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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Buncha noisy kids with too much booze in ‘em…

Apologies for my absence. The lack of updates this week just gone is due to a delightful infection I seem to have picked up, although I am now on the mend, and have gone from ‘death warmed over’ to ‘just slightly achey.’ On the upside, being in bed feeling sorry for myself gave me some time to ponder. I thought, among many other thoughts, about the gaming magazines of the past: EGM, Gamepro, Nintendo Power. Sure, the latter two still exist and the first is going to be revived shortly, but they are wholly different entities to what they were in the 80s and early 90s, when I were a lad. Nintendo Power was basically a Nintendo catalogue that you paid for, but as a kid, too much Nintendo was never enough. EGM and Gamepro had a real sense of personality, and EGM in particular had a particular ‘vibe’ that you just can’t find in games magazines these days.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some great games writing out there. I’m a huge fan of sites like Old Man Murray, Bitmob and Rock Paper Shotgun, and I read a bunch of magazines I like, as well as many blogs, which insert a bit of humour and/or personality into talking about games. It’s unfortunate that the same can’t be said for every gaming site or publication. I think the shift came when games journalism stopped being made by a bunch of rowdy kids and became ‘professional.’

The main problem I have with a lot of games ‘journalism’ is that it’s not journalism, but thinks it is. It’s a combination of an extension of marketing and PR (at a preview stage), and criticism (at a review stage), but it’s put through the filter of trying to be objective. And it’s boring. Telling me that it is ‘like X former game, the graphics are y, the gameplay is z, the sound is a’ is fucking boring. It’s formulaic, and it misses the forest for the trees. It tells me everything about a game, and yet nothing about a game, because it often misses the key criteria: tell me why I should or shouldn’t play this game, through the prism of is it fun? Don’t just describe the game to me.

For example, I’m not a huge fan of FarCry 2: the endlessly respawning enemies at every crossroads, the poorly explained reasoning behind your character’s motivation, the pointless malaria mechanic that serves only to artificially lengthen the game with some sidequests, the million diamond cases that are also pointless to chase after you get enough to buy a decent weapon or two, and the lazy PC porting.

However, it’s fucking beautiful and gives a real sense of place. It makes me want to go visit Africa. There are moments when one weapon jams, and another runs out of ammo, and you’re running through a hail of bullets trying to pick up another weapon that a dead enemy has dropped, where your heart is pumping, and it seems like a near-perfect game, if only for a moment. And the reason why I even bought and played through it in the first place was a hail of blog posts, from some of the blogs in the sidebar, telling me why they loved it, despite its flaws. They made me want to experience what they had, warts and all.

A game review would instead usually give me the mechanics: how the game works + how long it is + a rough plot outline + the negatives (ie. my complaints) + a note about the attractive graphics, with a cliched sign-off like ‘FarCry 2 is flawed but still playable. If you like FPSes, you’ll like this game.’ There’s rarely anything about how it made the reviewer feel, and what makes it worse is that although game writing often tries ever-so-earnestly to be objective, it tends to fucking fail at that, too.

Reviewers natually have favourite game genres and settings, or they’re working to a tight deadline, or whatever else. Tell me this. Music critics do. Film critics do. Treat yourself like the critic you are. Let me know ‘I didn’t like x FPS very much, but I don’t really like FPSes, I’m more of a RTS kind-of-guy,’ or ‘this mech game is way too short, but I fucking love mechs, so I loved it.’ Let me know where you’re coming from.

Also, the scoring system used by most is pretty much broken. 5-6 is a ‘crappy’ game, ’7′ is ‘average’. Below 5 is for truly shitty games, not for mediocre games on down like it should be. Scores below 3 seem to be reserved only for unfinished games, rushed out. The score often doesn’t even match the review: ‘This game sucks…6.5′ or ‘this game is nearly flawless…8.’

My previous example of “aggressively mediocre games” are a 5-6/10. These games are relatively complete and sound – there’s no guaranteed game-breaking bugs or obvious missing chunks of quests. They’re not terrible games where you don’t even know where to begin when criticising them. But they’re whitebread. There’s some flaws, and nothing makes them stand out. They stick to genre conventions. Their story is probably generic. Their graphics are attractive without being outstanding and their musical score is pleasant and/or forgettable… Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is, in my mind, a classic aggressively mediocre game – a 5/6 out of 10. Metacritic puts it at 72/100 – because, again, 7 is ‘average’ in game reviewing.

What’s the solution? Well, there’s no one solution. Reviews need an overall. Scoring needs an overhaul. But I can think of something that will at least enliven reviews: show me your personality. Be subjective, games writers. You’re not journalists in any traditional sense, and nor should you be. You’re not reporting the news. Don’t give me the games writing equivalent of a lede and a nut graf then tick off boxes on your review formula. Tell me about what the game made you feel, why it’s fun or not, and what else you like so I can compare our tastes, please.

Image from Video Games Blogger.

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