I don't know what games will be topping people's Game of the Year Lists in 2008, but here are some that shouldn't.
Grand Theft Auto IV Never before has such a fantastic game been rendered so annoying by a single feature. Liberty City looks beautiful, the missions are (mostly) fun and the story actually isn't bad at all. At first, it isn't even too obtrusive when Niko's irritating friends start calling. But then they keep calling...and calling...and calling. And then they call some more. Aside from Niko himself, every character in the game is a sad puppy, constantly in need of attention and a trip outside. Sure, you can turn Niko's phone off, but then you get to watch a constant stream of "thumbs down" icons popping up in the corner of the screen as friend after pathetic friend pouts about being ignored. And heaven help you if you do turn your phone back on, to receive a string of passive aggressive tirades. "Hey, Niko. I guess you've forgotten all about me. You probably never liked me anyway, you worthless asshole. I'm just gonna go kill myself now. Anyway, wanna go bowling?"
Braid Somewhere, some pretentious idiot is going to put this XBLA platformer on top of his game of the year list, and I'm going to want to smack him. Yes, Braid is smart, pretty and even a little bit touching. But anyone who would say it's game of the year is probably waiting with bated breath for the next Bright Eyes album, hoping his new shipment of Threadless t-shirts arrives soon, and blogging about how awesome dinosaurs are.
Bioshock I thought Bioshock was the best game of 2007, but just because they waited a year to release it on the PS3 doesn't mean it deserves to monopolize Game of the Year lists all over again. Would you kindly pick something new this year?
Mirror's Edge Again, most people probably wouldn't consider this, but it's just innovative enough that some people will. Those people probably stopped playing around the sixth level, while the game was still fun. Unfortunately, the last couple of levels are sculpted from pure evil, a mistake which will hopefully be rectified when EA releases the inevitable sequel (assuming they haven't shut down all of their studios by then).
Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts I don't think anyone loves Nuts and Bolts quite as much as the guys at Giant Bomb, but if they do, they need to undergo electroshock therapy. This might be the worst game I've played in 2008. The driving controls are just so-so, the characters are thoroughly unlikable, each mission is more annoying than the last, and the whole game is built around the same concept that worked so well when it was in Kingdom Hearts and they called it the Gummi Ship. Not surprisingly, it's even less fun when it's made into a full-length game.
Rock Band 2 While they seriously improved the instruments this time around, that positive is overshadowed by a terrible track list and bland, overly gamey charts. When I play Rock Band or Guitar Hero, I want to feel like I'm really playing an instrument, not having random, meaningless notes thrown at me because someone doesn't realize that "harder" is not necessarily the same as "more fun". If you want your music game to be more challenging, include songs by more technically proficient bands. God knows they would be better 95% of the music on this disc.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Bunch Games Presents: Moon Ranger
In the late 80's a company determined to capitalize on the crushed dreams of children arose, and it went by the name Color Dreams. Most know Color Dreams games, or at leas
t they know the disgustingly discolored baby blue cartridges thrown in the discount bin of any local used game store. Of course Color Dreams was not out to specifically crush dreams, but oh did they.
Color Dreams came to be in the flood of unlicensed developers finding a way to bypass the NES 10-Nes chip that locked out anyone who did not pay Nintendo a lot of money and follow all their rules to get their official developer's kit. This seems like a lot of work, but producing low-budget games is something that doesn't turn the profit Nintendo required.
Anyone who attempts to play a Color Dreams game will note that they are much harder to get to load than a licensed game, and always have been. Since loading a licensed game can take a long time with the near-perpetual flashing red light of the NES, imagine. What caused this was the process of bypassing the chip, making the cartridge a finicky, glitch-filled pain to try to bring up on the screen. Many times in my experience with these games they tend to freeze up randomly. Got to love corner cutting.
Anyway, why is Color Dreams important? Well they are the guys behind both Wisdom Tree and Bunch Games. Wisdom Tree was the branch that dealt primarily with the religious games Color Dreams sought to control the market on, and Bunch became the way for them to produce relatively inexpensive games. Since everyone and their sister can tell you all you want to know about Bible Adventures and Bible Buffet, I am going to take a turn to tell you about the 'best' of the Bunch Games.
The Moon Ranger is a g
uy out to save the Earth from a dangerous alien race out to do...something that threatens Earth. To save us all he must go to the moon and search for pieces of an intricate bomb that spells doom for the invading race. It sounds averagely interesting for the 8-bit era.
Moon Ranger results in a world of garishly oversized sprites. It tries to be engaging, as the gameplay is mixed between side-scrolling shooter and then agonizingly constructed platformer. In the 2 hours I toyed with this game I did not have the patience to make it much further than the near end of the first level. 2 hours seems like a long time doesn't it? I spent most of it restarting as the game froze randomly, and when it did work I continued constantly.
The oversized sprites are horrible and at fault here. Trying to move a gigantic sprite is quite a hassle, since the world it is in has to be able to handle the large amount of space a large sprite needs to move in. Moon Ranger is alright at handling this problem during the shooter elements, but dodging fire is nearly impossible if there is more than one shot coming at once...which happens often.
What is not at all playable comes in between the shooter segments, the awkward nearly colorless platforming that has the sprite falling through platforms more times than he lands on them. One average jump took forever to complete by the cramped space of the levels and the poor design of the game in general...not to mention unresponsive controls coupled with obstacles placed to waste your meager 3 lives.
My particular favorite event is in the very first room. You walk in the door only to find a gun obstacle firing directly at your level. there is hardly any time to jump between shots and you pretty much have to take damage just to progress. Games should not require you to take damage to overcome a simple jumping puzzle. If you can do it without taking damage, i implore you to share footage.
I could not make it through this level mostly because of badly spaced platforms, a hideous sprite that handles like a brick would in the same situation, and a very chaotic level design with doors that seem to never lead back the way you came.
So I'll leave you with a video of the first 5 minutes. The person playing this is pretty good at the game, but it is seemingly impossible to do things without taking damage.
t they know the disgustingly discolored baby blue cartridges thrown in the discount bin of any local used game store. Of course Color Dreams was not out to specifically crush dreams, but oh did they.Color Dreams came to be in the flood of unlicensed developers finding a way to bypass the NES 10-Nes chip that locked out anyone who did not pay Nintendo a lot of money and follow all their rules to get their official developer's kit. This seems like a lot of work, but producing low-budget games is something that doesn't turn the profit Nintendo required.
Anyone who attempts to play a Color Dreams game will note that they are much harder to get to load than a licensed game, and always have been. Since loading a licensed game can take a long time with the near-perpetual flashing red light of the NES, imagine. What caused this was the process of bypassing the chip, making the cartridge a finicky, glitch-filled pain to try to bring up on the screen. Many times in my experience with these games they tend to freeze up randomly. Got to love corner cutting.
Anyway, why is Color Dreams important? Well they are the guys behind both Wisdom Tree and Bunch Games. Wisdom Tree was the branch that dealt primarily with the religious games Color Dreams sought to control the market on, and Bunch became the way for them to produce relatively inexpensive games. Since everyone and their sister can tell you all you want to know about Bible Adventures and Bible Buffet, I am going to take a turn to tell you about the 'best' of the Bunch Games.
The Moon Ranger is a g
uy out to save the Earth from a dangerous alien race out to do...something that threatens Earth. To save us all he must go to the moon and search for pieces of an intricate bomb that spells doom for the invading race. It sounds averagely interesting for the 8-bit era.Moon Ranger results in a world of garishly oversized sprites. It tries to be engaging, as the gameplay is mixed between side-scrolling shooter and then agonizingly constructed platformer. In the 2 hours I toyed with this game I did not have the patience to make it much further than the near end of the first level. 2 hours seems like a long time doesn't it? I spent most of it restarting as the game froze randomly, and when it did work I continued constantly.
The oversized sprites are horrible and at fault here. Trying to move a gigantic sprite is quite a hassle, since the world it is in has to be able to handle the large amount of space a large sprite needs to move in. Moon Ranger is alright at handling this problem during the shooter elements, but dodging fire is nearly impossible if there is more than one shot coming at once...which happens often.
What is not at all playable comes in between the shooter segments, the awkward nearly colorless platforming that has the sprite falling through platforms more times than he lands on them. One average jump took forever to complete by the cramped space of the levels and the poor design of the game in general...not to mention unresponsive controls coupled with obstacles placed to waste your meager 3 lives.
My particular favorite event is in the very first room. You walk in the door only to find a gun obstacle firing directly at your level. there is hardly any time to jump between shots and you pretty much have to take damage just to progress. Games should not require you to take damage to overcome a simple jumping puzzle. If you can do it without taking damage, i implore you to share footage.
I could not make it through this level mostly because of badly spaced platforms, a hideous sprite that handles like a brick would in the same situation, and a very chaotic level design with doors that seem to never lead back the way you came.
So I'll leave you with a video of the first 5 minutes. The person playing this is pretty good at the game, but it is seemingly impossible to do things without taking damage.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Braid: A Story of Screen shots and demos
Site, after site...after site praises the glory of Braid aside some of the worst screens of a game I've ever seen. The colors looked muddled, the game play generic. Now before you flip on me saying that I have committed the crimes of a thought criminal, I would like to remind you that many, many games in this world receive an inadequate amount of hype when their actual game play is taken into consideration.
My biggest example is that beautiful death Assassin's Creed, that was so bright you could fry something on your television the poor unit was working so hard, and the game play was really not standing up to the ridiculously bright world you run around in. I remember screens being something I could not really determine, the world too bright, too 'detailed' in a sense. I knew that Altaire had a fantastic outfit, but beyond this it is not really something digestible.
For Braid the reaction was similar, at least on the screen shots side of it all. Any screen I saw of Braid was a mixture of color to the point I could barely find the character, and the backgrounds had a weird transition appearance to them. There was something off about it in my mind. I could not see the brilliance, and I doubted any picture would give me the evidence I needed to combat the waves of praise the game seemed to create.
Demos are very useful tools. They can show you how well an idea on paper transitions, especially if you are like most of the gaming public that live vicariously through journalists. Braid has a demo on live, so I bit.
A demo can give you the entire atmosphere of the game, something a picture and a fanatic description cannot. The first thing I realized was the beautiful transitioning of color, something that left the screens looking muddled. The color and its usage is something that had my jaw hitting the floor, my eyes lost in the viciously bright backgrounds of world 2 that somehow seemed less harsh than Assassin's Creed.
Though I praise demos for their uses, I am forever hesitant about their accuracy in delivering a good feel for a game. Too Human bombarded me with the overall complexity the game seems to be designed around and was not particularly enjoyable. I was not left with a desire to buy Too Human after watching poorly animated expressions and faces with curious color pallets. As if in an effort to completely dispel Too Human, the demo of Braid trapped me in its world, in its blinding brightness and the excellence of the music. From presentation alone I was nearly completely sold on the game.
I love Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for the sands rewind feature. When Braid based its game play on the concept of being able to rewind through the puzzle levels I was dancing for joy. And the near unlimited rewind is a wonderful function and makes the puzzle-solving gameplay much, much, much more practical and enjoyable. My only problem is how the rewind function distorts the beautiful music.
Braid is brilliant, adorable, intelligent and excellent for its price. Considering that like games with its level of complexity and craft would cost much more, I do not understand the complaints at the price.
For those who are doing similar things with Braid, as in saying the screens are horrible and the game play looks childish, give the demo a shot. It is ridiculous now, looking back at all the negative feedback the game is raking in from the uninformed. I was not going to write a thing here until I was sure of what I thought of the game.
Now I know it is certainly worth its price, if for nothing more than the precious little dinosaur that talks to you.
My biggest example is that beautiful death Assassin's Creed, that was so bright you could fry something on your television the poor unit was working so hard, and the game play was really not standing up to the ridiculously bright world you run around in. I remember screens being something I could not really determine, the world too bright, too 'detailed' in a sense. I knew that Altaire had a fantastic outfit, but beyond this it is not really something digestible.
For Braid the reaction was similar, at least on the screen shots side of it all. Any screen I saw of Braid was a mixture of color to the point I could barely find the character, and the backgrounds had a weird transition appearance to them. There was something off about it in my mind. I could not see the brilliance, and I doubted any picture would give me the evidence I needed to combat the waves of praise the game seemed to create.
Demos are very useful tools. They can show you how well an idea on paper transitions, especially if you are like most of the gaming public that live vicariously through journalists. Braid has a demo on live, so I bit.
A demo can give you the entire atmosphere of the game, something a picture and a fanatic description cannot. The first thing I realized was the beautiful transitioning of color, something that left the screens looking muddled. The color and its usage is something that had my jaw hitting the floor, my eyes lost in the viciously bright backgrounds of world 2 that somehow seemed less harsh than Assassin's Creed.
Though I praise demos for their uses, I am forever hesitant about their accuracy in delivering a good feel for a game. Too Human bombarded me with the overall complexity the game seems to be designed around and was not particularly enjoyable. I was not left with a desire to buy Too Human after watching poorly animated expressions and faces with curious color pallets. As if in an effort to completely dispel Too Human, the demo of Braid trapped me in its world, in its blinding brightness and the excellence of the music. From presentation alone I was nearly completely sold on the game.
I love Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for the sands rewind feature. When Braid based its game play on the concept of being able to rewind through the puzzle levels I was dancing for joy. And the near unlimited rewind is a wonderful function and makes the puzzle-solving gameplay much, much, much more practical and enjoyable. My only problem is how the rewind function distorts the beautiful music.
Braid is brilliant, adorable, intelligent and excellent for its price. Considering that like games with its level of complexity and craft would cost much more, I do not understand the complaints at the price.
For those who are doing similar things with Braid, as in saying the screens are horrible and the game play looks childish, give the demo a shot. It is ridiculous now, looking back at all the negative feedback the game is raking in from the uninformed. I was not going to write a thing here until I was sure of what I thought of the game.
Now I know it is certainly worth its price, if for nothing more than the precious little dinosaur that talks to you.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Evolution. And Pokemon...
On a whim, and a suggestion from Cameron, I've picked up E.V.O. Search for Eden
on the SNES. What I am amazed by is how just... overlooked it seems to be. Of course if you own a copy you know that it is not overlooked by those who wish for you to pay them for it. In fact...
A complete*version of the game is selling for $199.99 on the bays of E at the moment. Such a fickle gathering of bays. The cheapest copy is running for 59.
The E.V.O. of the title goes a long way to suggest what the game is about, the Search for Eden addition is not simply to let the game get by in this anti-evolution reality we live in. The game has you starting off as a fish who must devour other fish to gain evo points with which you....evolve parts of your body. Oh no! there goes the head of people who claim evolution is a no go.
Despite them, I find the customization of your little animal to be interesting. You move from the ocean to the life of an amphibian, then to something decidedly more land-based, then air-based, pretty much moving through an odd mis-matched evolutionary ladder. All the while you can choose what of your animal you will customize and what of it you will not. Each customization comes with pluses and minuses, which is something completely addictive to me in games. Soul Calibur hits this the best with me, and the armor and weapon pluses and minuses are similar to giving your fishie rock jaws or a sword fish horn.
Having played through E.V.O. I can see how a copy of the game would rightfully cost you over $50. the game is an odd gem in the SNES world, and something I've decided is incredibly rare. Once I lived and breathed the SNES gospel, but looking back there are very, very few games that stand up to the test of time. E.V.O. is just a delightful oddity that I think could be successfully adapted for...oh wait. Spore. Sigh...
In other news: Gamestop employees get miffed when some girl knows more about their potential August 17th inventory than they do. Or: The new POKEMON DS is coming here. I am pretty excited since it will be a while before I can make my happy way to the Pokemon Center in New York or Japan. What I am annoyed with here is that I wanted this DS to launch here first. This is the ultra not so flash Pikachu Edition, and over in the shined out bottom right-hand corner there is a little etching of the current re-styled slim pikachu. I don't know why Pikachu had to be slimmed down, but that does not make me want this any less. Some day I might own this glowing object of excellence, but I am fore sure going to get another of the Pokemon Center DS lites, the one Japan thinks American kids would eat up.
I guess we do tend to export Japan's monsters frequently, or at least those capable of destroying the world or existence. This is the DS coming to your local unfriendly Gamestop this weekend (hopefully), and one you will see in my hot little hands. I like the black DS for how sleek it appears compared to the white or pink, and now that is supports two awesome monsters it is just that much more awesome. What makes this DS particularly cool to own is not that spiffy graphic, but the Pokemon Dungeon short that comes in the bundle, the carrying case, and the rumored Gamestop t-shirt. Christmas has come early to pokemon nerds who know they should focus on buying text books over a shiny bit of plastic. In my defense, this is an awesome shiny bit of plastic!
on the SNES. What I am amazed by is how just... overlooked it seems to be. Of course if you own a copy you know that it is not overlooked by those who wish for you to pay them for it. In fact...A complete*version of the game is selling for $199.99 on the bays of E at the moment. Such a fickle gathering of bays. The cheapest copy is running for 59.
The E.V.O. of the title goes a long way to suggest what the game is about, the Search for Eden addition is not simply to let the game get by in this anti-evolution reality we live in. The game has you starting off as a fish who must devour other fish to gain evo points with which you....evolve parts of your body. Oh no! there goes the head of people who claim evolution is a no go.
