Oldschool Hard

Now this is a REAL “holiday season” game.

In the latest in a long line of excuses for my laziness, this time my absence from posting is mostly to do with a wedding. No, not my wedding – deity knows that’s a long way off, if ever. No, instead I get to play best man – paying lots of money for a suit I’ll probably wear once, dealing with frayed nerves and delicate sensibilities, trying to deal with the fallout of the bucks night (see: delicate sensibilities) and being subject to the whims of a certain someone in a dress. It has a lot of the same aspects as what the groom has to deal with only it costs me just a little bit less, and at the end I don’t get to fuck the bride. One more week to go, and then over a year of having to hear about every aspect of the planning for the wedding is done. Hoorah. Queue the veiled jabs in the speech.

In news more relevant to this blog, going to Blizzcon in 2007 is the gift that keeps on giving, because a couple of weeks ago I received a beta key for Starcraft 2. I wasn’t really into the first one very much, and I have made comments about my ambivalence about RTS before, but having had a think about it, and considering that I enjoyed Warcraft 2 back in the day, and Company of Heroes, World in Conflict, and the small parts of the two Dawn of War games that I’ve played, I guess that’s not really true. I couldn’t get through Warcraft 3, and it’s fair to say that I suck at RTSes, but the good ones still do something for me.

Of course, I had to boast about it on twitter, and it took less than 5 minutes before I had a bunch of ‘OMG, WHAT DO U WNT 4 DA KEY!?’ from a bunch of people I didn’t know. Ah, the internet, it’s magic.

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On another note, you may have seen the case of my stupid fellow countryman who bought a copy of New Super Mario Bros. Wii a week before the official release date and then boasted about it on the internet, not by posting photos of himself with the game, but instead by uploading it to the internet in a way that led easily back to him. The end result was a $1.5 million AUD settlement with Nintendo (should’ve got a better lawyer, amirite?) I think he got what was coming to him – a stupidity tax, more or less. I think the amount announced is probably largely meant to set an example, and I doubt that he’ll have to pay back anywhere near that much. Nintendo, to complete the image of being the evil empire, have also announced they’re going to release a black Wii – WTB a faux-woodgrain PS3 chunky.

Although an incidental detail to the main story, I found there was something interesting in how he received the game – a store sold it to him a week before the ‘official’ release date. To me, this is another example of the stage-managed nature of the hype machine that largely surrounds games these days. If stores have stock of a game, why is there an embargo made to prevent them selling it? What possible harm can there be for someone to buy a game as soon as a store receives stock? It’s obviously supposed to be a complete product at that stage, or it shouldn’t be sold at all. But then this is just one example of the ridiculousness of the typical yearly release schedule. “People are affecting our sales by, um, buying our games…”?

This year, to be fair, has had a fairly good amount of games released through the first couple of months, with a few big names like Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2, but this is not usually the case – a large number of games usually get released in a glut around “holiday season”, the specific holiday being, of course, Christmas. Then it’s often a pretty barren landscape until around April, with a few months of games popping up before the northern summer leads to a bit of a wasteland again, and then the industry ramps up towards the next holiday season.

I suppose when you work off a pile like I do, exactly when the games are released doesn’t matter too much, but I can’t help but to think how many games are lost in the shuffle when there’s a release glut, that could have their chance to shine if given a release window with little competition.

Image snagged from Kotaku.

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This is not my pile of games, but if all my digital games were boxed copies, this would be about right, if not too small.

I did a clean out this week, for the dual benefit of making a little bit of cash out of what I have lying around, and clearing some clutter. I’ve got an apartment’s worth of stuff crammed into a room, and the saying about square pegs and round holes comes to mind – I can move it around as much as I like, but it still doesn’t fit properly. I have a remarkably hard time getting rid of certain things. I’ll buy, sell, and trade computer equipment without a second thought, but when it comes to games, books and magazines, I just can’t seem to let go. I find it very difficult to part with 3-year-old Custom PC magazines that are, with the rapid advance of technology, now practically useless, full of outdated information about hardware no longer being sold. I keep car magazines talking about cars I will never buy and workshops that have shut down. I have books from my childhood that I will never read again. Perhaps I can justify that by saying that they’re for my children, but I don’t have any of those and am not likely to for quite some time, if ever.

I still have my DS phat from 2004, despite its wrist-breaking weight and size and tiny screens, because I won’t dispose of something that works, and being video-game related, I won’t sell it. The only games I’ve sold in years are games where I picked up another, improved, version, or I picked up another copy in a steam multi-pack and thus have no use for the boxed version anymore. The one exception is Saints Row 2, which I bought on 360 in a one-day sale, played through, and sold for pretty much the same price as I originally paid. And I only sold that because I intended to buy another copy when it got cheaper. And eventually I did, in a roundabout way, buying the THQ complete pack on steam, of which SR 2 was one of the included games. Even when I was a kid I was hesitant to sell games. Before Saints Row 2, the last game I can remember selling was Jet Force Gemini on the N64, and before that, NBA Jam Tournament Edition on Gameboy. Otherwise, I’d trade in systems and my whole collection on that system, towards the new latest and greatest, but only the whole collection, because the endorphin rush of getting something new overcame the regret at selling games, and losing the whole collection at once left no reminder of what I had previously owned.

