Akusai's Video Game Musings

Goddamned Spam

2009-11-20T15:29:00.003-05:00

What the fuck is it with random Chinese spammers? Do they actually think I'm going to follow a link that comes after a bunch of shit I don't understand? Seriously?

Fuck you, Chinese spammers. Between you and the goldfarmers, I'm not sure I care about China's human rights problems anymore.

I will be back to posting at this intermittent video game blog soon. I have one almost in the can. Not as if anyone reads this anymore.

Chrono Trigger!

2009-01-27T00:49:00.001-05:00

Well, we didn't make our goal of seven hours, but it's become clear, I think, that it's a futile effort. We did, however, beat least year's time and cleared the game, total completion run, in 7 hours and 30 minutes exactly!

And we beat Lavos before he made a single timeshift!

Burger Time!

2009-01-26T15:02:00.003-05:00

Okay, not really burgers per se, but I wanted to name the post after a video game.

Below the fold are pictures of our glorious feast of Arby melts. This is only 25 of the original 30 we bought, because we got hungry before the camera was finished charging.

Click to embiggen the deliciousness.

Mmm...And then tomorrow we're making the Bacon Explosion, and Wednesday it's to Hooters for all you can eat buffalo wings. What a week.

We're knee deep in Chrono Trigger at the moment. More on that when we get our final time.

Praise the Gods of Wintereenmas!

Wintereenmas, Days 1 and 2

2009-01-25T22:31:00.003-05:00

Nothing too eventful, so far, owing partially to Magus working yesterday and today, which meant there wasn't much gaming to be had. Also, a good friend visited from out of town yesterday, so we got some dinner and watched Yojimbo, which was awesome.

We've played some 2-player House of the Dead on the Wii. Today Magus went hog-wild in Assassin's creed, killing everyone he came into contact with just to see what would happen. He claims that it's actually far easier that way than trying to be stealthy.

Today, I played through the first level of Donkey Kong Country 2, which I found the other day at the Goodwill Store fore $2.99. Magus played some Trauma Center: Second Opinion. I wore myself out on Okami, which is fucking amazing. I beat Oroshi and entered the big city before breaking to eat dinner and do some reading for class tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Chrono Trigger speedrun!

Wintereenmas Update

2009-01-20T04:01:00.002-05:00

Sadly, there will be no six-foot sub.

Those fuckers cost, at minimum around here, $72. I can get six one-foot subs for less than half that. What happened to buying in bulk?

So this year, like last year, we're back to 50 Arby melts and a shitload of pop. Though probably not a shitload of pop, actually. We stopped regularly buying pop when we started lifting weights in 2007, and last year at WEmas, we discovered that a shitload of pop makes us feel sick. So probably Gatorade G2 or something.

Now, for the games. Ahem.

Of course, Chrono Trigger, as mentioned before.

Trauma Center: Second Opinion and Trauma Center: New Blood on the Wii
A bit of Twilight Princess on the Wii
Secret of Evermore on the Super Nintendo
Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Killer Instinct on the Super Nintendo
Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance on the PS2
House of the Dead 2 & 3 on the Wii

And, for some strange reason, Magus wants to play Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2, a game that I consider one of the most overrated pieces of shit ever produced. He wants to replay the first couple of colossi, the ones that were fun before we realized that the game was awful and disgustingly frustrating (intentionally so; they purposely made the horse not do what you told it, because it was apparently more "relistic"). But it's preeeeety!

I have a pile of games to trade into the Game Xchange so I can get credit for a new Wiimote; House of the Dead would be much less fun single player.

So far, that's the tentative plan. I want to say there are games in the to-play pile that I forgot about, but I can always mention them later.

Happy Wintereenmas to all!

Wintereenmas Approacheth

2009-01-19T02:13:00.002-05:00

Despite my very public and very negative feelings towards the holiday's creator, Tim "I'm A Giant Douche" Buckley, I still find time every year to celebrate Wintereenmas. And why not? It's an excuse to dress up in a ridiculous costume, take a week off work, and play video games from dawn until dusk.

Last year was quite a celebration. We found an Arby's coupon for "99 cent Arby melts - NO LIMIT!" so we decided to test out truth in advertising. Rather surprisingly, not only were they not annoyed at our order of fifty Arby melts; they were ecstatic. They never get that much business, apparently. We used to have pictures of the ziggurat we built with them, but I think they're on my old hard drive that I haven't bothered to hook back up yet. I hope they are.

Anyway, herein I'll partially lay out our tentative agenda for this year.

First thing's first: we found another coupon for no limit 99 cent Arby melts. So that's good. We also have a coupon for Subway where if you buy a six-foot sub, you get 36 cookies for free. That's not a bad deal, since we'd be buying that many cookies anyway, and it means we can have some variety between our six-foot sub and our unlimited Arby melts. So that's our food situation, as it stands.

Games-wise, our first order of business is our annual speedrun of Chrono Trigger. Now, this isn't any normal kind of speedrun. It's not "Fight Lavos in the right transporter with only Crono and Marle." Nor is it "Go through as fast as humanly possible by skipping all the dialogue." No, this is a speedrun based on game enjoyment and personal perfection. We read every word of dialogue and complete every inch of the game, because it is simply one of our favorite games of all time. The test is basically to see how well we have the game memorized so that the actual gameplay is down to a very strict routine. The only parts that continue to fuck us up are forgetting who has the Jerky and the battle with Son of Sun, which is based on a roulette structure, so it's pretty much out of our hands anyway.

Last year we finished in 7 hours, 47 minutes. This year we're going to shoot for 7. That might be a bit low, but you have to have something to work towards. 8 hours was our old goal, and we weren't sure we'd ever make it, but we did, and then some.

Other than CT, we tend to avoid RPGs during WEmas, because they're simply too time consuming. If we dedicated ourselves to an RPG, it would take the whole week and leave no time for other games. Though last year we did tear through Super Mario RPG, but it's neither long nor hard.

It's hard, sitting here in my office at work, to say what else we'll play, since I'm not looking at the game library at the moment. There might be a fighting game tournament, either Street Fighter Alpha 2 or Killer Instinct, probably a Mario game of some sort...I've had a hankering to replay Kingdom Hearts II for some reason, but that would take too long. Same for Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Any of those might see a bit of playtime, though. Just not a whole lot.

If I can get my NES working again, that opens up a world of possibilities. A few weeks ago I suggested a Duck Hunt tournament, but that was before I knew the NES was on the fritz. And it's not just the games; it gives me the same flashing blue screen no matter what game I put in. And no, I haven't blown on them. That only makes things worse.

We've been saying for a while now that we wanted to buy a second wiimote (yes, we still only have the one) and House of the Dead 2&3, so that's a possibility.

Anyhow, when it's all figured out, I'll tell you about it. I'll also try to make a short post every night with something interesting about that day's events. When I get a picture of myself in the King of Wintereenmas ensemble, I'll probably post that, too. I'd use the old one, except I was much fatter back then, so it couldn't hurt to take a new one.

Happy Wintereenmas to all!

Like Riding a Bike

2008-12-27T10:05:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I ran by the used game store and, as luck would have it, they had a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX for the Game Boy Color. My copy of that disappeared years ago and I have no idea what happened to it. I've been looking for a replacement ever since. Even better, it was only $9.99.

(Side note: is it just me, or do some used game stores tend to misjudge prices both ways? I've seen Link's Awakening for upwards of $20 elsewhere and given the popularity of the game and the difficulty in finding used GB or GBC games, I'd figure it was worth about that much. On the other side, you can't seriously have a display case with a dozen copies of Final Fantasy VII in it and expect me to pay $50 for it.)

I dig out my old GBA SP (long abbreviations are amusing; a friend and I once laughed when I bought "The Saga or Goku" or something on the GBA in high school because it meant I had a DBZ RPG for the GBA SP), charged it up, and plugged LA into the slot this morning. What resulted was something I've experienced with other games, but rarely so acutely.

Basically, here's a game I haven't played at all in close to ten years, but the whole thing still lives in my head. Some years I forget my girlfriend's birthday, but I can play LA with my eyes closed. At first, things were muzzy in my memory, but after about ten minutes in, it all came flooding back. "Dig here for a secret seashell." "Walk around back of the shopkeeper to steal items."

I can even remember a good chunk of the trading sequence; Yoshi Doll-->Ribbon-->Dog Food-->Banana-->Stick-->Honeycomb. At some point later, you trade food for a flower, a flower for a letter, give the letter to Mr. Write and...then it goes fuzzy again. But it'll come back. It's all coming back. I imagine I'll have trouble with the 7th dungeon, but then I always had trouble with the seventh dungeon. Never once did I get through it without quite a lot of frustration. Once I somehow found a glitch that caused a mid-boss key drop to redrop every time I reentered the room; after a while, it was keeping track of my keys in hexadecimal and dungeons 7 and 8 were cakewalks.

It's weird how games I played ad nauseam as a kid become almost reflexive even after such long spans of time. My freshman year of college, I visited someone at another school and we popped Super Mario Brothers 3 into her NES. She was terrible at it, as she had never owned an NES as a kid, so she was content to watch me play while we talked. I remember beginning World 1, and then I remember looking at the screen at some point during World 4 and saying "When did I get here?" I honestly have no memory of the intervening levels; I was on autopilot the whole time. What I know I know because I was told: "You didn't warp, and you didn't lose a single life."

Other games on which I operate similarly: Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VII (though I still need the strategy guide for chocobo breeding and some steals and enemy skills), Chrono Trigger (going for seven hours in this year's speed completion run!), Super Mario RPG, Metroid II and Super Metroid, and Mega Man X.

It's no coincidence that they're all games I played during middle school and before. These days I simply don't have the patience to play a game until it's ingrained into my mind so thoroughly. It's something I both miss and don't miss.

On the one hand, I got so much more time out of games when I'd play them like that. It came from a number of factors: an abundance of free time and an obsessive need to play until everything in a game was second nature were definitely factors. I'd put a lot of it down to a lack of metagame awareness, though. These days I can tear through many games because I've played enough to understand how the developers have structured them, and move forward at an accelerated pace. Games don't require nearly as much random wandering and trial-and-error as they used to for me because I'm just plain familiar with the standard tropes and design decisions. Thus I spend less time in beating them, and they don't get imprinted on my mind because of it.

Take Twilight Princess. Many reviews claimed that it was a 70-hour game, even before you took into account pieces of heart and the other various sidequests. I beat it in just over 30, during which time I completed that 100-level pit-dungeon thing, beat a few of the mini-games, collected a lot of the shiny bugs, even a few extra pieces of heart, and spent loads of time trying to figure out the less-than-intuitive controls for fishing. Assuming the reviewers were not padding the game's length for some reason, I assume that I'm simply more familiar with Zelda tropes than they are and so nothing really hung me up too bad. Looking back at it, I really don't remember too much of the game, except that I enjoyed it thoroughly, which probably means I should go back and replay it sometime soon. I have three weeks off here in a month or so; sounds like a plan.

