Oldschool Hard

I usually got to see this about 50 times a match, 0.1 seconds before waiting to respawn.

My first post to Bitmob made the front page a few weeks ago. It’s about the coming changes to raiding in the next WoW expansion, Cataclysm. If you’re interested, you can check it out over here.

Also, for a fun little retro gaming mashup, check out Super Mario Crossover.

Work is nearly finished on my thesis, with a week left before I hand it in. No fabulous job offer has presented itself, tickets have been purchased, and in just under two weeks I move halfway across the world with a suitcase, a laptop, and a guitar. I ultimately made the decision to take my PS3, DS, PC and 360 games with me, and not sell my PS2 games. It’s keeping a foot in two camps, I guess, but whether or not I decide to stay or come back, I figure that my PS2 collection is essentially worth as little as it’s ever going to be worth, and I can sell it on a later visit back, should I need to, or it’s there for me if I come running back with my tail between my legs.

I’ve been reading, even if I haven’t been writing, and I found one particular article to strike a chord. Here is an admission of guilt within, rather than about, videogames.

My own admission: Well, I’ve thrown my controller a few times before in frustration, but I’ve already mentioned that. The general tone of this blog probably indicates that I’m prone to being a tad surly at times, so that should come as no real surprise.

A deeper admission, for someone who complains so much about what games should and shouldn’t be and thus likes to portray himself as a switched-on gamer: I’m terrible at multiplayer gaming.

WoW? Well, not WoW. I’m not the best but I’m in the upper half. PvE WoW is easy. Do some maths or read someone else’s maths so you gear correctly, don’t stand in the fire, watch the cast bar, hit the right buttons. PvP WoW is rock paper scissors, pick your battles and you’ll probably win. Other types of games, though, well…

Generally, it’s the speed of the game that gets me.

RTS? I build too slowly, try and get massively fortified, and end up getting rushed and stomped very quickly with my fortifications half-done.

FPS? I panic when someone starts shooting at me and when I fire back my shots tend to go everywhere but where they should. I can do reasonably well with an AoE class like the Pyro in Team Fortress 2, where I don’t have to be dead-on with my shots, and I’m adept at not dying when I play a support class, like someone repairing, doling out ammo, or chucking healthpacks around, but by genre definition, the games are shooters, and I fail at that part. I’m especially bad at the fastest-paced games, and vividly recall the thrashings I got when Quake 3 came out. In single player FPS, I can hide, take my time, rely on the predictability of the AI, and think about things. I don’t have that luxury in multiplayer FPS. The same problems also largely apply to me and third-person multiplayer games. Shit, even when I played on various MUDs, MUSHes, and MOOs, I’d panic during combat and not be able to type quickly enough half the time.

Sports games? I lack the aftertouch finesse, reflexes and, in most sports, tactical awareness needed.

I can’t think of any other common multiplayer genres at the moment, but it’s a good bet I suck at them, too. I generally need time to consider what I’m going to do, and other people don’t, it’s that simple. Me fail gaming? That’s unpossible!

Image from Unreality Magazine.

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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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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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