes Infinity Ward had made with Modern Warfare 2, the game was undeniably massive in popularity and gave Activision a huge cushion to work with on the year's balance sheet. Don't get me wrong, IW made a LOT of mistakes, but to be honest, they put a lot of work into this game and they should be commended at least a little bit for keeping the mistakes tolerable. Let's face if, if they didn't care about this game, then considering the expectations involved, we would have a revolution on our hands.

Before all that, we got Ubisoft's DRM for Assassin's Creed 2, and there is no correct response to this except for the universal "WTF are you thinking?" that came immediately after. I love my games, but there is a line of tolerance that I'm not willing to cross when it comes to choosing a game. Ubisoft leaped across that line, which makes it easy for me to discontinue support for that company until they reverse that insult. That was a middle finger to the fans that pay for their games, and even they should have the common sense to know this.

It's been pretty hard to get all this anger into text, to be honest. I'm not one for spouting off without doing my homework, but it's clear that these companies are doing an incredible disservice to their fan bases. Most casual players would hardly notice who's the CEO of whatever company, so sometimes I look at my rants and think, "Ya know, nobody really cares in the end."

I hope that's not true. I'm probably knee deep in a "wishful thinking" scenario, but I thought we all played games because they were fun and brought people together. They should be entertaining people, and here we are facing massive companies that could care less about the fanbase. It's always been that way. Nintendo used to use some really shady market control practices back in the NES days, and nobody really knew about that until years later, even after the antitrust case was over. People still buy these games, and you can't force people not to. These companies may be crossing a number of lines that they shouldn't be allowed to cross, but we're telling them that it's OK to do it. We have the power to stop the DLC craze before it begins. We have the power to enforce our own fair-use rights on companies. We have the power to put Ubisoft out of business by next month. We can get Kotick fired if we wanted to. If he's reading this, he's laughing, because he knows that it will never happen. Companies know that you will pay them to f*** you over.

So yeah, it's hard to write a substantial article about these guys. It feels delusional in some strange way. It has to be done, though, even if it is just a messy, thrown together critique about business practices. Hopefully, it'll lose them a same here and there. Who knows.

Oh, Activision, now you've done it.

2010-02-28T22:39:00.000-09:00

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.

Everything old is expensive again.

2010-02-25T21:38:00.000-09:00

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.

Why I need to start a gaming company.

2010-02-25T05:51:00.000-09:00

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.

And you thought I hated X...

2010-02-24T11:37:00.000-09:00

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.

Heavy Rain impressions.

2010-02-24T05:03:00.000-09:00

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.

Mass Control 4

2010-02-22T05:48:00.002-09:00

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.

Choose your burner.

2010-02-22T03:02:00.000-09:00

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.

But do you have the complete set?

2010-02-21T22:50:00.000-09:00

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.

Bands like it when you yell "Yar" at them.

2010-02-20T22:51:00.000-09:00

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.

No, that doesn't come standard.

2010-02-20T05:05:00.000-09:00

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.

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.

Status update

2010-02-19T03:40:00.000-09:00

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.

Maybe it needs some more megachips.

2010-02-04T04:49:00.000-09:00

It's been a busy week so far, and I've had a tough time stringing together an article about each individual announcement. They're all announcements or announcements of things that are going to be announced, but nothing in this article actually exists for consumers as of this moment. So, down to business.

We start off with Apple, of course, who put a tired Steve Jobs in front of a crowd full of crazies to announce the iPad, a hilariously misnamed device that really should have went through common sense quality control before receiving this title. I only watched the demonstration, but either the crowd was just as tired as Jobs was, or something was a little underwhelming. I'm not going to sit here and bash on the lack of a camera or how Apple is sticking with AT&T for the moment, because that's silly talk. I don't see that as being important at all. What is important is that this is a tablet computer, or at least an oversized iPhone. The good news? It's an oversized iPhone. The bad news? It seemed to be marketed towards the e-reader crowd and interactive picture frame more than anything else.

Apparently, I missed the part where iWorks was announced for the iPad, and I'll give them their due on that. That still doesn't justify this product being what it really is. All Steve Jobs did was go on stage and do what he's already marketing that device for, and that's to read books, play music, and to look really shiny. The latter, of course, is either something great or something awful, and that really depends on how you want to use your tablet. If you would like to stick it on a frame at your desk, do some paperwork, and occasionally answer a text or pick a song with a free hand, then you simply reach over and touch the screen that's displaying a picture of your kids. That sounds awesome and sleek, and don't get me wrong, there's a certain demographic out there that's going to love that. What gets to me is that the device looks fragile, and making it look like a bigger iPhone is not going to help the discussion on how much of a beating this machine can possibly take.

The real missed use of this item is that it can be one of the greatest tools for students and an all around utility for anyone with a job or a hobby. I know that it's an e-reader, but have you seen what college kids do to their books? That thing wouldn't survive long. It's low-weight, portable, easy to use, it has a touch screen, can be thrown in a knapsack with no fuss when you're on the go...this is something that would get demolished in a college environment. Looking at the design of a Samsung Rugby phone....seriously, how did you not take a cue? A tablet computer is potentially a powerful and portable tool that can be used for immediate application wherever its needed. An iPad doesn't fit that bill.

Next up is the creamy software filling, Sonic the Hedgehog 4, which doesn't seem to be using my idea of being able to see more screen. That's disappointing, because now you have a game that's been done before. Sonic the Hedgehog 4 just isn't that impressive looking when you get right down to it, and I mean that as a comparative statement. Granted, I haven't seen much, but from what has been announce, this game will offer you up nothing that you couldn't get over at the hack sites. I burned Sonic Megamix to play on a Sega CD and had loads of fun with it. That's not to say that Sonic 4 isn't going to be fun, but I sincerely hope there's a few more tricks up their sleeve than "It's 4!", "More special moves!", and "It's a downloadable game!". I'll get it, sure, but unless they're hiding something, they should have been able to do more.

Finally, it's making the rounds that the Wii successor is going to be announced very soon and that developers are already making games for it. Now, I'm not entirely sure that every developer knows this, but they are all working on titles for the next Wii because nothing much is going to change. Just as with the GCN to Wii jump, the Wii to Wii2 isn't going to change the formula much. I'm not going to fault Nintendo for this, because it's generally a good idea right now to keep development costs low for their system as a selling point for third parties, and also because they really don't need to throw together a bunch of new hardware to upgrade their system. A graphical boost would be desired, and we're going to get it, but I really don't think any sane person is going to demand that their games look photorealistic. The trick up Nintendo's sleeve that they are not revealing is that this is most likely to be a gap-bridger between the Wii and Natal. HD output was a given, but as I've mentioned in a previous article, you will most likely see a camera and microphone included on the box as well as a few other software surprises. Don't go throwing out your Wiimotes just yet, because the odds are good that you'll be just fine in keeping them.

Nah, we saved the world in the last game.

2010-01-28T04:05:00.000-09:00

I'm trying to find a decent RPG to get into right now. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne has been sitting in my PS2 for a while now, but I'm just not feeling the style at this particular moment. For those Megaten fans out there, I did not just say that Nocturne was bad in any way. I'm simply saying that I'm looking for something new. As you may have guessed from previous posts, I'm looking for something with a little more than the standard RPG experience. TRPGs are on my mind a lot right now, but in general, it's becoming more difficult to find an RPG that strikes that careful balance between playability, fun, and story.

Playability is pretty easy to figure out. When you get an RPG, you would expect that there isn't much to take care of in the gameplay department. There are four-directional menus and eight directions you could possibly use on the field, and you press A or X to say "yes" to something and B or circle to say "no" to something. It isn't that hard. Occasionally, a developer will challenge your patience by making a game so convoluted and confusing that all that simplicity is thrown out the window. People often wonder why I don't have a high opinion about Working Designs, and I'll throw Dragon Force right back at them as that game I desperately want to get into and love, it's just that the game never ceases to confuse the hell out of me right after the introduction with no explanation whatsoever.

Fun is why I didn't thrash Shining Force CD last review. RPGs can sometimes fail in all other areas yet maintain an addictive game. Will I play Final Fantasy X again? No. Was it fun while I was there? Battles were fun and the sphere grid was a neat gimmick to toy with, so I was able to persist to the end without. The Persona series on its own shows what happens when a developer chooses to throw a little more addiction into its games, and thankfully we have Persona 3 and 4 to show for it.

Story. That's where everything falls apart, and while I have only begun to touch upon this in the past, it's time for a revisit to this lost art. This may just be me, but when I play an RPG, I mainly play it for the story. Yes, I can be accused of loving the good JRPGs a little too much, but there's nothing like interacting with a deep world and an epic plot rather than just slaying the dragon and calling it a day. The trouble is that with most of these games, the plot is either epic or its not, and if it's the latter, it's just not worth playing in my eyes. With each Final Fantasy installment, you're achieving a goal that is simply massive in scope, and once the world is safe, you feel very accomplished.

Maybe I'm just bitter about not having success finding a new game, but if you've got a suggestion, drop me a line.

Play testers, yes. Cliche testers, not so much.

2010-01-27T11:59:00.000-09:00

It's everywhere you go now. Long gone are the days when the little SD characters in your Final Fantasy game could be linked to an elaborate Amano character portrait. All on their own, the paintings dove well beyond the standard roles that video game PCs (and unfortunately thousands more NPCs) seem to fall into in every title. It wasn't even the right time for design creativity, and that's part of the reason why Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger stick out in most people's minds as legendary. We're talking about a time when games still had a lot of evolution to do, and so long as the mechanics grew up as we did, an RPG party made up of a squishy wizard, a staff chick, and a hero with giant sword didn't even phase us. This is the same generation that embraced a blue hedgehog with tennis shoes and a fat Italian man chasing mushrooms. We weren't asking for much, but somehow we had something original slip in here and there when it came to character design, even if it was ludicrous.

You would think that now we have games a generation away from photorealism with analog controllers in our hands that the mechanics have refined themselves to the point where creativity would run rampant. Yet here we are in 2010 looking at a stable of newcomer characters that reads like everything else you've seen before, and sometimes developers are even skipping the "new" step in some cases and running straight into the cliche bin.

As I'm looking back in my growing retro collection, I started to notice things that were bothering me with characters that never bothered me before. At one point, the "you gotta have blue hair" approach was pretty fun, since in most cases games were meant to be as colorful as possible and it worked out for everyone. I realized that the reason why it bothered me so much is because developers haven't seemed to figure out a way to evolve beyond that. If you're playing a Japanese designed game, the odds are high that you're going to be controlling someone with blue hair, a giant sword, a metal suit, or an obvious set of knockers. If you're playing a western release, then you'll either be a scruffy bald guy, carrying a big gun, using metal armor, or have a huge set of knockers. Come to think of it, it's all running together now.