So part of me really misses the sense of pure fun and lack of behind-the-curtain knowledge I had that led me to play games so much (and enjoy them all the while) as a kid. These days I only do that with the big open-ended games by Bethesda, and even then only because I can play them so differently each time.

On the other hand, that kind of obsessiveness caused me to miss out on a lot of games because I was too busy playing others. To this day I'm still catching up on a few PSX games I missed while I was distracted by the various Final Fantasies. That's really not a huge deal, though, because I usually had fun playing the games I was playing, and that is, after all, the whole point. I can just pick up the games I missed later on and have fun with them then. It helps that these days I'm rarely really interested in more than 2 or 3 new launches a year. I have my whole life to catch up.

One thing I cannot excuse, though, and that I don't miss at all, was the sheer amount of frustration such obsessiveness often caused. I got every single star in Super Mario 64 when I was 12 or 13. It is an achievement I am quite proud of, but the long days and nights spent dying over and over and over until my blood pressure was through the roof and I was ready to throw my controller into the screen are nights I don't miss. It's those nights that made me decide not to go for the completion in Super Mario Galaxy; ray surfing was simply too awful and frustrating, as was that stand-on-the-ball-and-roll-it thing. I got the stars I had fun getting. I only did a couple of the time trials, but eschewed the rest because I'm really not interested in them. I'm looking forward to Mirror's Edge PC for the ability to replay segments of the game and race against my own personal best. That kind of trial I still really dig. It's one of the reasons I enjoy the Trauma Center games so much. But I really don't give a shit about competition, much less necessary competition against an arbitrarily fast, AI-controlled character. I just don't have any fun with that at all.

I've said a hundred times before how little time I have for multiplayer games. I think this is a function of that. I'm honestly not interested in competition when playing games. I'm interested in fun and palpable achievement. I want to have a good time and I want to feel like I'm going somewhere (note to Xbox obsessives: Achievements, while a good idea in principle, are not what I'm talking about; they're far too often related to arbitrary goals and are generally used solely for metagame competition and Live e-penis waving).

I honestly can't think of a single game in the last couple of generations that I have memorized so thoroughly that I could play it on autopilot. Part of me worries that I'm simply not having enough fun playing most of my games; that I'm playing them out of a misguided sense of necessity rather than because I'm having a good time. And I think that's partially true; my metagame awareness certainly lessens my fun factor at least a bit. But generally, when a game stops being fun, I just stop playing it. I've stopped playing a lot of games in recent years, and I'm not sure if that's me or a problem endemic to modern game design. In "Wind Waker," it certainly wasn't me; rupee-grinding to find the plot coupons is just plain bad design.

Anyway, I'm putting all of this out there mainly to see if anyone else has had similar experiences. Any games that set your brain on auto-pilot? What are they? Any thoughts on the rest of what I've said?

Whatever Happened to Antagonist, Inc?

2008-11-13T02:25:00.005-05:00

Years ago when I was a teenager (way back in the last century when the internet was powered by steam), the only access I had to the net was through my parents' AOL account. My time was spent IMing with friends, trolling Christian chatrooms and trying to convince them that Spam was the One True God (seriously), and hanging out at Antagonist, Inc.

For those of my five readers who don't know (probably all of you), Antagonist (known to its adherents as ANT) was AOL's resident video game community. And it was glorious.

ANT was the place to be for anyone who really dug games. Before anyone gave a shit about IGN, before Gamespot was a blip on the radar, there was ANT. ANT was centered around two things: a great love of video games, and a take-no-prisoners attitude towards those who disagreed with you. It was all in good fun, with a healthy dose of irony most of the time, but still, the flame wars were legendary.

ANT's layout was a parody of military conventions, kind of a general web-based satire of the console wars. Each game platform had its own "fortress," and they all played like they were mortal enemies. None moreso, however, than the N64 fort and the PSX fort. The bitter rivalry between those two consoles led to many a chat spam of "PSX SUXX!!!!!" and retaliatory "N64 IS FOR LOSERS!!!!1!!"

Each fort, too, had its "commander." I can't remember if they were actually called that, but there was most definitely a central person who was in charge of each fort. If I remember correctly, ANT Asur had the N64 fort, ANT Camper had the PSX fort, and ANT Caustic had the PC fort. I could be wrong, however, and I don't remember who had the Dreamcast fort at all. That could be because DC SUXORZ.

There were also "bunkers" for smaller platforms: the Game Boy bunker is one that springs to mind.

Thus everyone antagonized everyone else (get it?) and had a good time pretending deep, heartfelt hatred for others. Of course, I'm sure some felt it for real, but overall, it was a lot of goofy fun and a good time was had by all. Hell, there were even anti-ANTs who, for some reason, hated Antagonist and would occasionally rally their troops and mount a flamewar offensive on all of us, at which point the ANTs would put aside their differences and join up against a common enemy.

Membership in ANT was simple: snag a screen name beginning with ANT. Early on (probably sometime in 1996) I claimed ANTMuaddib, owing to my obsession, at the time, with Frank Herbert's Dune. I posted under that handle for years. I twice won the ANT creative writing contest. I pissed off ANT Caustic by promising to make him an Atari T-shirt (this was long before you could find them at every store) and never getting around to it. I cussed out PSX fanboys, because N64 was totally better (eh...hindsight is 20/20). There were tons of us.

What I personally loved so much about ANT was the atmosphere. It felt like a place where people who really loved games got together to talk about them. The writers were on the same level as the rest of us; they were paid employees of Antagonist, Inc, and worked in their offices, but they were basically forum admins who wrote game news and reviews. They seemed to have an honest love of games and, to a one, a great sense of humor. In particular, the precious few episodes of ANT Radio they put together made me laugh my ass off.

But, like I said, it was clear that everyone there loved video games. The writers were big game dorks from way back; they loved games because they had been playing games for as long as there had been games. That's a feeling I don't get from any of the big modern video game communities online; it feels like their writers are people who needed a job and writing about games happened to be one. Maybe they played a game or two in the past, maybe not. Places like IGN, Gamespot, 1UP, and Gamespy feel cold and corporate to me. It's all very professional, and there's a wide separation between the writers and the community (what there is of one). ANT, by comparison, was kind of a homespun bastard child of games and the internet. And it was glorious.

Unfortunately, AOL's market share began to falter with the introduction of DSL and cable internet service, and ANT felt the crunch. Probably less than a year after a major upgrade and overhaul, updates began to dry up. Then the news came that ANT was moving to the web, trying to extricate itself from AOL. Antagonist.com was launched, but updates were slow there, too.

Soon, updates were nonexistent. Before much longer, Keyword: ANT redirected to the general AOL games area. ANT had died, and it had gone out with a whimper rather than the kind of bang befitting its bombastic existence. Its writers scattered to the winds and it became a phantom memory. The granddaddy of modern online video game communities met a slow, bitter defeat and faded away into nothingness.

And all the ANT points I had accumulated from the various lotteries and contests I had won disappeared, and the ANT t-shirt I was saving up for never materialized...

Every once in a while I think about ANT and wonder what happened to everyone. All I can find with the Great Google is a pretty-well defunct Livejournal community, one that hasn't been hit by anyone I remember. I really miss ANT for the gleeful absurdity of its mock military premise, for its humor, and, overall, for its authenticity. Today's review sites just can't live up to it. It was the first and only online community I was ever really a part of; to this day I don't post on forums. Don't really like to. But I did when ANT was live. I have a Gamespot membership, but that's just to access their downloads. I never use it. Gamespot (while it tends to be my preferred news and review site these days) is generally douchey and lame.

Where did everybody go? ANT Camper, who pissed everyone off when he created "radioactive decay" and downgraded Final Fantasy VII's 100% score to 70% after a couple of years? ANT Asur, whose name (pronounced as-you-are) was taken from a Nirvana song, and who kept us hyped even when it was clear the N64 was failing? ANT Caustic, who weathered the giddy highs and cthonic lows of John Romero's Ion Storm?

ANT Nomad?
ANT Johker?
Johnny Law?

Anybody?

So if anyone remembers ANT, leave a short message on this, my little paean to times gone by. If anyone was an ANT, feel free to reminisce, or tell me anything you know. And anyone that didn't know about ANT, well, you missed out on some true greatness, my friends.

ANT Muad'dib, signing out.

Microsoft is Retarded

2008-09-27T20:06:00.000-05:00

Seriously, guys, this XBox Experience thing is lame as hell. Do you really think nobody is going to notice that you're completely ripping off Nintendo? Even worse, you've essentially made XTREEEEME MIIS!!!

I'm so sick of this XTREEEME gaming shit, and Microsoft seems to be the paramount purveyor of it. They tried to make a really cool little thing hip, and in doing so just made themselves look retarded.

"Hip" is for tools. Fuck you, Microsoft.

It's Alive!

2008-09-20T07:46:00.000-05:00

The Witcher Enhanced Edition is already better than the original! I was able to watch through the intro movie without the game crashing! Fantastic!

Hopefully the rest of it is more stable, too.

In the Background

2008-09-20T04:58:00.003-05:00

Today I'm going to take a moment to advocate for a couple of perhaps lesser-known games that have recently come out that are most definitely worth playing.

What with the launch of Spore and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, I worry that quality pieces like this might go unnoticed, so as a public service, I'm writing about them for the two people that read this blog.

Game the first: The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

The Witcher is one of the few games I can say would be amazing, but for the many, many bugs. Most buggy games are rendered shitty by their bugs, i.e. the bugs affect gameplay or the interface or something, or the game itself just isn't good enough to make up for the bugs. The Witcher is something different. The bugs are all very annoying; on the two computers I tried to run it on, it crashed, on average, about every twenty minutes, and we're not talking about a crash to the desktop ("pulling an Oblivion," as I like to call it). No, friends, it would take my entire computer with it and just reboot the fucker. Add that to the truly horrendous load times and you should have a real monster of the game.

But The Witcher was special. The gameplay was deep, the setting was gritty, realistic, and well-realized, the characterization was so much better than pretty much every other fantasy-genre game ever. The voice acting was pretty good, even. Without the bugs, it would be a spectacular game, so with the bugs it was, instead of a shitty game, a spectacular game with bugs.

Bear in mind I never even got more than a couple of hours into the game, and I had already fallen in love with it.

What were really great were the decisions you made that changed the story's flow. Most of the consequences, however, were not immediate, but far along in the story and (gasp!) unforeseen. This means that you couldn't just load a saved game if you didn't like the result; well, you could, but you'd have to play through hours of game to get back to the same spot.

What I liked even better was that the one major decision I had to make towards the beginning of the game wasn't a moral decision. As I've said before, I think that basing all important decisions on some system of morality or another is becoming increasingly overdone and was really quite shallow to begin with. In The Witcher, my first major decision was the kind of real-life crisis decision that a guy fighting giant monsters might have to make: go here and help Group A fight Bad Guy A, or go there and help Group B fight Bad Guy B. The one you choose changes your story path and has far-reaching consequences, and neither is a "good" or "bad" decision. Either one is just a decision you have to make, and neither is easy because it might have dire consequences for the people you didn't help.

