Once again I strive to meet the insatiable public demand for videogame jokes, architectural engineering analysis, and poetry.
(I was going to do a Dramatic Reading of the poem, as with Boris Karloff in the original How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but then I decided to play Mass Effect instead.)
In Reset Button I said that Prince of Persia was “flawlessly executed”, which, looking back, was a little hyperbole brought about by my love of the game and a desire for brevity. Let me make good by enumerating some of the shortcomings.
It’s a matter of taste, but the saturation of fantastical elements has been maxed out in this entry. In Sands of Time, the buildings and stunts were all semi-plausible in a visual sense. In the latest game, the stunts are preposterous, with barely a nod towards the effects of gravity or friction. The scenery is a lot of abstract platforming with Persian-themed highlights and window dressing. It looks wonderful, but it doesn’t look like there was ever a point where the place made sense as an inhabitable space.
The game suffers from a lack of challenge for advanced players. This is a nice change of pace from all the other games which are aimed only at advanced players, but I have a big-tent view of gaming, and I would have liked if the game could have offered everyone a challenge. My worry is that the next title will over-correct for this, and we’ll get another tedious game of pointless punishment. (This is exactly what happened going from Sands of Time to Warrior Within. The rewind feature and forgiving platforming brought in new people and bored hardcore, and then Warrior Within placated the hardcore and frustrated the newcomers.) But they could ramp up the difficulty without resorting to the cudgel of checkpoint-based practice & punish gameplay. Some suggestions:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Prince of Persia:
Flaws”
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| A French press, which is used in America and probably made in Taiwan. (Not pictured) The ever-present Brown Puddle. |
A French press is, as I feared, deviously simple. It’s a cylinder. You dump coffee grounds in the bottom. Then you pour in hot water. Then you take the filter and push it down through the water. This pushes the grounds to the bottom, leaving the now-coffee-ified water on top where it can be poured into a suitable vessel for consumption.
Well, that’s the thoery, anyway. Here is how the French press actually works:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “French Press”
Yahtzee reviews Prince of Persia this week. I don’t usually embed ZP since everyone knows where to find it if they want it, but I thought it provided a nice compare & contrast with Reset Button.
(And if by chance you’ve missed the ZP bandwagon, I do need to give you a heads up: Strong language ahead.)
To those who keep emailing me saying, “You should make more movies”:
I’d love to. Ideally, I’d love for it to be sponsored by someone. The more the movie gets spread around, the easier it is to get that “someone” interested. I’m currently fishing around for sponsorship. We’ll see if anyone bites.
End-of-year lists. The annual throwaway post for reviewers and pundits. Just gather up an N-numbered list of otherwise unrelated stuff, put the name of the year over them, and then hurry off to start the New Year celebrations early. We shall observe this ridiculous tradition, together, beginning now:
#10 Most Funny Game – Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People
The competition was fierce in this category this year, but in the end Strong Bad just barely edged out the hilarious Travis Grady of Silent Hill Origins to be this year’s leading funnyman.
#9 Best RTS – Starcraft
Yeah, yeah. You guys won again. It’s not as impressive as it was the last nine times. Don’t be so smug.
#8 Most Lamentable – Spore
How sad is it that the DRM controversy overshadowed the buzz surrounding this game, which was that it wasn’t very good because it had been “streamlined” for a broader audience? They threw Will Wright’s magnum opus onto the casual games bandwagon, without really understanding what was driving the trend or what all these new players were looking for. Like I mentioned in Reset Button, making games accessible to newcomers means making games that will teach you how to play, not reducing complex ideas into something on par with Peggle.
Putting a big, fat DRM padlock over the thing didn’t help matters either.
#7 Worst MMO Launch – Hellgate: London
Take a great concept. (Fast-paced first-person MMO) Add in a great team. (The Blizzard exiles who made Diablo II.) Add in an interesting premise. (A modern-day demonic invasion.) What do you get? A buggy, shallow, poorly-engineered soup of half-finished ideas and agonizingly bad writing.
Flagship Studios has closed its doors for good. Hellgate is shutting down on January 31. I can envision better ways for this to have turned out.
#6 Best MMO – World of WarCraft
Oh look. Another category where Blizzard just wins over and over again without even trying.
Jerks.
#5 Best FPS – [This Space Reserved for Half-Life 2, Episode 3]
Hurry up guys! This one is yours if you can release before midnight!
#4 Most Adhesive – World of Goo
Delightful, fun, and engaging. (But short.)
#3 Most Bifurcated – Fallout 3
At last, an open world sandbox game that really looks like a giant box filled with sand. Should I love the game for the fun gameplay and setting, or hate it for the inept writing and hilariously bad dialog?
#2 Best Game for everyone else and Worst Game for Me: The Witcher
A widely beloved and celebrated game that I actually found repelling. You can’t please everyone, I guess. You can’t enjoy an RPG if you can’t embrace the main character, and Geralt is someone I don’t want to touch, let alone embrace.
Just goes to show that you should never rely on just one reviewer.
#1 Hey. Why am I numbering these? They aren’t even related.
Crap. I forgot to put Prince of Persia in this list someplace. Ah well.
My question for you: What was your favorite game this year? (It doesn’t have to be FROM this year, just the one you discovered in 2008. We are not the sort to throw away old games at the ringing in of the new year. This is a place for civilized people, after all.)
Thanks for reading. Have a great New Year.
Now, you KNEW I was going to take a potshot at EA for their new DRM stance in my comic.
It is my dream to someday focus all of my might, my power, and my command of the English language, and concentrate my efforts into a single blow so severe, so cutting, and so precise, that EA might take a sort of disinterested halfway glance in my direction.
The dream lives on…
Here is the video project I’ve been working on. Part documentary, part op-ed, it tries to make the case that the game nobody is talking about is the most innovative game of 2008. This game is a gateway drug. And we need more of those.
I’m not thrilled with how it turned out. I’m not crazy about the titles & credits, there are clicks and pops in a couple of spots because Windows Movie Maker sucks, I had to cut most of my crude and feeble attempts at humor to meet the 10-minute YouTube limit, and my diction was sloppy in a couple of places. And while I’m at it, “Reset Button” probably isn’t the most catchy or original thing to call it, but you gotta call it something. I thought I should call it something retro and old-timey. Maybe “Penny Arcade”? I should Google and see if anyone is using that.
Ah well. I’ve wanted to get this out of my system for a while now. I imagine it will stand or fall based on the ideas it contains, not on my various technical deficiencies.
Now that I’ve sufficiently lowered your expectations, here is the fruit of my labors:
Link (YouTube) |
1,000 geek points to whoever can identify the music in the end credits. And I’m serious about the question I ask towards the end: Do you need a game to punish you for failure in order to enjoy victory? (I’m not just talking about blocking progress until you overcome the challenge, but taking away existing progress when you fail.) Does making the punishment more punitive make winning more fun?
Share and enjoy.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
T w e n t y S i d e d