God of War and Bayonetta is where the argument pretty much starts and ends. Aside from the fact that the games are obviously comparable in style and genre, the two characters share something in common. They are the furthest thing from original as you can get, yet somehow manage to bring something new to the table. Kratos is pretty much Riddick on steroids and the powers of a god, so being bald and painted is all part of the gimmick. If he had long hair, then he would be closer to the Prince of Persia series, and we would never think of Kratos the same way again. So while the man is a walking cliche of design, the game itself is about kicking copious amount of ass in the most brutal ways possible. It's complete indulgence. The game itself made that character great. Stick Kratos in the role of the Hitman, and you probably wouldn't have achieved the same result or impact.

Likewise, there's Bayonetta, who takes the indulgence sell-point and runs naked through her game with it. She doesn't have much of a personality "yet" (I haven't beat the game yet, but I'd be shocked if she somehow decided to change her approach), and it's not like sex appeal hasn't been done before. The thing that separates her from your token jiggly girl on a fighting roster is that the game is based around her going completely ballistic (literally) with her sex appeal and letting it fly all over the place. She spends the entire game naked, but she's covered by her hair...which looks like a cat-suit. She has guns for heels, does stripper moves while fighting, uses lollipops to heal herself, and tells everyone she meets to piss off. That's just to start things off, but you get the idea. There's no character, only fan service. Do we care? No, because it's actually sort of original to just go nuts with this kind of character once and a while.

So a great game can make an otherwise "we've seen this before" character into something neat, and thankfully those two at least have every reason in the world for being who they are. They have a reason to be able to get away with the things they do. The rest don't.

Sadly, it dawned upon me while writing this that there is a better way to demonstrate everything that I'm trying to say. So 15 minutes later, I threw together what was already in my brain. Squeenix, thank you for making this so easy on me. All I had to do was turn down the blue on Rinoa.

Weight has nothing to do with it.

2010-01-27T08:00:00.000-09:00

As mentioned in the previous posts, I'm on a bit of a retro kick. By a bit, I mean that I'm gorging myself in it these days to make sure that I've significantly played some games I may want to bash in the future. Today's adventure was on the Sega CD with a title you may have heard of: Shining Force CD. I couldn't actually play it on the Sega CD itself because getting myself prepped to see where in the complete storyline the game took place gave me an immediate finger.

Apparently, in order to fully experience the game, you need one of those Sega CD Backup RAM carts which go for about $60-80, and I wasn't about to shell out the cash to play it and Road Rash. I may be wrong about this, and if I read it all right there's a workaround for Shining Force CD, but those two games apparently use up a little too much system-save RAM and may not actually save at a certain point because of it. Instead of testing the workaround of deleting save games before you start a Book (in a way, there's 4 games on one disc) but after completing an earlier Book without resetting, I said "screw it" and went for the trusted and always awesome Kega Fusion emulator.

To set the stage, Shining Force CD is one of the agreed "gems" on the Sega CD, and fans of the series and system constantly hope for it to be released again, whether it be on the DS or as a Virtual Console download (I just can't see this game making it to XBLA or PSN, sorry). The Fire Emblem inspired tactical RPG works exactly the same as Nintendo's offering with a few minor changes in how the system works. Promotions can be given out at the users discretion rather than automatically achieved at a certain level, weapon types are already predetermined for each character and cannot be chosen between, and one character's death will NOT have you throwing your controller and angrily mashing the reset button.

Seeing as how America didn't get the Fire Emblem series, or even a character from it, until over a decade after its release, Shining Force on the Genesis was the series that most Westerners grew up loving. Yet, it's a straight up clone of everything Nintendo did. The major differences are, of course, in the aesthetics. Sticking with the 16-bit era, a player would find that the Sega offering had that cheap arcade style crossed with a little bit of anime from the time with a music track filled with that Genesis synth-sound. Nintendo would of course stick with its SNES music style that's prevalent in Mario, Zelda, and Metroid on the system with tighter graphics. That's about it.

Playing Shining Force CD was actually fun for a while. The game doesn't bog you down with a zillion choices and the controls are easily memorized for those who just wanted to get on with playing the game rather than to sift through menu's and waste a lot of time. In fact, battle preparations never took me but 5 minutes at the most in between fights. The entirety of the game is based around the simplicity of things, which may have something to do with the game being a port of two gaiden Shining Force titles on the Game Gear. If you love the style of the game and absolutely hate the verboseness of Fire Emblem, then you'll be pleased to know that the "talk" button in your camp just gives you a sentence rather than a drawn out speech expressing how they feel after every single fight you get into...

...which leads right into the game's failures. Unlike Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, Ogre Battle, or almost any TRPG out there, Shining Force CD is pretty much devoid of any depth whatsoever. There is no story. The game has a few plot-twists that are so lamely executed that they can hardly be considered twists at all. The game is split into four Books, with the first two being the Game Gear games and the second two being original to the Sega CD, and the final "twist" of the first Book was so bad that it stopped me from even wanting to pick up the second game. In order to play the final two Books, I have to beat the second Book. What I should have done was skipped to the second, but I'm a completist and I didn't think it would be that bad.

Now, if this were on the Genesis like the first two Shining Force games or on its original Game Gear hardware, I wouldn't hate it nearly as much. Yet, they were dealing with the Sega CD, and apart from the elaborate three musical scores and two voiceovers beginning and ending Book 1, there was nothing done to this game to give it any extra oomph.

Though it's not necessarily the game's fault, the system in place is too easy. If you fail a mission or choose to leave it, you can simply restart the mission while keeping all of your gold, items, and experience gained from the original battle. This means that every battle has a purpose (no random or "travel" battles). Pair that with the lack of perma-death and you have yourself an easy-mode game immediately. I found myself loaded with cash and easily 25% more leveled than I'm sure I was supposed to be because I was pretty sure the infamous "reality check" battle would come to remind me how weak I was, but it never came. I ended the game with 8 bona-fida superheroes, and the final bosses were barely denting me. As I said, it's not so much the game's fault, because it made the game a lot less annoying than Fire Emblem. If a character died, I could at least finish the battle at hand.

A few tips before I conclude:

- For those wondering when you should promote characters, don't promote them immediately, but don't wait until level 20 regardless of what FAQ you read. Supposedly, the later Books are a little tougher, but 14-16 is fine. I promoted at 17 and 18 only to find that I turned into an army of marching overkill.

- Stats are randomly assigned as far as I can tell, so if you see that a unit of a particular type isn't matching up well with a similar unit and you're running out of room, just leave him behind and don't think twice. Don't even bother wasting your time leveling up someone who's already in the dust.

- If your original hero, archer, warrior, and knight get beefy early in the game, then you're pretty much invincible for the rest of Book 1.

- If you want something, buy it. You'll rarely run out of money. The most expensive item in the game still leaves you with tons of leftover money if you only did one mission replay, and while I never used it, I pretty much gather that if I did, the final battles would have been a joke.

People have told me to go play Shining Force, and one day I just might. I may even continue to play this game, because for all I can say about it, it's addictive. There's zero depth in Book 1 anyway, and I imagine that it's not going to get any more complicated. If you like simple TRPGs, this can waste hours of your free time and it won't be such a bad thing. I personally just hate the fact that this game was so highly recommended that I dove into it, and the lack of depth and story just made me wonder if I should even bother with the rest of the series. I'm not looking forward to playing through Books 2 and 3 just to unlock Book 4 for the sole privilege of determining whether it gets any better, so I won't. It does make me wonder if the other games have anything more to offer, so I'm not writing this series off yet. Should anyone wish to explain to me how Shining Force CD does get better if I were to persist, then feel free to leave me an e-mail or comment explaining why I shouldn't write this title off.

For its time, this may have been good, but there's little holding this game up to time. It's a time waster, and so far, it's not what I expected one of the "few Sega CD classics" to be.

It'll get you drunk.

2010-01-22T07:37:00.000-09:00

With all of the retro goodness coming out on the XBLA, PSN, and Virtual Console, you would think that somebody out there would really take some pride in doing good work on the actual home consoles they are based on. It's rare, but occasionally there's a pet project out there that takes advantage of the resources our generation has to make this possible. Pier Solar, for example, is a Genesis (optional Sega CD bonuses) RPG currently in development that will be released on actual carts by the homebrew community. The potential is there, but who's taking advantage of it?

Most people limit their idea of "homebrew" to the creation of mods for current IPs. At times, the ideas work really well. Someone once ported Sonic to one of the earlier 3D engines (Doom, Quake, Half Life....I really don't remember nor can I find it) a while back, and it actually looked like it was more fun to play than the vast majority of modern 3D Sonic games because it kept the feel, look, and mechanics intact while making the 3D jump more natural. That's the main problem with the fan community out there for older IPs: something is lost in many of the translations. You absolutely have to have the authenticity to make these projects work, and while I applaud gamers at any point when it comes to putting an original creation out there, I think that when it comes to honoring the past, nothing ruins the acceptance of an idea than to take one single aspect of the retro scene and running with only that.

Staying with Sonic, there's a Sonic fan project site that hosts Sonic Megamix, a combination of 2D Sonic elements into one game that plays like it's completely official. The difference, I think, is that it takes all aspects of what people liked about Sonic games and incorporated them all into something different, yet familiar. It's one thing to make a first person Sonic mod for Half-Life, but it winds up being a novelty in the end compared to something with a little more soul in it.

So when it comes to questioning the homebrew scene, I often wonder why people waste their time with mods when they could be putting real projects into circulation. I'm not even referring to the deceased (choke on it, Square) Chrono projects that nearly made it. I'm talking about something original. Retro is more than just nostalgia. It's also about appreciation for the older game mechanics that have been lost along the way and giving the old hardware news legs. Sometimes, it begins with a simple fan translation project that can be dumped onto a real card or burned to disc. Other times, as with Pier Solar, it gets beyond that.

While I can't speak for programmers, I'd like to imagine that it isn't impossible with the knowledge and resources available to us to make something happen with those old consoles. Consoles such as the Jaguar, Sega CD/32x, 3DO, CD-I, and the Virtual Boy were considered to be terrible consoles, but the limited library of games often made me wonder what kind of games were possible on them if their potential was ever really tapped. The CD-I, for example, had a firm grasp on multimedia applications and offered up some of the cleanest visuals despite extremely limited gaming power. The 3DO and Jaguar have a difficult time proving themselves due to some really shoddy games and severe problems with polygons which were becoming standard at the time, but there was so much power in those consoles to do hundreds of other things really well. The Jaguar never had a game that pushed the hardware, and it makes you wonder. The Virtual Boy had some surprisingly good power behind the goggles, but no one ever even tried to do anything with it because of the crippling red color scheme. The Sega CD and 32x combination never quite caught on the way that Sega hoped, but each addon added more functionality to the Genesis that was only touched in a couple of games.

The majority of these systems have something in common, and that's the CD format. Either the system itself or an appropriate addon gave these systems CD functionality, and I think that the homebrew community has really glossed over this when it comes to choosing projects. Considering that there is zero copy protection on any of those systems, it sort of makes you wonder what's possible.