That's good story design.

Anyway, it was still buggy as hell, and some of the dialogue was...awkward. Translating from Polish will do that, I suppose. The Enhanced Edition launched the other day (the 16th) and it purports to fix the bugs, make the game stable (praise God), redo the interface (another mildly annoying part), cut load times by 80%, and provide completely rewritten and rerecorded dialogue.

I actually don't know if it carries through on its promises yet. I'm in the midst of downloading it, as it is free for people who already own The Witcher. The first chunk was a massive 1 gig patch file, and now I'm working on the half-as-massive 500 meg English Language pack for the new dialogue. I'll probably write about it once I get it up and running.

For all of you who own The Witcher, but put it aside, as I did, because of the numerous bugs and stability issues, this is the patch for you. This game is so very worth playing. It didn't win all sorts of awards for nothing. For anyone that doesn't already own it, the Enhanced Edition hit retail the same day, and it's $50 well fucking spent.

Game the second: Quest For Glory II: Trial By Fire VGA version

Quest For Glory II: Trial by Fire is inarguably the finest adventure game of the EGA SCI0/SCI1 era. It's just not arguable. If you argue that it isn't, you're just wrong. Plain and simple. It improved upon its already amazing predecessor in many ways, with an enhanced battle system, a longer, more in-depth story, deeper characterization, better puzzles, more epic scope, and more of the wonderful, cheesy jokes and pop-culture references that make the series what it is. It's got replay value out the ass, and easter eggs all over the place.

For those of you that have never played any game in the series, Quest for Glory is a superb adventure/RPG hybrid series where you choose to play a fighter, magic user, or thief and become a hero through derring-do, monster slaying, and lots and lots of really bad jokes. The adventure gameplay is fantastic, and the RPG elements pioneered the incremental growth through use system that I favor (i.e. your climbing skill goes up as you climb more). I'd go so far as to say that the very reason I favor that system so much (apart from the fact that it just makes sense and is far more organic than a level-up system) is that I spent so many hours playing QFG as a kid. I dressed as the hero for two Halloweens running.

AGD Interactive (formerly Tierra Studios) has been working on their VGA remake for years. I remember buying a new hard drive in 2005 and thinking "The remake of QFGII should be launching soon, and I need more hard drive space." It's been at least five years. At least.

What's great about the guys (and girl) at AGD is that they don't only remake the old games with VGA graphics, they enhance them. Their remake of King's Quest II is far and away better than the original; they made the puzzles less random and more intuitive, got rid of some of the most frustrating elements of gameplay (like the collapsing bridge that could fuck you over permanently if you crossed it too many times), and inserted story elements that made the game flow better. Not only that, they actually created something like 100% more dialogue and story that actually incorporated and added to the King's Quest universe and fleshed out the almost nonexistent narrative of the original to new dimensions.

They even did voice acting!

The Silver Lining project (a fan-made KQ9) has nothing on them. Trust me; I played their demo, and it blew hard.

Their version of QFGII stays true to the original, while adding a massively enhanced battle system (I still haven't got the hang of it), and streamlining frustrating elements of the original (hello, better map system). It even allows you to play the game with the parser instead of the mouse pointer if you want the original feel. They went out of their way to include all the original easter eggs (like Silly Clowns and the infamous x-ray glasses), redid the music (which was already great), and generally made a classic better in just about every way. And they did it all for free, because they wanted to do it.

Head to their website now and download their remake, whether you've played QFG before or not. It's well worth your time, I promise.

Douchetastic

2008-09-19T00:12:00.005-05:00

This is a terrible attitude to have.

It doesn't help that Tim Buckley might just be the biggest douchebag on the internet; between his drunken rages on World of Warcraft, his random purges of his forums, or his derivative comic with okay art and jokes that drag on far too long, he's been douching up the webs for years.

Penny Arcade doing well? Make a derivative comic about gaming! The Penny Arcade Expo a huge success? Start your own convention! After all, rather than celebrating the success of your webcomic colleagues, why not just ride their coattails to your own underserved fame among teenage Halo 3 players by writing unfunny jokes and creating a terrible, less funny animated series?

This guy's ego is ridiculous. The only useful thing he ever did was to create Wintereenmas and give me an excuse to take a week off of work every January and binge-game, and even that was another attempt to be "king" of something.

But I digress.

The attitude to which I am referring in the above link is this (referring to Spore):

Need to get this out of my system this weekend, with Rock Band 2, Force Unleashed and WAR dropping next week.

You, sir, have completely missed the point of gaming.

Like the douchebag you are, you seem to think that gaming is about staying on the top of the pile, of keeping up with the next best thing before it's even launched, of rapidly playing through whatever big name games are out this week before moving directly onto whatever comes out next week. You see gaming as a competitive exercise in self-aggrandizement, as a big contest where the one who dies with the most high-octane geek cred wins.

I feel sorry for you. As much as you annoy me, I pity you, with your shallow take on the pastime.

You shouldn't have to "get it out of your system." If you enjoy Spore, keep playing Spore. Those other games will still be there next month, next year, or ten years from now, in one format or another. There's no need to rush through something enjoyable just so you can be the first kid on the block to be Starkiller.

You, and people like you, have hopelessly defined yourselves by your ability to buy and tear through new, big-name games as fast as they come out. You live to impress others with the acuity of your buying power. You've traded dick-waggling pissing contests for shelves full of games you barely played, because you were too busy barely playing the game that came out a week later. You are obsessed with the "rep" you will obtain by showing people how many games you can buy and fail to enjoy.

You're such a sad fucking sack.

You've traded fun and enjoyment for what essentially amounts to real-life level grinding. Instead of finding escape or pleasure or some kind of simple fulfillment in the hobby of gaming, you work tirelessly to prove that you're the biggest, baddest buyer on the block. You don't enjoy games for their own sake; you enjoy them for what they make others think of you. You don't actually have fun playing games. For you, they are but a means to an end, a way to manipulate people into thinking highly of you based on a shared arbitrary value standard.

By trading the enjoyment that video games can bring you for a shallow attempt at image-creation and reputation building, you have completely and totally missed the point. You take your gaming seriously, but only so far as it can affect the image you project to others.

In short, you are a douchebag.

It's no wonder Gamer Points and Achievements are so popular with the douchecrowd. Many of them have added "waving the e-penis" to the list of "ways to impress other people" along with "wearing Livestrong bracelets" and "bragging about that drunk chick I banged last night." All this window-dressing metagame nonsense is just another way to pretend that your minor, meaningless achievements are worth more than a hill of beans. It's just another way to beat your chest and yell "Look at me, for I am cool!"

My only advice to you: lighten up. Stop giving so many shits about being first in line to try the new flavor. It doesn't matter at all, and you're missing all the fun that lots of the rest of us are having. If you like a game, play it. Don't rush through it to make time for more. Enjoy it; savor it. Play it until it bores you, and then move on. Have a good time with your hobby and stop worrying so damn much about impressing everyone else.

It's always a complete waste of time.

Of course, there's always an alternative explanation for your douchiness, one that I've been considering for a long time: that you've never actually enjoyed gaming, that it just gives you a playing field on which you can find some level of acclaim, even if it is generally among the lowest common denominator of an already low-on-the-totem-pole subculture. You play them only because you must in order to relate to the gomers that love your increasingly bad webcomic. You play them not in any way to gain enjoyment, but only so you can keep up with the most cutting-edge geek conversations and pull out your cock whenever it might make you look just a little bigger. You play them because you are cynical, exploitative, and narcissistic, and that makes you an even bigger douchebag than the above situation.

In either case, you think far too highly of yourself and have far too much need to be recognized, acclaimed, and impressive to those around you.

Seriously, Buckley. Your wang can't be that small, can it?

Maybe I'll just ask that alleged underage girl.

Christ, when did one of my favorite pastimes get infiltrated by these douche-types? I must have been napping, and now it's too late.

We Don't Need Your Steenkin' Multiplayer

2008-08-05T05:02:00.005-05:00

Last year I was quite candid with my views on multiplayer. Those views have not changed. The world is still full of pointless, added-just-to-have-it multiplayer, shoehorned in unnecessarily whether it fits or makes sense or not.

I also talked about Fallout 3, soon to be released by Bethesda Softworks. It looks ever more promising, and every E3 preview was quite positive. It won all kinds of awards after the show.

These things have just met each other in a jarring, high-speed collision.

From Gamespot (emphasis mine):

Bethesda has gone on record to say that the planned downloadable content will be for the PC and Xbox 360 only, and unfortunately there'll be no multiplayer in the game.

I'll pause a moment to let that sink in.

...

Now, imagine me screaming at the top of my lungs, veins popping out of my beet-red forehead like a geeky Louis Black: "What in the name of fuck would multiplayer add to Fallout 3, you worthless, ignorant sack of rancid goat shit?"

Has Guy Cocker, Gamespot UK (I really hope that's his real name) ever fucking played Fallout? Moreover, has he ever fucking played a non-MMO Western RPG?

There is nothing that standard multiplayer would add to Fallout 3 except a boring, shallow, and decidedly un-Fallout deathmatch. Running around in Vault 101 jumpsuits and fragging people.

I sometimes like deathmatches. I played a hell of a lot of Unreal Tournament 2003 my freshman year of college. Deathmatches have their place. Fallout isn't it.

Fallout is only marginally about running around and shooting people and things. It's more about its atmosphere, its setting, and its story. It's more about its character interactions and its SPECIAL System-driven gameplay. Given that you could potentially walk through Fallout 1 and 2 and rarley even fire your gun depending on your skill choices, I think its fair to say that running around shooting people and things is only really incidental to the Fallout experience.

Moreover, how the hell would that even work? Fallout 3 reportedly has almost 100 different weapons and variations of weapons; it's not some FPS with a handful of static weapon types that are left lying around for you to pick up and shoot people and things. It's also an RPG; part of the game's progress involves leveling up and building up your skills, including weapon skills. So how does that work in deathmatch? Does everyone play a level one n00b character with a crappy pistol, and 5 of the game's many, many weapons are chosen to be "standard" deathmatch weapons? No armor, no leveling, no weapon customization, no dialogue, no stealth, no pickpocketing, no story.

No wonderfully, blackly loopy retrofuturistic Fallout setting. Just shallow, pointless running around and shooting people. That'll sure add a lot to the package. But you gotta get that multiplayer in somewhere!

And Gamespot's not the only place I've seen this "criticism." Game journalists seem to get dumber and more out-of-touch the longer I live. It seems more and more that every last one of them was weaned on Halo with one of those giant Xbox controllers in their hands. They, it must be said, have no gamer provenance. They make idiot uninformed opinions based on nothing more than current industry trends. So often I read something that a game journalist has said and wonder "Did you actually think about that at all before you said it?"

