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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This is not my pile of games, but if all my digital games were boxed copies, this would be about right, if not too small.

I did a clean out this week, for the dual benefit of making a little bit of cash out of what I have lying around, and clearing some clutter. I’ve got an apartment’s worth of stuff crammed into a room, and the saying about square pegs and round holes comes to mind – I can move it around as much as I like, but it still doesn’t fit properly. I have a remarkably hard time getting rid of certain things. I’ll buy, sell, and trade computer equipment without a second thought, but when it comes to games, books and magazines, I just can’t seem to let go. I find it very difficult to part with 3-year-old Custom PC magazines that are, with the rapid advance of technology, now practically useless, full of outdated information about hardware no longer being sold. I keep car magazines talking about cars I will never buy and workshops that have shut down. I have books from my childhood that I will never read again. Perhaps I can justify that by saying that they’re for my children, but I don’t have any of those and am not likely to for quite some time, if ever.

I still have my DS phat from 2004, despite its wrist-breaking weight and size and tiny screens, because I won’t dispose of something that works, and being video-game related, I won’t sell it. The only games I’ve sold in years are games where I picked up another, improved, version, or I picked up another copy in a steam multi-pack and thus have no use for the boxed version anymore. The one exception is Saints Row 2, which I bought on 360 in a one-day sale, played through, and sold for pretty much the same price as I originally paid. And I only sold that because I intended to buy another copy when it got cheaper. And eventually I did, in a roundabout way, buying the THQ complete pack on steam, of which SR 2 was one of the included games. Even when I was a kid I was hesitant to sell games. Before Saints Row 2, the last game I can remember selling was Jet Force Gemini on the N64, and before that, NBA Jam Tournament Edition on Gameboy. Otherwise, I’d trade in systems and my whole collection on that system, towards the new latest and greatest, but only the whole collection, because the endorphin rush of getting something new overcame the regret at selling games, and losing the whole collection at once left no reminder of what I had previously owned.

Now, I keep all my games. If I get a new system, it joins the collection, and I don’t trade an older system to get it. Some games I continue to own just to say I own them – I liked playing through them, but there’s no real reason to keep them other than that they’re rare and it increases my e-peen, like the two Space Channel 5 games and Gitaroo Man on PS2. Or I can use them to say that I own ‘x’ amount of games on ‘y’ system, even if I don’t particularly care about them individually once they’ve been played through. There are some games that are worth keeping, because of multiplayer or that I can go back and replay them – I can play Ico or Rez again and again and still enjoy them, and I like playing Team Fortress 2 or Left4Dead multiplayer, because I’m big into cooperative team games where I can play a part in the success of the team while still being a terrible aimer (and I am atrocious).

It also means I have a number of games of shame that I’ve picked up, through competitions, clearance (and thus being cheap), or just not doing my research before picking the games up. I not only own the first Getaway game, I own the second one, Black Monday, too. I expected them to learn from their mistakes. I was wrong. Driver, and Driv3r. Still hadn’t learnt my lesson on sequels to crappy games. Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, although in my defence, Allied Assault was a good game. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories. I thought I couldn’t get enough GTA, at the time. After an hour or two of this game, I could get quite enough, thanks very much. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. I liked the first Enemy Territory, being a team-based multiplayer game. I think what I liked most about it, in hindsight, is that it was free. Mission Impossible: Operation Surma. I stand by that one, because I liked the Mission Impossible game on the N64, even though it looked like someone had smeared vaseline all over the screen.

Perhaps the crappiest game I own is Die Hard: Vendetta, the PS2 version. There was a 3/$40 deal going on at the time, and it was one of those circumstances where I definitely wanted 2 of the games on offer, but it was a crapshoot for the third. I played about an hour of it before putting it back in the case, never to come out again. The textures were worse than an N64 game, the mission triggers were buggy, all the faces looked like masks and the level design was stupid. It might get better from that point, but I’m not brave/stupid enough to find out. It’s things like this that let me make posts on this blog with a clear conscience. I’m aware that I’m negative about a lot of games, but, hell, I’ve played enough games to have formed my beliefs through experience. I make bad choices, too, but I’m also prepared to accept any criticism I get.

Now, anyone want to buy some magazines?