I dare to dream, but take the FMV movement as an example. YouTube is starting to be experimented with more and more as time goes by, and I've actually seen an interactive game or two hosted through video clips on the site as an experiment. Take that to a console that can handle it, and you've got yourself a homebrew game on your hands that could conceivably get cross released for retro gamers looking for a nostalgia bomb. I doubt any retro fans would pass up a popcorn opportunity to play through a purposefully cheesed horror game in FMV, fully original and littered with tongue in cheek humor about the old days.

Digitized fighting games that cloned Mortal Kombat such as Tattoo Assassins, Way of the Warrior, and Kasumi Ninja weren't the pinnacle of control or quality, but if Bikini Karate Babes has taught us anything, it's that new life can get into this genre at any moment. But why stop there? All it takes is for someone to take it a little more seriously, throw down with some good controls, and suddenly the charm is back. If you don't believe that's possible, find someone versed in the M.U.G.E.N. system and you'll find yourself talking to someone who knows just how feasible that could be.

The point is that while people are out there making useless mods for everything modern, there's still a lot of potential for the retro systems to get their due. With unused hardware to play with, it's not even bold to say that the best games on each of these systems haven't even been made yet. I challenge the homebrew community to stop porting for a week and take a good look into what's possible on those forgotten consoles. It's not only interesting to push boundaries, but to be honest, most of the current projects just don't live up to the retro feel. The spirit has been lost somewhere in translation, and it's time to bring the devotion back to the consoles that inspired you in the first place.

Star Control II: What a game should be.

2010-01-21T07:11:00.000-09:00

I got a 3DO, and through all of my excitement, I wasn't entirely sure what to fire up first. I popped in Slayer and was treated to a 5 minute load of crap that spawned (I need to clean the lens) a now often used "give up" phrase between my friends and I. When it came to good games, though, I was stuck between giving Wing Commander III a go on a standard controller, taking the easy route and popping in Road Rash, or lending myself to the dedicated side of gaming and give Star Control II another chance.

I'll preface this with some history.

I first played Star Control for the Genesis in my grandparents basement when a friend of the family knew that I was going to be in town for a couple of weeks and needed something to do as a kid when the parents wanted to have a glass of wine and play cards upstairs. Star Control actually got my dad sucked in, and he advised me to give it a shot because it was more tactically approached. It just so happened I was a freakin' genius back in the day, so this was right up my ally. I was also a paranoid kid, so the "bad" endings littered throughout the game mixed with the setting of space sort of disturbed me, as things like black holes, supernovas, and the empty void of space tended to make me think way too much into things and get freaked out and depressed.

To be fair, that still happens, but more on that in a second. The bottom line is that the original Star Control gave me a feeling that sat inside of me for years. Strangely, picking up the game again was a complete shock to the lower regions, as it appeared as if someone stomped on my nostalgia with an ugly stick and broke the thing into tiny bits. I just couldn't play it.

The sequel was a game I never knew about until years later when I was trying to remember the name of the Genesis game that was etched in my head. I found out about Star Control II, which sounded a hell of a lot like the game I wanted to remember. Then I gave The Ur-Quan Masters a shot, only I didn't know what the hell I was doing and decided that it wasn't worth my time to find out. It looked like a DOS game whose interface simply didn't age well.

I was wrong.

When my 3DO arrived, I decided I should give it a decent shot on a true console, and found the exact game that I wished somebody would have made. There isn't even a nostalgia filter when it comes to describing it, it's just damned good. There is a reason why it makes all-time lists. The nostalgia filter is sort of humorous when you consider that what awesomeness I remembered from the original game was exactly what I got from the sequel over a decade later.

The story is pretty simple from the start. You were on a mission away from Earth and stumbled across Protocult-...I mean, a Precursor base that turned out to be an automated shipyard. That race was ancient and disappeared long ago for no explained reason, but you return to Earth's doorstep in the ship only to find that there's an impenetrable red force-field surrounding what should have been a pretty blue planet. Humans are now slaves of the Ur-Quan, who seek to do the same to the rest of the universe. Or galaxy. Or whatever, so long as there's a civilization that can be enslaved that they know about.

Your mission, of course, is to take your one ship and forge an alliance capable of defeating the Ur-Quan. To do this, you need to spread out and discover literally thousands of locations in order to seek out friends, scout your enemies, explore for alternate means of help through items and exploration, and gather resources to fuel the fight. It's so freakishly expansive that the at first, the game seems boring, dull, and lonely.

However, this expansiveness is exactly what makes Star Control II the freakishly good experience that most RPGers wish they could find. The feeling of void is echoed in the game's design right down to the musical score and the way you interact on an everyday level within the game, so what seems dull at first turns out to be a massive strength for the title. The thing is, you ARE alone, so parading through the nearly conquered galaxy making as much noise as possible isn't a recipe for success. At first, the game forces you to save your game often and plan out trips with the knowledge given to you while looking over your shoulder all the while, less you be deadified by the Big Bad. Or those crystal guys. Or the spore men. Or....forget it. A lot of the game wants you dead unless you know how to talk your way out of the frying pan.

That isn't to say that everything is hostile, because there are some genuine pansies amongst the stars. Each race in the game has a particular behavior that you can exploit to your own advantage, but you really have to know what you're looking for. Just as I said that trip planning takes thought, so does everything else in the game. You absolutely have to learn about what's going on or you will never succeed, and it is one of the few games out there that completely expects you to do a little homework before waving guns around.

Some of the information is useless, but it really helps you know about the "how" and "why" factors. Most all of the information is useful for that exact same reason. This goes with just about every race in the game, but there is one specific example that sums it all up. Inevitably, you will run into a race with no designated region of occupation. They're everywhere, and it's only a matter of time before one shows up to try and make peaceful relations. Trouble is, they aren't very sentient, and no matter what you do or how nice the conversation begins, it always ends the same way: they try and kill you. You don't exactly know why, but little mentions are made of them during your travels. If you can piece what information you have together and explore in the right area, you can put a stop to the attacks for good.

Because of this, your first foray into the game world is almost certain to end badly or very unproductively. The sheer lack of confidence and knowledge will force newcomers to progress slowly and to be more defensive than anything else, as you will more than likely be suckered into one of the game's not-so-obvious methods to get the "game over". The second time around, however, is where the game really shines. Armed with a little more knowledge and experience, the confidence levels boost and you're off to do some dirty work.

Technically, the game has one small fault against it in that it's just plain dated. Things look a little bland in some areas, but they don't really affect gameplay. Everything else is on the money. Controlling battles takes some getting used to, but they can wind up being extremely fun. Menus are simple enough, and the resource management for your fleet is not only balanced, but sensibly uncomplicated. Conversation is straight forward and easy to get into, and a full voiced cast not only sounds great, but it adds so much more to the experience.

Ultimately, the game is about character. Star Control II fleshes out the personalities, voices, tendencies, culture, and history of each race. You will spend most of your time gathering resources, exploring, and traveling to important locations, but you do all of your interacting and learning through conversation. As I said, the first playthrough is really a primer for things to come, while the second one is putting what you need to know for survival into play while then making your moves to figure out what makes each race tick. It's a joy to put a random fact about a race that you overheard in conversation to good use with impactful results.

Results are what matters, in the end, which is why it's important to consider what makes this game great. Every action you do has an impact on the game world. Well, not every action. Picking up a lump of iron isn't going to make waves, but you can be damned sure that if you figure out what the item you're holding in inventory does, you will definitely affect the entire game world. Even biding your time before getting into a fight can produce valuable information which can not only affect your quest, but give you the verbal ammo you need to avoid the fight and alter the game world all at the same time.

People love this game for a reason, and it's old appearance shouldn't dissuade you from trying. The learning curve can be steep at first, but once it's figured out, the galaxy is yours for the taking. Plunder worlds, make friends and enemies, blow things up, and discover secrets about the galaxy nobody else knew about...it's all there, and it's fun to play. Backed by full voice acting and terrific atmosphere, it's really hard to put the game down once you're familiar with it. More games should try to be like Star Control II. The best part is? It's free here.

I'll tell you what the effect is...

2010-01-13T23:52:00.000-09:00

Apple fans generally go nuts when rumors of the latest iToy hit the tubes. It's sort of cultist in a way, but also a testament to the community that Apple has developed over the last ten years they have spent developing a powerful brand image with mass appeal. More people are jumping over to the Mac side of the force every day, and it's largely due to their marketing penetration that began with the smart designs of the Mac and Macbook lineup and spread out to the iPods, iPhones, and other non-computer devices that really put them back on the map.

With all the talk about the iTablet or whatever it will be called, it started to make me wonder about many things Apple.

First, their devoted fans are sort of nuts, and this announcement sealed the deal. When people get excited over whether or not the iTablet will include a camera, I look at my iPod Nano that does have a camera and wonder why this is big news. It's a camera. People have cameras all over the place. It was a big-ISH deal when the DSi had one, because it was the first time that a gaming system really broke the games-only barrier by adding functionality beyond the game itself. A computer not having a camera is not news, and the fuss I've seen reminds me of a Star Wars convention. The bad kind, I mean, not the good kind.

On top of that, the very second rumors started to get out, every other YouTube link was some extremely white guy reading off the pre-printed list about how everything about it is big news. They even said something along the lines of "my sources tell me..."

You don't have sources. You have the Internet just like everyone else. How do I know? You're "reporting" over YouTube, and you're doing it badly. Of course, if you decided to just lick the iPhone instead, a website may just ignore your useless banter and hire you anyway.

I hate to continue with the Apple bashing, but I have to, because this next part is a mixed bag that both benefits and hurts them all at the same time.

Nothing Apple has ever done has been original. As a matter of fact, Apple's MO is generally to take an idea that has existed for years, patent it, then enforce as much control as possible over it. Laptops existed before the MacBook, MP3 players were widespread before the iPod came around, smartphone users in Japan have for years had the advanced features of the iPhone, and the tablet has been commonplace since before Stargate: Atlantis launched. I say this because they flaunted those tablets every chance they got because Dell was paying them obscene amounts of money to do so.

Nothing about Apple is earth shattering, original, or creative.

Where they succeed, however, is doing what no one else does. Functionality. Yes, there are arguments, and I will be the first to bring them up, but Apple products are generally solid and much more reliable than the jumbled mess of components a PC can turn into. MP3 players used to be garbage. If it wasn't a flimsy plastic piece of crap to begin with, they never stood up to any regular use, were a pain to get music onto, and were obsolete within the year it was bought. Apple changed that into an overpriced product, but they gave it the pride, usability, support, and pipeline that music lovers didn't know they wanted all along. Macs have come a long way, too, becoming functional workstations when serious business needed to be taken care of with as little fuss as possible. The entertainment industry has pretty much preached for years that powerful applications for movie, music, and graphics are much more intuitive on a Mac. iPhones are standard social toys now because they wrap 100 useless products into a single useless product that works well.

