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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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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Deja Vu? This could be what all gaming will feel like, soon.

As well as the big pile o’ unplayed games, I keep a list of games that I hear/see/read about, both already released games that I’m yet to get (some examples: Bayonetta and The Saboteur), and games yet to come out (like Heavy Rain, Alan Wake, and Rage). As the examples show, there’s definitely still new stories, new gameplay ideas, and new stories grafted onto old ideas coming out of game publishers. However, these new ideas have to fight very hard to get any traction. On my list of 31 upcoming games to watch, 22 are either direct sequels or part of an already established series. Mass Effect 2, Crackdown 2, Max Payne 3, Diablo 3, Thief 4…

I suppose I’m the sucker; it’s my own list, after all. And it’s probably what a large section of the gaming public wants – why wouldn’t you want more of a good thing? But it makes me wonder, are these games being released in addition to games with original ideas and settings, with as many new properties being released as there has ever been, or are they the replacement for new ideas? I worry when I see things like Activision (oh, you have come a long way since Pitfall, haven’t you) talking about not releasing new games unless they can be “annualised.” That statement does perhaps imply new ideas in gaming, but it implies ‘safe’ new ideas. Does it prevent any resources being put into the next Psychonauts, Ico, or Okami?

Call of Duty, Guitar Hero - these sort of series will be cranked out on a yearly basis, quality or need be damned. As game budgets and therefore the number of units needed to sell to make a profit rise, the will to take on risk evaporates, and thus these sort of sequels or annual installments will be prevalent. GTAIV, as an example, had a lot of ambition, and in some ways its reach exceeded its grasp, but at the core it was largely the same game as every GTA game since GTA3 – and stuck largely to what people look for in a GTA game. I can see the Madden Syndrome threaten to take over before too long, where the game title just becomes ‘Call of Duty 2011‘, and any gameplay changes are minor and incremental. It seems like the only games that will join these existing series’, at least from major publishers, will be games that are derivative of them.

Repitition and sequels are old as games themselves: Look at Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man, Galaxian and Galaga. There’s been a million Zelda sequels, give or take, and that’s down to a fine art by now, which is pretty much exactly why I struggle to take much interest in the Zelda series anymore. You can contrast this with the (western versions of the) Super Mario Bros. series, which up to Super Mario 64 (at the very least) did something different in every game. But the development cycles were long, and games were relatively less expensive to make – the pressure was undoubtably there to make a hit, but would be unlikely to sink the company if one game in a series wasn’t quite the blockbuster they were hoping for. There was time to experiment when a game didn’t have to come out every year, and even if games were released annually, they didn’t need the scores of graphic and sound resources that games do now.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t want a good sequel to a game I enjoy, but getting one every year is a bit ridiculous and can make you tired of even the best ideas. I mean, I like pizza, but I don’t want to eat it every night, you know?

Image from Sports Rubbish, done over with my 1337 chopping skillz.

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