Image from EZ-Mode Unlocked, resized.

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Just pass 700 more of these challenges, and then we’ll let you drive a Camry.

I like the idea of a decent learning curve and gathering more things as a game goes on to face greater challenges. Pretty much everyone’s aware of the ‘gather boomerang, gather hookshot, get more life-hearts’ Zelda-type of progression, and I don’t have a problem with that. Being able to get uber-gear straight off (like you can in, for instance, Oblivion, if you know what you’re doing) doesn’t make the game present much of a challenge, and while it’s fun to absolutely destroy everything in your path, the novelty grows old pretty quickly.

Note, however, the concept of a ‘decent learning curve.’ If a game ramps up the difficulty level exponentially, and then won’t let you get any further unless you do what it wants, that’s not fun. Ridiculously hard side-challenges like Ruby and Emerald weapon in Final Fantasy VII, I have no problem with – they don’t affect the main game at all. But something like the Guitar Hero games – “Yeah, play through these songs you don’t like to get to songs you do. Jump through some hoops to get what you paid for”? Fuck that.

It’s especially awful in games like the Gran Turismo series: I can’t speak for everyone’s motivations, but what I buy those games for is to drive fast cars that I’ll never be able to afford to actually buy. Having to pass ridiculous licence challenges in boring cars to get to the good bits strikes me as being against the spirit of being a game. Boring, arbitrary challenges that you have to do to get to do other things are usually known as a job, and you at least get paid for those.

Don’t get me wrong, some people like these ‘challenges’ and see them as fun. A good friend of mine refused to buy Gran Turismo 4 until he had completed 100% of Gran Turismo 3. He talks proudly about how it took him 2 years before he could complete a lap in Grand Prix Legends, at a decent speed, without crashing. However, for the rest of us without an acquired brain injury or autism spectrum disorder, this sort of stuff is generally regarded as bullshit.

At least unlockable content doesn’t cost you any money beyond what you’ve already paid for a game. I’m not really against downloadable content if it adds to a game, but paying for stuff that’s almost essential strikes me as a special kind of stupid. For instance, I’m enjoying the few hours of Dragon Age: Origins I’ve played so far, and as the Bioware sucker that I am, I bought the ‘deluxe’ (aside: notice how almost everything is or has a version that’s ‘deluxe’ or ‘premium’, these days? To paraphrase The Incredibles: “When everything’s special, nothing is”) edition, which came with all the DLC included. I bet the people who bought the regular edition of the game weren’t especially pleased to find that the fix to a widely acknowledged inventory problem could only be downloaded as part of the Warden’s Keep DLC pack. Sure, you got extra content, but anything that’s a systems-fix needs to be available free.

That wasn’t DA:O‘s only DLC sin, either. The idea of leaving hooks in the game (“Will you help me free my dronkey? To help me, thou needst to [PAY EA SOME MONEY]“) that slap you in the face with your ‘missing’ paid DLC is against the whole idea of stepping into a game world, and especially of playing a role in an RPG. Then there’s content like the extra multiplayer maps in games like Halo 3 and Gears of War 2, not technically ‘essential’, but without them it can be very difficult to find a multiplayer game. I haven’t even touched the concept of ‘day-1′ DLC, like the ‘classic’ map pack in GoW 2, the pack-in extras in (again) DA:O, and the Saboteur ‘titty code’.

What I find perhaps most ridiculous, keeping in mind that at this stage it’s just a rumour, is the rumour of Modern Warfare 2 having ‘DLC’ locked on the retail disc. It’s one thing to jump through in-game hoops to access what you’ve paid for, another thing entirely to pay more money for things that were on the disc YOU ALREADY PAID FOR.

But, you negative nancy who never has anything nice to say, my dear voices inside my head ask, what games do DLC right?

Burnout: Paradise is a great example – not only does it have a good unlockable learning curve and basically no ‘essential’ unlockables, Criterion keeps releasing new DLC for the game, with a mixture of free content, reasonably priced content, and vanity items that you can buy if you love the game, but have no effect on the gameplay if you don’t. Team Fortress 2 is another, always getting updated and added-to, for free. It can be done, the developers and publishers just have to have the will to do it.

Image from IGN.com

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