Despite them, I find the customization of your little animal to be interesting. You move from the ocean to the life of an amphibian, then to something decidedly more land-based, then air-based, pretty much moving through an odd mis-matched evolutionary ladder. All the while you can choose what of your animal you will customize and what of it you will not. Each customization comes with pluses and minuses, which is something completely addictive to me in games. Soul Calibur hits this the best with me, and the armor and weapon pluses and minuses are similar to giving your fishie rock jaws or a sword fish horn.Having played through E.V.O. I can see how a copy of the game would rightfully cost you over $50. the game is an odd gem in the SNES world, and something I've decided is incredibly rare. Once I lived and breathed the SNES gospel, but looking back there are very, very few games that stand up to the test of time. E.V.O. is just a delightful oddity that I think could be successfully adapted for...oh wait. Spore. Sigh...
In other news: Gamestop employees get miffed when some girl knows more about their potential August 17th inventory than they do. Or: The new POKEMON DS is coming here. I am pretty excited since it will be a while before I can make my happy way to the Pokemon Center in New York or Japan. What I am annoyed with here is that I wanted this DS to launch here first. This is the ultra not so flash Pikachu Edition, and over in the shined out bottom right-hand corner there is a little etching of the current re-styled slim pikachu. I don't know why Pikachu had to be slimmed down, but that does not make me want this any less. Some day I might own this glowing object of excellence, but I am fore sure going to get another of the Pokemon Center DS lites, the one Japan thinks American kids would eat up.
I guess we do tend to export Japan's monsters frequently, or at least those capable of destroying the world or existence. This is the DS coming to your local unfriendly Gamestop this weekend (hopefully), and one you will see in my hot little hands. I like the black DS for how sleek it appears compared to the white or pink, and now that is supports two awesome monsters it is just that much more awesome. What makes this DS particularly cool to own is not that spiffy graphic, but the Pokemon Dungeon short that comes in the bundle, the carrying case, and the rumored Gamestop t-shirt. Christmas has come early to pokemon nerds who know they should focus on buying text books over a shiny bit of plastic. In my defense, this is an awesome shiny bit of plastic!
Friday, July 18, 2008
Nintendo, and the Future of Casual Gaming
That title probably suggests a broader scope than this entry will actually offer. However, I couldn't resist commenting on Shigeru Miyamoto's remark that Nintendo's E3 lead balloon Wii Music is "better than a video game". Hubris is expected, if not justified, from the man who created both Mario and The Legend of Zelda, especially when his output captures the public's imagination and money in the quantities Miyamoto's recently has; but any time an artist (allow me to forgo argument for application of the term here) decides he is bigger than his medium, there is cause for concern. In this entry, I want to examine Nintendo's current audience, and the prospects of its existing after the end of this console cycle.
There is no doubt that Wii Music is a casual title, like every other game Nintendo showed during their now infamous E3 press conference. And it's tough to fault them when they've risen to dominance in the perpetual "console war" on the backs of casual gamers. This has naturally lead to spurned hardcores branding the Wii a "toy" and a "fad". But the casual market was big business long before Nintendo began testing its waters with their little white box, and while I suppose it could still turn out to be the case that the Wii really is just a fad, casual gaming most certainly is not. However, this is not to say that the casual market will always exist. One need look no further than the 1984 video game crash to see that a booming market, and one that has been around too long to be called a fad, can still disappear virtually overnight.
But while history can serve as a cautionary tale, it cannot predict the future. Therefore, the question of whether the present market for casual games will continue throughout this console generation and beyond is open to debate. My personal opinion is that we are not likely to see another crash like the one in 1984, which is across the board and more or less brings the industry to its knees. But I am starting to wonder whether there may not be a similar crash in the casual market sometime in the next few years. While the enthusiast market will never produce, by itself, the kind of revenue we're presently seeing, it is also unlikely to get overburdened with the kind of sub-par junk that causes markets to crash in the first place. When the uneducated consumer feels that she is more likely to get junk than quality for her money, she will find something else on which to spend her money. Take a look at the Wii section next time you're at a game retailer, and you'll see that the mechanism for destroying consumer trust is already being assembled. For every Wii Sports, there are at least 15 Ninja Bread Men.
The difference between 2008 and 1984 is that the hardcore market is viable now in a way it wasn't then. Therefore, when what I consider the inevitable crash of the casual market occurs, it won't spell the end of gaming as we know it. As long as Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and the wealth of great third-party developers continue to produce games aimed at the hardcore market, that market is not going away. Of course when Miyamoto starts talking about his latest casual endeavor being "better than a video game", there seems to be cause for concern. And there is cause for outright fear when he says, as he did in an interview with 1Up's James Mielke: "With Zelda, we have to consider how to make it accessible for new gamers to pick up and play and enjoy just as hardcore gamers have." Have? Hopefully something has been lost in translation, but one would be excused for thinking that quote points at a casual future even for Nintendo's franchise titles.
As noted before, this is all speculation. Miyamoto may prove us all wrong again, and Wii Music may turn out to actually be better than a game, ushering in the era of console edutainment. But the market is bigger even than the great Shiggy, and it will ultimately be the quality of the Wii's software library--and not a single game--that determines its longevity, and maybe even the longevity of the casual market for console games.
There is no doubt that Wii Music is a casual title, like every other game Nintendo showed during their now infamous E3 press conference. And it's tough to fault them when they've risen to dominance in the perpetual "console war" on the backs of casual gamers. This has naturally lead to spurned hardcores branding the Wii a "toy" and a "fad". But the casual market was big business long before Nintendo began testing its waters with their little white box, and while I suppose it could still turn out to be the case that the Wii really is just a fad, casual gaming most certainly is not. However, this is not to say that the casual market will always exist. One need look no further than the 1984 video game crash to see that a booming market, and one that has been around too long to be called a fad, can still disappear virtually overnight.
But while history can serve as a cautionary tale, it cannot predict the future. Therefore, the question of whether the present market for casual games will continue throughout this console generation and beyond is open to debate. My personal opinion is that we are not likely to see another crash like the one in 1984, which is across the board and more or less brings the industry to its knees. But I am starting to wonder whether there may not be a similar crash in the casual market sometime in the next few years. While the enthusiast market will never produce, by itself, the kind of revenue we're presently seeing, it is also unlikely to get overburdened with the kind of sub-par junk that causes markets to crash in the first place. When the uneducated consumer feels that she is more likely to get junk than quality for her money, she will find something else on which to spend her money. Take a look at the Wii section next time you're at a game retailer, and you'll see that the mechanism for destroying consumer trust is already being assembled. For every Wii Sports, there are at least 15 Ninja Bread Men.
The difference between 2008 and 1984 is that the hardcore market is viable now in a way it wasn't then. Therefore, when what I consider the inevitable crash of the casual market occurs, it won't spell the end of gaming as we know it. As long as Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and the wealth of great third-party developers continue to produce games aimed at the hardcore market, that market is not going away. Of course when Miyamoto starts talking about his latest casual endeavor being "better than a video game", there seems to be cause for concern. And there is cause for outright fear when he says, as he did in an interview with 1Up's James Mielke: "With Zelda, we have to consider how to make it accessible for new gamers to pick up and play and enjoy just as hardcore gamers have." Have? Hopefully something has been lost in translation, but one would be excused for thinking that quote points at a casual future even for Nintendo's franchise titles.
As noted before, this is all speculation. Miyamoto may prove us all wrong again, and Wii Music may turn out to actually be better than a game, ushering in the era of console edutainment. But the market is bigger even than the great Shiggy, and it will ultimately be the quality of the Wii's software library--and not a single game--that determines its longevity, and maybe even the longevity of the casual market for console games.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Nintendo E3 Press Conference Thoughts
After the internet-killing announcement that closed out Microsoft's press conference yesterday, Nintendo and Sony came into day two of E3 needing something big to steal the show. But Nintendo is in a position right now where they really don't need a "megaton" announcement, and ended up keeping things low key. No new DS, no new character-driven franchises announced, no new Mario, Zelda or Metroid games. However, the focus on casual gaming was front and center, especially with the big announcement.
Wii Games
Wii Music: The big, show-closing Miyamoto announcement was Nintendo's first party music game, which will allow players to simulate playing 50 different instruments using the Wii remote, nunchuck and balance board. Rather than trying to match button inputs to on-screen cues, you basically hold a controller and emulate the movements you would make when playing a real instrument, and the game generates a song. Sounds like Wii Fit, in that it doesn't appear to give you goals (it may not even evaluate your performances, though there is much confusion about this). I can already hear the hardcores screaming about the Wii being "just a toy", but you have to give Miyamoto credit for pushing the casual genre to its extremes. My personal interest in Wii Music entirely hinges on there being some creative input from the user. If it's just Rock Band where any old movements you make are good enough to keep the song going, I would have zero interest. If I can actually use it to make music, then it might be a different story.
Animal Crossing: City Folk: An Animal Crossing title for the Wii was the big non-surprise of Nintendo's event. What is much bigger was the related announcement of Wii Speak, a new peripheral (apparently shipping with the game) which allows in-game communication options like (limited?) voice chat, as well as game-to-cell phone messaging. It will be interesting to see whether they open the online experience up more across the board, or if they're still going to require friend codes for these features. It will be even more interesting to see how this is spun on various news sites. Obviously, it's big news for the Wii, but as the other consoles offered voice chat out of the box (at least in games that supported it), I hope nobody comes out touting this as a huge step forward for gaming in general.
Wii Sports Resort: A new Wii Sports title meant to take advantage of the Wii MotionPlus peripheral (and, of course, the massive success of the original Wii Sports). Includes frisbee and fencing games. Judging by the success of Wii Play, I would assume they plan on bundling the MotionPlus with this and selling a million billion units.
Star Wars: Clone Wars: The long-awaited Wii remote light saber fighting game. I'm sure it will fly off the shelves to Star Wars nerds, but as Red Steel and Dragon Quest Swords have shown, the Wii has a long way to go to get sword fighting right.
Call of Duty World at War: This is a bit more interesting: a Wii-port of an honest to goodness triple A title. Wii remote aiming is naturally included, but I don't see people who have access to the PS3 or 360 versions choosing this one. Nice hardcore gateway drug for casual gamers who only bought a Wii, though (assuming they can make it fun).
Shaun White Snowboarding: I have a feeling we'll see a flood of balance board extreme sports titles in the next year, but outside of Wii Ski (which isn't really extreme sports), looks like this will be the first.
Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party: A party game using the balance board. Not much other info yet, as it's not coming until late 2009.
DS Games
Guitar Hero On Tour Decades: Features song-sharing between games, whatever that means. Very little info otherwise.
GTA: China Town Wars: An all new GTA game set in Liberty City and featuring a "custom game engine", which I assume means touch functionality. I have a feeling this will really give us an idea of what the DS's limits are. Coming this Winter.
Spore Creatures: Sounds like the Creature Creator for the DS, with the ability to share creatures over Wi-Fi. Again, very little info otherwise.
Pokemon Rangers: Shadows of Almia: No info given outside of the title, but it's Pokemon, so even if they don't ever tell us what the game is, it will still sell millions.
Non-Game Software
It was announced that Nintendo is working on applications that will allow the DS to do some useful things for travelers, such as displaying flight information (and maybe even the location of one's luggage!), restaurant guides and more. Cool if they can get it working.
Cooking Navi: This formerly Japan-only title is now coming to the US. It's basically a cookbook (featuring around 200 recipes) with various search options. Should do pretty well, especially with the ever-widening audience for the DS.
Hardware
Wii Motion Plus: Finally, there's Nintendo's newest peripheral, a small dongle that plugs into the Wii remote's nunchuck slot and vastly improves the precision of the remote's motion tracking. As mentioned above, it was demoed with Wii Sports Resort, and I'm willing to be there will be a bundle.
And that's it. Lots of graphs and talk about how Nintendo is outselling everyone at everything all the time. Obviously, the company's focus is more and more on casual and inclusive gaming, which is obviously a very successful business model, but one I find interests me less and less as far as the products they're really pushing. However, I'm left wondering if Nintendo is waiting to bring out their big guns at Tokyo Game Show.
Wii Games
Wii Music: The big, show-closing Miyamoto announcement was Nintendo's first party music game, which will allow players to simulate playing 50 different instruments using the Wii remote, nunchuck and balance board. Rather than trying to match button inputs to on-screen cues, you basically hold a controller and emulate the movements you would make when playing a real instrument, and the game generates a song. Sounds like Wii Fit, in that it doesn't appear to give you goals (it may not even evaluate your performances, though there is much confusion about this). I can already hear the hardcores screaming about the Wii being "just a toy", but you have to give Miyamoto credit for pushing the casual genre to its extremes. My personal interest in Wii Music entirely hinges on there being some creative input from the user. If it's just Rock Band where any old movements you make are good enough to keep the song going, I would have zero interest. If I can actually use it to make music, then it might be a different story.
Animal Crossing: City Folk: An Animal Crossing title for the Wii was the big non-surprise of Nintendo's event. What is much bigger was the related announcement of Wii Speak, a new peripheral (apparently shipping with the game) which allows in-game communication options like (limited?) voice chat, as well as game-to-cell phone messaging. It will be interesting to see whether they open the online experience up more across the board, or if they're still going to require friend codes for these features. It will be even more interesting to see how this is spun on various news sites. Obviously, it's big news for the Wii, but as the other consoles offered voice chat out of the box (at least in games that supported it), I hope nobody comes out touting this as a huge step forward for gaming in general.
Wii Sports Resort: A new Wii Sports title meant to take advantage of the Wii MotionPlus peripheral (and, of course, the massive success of the original Wii Sports). Includes frisbee and fencing games. Judging by the success of Wii Play, I would assume they plan on bundling the MotionPlus with this and selling a million billion units.
Star Wars: Clone Wars: The long-awaited Wii remote light saber fighting game. I'm sure it will fly off the shelves to Star Wars nerds, but as Red Steel and Dragon Quest Swords have shown, the Wii has a long way to go to get sword fighting right.
Call of Duty World at War: This is a bit more interesting: a Wii-port of an honest to goodness triple A title. Wii remote aiming is naturally included, but I don't see people who have access to the PS3 or 360 versions choosing this one. Nice hardcore gateway drug for casual gamers who only bought a Wii, though (assuming they can make it fun).
Shaun White Snowboarding: I have a feeling we'll see a flood of balance board extreme sports titles in the next year, but outside of Wii Ski (which isn't really extreme sports), looks like this will be the first.
Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party: A party game using the balance board. Not much other info yet, as it's not coming until late 2009.
DS Games
Guitar Hero On Tour Decades: Features song-sharing between games, whatever that means. Very little info otherwise.
GTA: China Town Wars: An all new GTA game set in Liberty City and featuring a "custom game engine", which I assume means touch functionality. I have a feeling this will really give us an idea of what the DS's limits are. Coming this Winter.
Spore Creatures: Sounds like the Creature Creator for the DS, with the ability to share creatures over Wi-Fi. Again, very little info otherwise.
Pokemon Rangers: Shadows of Almia: No info given outside of the title, but it's Pokemon, so even if they don't ever tell us what the game is, it will still sell millions.
Non-Game Software
It was announced that Nintendo is working on applications that will allow the DS to do some useful things for travelers, such as displaying flight information (and maybe even the location of one's luggage!), restaurant guides and more. Cool if they can get it working.
Cooking Navi: This formerly Japan-only title is now coming to the US. It's basically a cookbook (featuring around 200 recipes) with various search options. Should do pretty well, especially with the ever-widening audience for the DS.
Hardware
Wii Motion Plus: Finally, there's Nintendo's newest peripheral, a small dongle that plugs into the Wii remote's nunchuck slot and vastly improves the precision of the remote's motion tracking. As mentioned above, it was demoed with Wii Sports Resort, and I'm willing to be there will be a bundle.
And that's it. Lots of graphs and talk about how Nintendo is outselling everyone at everything all the time. Obviously, the company's focus is more and more on casual and inclusive gaming, which is obviously a very successful business model, but one I find interests me less and less as far as the products they're really pushing. However, I'm left wondering if Nintendo is waiting to bring out their big guns at Tokyo Game Show.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Too Human Demo Impressions
E3 has more or less ensured that it's not getting covered, but the Too Human demo did show up on XBL last night, and at last the trolls at NeoGaf can play an hour of the game they've already declared a failure. Not surprisingly, the game is not as bad as the trolls would have you believe. But that's not to say it's an unqualified success. After two play-throughs, I would be interested in playing more Too Human, but the demo doesn't sell me on the game--at least not at full price.
People throw around a lot of references when discussing Too Human, but here's what I took away from it. The overall art style reminded me of Mass Effect, Halo 3 and Silver (how's that for an obscure reference?). The combat was a weird hybrid of dual stick shooters, Diablo II, Kingdom Hearts II, and the newest Alone in the Dark. The story...well, the use of Norse mythology is both goofy and pretentious, but it all ends up feeling like an early '90s comic book, and I have to admit it had its hooks in me by the end. It should already be obvious from what I've written that Too Human isn't doing anything new, and in some cases it doesn't do what it tries to do all that well. But then again, sometimes the whole experience comes together and is a mindless good time.
Of course the game has been sold as a lot more than a mindless good time, and that's the problem. Had Too Human been billed as a popcorn game from the beginning, the reaction almost certainly would not have been as negative as it has been. Whatever Denis Dyack might have hoped for Too Human to be, he should be able to tell that it's no masterpiece, and adjusted the hype accordingly. Maybe in the end Dyack will be proven right; maybe after an hour of gameplay the tide starts to turn and the true value of Too Human becomes apparent. But I doubt that's the case for the simple reason that most of the game's flaws are not of the "overly ambitious" variety, but the "feels like a last-gen game" variety.