This all could have happened before if someone stepped up, but Apple pretty much led the charge when it came to stealing ideas and making them functional. Granted, you're completely limited if you choose them, because there is always a distinct lack of options with it comes to Apple. They choose their hardware so that everything works right every time, but that is usually all you'll ever get. You are literally paying Apple the premium to be organized and nothing else. I've seen idiots set up a wireless Apple household down to the Apple TV. I've seen geniuses fight to get their customized rigs to work right.

Why has no one else stepped up? Well, it's a problem that leads to my third and final remark.

That lack of organization is going to come back and bite someone in the ass sooner than later, and that someone is Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't quite realize it fully, but they know the danger is there. The reason that they are pushing themselves into gaming more now is that they know that they do one thing extraordinarily well, and that is to mercilessly advance things beyond the points of usability. Unfortunately, that also carries risks, but Microsoft is trying to strategically place themselves at a point of power in gaming, and this goes way beyond the XBox brand. Their tech is being used, their ideas are being implemented, and they threw so much money into gaming a decade ago because they knew that there was going to be an endless flow of cash that they wanted to be a part of. They are trying to expand themselves because the monopoly is crumbling fast.

Apple is simply doing what makes too much sense. Microsoft develops something and throws it into the clusterf*** that is the Windows infrastructure, then forgets about it. Apple picks it up, organizes it, waits until they can make it work right, then releases it for a lot of money. Apple has started small, getting their devices into people's pockets without them ever buying a Mac. Google started small on the internet, and is now proving that they can make an impact outside of the browser. The Linux crowd is always dangling the "it's free, and it works better" sign in front of them, and for good reason. Microsoft is left with Windows, but that's not going to last too much longer.

Soon, all three are going to make an emphatic push all at once. Google's OS is going to nab the netbook hold from Windows XP, and in doing so, they will take aim at the flagship. Apple is working its way up, but one day, people are going to realize that the iTablet is only a whisker away from being a Mac, and there will be too much comfort there to ignore. Linux is going to get experimented on more and more by people looking to delve deeper into how a computer works. There isn't much room left for Microsoft after that.

Not that I'm legitimizing Apple, don't get me wrong. It's just that Microsoft could have really pushed the hardware guys to give us a good tablet years ago. You know, when it was new and original. At least when Apple releases the iTablet, it won't cost so damned much to go buy one I'll actually use.

The return

2010-01-05T02:02:00.000-09:00

It's been quite a long time between posts, and the hiatus hasn't been very inspiring. Too many games became available to me at once, and most of them have been due to the retro bug hitting me quite hard. The good news is that I've managed to reclaim a Dreamcast, then turn right around and score 2 Sega CD's and a 3DO in the span of a month. That also means that I haven't had time for anything new between that and the holidays.

Returning from it all, I had the knowledge that the Dante's Inferno demo was available for download, so I checked out the PSN to find even more goodies waiting for me. I decided to give three game demos a legitimate change to catch my attention, with one coming out as a decisive winner.

First up is Dante's Inferno, an extremely indilgent vacation through the levels of hell as Kratos. I mean, Dante. God of War of written all over this game, and if nobody has noticed, we seem to be in a 3-D beat-em-up golden age. If you haven't seen the new Castlevania trailer, then get on Youtube and look for yourself, but with that on the way, Bayonetta, Ninja Gaiden, and God of War III on the way, you're in for some serious good times if you're a fan of the genre. To top it all off, the lot of them are looking to be golden.

I haven't been into the genre much, but it doesn't take a lot to jump right back into it. The descent into Hell is colorful, and yes, you get to see your first rack in the first cinematic. It's a greatly stylized game, but it's still the exact same as God of War, not that you'll care. I can appreciate taking an already good thing and changing an already amazing setting to something equally badass, and that's what Dante's Inferno does.

Second up was MAG's public beta, and I have extremely mixed feelings about what on paper came out sounding like a FPSers wet dream. 256 players. MMO. Player interaction with the overarching "war". Massive maps. Rank actually meaning something other than longevity. Vehicles. Insane amounts of customization.

Trouble is that Modern Warfare 2 is out. I know that we're talking about two completely separate styles with completely different server/processor demands, but the difference slaps you in the face. MAG is accurate, don't get me wrong, but you're going to spend most of your time passively fighting a war rather than directly fighting for every breath of your AMP infused live. The frame rate doesn't chug and the graphics are amazing, but they are most lacking that crisp feeling that draws people into MW2 among all other games.

As a Battlefield killer, it may just have the stuff, though I didn't get to experience all of that goodness because the map I played was pretty limited in scope and I got bored. If you're into Battlefield, give this a shot because it's right up your ally, but if not, you may end up bored like me.

Finally, there was Bayonetta...which immediately put everything else I played to shame. Dante's Inferno may wait for the discount bin before I try it, because Bayonetta did enough with its demo to convince me to buy that without question. It does everything Devil May Cry and God of War do, just better. I was actually done buying games this winter until I played this game.

That's all for the roundup. Brief, yes, but I'm still busy with life so all I can spare is the ten minutes for the moment.

Guide dang it!

2009-12-04T12:12:00.000-09:00

If you don't know about this site, tvtropes.org is something you should check out at some point. It's an awful lot like Wikipedia in some ways, and yet completely different. It's a listing of devices used in media, and while the site began listing ones used in television programs, it has since expanded to include other mediums. Video game tropes make up a large part of their site, and it's really interesting to look through and see just how common a particularly loved or hated plot device has expanded beyond your game.

The title in question is something that has always bothered me since the dawn of gaming. Guide Dang It! is a device that described when a player can only come up with the solution to a problem or the means of obtaining something by using a guide, since conventional and common sense approaches just don't work.

Take Shadowgate, for instance. The old NES classic was not only difficult and threatening, but the sheer abuse of power made this game a frustrating beast for gamers at the time. Should you wander into a room carrying the wrong item on your person, you'd die. If you were stuck at a dead end and there was a device at the dead end needing activation, a player could attempt to go through their item stack to see what presented a solution. Only problem is that the player could be killed by using any of the wrong items. It's just tough to play this game without feeling like a masochist, and that's not even the best example.

Which brings me to the Zodiac Spear. Sure, there were guides and FAQs available for this game the second that is was released. Imagine that you bought this game and headed off to a cabin with no internet, phone, or guide. Would you ever find the Zodiac Spear or know of its existence? Without a guide, and if everyone who worked on the game shut up, would anyone have found it? For those who don't know what the weapon is, it's one of the ultimate weapons in the game, and while there are a couple methods to get it, the widely accepted version of acquiring the item involves you not opening certain treasure chests in the game. Within the game, there are no hints about this.

Which leads me to wonder, what is the point of guides? It's been suggested that guide makers pressure developers to sneak these secrets in to sell guides, but there are too many games (specifically RPGs) that include secret stashes of items or special endings requiring the player to be absurdly obsessive. I consider myself to be a capable gamer with a pretty decent melon, but sometimes I will sit there playing an RPG wondering why it's second nature for me to have the guide before I even begin.

To take this point further, this doesn't bother me so much if the game is completable without a guide. If I can beat the game without a guide and still discover the full extent of the story, then I don't bother unless I'm completely stuck on how to advance in the game (which is rare). If I can advance on my own, I'd rather not use a guide, and as you can probably tell from previous posts, I don't have a fascination with ultimate weapons. Generally, by the time I can get it, I don't really need it anyway. Some game secrets are specifically designed to pair with a guide and meant for only obsessive completists. So, unless there's a huge plot secret or a secret ending, guides don't make sense to me.

That's when it pisses me off, though. It's when developers put these super-secret paths into their games and apply story weight to them that truly pisses me off. If there's some random hidden room that contains the key to the "true ending", or a character that needs recruiting so that you can face the real final boss, sometimes it's obvious to the player, and sometimes it's anything but. I seriously wonder at times why a developer would choose to put something vital in a game and require that the player be insane to have figured out how to get it. I know that selling guides is a factor, but who comes up with some of this stuff expecting a regular player to come up with a solution on their own? Go to GameFAQs and look up secrets for the latest Fire Emblem game and tell me that you know somebody who would have discovered this stuff on their own with no help whatsoever.

It makes me curious, though. How many huge game secrets for legacy games have honestly been discovered by players and not leaked out by the companies themselves? Are there any game secrets that have been left undiscovered? On top of that, there's the reverse question of what would happen if, hypothetically, Squeenix released Final Fantasy XIII without a guide. Would players have any clue about getting ultimate weapons, summons, and side-quests? How would that pan out?

Finally, I'd like to see a game be challenging by avoiding guides altogether. To clarify, I think that someone out there should experiment with a guide-proof game, forcing the player to get creative and to explore the game on their own terms rather than having their hand held. Some players out there rely on guides for survival and completion without using brainpower. I've seen it happen where a friend will get a brand spanking new game complete with guide, and every time that game is played the guide is open. How is that playing a game, and have games become so shady in their structure that guides are a required game tool?

On the topic of how to make a game guide-proof, I've had some pretty good ideas in the past. Randomization is part of the equation, but alone it's an entirely broken idea. If you have to do something at a certain location, then a guide can always help you so long as you can find that location. If an enemy shows up in a different place each playthrough, the strategy will remain the same, so it's not the biggest deal in the world.

What is required is a complex game system that avoids becoming a jigsaw puzzle, and by that, I mean that a game should make sense and not rely on the complexity as the game's sole selling point. Otherwise, the game turns out to be a jigsaw puzzle where you're spending the entire game piecing together the method and order rather than letting the game speak for itself. So, randomization is part of the equation, but there has to be some sense involved. NPC's who have dynamic dialogue can help avert this so that the player can discover things in a sensible fashion within the game world rather than piecing together the game world itself. It's just one example, but I hardly ever see this used in a game. If I go to GameFAQs, I know the exact location of every item, the odds of getting it, the method of getting it, who to take it to and where to find them, and what taking it to that person will do. It just doesn't seem very...satisfying.

Anyway, rant over. Rescuing laundry.

Achievement unlocked: Read every page of the history book

2009-12-03T23:30:00.000-09:00

I'm still playing Demon's Souls, and it has become a much more impressive beast with each hour I put into it. It just gets better. Yes, I had this the night it came out, but I lapsed quite a bit when about a dozen new games came out that demanded my attention. The time allowed me to reflect and get a fresh perspective on what I could do to survive a little longer, and it has certainly helped. Since I'm not fearing corners anymore, it has given me more time to appreciate the attention From Software gave to their game world, and start to viciously hate some other games out there that avoid this.

Starting with Half-Life 2 as one of the best examples of all time, the concept of the "game world" should be an awful like what is done with movies in that a movie studio doesn't hand out a book with every showing to explain everything that's going on. That's what the two hours are for. It's a studio's job to develop a world and immerse the viewer in it. Blade Runner did not ask that you read the Phillip K. Dick novel, nor did it explain what had put Earth into such decay. Instead, it showed in a few seconds how pollution had accumulated, and some of the most moving passing words in the history if films described the breadth of human colonization. Nowhere did this movie slap speeches or texts to explain things, and left that task to the brilliant visuals that told their own story to fill in any gaps.