Now, I keep all my games. If I get a new system, it joins the collection, and I don’t trade an older system to get it. Some games I continue to own just to say I own them – I liked playing through them, but there’s no real reason to keep them other than that they’re rare and it increases my e-peen, like the two Space Channel 5 games and Gitaroo Man on PS2. Or I can use them to say that I own ‘x’ amount of games on ‘y’ system, even if I don’t particularly care about them individually once they’ve been played through. There are some games that are worth keeping, because of multiplayer or that I can go back and replay them – I can play Ico or Rez again and again and still enjoy them, and I like playing Team Fortress 2 or Left4Dead multiplayer, because I’m big into cooperative team games where I can play a part in the success of the team while still being a terrible aimer (and I am atrocious).

It also means I have a number of games of shame that I’ve picked up, through competitions, clearance (and thus being cheap), or just not doing my research before picking the games up. I not only own the first Getaway game, I own the second one, Black Monday, too. I expected them to learn from their mistakes. I was wrong. Driver, and Driv3r. Still hadn’t learnt my lesson on sequels to crappy games. Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, although in my defence, Allied Assault was a good game. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. I thought I couldn’t get enough GTA, at the time. After an hour or two of this game, I could get quite enough, thanks very much. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. I liked the first Enemy Territory, being a team-based multiplayer game. I think what I liked most about it, in hindsight, is that it was free. Mission Impossible: Operation Surma. I stand by that one, because I liked the Mission Impossible game on the N64, even though it looked like someone had smeared vaseline all over the screen.

Perhaps the crappiest game I own is Die Hard: Vendetta, the PS2 version. There was a 3/$40 deal going on at the time, and it was one of those circumstances where I definitely wanted 2 of the games on offer, but it was a crapshoot for the third. I played about an hour of it before putting it back in the case, never to come out again. The textures were worse than an N64 game, the mission triggers were buggy, all the faces looked like masks and the level design was stupid. It might get better from that point, but I’m not brave/stupid enough to find out. It’s things like this that let me make posts on this blog with a clear conscience. I’m aware that I’m negative about a lot of games, but, hell, I’ve played enough games to have formed my beliefs through experience. I make bad choices, too, but I’m also prepared to accept any criticism I get.

Now, anyone want to buy some magazines?

Image from EZ-Mode Unlocked, resized.

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FUCK THIS GAME’S LOGIC IN ITS FUCKING FUCK.

Some things are much better in the nostalgic haze of your memory than they are in your current reality. A few years back I won a small competition to do with a Transformers game coming out on PS2. I won the game, a t-shirt with an autobots logo, and a DVD box set of the first season of the TV series, which I had loved as a kid. The game was middling, and I still wear the t-shirt, but after dropping in one of the DVDs to refuel my memory banks, I wished I hadn’t. While the TV series probably got better when they started to make more money, I hesitate to get any more DVDs to try and work this out. This particular DVD was full of a bunch of cheap japanimation, where many scenes are completely static except for moving mouths. It was, in a word, awful. And my 5-year-old self had thought it was the BEST. THING. EVARRRRRRR. It’s why I recommend revisiting any games you used to love as a kid with caution, because some age well, but others are very much of a time and place that you are no longer a part of.

Sure, I rag on new games a lot, but I will admit that a lot of the changes made to games over the years have been for the better. A lot of games point the way to where you need to go, with varying degrees of subtlety. Dead Space was a particularly good example of how to implement this – you only got a prompt when you asked for it, and it was done in a way in keeping with the total user interface, where health and weapon charges were shown in game on your character, rather than as part of a HUD. Even with games that don’t always push you towards a goal, like a ‘sandbox’ game, you have the freedom to walk around and think, in a positive way, “what do I do now?”, because there’s so many things you can do. With a lot of older games, you get one way to go, and if you can’t figure it out, it’s more like scratching your head, and going “what do I do now?” You’d have to wait for the damn Nintendo Power or somehow come across it through complete luck in the midst of flailing around wildly.

The single example I remember most clearly is in Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest, where at a certain point, to get any further in the game, you have kneel before a wall while holding the right crystal, before a fucking tornado sweeps you away to where you need to go. I’d love to say that I worked that out myself, but that was a definite example of needing to wait for the guide. You also needed to equip a different orb later in the game to get through a lake without drowning. There is, as far as I’m aware, only one cryptic in-game explanation for either of these, other than that the crystals exist.