One site previewing Fallout 3 suggested co-op multiplayer, where, instead of recruiting an NPC, the main player recruits another, human player to tag along with them from their computer.

How is this fun? Firstly, the secondary player is at the mercy of the main player's progression through the plot before they can play. They are also limited to doing nothing other than shooting things. They don't engage in dialogue, they don't utilize skills, they just run-and-gun. In towns, the tag along behind the primary player and watch him do everything, waiting for him to leave so they can get more action.

It's as lame as Final Fantasy III/VI's "multiplayer" option on the SNES, where Player 2 could only give commands to half of the party in combat while Player 1 did everything else in the game. "Okay, you walk, buy things, talk to people, access the menu, set up the party's order and equipment, and cast field spells, and I'll...Tell Locke to attack sometimes." Fun.

Moreover, co-op in Fallout 3 would create a shallower gameplay experience for the main player, in that they couldn't interact in-game with their party member. They could interact in metagame over teamspeak, but that's not a part of the actual game at that point.

The only other option, as I see it, is to have a Fallout 3 gameworld where multiple players run around doing their own thing and running into each other from time to time, maybe sometimes teaming up. But that's what's called an MMORPG, and Fallout 3 is not an MMORPG.

So tell me, Guy Cocker, Gamespot UK: why, precisely, would you rather Fallout 3 have multiplayer? Could it be because you're a fucking wanker?

Mass Effect: Mediocrity '07

2008-08-04T00:36:00.004-05:00

Earlier this year Magus and I finally got an XBox 360. It was a steal at $150 for the machine, a hard drive, and all relevant cables. We bought a bunch of games and were discussing buying Mass Effect when our lifting buddy Wikinite told us "You can just borrow my copy. You wouldn't want to buy it anyway."

I did not hate the game, but alas, he was quite right.

I had great, great hopes for Mass Effect. After all, it came from the same folks that brought us Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights (and the same people who farmed out each sequel to Obsidian, who decided it was a good idea to release incredibly broken games each time). Even when I was a 360-hater back in the early days it looked, at the least, intriguing.

We loaded it up one night and eagerly set-to, hoping Wikinite's assessment wouldn't jibe with our own. I made up a character that looked kind of like a pale, gaunt version of Jayne from Firefly, named him "Jesus Shepherd," chose whatever class it was that's half tech and half soldier, and set to.

The intro level was a cakewalk, but I was immediately annoyed by the lock-picking/hacking minigame. It was arbitrary and completely nonsensical. What were the button-pushes supposed to represent in in-game terms? How come I had to have a certain skill level before I could even attempt the random Simon-esque minigame? How come sometimes it was 3 buttons, sometimes 5, and sometimes 7, and that number seemed to have no correlation with the actual difficulty of the lock or my skill in relation to it?

But random, nonsensical minigames are a part of game design culture. At least Mass Effect's was less incredibly annoying than Oblivion's lock pick.

Then I encountered the menu.

Gods above, has anyone ever, in the history of game design, designed a shittier, less intuitive, messy, overly complicated, busier menu interface? Even Oblivion's tabby-tab-tab monstrosity was easier to use than that. It's like Bioware said "Hey, you know how annoying Oblivion's menu interface was, and how people hated it? Let's try to come up with something even worse! It'll be awesome!" For some reason, they decided to base every damn thing in the game around the physical structure of the analog joystick.

This was incredibly annoying for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's unnecessary. Regular, top-to-bottom menus have worked fine forever, and there's a reason for that: they're more intuitive. We don't read in circles. We read (at least in the West), left to right, top to bottom. And most of the sub menus were top-to-bottom, so why was the main menu joystick-based? Why the character skills menus? Why the dialogue?

Secondly, it reminds the player unnecessarily, I think, that there's a joystick in their hands and they're playing a game. Basing the in-game interface so closely on an out-of-game piece of equipment can kind of break immersion a bit. That's a nitpick, though.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it is necessarily limiting. This probably wasn't a problem for the menu screen because they only had so many things to fit there. But when you have a list of 60 weapons in your inventory, they had to switch to top-to-bottom lists. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they limited the number of character skills based on the rotary menu system. What really suffered, however, was the dialogue.

To this day I'm still reading game reviewers spouting breathless superlatives about how wonderful the Mass Effect dialogue system is. My only response is "Are you fucking kidding me?"

The system is unnecessarily stunted, it gives you the illusion of choice, it is terribly cut-and-dry, and it breaks immersion regularly.

Let's first talk about the stuntedness: this is a result of their stupid decision to have a "dialogue wheel" rather than a list of possible responses. This limits them to six choices at all times, one of which is always "Goodbye," so there's actually only ever five. However, this problem only really ever comes up when you're being inquisitive and asking about multiple different topics, a mechanic which is only offered when it's offered and usually quite transparently so (i.e. an option in a higher-level branch of the dialogue tree to "Ask Questions"). Two things happen in Mass Effect: either there are five or fewer topics about which you can inquire, or you're given four topics, a "Goodbye," and an "other topics" choice that takes you to a second wheel of questions. This is just awkward and unnecessary, and it is a direct result of their awkward and unnecessary dialogue wheel. That choice stunted their options in dialogue, and when they wanted to break from their self-imposed limitation, they made something more annoying than any list-based dialogue tree.

Next up is the illusion of choice. During the game, there are only a few times when you make a choice that actually affects the story. This is not terribly unusual, as most non-Fallout games majorly railroad you from the getgo. What bugged me about Mass Effect, though, was that it was sold with this "choose your own path" dialogue system that is really anything but. I prefer a game to let me know when it is railroading me instead of pretending that it isn't and that my choices count for something. In Mass Effect, it was quite obvious to the both of us as we played through that Bioware had done their utmost to make it completely irrelevant which dialogue choices you picked; so many NPC responses were vague, and some were downright inappropriate responses to what Shepherd had said. They purposely designed the NPC dialogue that way so that it didn't really matter what you said; they only had to write one response. I played through some parts of the game twice in succession, making different choices, and, lo and behold, we were right. The NPCs said the same damn thing no matter what we said.

The only times (other than plot-dictated moral quandaries) where the dialogue system allowed anything approaching a real choice was when you could either Charm or Intimidate an NPC. However, this is where the cut-and-dry criticism comes in. The dialogue system in Mass Effect is utterly predictable, front to back. Unless you're asking about specific topics, you're given three responses (other than "Goodbye"): the "nice" response, the "mean" response, and the "non-committal" response, always on the top-right, bottom-right, and middle-right wheel segments, respectively. If you want to play the good guy, you don't even have to think. You just have to stick your left stick in the top-right position and press the green button. Here, of course, the previous issue comes out: usually, no matter which of the three you choose, the NPC reacts the same way. Sometimes, maybe, the NPC will balk at your meanness before saying the same thing they would have said otherwise. The Charm and Intimidate options were even worse. Sometimes you have to coerce someone into doing something. If your Charm skill is high enough, you'll be able to choose the green, top-left Charm option, and they will do as you ask. If your Intimidate skill is high enough, you can choose the red, bottom-left Intimidate option, and they will be cowed to your will. Always. Your third option, if both skills are too low, is usually to fight it out and get what you came after anyway.

What's worse is that you can see greyed out Charm or Intimidate options even when you can't choose them. This doesn't make any sense; if Shepherd can't say those things, why would you know that they even exist? It also makes those dialogue nodes even more predictable; there are certain nodes where you don't just respond, you can coerce. Except when you can't, and then they basically rub it in your face that your skills aren't high enough. It makes the dialogue feel very artificial.

And then you go to talk to your party members and advance their personal narratives. Sometimes you get the regular three plus goodbye, but as often as not you only have two options, both of which reliably lead to the exact same NPC response! CHOICE, HERE WE COME!

What's especially annoying is their complete laziness: they have five spaces for choices, but regularly give you only three. When I applied for a job at Bioware, I had to make a Neverwinter Nights module with the Aurora Toolset. One of the guidelines to follow was "At least three dialogue choices at every node, preferably more." Good to know they follow their own rules.

Finally, their "dialogue wheel" breaks immersion on a regular basis. Because there is only limited space to spell out the general gist of what Shepherd will say when you make your choice, you're left a major step away from the game. You're just the monkey that presses the button, and Shepherd says what he wants. It is the exact opposite of immersion to have the main character that you designed that is supposed to be your avatar in the game world and do what you would do speak his own lines while you only have a limited amount of choice in the matter. What's worse is that sometimes Shepherd will say something that makes you go "Huh?" because it was so different from the summary in the option you chose. Shepherd says what he wants; you just poke him (or her) a little here and there.

Seriously; haven't these guys ever played Fallout? They're good buddies with Feargus Urquhart and his Black-Isle-turned-Obsidian crew. Can't they do better than their lame, stunted, awkward dialogue wheel system? (A related rant would be how come the former Black Isle guys can't make a good game to save their lives these days, but I digress).

Okay, so I think it's clear that I really, really hated the dialogue system. Another major issue I had was the "morality" system. While they get points for making "Paragon" and "Renegade" not mutually exclusive, they lose points for maintaining this idea in game design that the only choices you can make in a game are ethical ones. There are tons of damn choices I make every day, all of which have repercussions, almost none of which are a good-or-bad ethical dilemma.

They pretend, however, to not make everything so black-and-white. Well, just because they changed the colors to green and red doesn't mean the mechanic is any different. As I said, your dialogue options are always "nice guy," "mean guy," and "noncommittal." Except it's worse than that. It's always "Superman-like Paragon of Justice and All That Is Good," "Humongous, Callous, Sociopathic, Major Asshole," and "noncommittal." Every dialogue choice is like that, almost every ethical choice is like that, and all it does is foster the false dichotomy. In a whole game ostensibly based around morality, all they give you are those two options. Choosing the middle has no benefits whatsoever, because being good gets you Paragon points which in turn get you stat bonuses, and being bad gets you Renegade points which give you different stat bonuses.

I'm seriously sick of developers marketing a game based on the moral choices you can make. Morality is not that central a fucking issue that it should be the only damn thing around which you design your plot and dialogue. Give me some other types of choices, please. When you base your dialogue on morality rather than "Here's a list of things you could say in that situation," you make your game unnecessarily one-track, and you rarely give the player a choice they would actually make. Dialogue becomes more of a means to an end than an immersive game mechanic: instead of controlling the character as you would yourself, you're instead picking certain choices for the rewards you'll get for picking them.

Now we come to the sidequest design. And when I say "design," what I mean is "complete lack thereof." Every sidequest is boilerplate: land on a small chunk of a mostly barren planet, drive around in your slow and hard-to-control tank, pick up pieces for the game's countless "Collect these things just for the sake of collecting them" quests, and then finish up by entering the enemy compound and walking through one of three maps. Seriously. There are only three in the whole game. Every single enemy stronghold in the galaxy is either the warehouse, the warehouse with two floors, or the underground warehouse.

Except for the rare occasions where you board another ship, and every single one of those ships has the exact same design.

