Thus begins my tribute the the recent excellence of episodic gaming. I don’t like the idea of big-name developers that put out a game with no ending and then hold the story ransom until they can get funding for the next installment. (And I’m looking at you, Assassin’s Creed and Dreamfall.) But Telltale Games is doing this episodic thing right.
This is the first in a five-part series that will chart my course from here to self-indulgent irrelevancy. (So we’ll basically be going full circle.)
A good question from Galen in the earlier post on Spore DRM:
I’m just curious now, from the other perspective, lets say you made the game. What would you do as DRM assuming your game was good enough to sell… a lot. I’m definately not siding with EA here. I’m just noticing that when you review games you say how you would do it (FPS trackball, Survival Horror posts). So what would you do if it were your money and time that will be pirated?
That depends on how much control I had. If I was working for any normal publisher, then I wouldn’t have any choice at all. I’d have to use whatever system they told me to.
But if I was making an indie game, or if I miraculously had the clout to dictate terms to a publisher, then I’d take my own advice:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “If I Ran the Show”
I’m beginning to realize that the game I hold up as an example of Survival Horror perfection – Silent Hill 2 – is a complete aberration. It was the first Survival Horror game I really played (aside from dabbling a bit with a couple of games for a half hour or so) and I assumed there were more like it out there. As far as I can tell, there aren’t. I can’t help but judge Survival Horror titles – games ostensibly designed to frighten the player – by the criteria I wrote about a while ago on how to scare players. That’s not really fair, since what I’m looking for is apparently very different from what the designers are trying to do. But until I become so fabulously rich that I can make my own game for other people to pick apart, I have to make do with what I find on the shelf. I buy these Survival Horror titles, each time hoping that my list of ideal features and the designer’s list of features have an area of intersection on some unidentified Venn Diagram.
ObsCure is very much a standard SH game. All the usual suspects are here: 1) Clunky combat 2) Rationed saves 3) Aggressively difficult gameplay and 4) A story that collapses like a house of baking powder if you accidentally think about it.
This is not to say it’s a bad game. In fact, if you’re a fan of old-school survival games then this is probably exactly what you’re looking for. But I’m going to pick it apart for not being the game I want it to be, because I’m petty and unfair. This nitpickery begins now: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “ObsCure: First Impressions”
It seems PC Gamers managed to rattle their cages loud enough to get the attention of the Washington Post and Forbes with their protest of Spore.
Several people commented that Amazon.uk has every right to remove reviews from people who haven’t played the game. I completely agree. Actually, Amazon has the right to remove any review from anyone at all – it’s their site and they can do as they please. They do need to be aware – and I’m sure they are – that regularly removing low reviews would cause people to distrust the whole system. But I don’t think that’s a problem here.
The thousands of people who gave Spore a one-star review on Amazon without playing the game weren’t reviewing the game as much as taking part in an impromptu protest. I agree with their cause and I’m very glad that Amazon USA let those reviews stand, since it was most likely the catalyst for the news stories above. If nothing else it’s forced EA public relations people to come out on stage so we can boo them.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spore: DRM Backlash in the News”
Imagine that someone makes a platforming game in the style of the classic Super Mario Brothers. Only, they replace the jump button with something crazy. Like mouse gestures. No, I don’t mean like Super Mario Galaxy where you just wave the Wiimote around to do that spin move, I mean full-on mouse gestures where you click and doodle you get your avatar to leap and jump.
It would obviously be a lot harder, assuming it was possible at all. You can’t “flutter” a gesture the way you can flutter a button. It takes longer to do a gesture than tap a button. The game would be less fluid and responsive, and the pace would have to be slower, more deliberate.
The designer could compensate by making the game more forgiving and by slowing things down. The game could be made to work in the sense that it would be playable, but mouse-gesture platforming still wouldn’t be the same gameplay.
There is a certain cathartic pleasure to playing these sorts of games. Aside from the scenery, the threadbare story, or whatever bells and whistles have been grafted onto the given title to distinguish it from the rest, the simple act of moving and jumping can be entertainment in itself. The seamless translation of player thoughts and intentions to on-screen activity – the player’s will instantly projected into an animated world – is what really defines the experience. The rest is mostly makeup. If the designer replaced buttons with mouse gestures, the game would lose more than the ease and pacing. It would lose a lot of the fun, and no degree of practice on the part of the player would make it possible to play this new game the way they played Super Mario Brothers, because there would be latency between the player’s thoughts and the gameworld.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Right Toy for the Job”
I may shake my fist at the clueless corporate behemoth of EA, but the truth is I’ve come to depend on them. If their upper management was hospitalized and began getting the mental help they so desperately need, the company might end up in the hands of reasonable human beings and I’d be out of a job. I make fun of stupid, and nobody does stupid like EA.
Perhaps you noticed the lack of posts today. Perhaps not. In any case, I’m probably well over 1,000 miles from where Ike made landfall, but even Ike’s far-flung remnants provided us with an annoyingly impressive windstorm. One of those savage windstorms that make you glad you live in a brick house, or make you wish you did.
By morning the wind was gone, along with electricity, internet service, and large parts of the surrounding trees. Everyone’s yard was carpeted with leaves, like some sort of monochrome autumn.
My house seemed to be one of a small number in the neighborhood that still had power, although I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with electricity without the internet. I’d heard it was useful for other things, but I couldn’t remember anything off the top of my head. I tried to Google it, but then I remembered, oh right.
It’s nearly evening now, and you can hear chainsaws all over the neighborhood as people carve up the fallen branches and trees into moveable chunks. Internet is back on (obviously) and everyone seems to have power again. Good show.
I’m not complaining. Many others suffered a lot worse, and a day without internet is a pretty timid calamity. Still, it drove home the point that:
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
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.
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
T w e n t y S i d e d