Then there is the whole litany of examples from adventure games. I loved and still enjoy (although with less frequency than I used to) adventure games, both text-based and point and click, with moments like the insult sword-fighting in The Secret of Monkey Island still being etched my memory:

“You fight like a dairy farmer!”
“How appropriate, you fight like a cow.”

However, some of the puzzle logic involved only made any sort of sense in the hindsight of having tried combining everything in your inventory, just to see what the game designers would let you combine. Note to everyone: the only person whose mind works exactly like yours is you. Further note to adventure game designers: this means that logic puzzles based on threads that are only connected together in your logic are FUCKING STUPID. Also fucking stupid: having to play ‘guess the verb’ with a text parser. I give an exception to the Douglas Adams Infocom games, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Bureaucracy, because these are intentionally absurd and frustrating. It’s post-modern, people, post-MODERNNNNNNN!

Some other specific examples of What Do I Do Now: The amount of absolutely necessary to advance ‘secrets’ in Milon’s Secret Castle. Having to guess the right order to do the bosses in to make the game manageable in every Mega Man game. The mazes in the original Metal Gear. The…no, fuck this. I’m angry now. Bad memories. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU…

Image cribbed from MeriStation.

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Mass Effect 2: Obliterate your free time, in spaaaaaace!

This post at Kotaku piqued my interest, covering some issues similar to what I usually look at in this blog.

Taking a point from said post, Mass Effect 2 has been released, and it seems like the topic du jour in gaming circles. Am I playing it? Of course not. I’m still stuck (for want of a better word; it’s not a chore) in Dragon Age, and it sets my tightarse sense tingling when it comes to paying full price for a game more than once every 3 or 4 months. What was Bioware thinking, releasing these games so close together? And the tight release schedule doesn’t stop – there’s more Dragon Age DLC coming in March. It’s insane. I like RPGs but fuck, there’s a million-ish decent games coming out in any given year and adults have jobs and kids and families and shit like that. Of course, I have none of those, and I barely consider myself an adult with my lack of responsibility and all-round juvenile sense of humour, but it’s the principle, dammit.

As I’ve written about before, as a kid you get what you’re given on Christmas and your birthday, so an RPG is brilliant, if you’re into them – more bang for the buck. It’s one thing to play a game over and over until you can do it with your eyes closed, but to have the same amount of game time with fresh content the whole way? Brilliant! The love story didn’t last – I fell out of love with JRPGs a while back, when I realised they were just treading the same ground again and again. I’m not so disillusioned that I won’t play any JRPGs at all, I just won’t waste my time and money searching for obscure spin-offs involving Thug no. 3 from Shadow Hearts‘ (no doubt) riveting backstory.

This also gives me the positive side-effect of having more time to spend playing other games that aren’t quite so demanding on my time, although those are getting less and less. Yes, I realise the irony of a WoW player saying this, but games are often just too damn long. Generally it used to be that it was either RPGs or ‘sandbox’ games that would suck up your time like a Hoover, but it seems to be creeping into all sorts of genres. I understand that the current revenue model involves bleeding you dry: full-priced games, or better yet, the ‘collector’s edition’ (hint: anything ever labelled as a ‘collectable’ when released is unlikely to ever be so) with some plastic chintz at maximum price, with the supposed ‘value’ in the 20+ hours of gameplay you get in exchange.

To me, value is in the intensity and enjoyment of the experience. I didn’t feel ripped off by the 6-7 hours of Shadow Complex I played, nor in roughly the same amount of time in the first Modern Warfare single-player game, although that one was at a discount. The experience was finely-tuned and there was rarely a lack of action. So I propose a new game model, to replace the game lengths and prices that are steadily creeping upwards.

Value is not in a 25 hour game with hours of cutscenes. Instead, provide a 5-15 hour experience, tuned for maximum action/enjoyment, at roughly half the price games are available at now. Make multiplayer a seperate entity at a price that means the single player experience + the multiplayer experience are available at a price on par, or better yet, slightly below, what full games cost now. Have some single-player modules, essentially just like current DLC, available at launch. That way, people who really like the single-player game world can have more of it without having to pay for a multiplayer experience they won’t use, those who don’t have time to play through a massive game can get a tight experience at a good price, and multiplayer-only gamers can avoid paying for superfluous single-player content they’re just not particularly interested in. Everyone gets the parts of the game they want, the incentive to buy secondhand is lessened (and thus developers and publishers lose less money to the secondhand market) because games are cheaper, and with more time and money on their hands, people may actually buy more games. A pipe dream, I know, but one I hope to see, especially with the rise and rise of digital distribution. Perhaps it’s a case of ‘check back in 5 years’?

Picture from Platform Nation.

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