"Lazy" doesn't begin to describe it. They gave you this giant galaxy to explore, and most of the planets you can only fly by and read what they're like; the rest are cookie-cutter carbon copies of each other only there to give you something to do that isn't the main quest.

The sidequests are boring, repetitive, and completely unnecessary. Most of them don't even add anything to the game's story or background.

Which I might add, is touch-and-go.

The main-quest story is really quite good, and some of the character interactions you have are, above issues duly aside, still pretty cool. The galactic background, however, is pretty annoying. A lot of the alien races are interestingly novel and you can learn plenty about them just by talking to the individual characters. A good lot of them felt like individuals, too, instead of the ones in, say, Oblivion, who were all walking fountains of poorly-accented trivia.

But if you really want to know the history of the game-world and its cultures, the only way to do it is to access the Codex in the main menu and read, read, read. Some of them are kindly voiced for you, but I'm of the old-school; I read far faster than these assholes talk, and I've been reading game dialogue for twenty years, so I could really give or take voice acting. I usually skip most of it anyway. What matters is that instead of fitting these facts into the game somewhere, they just leave them there, in kudgel form, to bash you over the head in the Codex.

One of the major rules of fiction writing is "show, don't tell." There's a different level of that in video games. The regular level applies; themes, ideas, and actions shouldn't be simply told the player in dialogue. The other level, though, is that any information you can't fit immersively and snugly into the actual gameplay probably shouldn't be there. Show me in the game, even if it's through kludgy expository dialogue; don't just put it in the menu (which is distinctly metagame) and have me read it. I know you, the developer, spent hours and hours coming up with this incredibly intricate backstory and all the nuances of this technology and the various cultures that use it, but if you can't fit it into the game, throwing it at me in the form of text is just a vanity project: "Look what we did! We want you to know that we did this! All our work means nothing unless it can be seen and validated by the players!"

George R.R. Martin, my favorite epic fantasy author (which isn't saying that much because I hate pretty much all other epic fantasy), did that too, probably better than any living writer. But you know what? He doesn't throw irrelevant information at me just because it's a fact he made up. I imagine he knows, in his head, what Asshai-by-the-Shadow is like, but unless and until it becomes important to his story, I won't find out. George doesn't believe you always need to go "everywhere on the map," and neither should game designers.

Finally, I want to say a bit about the inventory system. It was confused by a cluttered and non-intuitive menu interface, and on top of that, it was lame. Each weapon or armor was little more than a box full of numbers, so when you changed equipment all you were really doing was raising or lowering your numbers. The accessories you could equip to armor or weapons added some wrinkles to the system, but the accessory-eqipping interface was among the worst in the game. Wikinite was halfway through before he figured out how to do it. You'd pick up so damn many items, and so damn many of them were flat-out worthless. Your inventory list would be cluttered all to hell and all you could do was look and see how the numbers compared. The numbers game is annoying in any game, but the higher your numbers go, the less important specific weapon choice becomes.

Now, the game did a number of things right. Once I got a hang of the controls (which took a while as the in-game tutorial was shit), it was pretty fun to run-and-gun my way through swathes of enemies. The four worlds you visit over the course of the main quest were all beautifully designed, and those chunks of story were interesting and engaging, even through the dialogue issues I had. The overall story was fun to play through, and when I was given a choice that mattered at the end, it gave me great satisfaction to *SPOILER ALERT* let those assholes on the council die. The voice-acting was really good overall, and the NPCs were all at least somewhat interesting, even if they weren't all useful in combat.

It also had save-anywhere instead of save points, thank fuck.

I played the game funny, I think. I finished the Citadel (which I hated because it was confusing to navigate for the longest time) and then jumped into sidequests for a good ten or so hours before I even embarked upon the main quest at all. Had I started the main quest first and then gone back to the sidequests, I probably would have been more forgiving, as the main quest was lots of fun. My method, however, exposed me to all the game's numerous shortcomings in their full glory before I ever even knew there was any awesome to be had. I almost quit multiple times but kept plugging because I so badly wanted to like Mass Effect.

What it comes down to, though, is a game that was fun even though it had quite a few design flaws (some damn near crippling, like the shitty, shitty menu) and I disagreed with its design philosophy on a number of levels (make the dialogue more "cinematic?" We're playing a game here, assholes, not watching a movie). What really saved it from the dumpster was its great story, its fully-realized galaxy (even though they wanted you to read all about it), and its sometimes-passable, sometimes-just-plain-fun gameplay. If the story, the world, and the characters populating it had been only okay, the game would have fallen into my "Total Crap" category.

As it stands, Mass Effect wins my award for the Most Mediocre Game of 2007. It was overhyped and overreviewed, and for the life of me I can't figure out why so many people loved it so much. But I did have fun with it.

Will I play the sequel? Yeah, if only to see how my choices in the first game effect the second (if at all). But I won't buy it.

We Finally LIBERATE Shaq-Fu

2008-08-03T05:24:00.001-05:00

Cross posted at my other blog, Action Skeptics:

Many moons ago I wrote a post begging people to join me in the battle for LIBERATION. LIBERATION, that is, from the horror of Shaq-Fu. Shortly thereafter I procured a copy from our local used game store. It sat around the house in a plastic bag with $20 worth of fireworks for almost a year until we got around to LIBERATING it, and thus saving the world from one more copy of its monstrosity. Every little bit helps. Again, I implore you to join us in the quest for total LIBERATION. Below the fold is video of the LIBERATION, soundtrack courtesy of Metallica.

Involved were myself, Magus, my girlfriend, and Wikinite, LIBERATION champions all.

We're here to make the world safe for gamers everywhere.

Platforming With a Noob

2007-06-14T04:33:00.000-05:00

My little 11-year-old cousin was staying with my mom this past week, and I found myself staying there as well for a few days. While killing time during the day waiting for all of my friends to get off work so we could hang out, I found myself playing the Super Nintendo that my younger brother had procured a while back. He only had Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, and Super Mario All-Stars, but if you're only going to have three SNES games, those are a good three to have.

Anyway, I was playing DKC and my cousin walked in and asked what I was doing. I told her I was playing the Super Nintendo. She replied "What's a Super Nintendo?"

I about threw her out a window then and there.

Then she said "This is stupid. Why don't you have an X-Box?"

It took all of my willpower to resist the urge to violently kill.

I convinced her to give it a try, and she ended up having quite a bit of fun. The experience of a complete noob playing old-school platformers gave me some insight into gaming.

See, she hadn't been playing DKC for more than a minute when she shouted "What!? I pressed jump!" I laughed my ass off, and she had no idea why.

Shortly there after she gave Mario World a try, and in a particularly thorny water level she suffered a near-miss (near-miss in the Carlin sense: "If you nearly missed it, you hit it!") with a Blooper. Her words: "What!? He didn't touch me!"

I laughed again and said "Welcome to the world of old-school platformers."

It was strange and hilarious hearing the exact same things that I and all my friends shouted at TV screens for years coming out of the mouth of an 11-year-old who had never, until that day, even heard of a Super Nintendo.

I guess getting pissed at Mario for your own shortcomings is just a universal experience, and, dare I say, a gamer rite of passage.

The Tenth Anniversary of Crap

2007-06-07T03:16:00.001-05:00

So there's a new Tomb Raider game out. Or a remake. Or something. And I've been seeing these commercials all over the place for a Gametap retrospective on the franchise. They have, it appears, documentaries and information and such, and, of course, you can play most of the games on their stupid service. I would like to cut to the heart of all this insanity. I would like to say something that needs to be said.

Tomb Raider fucking sucks. There has never been a decent Tomb Raider game.

Back in the heyday of the PSX, I played all of the Tomb Raider games at least for a few minutes until I remembered why I hated the franchise. I never figured out why anyone liked it. I had a feeling that my friends, young teenagers all, only liked the series because of the...endowments of the female protagonist.

Tits are a fine reason to like a porn flick. They are a poor reason to like a video game.

The fact is, the Tomb Raider games, all of them, fail miserably to provide the one part of the gaming experience that is absolutely crucial, the one thing that needs to be more than serviceable, that thing which defines a video game and distinguishes it from other forms of entertainment. The Tomb Raider games have godawful gameplay.

Let's talk about the control scheme first. Lara Croft's moveset is unnecessarily complex. You have half-a-dozen different types of jumps and rolls and shit for different situations, some of which are so similar to others that you fuck them up all the time. She accellerates like one of those suitcase cars, and she turns like an ancient, rusty bicycle. That touches on the major problem with the game's control: everything is so goddamned sluggish. If you want her to jump, you have to plan ahead by at least a second and a half. If you want her to shoot, you have to draw the guns, work the shitty aiming mechanism, and then wait at least a half second between button push and weapon discharge. I'm not sure if they did all these damn things to add "realism" to the game, but the entire control scheme of a Tomb Raider game is garbage. Even if this was inarguable realistic, realism should never get in the way of the gameplay. A player should never be able to say "I could do that easier in real life than in the game." If it takes more effort to press the right buttons in the right sequence at the right time to avoid death by impalement than it would to jump over the spikes in real life, your game has a problem.

Beyond the control scheme there comes the actions taken in the game itself. The Tomb Raider games are often marketed as "action-adventure" games. I take issue with both of those designations. The action is intermittent, lackluster filler marred by an awful control scheme. Fighting things in those games is nigh-impossible. The myriad ridiculous jumps and rolls and the endless hours of slowly inching your way across chasms do not constitute action. The "adventure" side is even worse: arbitrary block-pushing puzzles, lever-pulling puzzles, crank-turning puzzles. These are only "adventure" in the lowest, basest, least creative sense of the word. A block-pushing puzzle is a cludge. It is an easy, wholly nonsensical stopgap to progress inserted by game designers who are too lazy or too unimaginative to come up with something better. Tomb Raider games are not "action-adventure." They are "boring-frustration."

These are the major issues. The control scheme is ridiculously complicated, sluggish, an awful, and the gameplay itself is hollow and pointless. What's worse is that they never fucking changed these problems. I heard that they altered them a bit for one of the more recent installments, but not nearly enough to make the game playable. I suppose that when legions of horny idiot teenagers flock to your every release and game reviewers (who are and almost always have been worthless and untrustworthy) give you 9/10 because they played the entire game with their genitals, you feel justified in putting out the same shit 4 or 5 times. But always remember, folks: a mistake doesn't become a problem until you refuse to fix it.

In other aspects, the games were mediocre at best. The stories were pointless Indiana Jones ripoffs. The main character was paper-thin and empty. The graphics were okay. Hardly the best of the PSX or succeeding consoles. The movies kinda sucked, honestly.

I still do not know why these games have survived so long and still manage to garner an audience. It cannot be simply that Lara Croft has giant breasts. I'm not nearly cynical or stupid enough to ascribe their continued popularity to that. There's got to be something, though, something that causes the masses to love these terrible pieces of shit, something that causes them to get mad at me when I badmouth them. I really have no idea what the draw is, and I don't think I ever will.

