Oldschool Hard

From the sublime…to the ridiculous.

Apologies for the lateness of the post, Windows 7 decided to restart itself to install some update yesterday while I was away from the computer, eating the first version of my post, and I needed some time for the rage to die down, and to recreate the magi…who am I kidding, there’s no magic. I just needed time to sublimate the rage.

One of my favourite games of last year was Batman: Arkham Asylum. I thought the game was really well crafted and used the licence really well. The Scarecrow-drugged sequences were great, the sidequests were fun and easy to avoid if you didn’t care for them, the combat made you feel like a superhero without having to remember a million combinations of buttons, and it was probably the first game to properly combine the ‘detective’ and ‘crimefighter’ sides of Batman. Sure, it had its niggles (detective mode was a little too useful to warrant switching off much), but overall it was a great game, certainly in my top 5 for last year. A great example of what can be done in a licenced game. Now, by ‘licenced games’ I mean those whose ideas and characters are taken from other media – movies, TV shows, comic books, and so on – not arcade ports. I don’t have enough ideas that I can just roll something like crappy arcade ports into a post and not use it on its own, when there’s been so many crappy arcade ports over the years…

On the flipside to Arkham Asylum was Terminator: Salvation, one of my least favourite games of last year, more true to the track record of licenced games in general, and a 4-hour-long insult to full-priced games everywhere. I sat down to play this at a friend’s place, and before the afternoon was out, we were done. T:S joins a long list of shitty licenced games. If you want an example, look no further than the bottom 50 on Metacritic‘s XBox 360 review list. Names like Tron, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Pimp My Ride, and a number more names stick out – and they’re all from licences. I don’t doubt the situation is very similar on other systems, too. Licenced games tend to be the very definition of shovelware, hastily cobbled together to push out onto the more casual gamer who sees a name they know and like, and buy the game regardless of quality. Oftentimes, they’ll figure out before too long that they dropped good money on a turd, but by that point the publisher has already been rewarded for their half-assery.

It’s a marketing strategy that’s worked since the 8-bit days, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I shall call it the ‘Ocean Strategy’, after the notorious English publisher famous for tons of crappy licenced games (and a few good ones). Ocean games were often known not only for being crappy, but for diverging massively from their source material – giant spiders in Rambo, anyone? Of course, a few games use a licence in a slight tangent to the source material to make a good game. Goldeneye on Nintendo 64 diverged from the movie slightly, but was close enough, and it pretty much incorporated all the set pieces from the movie along with the tangents. More often, though, a tangent to the source material ends up more like Superman 64 – a pointless set of hoops to jump through (literally, in this case) from trying in vain to make something ‘game-y’ out a licence, and failing miserably.

I know I’m probably preaching to the converted here, but please, please, please make developers and publishers -earn- the money that they need to pay back their licence fees. Rent, read reviews, play a friend’s copy – do whatever you have to do, but subject licenced games to the same scrutiny you would subject any other game to, whether it’s got your favourite superhero in it or not. To the Ocean Strategy, Oldschoolhard says NO.

Images from PlayworksOnline and Das Gamer, cooked up into this delicious stew.

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Happy New Year. I hope Santa brought you what you wanted and your New Year’s resolutions are achievable, or better yet, that you didn’t make any at all.

HAY WHAT’D YOU GET FOR CHRISTMAS, EDDIE? HUH? WHAT’D YOU GET?

I got clothes, and books. Clothes bought by other people are great because I have terrible taste in clothing (eg. boxer shorts with cartoon characters, and t-shirts with obscure video games) and whatever other people buy me is almost always better than what I choose myself. Books are also great. I like books. Books are a place where I would love to make a career. Like with games, I keep a big pile (in fact, multiple piles) of books. I try to read at least one a week. I fail, but I try.

Oh, and a camera. It’s tiny, a little Canon to replace my big-ass old Canon that has a sensor problem and makes every photo it takes look like the cover of a Peter Gabriel album. We had a good run, but I like photos to actually document what I’m looking at. Demanding, I know.

BUT WHAT ABOUT GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMES?

I bought myself a fuckload more games in the Steam holiday sale. I don’t ask other people to buy games for me, because I can buy my own damn games, and I know my own tastes, which don’t always stretch to the latest AAA game.

WHAT ELSE DID YOU DO?

After my initial plan fell through, I went up the highway a little to the country for New Year’s Eve and watched as Mother Nature rolled in a rather spectacular thunder and lightning display, a kiss-off to a shitty decade from her perspective (and a passable one from mine). Then I came home and attempted to reinstall WoW again.

