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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From the sublime…to the ridiculous.

Apologies for the lateness of the post, Windows 7 decided to restart itself to install some update yesterday while I was away from the computer, eating the first version of my post, and I needed some time for the rage to die down, and to recreate the magi…who am I kidding, there’s no magic. I just needed time to sublimate the rage.

One of my favourite games of last year was Batman: Arkham Asylum. I thought the game was really well crafted and used the licence really well. The Scarecrow-drugged sequences were great, the sidequests were fun and easy to avoid if you didn’t care for them, the combat made you feel like a superhero without having to remember a million combinations of buttons, and it was probably the first game to properly combine the ‘detective’ and ‘crimefighter’ sides of Batman. Sure, it had its niggles (detective mode was a little too useful to warrant switching off much), but overall it was a great game, certainly in my top 5 for last year. A great example of what can be done in a licenced game. Now, by ‘licenced games’ I mean those whose ideas and characters are taken from other media – movies, TV shows, comic books, and so on – not arcade ports. I don’t have enough ideas that I can just roll something like crappy arcade ports into a post and not use it on its own, when there’s been so many crappy arcade ports over the years…

On the flipside to Arkham Asylum was Terminator: Salvation, one of my least favourite games of last year, more true to the track record of licenced games in general, and a 4-hour-long insult to full-priced games everywhere. I sat down to play this at a friend’s place, and before the afternoon was out, we were done. T:S joins a long list of shitty licenced games. If you want an example, look no further than the bottom 50 on Metacritic‘s XBox 360 review list. Names like Tron, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Pimp My Ride, and a number more names stick out – and they’re all from licences. I don’t doubt the situation is very similar on other systems, too. Licenced games tend to be the very definition of shovelware, hastily cobbled together to push out onto the more casual gamer who sees a name they know and like, and buy the game regardless of quality. Oftentimes, they’ll figure out before too long that they dropped good money on a turd, but by that point the publisher has already been rewarded for their half-assery.

It’s a marketing strategy that’s worked since the 8-bit days, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I shall call it the ‘Ocean Strategy’, after the notorious English publisher famous for tons of crappy licenced games (and a few good ones). Ocean games were often known not only for being crappy, but for diverging massively from their source material – giant spiders in Rambo, anyone? Of course, a few games use a licence in a slight tangent to the source material to make a good game. Goldeneye on Nintendo 64 diverged from the movie slightly, but was close enough, and it pretty much incorporated all the set pieces from the movie along with the tangents. More often, though, a tangent to the source material ends up more like Superman 64 – a pointless set of hoops to jump through (literally, in this case) from trying in vain to make something ‘game-y’ out a licence, and failing miserably.

I know I’m probably preaching to the converted here, but please, please, please make developers and publishers -earn- the money that they need to pay back their licence fees. Rent, read reviews, play a friend’s copy – do whatever you have to do, but subject licenced games to the same scrutiny you would subject any other game to, whether it’s got your favourite superhero in it or not. To the Ocean Strategy, Oldschoolhard says NO.

Images from PlayworksOnline and Das Gamer, cooked up into this delicious stew.

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