Take the combat, for example. Attacking with the right stick is an interesting mechanic, and sometimes it's pretty fun. But aiming is spotty and frustrating, and precision targeting is nearly impossible. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the shooting is broken, but it's certainly well below average for this generation. There's something like auto lock on, but it's far too easy to randomly turn your back on battle and fire at nothing at all when trying to switch targets. It happens far too often for something that shouldn't happen at all. The moments when I had the most fun were when I was being swarmed by enemies, Drakengard style. When alien sword-fodder is all around you, it doesn't matter if the auto-aim feature randomly causes you to turn your back on the thing you're trying to shoot. And since melee attacks are acomplished with a flick of the right stick, there's no button-mashing fatigue.
Of course the fact that melee attacks are mapped to the right stick means that control of the camera is largely out of the player's hands. In 2008, I would really rather not play a 3D action game in which I don't have full camera control, and that goes double for a 3D action game with a broken camera. Remember 1997, when pre-rendered backgrounds were all the rage? Remember how, in those games, you never knew what angle the camera was going to switch to when you came around a corner? If so, then Too Human is a trip down memory lane. Worse yet, the angles are often the worst ones possible, forcing you to run blindly ahead, or constantly trying to pan away from the action, playing havoc with the already shoddy aiming. The left bumper centers the camera behind your character, but that's about the extent of useful control. If anything about Too Human is an unqualified failure, it's the camera.
The graphics also don't do much to impress. While the aesthetic is a strange and fairly likable cross between Mass Effect and high fantasy, the execution is far from cutting edge. The character designs are hit and miss (the women are much more interesting than the men, who are mostly grizzled, bald space marines, at least as far as the demo shows), but the actual models just don't look very good. The geometry is very obvious under the thin-looking skin textures, and characters look especially artificial when talking. Hair is ugly and very last-gen. Nitpicking? Perhaps, but again, when a game's developers promote it like Silicon Knights (or maybe just Dyack) has promoted Too Human, it's not unfair to expect more. The environments fare better, but I hope that more of the full game takes place in the lush outdoor environments which the game calls "cyberspace", as opposed to the dull gray hallways where all of the combat in the demo happens.
Finally there's the story, which is unintentionally ridiculous, yet successful in a way I'm sure Dyack never intended. As I said before, I couldn't shake the feeling of early '90s mainstream comics, especially Marvel's more sci-fi oriented titles. The pastiche of Norse mythology and Shakespeare (the Norns encountered in the demo are an obvious reference to the Three Witches from MacBeth) is trying so hard to prove that games can be high brow, but it really just ends up feeling like someone trying to show how smart they are by making very shallow references to classic literature. Still, absurd touches like angels coming down to take your dead squad-mates to Valhalla are undeniably entertaining, and the whole thing at least gets credit for gusto. It may sound like I'm just taking the piss out of Too Human with back-handed compliments, but I really would be interested to see how the story unfolds.
One of the big problems that Too Human is likely to encounter is that it's very easy to create a laundry list of complaints, and not nearly as easy to put into words how it succeeds. That's because, like some of the games it aspires to be--Diablo II, Mass Effect--what makes it fun is a certain intangible convergence of things that don't sound all that fun when described. Don't get me wrong--it is extremely unlikely that Too Human will be as good as any of the games it seeks to emulate. But it does appear to be worth a rental or even a used purchase for those who love the plentiful loot drops it offers enough to tolerate its occasionally overbearing flaws. Another six months or so of development wouldn't hurt it, but maybe if the already-announced sequels ever see the light of day, some of the problems can be fixed. If so, Too Human might end up doing all right for itself in the end.
People throw around a lot of references when discussing Too Human, but here's what I took away from it. The overall art style reminded me of Mass Effect, Halo 3 and Silver (how's that for an obscure reference?). The combat was a weird hybrid of dual stick shooters, Diablo II, Kingdom Hearts II, and the newest Alone in the Dark. The story...well, the use of Norse mythology is both goofy and pretentious, but it all ends up feeling like an early '90s comic book, and I have to admit it had its hooks in me by the end. It should already be obvious from what I've written that Too Human isn't doing anything new, and in some cases it doesn't do what it tries to do all that well. But then again, sometimes the whole experience comes together and is a mindless good time.
Of course the game has been sold as a lot more than a mindless good time, and that's the problem. Had Too Human been billed as a popcorn game from the beginning, the reaction almost certainly would not have been as negative as it has been. Whatever Denis Dyack might have hoped for Too Human to be, he should be able to tell that it's no masterpiece, and adjusted the hype accordingly. Maybe in the end Dyack will be proven right; maybe after an hour of gameplay the tide starts to turn and the true value of Too Human becomes apparent. But I doubt that's the case for the simple reason that most of the game's flaws are not of the "overly ambitious" variety, but the "feels like a last-gen game" variety.
Take the combat, for example. Attacking with the right stick is an interesting mechanic, and sometimes it's pretty fun. But aiming is spotty and frustrating, and precision targeting is nearly impossible. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the shooting is broken, but it's certainly well below average for this generation. There's something like auto lock on, but it's far too easy to randomly turn your back on battle and fire at nothing at all when trying to switch targets. It happens far too often for something that shouldn't happen at all. The moments when I had the most fun were when I was being swarmed by enemies, Drakengard style. When alien sword-fodder is all around you, it doesn't matter if the auto-aim feature randomly causes you to turn your back on the thing you're trying to shoot. And since melee attacks are acomplished with a flick of the right stick, there's no button-mashing fatigue.
Of course the fact that melee attacks are mapped to the right stick means that control of the camera is largely out of the player's hands. In 2008, I would really rather not play a 3D action game in which I don't have full camera control, and that goes double for a 3D action game with a broken camera. Remember 1997, when pre-rendered backgrounds were all the rage? Remember how, in those games, you never knew what angle the camera was going to switch to when you came around a corner? If so, then Too Human is a trip down memory lane. Worse yet, the angles are often the worst ones possible, forcing you to run blindly ahead, or constantly trying to pan away from the action, playing havoc with the already shoddy aiming. The left bumper centers the camera behind your character, but that's about the extent of useful control. If anything about Too Human is an unqualified failure, it's the camera.
The graphics also don't do much to impress. While the aesthetic is a strange and fairly likable cross between Mass Effect and high fantasy, the execution is far from cutting edge. The character designs are hit and miss (the women are much more interesting than the men, who are mostly grizzled, bald space marines, at least as far as the demo shows), but the actual models just don't look very good. The geometry is very obvious under the thin-looking skin textures, and characters look especially artificial when talking. Hair is ugly and very last-gen. Nitpicking? Perhaps, but again, when a game's developers promote it like Silicon Knights (or maybe just Dyack) has promoted Too Human, it's not unfair to expect more. The environments fare better, but I hope that more of the full game takes place in the lush outdoor environments which the game calls "cyberspace", as opposed to the dull gray hallways where all of the combat in the demo happens.
Finally there's the story, which is unintentionally ridiculous, yet successful in a way I'm sure Dyack never intended. As I said before, I couldn't shake the feeling of early '90s mainstream comics, especially Marvel's more sci-fi oriented titles. The pastiche of Norse mythology and Shakespeare (the Norns encountered in the demo are an obvious reference to the Three Witches from MacBeth) is trying so hard to prove that games can be high brow, but it really just ends up feeling like someone trying to show how smart they are by making very shallow references to classic literature. Still, absurd touches like angels coming down to take your dead squad-mates to Valhalla are undeniably entertaining, and the whole thing at least gets credit for gusto. It may sound like I'm just taking the piss out of Too Human with back-handed compliments, but I really would be interested to see how the story unfolds.
One of the big problems that Too Human is likely to encounter is that it's very easy to create a laundry list of complaints, and not nearly as easy to put into words how it succeeds. That's because, like some of the games it aspires to be--Diablo II, Mass Effect--what makes it fun is a certain intangible convergence of things that don't sound all that fun when described. Don't get me wrong--it is extremely unlikely that Too Human will be as good as any of the games it seeks to emulate. But it does appear to be worth a rental or even a used purchase for those who love the plentiful loot drops it offers enough to tolerate its occasionally overbearing flaws. Another six months or so of development wouldn't hurt it, but maybe if the already-announced sequels ever see the light of day, some of the problems can be fixed. If so, Too Human might end up doing all right for itself in the end.
Microsoft's E3 Press Conference Thoughts
A quick note before I jump into the Microsoft E3 goodness: I played through the Too Human demo this morning, and have some thoughts on it, but since I had one eye on E3 coverage, I wasn't paying much attention to anything but the combat. I'll probably go through it again before posting on it. Now, on with the show:
The Games
Final Fantasy XIII for 360: Fantastic. The more expensive gaming gets, the more I loathe exclusivity. Of course the game still seems to be in such early stages of development that it's unclear whether it will run as well on the 360 as on the PS3, but it's really good to see that Square Enix is really getting serious about the American and European markets, and not letting the politics of the Japanese market dominate all of their business decisions.
Fallout 3: I don't know what to say other than that this sounds like "The Next Bioshock". Since I loved Bioshock, I can't wait to get my hands on Fallout 3.
Resident Evil 5: A bit disappointed to know that you still can't move while shooting, but other than that the game still seems to be on track to be a worthy follow up to the great RE4. The March 13, 2009 release date feels like a long time to wait, but at least it's not as long as some people were predicting.
Gears of War 2: Eh. The first one never hooked me, and the addition of more testosterone to the sequel doesn't sell it to me. However, I'm sure the people who liked the first one are going to find a lot to like in this one, as well. I'll probably give it a try, but my completely non-objective viewpoint is that I don't expect to enjoy it much.
Fable II: I'm interested, but here's my issue: I'm an avid dog lover, and if your canine companion can get hurt, I won't be able to play it. I was so worried about the fate of the dog in RE4 that I could hardly watch the boss fight where he comes to help Leon. Yes, I'm totally weak, but as cool as some aspects of Fable II look, the dog is going to make it or break it for me.
Rock Band 2: As much as I love Rock Band, I won't be buying Rock Band 2. Why? The track list is awful. With the exception of songs by Lush and Interpol, everything else on the disc is either a played out hit that I never want to listen to again, or by bands I never wanted to hear in the first place, like System of a Down, The Offspring and Presidents of the United States of America. I'll buy the new instruments, and I'll keep buying DLC, but I'm putting my foot down on the disc (literally, if possible). If the disc were required to keep getting DLC, I would just sell my copy of Rock Band and move to Guitar Hero World Tour. It's that bad.
Portal: Still Alive: I'm actually glad that this will be coming to XBLA. My only fear for a Portal sequel was that the writing wasn't really suited for a full-length release. But it looks like they're going to go the DLC route, which sounds perfect. If not for FFXIII, the announcement that this is coming this fall would have been the most exciting moment of the conference for me.
Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts: Another one that just doesn't interest me in the least. I've never played a Banjo game becuase I hate the title, and the characters look totally unappealing to me. Maybe I'm really missing out on something big, but you know what? I don't care.
Guitar Hero World Tour: When this was announced, I had no interest in purchasing the full-band set up. I'm not a partisan to either Rock Band or Guitar Hero, but I do expect different things from them. Rock Band is the fun and easy party game with a more diverse set-list. Guitar Hero is where I go if I want a solid, guitar-based ass kicking. Both are great in their own ways. So when Red Octane announced that they were going to rip off the rock band concept, I yawned and hoped that there would be a package with just a guitar and the game. But now that Harmonix has utterly failed on the Rock Band 2 track list, I'm more open to the possibility of owning more plastic instruments. We'll have to see if Red Octane can come up with a better group of songs, though. I could very well end up sitting out this round of the music game wars.
The J-RPG fleet: Infinite Undiscovery, The Last Remnant, Star Ocean...honestly, I don't know what is supposed to differentiate any of these games from one another, and now that FFXIII is coming to the 360, isn't it a moot point? My understanding was that Microsoft was bringing over this quantity of second-tier J-RPGs in hopes of distracting people from the quality of the same genre that has previously been Sony's exclusive domain. But if Square Enix is going truly multi-platform with its big releases, do these other games become superfluous? We'll see, but for now I wouldn't even be able to identify screen shots of any of these.
Lips: Call me a music game whore, but I'm fairly excited by the first game to allow me to use any song out of my own MP3 library. It remains to be seen how their vocal-removal technology will work with songs whose production techniques are off the beaten path (will I be able to sing along to My Bloody Valentine and Ulrich Schnauss?), but otherwise this is sounding very cool.
The Ton of XBLA Announcements: The game shows are going to be cool for some people, but as someone who doesn't like game shows, I'm left cold. The announcement of what people are already calling Galaga Championship Edition is far cooler. GTAIV episodic content will definitely get me to put that game back in. Otherwise, I don't remember what was announced, and don't feel like sifting through the coverage to remind myself.
Xbox Live Changes
Avatars: Yawn. I don't do anything with Miis, and I don't see myself doing anything with XBL Avatars, either. Except that, you know, now I'm going to be forced to. I'll miss the picture of the Fruit Fucker that has graced my account for as long as I've had my 360. Also, the thought of paying for customization options doesn't appeal to me, and honestly I don't see it appealing to enough of the user base to make it worthwhile.
New 3D Dashboard: 3D interfaces strike me as something people thought was a good idea a long time ago that technological limitations have kept from becoming a reality until recently, leading to the discovery of better solutions in the meantime. Case in point: would you want to replace your web-browser with Second Life? If you want to look up a word on dictionary.com, do you really want to have to walk an avatar to a virtual bookshelf and pull down a book which then opens the web site? I know I don't. At any rate, this is why I don't care if Home ever actually emerges on the PS3, and why I hope Microsoft isn't going for something similar here. I'm all for streamlining the dashboard, but they're going to have to prove that a flashy 3D interface is actually more functional than 2D, and I think that's going to be very difficult.
Netflix on XBL: This is exciting, but I'm not sure how to interpret the official line that the service will come "at no extra cost" to Gold members. That sounds to me as if they're saying that now with my Gold subscription, I can download movies from the Netflix library for free. But since XBL already has a movie download service, which does not come free with a Gold subscripition, I'm assuming that what "no extra cost" actually means is that I'll be able to pay for Netflix rentals without having to have a unique Netflix subscription. However, if the movies are truly free to Gold subscribers, this is one of the most exciting announcements of the day.
My Verdict
Despite much of this information being leaked in the Intellisponse fiasco last month, they still managed to surprise with FFXIII, which I'll go out on a limb now and predict will be the biggest announcement of E3 '08. It was at least a huge opening shot, and I'm really excited to see how Sony and Nintendo counter.
The Games
Final Fantasy XIII for 360: Fantastic. The more expensive gaming gets, the more I loathe exclusivity. Of course the game still seems to be in such early stages of development that it's unclear whether it will run as well on the 360 as on the PS3, but it's really good to see that Square Enix is really getting serious about the American and European markets, and not letting the politics of the Japanese market dominate all of their business decisions.
Fallout 3: I don't know what to say other than that this sounds like "The Next Bioshock". Since I loved Bioshock, I can't wait to get my hands on Fallout 3.
Resident Evil 5: A bit disappointed to know that you still can't move while shooting, but other than that the game still seems to be on track to be a worthy follow up to the great RE4. The March 13, 2009 release date feels like a long time to wait, but at least it's not as long as some people were predicting.
Gears of War 2: Eh. The first one never hooked me, and the addition of more testosterone to the sequel doesn't sell it to me. However, I'm sure the people who liked the first one are going to find a lot to like in this one, as well. I'll probably give it a try, but my completely non-objective viewpoint is that I don't expect to enjoy it much.
Fable II: I'm interested, but here's my issue: I'm an avid dog lover, and if your canine companion can get hurt, I won't be able to play it. I was so worried about the fate of the dog in RE4 that I could hardly watch the boss fight where he comes to help Leon. Yes, I'm totally weak, but as cool as some aspects of Fable II look, the dog is going to make it or break it for me.
Rock Band 2: As much as I love Rock Band, I won't be buying Rock Band 2. Why? The track list is awful. With the exception of songs by Lush and Interpol, everything else on the disc is either a played out hit that I never want to listen to again, or by bands I never wanted to hear in the first place, like System of a Down, The Offspring and Presidents of the United States of America. I'll buy the new instruments, and I'll keep buying DLC, but I'm putting my foot down on the disc (literally, if possible). If the disc were required to keep getting DLC, I would just sell my copy of Rock Band and move to Guitar Hero World Tour. It's that bad.
Portal: Still Alive: I'm actually glad that this will be coming to XBLA. My only fear for a Portal sequel was that the writing wasn't really suited for a full-length release. But it looks like they're going to go the DLC route, which sounds perfect. If not for FFXIII, the announcement that this is coming this fall would have been the most exciting moment of the conference for me.
Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts: Another one that just doesn't interest me in the least. I've never played a Banjo game becuase I hate the title, and the characters look totally unappealing to me. Maybe I'm really missing out on something big, but you know what? I don't care.
