Oldschool Hard

OMG BEST GAME EVAR IF U DUN LIKE IT YOU MUST LIKE GAYSTATION (nb. I am aware that it is also available on PS3)

If you look at the theme of most of my posts, it probably seems like a game developer must’ve kicked my dog and that a game publisher ran over my kid. Admittedly, I do place a lot of blame for the problems in gaming on developers and publishers. As I’ve already talked about, they are the group guilty of releasing shovelware, contributing to (causing?) the massive hype around certain games while other just as worthy games get released without any fanfare, and trying to suck money out of you while they hold onto control over how you use their games (that you supposedly own). And don’t think I don’t have more complaints for future posts, either.

I have to admit two things, however. One, that there are plenty of good games that come out, still, in spite of the stupid development and marketing decisions that are sometimes made, and two, not all problems with gaming are the domain of game makers.

The gaming ‘community’ is pretty good at being stupid, too, like in the ‘robust discourse’ of a typical XBox Live session, in proposing boycotts that they don’t follow, or having ridiculous attachments to particular games and/or systems that go beyond a healthy interest and devolve into pointless arguments and flame wars (‘ZOMG, DA GAYSTATION SUX XBOX 4EVA!!!’). Parts of the gaming press are also often pretty good at helping contribute to the hype train, and the scoring system that some magazines and websites use is broken (and something I will discuss in yet another post).

A problem both fanboys and these segments of the gaming press share is a habit of overrating games. It usually goes one of two ways:

- A game is released, reviews solidly, and then somehow rises in the collective imagination over the years until it’s held as a pinnacle of achievement for (insert genre, developer, system or publisher here).

OR

- A game is released, reviews spectacularly, and is held up the ‘THE BEST GAME EVAR!’ or similar, completely ignoring the obvious flaws. The game may be a great game, but hardly the perfect game that it gets reviewed as, and this eventually gets sheepishly acknowledged – but only in hindsight.

I can use two of my perennial whipping boys as examples to illustrate each.

In the first case, Final Fantasy VII is a great example. As a lot of people’s entrance to RPGs and a step forward as far as cutscenes on consoles go, it has plenty of reason to be well regarded, and it is a good game. But best RPG of all time, or even worse, best game of all time? Puh-leeze. You can argue the relative merits of atmosphere and mechanics, but Final Fantasy VI was pretty much a better game, as was V, arguably (and although I acknowledge it’s not a better game, I personally prefer IX to VII). Ergo, it is not only not the best RPG of all time, it’s not even the best RPG in its series.

As for the second case, step forward, yet again, GTA IV. You were ambitious, set out a remarkable stylised version of New York, and I played you for nearly 40 hours. You also had terrible draw-in and jaggies and looked very fuzzy on the XBox (and I assume the PS3, too), chugged along horribly without a quad-core processor on the PC, had cars that controlled like barges, hollow characters, and both your mission and game structure followed a model that was basically inherited, with only small changes, from a near 10-years-old predecessor. We had a good time together, GTA IV, but you weren’t the perfect game your other suitors said you were. I think they realised that, too, once they had stopped drinking the kool-aid and sobered up.

Image from Xboxer, resized.

Share this post:

Blocky, isometric corporate evil happens here.

When doing some googling for something completely unrelated to gaming, I came across a game called Skyscraper, which apparently came out on PS2 in 2008, is out on PC, and is being adapted to the Wii. Metacritic doesn’t seem to think it exists, and I can’t find a review for it, which probably tells me all I need to know about its quality. Nevertheless, it got me thinking.

I’m an early Generation-Y. While most of my childhood memories are of the 90s, I’m a child of the 80s, the decade famous for, among other things, greed. Corporations were evil and about to take over the world, especially Japanese corporations. Shiny black skyscrapers were the most visible symptom of the malady of these world-conquering companies, evidenced in books and movies like Die Hard, Robocop, and Rising Sun. The whole cyberpunk movement was a response to the seemingly inevitable corporate takeover of the world, leading to books like Snow Crash and my favourite book of all time, Neuromancer. Nefarious things were planned and executed in skyscrapers – what exactly was going on behind that black facade? You can certainly still put forward a case for corporations trying to rule the world (not that they didn’t try before the 80s), but the idea of the Japanese taking over the world fell by the wayside in a fairly spectacular fashion, and near-future fiction has largely moved on to other concerns.

I still love cyberpunk, and I still think skyscrapers are cool, especially black skyscrapers, even if all the people inside are doing is selling paper products. One of my abiding childish dreams in life is own the world’s only full-skyscraper laser tag centre. As a result, I love to see games with skyscrapers featured in them, and I don’t think there’s enough games that use the skyscraper as the centrepiece that it should be. Arguably, games set inside skyscrapers are often just dungeon crawls taken outside of a fantasy setting, but while the mechanics may be similar, the vibe is usually completely different.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a number of games involving skyscrapers. There’s games with skyscrapers in the background, or forming an incidental part of play, like Arkham Asylum, just about any cyberpunk game (Deus Ex, Syndicate, etc.), the GTA series – well, really any game set in or near a city. There’s games where you’re on skyscrapers, like AaaaAAaaaaaaAAAAaaaaaa (with however many ‘a’s it has) – A Reckless Disregard For Gravity, Crackdown, or Spiderman 2. But what I really love are games set exclusively in skyscrapers.

Getting the rocket to blast open the doors, racing to beat the terrorists as they break the multiple locks, trying to get a radio, walking slower as your ‘feet’ meter goes down after walking on glass, the tension of the sparse music – Die Hard on the NES may have only been half an hour long when done right, but it took many goes to work out exactly what you needed to do. Hard but fair. D/Generation and Corporation/Cyber-Cop both had a dark, creepy atmosphere, with riffs on the same ‘illegal genetic experimentation inside a skyscraper’, although one was isometric and more of a survival-horror type of game, the other first-person and more stealth/action.

There are also borderline cases of skyscraper crawl – the tower crawl during the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII, and the tower in Thief 2, that while not technically a skyscraper, served largely the same purpose in the steampunk style of the game. It’s debatable whether the skyscraper plays more of a role in these games than in, say, GTA IV or Crackdown, but it comes back to that nebulous darker cyberpunk-ish ‘vibe’. Mirror’s Edge is another borderline case, of which some happens in a skyscraper, some on a skyscraper, but doesn’t have quite the same sense of dark art-design that skyscraper crawls seem to have. Again, the ‘vibe’ isn’t quite right. I can’t complain too much, though – any scraper is better than no scraper.

Image from Abandonware Paradise, cropped to size.

Share this post:

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?

Share this post: