Okay, I’m not going to link to these guys each and every time they put one up, but this one got some laughs out of me:
This is the last time I’ll just repost Unskippable. Unless there is another one where I just can’t resist. Or if I forget I made that promise. Or I can’t think of anything else to post. Or if I just feel like it.
Let us gently open this topic for discussion, and see if we can keep it from blowing up into a flamewar.
I’ve always been in favor of lots of freedom when it comes to producing media: TV, Movies, Computer games, Music, etc. As long as people can choose not to experience it, and as long as you didn’t hurt anyone in the process, you can be as offensive as you like as the worst I’ll do is complain about it because the controls sucked and the save points were too far apart. (Or whatever.) I realize this sounds like the beginnings of a political rant, which says more about the sad state of politics than anything else. So to head that off – let’s just keep this in the realm of personal opinion and no use this discussion as a launching point for or against a political group.
Sometimes I’ll articulate this and someone will throw me a “me too!” for my troubles. Now, as much as I like having people agree with me, I’m always curious if this person really agrees with me, or if they just don’t like the idea of censorship.
In which case it’s time for a blend of the hypothetical and rhetorical:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ban This Game”
Interesting to see that I am not the only person who felt a deep ambivalence towards Fallout 3. I expressed this internal conflict during my review series, and now I’m noticing that others are also confused as to what to say about the game from a review standpoint. Scott Jones at Crispy Gamer gave the game good marks, but is now flip-flopping on the issue.
But is this such a crime? A game entertains you for forty hours. Then you walk away, and with a halfhearted shrug you lament that, “It could have been better.” A couple of days later, irritations and inconsistencies percolate to the surface, discoloring your memories of the game with the dirty hue of plot holes, glitches, and lame dialog. What now? Did this tainted aftertaste somehow undo those forty hours? Do you recant your earlier praise, and declare the thing to be the work of sophomoric hacks, or do you cleave to your original assessment?
What if, despite the flaws, you find yourself wanting to play again in six months? How many times are you allowed to alter your official position on a game?
(Scott Jones also makes a big deal about how he thought he was the only one who didn’t like the game. If you’re one of those who found that the game has left you cold and you’re looking for like-minded people, then allow me to direct you to No Mutants Allowed. They hated the game before you did, and with more fervor.)
This game is the reviewer’s bane. For people who are supposed to distill an experience down to a single, definitive opinion – perhaps even with a precise numeric value to accompany it – the game poses an impossible challenge. I can’t even decide how much I enjoy the game, much less make any sort of meaningful guesses about how the complete strangers of the world will respond to it.
Yes, this has made the rounds and then some. How It Should Have Ended is a fairly famous series, although somehow this one slipped by me until recently.
Link (YouTube) |
Amazingly, this really does seem to be how it should have ended, yet it never occurred to me.
Please pause for several minutes between panels four and five.
Via Kotaku, we have a quote from John Koller of Sony:
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| SONY: Everything is fine. We’re sure the market is going to abruptly change any minute now to something which is more favorable to us, without us having to do anything. |
Which is how I think Sony has viewed this all along. Their real goal was to win the format wars, since controlling the format of video content for the next decade is worth far more than having a respectable share of the console market for the next six years. They put the blu-ray player in the PS3, thus driving the price through the roof. Thus less were sold. Thus less developers wanted to make exclusives. Thus the main selling point of the PS3 – its super-powered processing abilities – went to waste, since only exclusives are going to be engineered to actually take advantage of all that extra power. Thus the system was even less appealing to people who just wanted a system for playing games, continuing a dreadful negative feedback loop.
But for Sony it’s still a win, because blu-ray won, and it won early. I’m not saying that having the blu-ray built into the PS3 is what won the format wars, I’m saying that Sony couldn’t afford to leave it out.
It makes business sense, although now that they’ve won the HD format war their behavior in regards to the PS3 has been slothful and unfocused. Their plan seems to be to announce that everything is fine on a regular basis, without really doing anything to close the gap with either of the other two consoles. I’d like to see them offer something to rival Xbox Live, gamertags, or the achievement system. (I know they have the trophy system, but it doesn’t look to be tied to anything like an account or gamer profile which can be shared. Without a gamertag, you have to just tell people you beat Explodious 3 on super double-hard. The system tracks your accomplishments, but it doesn’t give you a way to share them, which is what makes the system social and perhaps even viral.)
The thing is getting marginally cheaper to produce, which is nice, but even if they cut the price to Xbox 360 levels (which is extremely unlikely) they still don’t have a way to woo potential customers who are shopping for a console gaming system, or who might already own one of the others.
I am still a huge fan of the PS2, and it’s still my favorite of the previous generation. But a large part of the appeal of that system is the vast library of quality titles. The PS3 can’t ride the coattails of its predecessor because they dropped most of the backwards compatibility. And it can’t hope to build a library of its own if it’s sitting in distant third place. The tale of the dusty, underused PS3 is a common one.
Dear Sony: The current realities of the market are working against you. You will need to do something if you want this to change.
Topic for discussion: If you own more than one gaming platform (PC, Gamecube, Playstation, Xbox, Wii, etc) which one gets the most use?
The Birdmen post the other day kicked off an interesting discussion on auto-leveling or auto-adjusting difficulty in games. Now, I’m very much against auto-adjusting difficulty, because it solves one problem – the need for a game to provide the “right” level of challenge to all players – by creating a worse one: Taking away the ability of the player to adjust for frustration tolerance.
Ask people if a game is easy or hard, and you’ll see responses like:
Player1: Pfft. That game was a cakewalk. I only died maybe once a level.
Player2: That game was a pain in the ass. I died on almost every level.
So even among players of the same skill, the same experience can lead to very different perceptions. Some people want to play on a level they know they can handle and hoover up the content. Some players want the threat of failure to enhance their excitement. And some players want constant failure to test them and force them to develop their skills.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Auto-Adjusting Frustration”
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
T w e n t y S i d e d