There are some games or franchises that I do not like, yet I am still able to understand why others might be drawn to them. Grand Theft Auto is one of them, for example, as are (to a lesser extent) MMORPGs. Tomb Raider is not one of them. It sucks, and people need to stop playing it.

Carnival of Video Game Bloggers #4

2007-05-20T23:38:00.000-05:00

Welcome, everyone, to my little corner of the web and the fourth edition of the Carnival of Video Game Bloggers. Please, make your way beneath the fold there to have a gander at a good sampling of the past month in video game blogging.

First off, we have the founder of this very carnival himself, James Newton, with his piece covering the Top Five Best Bad Games. Among others, he takes a look at one of my own personal favorite bad games, Gauntlet Legends:

Yet, for all its flaws, it’s still stupidly entertaining to hammer buttons with a friend for an hour or two. There’s a steady flow of enemies to batter and enough laughable graphics, FMV and sampled speech to satisfy anyone’s tastes. Good old Midway.

That arcade machine ate way too much of my money in summer 2000.

Next up, Shishia at Real Gaming Reviews looks at a new concept: the totally-online, Flash-based FPS Phosophor Beta 1, and what it says about the future of digital delivery:

As games get prettier, more complex, and consequently larger in file size, the current and future mediums we use to get our gaming fix, (CD, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray), will eventually run out of room, and for you old-timer's out there, do you remember when games used to come on ten or more floppy disc's?!?! It was insane!

Truly, truly it was; I have awful memories of the 8-floppy version of Quest for Glory, though many, many fond memories of the game itself.

Direct your attention now to Optimist Under Siege, who gives us the perspective of a woman newlywed to a man and his games in "God of War and the (not so) Goddess of Video Games". Ladies everywhere: know that when you marry a man, his games are part of that "'Til death do you part" thing:

The problem with video games and I is that we just don’t have a long history together. We only started dating (video games and I) about a year after I met my husband, Eric. Coincidence? Perhaps not! Anyway, while Eric has had a video game love affair for many years now, I’m really just past the awkward stage where silences have become comfortable between video games and I. You know what I mean?

I don't know personally, but I'm sure my girlfriend can relate.

Up next is Andy at Jigsaw hc's Rants and Reviews, who gives us his April Xbox Live Arcade Review and Recap. Live Arcade did better in April than the month previous:

Xbox Live Arcade has come a long way in a month going from a "C" to a sold "A". If they continue to release multiple games each week and keep the number of retro game to a minimum they should have no trouble keeping their grades up.

We'll see you at the head of the class, Live Arcade.

This brings us to Kevin McGinn from The Prometheus Perspective, who speaks out on how The Next Generation of Gaming Brings a New Dimension to the Medium. He takes a critical look at storytelling style in games and how it was quite well managed in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time:

This piece of software impresses the audience with clever play mechanics; however, there is another facet of Prince of Persia which makes it an important title. In addition to the exceptional control scheme there is the expert placement of the narration.

He posits that the old standard of placing story inside non-interactive FMVs is being replaced by a better flow of narrative as the game itself progresses. Let's hope so.

We now come to Rickey Henderson at Riding with Rickey, where we learn about some new Halo 2 maps, and Ricky urges:

If you’re a Halo addict, post your XBL name below in the comments section and Rickey will add you to his friends list.

Enjoy the maps, folks.

Next up is the bamf blog, where BLank Czech waxes superlative about the Pokemon series in "a note on pokepiracy" and shares some of my frustration:

How the hell did a series like this last so long. It’s fucking good. Good games are hard to come by these days. Mostly because everyones trying to be so “innovative” and have the best graphics for their game. Wanna hear a shocker? Your game has such good graphics, that, oh boy, I can’t even play half the motherfuckers.

DISCLAIMER: While I agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, I don't actually play Pokemon myself. Not since Red and Blue way back when, anyway.

Want to get your Flash on? I know I do, and tower defense games are a great way to kill anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. Michael Hwang at Remikz agrees, and gives us his Top 10 Tower Defense Games, saying:

Since I've quit playing more serious games for the most part, I've discovered tower defense games to be a good, casual alternative.

Thanks for the recommendations, Michael, and I hope that you can find your way back into the fold of serious gaming someday...

Coming in next is Sharde26 at The Slag Report, who is understandably Super Smash Bored by the "big announcement" that Fox McCloud is the latest super secret character in Super Smash Brothers Brawl for the Wii:

The new super secret character from the upcoming Smash Bros. game is the unexpected Fox McCloud! Stand up if you are surprised. It looks like one out of a hundred are easily excited. Don't get me wrong, I look forward to the upcoming game, but saying that Fox will be a character in Super Smash is like revealing that Mario is included.

I'm rooting for MegaMan and/or Zero, myself.

Finally, coming in last but definitely not least, is the eponymous Dr. Deb from dr. deb, who sheds some light on the newest evolution in novel game genres on, of course, the Nintendo DS:

DS Therapy will ask users a series of quizzes which are measured against up-to-date psychology findings. Topics covered include love, money and relationships, just to name a few. Also included in the game is a dream diary, a mode containing psychology-based games, and even a psychology glossary.

It would be interesting to see how this affects all the hypochondriacs out there...

Well, that about wraps it up for this fourth edition of the Carnival of Video Game Bloggers. Thanks to everyone who submitted. I'd like to apologize to Fun Game Videos, as the submitted video had been removed from YouTube at the time of posting. Hopefully the link above will make up for it.

We'll see you all in a little less than a month when Number Five is hosted at Jigsaw hc's Rants and Reviews. Until then, rock on, folks.

Fallout 3

2007-05-04T23:45:00.000-05:00

It's been common knowledge in the PC world for quite some time now that Bethesa Softworks, creators of the venerable Elder Scrolls series, has obtained the rights to the at-least-as-venerable Fallout franchise. A few years back, after Black Isle disbanded, they licensed the rights from Interplay, and more recently they just bought them outright. Black Isle, of course, went on to become Obsidian Software and become famous for making shitty sequels to great games.

I was ecstatic when I heard the news. After all, I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a huge fan of Morrowind and Oblivion. I love the hugeness, the freedom, the skill-based gameplay that responds to how you play in a natural, organic way (for the most part). I also love Fallout to death, so combining my favorite style of gameplay with my favorite franchise really gets me excited.

Now that Bethesda has launched an official place-holder website for the game and promises an official teaser on June 5, it seems that some of my wildest dreams of more Fallout are finally coming true.

But with proximity has come the harsh hand of reality to smack me upside the head; when the game was living as a fantasy in my head, it was perfect. I would install the game, start it up, and move, physically, from this world into that one and never return. Now that it's actually happening, though, I am forced to look at what might actually happen. I need to gather my thoughts and temper my fantasies. To that end, I've decided to sit down and look at the harsh realities of Fallout 3 by Bethesda Softworks, what might go right, and what might go horribly, horribly wrong.

What could go right:

It's more Fallout
It's bound to be huge and detailed
The gameplay of the Elder Scrolls games is really awesome
Bethesda tends to make quality games
The graphics are guaranteed to be fantastic
The music is guaranteed to be fantastic
It will no doubt offer hours of play
With a use-based skill growth system, the game will not be nearly as terribly, disgustingly punishing as Fallout and Fallout II

There isn't much to say here. It's pretty cut and dry, really. What could go right is everything that is good about Fallout and The Elder Scrolls.

What could go wrong:

The placeholder site has a pretty dark tone; Pipboy is absent and it just feels very serious. If Bethesda doesn't recognize that Fallout is at heart a black comedy, the game will be missing a whole lot of a key element: humor
Bethesda might contract with the same five voice actors who made talking to NPCs in Oblivion so very boring
Without the action points and isometric view, it might not feel quite like Fallout
In this post-Hot-Coffee world (I say that with the utmost of irony), the wonderful raunchiness that was Fallout (whoring out your wife, starring in a porn movie, etc.) might not be possible or, at the very least, Bethesda might not even risk trying to include these things
The guys at Bethesda, being new to the franchise, might not quite have a hand on the proper overall feel
In that same vein, it might feel too much like a repalletted Oblivion. While I loved Oblivion, I don't want to play it when I put in Fallout
The dialogue might be oversimplified in the Oblivion vein, with one-word options; this would not fit at all well into a Fallout game

The potential problem is that it might not feel like Fallout for a variety of reasons: Too serious, less adult, too Oblivion. The Elder Scrolls games are full of humor, and Oblivion originally had nude models under the clothing, so they're probably okay there. I guess I'm most worried that this will be little more than post-apocalyptic Oblivion, which would be a damn shame.

Overall, though, I think I trust Bethesda to do a good job with this one.

Any thoughts?

The Ubiquity of Multiplayer

2007-04-27T23:53:00.000-05:00

I have a problem with multiplayer.

I want to start this off by saying that I don't hate multiplayer games. I have enjoyed many a multiplayer game, though I am much more a devotee of the single-player experience. I've Goldeneyed and Counter-Striked (Counter-Struck?), Battlefield 1942ed, and even dabbled in Haloing (though it was a pretty unpleasant experience). I've played MP games of a few RTSs, and a bit of Diablo and Diablo II and I even wasted three months of my life playing World of Warcraft. Finally, it goes without saying that the only way to play Secret of Mana is with a multitap and two buddies.

I am not against multiplayer in principle. Hell, I'm not even against multiplayer in practice. What I'm dead fucking sick of, though, is a trend I'm seeing more and more: making everything multiplayer.

As a single-player kind of guy, my favorite type of "multiplayer experience" is me and a friend or two trading off playing through a single-player game. So many happy hours of my life have been spent in the passenger's seat of a Japanese RPG. When I first bought Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, my roommate's computer couldn't yet run his copy, so he watched me play for hours, and all was well. I consider myself to have "beaten" a game even if I was only playing part of the time. To me, this is the essence of multiplayer: enjoying a game with multiple people. It does not require head-to-head deathmatches or co-op play, though those are certainly ways to get at that essence.

There was a time, not that long ago, when there were single-player games and there were multiplayer games, and there were games that offered both, like RTSs and FPSs. There were lots of single-player games in which people like me could revel, and lots of multiplayer games for us if we chose to dabble.

Those days are long gone. These days I cannot swing a stick without seeing a game that is geared almost totally toward multiplayer, and single-player games are thin on the ground. Franchises that were once dedicated single-player games, and for good reason, have given into the pointless ubiquity of multiplayer. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes did a lot of things wrong, but high on that list is including a pointless multiplayer setting where up to four Samuses (Sami?) can shoot at each other.