Half-Life 2 achieves this beautifully, expecting the player to gain knowledge of the events around them by brief context clues and the interpretation of how the events of humanity came to be. The storyline can, in fact, by summed up briefly by speeches, but 90% of what's going on is left for your senses to complete. It is a world of immersion at heart, and it is a plus for Demon's Souls to carry on with this approach to storytelling. Do either of these games force you on fetch quests or "catch 'em all" achievement lists so that you can understand every piece of the story? Are either of these games pretentious enough to explain more than is necessary?

Failures of storytelling amount to dropping the midi-chlorian bomb in game form. Less explanation, more application.

In a strange twist, I chose Blade Runner for its storytelling strengths when a game largely inspired by it came out in the form of Snatcher. Snatcher is a text game that requires you to investigate nearly everything in the game world, but that world is so freakishly detailed that it even has a database dedicated to educating the player on the past and present of the game world. While it seems as if this would be a complete storytelling failure, it actually works well. Some games can pull it off while others cannot.

It's pretty simple, though. If you're a game devoted to information and brains with a slow pace, then describing more gives a game a novel-like strength. If you're spending most of your time knee-deep in action, than information should be more inferred and shown as creative eye candy rather than taking the pansy route out and dropping pick-ups along the way. While it's true that I had been impressed with the Web of Intrigue within Prototype, it was the introduction of a concept that had me thinking positively, not the way it truly played out.

In games where a lot of visuals are going on, what a developer chooses to show carries more weight than how they usually choose to explain it. Aeris' ghost in the later parts of Final Fantasy VII caused a gigantic wave of interest, while I do not know of any audio log that has garnered any significant attention.

The times, they are a changin'

2009-12-02T01:56:00.000-09:00

A year ago, the PS3 was in pretty bad shape. Black Friday had come and gone, and the PS3 got whooped on in the process. Rock Band 360 bundles were flying off shelves, and there was no way that Sony was going to catch up. There were still high hopes, but some people honestly thought that the PS3 had taken a reeling punch that it would never fully recover from. The library was utter crap, games were too expensive, the hardware was too expensive, the system was a monolith, and the company had no real identity.

Thankfully, Sony didn't tap out, and instead pulled itself out of the gutter with a mixture of guts, timing, and pure luck. They cut the price of the console by 25%, worthy bundles started showing up, and whatever loss they were going to take on Black Friday in system sales they were going to make up for with an install base that is still growing by leaps and bounds. There's no easy way to say this, but once the price of the PS3 was within reach of mortals, there is no question that the Xbox was second on the population's mind. Sales figures prove it, and almost everyone I know that was without a system snapped up the PS3 like it was common sense. Even a few Xbox devoted have ceded that the PS3 is sitting pretty right now, and it's only going to get better.

Before you yell "fanboy", I still think that Sony has problems that they need to sort out. They're still the loser, but all the facts point to a wicked comeback, and that's worthy news. Over the past 3 months, they have managed to keep pace with Microsoft. In August, Sony was behind by 6.4 million consoles. Currently, they are about 6.6 million units behind. For a console that had the "loser" tag on it, it's amazing that they kept up. Cleaning house on Black Friday means that the gap will shrink, and the holiday season isn't even over. We'll find out how strong the PlayStation brand name is over the course of the month, but if last weekend was any indication, they could conceivably bring the gap well under 6 million by the time the year is over with.

The new "it only does everything" slogan in blue seems to be working for Sony, effectively ceding one of the most expensive marketing errors their company has ever produced and returning the console to its roots. Right down to the logo and plastic casing, this system is finally reminding people what owning PS2 dominance felt like. The more familiar look is likely to get a few sales back in Sony's corner, and their Sony "family" is finally getting some real use. Even the media marketplace is finally looking really good, and rumors are heavy that the upcoming backwards compatibility should be a free "thank you" to follow through on promises rather than a paid scam.

To think, all of this good news for Sony and their potential sales, and we still haven't even made it to Final Fantasy XIII.

Yet, there I go, mentioning software like Sony had planned this. No, they got really lucky. A year ago, PlayStation owners were wondering just where their titles were. The shelves were barren of anything worth playing exclusive to the black beast. A year later, everything has changed.

Demon's Souls came out of nowhere to pacify the RPG fans who were about to lose their minds over a lack of truly great games for the genre. Sure, Atlus was certainly surprised enough to reprint the game, but Sony sure as hell didn't expect that kind of attention and wound up with a terrific piece of ammunition for the fight.

Then there were the exclusives. Infamous came out and met expectations. Uncharted 2 blew everyone away. The downloadable hit Fat Princess caught attention when the PSN was notorious for having few exclusives. The future looks to be in good shape, too. MAG and God of War III are on the way, and the Last Guardian was looking like a worthy follow up for Team ICO.

Good multiplatform games then started to swarm. Modern Warfare 2. Batman: Arkham Asylum. Bayonetta. Ninja Gaiden 2. Borderlands. Dragon Age. Assassin's Creed 2.

For once, a PS3 owner can feel overwhelmed by the amount of great games out there. It's partially luck that it all happened so fast, but it's also what happens when you put a powerful system out there that no one has truly figured out how to use yet. The PlayStation library is going to get better in a hurry, and we haven't even made it to the point in the current console generation where niche titles start to see the light of day. Atlus hasn't made a major release outside of Demon's Souls, which they only published, so you can count on even better times ahead.

So yeah, they got lucky. They had a lot go right for then in the span of a year that really saved their brand, part of it planned, part of it blind luck, and part of it was also taking that blind luck and running with it. This is Sony we're talking about, so it's entirely possible they may choose to pull off some bonehead move to alienate the populace yet again. For now, PS3 owners can finally smile.

As a final note, to the many Diggers and media boys out there who think that the current generation is on the fade, think with your brains. We aren't even at the halfway point. Both the 360 and the PS3 will peak in the near future, but we haven't even touched on what both consoles are truly capable of. Developers are still learning what they can do with the hardware.Microsoft is sitting pretty with a "stable" piece of hardware with a good lifespan, and they will expand functionality. Sony still wants to make a profit, and their system hasn't even begun to peak. A new system would be a huge flush of cash, partners, publicity, and trust.

Why haven't I mentioned Nintendo? Well, it's obvious that if they really want to stay in the game, they're going to have to go the DSi route and release an updated Wii system, or the "Wii HD" as it has been termed. Third parties familiar with GameCube and Wii experience are already sending games out the door at a blistering pace and would LOVE a boost in power to take advantage of the install base and cheap development costs while seriously competing with the other companies' major titles. Expect Wii Motion Plus to be built in to the Wiimote, better graphical capabilities, 720p, a bigger focus on digital media, and a couple of serious ports (RE5). I'd even go so far to say that they will sneak a camera and a good microphone onto the system and Wiimotes, as well as putting some focus on social media. This would not only give them video chat and an integrated headset, but also evolve their patented motion controls to compete with Natal and the Wand. Expect it.

Thus ends my "state of the big 3" that is customary every other month.

As if enough non-related ranting had already happened...

2009-12-01T11:39:00.000-09:00

If you've been paying attention to the world of sports this week, you'll notice that Tiger Woods has finally made headlines for something other than his golfing exploits. The dependably clean cut star found himself in a car crash, and he'd rather not talk about it. Police have tried to get a warrant to further investigate the matter, believing the circumstances to be a little more than an "oops" on Tiger Woods' part. As of posting this, police have cited him for careless driving and nothing more.

Since news of the crash came to the media's attention, Tiger has maintained that the matter is private and that he will remain silent to everyone including the police. However, this story has since exploded to epic scandal proportions. Was he on drugs? Was he having an affair? Was there domestic abuse? The facts don't match up the way I like them, something is afoot!

Well, tough.

I'm not a Tiger follower because I'm not a golf guy, so maybe I don't understand where the obsession is coming from to turn him into an evil character overnight. Why everyone is demanding information on this is beyond me, because no one has the right or reason to do so. Even looking at the reports, I don't see why anyone thinks something has to be going on in the background. He got into a car accident and some things happened that seemed weird, but in the end, it was a car accident. You are specifically told by anyone who knows anything about car accidents to divulge only the facts that are necessary when describing the incident. You don't say what you think, you don't say what you feel, and you certainly don't tell people anything more than they need to know.

Seeing as how I have heard this story told second hand a few times now, it sounds like Tiger was mad at something, so he got in his car and tried to cool off, only he was flustered enough to make a mistake and hit something that wrecked him. Have you ever been flustered behind the wheel of a car? If you get pulled over and questioned by your insurance and the cops, do you really think it's a good idea to describe in detail that you were pissed off at something, what that something was, and that you were guilty of something other than a second of bad driving? Of course you don't. You're nuts if you do.

What happened with Tiger happens with people you know all the time, and we tell those people to do the exact same thing Tiger is doing now. Shut up, only tell them the facts, pay the fine, and be happy it wasn't more serious than it was.

If you're still not convinced, go find a guy at your workplace that just got into a car accident. Proceed to tell him that you know the truth, and that he was really just hopped up on painkillers before he got in the car to go sleep with a downtown hooker. See where that gets you.

When your spouse won't stop asking where you got the black eye from, I'm pretty sure it'll just be a misunderstanding that you don't want to talk about.

I hate America, and you do too

2009-12-01T09:18:00.002-09:00

With a title like that, you'd think I'd start spouting verses from some cult pamphlet.

Searching through the mountain of crap that is Facebook just to find out if a friend dropped a message about the Saints/Patriots game, I discovered how much less I like the service when every other friend seemed to have an opinion about God or America that was pretty narrow in scope. Having a belief is not a bad thing, but as I've said before, things are getting to the point where insanity is a gentle way of describing the way humanity has become.

The reason is that all of these beliefs are becoming antiquated, or at least they should be. When I was a child, I believed that the American way of life was the only way to go. Even now, I don't see anything particularly wrong with the hope that if one works hard, one can succeed and reach their desired goals. Our rights should be protected, because we are human beings, but the entire concept of this has gone out the window. "Real American" is a term that actually fights against what we're supposed to believe in. If the "American Way" and our unofficial Christian religion actually had anything to say, then each individual American wouldn't spend their time defending how it is their God-given right to use others as a pedestal. Seriously, listen to these people who get up on their podiums and say, almost exactly, these phrases:

"If the government gets any more control, I will no longer be able to field a company of fat CEO's, and that is un-American."

"You are a traitor if you believe that caring for the well-being of others is a priority of the country."

"It's OK to take liberties away from people, as long as its not me. That would be Socialism/Communism."

"It's OK to cheat people our of their money. Asking me to spare a few bucks from my multi-million dollar bank account to make sure someone doesn't die from a cold is not OK."

"Our President showed respect for another world leader? Well, he must be an evil socialist, because a true american capitalist would have pissed on his shoes."