I used both a disc and the direct download to install, multiple versions of the various patches, tried defragging and all the other steps suggested on the WoW tech support forums (even though their suggested cause of the symptoms I was experiencing was essentially impossible), and even updated to Windows 7, but I still had patching errors.

After coming home from New Year’s, WoW finally installed, patched and played without issue, after previously failing to install and/or patch properly about 20 times. I have no idea what I did differently, or what had changed, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Of course, it had to be the day after Winter Veil that it finally decided to work, depriving me of those achievements for another year, but hey, it’s only nerd points.

While the reinstall process drove me mad, I generally don’t have too many problems with patching, and I vastly prefer this gaming generation’s computer-gaming foibles to those I’ve had to deal with in the past. Having patches and drivers available over broadband internet, rather than waiting for magazine cover discs or having to contact the company to have them send out floppies (at my expense) is a massive improvement.

Sure, in PC gaming there are still patching problems (crucial in a MMORPG, not so much a problem in a single-player game where I don’t necessarily have to have the patch to play) and game breaking bugs – issues which I feel can be solved by better quality control and testing, and driver issues, which probably relate more to the almost unlimited combinations of hardware that a PC can have than anything else, but I no longer have to write custom autoexec batch files, just to make things load in the right order to have enough extended memory to play a game (“640k, more than anyone could need!”). I don’t have to know the commands to make a system ready to receive a game to be loaded off of a cassette tape, then have to wait for the tape to play through while the computer reads the data off it, only to find out I’ve been duped by another shitty Ocean licenced game.

Things could be better, sure, but things could also be worse, and at least these sort of problems seem to be getting better, rather than worse.

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Eons pass as you wait for this thing to get to where it’s going.

A small tangent:

I live in Australia. When it comes to video games, we’re the laughing stock of (at least) the English-speaking world. If you’re not aware, we don’t have an 18+ rating for games (while we do for movies), which results in a number of games getting neutered to be released here (Left4Dead 2 had the gore removed, for instance) or not being released at all. While the magic of the internet means that it’s not really a great practical problem, it’s still a silly situation that a hobby that is now largely adult is subject to laws that treat gamers like they’re children.

I started to write a (later aborted; it’s a long story) honours thesis in 2006, titled ‘Censorship in New Media in Australia’, focusing mostly on video game censorship, so it’s hardly a new issue, but as the list of banned or modified games grows, the need to examine our laws grows.

The long and short of it is we currently need unanimous agreement among our state Attorneys-General to even look at starting the process of changing the law, and there’s one vocal holdout: Michael Atkinson from South Australia (not my state).

There may now be some hope of a work-around, with the Commonwealth AG office releasing a discussion paper on an R18+ rating, and asking for public submissions. I await the outcome with bated breath.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming…

****

I pulled a game off the unplayed games pile last weekend, trying to reduce the height from ‘you will die and cats will eat your face off if it collapses on you’ to ‘you may only be seriously injured if it collapses on you.’ It was Bully: Scholarship Edition (yeah, I’m up with the latest and greatest, totally cutting edge here), which was essentially an extension of the GTA III -> San Andreas series, except set in a prep school. I would guess Rockstar hadn’t changed much from the PS2 version, as the graphics were a bit janky, but I enjoyed it enough to play through the whole game. However, one annoyance really

LOADING.

LOADING..

LOADING…

stood out for me – the amount of loading screens.

Admittedly, while there was plenty of them, Bully‘s loading times weren’t awful, and they weren’t every three steps like some games (Ugh, Postal 2). Also, they didn’t try to ‘hide’ them like Mass Effect and the infamous elevator scenes, which just served to highlight the ridiculous wait.

Those elevator scenes go something like this:

(The Mass Effect elevator starts. Eons pass. Stars go supernova before ejecting their material into the greater universe. Worlds form from the detritus. Life emerges from the primordial swamp in said worlds, evolves, and develops sentience.)

Insert your own favoured team members here, if you don’t like battle-armor covered curves…why don’t you like battle-armor covered curves?

Liara: ‘Even for a race that lives a thousand years, this elevator ride seems to be going for half my lifetime.’

Ashley: ‘You’re telling me. I think I just went through all of my menopause.’

(The elevator finally reaches it’s destination.)

Methinks I dost protest too much? Sure, for those who owned an 80′s 8-bit computer with a tape drive, today’s loading times are laughably small, particularly when loading from a hard drive and not direct from disc, but if you grew up with cartridge-based gaming, then it’s a case of ‘loading? What the hell is this loading shit?’