This choice made no sense to me. The awesomeness of the Metroid franchise has a lot to do with its lack of explicit story and the solitude that permeates Samus' explorations of the various planets on which she finds herself. It worked well in two dimensions and Retro Studios, with their first outing, made it work incredibly well in three dimensions as well. They made it into a first-person game, but it was hardly a "First Person Shooter," going by the standards of that genre. It wasn't very twitch-based (it in fact had a limited automatic lock-on feature), ammunition was not an issue, and it wasn't terribly linear. Exploration and puzzle-solving were the major features of the gameplay; in short, it wasn't a First Person Shooter. It was a First Person Metroid. Somehow Retro forgot that when making Echoes. Multiplayer is for FPSs, not FPMs. Then Prime: Hunters came out for the DS, dedicated almost exclusively to multiplayer. What does this add to the franchise? Nothing. It takes a game loved for its single-player experience and makes it into something totally different and worse, something that no longer has the magic of its single-player past due to the almost inherent shallowness of multiplayer gaming.

The current wave of multiplayer ubiquity is awash with MMORPGs. Now, I have problems with MMORPGs in general, but this post is not about that. What matters here is that seemingly every marketable franchise or story setting in the world is having an MMORPG made around it. Conan the Barbarian, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Final Fantasy, fucking Serenity. Star Wars: Galaxies was a shitty Everquest clone. LotR Online is a shitty World of Warcraft clone. It is almost guaranteed that the flood of upcoming MMORPGs will be clones of one or the other of those games, most likely WoW these days thanks to its runaway success. The point here deals with market saturation and uniformity: none of these games is original, and they are only multiplayer to be multiplayer (and to make money). I understand that the game industry is profit-driven, I really do, but is there anyone left that has a unique vision they want to bring to life (other than American McGee and Hideo Kojima; one's retarded and the other's insane)? Is there anyone out there who wants to make a sumptuous game that can be enjoyed in solitude?

What I'm complaining about here is not so much that there are more multiplayer games but that there are less single-player games, and many that are marketed as potentially single-player lose quite a bit if you don't utilize the multiplayer component. Dragon Quest IX is going to be on the DS, and it is going to be an action-rpg with wifi-multiplayer. Reading the previews, it sounded to me like playing the game single-player wasn't really an option. Hell, it's a party-based action-RPG; its almost always torture to play those by yourself. I enjoyed over 90 hours of Dragon Quest VIII in the company of my best friend; it was a single-player game, but we nevertheless has a multiplayer experience. Dragon Quest IX does not need to have multiplayer just to have it, and especially not wifi MP that can leave you playing with anonymous people from across the room.

For God's sake, handhelds are no fucking place to be putting primarily multiplayer games. The whole point of them is that they're portable and they go with you and you're the only one that plays them.

The only game company out there that seems to be dedicated to creating a great single-player experience is Bethesda Softworks, whose Elder Scrolls series has always been dedicated to that noble goal (they quite explicitly state this), and it really does succeed; Morrowind and Oblivion, both games released in the midst of this muliplayer flood, were showered with award after award. And it's not like they're critically acclaimed art-house games with a limited audience. They both sold like wildfire. These games are highly profitable. IGN succeeded in royally pissing me off a couple of weeks ago when one of their dipshit writers speculated on an Elder Scrolls V, saying that an MMORPG would be a "natural evolution of the franchise." This man should lose his job. He is on the level of the douchebag Gamestop employee who thought World of Warcraft was only a card game. He obviously knows nothing about the franchise about which he is writing and cares only about the newest, hottest trends.

Writing this now, part of me is beginning to think that the death of the classic point-and-click adventure game came in part because its almost impossible to translate those games into multiplayer. What a terrible loss for such a pointless reason.

Just because a game doesn't allow many people to play against each other at the same time doesn't mean one cannot get a meaningful multiplayer experience out of it. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that my time spent playing decidedly single-player games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII in concert with close friends were far better multiplayer experiences than logging into a random server to play Counter-Strike or joining a WoW guild full of people you only ever speak to over Teamspeak, and then only about in-game goals.

My style of gaming is being marginalized. Some might say "Get over it; things change. Deal with it." And to these people I say "Fuck off." I like single-player games, and I don't like to see the market completely shift away from my desire simply because multiplayer is profitable. Single-player is profitable too. People play it. Adding empty, meaningless multiplayer to everything under the sun accomplishes nothing.

Please, game industry, stop marginalizing us. There are a lot of us out here. I've talked to them. Not every game has to involve online play or squad-based co-op. Games can be single-player, too, just like so very many of the classics from the last two decades. Stop cramming the square peg of multiplayer into as many round holes as you can find. Lots of us will thank you for it.

EB/Gamestop Can Suck My Balls

2007-04-07T23:42:00.000-05:00

I've posted before, on my other blog, about how much I hate EB and Gamestop. In short, for anyone who doesn't want to read that singular piece of ranting, they have shitty sales policies, they hire morons who don't know shit about gaming, and they treat their customers like ass. I stopped buying my games from those stores a long time ago and I find I don't miss it in the least.

One of the things I hate the most about EB/Gamestop is their "Game Guarantee," whereby they attempt to extort extra money from you for "insurance" that you'll never use. Everytime they would try to pitch that shit to me, they did so in a condescending manner that implied "You take bad care of your games. You don't respect your own property or treat it well. You need this Guarantee." It was utterly insulting. I am a gamer. I love video games. As such, I treat my games almost as children. I'm very careful with them because they are expensive things and I don't want to buy a new one. I have a working fucking NES from 20 fucking years ago. That thing is in such good shape that I don't even have to blow into half of my games. I don't need your bullshit game insurance. The fervor with which they push the thing turns it from mildly annoying to flat-out offensive. They refuse to let it drop. I have had to say "no" as many as three times before they got the picture that I didn't want their damn insurance.

Insurance is a gamble in which the house (the provider) is almost guaranteed to win. Insurance companies make profits because most people don't get into car accidents or get hit by tornadoes. Some people are more likely than others, however, to suffer misfortune and thus require a payout from the provider. This is why people in hurricane zones have higher insurance premiums. This is why people with a history of accidents or drunk driving pay more for car insurance. This is why people with health problems pay more for health insurance. There are good insurance risks and there are bad insurance risks, and if you're a bad risk, you're expected to pay more to make up for the increased risk that the house is going to lose their gamble. See, they don't want to lose.

The EB/Gamestop Game Guarantee is one flat rate, no matter who you are, for any game on any system. You would think that they'd insure more expensive games at a higher rate. After all, a 360 game costs a lot more than a GBA game. You'd think that they'd insure used games cheaper than new games. You'd think that, if they were actually worried about paying out on their Guarantee, that they'd use some sort of sliding scale somewhere, but they don't. Flat rate for any person for any game. We can surmise something from this fact: they are not at all worried about paying out on their little insurance policy.

Real insurance companies expect to pay out a good deal of the time and as such they try to make up for it by assessing risk before they cover someone. That helps ensure that they will win the gamble no matter what. EB/Gamestop doesn't bother to do anything like that, and so it stands to reason that they feel guaranteed to profit from their Game Guarantee no matter the circumstances. They know that almost nobody will bother to seek reimbursement for a busted game because almost nobody ever fucks up their games beyond repair in the first place.

In this light, the Game Guarantee is even more insulting. EB and Gamestop badger and insult you to get you to give them free money. They know they're not going to have to pay out on their cute little policy, but they harangue you and imply that you are a clumsy dipshit who doesn't take good care of his stuff. They intentionally offend you in their quest for free fucking money. They do with with a straight face and a sense of entitlement. These people have no shame. These people really are giant dicks.

But everything I just described? That's the old way of selling the Guarantee.

Hot off the presses, just into the newsroom is the news, from an old friend of mine at Ball State University, of EB/Gamestop's new method of attempting to steal your money. He overheard a manager training an employee in the new method. It went something like this:

The manager rang up a customer. "That'll be $30," he says. "But my game only costs $14.99," replies the customer. "Oh, yes," says the manager, "but you want the Game Guarantee and the strategy guide and all this other stupid shit, too right? Right?" The customer looks at him like he is an idiot (because he is) and says "No. I just want the game." Only then does the manager remove the extra shit from the purchase.

This is beyond insulting, beyond offensive. This is absolutely, ridiculously dickish. The default purchase, apparently, includes these things until the customer expressly asks for them to be removed. Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but when I go to buy something, I only want the thing I put on the goddamned counter. It is not the job of the fucking register monkey to add more shit that he thinks I need. I am pissed off beyond reason over this new sales practice.

They go from trying to extort free money from you to just taking the free money unless you specifically tell them not to. How is this shit legal?

The arrogance they showed with the original Game Guarantee pales in comparison to this new level of hubris. Do they not see how it is a terrible business practice to add extraneous shit to someone's bill without telling them? This is going to result in many, many lost customers, returned games, and possibly lawsuits.

On second thought, this new sales policy is a fantastic idea. Perhaps once they insult, offend, and swindle away enough of their business, perhaps after they suffer a class action or two from customers who weren't paying attention and ended up paying for $15 worth of shit that they didn't want without knowing it, those assholes at EB and Gamestop will begin to rethink the heinous circus of douchebaggery that is their sales policy.

Maybe they'll even go out of business and a new game franchise will pop up to fill the void. A game franchise where they don't treat you like shit and actually know about gaming.

I can dream, can't I?

Jack Thompson, At It Again

2007-03-24T01:06:00.000-05:00

We thought he was gone. We thought that Gabe's and Tycho's signatures on Penny Arcade's $10,000 check to charity in Jack's name had neatly written Jack Thompson out of this drama we call Life. Having been humiliated by his own refusal to cough up the dough when his "modest proposal" was met multiple times by multiple people, we thought he had retreated into his hole, never to return and again bother the gaming world with his personal brand of lunacy.

We were wrong.

In short: Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Rockstar Games and publisher of the GTA series, started litigation against Thompson prior to the release of the upcoming GTA4 in order to forestall any attempt by him to fuck with their launch. Good foresight on their part, if you ask me.

Thompson counter-sued, claiming that the Take-Two is engaged in racketeering and that their pre-emptive suit

is an attempt by Take-Two to violate his First Amendment right "to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Seriously. That's what this crazy sonofabitch is saying.

Let's have a brief lesson in Constitutional Law for Mr. Thompson, the fucking lawyer. See, we have this Constitution, and it lays out the powers of the government. Then we have this Bill of Rights, comprised of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, that, by and large, exists to limit the powers of government in order to protect basic freedoms and civil rights. Read that carefully: the First Amendment stops the government from abridging the freedom of speech. It says nothing about private entities.

Let's give an example. Say Jack Thompson walks into my house and calls my girlfriend a dirty cunt. I ask him not to say that, on the grounds that only I am allowed to call my girlfriend a dirty cunt (it's true). He refuses and once again insults her. I tell him that he can either watch his mouth or he can leave. Again he repeats the insult. I kick his ass out of my house. Have I violated his freedom of speech? Not for a goddamned second. It is my house, and I am the arbiter of what goes on there. If I don't appreciate or approve of something somebody is saying or doing, I am fully within my rights to kick him out, as it is my property. I am not the government, and there is no law against me telling Jack to shut the fuck up and kicking him out if he does not.