I could go on for hours, but I don't care who you are, you simply cannot argue that these things have been said. We're not Americans. We're elitist pricks who care nothing of others, so long as they aren't bombing us.

You can save your hate mail for another few minutes, though, because Americans aren't the only problem. Rather, the country is just making obvious what the real problems are, and sometimes it's even nice to be part of a country that is at least willing to tell some nutcase that no, he can't have a mass murder device to play with.

It's people, in general, that are the problem, and it is a problem that I've been dwelling on for years. It hit me like a ton of bricks and has been raking at my brain ever since I read an article about how we haven't found intelligent life "out there" yet. This has everything and nothing to do with alien life. The ideal behind the article is one that has been debated ever since we've seriously considered first contact a real possibility. If there's intelligent life out there, how come they haven't contacted us? Are they smart enough to stay away? Are we egotistical to think that our green time bomb is worth the trouble to a species capable of interstellar travel? Maybe there's nothing out there. Maybe it's already extinct. Maybe we're lucky.

Or, maybe, as the article pointed out, the entire idea of "civilization" is a counter-productive word in itself. Maybe having the brains to create a civilization and the ego to shape it is ultimately what prohibits us from advancing to the point of being star-tourists. When the time comes, are we really going to be able to save ourselves from anything? At this point, no.

People think that communism is evil, but that wasn't always the idea. On paper, communism was the perfect idea that needed a little tweaking, but communism has never existed as it was meant to. Communism is meant to be something along the lines of a zombie survival clan. The team is led by the best brain or two, the guns go to the best shooters, the rest gather resources, and the food and shelter is shared. If someone is cut loose, it's for the greater good and not for greed. Even that doesn't ever play out well, so you can see why communism never worked. People have needs and desires, and these needs and desires will clash. If everything is shared, someone will want more. Communism was always corrupt this way.

Capitalism, on the other hand, is a bunch of people who don't know when enough is enough. There is a girl I know that is the epitome of capitalism. She has never worked hard in her life and has always had everything handed to her on a silver platter. She has never earned anything, but rather, gets on the good side of those who would give it to her for free. She honestly believes that if it came down to it, she deserves health care more than your un-insured mother. Why? Well, despite her supposed belief in sharing, it is also her belief that despite the fact that her name has never been the primary recipient of health care, it is being shared with her in a capitalistic fashion, so that makes it OK. It bothers her that the government would allow someone to have health insurance that didn't work for it, even though the main priorities of her day are makeup and playing with her iPhone, none of which she bought. Though, I do suppose that this description would classify her as a pet more than anything, so maybe my argument is moot.

In reality, it all comes down to what mankind is capable of if we would just drop these labels. It's sad, but if a republican, a democrat, a communist, and a socialist were driving in a limo with a trunk full of food through the Sahara Desert and they came across a starving toddler....do you really think that there would be any argument as to what happens next? This is what we are capable of. If we took all of the food that this country wasted in the span of a week and tallied it up, we would find that world hunger is quite possibly the easiest thing in the world to solve, but we just refuse to do it. If the top ten most profitable companies in the world decided that they would take half of their yearly profits and were to fund new schools with them instead, then we would make a significant leap forward in our planet's overall education. We won't, and sometimes we can't because of other ego problems. Let's face it, if you start dumping several million dollars of goods in front of a country that hasn't stabilized itself yet, then someone is going to demand control over that for some stupid reason.

Then, there's religion. Please, somebody, ANYBODY, write me and tell me a religious doctrine that includes the decimation of non-believers. I actually don't know the answer to that. It would seem like religions mostly say, "live a good life in this way, live by these rules, and you will be rewarded."

Since when has humanity ever obeyed by those rules? In the average day, and American knowingly breaks at least one religious rule that they claim to believe in. Just owning a TV is grounds for getting thrown into Hell if you pay attention. Religion ultimately makes us go at each other's throats more than anything else when it comes to the grand scheme of things. You'd think that it was the US Armed Forces vs. terrorists, but some people have even spun that into an Americans vs. Muslim cage fight.

And we make weapons. Lots of weapons. We call it defense, but we really just perfect the art of killing. We can do it clean, quietly, and make sure no one ever knew it happened, or we can create the biggest bang in the history of bombs. It all comes down to style and the message you're trying to get across. They don't call it the "business end" without reason.

One day, none if it will matter. A black hole, supernova, meteor, alien death fortress, grey goo, polar shift.....none of those will discriminate. It won't matter what color you are, what race you are, what religion you are, what country you're from, what clothes you wear, what car you drive, etc. It's just going to kill you and bring some peace and quiet to the solar system. Funny thing is, we're entirely capable of handling all of that.

Most likely, we'll kill ourselves off first. Here we are, arguing about global warming, and the entire argument is the most worthless argument ever seriously debated in the planet's history. We're pumping tons of toxins into the air every minute of the day, and nobody in their right minds can honestly say that is a good thing regardless of whether or not it's causing the warming or not. If the world is cooling or warming, shouldn't we also stop arguing about who started it and maybe, you know, use our powerful human brains to decide what we're going to do when it ultimately happens? We're screwed. We're never going to get off this rock. We could, but we don't want to. We're incapable.

Watch Star Trek IV. Kirk winds up in the 80's with the crew of the Enterprise in an effort to save the future Earth because of the destructive sins of its past. In particular, humpback whales went extinct due to excessive and needless hunting practices. Yet, even though this point is pummeled through your brain like a jackhammer, it's something else in the movie that makes even more sense. Kirk gives away a few bills to each crew member, saying that the people of 80's Earth still use currency.

With all of the clamor made about having to start using Chinese currency or joining the EU, think about how things would be if we ditched money altogether. If we actually put ourselves to the test and did what humanity was capable of, we wouldn't need the stuff. It's really up to you to think about the different flavors of good that could be.

You may argue that you are absolutely against a world government. That's fair, but it makes no sense if the government was a good one. You may argue that religions would die out, but I don't see why they would have to. No one ever said that in order to succeed as a race, we had to block out the eastern sun or bulldoze a temple. You may also argue that capitalism would die, but why is that a big problem? You mean to honestly tell me that the value of a person's music or the ability to write "yes" on a sheet of paper makes them worth more than the person who works hard to make sure that their buildings are safe to sit in? I, for one, can't make that judgement. No one can. If music was free, would we have pirates? If we didn't have pirates, would we get spied on as much? If a person had all the resources in the world at their disposal to improve themselves, then how many frustrated people would we lose in this world that potentially could have caused the rest of us harm?

Sure, it sounds like utopia, but we are a species, and we're supposed to be surviving. We're not doing a very good job of it. Surviving means eventually getting off this rock, because it's going to go away eventually. Utopia on Earth would not mean that our species would lack a goal or challenge to push us forward and retain our humanity. We'd find trouble elsewhere, and we'd always have a little chaos on the homefront, but at least our species would have finally done what our parents always told us to do; go out there and be somebody.

Which is funnier when you consider that every politician and pundit whines and cries (see Beck, Glenn) about how their parents don't know anything.

A sacrifice for the greater good

2009-11-30T07:50:00.000-09:00

So now that the explanation is out of the way, which series need to make like a tree?

Some of our most loved series may be ageless in plot, but unfortunately for them, time passes in the real world and the grey hairs are showing. The next five games you're about to see have seen their time come and go, and while the concepts that they introduced may have captivated us at some point, those mechanics need to find a new home.

Final Fight

Once the definitive arcade beat-em-up, Final Fight lost its luster once games got their third dimension. The original game was given two proper console sequels that lived up to expectations, but in the 14 years since, its been hard to get a good reminder of what it was like to break through the gangs of Metro City without going all the way back to the original.

It's difficult to want this series to be obsolete, but it is. Any other game could pick up the basic formula and run with it. The series was known for doing one thing extremely well, and its that very same thing that other bigger titles lack. Many gamers long for the days when a good street fight meant responsive controls and predictable behavior from their character without the need for physics to mess up a good thing. Since physics are here to stay, developers have gone the way of lock-on targeting/combos to make a 3-D plane go the 2-D route, and almost any game you pick up will have the basic hand-to-hand system Final Fight gave us.

Guy and Cody are back in Street Fighter, and Capcom is known to re-use characters if the opportunity presents itself, so you won't be seeing the last of Metro City. However, its time for the Final Fight franchise to take a bow.

Should be incorporated by: Grand Theft Auto

Driver

This one goes without saying. Driver did a lot of things right when it was first released, but each installment since has been an effort to do expand the series beyond what it did so well. When it came to feeling like you were truly behind the wheel, Driver was one of the very best on the original Playstation. With each sequel less welcome than the one before it, it's easy to put this series on the list.

If anything, Rockstar has single handedly made this game obsolete. What Grand Theft Auto doesn't do, Midnight Club does. Any sandbox game worth its salt is going to have driving in the mix, and we now know that at least one or two of them are going to do it better than a Driver game will. When you do one thing well, yet another series that isn't even focused on that aspect does it better, you have a good reason to hang it up for good.

Should be incorporated by: Done.

Fable

Probably the biggest shocker on the list, but it really shouldn't be. Fable's main drawing point is that you interact with the world, and in turn, the world reacts to you. The sheer freedom of action addicts many gamers, alluring many of them to seduce entire towns while buying up all their property behind their backs. Even your character's appearance changes depending on how you plan the game, leaving this western-RPG with one of the most interactive gaming worlds every created.

The trouble is that no one can put up a good argument that the story is any good for either game. While the concept is sound, it winds up being boring, leaving many players hoping for sequels that would hopefully improve the whole experience by delivering on false promises made by a certain developer and his big mouth. That day will never come, because Fable is an idea, and unfortunately one devoid of any real direction or execution.

While I hate to refer back to GTA again, San Andreas gave a glimpse as to what would happen if this idea were incorporated into a real game. If you ran a lot, your character would be more fit. Almost any game with an RPG feel could take the mechanics Fable used and put them into a better narrative, and sandbox games could use those same mechanics to beef up general freedoms. Hell, it's already happening. Why do we need Fable?

Should be incorporated by: Grant Theft Auto, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and if Blizzard wanted to be a prick, World of Warcraft

Sonic the Hedgehog

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. On the Genesis, his games were golden, offering blistering speed in a time when games just didn't move fast at all. Even the platforming wasn't all bad for its time. As with Final Fight, 3-D just wasn't too kind to the blue blur, and the games suffered from flaws that could encompass a list 100 entries long. For starters, the plots were just plain bad, made even worse by the fact that the games actually focus on them. To be fair, if one were to buy into Sega's claim that creating hundreds of miles of "track" isn't realistic and that the action needs to be broken up somehow, this makes sense, but the plots don't have to be that bad, do they? Then the plots are voiced over by people who make you mute the TV. If you can bear all of this, you're not even treated to true Sonic speed 90% of the time.