On consoles, CD-ROM games brought us innovations like full motion video and redbook audio. They also brought in the ‘magic’ of waiting for shit to load. And thanks to Namco owning the patent on loading-screen minigames, we can’t even do anything interesting in-game while the loading happens.

Such is the price of innovation, I guess. At least I get a small snatch of time to delete the emails on my Crackberry.

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Bill Hicks’ views on marketing probably come from knowing the guy who made this ad.

Some games come almost out of nowhere, quietly released to slowly build an audience. Gems, like Torchlight, or Trine, that take a while to get a hold in the market, but you appreciate them all the more for the surprise element – where has this been hiding?

Of course, the way game budgets now typically are, with a need to recoup staggeringly large development costs, you’re aware of most games for months, maybe years, before they come out. Teaser trailers, developer interviews, hands-on previews – you follow a game from start ’til they go gold, and then you’re lining up at midnight, in the freezing cold, with a stinky fat guy either side of you, looking like they’re venturing into the unknown of the outdoors for the first time in three months. You shuffle forwards, eventually reaching the front of the line, getting your hot little hands on Diablo Effect CreedDead 27, and rushing out of the store to go home and play it for long enough to sound convincingly ill when you call in sick to work the next day, not having slept a wink. There’s nothing quite like that feeling of taking the shrinkwrap off a new game that you’ve been anticipating, popping it out of it’s case, sticking it in the machine (and in the case of a PC game, waiting for it to install), excitedly choosing ‘New Game’ and settling in…

To then find out you’ve bought a turkey.

But why? It looked so good in the videos. The screenshots had wicked HDR lighting and soft shadows and perky polygon tits. How could this game be so shitty?

Sorry, you’ve just fallen victim to the hype monster. John Romero has made you his bitch, and not in the way you intended. Sega don’t do what Nintendon’t. It’s just another mediocre game, no matter how much money’s been spent on marketing it to you. Sure, you could’ve read the pre-release reviews, but you didn’t want to spoil the game (anymore than it had already been spoiled by the 18 months of previews), or you had read the review, and it was a 10 on everything! Like GTAIV – a great game, but with very obvious flaws, not that you’d know it from some of the fawning reviews when the game was released, considering the flaws were only talked about when the reviewers had retconned their thoughts for when the DLC was released.

Hype’s not new. I can remember when Super Mario Bros. 3 was coming out, and they made a whole movie (The Wizard) to promote Nintendo products, with SMB 3 at the forefront. I only saw the hype machine there in hindsight, being too young at the time to recognise what was happening. Then there was the Nintendo/Sega ‘war’ of the early 90s, with crap like ‘blast processing’ and ‘color palettes’ that no kid really understood, but sounded cool, leading to things like the aforementioned Daikatana ad.

Perhaps the hype machine I remember most vividly is the one surrounding Final Fantasy VII. Not just for the game itself, but for the revelations about Nintendo giving Sony the screwjob in regards to a SNES CD add-on, eventually leading to the Playstation, and Square ironically giving Nintendo a screwjob of its own by switching to developing for Sony. There was breathless hype about the pre-rendered backgrounds, the CD music and full motion video, and for a lot of people, FFVII was their first and most beloved RPG, perhaps because of the hype machine making it into the first ‘mainstream’ RPG. FFVII was good, and you could do far worse as far as a favourite game goes, but it’s not the greatest RPG ever – not even the best in the series. V, perhaps also VI, is better.

The machine’s bigger than ever. There’s more money to lose, so publishers will do whatever it takes to make you buy. Sometimes the machine just picks the right way to get us interested. Sometimes, it’s our own fault for not learning from our past mistakes. Anything Pete Molyneaux does is guaranteed to be overhyped, and underdelivered – ‘Yeah, it’ll give you a blowjob while you play, and any cash you make in the game gets delivered to your own bank account IN REAL TIME!’ – and anyone who expected Spore to be different to what it turned out to be had probably never played The Sims before.

I can almost guarantee that like the ‘real gameplay footage’ that accompanies the launch of any new generation of console (and inevitably turns out to be pre-rendered), Project Natal will turn out to be far less interesting than the ‘Milo’ demonstration and subsequent breathless coverage and discussion. But it’s already done the job it needs to do – oiling the cogs of the hype machine.

I bet you’re going to buy it the day it comes out, aren’t you?

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