Guitar Hero World Tour: When this was announced, I had no interest in purchasing the full-band set up. I'm not a partisan to either Rock Band or Guitar Hero, but I do expect different things from them. Rock Band is the fun and easy party game with a more diverse set-list. Guitar Hero is where I go if I want a solid, guitar-based ass kicking. Both are great in their own ways. So when Red Octane announced that they were going to rip off the rock band concept, I yawned and hoped that there would be a package with just a guitar and the game. But now that Harmonix has utterly failed on the Rock Band 2 track list, I'm more open to the possibility of owning more plastic instruments. We'll have to see if Red Octane can come up with a better group of songs, though. I could very well end up sitting out this round of the music game wars.
The J-RPG fleet: Infinite Undiscovery, The Last Remnant, Star Ocean...honestly, I don't know what is supposed to differentiate any of these games from one another, and now that FFXIII is coming to the 360, isn't it a moot point? My understanding was that Microsoft was bringing over this quantity of second-tier J-RPGs in hopes of distracting people from the quality of the same genre that has previously been Sony's exclusive domain. But if Square Enix is going truly multi-platform with its big releases, do these other games become superfluous? We'll see, but for now I wouldn't even be able to identify screen shots of any of these.
Lips: Call me a music game whore, but I'm fairly excited by the first game to allow me to use any song out of my own MP3 library. It remains to be seen how their vocal-removal technology will work with songs whose production techniques are off the beaten path (will I be able to sing along to My Bloody Valentine and Ulrich Schnauss?), but otherwise this is sounding very cool.
The Ton of XBLA Announcements: The game shows are going to be cool for some people, but as someone who doesn't like game shows, I'm left cold. The announcement of what people are already calling Galaga Championship Edition is far cooler. GTAIV episodic content will definitely get me to put that game back in. Otherwise, I don't remember what was announced, and don't feel like sifting through the coverage to remind myself.
Xbox Live Changes
Avatars: Yawn. I don't do anything with Miis, and I don't see myself doing anything with XBL Avatars, either. Except that, you know, now I'm going to be forced to. I'll miss the picture of the Fruit Fucker that has graced my account for as long as I've had my 360. Also, the thought of paying for customization options doesn't appeal to me, and honestly I don't see it appealing to enough of the user base to make it worthwhile.
New 3D Dashboard: 3D interfaces strike me as something people thought was a good idea a long time ago that technological limitations have kept from becoming a reality until recently, leading to the discovery of better solutions in the meantime. Case in point: would you want to replace your web-browser with Second Life? If you want to look up a word on dictionary.com, do you really want to have to walk an avatar to a virtual bookshelf and pull down a book which then opens the web site? I know I don't. At any rate, this is why I don't care if Home ever actually emerges on the PS3, and why I hope Microsoft isn't going for something similar here. I'm all for streamlining the dashboard, but they're going to have to prove that a flashy 3D interface is actually more functional than 2D, and I think that's going to be very difficult.
Netflix on XBL: This is exciting, but I'm not sure how to interpret the official line that the service will come "at no extra cost" to Gold members. That sounds to me as if they're saying that now with my Gold subscription, I can download movies from the Netflix library for free. But since XBL already has a movie download service, which does not come free with a Gold subscripition, I'm assuming that what "no extra cost" actually means is that I'll be able to pay for Netflix rentals without having to have a unique Netflix subscription. However, if the movies are truly free to Gold subscribers, this is one of the most exciting announcements of the day.
My Verdict
Despite much of this information being leaked in the Intellisponse fiasco last month, they still managed to surprise with FFXIII, which I'll go out on a limb now and predict will be the biggest announcement of E3 '08. It was at least a huge opening shot, and I'm really excited to see how Sony and Nintendo counter.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Leaked Rock Band 2 Tracklists Kill My Interest
Back in April, I wrote a post about Rock Band DLC which basically opined the fact that my favorite genres ('80s and '90s alternative from the UK) are under-represented in rhythm games, albeit it with good reason, financially speaking. The number of people who are going to pony up the dough to download My Bloody Valentine's "To Here Knows When" is a lot smaller than the number of people who will buy any given Red Hot Chili Peppers song, and while that might be a very sad comment on the average American's taste in music, it makes it pretty clear what Harmonix should do if they want to make money.
However, a strange thing happened since that post, namely the release of The Pixies' Doolittle as a Rock Band album pack. Now The Pixies aren't from the UK, but Doolittle was released by my favorite label, 4AD, which has played host to some of my favorite bands of all time, including the Cocteau Twins, Lush and Throwing Muses. When the release of Doolittle was followed closely by the announcement of Rock Band 2, to feature bands who had never before appeared in a rhythm game, my mind instantly leapt to some wondrous possibilities.
Well, this week, Kotaku ran a story about a couple of leaked tracklists which may or may not shed a lot of light on what to expect from Rock Band 2. And if you like good music, it looks like this definitely will not be the game for you. In fact, if the lists are to be believed (and never have I so desperately wanted a rumor not to be true), Harmonix seems to have gone out of their way to make a game I would absolutely not buy. The appearance of Lush's "De-Luxe" on both lists does nothing to change the fact that System of a Down, the Offspring and The Presidents of the United States of America are three bands I hate so much that hearing one of their songs literally ruins my whole day. I realize that's an irrational degree of hatred, but as a good musician once said (guess which one) "I can't change the way I feel". Any one of those bands making the final list will prevent me from buying the game, because I'd have to stop as soon as I came to their song.
I can't get irrationally upset, though, because like I said in my previous post on the topic, I understand why Harmonix is going with so much garbage: the masses have no taste. It's my own fault for developing expectations that were never going to be met. My only hope now is that more good stuff will eventually appear as DLC--or that Guitar Hero World Tour will pick up the slack and woo the money I would have spent on Rock Band 2 into Activision's pockets instead.
However, a strange thing happened since that post, namely the release of The Pixies' Doolittle as a Rock Band album pack. Now The Pixies aren't from the UK, but Doolittle was released by my favorite label, 4AD, which has played host to some of my favorite bands of all time, including the Cocteau Twins, Lush and Throwing Muses. When the release of Doolittle was followed closely by the announcement of Rock Band 2, to feature bands who had never before appeared in a rhythm game, my mind instantly leapt to some wondrous possibilities.
Well, this week, Kotaku ran a story about a couple of leaked tracklists which may or may not shed a lot of light on what to expect from Rock Band 2. And if you like good music, it looks like this definitely will not be the game for you. In fact, if the lists are to be believed (and never have I so desperately wanted a rumor not to be true), Harmonix seems to have gone out of their way to make a game I would absolutely not buy. The appearance of Lush's "De-Luxe" on both lists does nothing to change the fact that System of a Down, the Offspring and The Presidents of the United States of America are three bands I hate so much that hearing one of their songs literally ruins my whole day. I realize that's an irrational degree of hatred, but as a good musician once said (guess which one) "I can't change the way I feel". Any one of those bands making the final list will prevent me from buying the game, because I'd have to stop as soon as I came to their song.
I can't get irrationally upset, though, because like I said in my previous post on the topic, I understand why Harmonix is going with so much garbage: the masses have no taste. It's my own fault for developing expectations that were never going to be met. My only hope now is that more good stuff will eventually appear as DLC--or that Guitar Hero World Tour will pick up the slack and woo the money I would have spent on Rock Band 2 into Activision's pockets instead.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
My Pokemon Ranch is better than your Pokemon Ranch.
So, I love Pokemon. I have badges I won in the card league, I have Pikachu slippers...occasionally I respond to things with cute poke-sounds. It is sad that I will be 20 in less than 6 months. The past will never leave you, and with Diamond and Pearl I went absolutely insane. Of course I am not hardcore, but I do not have a party of six pikachus either. Hell, I am desperately in search of A pikachu.
But yes, I will gobble up any and all Pokemon propaganda and harmless crap if I think it is affordable, and the latest Wii Ware game My Pokemon Ranch was totally up my alley. Though I like it, I feel the game may be too...Japanese for many people's tastes.
On first impression, My Pokemon Ranch is a Mii-ed up Pokemon Snap, but now you don't even control an annoying character. This is probably going to make many players shy away from their latest 10 dollar purchase. There is very little that you actually do, and it is designed for people who want to see their lovingly trained pokemon in 3d. Like Pokemon Channel, this is watching pokemon, and like Snap, you are taking pictures of them.
That is really over-simplifying things. The game is really a game in a very Animal Crossing sense, mixed with Harvest Moon. Animal Crossing forces the player to be very patient and diligent in playing the game, and Ranch is all about taking it one day at a time. Every day your benefactor Hailey will generously bring you a new pokemon, and you are supposed to care for them. The pokemon she provides are very basic, but not entirely the original 150. But, the game launches with a Pikachu. That my friends is awesome. Though at first the all-time favorites look weird and boxy, definitely making the whole thing more Animal Crossing than Snap in presentation.
Harvest Moon creeps in with the leveling of the farms, but this could also relate back to Animal Crossing with the gradual construction of your house. Levels are reached when you gather enough Pokemon, and I am hoping this will soon allow me to add the games and toys the opening trailer hints at. Directly upon download I could not see anything to place, and in fact the controls were a bit swoopy to me. It definitely could do with a bit more control instruction, but i think the best instruction would be 'this is like the Mii channel with a ranch and Pokemon skin.' So you start out with 6 pokemon and watch them wander around. That's what you do in this game, watch. Of course I can watch Jesus, Gabe and Tycho interact with Pokemon. Bless you Check Mii Out.
My favorite element, and the one that will keep this game afloat for many younger gamers, is the the ability to import my Pokemon into my ranch. The Wii is beautiful for the wireless connection stability with the DS, and the ease at which I could load up my little Poke darlings and watch them romp was delightful. There is a downside. This functionality is not like that presented in Battle Revolution, where the game makes copies of your Pokemon. My Pokemon Ranch completely removes the Pokemon from your DS card and stores them in the Wii's hampered memory. Unlike previous hand held-to-console Pokemon exchange flops, Ranch saves itself by allowing the stored pokemon to be returned to the card as long as you aren't stupid and restart your game before you do it. Thank you Nintendo for making sure we were well-informed about this, as you get approximately 6 warning screens on both the television and the top DS screen telling you that you can retrieve your pokemon as long as you are not a dumb-ass. And you cannot take Pokemon other people give you, but they can take their own back. Cool to me, probably going to make little kids cry. But I make little kids cry by looking at them.
The coolest element to me is that Hailey will give you Pokemon Wanted posts on the in-game BBS. She examines your imported Pokes and your Pokedex to decide what Pokemon you should hunt down and provide for the Ranch. This is the playable element I think, being able to quest in your DS game for Pokemon required by your Wii game. I am not big on online gaming, but give me more communications gaming like this Nintendo and I'll be eating out of your hand.
Now this game is going to sell. It will sell like crazy because there are kids, kids like Pokemon, and parents like cheap Pokiman things to shut their kids up. What will be a downside is that this game is a game of watching and enjoying the relaxing movements of frolicing critters. From my time spent as a hawker of soft-wares, the average Pokemon kid of this latest craze is not going to get it. For every late teen to Mid-twenty-year-old who sneaks their DS to work to catch a Murkrow this game will be the shit. Unless they want action. Then I don't know what to tell you. Animal Crossing Pikachu is precious! That is what I tell you!
But yes, I will gobble up any and all Pokemon propaganda and harmless crap if I think it is affordable, and the latest Wii Ware game My Pokemon Ranch was totally up my alley. Though I like it, I feel the game may be too...Japanese for many people's tastes.
On first impression, My Pokemon Ranch is a Mii-ed up Pokemon Snap, but now you don't even control an annoying character. This is probably going to make many players shy away from their latest 10 dollar purchase. There is very little that you actually do, and it is designed for people who want to see their lovingly trained pokemon in 3d. Like Pokemon Channel, this is watching pokemon, and like Snap, you are taking pictures of them.
That is really over-simplifying things. The game is really a game in a very Animal Crossing sense, mixed with Harvest Moon. Animal Crossing forces the player to be very patient and diligent in playing the game, and Ranch is all about taking it one day at a time. Every day your benefactor Hailey will generously bring you a new pokemon, and you are supposed to care for them. The pokemon she provides are very basic, but not entirely the original 150. But, the game launches with a Pikachu. That my friends is awesome. Though at first the all-time favorites look weird and boxy, definitely making the whole thing more Animal Crossing than Snap in presentation.
Harvest Moon creeps in with the leveling of the farms, but this could also relate back to Animal Crossing with the gradual construction of your house. Levels are reached when you gather enough Pokemon, and I am hoping this will soon allow me to add the games and toys the opening trailer hints at. Directly upon download I could not see anything to place, and in fact the controls were a bit swoopy to me. It definitely could do with a bit more control instruction, but i think the best instruction would be 'this is like the Mii channel with a ranch and Pokemon skin.' So you start out with 6 pokemon and watch them wander around. That's what you do in this game, watch. Of course I can watch Jesus, Gabe and Tycho interact with Pokemon. Bless you Check Mii Out.
My favorite element, and the one that will keep this game afloat for many younger gamers, is the the ability to import my Pokemon into my ranch. The Wii is beautiful for the wireless connection stability with the DS, and the ease at which I could load up my little Poke darlings and watch them romp was delightful. There is a downside. This functionality is not like that presented in Battle Revolution, where the game makes copies of your Pokemon. My Pokemon Ranch completely removes the Pokemon from your DS card and stores them in the Wii's hampered memory. Unlike previous hand held-to-console Pokemon exchange flops, Ranch saves itself by allowing the stored pokemon to be returned to the card as long as you aren't stupid and restart your game before you do it. Thank you Nintendo for making sure we were well-informed about this, as you get approximately 6 warning screens on both the television and the top DS screen telling you that you can retrieve your pokemon as long as you are not a dumb-ass. And you cannot take Pokemon other people give you, but they can take their own back. Cool to me, probably going to make little kids cry. But I make little kids cry by looking at them.
The coolest element to me is that Hailey will give you Pokemon Wanted posts on the in-game BBS. She examines your imported Pokes and your Pokedex to decide what Pokemon you should hunt down and provide for the Ranch. This is the playable element I think, being able to quest in your DS game for Pokemon required by your Wii game. I am not big on online gaming, but give me more communications gaming like this Nintendo and I'll be eating out of your hand.
Now this game is going to sell. It will sell like crazy because there are kids, kids like Pokemon, and parents like cheap Pokiman things to shut their kids up. What will be a downside is that this game is a game of watching and enjoying the relaxing movements of frolicing critters. From my time spent as a hawker of soft-wares, the average Pokemon kid of this latest craze is not going to get it. For every late teen to Mid-twenty-year-old who sneaks their DS to work to catch a Murkrow this game will be the shit. Unless they want action. Then I don't know what to tell you. Animal Crossing Pikachu is precious! That is what I tell you!
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Penny Arcade Adventures: A Cautionary Launch Celebration
The big releases for this spring/summer are sure things: GTAIV was more or less guaranteed to be the biggest launch in gaming history months before it hit shelves; Metal Gear Solid 4 won't be as big due to its PS3 exclusivity, but it's still going to be huge, and probably move thousands of consoles for Sony. Wii Fit will sell like crazy if Nintendo can actually produce enough to keep up with demand, something I kind of doubt given the abysmal job they've done getting Wiis into stores. But the game I'm most excited about this summer is much riskier, from the creative, critical and business standpoints. That game is, of course, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, the first installment in a new episodic RPG from Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkis and Mike Krahulik, and Hothead games. To celebrate its release tomorrow, I'll be looking at why this title has a hard road ahead of it.
The Critical Factor: Penny Arcade has spent years celebrating great games and haranguing bad ones, and has in the process has allowed its creators to live what many gamers (and, truth be told, probably some critics as well) would consider a charmed life. The fact that Holkis and Krahulik actually make a living off of their comic and its satellite activities (including their own convention, Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX) and still find the time to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cash, games and consoles for their Child's Play charity every holiday season has caused a fair bit of jealousy and indignity to be sent their way by gamers and hack web comic artists. But PA's satire has never been restricted to games themselves, and has at times bled over into criticism of the gaming press, and this is where the problem comes in. While most critics will probably view the game objectively, others will almost certainly see their reviews as an opportunity to put PA's creators in their place. While I would be shocked to see any truly awful reviews (if only because I doubt Holkis and Krahulik would have gone ahead with the project had the game been bad enough to deserve them), I will not be at all surprised by nitpicking and general snippiness.
The Fanboy Factor: If Penny Arcade Adventures faces some difficulties with critics, the reception it will likely have to endure from hardcore gamers can only be called a shitstorm of legendary proportions. As others have noted, the core of the gaming community does not realize that there is a middle ground between "ZOMG" and "epic fail", and this attitude has always applied to anything associated with the Penny Arcade name. But for, arguably, the world's best-known game satirists to dare to make their own game...let's just say it's a safe bet that none of the hardcores are going to be typing "meh" in response.
But why, exactly, is this a problem? Everybody knows at this point that message boards are not indicative of the general population. For every hundred people who go on boards and complain about a lack of hardcore games on the Wii, there are a million people buying Game Party. But there are two differences between the Penny Arcade game and most major retail releases: (1) at launch, it will only be available through digital distribution and (2) it will be well below the radar of most people not already familiar with Penny Arcade. In other words, people aren't going to be walking into Best Buy and Gamestop and seeing big posters advertising the game (or even a box). And casual fans online who may be only marginally (or not at all) familiar with PA might end up being swayed not to by the game if they stumble into a troll-fest. Now if critical reception turns out to be generally positive, this problem will be more or less neutralized; but given that most people who don't spend a lot of time online reading about games are not familiar with Penny Arcade, it could end up being very tough for the game's audience to expand beyond the comic's devoted fans.
