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.

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Problems with new games: not enough floating skulls.

Tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of the release of one of my top 5 games of all time, Planescape: Torment. This game, following a trend among many of my top 25 games, never sold very many copies, but has almost universally excellent reviews. Admittedly, these are the same publications that called GTA IV ‘perfect’, so you can take that with a grain of salt if you like.

Unlike most Dungeons and Dragons games that are set in the elves ‘n’ dwarves high fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms, Planescape: Torment, as the name suggests, is set relatively obscure multiverse of Planescape, where many different planes of existence meet, and the nature of multiple universes can be changed by particularly strong-willed individuals. The game revolves around you playing an immortal, in the sense that you can die and will rise again, not that you are unkillable. You forget the events of your previous lives upon reincarnation, and must wander the multiple planes of the setting to reclaim your memories, often coming across characters who have you at a disadvantage, knowing you, without you knowing them – and a lot of them are pissed off with you.

You can choose to work for a range of factions and with a range of characters you meet, although one character, Morte, a sarcastic floating skull, is with you the whole game, and picks up insults NPCs fling, later to use them against you. I might be easily impressed, but damn, a talking smartarse skull. Niiiiice. The multi-plane setting of the game universe means you come across all sorts of creatres, from demons to deities, although not any of the Forgotten Realms familiars (like elves ‘n’ dwarves).

The game starts with you waking in a morgue (like one of my other favourites, the SNES Shadowrun). Death is a central part of the plot, and often dying is the only way forward. This is a zero-sum resurrection – some poor bastard has to die to provide for you to live again. Through each death, you rely on other characters or notes you have tattooed on your body (yes, this came out pre-Memento) to work out who you are and what you need to do. There’s a line early on in a conversation, after you find the person who made you immortal, that really sums up with the game is about: ‘What can change the nature of a man?’ Without giving too much away, there’s a reason you were made immortal, and you have a notoriety throughout the planes. How you choose to deal with that directs where the game’s plot goes.

PC:T one of the most ‘adult’ games I’ve ever played, and not in the ‘titties and blood’ sense – there’s not a lot of combat, and quests are often better solved by careful thought and the right course in conversation, and there’s no one ‘right’ choice to solve any particular problem – no easy answers nor obvious immediate impact in the choices that you make. It’s one of the earliest RPGs that I can remember where the protagonist is not a font of virtue or a good man in a bad land, the choices you make influence both your character and plot greatly, and the experience is not diminished by choosing to be a ‘bad’ character.

Slow-paced, with combat like a retarded Baldur’s Gate, and mountains of text, it’s not a game for everyone, and I can see why it didn’t grab people browsing on a store shelf or reading reviews – it looks drab, brown and grey – and long existential conversations aren’t exactly everyone’s idea of a good time. That being said, it’s possibly Black Isle Studios’ crowning achievement, and that says a lot when you consider that they also developed the first two Fallout games and helped Bioware with the Baldur’s Gate series. Although showing it’s age now, particularly with a hard 640×480 resolution, if you can pick up a copy on eBay at a non-exorbitant rate, I highly recommend it.

Picture ripped from Gamespot. Yeah, I do that.

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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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This shouldn’t ever been seen in a PC game.

PC games have long been rushed out the door to meet a deadline without everything being tested 100%, leaving in bugs and glitches, some minor, some crippling. Most crippling bugs are at least confined to breaking only the game itself, like in the legendarily buggy Arcanum, but one heinous example, Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor (nb. not the awesome gold box game), after being uninstalled (usually for being a buggy piece of crap) not only nuked the game install, but your entire Windows installation. Ouch.

This sort of bugginess was pretty bad back in the days before the internet was common, but generally you could wait for when a PC magazine with a covermount came out and use a patch on the disc to fix it. When the internet became commonplace, it was even less of a problem. Oh sure, some games (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) are still so broken that a patch renders all your previous save games unplayable, but at least the patches are there.

Old console games had no such luxury. Not to say they were 100% bug free, or that there were no broken games, and of course the seal of approval didn’t mean jack when it came to the actual quality of the game, but at least a game could usually be finished, if you were good enough to beat the Nintendo Hard gameplay. They had to be tested thoroughly, if only because recalls are incredibly expensive. Towards the end of the last console generation, though, online play started to creep into view for XBox and PS2 users, and this has helped create a slippery slope.

The latest generation of consoles all came out with built-in online ability. While it’s definitely been positive – the ability to update firmware and games means that your console can be become more useful, sometimes for free, online play (on games where strident 12 year olds don’t serve as your main opponents) adds to the experience, and the PSN and Live stores allow games with a smaller scope to be commercially viable – it’s also had its downsides.

Now, console games are being released with bugs because of the assumption of internet capability: “Ah, we’ll fix it in the patch.” It’s PC syndrome, only the games are more expensive, unmoddable, and you can’t tweak anything if they run like shit. While Fallout 3 was a fantastic game, there were some incredible bugs in it. How many people lost Dogmeat for the whole game because of him glitching out somewhere?

This convergence of PC and console hasn’t just led to a lazy attitude about bugs being in a shipped console game, either. There are some truly shitty design decisions in PC ports of console-led games – like limited graphics tweaking options, control schemes and complicated nested menus clearly designed to work on a controller with limited or no options for remapping, save points, and patching exclusively through Windows Live, that may or may not work.

Specific examples? Oblivion‘s inventory and menu system – clearly meant for a controller. Shadowrun‘s deliberately fuzzy aiming so PC users with a mouse and keyboard (the way an FPS -should- be played) couldn’t get an advantage on their console competitors. The save points lazily left in Far Cry 2 when in the PC version, you can save anywhere. GTA IV not being optimised for the wide variance in PCs, and chugging like a steam train on anything other than a quad-core system (though, to be fair, GTA IV chugged a bit on the 360, too.) Modern Warfare 2 with no dedicated servers, handing a distinct advantage to the game’s host, and no user-created maps or modding allowed – when the previous game in the series had dedicated servers, user-made maps, and modding. Don’t take away what you’ve previously given us, Infinity Ward. That makes you an Indian giver. And a jerk. You say it’s because you’re trying to make people play the experience you’ve created, well, I like playing certain types of games on a console, certain types on a PC. Whatever I choose, I should be able to take advantage of the upside(s) of the platform.

Edit: My host, lord, and master, Kingfox, pointed out that the console-led bastardization of PC games started out around the time of Deus Ex: Invisible War. Good for me, the only thing I really remember about that game is that it isn’t good enough for me to reinstall to remember more about that game. I believe it fits perfectly into my category of the “aggressively mediocre.”

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