Oldschool Hard

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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This looked like the future, once.

It’s funny sometimes how your gaming ‘career’ is shaped. My early to mid teenage gaming time was spent with a Nintendo 64. I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew I wanted one. They were yet to officially come out, but there was a demonstration model in the local Target. It was showing Super Mario 64, and I had to get it. This. Was. The. Future. I begged my parents for one, and they agreed to pay the difference for the system and game, if I traded in my Megadrive to a local game store (now long-extinct) which I eventually did (and took a bath on). My mother asked if I would prefer a PlayStation (smart lady), but I was adamant. I had seen Mario 64, dammit. That was the fucking FUTURE.

I would come to regret the decision when all the sweet JRPGs, a genre that I loved at the time, came out on PlayStation. At the same time, though, all my close friends had 64s, so it was no problem to bring a controller over to anyone’s house and engage in some sweet Goldeneye multiplayer. The 64 also put me off console gaming for a couple of years when the river of new titles turned into a trickle and I didn’t yet have the money (or mentality) to have two consoles.

Although the PlayStation’s library ended up being far superior, I will argue to the death that the 64′s graphics have aged much better than the PS1′s, even with the crappy blurry textures and endless fog. I later caught up on my PS1 rpg backlog when I got a PS2, so my dilemma was eventually solved, even if it was 7 or 8 years late.

Earlier at the same store, before I traded in my Megadrive, one of the staff had generously offered to sell me his first-gen Mega-CD, because I thought it would go much better looks-wise with my first gen Megadrive than the Mega-CD II. It was only through not having enough money (because I had bought so many Basketball cards) that I didn’t get it. In retrospect, bullet dodged.

- Although good, that wasn’t the best local game store we ever had. That honour belonged to a little independent store just outside of the mall, which was a treasure trove – multiple systems set up, ready to test anything, all sorts of obscure and back-catalogue stuff, Neo Geos and their incredibly expensive games when no-one else stocked them, converters for foreign NES games, strange game paraphernalia, and a weird guy, probably the owner, with a mullet, fast-bowler neck chain, and handlebar moustache. While I’m appreciative of the virtues of internet stores, I miss independent and small chain stores filled with the weird and wonderful. To buy games now, at least in the suburbs, all we seem to have are big box stores, department stores, and a few chains, and I can almost guarantee that stock will be identical between the stores.

- For Christmas the year after I got my NES, I got a NES Advantage joystick. It was great – just like the one out of Ghostbusters II! It had a good, solid feel and weight, like an old telephone. Unfortunately, we were staying with my aunt, uncle and cousins on holiday interstate at the time, with no NES. I wouldn’t get to use it for over a month. At that age, that may as well have been a lifetime. I still played fantasy NES with it at least 3 times a week until we drove back home.

- In a visit to a secondhand book store when I was a kid, I got my mother to buy me the Lufia strategy guide, in the vain hope my parents would get the hint and buy me both a SNES and Lufia. I was way too obtuse. The strategy guide is long gone, the SNES and Lufia never were.

- I played so much Phantasy Star II while listening to one of the crappy local pop stations, which was playing ‘Earth Song’ by Michael Jackson to death around roughly the same period, that I can’t hear that song now without envisioning a blue grid and feeling a desperate need to draw a map.

- I got all the way to the entrance of the last dungeon in Sword of Vermilion, before realising the inconspicuous key I had been carrying around for most of the game, that didn’t seem to be for anything in particular and I had thus had dropped for the inventory space, was needed to open the final dungeon. Of course, where I dropped it wasn’t indicated by anything on the map. I spent about an hour moving back through the game, one space at a time, and searching.

I never finished that game.

Image from Colour Lovers.

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Mmm, River City Ransom. “BARF!”

My last post probably gave you some idea of what sort of games I like.

So you can get even more idea of where I’m coming from, and can decide now if we’ll never agree and you can thus make a graceful exit (door opens outwards), here is a list of my top 25 favourite games. There’s a few that are stiff to miss out, but this is basically it. I originally drew up a huge list of my favourite games on each platform, it was long and boring, and I won’t subject you to it.

Bear in mind a few things: I keep both a literal stack of unplayed games that I get cheaply, and a figurative stack of digital files from steam weekend discounts, impulse sales, and so on, and the pile is currently up to about 80 games. Also, I could only own one console per generation before becoming an adult and being able to buy as many systems as I want, so I may have missed your particular favourite. My exposure in particular to non-RPG PS1 games, XBOX games, and Sega games post-Megadrive is limited, because I never owned the systems. Lastly, these are my personal favourites. I may have played -better- games, but sometimes something about a game just sticks with you.

River City Ransom
Crystalis
Mutant League Football
Shining Force 2
Snatcher
Shadowrun (SNES)
Super Mario Kart
Zelda: A Link to the Past
Planetfall
Wasteland
System Shock 2
Knights of the Old Republic
Vampire: Bloodlines
Planescape: Torment
Deus Ex
Fallout 3
Grim Fandango
Psychonauts
Baldur’s Gate/2
World of Warcraft
Super Mario 64
Shadow of the Colossus
ICO
Rez

Why yes, I do like cyberpunk, post-apoc, Tim Schafer, and Bioware. Why do you ask? I generally like moody FPS games, western RPGs, quirky adventure games, the unique, and anything with some form of experience and/or loot grind. Mmm, purplz.

This month, all going to plan, I will sit down with Brutal Legend, and Dragon Age: Origins, both of which have the potential to be in there, based on my usual preferences. Something like Diablo 2, Mass Effect, Majora’s Mask, Okami, Metal Gear Solid 3, Half-Life 2 or any of a host of other Infocom text adventures could be in there if I wrote this on a different day.

But I didn’t.

So they aren’t.

What about my least favourite games? Well, I don’t really have the patience to tackle JRPGs anymore, unless they review very, very highly. It’s not active hate, I just don’t love them the way I did as a kid, when the longer the game, the more the value.

Real Time Strategy is another genre I don’t have much love for – I enjoyed Company of Heroes and World in Conflict, but I tried to play through Warcraft 3 to get more of the World of Warcraft background story, and I just couldn’t do it. The style of play seems foreign to my gaming skill set and just not enjoyable to me.

I don’t like 1 on 1 fighting games, either. I don’t want to remember a million moves, I don’t enjoy the blocking techniques, and I don’t like getting my shit fucked up by a guy hitting an 80-hit combo that I can’t do anything about.

Perhaps my biggest pet hate crosses genre lines: aggressively mediocre games. I’m not talking about the truly crappy like Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, E.T. or Altered Beast, but the games like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, that have a framework of competency that leads you to believe they could have been something good, but have all the life sucked out of them.

My least favourite game? Halo. I’m not fond of FPS on a console at the best of times, so take this with a grain of salt, but I found this game massively uninspired. It had a colour palette like it was CGA all over again. Its way of ‘extending’ the game (and thus the value) was to make you run back through the levels, in reverse. And this was the company that made Marathon. They had a good track record. They knew better. Of course, it sold by the truckload and has a devoted team of fanboys. The series sells massively. It rated well. What do I know?

Picture shamelessly ripped off from IGN.com. If it makes you feel any better, I cropped it myself.

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