What's worse is that the series has run its course even on the 2-D plane. Even with good handheld games being released, it all feels like a rehash. There was once a way to save this series, but I don't think it can be done anymore. If the Sonic universe had incorporated, say, Super Monkey Ball in between the speed sections, then Sonic would have had something else to offer besides speed that would actually have been good. Diversity doesn't mean sticking 10 other Sonic-clones into a game to serve the same terrible purpose.

Should Sonic himself go? No way. He should stick around and be the fast and badass mammal we all want him to be. Under no circumstances, though, should he ever be allowed to get a full game to his credit again.

Should be incorporated by: Mario, a Sega Universe title, Mega Man (all you have to do is ask)

Ridge Racer

A mainstay for Sony consoles, Ridge Racer has consistently been the marker of a new generation. From launching a new Playstation to showing off what an aging console is capable of, Ridge Racer has always been there to remind us that racing titles can be for everyone while looking damn good in the process.

When I bought my PS3, I immediately went for a trio of racing games to test the console. Burnout: Paradise, Gran Turismo 5: Prologue, and Ridge Racer 7 were those games, and I felt that I was covered as far as my racing needs were concerned. Yet, I never went back to Ridge Racer. The original Ridge Racer and R4 have always been two favorites, but I thought that the series suffered from a couple of miscues outside of that. Little did I know that the series was generally a miscue of its own. It's hard to say it, but Ridge Racer doesn't offer anything impressive any more. If you need insane arcade speed, then you play Burnout. If you want realism, you play Gran Turismo. If you're looking for a sensory overdose, then you play Wipeout. Ridge Racer used to be known for its solid racing mechanics and fun drifting, but the drifting is completely overused to a laughable extent and it doesn't feel like Ridge Racer is fun to play anymore.

Everything that Ridge Racer does well is easily transferable to another game. When it comes to launching a system, then Ridge Racer is really the only game in town to get your racing fix. If you have any patience at all, then you will be rewarded for not spending your money, and while it pains me to say it, that pretty much makes this series obsolete.

Should be incorporated by: Burnout (with a city based in Japan), and Gran Turismo (having a true arcade mode)

So there you have it. Nothing against the characters of these games, because we all want to keep the likes of Guy, Sonic, and Reiko, but their series have nothing to offer anymore. Each game possesses a quality that is great, but would be better served working for another team, because those qualities alone do not make a great, or even good, game. Not that it matters, because at least four of these titles will have another sequel.

Law of Convergence

2009-11-30T05:27:00.000-09:00

If anybody read the Grand Theft Auto V retort a few days ago, you may remember that I mentioned the Law of Convergence. I'm almost sure that there is a proper term for this, but I'm too lazy to find it and I came up with it a long time ago anyway. Regardless, the idea is sort of commonplace now, and is relevant alongside Moore's Law and Chaos Theory.

The technical explanation? Well, it doesn't even strictly apply to games. The idea is that computing power, as it increases, allows for more complex applications to be processed as time passes. As more powerful applications are developed, the job of the new application is to also perform tasks that, at one point, were standalone applications that used the bulk of that computing power. The most basic example is the calculator. When computers first came around, they had to be the size of rooms to perform basic calculator functions and only that. Years later, a calculator could be written as an application booted by the computer, but the computer could only run one application at a time. Even later, an operating system enabled the calculator task to be performed within an operating system, which in essence, is an application. Now, a calculator is incorporated into any program that uses numbers.

The Law of Convergence also allows for the re-allocation of smaller applications as trends progress. Take AOL, for instance. AOL contained a full suite of internet applications, but AOL was not necessary as an application in itself. As time passed, the functions of AOL such as Instant Messenger and their e-mail service were no longer incorporated into the AOL program, but were broken down into individual parts. Some services become obsolete, and Instant Messenger was given its own lightweight program to be reincorporated elsewhere.

While the idea is applicable to most technology, its most visible use is in social media and gaming. Grant Theft Auto IV, for example, lets you play an arcade game while your character is in a pool hall. This game is your standard puzzle game that could have been, and still could be, sold as a standalone game. It has been converged into a larger game at the most literal level. Grand Theft Auto, as a sandbox game, pretty much exemplifies what convergence actually does for gaming apart from this time waster.

As the series progressed, it started taking on the traits of other games. Driver, for example, was pretty much screwed as a competitor because it only did one thing really well: driving. The physics were great and it was loads of fun to play, but eventually Rockstar took everything that was good about the driving and placed it into their flagship series, eliminating the need for another Driver to ever see the light of day. GTA: SA started to use elements from western-RPG's to promote character growth (sometimes literally), and GTA IV has a rudimentary hand-to-hand combat system that allows for basic combos. Flight is also included in the modern games, as well as boating. Many side missions even encourage you to take a stab at taxi missions and street racing, ideas that still manage to have full games devoted to them.

Basically, Grand Theft Auto will eventually be Midnight Club, Crazy Taxi, Final Fight, Black, Fable, and several other games wrapped up into one title. Unless another game beats Rockstar to the punch, it's going to happen. It's inevitable. It's law.

So there's the explanation. Now, getting on to the application...

Minus the spider

2009-11-30T00:55:00.000-09:00

After months of having a "sort of want" view of Infamous (I won't be using inFAMOUS here), a deal too good to pass buy put the game into my possession. I gave a Twitter post reminding of the Infamous/Arkham Asylum/Dark Knight Blu-Ray PS3 bundle for the regular PS3 price of $300, and my intentions played out well in that a friend of mine itching for a PS3 got the system while I got the game at a reduced price for everybody. Hey, the economy demands that creativity be had.

After playing the hell out of Prototype, I felt obligated to make a comparison somewhere down the line, but that feeling has since passed. These games are just too similar, down to wonky controls and side missions. The criticism I slap down on one easily translates to criticism of the other. If you consider that Prototype was heavily inspired by a recent Hulk game and that you could throw a lot of Spider-Man games into the mix, we're talking about a general superhero problem.

What impressed me the most was that the companies behind Infamous and Prototype approached their subject matter in a fresh way. Instead of banking on an already known superhero, the development houses created characters and narratives from scratch to deliver their high ambition games. Short, comic-booky cutscenes littered each game and the player has to learn about what's going on in the background through these plot morsels. It's a good idea, and each game turned out to be a solid effort in the end, so their creativity didn't end up in vain.

The criticism, for the sake of article flow, also begin here. As ambitious as the projects were, I felt that the storylines were a bit of a let-down in some ways. With an entire city available for playground needs, plot becomes scarce and amounts to checkpoints in the game. This is sort of the norm, and there's nothing immediately wrong with that. In an RPG, you generally have time to roam until you choose to approach the next step in the ongoing story, and that's what you get in these games. It is something that I think needs changing, and I was hoping that these games would provide a little of that evolution.

The reason I say this is because they had a golden opportunity to do something truly revolutionary with their storytelling. The gameplay in each game is heavily flawed in many respects, and the storyline should have picked up the slack. Many entertainment houses are trying to cash in on the superhero, and even comic, tag. Heroes, Lost, and Push (hey, I liked it) have all tried their hand in some way at creating new comic book experiences outside of print, and they generally succeeded while introducing something new from a creative standpoint rather than tried and true legacy heroes that litter every aspect of entertainment. Games have lacked this, despite being the perfect venue to evolve the narrative beyond a set story.

Spider-Man 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum were outstanding, don't get me wrong, but they were more fun than evolutionary, and worse, the pinnacle of superhero gaming. Beyond these titles, you get Spider-Man 3 or Web of Shadows, Ultimate Alliance, Iron Man, Superman 64, Turok, etc. Each game varies on the fun-factor scale from good to terrible, but each one was significantly castrated in some way. Even Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, a huge release, amounted to little more than a pseudo-RPG designed around unlocks more than anything, fetching junk, mindlessly and unimaginatively plowing through enemy waves, and trying to be Diablo while having none of its depth.

Thing is, comic books may be devoted to unbelievable stories of skill and superpowers, but they're also about a multi-layered story. Civil War was an event that hit every major title on the shelves, and you basically had to pick and choose what characters you wanted to follow through the whole ordeal or sacrifice a paycheck. That was just for one week of publications, nevermind the saga in its entirety.

So when I say that these games missed a golden opportunity, I mean it. There was a great opportunity here to develop a huge, massive world of characters and motivations that didn't necessarily need to resolve itself within each games' timespan. I understand that there are some exceptions, but those are nothing compared to what could have been done.

Why are games perfect for this? A movie or TV series needs to focus itself to advance a narrative. Comics need to do this as well, but there are multiple opportunities each week to drop a little bit of the complete story across dozens of titles. There's flexibility there. Games don't need to focus themselves so much, and sandbox games such as these designed around player freedom have even less of a reason to provide a singular focus through 100% of the game.

So what happens when a developer half-assedly tries to expand the game world? Fetch quests, the bane of these games and one of the worst flaws that a superhero game can have. I loved the Web of Intrigue idea that Prototype had, but it really amounted to a prolonged fetch quest that I felt had more potential. Each game has too many fetch quests already. Each game had tokens to discover, scattered along the rooftops of each respective city, and you were always chasing something minute down. The problem is that there is such little reward and less imagination involved. You're generally hunting down side-mission markers on a map for some reason or another, and your reward is usually a token, medal, or a mission. While the first two are just unavoidable nowadays, the mission part of each game is terrible. No matter what, you will play the same mission dozens of times before the end of the game. It amounts to a bad ripoff of Spider-Man's "citizen in distress" side-missions.

Yet, you're not doing anything other than collecting. There is a battle for territory going on in both games, but I can't think of a time where I completed a side mission and thought that I understood the game world better. I usually felt the exact opposite, feeling like I was mindlessly grinding until all of the side-missions were done so that they wouldn't be locked away from me when I tried to advance the actual story. Specifically, in Infamous, there is a mission called "Spy Games" where you follow a grunt for a few blocks until he drops off a package. You'd think I'd actually be spying on something, but I was actually just following this grunt to "fetch" his tokens when he dropped them. I didn't spy on an enemy to gain story insight; I spied on him for shiny objects. Prototype doesn't bother to avoid this either, asking the player to do missions involving what you normally do around the city, but doing it in a limited space instead.

Oh, and the controls are clunky in both games. Not unplayable, just clunky.

My real beef is just story related, though. All that I've said doesn't begin to describe what the games could have offered. Sure, each will get its sequel and get a chance to expand the characters, but so much more could have happened. A lot was going on in the background of both games (or at least, a lot COULD have been going on), but it was all related to the immediate story. Where's the imagination to go beyond that? If a developer creates a comic-inspired game, then maybe it would benefit them to, well, actually get their inspiration from comics. Comics aren't just about the superpowers. I appreciate Infamous trying to give Son of Electro a black and white choice on the matter, but a good story begins when you take a character, place him into a situation, and see how he reacts to a situation. Marvel Comics in particular deal with this as their MO. Testuo-Hulk destroying everything is hardly character development. Tthough, Hulk is a hard character to write a story for because of this.