The Price Factor: Another reason the game is going to have a tough time attracting curious outsiders is its controversial price tag: $19.95 through PA's new Steam-like service, Greenhouse, or 1600 Microsoft points ($19.95 plus tax) on XBox Live. With roughly six hours of gameplay being promised, some are finding this hard to swallow. Now it may be that this is not a valid complaint: after all, Valve recently released a standalone version of Portal, which shouldn't take more than four hours on a first run, and which experienced players can easily finish in less than two hours, for $19.95--and this after the game has been available as part of The Orange Box for over six months. It may be legitimate to argue that Portal, one of the most critically acclaimed and innovative games of 2007, is not the same thing as Penny Arcade's episodic RPG; but when the entirety of one's argument is "no six hour game should cost $20", Valve--who no reasonable person would accuse of being bad at business--has already made a powerful case to the contrary.
Again, though, setting aside any issues of quality, the $20 price point is likely to deter a lot of the game's potential "pedestrian" audience. Think about Portal again: it's a game that has not only received glowing reviews from every major gaming website, but it has even had its own story on NPR and has been mentioned in other mainstream media outlets. PA Adventures is unlikely to enjoy the same sort of coverage, so it's going to be a lot harder to sell someone unfamiliar with the comic on shelling out $20 to see what all the fuss is about--especially when the comic is right there for free.
The Creativity Factor: So far, the problems that we have looked at for Penny Arcade Adventures are of a sort that would only affect the game's potential casual audience. But I want to close with one that might affect the game among its core audience: its creative direction. Now before I go any further, let me say that one of the most appealing things to me is the "alternate universe" direction that Holkis and Krahulik have taken for the game, casting PA stars Gabe and Tycho as supernatural detectives in a turn of the century, Lovecraftian world. But is this what most hardcore PA fans want? I'm reminded of my childhood, when a game would come out based on a popular cartoon license, and it would turn out to be a generic platformer with no relation to its source material outside of its main characters. And in a way, this is exactly what Penny Arcade Adventures is--the characters are there, but everything else has changed. Furthermore, is episodic content the right format for a game whose creators have repeatedly expressed disdain for continuity in their comic strip?
Again, I don't doubt that the final product here will satisfy me as a Penny Arcade fan; but I think it might be a legitimate concern that some fans will be turned off by the sweeping differences between the game and the comic. The sort of gamer who wants movie games to just reinact the story of the movie might very well be disappointed by the revelation that this will not be a game about Gabe and Tycho inflicting violence on each other in series of scenes parodying other games. As banal as I personally think that would have been, it is still a reason some might find to not pony up the money for the game at launch.
Hopefully none of these factors will adversely affect Penny Arcade Adventures. If I have ever been rooting for a game to do well, it's this one. But given the attitudes of the gaming community, the minor controversy over the game's price, and its bold creative direction, there is a chance that On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness will not live up to its sales potential.
The Critical Factor: Penny Arcade has spent years celebrating great games and haranguing bad ones, and has in the process has allowed its creators to live what many gamers (and, truth be told, probably some critics as well) would consider a charmed life. The fact that Holkis and Krahulik actually make a living off of their comic and its satellite activities (including their own convention, Penny Arcade Expo, or PAX) and still find the time to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cash, games and consoles for their Child's Play charity every holiday season has caused a fair bit of jealousy and indignity to be sent their way by gamers and hack web comic artists. But PA's satire has never been restricted to games themselves, and has at times bled over into criticism of the gaming press, and this is where the problem comes in. While most critics will probably view the game objectively, others will almost certainly see their reviews as an opportunity to put PA's creators in their place. While I would be shocked to see any truly awful reviews (if only because I doubt Holkis and Krahulik would have gone ahead with the project had the game been bad enough to deserve them), I will not be at all surprised by nitpicking and general snippiness.
The Fanboy Factor: If Penny Arcade Adventures faces some difficulties with critics, the reception it will likely have to endure from hardcore gamers can only be called a shitstorm of legendary proportions. As others have noted, the core of the gaming community does not realize that there is a middle ground between "ZOMG" and "epic fail", and this attitude has always applied to anything associated with the Penny Arcade name. But for, arguably, the world's best-known game satirists to dare to make their own game...let's just say it's a safe bet that none of the hardcores are going to be typing "meh" in response.
But why, exactly, is this a problem? Everybody knows at this point that message boards are not indicative of the general population. For every hundred people who go on boards and complain about a lack of hardcore games on the Wii, there are a million people buying Game Party. But there are two differences between the Penny Arcade game and most major retail releases: (1) at launch, it will only be available through digital distribution and (2) it will be well below the radar of most people not already familiar with Penny Arcade. In other words, people aren't going to be walking into Best Buy and Gamestop and seeing big posters advertising the game (or even a box). And casual fans online who may be only marginally (or not at all) familiar with PA might end up being swayed not to by the game if they stumble into a troll-fest. Now if critical reception turns out to be generally positive, this problem will be more or less neutralized; but given that most people who don't spend a lot of time online reading about games are not familiar with Penny Arcade, it could end up being very tough for the game's audience to expand beyond the comic's devoted fans.
The Price Factor: Another reason the game is going to have a tough time attracting curious outsiders is its controversial price tag: $19.95 through PA's new Steam-like service, Greenhouse, or 1600 Microsoft points ($19.95 plus tax) on XBox Live. With roughly six hours of gameplay being promised, some are finding this hard to swallow. Now it may be that this is not a valid complaint: after all, Valve recently released a standalone version of Portal, which shouldn't take more than four hours on a first run, and which experienced players can easily finish in less than two hours, for $19.95--and this after the game has been available as part of The Orange Box for over six months. It may be legitimate to argue that Portal, one of the most critically acclaimed and innovative games of 2007, is not the same thing as Penny Arcade's episodic RPG; but when the entirety of one's argument is "no six hour game should cost $20", Valve--who no reasonable person would accuse of being bad at business--has already made a powerful case to the contrary.
Again, though, setting aside any issues of quality, the $20 price point is likely to deter a lot of the game's potential "pedestrian" audience. Think about Portal again: it's a game that has not only received glowing reviews from every major gaming website, but it has even had its own story on NPR and has been mentioned in other mainstream media outlets. PA Adventures is unlikely to enjoy the same sort of coverage, so it's going to be a lot harder to sell someone unfamiliar with the comic on shelling out $20 to see what all the fuss is about--especially when the comic is right there for free.
The Creativity Factor: So far, the problems that we have looked at for Penny Arcade Adventures are of a sort that would only affect the game's potential casual audience. But I want to close with one that might affect the game among its core audience: its creative direction. Now before I go any further, let me say that one of the most appealing things to me is the "alternate universe" direction that Holkis and Krahulik have taken for the game, casting PA stars Gabe and Tycho as supernatural detectives in a turn of the century, Lovecraftian world. But is this what most hardcore PA fans want? I'm reminded of my childhood, when a game would come out based on a popular cartoon license, and it would turn out to be a generic platformer with no relation to its source material outside of its main characters. And in a way, this is exactly what Penny Arcade Adventures is--the characters are there, but everything else has changed. Furthermore, is episodic content the right format for a game whose creators have repeatedly expressed disdain for continuity in their comic strip?
Again, I don't doubt that the final product here will satisfy me as a Penny Arcade fan; but I think it might be a legitimate concern that some fans will be turned off by the sweeping differences between the game and the comic. The sort of gamer who wants movie games to just reinact the story of the movie might very well be disappointed by the revelation that this will not be a game about Gabe and Tycho inflicting violence on each other in series of scenes parodying other games. As banal as I personally think that would have been, it is still a reason some might find to not pony up the money for the game at launch.
Hopefully none of these factors will adversely affect Penny Arcade Adventures. If I have ever been rooting for a game to do well, it's this one. But given the attitudes of the gaming community, the minor controversy over the game's price, and its bold creative direction, there is a chance that On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness will not live up to its sales potential.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
The Nintendo Channel
I walked into the living room this morning and was greeted by the eerie pulsating blue filling the room. My first fear was that the Mii channel once again had some stupid contest that theoretically I could win if I were that much of a loser, but those messages had stopped abruptly so long ago. The Wii hardly flashes anymore, so this was peculiar, and I can see why when you are greeted with that light in the morning your first thoughts are not about video games but about aliens...
Anyway, it was the Nintendo Channel update. Nintendo Channel....Oh, I thought, and promptly downloaded the channel that I felt would be about as useful as that voting channel. Really the only useful Channel aside from the Shop channel is the internet, and the only good thing about the internet channel is that it supports a website called Surf the Channel. Look it up, you'll see why that is good.
The Nintendo Channel, in case you've been living under a rock, is your connection to third party games on the Wii, something I feel is still lame, since nothing hopeful has yet to be announced. And no third party thing comes with the launch. But, I am fine with it. The Virtual Console sucked too. I flipped mindlessly through videos of things, vaguely interested in their content and were it not for a World Civilizations II final this afternoon I would have lingered and watched a few. But I was left with a very good impression as Nintendo did something i thought they never would do: A look at what VC games look like.
I am, and I am sure many others are also, annoyed by the fact there are no demos of VC games that are not on SSBB. Xbox LIVE has the market on this covered, providing consumers with demos for their Arcade games, and demos that do provide a decent feel for what the game provides. And any service that allows you to buy games directly on your console should come with the ability to see if that game is shit. It is only fair, but I suppose Nintendo neglects this because many of the games filling up the VC are really, undeniably, horrible games. Any demo of those games would ruin the selling value as kids would probably be less inclined to badger mommy for China Warrior. But I don't think a demo would keep people from demanding shitty games, since I've watched countless people pick up that Conan game.
What Nintendo has done is offer game footage. Anyone with a brain, fingers, and the ability to put you and tube together can do this, but now you can do it through Nintendo. Which is good. I already knew I wanted Pokemon Puzzle League, but it is nice to see James is still in a dress as he stands beside your puzzle grid.
What I am really impressed with though is the DS download service. I've long felt that eventually there would be a DS virtual console, and with the rumors of the DS with internal memory, I felt it was even more of a reality. What better way to fix the fact the DS cannot play older games the old fashioned way than to download them directly? See, cool, damned cool. Though those rumors died a very painful death, but live on in my dreams. Even though the DS download service is a bit empty at the moment, and the DS can really only support demos, it is still a fantastic, and more effective, method of demo distribution. I hate using those download stations in stores. The store I worked in never had the station DS turned on....
Anyway, if you haven't by now, download the Nintendo Channel and go to town. It sucks for the time being, but everything sucks when it first launches. It needs to age, and then it will knock your socks off.
Anyway, it was the Nintendo Channel update. Nintendo Channel....Oh, I thought, and promptly downloaded the channel that I felt would be about as useful as that voting channel. Really the only useful Channel aside from the Shop channel is the internet, and the only good thing about the internet channel is that it supports a website called Surf the Channel. Look it up, you'll see why that is good.
The Nintendo Channel, in case you've been living under a rock, is your connection to third party games on the Wii, something I feel is still lame, since nothing hopeful has yet to be announced. And no third party thing comes with the launch. But, I am fine with it. The Virtual Console sucked too. I flipped mindlessly through videos of things, vaguely interested in their content and were it not for a World Civilizations II final this afternoon I would have lingered and watched a few. But I was left with a very good impression as Nintendo did something i thought they never would do: A look at what VC games look like.
I am, and I am sure many others are also, annoyed by the fact there are no demos of VC games that are not on SSBB. Xbox LIVE has the market on this covered, providing consumers with demos for their Arcade games, and demos that do provide a decent feel for what the game provides. And any service that allows you to buy games directly on your console should come with the ability to see if that game is shit. It is only fair, but I suppose Nintendo neglects this because many of the games filling up the VC are really, undeniably, horrible games. Any demo of those games would ruin the selling value as kids would probably be less inclined to badger mommy for China Warrior. But I don't think a demo would keep people from demanding shitty games, since I've watched countless people pick up that Conan game.
What Nintendo has done is offer game footage. Anyone with a brain, fingers, and the ability to put you and tube together can do this, but now you can do it through Nintendo. Which is good. I already knew I wanted Pokemon Puzzle League, but it is nice to see James is still in a dress as he stands beside your puzzle grid.
What I am really impressed with though is the DS download service. I've long felt that eventually there would be a DS virtual console, and with the rumors of the DS with internal memory, I felt it was even more of a reality. What better way to fix the fact the DS cannot play older games the old fashioned way than to download them directly? See, cool, damned cool. Though those rumors died a very painful death, but live on in my dreams. Even though the DS download service is a bit empty at the moment, and the DS can really only support demos, it is still a fantastic, and more effective, method of demo distribution. I hate using those download stations in stores. The store I worked in never had the station DS turned on....
Anyway, if you haven't by now, download the Nintendo Channel and go to town. It sucks for the time being, but everything sucks when it first launches. It needs to age, and then it will knock your socks off.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
The Sweet Pain of Ikaruga
Some games are about more than winning and losing.
I'm sure there are people for whom the ability to finish Ikaruga is a defining element of their identity. And that's fine for them--I'm sure if I could ever find it within myself to beat the game, I would never miss an opportunity to tell people about it. But experiences can vary, and the experience I have always looked for in Ikaruga is more like looking into the face of God. I will never be better than Ikaruga, and I know it. But I can spend fleeting moments with it, basking in its glory. Perhaps I can't put it more succinctly than this: Ikaruga is one of the few games that can, literally, bring a tear to my eye. Not through Final Fantasy-esque melodrama or controller-throwing frustration, but simply because it is so perfect. Not just its control mechanics, but its level design, its music, its presentation, its crushing difficulty; every aspect of Ikaruga is a work of art.
The religious terms in which I have so far described the game are not accidental. Ikaruga's director, Hiroshi Iuchi, fully intended the game's Buddhist connotations. Ikaruga is a pure bullet-hell shooter, but its central gameplay mechanic is the player's ability to "flip" the polarity of the Ikaruga ship (or the Ginkei, for player 2), enabling it to absorb same-color (light or dark) enemy fire. The player does not collect power-ups, and in fact the ship's primary gun never changes; but by absorbing same-color firepower from enemies until a guage a the bottom of the screen fills, the player can unleash a flurry of homing missiles which can cut a swath through the enemies which fill the screen at all times. The polarity-changing mechanic is more than a brilliant gameplay concept, though; it also symbolizes the Buddhist concept of Yin and Yang. There are other references to Buddhism throughout the game, but there is also something of an inspirational message conveyed to the player through poetic Engrish (and I hesitate to use that word for fear of sounding demeaning) text that appears onscreen at the beginning of each stage. Playing through Ikaruga is not just playing through a video game; it is a journey toward enlightenment.
As for the greater whole of Ikaruga's gameplay, while from the outside it might appear to be another entry in the seemingly infinite 2D shooter genre, appearances can be deceiving. At times, Ikaruga feels like a pure puzzle game, with the player having to concentrate more on split-second polarity changes to navigate bullet-filled passages than on shooting down any enemy fighters. But there is no denying that the game is at the very least a shooter-puzzle hybrid, a paradox that fits in neatly with the game's Buddhist theme: a shooter that exercises your brain as much as your trigger finger.
Enough cannot be said about Ikaruga's music, either. Simultaneously majestic and ominous, the game's orchestral score provides a perfect, sombre backdrop to the non-stop action. Unlike other shooters, which rely on hair-metal and synth-rock to set the stage for the onscreen fireworks, Ikaruga's music is every bit as deep and serious as its gameplay. And while this might make the game start to sound pretentious, one should not forget that pretense really describes something that pretends to a greater status than it can actually claim. Ikaruga is every bit as great and awe-inspiring as I have so far made it out to be.
Of course this is all leaving aside the one factor that drives many people away from the game: its unbelievable difficulty. While I have spent many hours with both the Gamecube and Xbox Live Arcade versions of Ikaruga, I am not ashamed to say I've never passed the third stage. While of course there are savants who can beat the game on a single life or play a two player simultaneous game by themselves, even a lot of hardcore gamers will be humbled by Ikaruga's challenge. But that does not mean that it is not worth playing. The game's beauty can be appreciated over and over even by players who can't progress very far, and in my experience, frustration has never been a factor. As I said at the beginning, some games are about more than winning and losing, and Ikaruga is one of them.
Ikaurga is a spiritual experience, and one that should not be missed by anyone.
I'm sure there are people for whom the ability to finish Ikaruga is a defining element of their identity. And that's fine for them--I'm sure if I could ever find it within myself to beat the game, I would never miss an opportunity to tell people about it. But experiences can vary, and the experience I have always looked for in Ikaruga is more like looking into the face of God. I will never be better than Ikaruga, and I know it. But I can spend fleeting moments with it, basking in its glory. Perhaps I can't put it more succinctly than this: Ikaruga is one of the few games that can, literally, bring a tear to my eye. Not through Final Fantasy-esque melodrama or controller-throwing frustration, but simply because it is so perfect. Not just its control mechanics, but its level design, its music, its presentation, its crushing difficulty; every aspect of Ikaruga is a work of art.
The religious terms in which I have so far described the game are not accidental. Ikaruga's director, Hiroshi Iuchi, fully intended the game's Buddhist connotations. Ikaruga is a pure bullet-hell shooter, but its central gameplay mechanic is the player's ability to "flip" the polarity of the Ikaruga ship (or the Ginkei, for player 2), enabling it to absorb same-color (light or dark) enemy fire. The player does not collect power-ups, and in fact the ship's primary gun never changes; but by absorbing same-color firepower from enemies until a guage a the bottom of the screen fills, the player can unleash a flurry of homing missiles which can cut a swath through the enemies which fill the screen at all times. The polarity-changing mechanic is more than a brilliant gameplay concept, though; it also symbolizes the Buddhist concept of Yin and Yang. There are other references to Buddhism throughout the game, but there is also something of an inspirational message conveyed to the player through poetic Engrish (and I hesitate to use that word for fear of sounding demeaning) text that appears onscreen at the beginning of each stage. Playing through Ikaruga is not just playing through a video game; it is a journey toward enlightenment.
As for the greater whole of Ikaruga's gameplay, while from the outside it might appear to be another entry in the seemingly infinite 2D shooter genre, appearances can be deceiving. At times, Ikaruga feels like a pure puzzle game, with the player having to concentrate more on split-second polarity changes to navigate bullet-filled passages than on shooting down any enemy fighters. But there is no denying that the game is at the very least a shooter-puzzle hybrid, a paradox that fits in neatly with the game's Buddhist theme: a shooter that exercises your brain as much as your trigger finger.
Enough cannot be said about Ikaruga's music, either. Simultaneously majestic and ominous, the game's orchestral score provides a perfect, sombre backdrop to the non-stop action. Unlike other shooters, which rely on hair-metal and synth-rock to set the stage for the onscreen fireworks, Ikaruga's music is every bit as deep and serious as its gameplay. And while this might make the game start to sound pretentious, one should not forget that pretense really describes something that pretends to a greater status than it can actually claim. Ikaruga is every bit as great and awe-inspiring as I have so far made it out to be.
Of course this is all leaving aside the one factor that drives many people away from the game: its unbelievable difficulty. While I have spent many hours with both the Gamecube and Xbox Live Arcade versions of Ikaruga, I am not ashamed to say I've never passed the third stage. While of course there are savants who can beat the game on a single life or play a two player simultaneous game by themselves, even a lot of hardcore gamers will be humbled by Ikaruga's challenge. But that does not mean that it is not worth playing. The game's beauty can be appreciated over and over even by players who can't progress very far, and in my experience, frustration has never been a factor. As I said at the beginning, some games are about more than winning and losing, and Ikaruga is one of them.
Ikaurga is a spiritual experience, and one that should not be missed by anyone.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Re: Murder Simulators and You
Maleficent has covered the (very true) angle that the real solution to most problems which might arise from kids being exposed too soon to extremely violent games is greater interaction between parent and child. However, since I am deeply committed to the idea that games have no greater causal link to acts of violence than do movies, books, television or even seeing acts of violence performed on the playground, I wanted to add a few comments to the discussion, mostly of a philosophical nature.
First of all, the philosophy of science is full of interesting material on the nature of causation, and the anti-game community (and this includes the supposedly reputable scientists who provide them with data) is either ignorant of this literature, or conveniently ignoring it. David Hume famously argues that cause and effect reasoning is totally unjustified, because while we can observe events which are constantly conjoined (such as a transfer of motion when two billiard balls collide), what we cannot observe is the causation. In other words, we see two balls colliding and moving apart, but we do not see cause and effect. Those who are uncomfortable with Hume's stringent empiricism are still not justified in jumping to conclusions about what causes what. Frank Jackson, who few would likely call an arch empiricist, marshaled a Humean argument in making a case for epiphenomenalism, which would also be applicable here. While thunderstorms are always preceded by falling barometers, nobody believes that falling barometers cause thunderstorms. Applied to the case of games supposedly causing violence, even if a serial killer played Postal before each and every murder he committed, the conclusion that the game caused the killings would not be rationally justified. There would have to be some serious work done to show that there was nothing wrong with the killer prior to playing Postal, and that there was no other pattern to the killings--and this is just for starters.
While I'm not exactly on board with Hume, I do agree with Jackson's point that causality is far more complex than most realize, and while there is often a "clear" causal connection, even a moment's reflection (which, of course, requires a fair-minded approach to problem solving--generally not a virtue of those who want to see video games eradicated) is usually enough to cast doubt on this supposed clarity. While this sort of methodological irresponsibility is par for the course with political crusaders of all stripes, we should demand more of those who call themselves scientists.
Of course the gaming community deserves some of the blame here, as well, because in general, our responses to the pseudo-scientific studies condemning our hobby go a long way in validating their results to the very people who are most inclined to accept them. Next time Jack Thompson or some guest on Nancy Grace starts ranting about how games will be the downfall of civilization, think twice before jumping on a message board and spewing out some obscenity-laden tirade. While the ultra-conservative (and even some ostensibly liberal) crusaders are misinformed and trigger-happy, the fact is, there are a lot of interesting ethical issues raised by violent games. But until gamers start acting like intelligent adults, these issues won't come out, and the anti-game zealots will be able to go right on defaming what most of us know from experience is a harmless hobby.
The fact is, there is an element of violence in human nature, and exploring it is part of our development. This is not to say that children should really be allowed to hurt one another, or that M-rated games are fun for the whole family. But on the other hand, pantomimes of violence should not be (and have not historically been) so quickly discouraged. Long before there were video games, kids were playing "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and Indians", roleplaying violent, ethically complex situations. This was in a time before conservative punditry was a cottage industry, but it was also a time before attentive parenting was considered optional. Good parents strike a balance between being too hands-on (snatching a game away from little Billy and yelling at him for playing it without telling him why he shouldn't) and being too hands-off ("Oh, you need GTA IV? Let daddy run to the store and pick that right up!") There's a happy medium between forbidding any exploration of violent behavior and allowing sadism to develop unchecked. In other words, "bang bang, you're dead" is not cause for alarm, but "now I'm going to hook you up to the car battery" is.
If all this is not clear enough, let me offer an example from my own childhood. My friends and I all owned the NES when we were kids, but we also owned G.I. Joe action figures and toy guns, and these saw almost as much action as our game consoles. In fact, nearly every sleep-over culminated in the lot of us running around in the dark of night, plastic firearms in hand, playing a game we called simply "guns", which was more or less Metal Gear LARPing. Between games like Contra and Ikari Warriors, our G.I. Joe toys and frequent sessions of "guns", my pre-adolescence was laden with the sort of simulated firefights of which today's "concerned citizens" live in abject terror. But despite all that, most of us have not so much as fired a real gun at a target, let alone another living creature.
Now it would be hypocritical of me to start tossing out theories of causation here, but I will offer some data that I think will illuminate why there is not an interesting causal connection between simulated violence and actual violence: Grand Theft Auto games have sold in excess of 30 million copies on the PS2 alone. Now if violent games really were encouraging copycat behavior on any sort of noteworthy scale, one would think that, at least, 1 in 100 GTA players would commit an excessive act of violence with a direct connection to something in the game. Of course nothing remotely like this has happened. But that fact has not, so far, prevented anti-game partisans from claiming a direct causal link between game violence and real violence, nor is it likely to in the future. But all responsible gamers have an obligation to speak up--without obscenities or ad hominems--and set the record straight whenever such claims are made. Gamers, by and large, are not criminals; and those who are would have been whether they ever played a game or not.
First of all, the philosophy of science is full of interesting material on the nature of causation, and the anti-game community (and this includes the supposedly reputable scientists who provide them with data) is either ignorant of this literature, or conveniently ignoring it. David Hume famously argues that cause and effect reasoning is totally unjustified, because while we can observe events which are constantly conjoined (such as a transfer of motion when two billiard balls collide), what we cannot observe is the causation. In other words, we see two balls colliding and moving apart, but we do not see cause and effect. Those who are uncomfortable with Hume's stringent empiricism are still not justified in jumping to conclusions about what causes what. Frank Jackson, who few would likely call an arch empiricist, marshaled a Humean argument in making a case for epiphenomenalism, which would also be applicable here. While thunderstorms are always preceded by falling barometers, nobody believes that falling barometers cause thunderstorms. Applied to the case of games supposedly causing violence, even if a serial killer played Postal before each and every murder he committed, the conclusion that the game caused the killings would not be rationally justified. There would have to be some serious work done to show that there was nothing wrong with the killer prior to playing Postal, and that there was no other pattern to the killings--and this is just for starters.
While I'm not exactly on board with Hume, I do agree with Jackson's point that causality is far more complex than most realize, and while there is often a "clear" causal connection, even a moment's reflection (which, of course, requires a fair-minded approach to problem solving--generally not a virtue of those who want to see video games eradicated) is usually enough to cast doubt on this supposed clarity. While this sort of methodological irresponsibility is par for the course with political crusaders of all stripes, we should demand more of those who call themselves scientists.
Of course the gaming community deserves some of the blame here, as well, because in general, our responses to the pseudo-scientific studies condemning our hobby go a long way in validating their results to the very people who are most inclined to accept them. Next time Jack Thompson or some guest on Nancy Grace starts ranting about how games will be the downfall of civilization, think twice before jumping on a message board and spewing out some obscenity-laden tirade. While the ultra-conservative (and even some ostensibly liberal) crusaders are misinformed and trigger-happy, the fact is, there are a lot of interesting ethical issues raised by violent games. But until gamers start acting like intelligent adults, these issues won't come out, and the anti-game zealots will be able to go right on defaming what most of us know from experience is a harmless hobby.
The fact is, there is an element of violence in human nature, and exploring it is part of our development. This is not to say that children should really be allowed to hurt one another, or that M-rated games are fun for the whole family. But on the other hand, pantomimes of violence should not be (and have not historically been) so quickly discouraged. Long before there were video games, kids were playing "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and Indians", roleplaying violent, ethically complex situations. This was in a time before conservative punditry was a cottage industry, but it was also a time before attentive parenting was considered optional. Good parents strike a balance between being too hands-on (snatching a game away from little Billy and yelling at him for playing it without telling him why he shouldn't) and being too hands-off ("Oh, you need GTA IV? Let daddy run to the store and pick that right up!") There's a happy medium between forbidding any exploration of violent behavior and allowing sadism to develop unchecked. In other words, "bang bang, you're dead" is not cause for alarm, but "now I'm going to hook you up to the car battery" is.
If all this is not clear enough, let me offer an example from my own childhood. My friends and I all owned the NES when we were kids, but we also owned G.I. Joe action figures and toy guns, and these saw almost as much action as our game consoles. In fact, nearly every sleep-over culminated in the lot of us running around in the dark of night, plastic firearms in hand, playing a game we called simply "guns", which was more or less Metal Gear LARPing. Between games like Contra and Ikari Warriors, our G.I. Joe toys and frequent sessions of "guns", my pre-adolescence was laden with the sort of simulated firefights of which today's "concerned citizens" live in abject terror. But despite all that, most of us have not so much as fired a real gun at a target, let alone another living creature.
Now it would be hypocritical of me to start tossing out theories of causation here, but I will offer some data that I think will illuminate why there is not an interesting causal connection between simulated violence and actual violence: Grand Theft Auto games have sold in excess of 30 million copies on the PS2 alone. Now if violent games really were encouraging copycat behavior on any sort of noteworthy scale, one would think that, at least, 1 in 100 GTA players would commit an excessive act of violence with a direct connection to something in the game. Of course nothing remotely like this has happened. But that fact has not, so far, prevented anti-game partisans from claiming a direct causal link between game violence and real violence, nor is it likely to in the future. But all responsible gamers have an obligation to speak up--without obscenities or ad hominems--and set the record straight whenever such claims are made. Gamers, by and large, are not criminals; and those who are would have been whether they ever played a game or not.
Murder Simulators and You
Now if I was a politician you would expect this to be an uninformed rant about the sexual deviancy of games and how these so called "murder simulators" flooding the market are corrupting our youth. I am not, and never plan to be, and maintain that the root cause of all of the problems with the world's youth can in some way be traced back to the glut of reality programming. Those ladies who clean your house will also pop a cap in your ass so you best watch out.
No, I am more troubled by the fact that the gaming world is making no effort to show that for every Rock Star game, there are 30-40 titles by everyone else that go unnoticed. From myexperiences with the unwashed thug mass that comes in to get their already abused copy of SanAndreas, I've concluded that no one has any idea what makes a game fundamentally good, orwhat makes a game bad. Not every game where you shoot a guy and make sausage out of hisremains and feed that sausage to your mother is bad, and not every game that is full of flowersand their upkeep is good. This is of course on the consumer end of things. When the idea o games is left to the government, even Chibi-Robo would have a considerable amount of questionable content.
One completely ridiculous view on this whole problem is that video games cause violence more so than the Power Rangers had children wanting to fight crime, and wear funny costumes. The concern here is that children will have access to such violent games and this will warp their sensitive minds to the point that they see nothing wrong with gunning down a hooker. Well, I'd like to say that gunning down a hooker is inherently wrong, and they do not fall into floating blocks of green bills.... but if they did, well, perhaps the world would be a bit different. What I mean is that you cannot assume that because a kid sees something like this they are more inclined to do it. More children actually respond to hero characters, and the violence that is in the name of justice. Now with a home environment that condones the shooting of hookers in an every-day way, or the beating of bitches for that matter, is more likely to produce a child that is capable of doing such a thing. Mortal Kombat was the series that was all the rage when I was young enough to be trained in the ways of the modern killer, and I remember my friends not being allowed to play those 'dirty games' because they were 'evil' and made people do bad things.
That truly boggled my little mind. What was so wrong? They weren't real.... It was a game, it was fun. I had had video games explained to me by my parents, about the time the ol' NES was hooked up in our living room. I never gave the concept much thought, I just went on assuming my friends were lame and my parents were awesome, but now I see that the issue is not violent games, but the irrational protective spirit of parents . For every family that produces a serial killer, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other families to strive to avoid such a result by presenting the children with the idea that absolutely anything that does not fit in a certain world view is wrong. Rather than explaining that video games simulate fantastic situations, they condemn the lot then when their children cry to be able to play games they only allow them movie games.
I feel for these children, as I have had to deal with the irrational parents who would not buy their 15-year-old Twilight Princess because it had a teen rating। Think about the complete ridiculousness of that situation. People have read this bizarre code into the ESRB, to the point that they cannot grasp the reasoning behind such a rating. These problems could be helped if parents actually put more effort into understanding the system, and there is no excuse now with the wealth of information online and even on magazine racks. I am not against the ESRB, and I am not against parents being cautious, but I feel more care could be taken to learn just why Twilight Princess is Teen and why Halo and Resident Evil differ greatly from Saints Row and Jericho.
Another problem with the idea that video games are inherently bad and corrupt children is that genuinely fun games are tossed aside in favor of the ones that are over-hyped. Professor Layton's American release was the exception to this, but the promotion for it was subtly charming with big posters of the heroes and the world, and little Nintendo pamphlets that many game stores neglected to put out. It was the first time in a long time a game sold out that did not have a soda, lawsuit, or exaggerated delay behind it.
I feel more effort could be made by the gaming population to devote less time to being hardcore and more time to enjoying all types of games than sticking to the controversial. Games like LocoRoco do not get the chance they deserve because there is no shooting. Were video games not created to be entertaining? I suppose I have very old tastes, where I like games to actually be fun every so often. I do not find 3/4s of a GTA game fun to play through again, Manhunt and Condemned are needlessly grotesque, but I am all about focusing on Japanese Survival Horror games because the emphasis is on how the game uses its horror elements.
The greatest downfall in gaming I believe was the first Manhunt game. Since I recovered from being irrationally afraid of the first Resident Evil game I came to see "horror" games differently. Manhunt had no depth, only mindless slaughter. No puzzles, but plenty of violent fetch quests. I compare this now directly to the Japanese games in the Silent Hill series that are not focused on fighting, or being outrageously disgusting for no reason. The gore in Silent Hill means weird shit is going down, the gore in Manhunt is a romp through Snuff Land.
I feel the real solution to the Murder Simulator problem is to better identify what makes a game appear questionable, and have parents understand their place in the filtering of the world to their children. It is bad to overindulge, but it is also bad to over protect to the point that the Legend of Zelda series is too questionable.
The fear of evil in games will not slack any time soon, not with Rock Star's new goal to make their games pure fuel for the war against freedom of expression. Politicians have worked their fear-mongering fingers into the minds of many a conservative, and to the point that I am yelled at at work for selling "This ungodly filth. People should be sent to jail for making these filthy displays...if they want to make them, make them pay." This same man was forcing his 14-year-old son to buy Billy Hatcher.
No, I am more troubled by the fact that the gaming world is making no effort to show that for every Rock Star game, there are 30-40 titles by everyone else that go unnoticed. From myexperiences with the unwashed thug mass that comes in to get their already abused copy of SanAndreas, I've concluded that no one has any idea what makes a game fundamentally good, orwhat makes a game bad. Not every game where you shoot a guy and make sausage out of hisremains and feed that sausage to your mother is bad, and not every game that is full of flowersand their upkeep is good. This is of course on the consumer end of things. When the idea o games is left to the government, even Chibi-Robo would have a considerable amount of questionable content.