If sequels are going to be made, then I implore both Sucker Punch and Radical Entertainment to drop the crappy side-missions and go read some comic books for inspiration. Even if the depth isn't that interesting, comic books at least have it. These games don't. It wouldn't stop me from recommending them to other gamers, but story depth is the difference between an 80% metascore and a classic game that goes beyond grading systems.

Careful, they bite

2009-11-27T10:32:00.000-09:00

Returning from my excursion into hell, or Black Friday as mortals call it, I checked Digg and read up on an article that described the Bulgarian space program as being in constant contact with aliens using crop circles as cosmic "texts". The idea is that aliens are watching us all the time, but they know we're too crazy to actually make real contact with. If they watch what goes on during a typical Black Friday, then I can see why they're choosing to stay the hell out of sight. I hate to turn holiday shopping into some profound moral lesson, but we're absolutely nuts as a species.

After a trampling death was reported last year, you'd think that people would sort of "get it", but they don't. During the "3....2....1..." countdown, some dipshit 20 some year old chick was giggling as she broke through the line and jogged her way to the electronics, despite constant reminders not to run, mainly because that would encourage other people to run to catch up to her. It would have been more poetic had they run, trampled her, then continued with no second thoughts. Sorry, but a girl who thinks she's being cute because she broke the line deserved a clothesline along the way at least.

If it wasn't for the smug look, it might not have bothered me. At least she could have look confused like she didn't know what was going on, or faking a female emergency would have worked, too.

Regardless, I managed to do some covert actions and snagged me the one piece of loot I was hoping to get, and quickly realized that the hounds were descending quickly. I escaped, but not before seeing people's common sense and dignity switches get turned to "off". Shoving happened a lot, and I hate to say it, but there was a clear gender gap when it came to cruelty. Women were so much more likely to shove, steal, and push their way through everything, where men were just trying to survive. One mother in particular was barking orders to her children like they were going to war and threatening to take away Christmas presents if they did not meet a success quota.

Is it all worth it? You know, it's hard to say. All I know is that there's something to be said for random people who have never met before from all walks of life being at a crazy event and just cracking jokes, having fun, and helping each other find the best toys. Not once have I ever gone to a Black Friday opening without taking a few moments to see if I can get my hands on something for a person I've never met before, and it's nice to know that the favor was returned. I always bump into someone that makes me smile, and that part is worth it even if 20 others are probably plotting my doom before the ropes even go down.

From the only man who ever got the 4th triforce piece

2009-11-23T08:47:00.007-09:00

A friend of mine came over when I decided to go through the original Legend of Zelda on the NES. I went through the first dungeon, making my adjustments back to the strict 4-dimensional ways of gaming, when the topic of A Link to the Past came up. The response? He had never played it. The only stories he could relate about Zelda were his Ocarina days.

A lot of people throw Ocarina in as one of the best games to ever grace a console, and they would be right, if it wasn't for the fact that it isn't even the best Zelda game. It's close, I'll give it that, but it comes out a clear second every time to a game without a 3rd dimension. A Link to the Past, in my eyes, was hands down better than Ocarina could ever hope to be. There's a few reasons why I believe that, but I'll just start out by saying that every standard in the Zelda series beyond the absolute basics began with this game and did it all right.

Later games, post-Ocarina, come off as a bit gimmicky. I know that the gimmicks began with LttP to begin with, but it never felt like you were being asked to do something stupid just to get through the story. As good of a game Wind Waker may be, the fact that you spend half of it sailing takes away from the core experience. That doesn't mean it's a bad mechanic, but it dilutes the purity of Zelda.

When the original first hit the NES, gamers were dropped into a world with a basic idea of what they were doing and a manual to go with it. I still vividly remember the little books that came with it. It took everything boring about the PC RPG and put it on a console with a controller, letting you manipulate everything and rely on skill and reflexes rather than aimless grinding. You earn your stripes in Zelda, having goals to pursue and tools necessary to make the adventure possible. The secrets in this game were many, and gamers were mostly left blind to figure out what to do, which made the satisfaction of beating the game monumental. It was a completely different experience from today's Zelda games, but it's understandable considering that a game like the original Zelda is a hard think to duplicate in today's gaming climate. Yet, the basics were there, and A Link to the Past hit the ground running to create the modern Zelda when it came out on the SNES.

Nintendo knew what made the original game classic, but it also had the task of creating a game that didn't just duplicate, but evolve the series out of blind adventuring. The Super Nintendo was, at the time, a beast of a machine, and to just copy the original Zelda would have been extremely bland and counter-productive. Hyrule became a lush world of bright colors in its "light" form and dreary, decrepit, and twisted in its "dark" form. NPC's roamed the land and a new form of interactivity with the world was invented that would become the Zelda norm.

To begin the game, Link wakes up and immediately starts his quest with an unseen cry for help. The first thing you do is storm a castle to rescue Zelda, with a simple dungeon serving as a tutorial or "warm-up" without actually being on. This idea is lost on later games, and although the complexity has risen since then, it's tough to beat that feeling of "getting on with it" rather than spending a half an hour talking to everyone and their mystical tree just to get your sword and shield. That, and speed is paramount in LttP. I appreciate the 3-D worlds given to us by Nintendo, but they tend to slow gameplay down at times. In Zelda, if you need to get somewhere, you haul ass across an action packed landscape to get to where you need to go, hardly ever needing to slow the pace down to introduce the new creatures you meet to the business end of your sword.

That doesn't mean that brains aren't a factor here, but you'll spend less time looking at an entire room top to bottom in an effort to craft solutions to problems and more time meeting your goals and getting some good loot out of it. The game has just as much equipment as any other Zelda game after it, but it is much less of a headache on the gamer to get them. This particular Hyrule is easy to learn by heart, and the in-game map it comes with it probably the easiest world map to use in any Zelda game ever.

As I mentioned before, the original Zelda left you blind through most of your quest, but the SNES version is very different. Because of the introduction of an in-game plot, you get more clues about where you need to go, giving you the simplest form of direction. Instead of Navi or Midna being at your side constantly to be your portable hint system, you are still left to determine the "how", but thankfully the "where" is pretty easy to figure out. Should you forget, there are places you can go to drop that reminder. Now, I realize that half of the Zelda formula is the dungeons with the other half being Hyrule itself, but this is the one game that really strikes that perfect balance between leaving you alone to figure things out and making it as painless as possible to do so. When people get stuck in a 3-D game, it's 10 times more difficult to figure out what you need to be doing to get past a certain point. With this game, you simply don't get that frustrated, as the answer is always right around the corner and easy to find.

By easy, of course, I mean quick and painless to find out. You still have to know what you're doing, and you certainly need brains and skill at all times. LttP is challenging, and is no walk in the park to figure out if you've never played it before. You need reflexes and effective use of your tools, but thankfully this is the best controlled Zelda game to ever exist. Yes, it's easier to perfect a 2-D system, but that doesn't mean that the game should receive less credit for achieving that. Gameplay ultimately makes or breaks a game, and that's probably why I consider this game to be the best.

It's not the longest game that Nintendo has produced for the series, but it is still huge, nonetheless. It offers up a very good challenge for gamers to this day, and even if you've played it before, it's hard to not come back to this game and have new kids of fun with it. When I played it again, I found myself sequence breaking everything I possibly could by sheer accident, and it added a welcome challenge. For those who never did play it, I urge you to give it a shot. The basics are all there; sound, graphics, and gameplay are excellent. It is the Zelda equivalent to Super Metroid in its perfection, and that's one of the highest praises anyone can give to a game. Lastly, if you're an Ocarina child, you're bound to love this game. It's much easier to pick up and enjoy while still retaining that Zelda-punch that the N64 provided. Don't expect anything archaic here. This game has stood up on its own for almost two decades now as a true classic, and don't expect it to go anywhere in the near future. This is THE Zelda game for now.

100%

Now, I am a devoted Zelda fan. Not to the point where I will gobble up anything Zelda related, but I love my Zelda. I admit that I wish some of this more recent stuff would just go away, as I think that I could not only do without the gimmicks, but also because I sort of liked the vagueness of Link as a hero. Growing up, Link was just a cool looking hero that was the exact opposite you could expect from a sword-swinger on a quest to save a princess. The greatest thing was that the plot-lines were so thin and so little history was given to Link that he sort of had this mystique about him. The Triforce was equally awesome, as only someone who played and loved the game would recognize it, and they would always love the reference. Now, it's everywhere. Link has partners, girls get Triforce tattoos all the time, and the games sort of take away the mystique a little bit. That's just my view, but don't think that I'm bashing the franchise. I'm not, and I know that I'm sort of nostalgic rather than realistic about those views.

That said, the series needs a kick in the balls.

For all of the reasons stated above, Zelda needs to return to its roots. This game, ideally, should start by dumping you into the game world immediately, no apologies. If there's a forced tutorial, then it cannot possibly take itself seriously. I don't even care if the game has an "attract mode" introduction to the story in full cut-scene splendor, but even then, the basics of what's going on will be fine. Besides, it's only going to be "This is Hyrule and Zelda's kidnapped.", so the cut-scene can't possibly be intrusive.

The game should look epic, like a good fantasy movie without the frills. I'm talking gritty 80's here. I don't care what it takes, but the next "true" Zelda game needs to make graphics a priority, because this game needs to have a bite to it. This game should have a threatening vibe without getting too creepy, more in tune with the NES games. NPC's can be in the game, provided that they don't look like cartoon versions of a douchebag like they have been lately. Impa should be in the game, and the old man should come back for fun with some moblins, too.

As far as sound goes, bring back some of the old tunes for authenticities sake. I'm tired of barely hearing the familiar fanfares of games past. While we're at it, a full orchestra is in order. No fake orchestra, no electronic synthesizers...only an orchestra will suffice. As far as sound effects go, I want that shooting sword back with its original sound effect.

In the end, this game would need to be fantastically grounded. I think that the series could benefit from some of its own nostalgia by trying to achieve the results found in pre-CG fantasy effects with movies as a style point. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the tangible nature of those films gave the sense that the fantasy was being lived rather than just existing as eye candy. In modern Zelda games, there's a whole lot of additions that make a "look at my game world" vibe come off a series that never needed to define its own make-up. The funny looking NPC's I run into seem pretentious, but a more realistic game could borrow some of that Jim Henson magic.

Just one game needs to happen that's a zero BS, sword-swinging, pure adventure without the frills and gimmicks. If every Zelda game after that has something to do with a different element, time travel, more masks, or even colors of the rainbow, I could care less and will even applaud them for it as long as they keep doing their series right. It's just that the purest of adventure and fantasy somehow got lost along the way. Drop the player into a gameworld with minimal narrative and let the fantasy do the rest. Don't explain anything. Don't help the player out minus minor cues about where to go. Don't litter the world with useless NPC's. Don't have tutorials. Don't let the player have a companion. Don't include cats. Don't get cute. Don't gimmick the game up with music and masks as a theme. Just get back to the basics for one game and give the gamers one hell of a ride for it.