One completely ridiculous view on this whole problem is that video games cause violence more so than the Power Rangers had children wanting to fight crime, and wear funny costumes. The concern here is that children will have access to such violent games and this will warp their sensitive minds to the point that they see nothing wrong with gunning down a hooker. Well, I'd like to say that gunning down a hooker is inherently wrong, and they do not fall into floating blocks of green bills.... but if they did, well, perhaps the world would be a bit different. What I mean is that you cannot assume that because a kid sees something like this they are more inclined to do it. More children actually respond to hero characters, and the violence that is in the name of justice. Now with a home environment that condones the shooting of hookers in an every-day way, or the beating of bitches for that matter, is more likely to produce a child that is capable of doing such a thing. Mortal Kombat was the series that was all the rage when I was young enough to be trained in the ways of the modern killer, and I remember my friends not being allowed to play those 'dirty games' because they were 'evil' and made people do bad things.
That truly boggled my little mind. What was so wrong? They weren't real.... It was a game, it was fun. I had had video games explained to me by my parents, about the time the ol' NES was hooked up in our living room. I never gave the concept much thought, I just went on assuming my friends were lame and my parents were awesome, but now I see that the issue is not violent games, but the irrational protective spirit of parents . For every family that produces a serial killer, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other families to strive to avoid such a result by presenting the children with the idea that absolutely anything that does not fit in a certain world view is wrong. Rather than explaining that video games simulate fantastic situations, they condemn the lot then when their children cry to be able to play games they only allow them movie games.
I feel for these children, as I have had to deal with the irrational parents who would not buy their 15-year-old Twilight Princess because it had a teen rating। Think about the complete ridiculousness of that situation. People have read this bizarre code into the ESRB, to the point that they cannot grasp the reasoning behind such a rating. These problems could be helped if parents actually put more effort into understanding the system, and there is no excuse now with the wealth of information online and even on magazine racks. I am not against the ESRB, and I am not against parents being cautious, but I feel more care could be taken to learn just why Twilight Princess is Teen and why Halo and Resident Evil differ greatly from Saints Row and Jericho.
Another problem with the idea that video games are inherently bad and corrupt children is that genuinely fun games are tossed aside in favor of the ones that are over-hyped. Professor Layton's American release was the exception to this, but the promotion for it was subtly charming with big posters of the heroes and the world, and little Nintendo pamphlets that many game stores neglected to put out. It was the first time in a long time a game sold out that did not have a soda, lawsuit, or exaggerated delay behind it.
I feel more effort could be made by the gaming population to devote less time to being hardcore and more time to enjoying all types of games than sticking to the controversial. Games like LocoRoco do not get the chance they deserve because there is no shooting. Were video games not created to be entertaining? I suppose I have very old tastes, where I like games to actually be fun every so often. I do not find 3/4s of a GTA game fun to play through again, Manhunt and Condemned are needlessly grotesque, but I am all about focusing on Japanese Survival Horror games because the emphasis is on how the game uses its horror elements.
The greatest downfall in gaming I believe was the first Manhunt game. Since I recovered from being irrationally afraid of the first Resident Evil game I came to see "horror" games differently. Manhunt had no depth, only mindless slaughter. No puzzles, but plenty of violent fetch quests. I compare this now directly to the Japanese games in the Silent Hill series that are not focused on fighting, or being outrageously disgusting for no reason. The gore in Silent Hill means weird shit is going down, the gore in Manhunt is a romp through Snuff Land.
I feel the real solution to the Murder Simulator problem is to better identify what makes a game appear questionable, and have parents understand their place in the filtering of the world to their children. It is bad to overindulge, but it is also bad to over protect to the point that the Legend of Zelda series is too questionable.
The fear of evil in games will not slack any time soon, not with Rock Star's new goal to make their games pure fuel for the war against freedom of expression. Politicians have worked their fear-mongering fingers into the minds of many a conservative, and to the point that I am yelled at at work for selling "This ungodly filth. People should be sent to jail for making these filthy displays...if they want to make them, make them pay." This same man was forcing his 14-year-old son to buy Billy Hatcher.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Rock Band DLC and Cognitive Dissonance
It had never dawned on me that Rock Band's DLC, just like Xbox Live Arcade or the Wii's Virtual Console, offered a hit or miss selection of products. I'm not sure why it took me this long to figure it out, except that the only song I had purchased before this weekend was Nine Inch Nails' "March of the Pigs", and that track was pretty fun. But now I know, and all future purchases will be made with a bit more caution.
My downloads for this weekend were David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream", Smashing Pumpkins' "Siva", Oasis's "Wonderwall" and, last night promptly at 11 p.m. (intuition told me that it would go up at midnight, Eastern time) the free download of Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" (the song is not, as some April Fools wary message board posters feared, a lie). Of these four, three are perfectly playable, and one is a dog. But in hindsight, I should have seen it coming.
While I love both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, I've always had the problem that my music tastes lean toward the pale and the pasty, and decidedly do not rock. Ok, I do like some pretty intense music, but it's generally the kind of stuff that flies under the rhythm game radar. I'd buy song packs by Lightning Bolt, Melt-Bananna or Naglfar without a second thought, but I seriously doubt any of those are forthcoming. But my true favorite bands include the Cocteau Twins, the Cure the Smiths, and New Order, and that means the future looks bleak for me. And, for the most part, that's with good reason. I realize that the primary reason for publishers to exist is to make money--not to please me. I would probably have a great time playing "Fascination Street" or "This Charming Man", and would at any rate be more than happy to purchase them, but I know I'm in the minority. And so I understand when the offerings run more toward the mainstream and the rockin'.
But there is another reason that you don't see more lonely, introverted and over-sensitive music on the horizon from these companies, and that's that a lot of it just doesn't translate well into chart form. "Wonderwall" proved this to me. While I'm not a big Oasis fan, I do enjoy that song, and so it seemed natural to me that I would enjoy pretending to play it. It didn't occur to me as I hit the "purchase" button that most of the song is built around repetitive acoustic guitar strumming and a fairly simple rhythm part. Even the vocals don't offer much in the way of variety, especially when you get to the long outro and just repeated "Maybe you're gonna be the one that saves me" over and over and over.
The lesson here, aside from my recommendation against picking up "Wonderwall" no matter how much you might still love Oasis, is that songs you like aren't always going to be fun to play, especially if you like music by pasty Brits. For me, that makes for a weird disconnect within the game. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are both about living out fantasies, but I don't particularly fantasize about being anybody whose songs appear in the games. I'd much rather pretend to be Robert Smith or Johnny Marr than Steven Tyler or Mick Jagger. Maybe my day will come, but for now I'll just have to keep thinking of these games as a fun exercise in frantic button mashing rather than some sort of wish fulfillment.
Bonus Content
Just in case anyone from Harmonix would like to turn me into the company's personal ATM, here are some suggested song packs:
Cocteau Twins Pack: "Carolyn's Fingers", "Bluebeard" and "Wax and Wane"
Siouxsie & the Banshees Pack: "Candyman", "Cascade", "Arabian Nights"
Cure Pack: "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea", "Fascination Street", "One Hundred Years"
Random Shoegaze Pack: "Alison" by Slowdive, "When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine, "Frost" by Chapterhouse
Smiths Pack: "This Charming Man", "The Headmaster Ritual", "Stop Me if you Think You've Heard This One Before"
Morrissey Pack: "Hairdresser on Fire", "Speedway", "First of the Gang to Die"
Lush Pack: "Sweetness and Light", "For Love", "500"
My downloads for this weekend were David Bowie's "Moonage Daydream", Smashing Pumpkins' "Siva", Oasis's "Wonderwall" and, last night promptly at 11 p.m. (intuition told me that it would go up at midnight, Eastern time) the free download of Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" (the song is not, as some April Fools wary message board posters feared, a lie). Of these four, three are perfectly playable, and one is a dog. But in hindsight, I should have seen it coming.
While I love both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, I've always had the problem that my music tastes lean toward the pale and the pasty, and decidedly do not rock. Ok, I do like some pretty intense music, but it's generally the kind of stuff that flies under the rhythm game radar. I'd buy song packs by Lightning Bolt, Melt-Bananna or Naglfar without a second thought, but I seriously doubt any of those are forthcoming. But my true favorite bands include the Cocteau Twins, the Cure the Smiths, and New Order, and that means the future looks bleak for me. And, for the most part, that's with good reason. I realize that the primary reason for publishers to exist is to make money--not to please me. I would probably have a great time playing "Fascination Street" or "This Charming Man", and would at any rate be more than happy to purchase them, but I know I'm in the minority. And so I understand when the offerings run more toward the mainstream and the rockin'.
But there is another reason that you don't see more lonely, introverted and over-sensitive music on the horizon from these companies, and that's that a lot of it just doesn't translate well into chart form. "Wonderwall" proved this to me. While I'm not a big Oasis fan, I do enjoy that song, and so it seemed natural to me that I would enjoy pretending to play it. It didn't occur to me as I hit the "purchase" button that most of the song is built around repetitive acoustic guitar strumming and a fairly simple rhythm part. Even the vocals don't offer much in the way of variety, especially when you get to the long outro and just repeated "Maybe you're gonna be the one that saves me" over and over and over.
The lesson here, aside from my recommendation against picking up "Wonderwall" no matter how much you might still love Oasis, is that songs you like aren't always going to be fun to play, especially if you like music by pasty Brits. For me, that makes for a weird disconnect within the game. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are both about living out fantasies, but I don't particularly fantasize about being anybody whose songs appear in the games. I'd much rather pretend to be Robert Smith or Johnny Marr than Steven Tyler or Mick Jagger. Maybe my day will come, but for now I'll just have to keep thinking of these games as a fun exercise in frantic button mashing rather than some sort of wish fulfillment.
Bonus Content
Just in case anyone from Harmonix would like to turn me into the company's personal ATM, here are some suggested song packs:
Cocteau Twins Pack: "Carolyn's Fingers", "Bluebeard" and "Wax and Wane"
Siouxsie & the Banshees Pack: "Candyman", "Cascade", "Arabian Nights"
Cure Pack: "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea", "Fascination Street", "One Hundred Years"
Random Shoegaze Pack: "Alison" by Slowdive, "When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine, "Frost" by Chapterhouse
Smiths Pack: "This Charming Man", "The Headmaster Ritual", "Stop Me if you Think You've Heard This One Before"
Morrissey Pack: "Hairdresser on Fire", "Speedway", "First of the Gang to Die"
Lush Pack: "Sweetness and Light", "For Love", "500"
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Systems Analysis: Atari 2600
Welcome to the first edition of Systems Analysis, where I take a gaming console, examine its history (not always from an entirely objective standpoint), and look at its ultimate place in gaming history. We're going to start with the earliest programmable console to have a major impact on the industry, the Atari 2600.
Though it may be difficult for some youngsters to believe, there was actually a time when the dominant form of console gaming in America was what you can experience these days on one of the various Atari collections which exist for nearly every platform. Those blocky, nigh-unreadable graphics, blurpy sound effects, non-existent music...once upon a time, these were home gaming at its finest. And if you were born before 1985, there's a good chance that your first exposure to video games came at the hands of the Atari 2600.
Originally released in 1977 as the Atari Video Computer System (or Sears Video Arcade, due to a pre-existing distribution deal with the retail chain), the 2600 was hardly a technological marvel, but various factors conspired to make it the most popular of all early programmable consoles. Its official lifespan was an incredible 14 years, with units being produced in some form or fashion until 1991. During its life, the console spawned one of the largest game libraries of any in history, several groundbreaking and unusual periphrials, and some of video gaming's most enduring legends. Long after its official death, the 2600 still has a vast network of devoted fans. Its software is still collected for nearly every new console that comes along, and a handful of talented homebrew programmers are still pumping out new software on a regular basis. While most people attribute the 2600's life after death purely to the nostalgia of aging Gen-X'ers who grew up with the system, this is an unfair assessment of its true value and historical importance.
History
You may be familiar with the video game crash of 1984 when, due to a market clogged with the output of "me too" developers and some major missteps on Atari's part (like the abysmal licensed game for E.T.), consumers lost interest and confidence in video games and the bottom fell out of the market. What fewer people realize is that in 1976, a smaller version of the same phenomenon was about to take place. The popularity of home Pong machines had opened the floodgates to hardware manufacturers looking to get rich quick, leaving a saturated market and consumers who were tiring of the single game that even the most sophisticated Pong consoles (which often attempted to dress Pong up as tennis, volleyball, hockey, soccer, or any other sport that might involve a ball being bounced from one end of a field to the other) offered. The games industry desperately needed something to recpature the waning interest of gamers: something like a home system with the technology to offer games besides Pong. Then, in the summer of 1976, a brand new console appeared, boasting of its ability to run various games simply by switching between different cartridges. It was a concept that made dedicated gamers and industry figures stand up and take notice. It was...
...the Fairchild Channel F.
No, the VCS was not the first programmable console on the market. While Atari was already hard at work on their "Stella" project (the codename for the 2600 during its development) when the Channel F hit shelves, Atari head Nolan Bushnell made the decision to sell the company to Warner Communications in order to raise the money to rush their own machine through the R&D phase and into stores before the same companies who had flooded the market with cheap Pong machines charged into the programmable console arena. By the next Christmas, the Atari Video Computer System and its nine launch titles were sitting comfortably alongside the Channel F, and the video game market was officially collapsing under its own weight. It was obvious that the real competition was now between the two programmable consoles, and so the Pong merchants began slashing prices in an effort to get out of the business as quickly as possible. As a result, the gaming industry experienced its first crash, and sales were disappointing even for the first-ever "next gen" machines. Fairchild, daunted by poor sales figures and the obvious technical superiority of the VCS (which actually ended up benefiting from coming out later, as the legendary MOS 6502 CPU came out in 1976 and was quickly incorporated into the VCS's design), discontinued the Channel F, and just like that there was only one viable gaming console left.
The rest is (much more widely known) history. Atari reversed the fortunes of the 2600's inauspicious launch by getting the rights to port Space Invaders (then all the rage in arcades) to their machine, and suddenly people were shelling out the $199 cost of the console just to be able to play the hottest arcade game of the day in their homes. In the early years of the console, this strategy worked again and again (and regardless of the quality of the ports, as evidenced by truly horrid renditions of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong). As the novelty of arcade ports waned, Atari inadvertently ushered in yet aother new phenomenon. A group of Atari's in house programmers, disgruntled over not being publicly credited for their work, left to start their own company--Activision--which became the world's first third party developer, churning out scores of great, original games, and showing others that doing so was a viable business model. Meanwhile, the games industry had become so popular that several other progromable consoles, including the Intellivision, the Vectrex, and the Colecovision, had hit the market, though none came close to challenging Atari's dominance. This was yet another first for Atari, as most of its competitors boasted technological superiority--setting a trend that has been repeated throughout the years, with systems like the original PlayStation and the Wii handily outselling their technological betters.
Of course in the end, the same fly-by-night companies that overburdened the early home gaming market with worthless Pong clones eventually returned to flood the third party software market. For every great game from publishers like Activision and Imagic, there were a hundred derivative, boring and often flat-out broken offerings from some "here today, gone tomorrow" developer. Since Atari had no way of regulating their third party developers (thus the existence of numerous porno games from companies such as Mystique, and controversial, "ultraviolent" licensed horror movie games from Wizard Entertainment), they had no way of preventing this huge influx of shovelware. Along with the appearance of more and more competing consoles (including Atari's own 5200, the ill-received successor to the 2600) and a new wave of low-cost home computers, almost all of which played video games, the 2600 suddenly found itself the king of a desperately oversaturated market.
And of course, there was E.T. While this 1982 release can't be realistically blamed for the entire 1984 crash, its importance as a catalyst shouldn't be overlooked, either. Atari and Stephen Spielberg's eagerness to get the E.T. game out as quickly as possible resulted in a disastrous and borderline broken game which was designed in two days and coded in under six weeks. Consumers were already gunshy due to all the shoddy third party games clogging store shelves, and when Atari began putting out products not much better than their fly-by-night competitors, the market began to crumble. Thousands of E.T. carts collected dust on store shelves--along with just about every other piece of entertainment software--until retailers decided to jettison the dead weight, leading to massive clearance bins with some legitimately great games being pushed out for next to nothing. Interest in gaming collapsed across the board, killing off almost every console besides the 2600, which was itself able to survive only because of its massive install base.
In the interest of fairness, it should probably be noted that E.T. programmer Howard Scott Warshaw was responsible for two other exemplary 2600 titles: the fondly-remembered space shooter Yar's Revenge; and the ambitious (if incredibly complicated) Raiders of the Lost Ark licensed game. Warshaw has taken a lot of abuse for, supposedly, being the man to single-handedly bring about the 1984 crash, but this is neither fair nor remotely true. If anyone is to blame for the crash, it's the companies whose insatiable greed and non-existent quality control created a market bursting at the seams with worthless products, and not a programmer put in the unenviable position of having to create a game for one of Hollywood's most powerful directors in six weeks.
Of course it would be less than two years before Nintendo began the revival of home gaming machines by bringing the Famicom to America as the Nintendo Entertainment System. Next to the NES's flagship game, Super Mario Bros. (which came bundled with the system) and even its lowest quality offerings, 2600 games fared about as well as cave paintings next to the Mona Lisa. But Atari had dealt with market crashes and technologically superior rivals before, and showed no signs of bowing out gracefully. The 2600 received a facelift, becoming the sleeker, smaller 2600 Jr., and games continued to be produced. It was 1991--when Sega had already ushered in the 16-bit era in America with the Genesis--when Atari finally took the 2600 off life support, though development for the system continues to this day in the form of homebrew games created by diehard 2600 fans.
Games
These days, it is customary for many gamers to write off most of the 2600's software library as unappealingly simple, unable to hold one's attention for more than a couple of minutes at best. Consequently, it would be easy to say that nostalgia alone has kept the 2600 in the public's imagination and given rise to the huge fan community which exists to this day. And honestly, given exposure only to certain games, that can be a tough charge to refute. Many 2600 games are terribly simplistic by today's standards, with controls and, subsequently, objectives, which can feel very confining. However, there are still some games that, while not terribly involved, are nonetheless involving; and, surprisingly, there are a few more complex titles which paved the way for the far deeper gaming experiences subsequently provided by the NES.
Ironically, few of the best 2600 titles make it onto the classic games compilation of the week. With the exception of the great Activision Anthology (which you owe it to yourself to buy if you've never played Pitfall or River Raid), most of the VCS's real gems and weird historical curiosities can still only be experienced (at least legally) in their original form. What follows is a very brief attempt to highlight a few games with which you might not be familiar if your only exposure to the 2600 has come in the form of compilations for modern platforms.
Five Games You Should Play
Jungle Hunt: One of the more varied experiences to be found in any 2600 title, Jungle hunt has four different screens/levels that manage to wring quite a bit of graphical detail and gameplay variation out of the VCS. Its jumping controls can be a bit floaty, the hit detection is suspect, and the attack controls on the second screen aren't the most responsive, but the game remains fun and impressively dense despite these technical missteps.
Dolphin: One of Activision's less raved-about games, Dolphin boasts the usual good graphics, but also has some interesting, sound-based gameplay. You control a dolphin which has to avoid an onrushing octopus while swimming between holes in coral barriers. The game moves quickly, but your dolphin comes equipped with sonar to be able to predict what's coming at her. The game emits a high-pitched beep when the hole in the next barrier is near the top of the screen, a low beep when it will be closer to the bottom. Of course in today's world of surround sound and rhythm games, this won't impress anyone, but in its day, it was a pretty cool feature.
Raiders of the Lost Ark: In the '80s, licensed movie games didn't always suck. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a prime example, a very primitive action-adventure game which requires the player to use two joysticks--one to control Indiana Jones, the other to cycle between items in his inventory. To finish the game (and see one of the earliest "cinematic" ending sequences in gaming history), you'll need to decipher what the items are and how to use them, all while avoiding some extremely persistent enemies. While the unbelievably abstract graphics artificially increase the game's challenge (approximately two items are immediately recognizable), this is still a pretty unbelievable example of the depth with which a good programmer could imbue a 2600 game.
Atlantis: Imagic's best-known title doesn't hold the position in gaming history that it probably should. A mash-up of Space Invaders, Missle Command, and Air Sea Battle, Atlantis may not seem like much today, but it does have its charms. Its graphics are neat and colorful, it controls nicely, and, from an historical standpoint, it is an early example of a game that took elements of other, better known titles, and refined them into an experience that was fun if not original. This may not be the highest honor that can be bestowed on a game, but it was certainly a precursor to what the industry has become today.
BMX Airmaster: This title came along in 1989, late in the 2600's life cycle, and it reaps the benefits of over a decade of collective programming knowhow. While the control-scheme shows just how limited the 2600's joystick and single-button set-up had become by the end of its life, BMX Airmaster does the best it can, allowing those who master its somewhat clunky controls to pull off tricks that make even those found in the SSX and Tony Hawk series look realistic by comparison. With three events--half pipe, quarter pipe and ramp jump--good graphics and smooth animation, BMX Airmaster is everything a latecoming title should be. Unfortunately, it can also be very difficult to track down. Atari's run of the game features an appropriately rad, full-color label, but is nearly impossible to find. You're more likely to run across the bland, white-label TNT Games version, but the contents of both cartridges are identical.
Names You Can Trust
Given that the 2600 is notorious for its parade of awful third party titles, it can be helpful for the beginning 2600 collector to know which developers were responsible for more hits than misses. Nothing takes the fun out of console collecting faster than picking up a new unit only to find out that all the available games are crap (trust me, I own a Sega Saturn).
In general, it's tough to go wrong with games by Activision, Imagic (the second-ever third party developer) and Parker Brothers (surprisingly enough, they were one of the best third parties making games for Atari's console). Activision games are particularly easy to find, as they were extremely popular in their time, creating genre-defining classics like Pitfall and River Raid, and a host of other technologically innovative and just plain fun titles. Imagic is less well known today, but their games are still pretty easy to find. Look for the distinctive silver-foil labels and unusual cartridge shape. Parker Brothers largely concentrated on making licensed games (including a great, early Spider-Man title, a good-looking Empire Strikes Back game, and at least one G.I. Joe offering), but they also had their share of originals, including the interesting puzzler Amidar.
Atari's first-party titles are probably more hit or miss, but this is mostly due to the huge quantity of games they released, and there is certainly no shortage of quality software in their back catalog. However, be wary of their arcade ports, especially Pac-Man (which you will find in huge quantities anywhere vintage games are sold, both because it was produced on a massive scale, and because everyone who bought it wanted to be rid of it). In general, though, Atari had the money and know-how to crank out quality titles. Coleco, Sega and 20th Century Fox are also worth checking out, though again proceed with caution where arcade ports are concerned--particularly Coleco's Donkey Kong, which is a slap in the face of one of the greatest games of all time.
[All screenshots from Atari Age]
Though it may be difficult for some youngsters to believe, there was actually a time when the dominant form of console gaming in America was what you can experience these days on one of the various Atari collections which exist for nearly every platform. Those blocky, nigh-unreadable graphics, blurpy sound effects, non-existent music...once upon a time, these were home gaming at its finest. And if you were born before 1985, there's a good chance that your first exposure to video games came at the hands of the Atari 2600.
Originally released in 1977 as the Atari Video Computer System (or Sears Video Arcade, due to a pre-existing distribution deal with the retail chain), the 2600 was hardly a technological marvel, but various factors conspired to make it the most popular of all early programmable consoles. Its official lifespan was an incredible 14 years, with units being produced in some form or fashion until 1991. During its life, the console spawned one of the largest game libraries of any in history, several groundbreaking and unusual periphrials, and some of video gaming's most enduring legends. Long after its official death, the 2600 still has a vast network of devoted fans. Its software is still collected for nearly every new console that comes along, and a handful of talented homebrew programmers are still pumping out new software on a regular basis. While most people attribute the 2600's life after death purely to the nostalgia of aging Gen-X'ers who grew up with the system, this is an unfair assessment of its true value and historical importance.
History
You may be familiar with the video game crash of 1984 when, due to a market clogged with the output of "me too" developers and some major missteps on Atari's part (like the abysmal licensed game for E.T.), consumers lost interest and confidence in video games and the bottom fell out of the market. What fewer people realize is that in 1976, a smaller version of the same phenomenon was about to take place. The popularity of home Pong machines had opened the floodgates to hardware manufacturers looking to get rich quick, leaving a saturated market and consumers who were tiring of the single game that even the most sophisticated Pong consoles (which often attempted to dress Pong up as tennis, volleyball, hockey, soccer, or any other sport that might involve a ball being bounced from one end of a field to the other) offered. The games industry desperately needed something to recpature the waning interest of gamers: something like a home system with the technology to offer games besides Pong. Then, in the summer of 1976, a brand new console appeared, boasting of its ability to run various games simply by switching between different cartridges. It was a concept that made dedicated gamers and industry figures stand up and take notice. It was...
...the Fairchild Channel F.
No, the VCS was not the first programmable console on the market. While Atari was already hard at work on their "Stella" project (the codename for the 2600 during its development) when the Channel F hit shelves, Atari head Nolan Bushnell made the decision to sell the company to Warner Communications in order to raise the money to rush their own machine through the R&D phase and into stores before the same companies who had flooded the market with cheap Pong machines charged into the programmable console arena. By the next Christmas, the Atari Video Computer System and its nine launch titles were sitting comfortably alongside the Channel F, and the video game market was officially collapsing under its own weight. It was obvious that the real competition was now between the two programmable consoles, and so the Pong merchants began slashing prices in an effort to get out of the business as quickly as possible. As a result, the gaming industry experienced its first crash, and sales were disappointing even for the first-ever "next gen" machines. Fairchild, daunted by poor sales figures and the obvious technical superiority of the VCS (which actually ended up benefiting from coming out later, as the legendary MOS 6502 CPU came out in 1976 and was quickly incorporated into the VCS's design), discontinued the Channel F, and just like that there was only one viable gaming console left.
The rest is (much more widely known) history. Atari reversed the fortunes of the 2600's inauspicious launch by getting the rights to port Space Invaders (then all the rage in arcades) to their machine, and suddenly people were shelling out the $199 cost of the console just to be able to play the hottest arcade game of the day in their homes. In the early years of the console, this strategy worked again and again (and regardless of the quality of the ports, as evidenced by truly horrid renditions of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong). As the novelty of arcade ports waned, Atari inadvertently ushered in yet aother new phenomenon. A group of Atari's in house programmers, disgruntled over not being publicly credited for their work, left to start their own company--Activision--which became the world's first third party developer, churning out scores of great, original games, and showing others that doing so was a viable business model. Meanwhile, the games industry had become so popular that several other progromable consoles, including the Intellivision, the Vectrex, and the Colecovision, had hit the market, though none came close to challenging Atari's dominance. This was yet another first for Atari, as most of its competitors boasted technological superiority--setting a trend that has been repeated throughout the years, with systems like the original PlayStation and the Wii handily outselling their technological betters.
Of course in the end, the same fly-by-night companies that overburdened the early home gaming market with worthless Pong clones eventually returned to flood the third party software market. For every great game from publishers like Activision and Imagic, there were a hundred derivative, boring and often flat-out broken offerings from some "here today, gone tomorrow" developer. Since Atari had no way of regulating their third party developers (thus the existence of numerous porno games from companies such as Mystique, and controversial, "ultraviolent" licensed horror movie games from Wizard Entertainment), they had no way of preventing this huge influx of shovelware. Along with the appearance of more and more competing consoles (including Atari's own 5200, the ill-received successor to the 2600) and a new wave of low-cost home computers, almost all of which played video games, the 2600 suddenly found itself the king of a desperately oversaturated market.
And of course, there was E.T. While this 1982 release can't be realistically blamed for the entire 1984 crash, its importance as a catalyst shouldn't be overlooked, either. Atari and Stephen Spielberg's eagerness to get the E.T. game out as quickly as possible resulted in a disastrous and borderline broken game which was designed in two days and coded in under six weeks. Consumers were already gunshy due to all the shoddy third party games clogging store shelves, and when Atari began putting out products not much better than their fly-by-night competitors, the market began to crumble. Thousands of E.T. carts collected dust on store shelves--along with just about every other piece of entertainment software--until retailers decided to jettison the dead weight, leading to massive clearance bins with some legitimately great games being pushed out for next to nothing. Interest in gaming collapsed across the board, killing off almost every console besides the 2600, which was itself able to survive only because of its massive install base.In the interest of fairness, it should probably be noted that E.T. programmer Howard Scott Warshaw was responsible for two other exemplary 2600 titles: the fondly-remembered space shooter Yar's Revenge; and the ambitious (if incredibly complicated) Raiders of the Lost Ark licensed game. Warshaw has taken a lot of abuse for, supposedly, being the man to single-handedly bring about the 1984 crash, but this is neither fair nor remotely true. If anyone is to blame for the crash, it's the companies whose insatiable greed and non-existent quality control created a market bursting at the seams with worthless products, and not a programmer put in the unenviable position of having to create a game for one of Hollywood's most powerful directors in six weeks.
Of course it would be less than two years before Nintendo began the revival of home gaming machines by bringing the Famicom to America as the Nintendo Entertainment System. Next to the NES's flagship game, Super Mario Bros. (which came bundled with the system) and even its lowest quality offerings, 2600 games fared about as well as cave paintings next to the Mona Lisa. But Atari had dealt with market crashes and technologically superior rivals before, and showed no signs of bowing out gracefully. The 2600 received a facelift, becoming the sleeker, smaller 2600 Jr., and games continued to be produced. It was 1991--when Sega had already ushered in the 16-bit era in America with the Genesis--when Atari finally took the 2600 off life support, though development for the system continues to this day in the form of homebrew games created by diehard 2600 fans.
Games
These days, it is customary for many gamers to write off most of the 2600's software library as unappealingly simple, unable to hold one's attention for more than a couple of minutes at best. Consequently, it would be easy to say that nostalgia alone has kept the 2600 in the public's imagination and given rise to the huge fan community which exists to this day. And honestly, given exposure only to certain games, that can be a tough charge to refute. Many 2600 games are terribly simplistic by today's standards, with controls and, subsequently, objectives, which can feel very confining. However, there are still some games that, while not terribly involved, are nonetheless involving; and, surprisingly, there are a few more complex titles which paved the way for the far deeper gaming experiences subsequently provided by the NES.
Ironically, few of the best 2600 titles make it onto the classic games compilation of the week. With the exception of the great Activision Anthology (which you owe it to yourself to buy if you've never played Pitfall or River Raid), most of the VCS's real gems and weird historical curiosities can still only be experienced (at least legally) in their original form. What follows is a very brief attempt to highlight a few games with which you might not be familiar if your only exposure to the 2600 has come in the form of compilations for modern platforms.
Five Games You Should Play
Jungle Hunt: One of the more varied experiences to be found in any 2600 title, Jungle hunt has four different screens/levels that manage to wring quite a bit of graphical detail and gameplay variation out of the VCS. Its jumping controls can be a bit floaty, the hit detection is suspect, and the attack controls on the second screen aren't the most responsive, but the game remains fun and impressively dense despite these technical missteps.
Dolphin: One of Activision's less raved-about games, Dolphin boasts the usual good graphics, but also has some interesting, sound-based gameplay. You control a dolphin which has to avoid an onrushing octopus while swimming between holes in coral barriers. The game moves quickly, but your dolphin comes equipped with sonar to be able to predict what's coming at her. The game emits a high-pitched beep when the hole in the next barrier is near the top of the screen, a low beep when it will be closer to the bottom. Of course in today's world of surround sound and rhythm games, this won't impress anyone, but in its day, it was a pretty cool feature.Raiders of the Lost Ark: In the '80s, licensed movie games didn't always suck. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a prime example, a very primitive action-adventure game which requires the player to use two joysticks--one to control Indiana Jones, the other to cycle between items in his inventory. To finish the game (and see one of the earliest "cinematic" ending sequences in gaming history), you'll need to decipher what the items are and how to use them, all while avoiding some extremely persistent enemies. While the unbelievably abstract graphics artificially increase the game's challenge (approximately two items are immediately recognizable), this is still a pretty unbelievable example of the depth with which a good programmer could imbue a 2600 game.
Atlantis: Imagic's best-known title doesn't hold the position in gaming history that it probably should. A mash-up of Space Invaders, Missle Command, and Air Sea Battle, Atlantis may not seem like much today, but it does have its charms. Its graphics are neat and colorful, it controls nicely, and, from an historical standpoint, it is an early example of a game that took elements of other, better known titles, and refined them into an experience that was fun if not original. This may not be the highest honor that can be bestowed on a game, but it was certainly a precursor to what the industry has become today.
BMX Airmaster: This title came along in 1989, late in the 2600's life cycle, and it reaps the benefits of over a decade of collective programming knowhow. While the control-scheme shows just how limited the 2600's joystick and single-button set-up had become by the end of its life, BMX Airmaster does the best it can, allowing those who master its somewhat clunky controls to pull off tricks that make even those found in the SSX and Tony Hawk series look realistic by comparison. With three events--half pipe, quarter pipe and ramp jump--good graphics and smooth animation, BMX Airmaster is everything a latecoming title should be. Unfortunately, it can also be very difficult to track down. Atari's run of the game features an appropriately rad, full-color label, but is nearly impossible to find. You're more likely to run across the bland, white-label TNT Games version, but the contents of both cartridges are identical.
Names You Can Trust
Given that the 2600 is notorious for its parade of awful third party titles, it can be helpful for the beginning 2600 collector to know which developers were responsible for more hits than misses. Nothing takes the fun out of console collecting faster than picking up a new unit only to find out that all the available games are crap (trust me, I own a Sega Saturn).
In general, it's tough to go wrong with games by Activision, Imagic (the second-ever third party developer) and Parker Brothers (surprisingly enough, they were one of the best third parties making games for Atari's console). Activision games are particularly easy to find, as they were extremely popular in their time, creating genre-defining classics like Pitfall and River Raid, and a host of other technologically innovative and just plain fun titles. Imagic is less well known today, but their games are still pretty easy to find. Look for the distinctive silver-foil labels and unusual cartridge shape. Parker Brothers largely concentrated on making licensed games (including a great, early Spider-Man title, a good-looking Empire Strikes Back game, and at least one G.I. Joe offering), but they also had their share of originals, including the interesting puzzler Amidar.
Atari's first-party titles are probably more hit or miss, but this is mostly due to the huge quantity of games they released, and there is certainly no shortage of quality software in their back catalog. However, be wary of their arcade ports, especially Pac-Man (which you will find in huge quantities anywhere vintage games are sold, both because it was produced on a massive scale, and because everyone who bought it wanted to be rid of it). In general, though, Atari had the money and know-how to crank out quality titles. Coleco, Sega and 20th Century Fox are also worth checking out, though again proceed with caution where arcade ports are concerned--particularly Coleco's Donkey Kong, which is a slap in the face of one of the greatest games of all time.
[All screenshots from Atari Age]
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