Likewise, jobs often have speech codes. A cashier at Wal-Mart will get disciplined for saying "fuck" in front of a customer, and that is perfectly legal. Like myself, Wal-Mart is not the government, and they can set speech codes to govern how their employees interact with customers.

Take-Two Interactive, in trying to stop Jack from fucking with the GTA4 release, is not abridging his First Amendment rights because there is no prohibition against Take Two from telling Jack to shut the fuck up. And, on a more practical level, Jack is attempting to stop them from engaging in their business, a completely legal enterprise, and is thus himself in the wrong, and they are fully justified in trying to get him to stop. And, hypocrisy of hypocrisy, check this one out:

As for the publisher's contention that a nuisance suit from Thompson would violate its own First Amendment rights, Thompson said it couldn't.

"All Take-Two would have to do is submit each game to a court of law to see if it contains material harmful to minors or if it does in fact constitute a nuisance of any kind under Florida law. The games are finished. There is plenty of time to submit the games, and doing so will not in fact impede their release--unless they are in fact harmful to children."

So, Jack Thompson, who claims that private entities are violating his freedom of speech and petition because they are attempting to forestall his attempts to jam up their business, thinks that it is perfectly constitutional to force said private entities to submit to government fucking censorship. This guy is too dumb, too crazy, too evil for words.

Here's a long quote that shows his insanity and his ability to completely ignore real, honest facts in his pursuit of his noble goals:

Thompson's defense also appears to contain a number of factual errors and misrepresentations. He claims the Entertainment Software Rating Board found that Take-Two Interactive failed to disclose objectionable content in its role-playing game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The ESRB said it found developer Bethesda Softworks was at fault in that matter, not Take-Two.

Thompson also said that Bully was found to have "homosexual sex" hidden in the game, about which Take-Two "forgot" to tell the ESRB and the judge in last year's suit over the game's release. The homosexual activity in that game was limited to kissing, and the ESRB said shortly after that game came out that such scenes were considered in issuing it a rating of T for Teen.

When asked by GameSpot about these incongruities and others, Thompson replied "I'm sorry you can't figure these things out."

So he's spreading falsehoods about Oblivion and Bully and the ESRB and when the manifest falseness of his allegations are pointed out to him, he accuses the pointers of "not getting it."

What don't I get, Jack? What don't I get? Do I not get the fact that you're lying about how the ESRB handled a pair of games that you found objectionable? Do I not get the fact that the ESRB did, in fact factor in the kissing scenes in Bully when they assigned it a T rating, despite your claim that Take Two "forgot" to tell them about it? Do I not get the fact that you are a completely insane and ignorant asshole who does not deserve to exist upon this mortal coil, much less practice law in it?

This crazy ass even said that Take Two is disrespecting the victims of 9/11 by running their business out of NYC! He said that! He tied the September 11 attacks into a lawsuit about violent video games!

But it's all about the kids, yup yup, the kids. Not about Jack's axe to grind against anyone who has ever pointed out his insanity for what it is. That's why he named Gamespot and those Godfathers of the Video Game Mafia, Gabe and Tycho of Penny Arcade, in his lawsuit. He says they're part of the "racketeering," the evil conspiracy of darkness that has been harassing him lo these last few years. Suddenly it becomes painfully obvious: this is the Jack Thompson "I'ma gonna sue any varmint what dares disagree with my holy, righteous quest!" suit. As Tycho said today:

We detest and confound you because you're an asshole. There is no greater conspiracy - or, if there is, we are not party to it. I love the idea that we act as media hitmen for hire, I love the drama and the romance of it. But it's not mystical or sinister: it's what you might call "media physics." You put out something we disagree with, and then (as by some natural inclination of the universe) we respond to it. It's still legal to disagree with you, right? I sometimes forget which country I live in.

Jack, nobody is out to get you. They have only used your own insanity against you in a fight for their own principles and way of life. You lose your cases repeatedly because you don't understand the US Constitution, you don't understand the law, and you don't understand business. Oh, and also because you're a batshit insane sack of sasquatch droppings. You dare to call yourself an advocate for civil liberties while spending great time and effort to stem the free expression of ideas that you and a small minority of people find objectionable. You pretend to be the opressed, freedom-fighting underdog while repeatedly attempting to enforce your sick, authoritarian will on other people. You make committments and break them, refusing even to donate to charity in your arrogance and obstinacy. You lie repeatedly. You file childish police reports to stop people from making fun of you. You make blanket defamatory statements about all gamers, saying that we are all drug-using sociopaths.

It appears, however, that there may be good news just over the horizon. Last year, Jack tried to sue the Florida Bar Association, claiming inanely that they are trying to discriminate against him because he is religious (get off the First Amendment, Jack. You're twisting it around so much I can hear it screaming from here). After months of no progress, mostly because he's a worthless douche with empty arguments and substanceless complaints, he withdrew his claim. But last month...Well, I'll let you read it. From Wiki:

In February 2007, the Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them.

This includes allegations that a lawyer, Tew Cardenas, who was attempting to brings ethics charges against Jack, was distributing pornography to minors.

Come on Jack, is there no depth to which you won't sink?

Oh, I forgot. You're a bottomfeeder.

This man isn't even a joke. Jokes make me laugh. His insanity, his twisting of the Constitution for his own dictatorial ends, his lies, and his hypocrisy infuriate me to no end. I hope with all my hope-power that he does indeed get disbarred, as he is clearly, clearly unfit to practice law. He needs a psychological evaluation, and then a swift kick in the groin.

This is America, Jack. You can bitch and posture and pound your monkey chest all day and all night, but we'll keep doing whatever the hell we want. We will live our lives free from your domineering arrogance. Developers will keep developing, players will keep playing, and all your wasted efforts will serve as little more than proof to the world, time and time again, that you are a small, insignificant man, with nothing better to do than to lie, cheat, and steal in an effort to police other people's lives. You, Jack, are the worst kind of person: a busybody. And worse than that, you're a busybody with a Juris Doctorate. I'd ask from a refund from your law school, if I were you. But because I'm me instead of you (thank the FSM), I find myself wishing more that your college would revoke your degree. You obviously know nothing at all about law and you are an unethical pile of shit.

Jack Thompson, fuck you in the neck. Asshole.

Carnival of Video Game Bloggers #2

2007-03-21T06:10:00.000-05:00

Well, it's that time of the month again. No, not that time. I mean it's time for the Carnival of Video Game Bloggers. This second edition is being hosted at its home blog once again, The Collected Writings of James Newton. Check it out for all the best video game blogging of the last month.

Game of the Week #6: Final Fantasy III/VI

2007-03-18T00:23:00.000-05:00

Final Fantasy III/VI
Genre: Japanese RPG
Platform: SNES, PlayStation (Final Fantasy Chronicles), and GBA (FFVI Advance)
Developer: Squaresoft
Year Released: 1994, 1999, and 2007 respectively

It occurs to me that it might be tacky to do FFVI right after I did FFV. I don't care. As you can see in my "What I'm Playing" widget over there on the right, I'm actually playing both of them concurrently, albeit on different consoles. FFV I'm playing on the GBA slot in my DS, while FFVI is getting the classic SNES treatment, though the cartridge (like the box above) says "Final Fantasy III."

And you know what? That's okay. The game could be called "Monkey Shit in a Box XCMLV" and it would still be awesome.

For a long time I couldn't decide which group was more pretentious. On the one hand, you had the group who insisted on referring to Final Fantasy games by their Japanese numbering even though (and often in spite of the fact that) most people were unfamiliar with the "proper" sequencing. Of course, the other side insisted just as strongly (if not moreso) that the American numbers were superior and the Japanese numbers crowd was a bunch of noobs who got their start on the series with FFVII and so didn't respect the 16-bit classics. I was stuck in the middle, as I didn't give a shit either way, and the dork war that waged quietly in chatrooms and college dorms across the nation was really kind of funny.

These days, though, thanks to Square-Enix continually inundating the market with Japanese-numbered remakes and rereleases, the trend has normalized to the Eastern side. Even though my cart says "Final Fantasy III," I still (usually) refer to it as "Final Fantasy VI," because now when I say "Final Fantasy III," it has an American referent on the DS and causes confusion.

Anyway, let's talk about the actual game. FFVI is one of the classics, a seminal Japanese RPG with a great story, deep characterization, and gameplay that is generally more varied than lesser RPGs. The Active Time Battle system is, honestly, pretty well crap, but the fact that each character has a specific ability (some more useful than others coughGauandRelmcough) makes it a lot more interesting. FFVI represented a middle ground between its strictly-classed forebears and the sequels VII and VIII, where every character was able to use every skill more or less usefully. It was a nice blend, though once you acquire the ability to learn spells through Magicite, some of those unique skills become moot.

What really places this game head and shoulders above so many other RPGs ever is its story and the characters that are involved in it. In short: The Empire, led by the evil Emperor Gestahl, is using its powerful technology and its knowledge of lost magics to take over the world. The game begins as Terra Branford, a brainwashed Imperial soldier, is found by Locke "Call me a treasure hunter or I'll rip your lungs out" Cole after a failed raid on an esper, a powerful and ancient creature of magic. Locke is a member of the Returners, a rebel group engaged in war with the Magitek Empire, and he enlists the amnesiac Terra.

The first part of the game plays out as a story of rebellion against the Empire. Slowly, however, bit-by-bit, it becomes evident that the true evil is Kefka, the clown-like and insane Imperial general. It's one of the finest and most well-integrated plot twists in RPGdom, in my opinion, far more interesting and realistic (and perhaps most importantly, foreshadowed) than FFIV's nonsensical "Cecil and Golbez are brothers and the real bad guy is someone else entirely!" and FFVIII's ridiculous "We were all in the same orphanage but we lost our memories! What a coincidence!" IV's "twist" was random (as in completely out of the bleachers behind left field random) and just plain dumb, while VIII's was a forced consequence of an overly contrived and poorly explained result of using Guardian Forces (the only answer to the question "Why do GFs cause amnesia?" is "Because Square needed the characters to have amnesia"). In contrast, the move from the Empire to Kefka as the major antagonist of FFVI was organic, gradual, and precipitated by a character's lust for power and his decisions surrounding that lust.

Not only that, Kefka is a really awesome villian. He's completely and utterly insane, with a wickedly black sense of humor. Looking at him in all his effeminate, clownish glory, you'd never expect him to be any threat at all. Instead he amasses great power and uses it to wipe out life at a whim. He isn't just a run-of-the-mill "I'm evil for evil's sake" villain in a dark cloak with a black sword. He's far more interesting than that.

One of the other things going for FFVI was briefly alluded to above when I mentioned each character's special ability: FFVI has a plethora of characters, and most of them are well-developed and likeable. Almost every character has a deep backstory and personal conflicts and axes to grind. No character lacks motivation (except the three "secret" characters, Mog, Umaro, and Gogo) or is used merely as an empty, throw-away plot element or foil. It's tempting to call Terra the main character, but this is misleading as the plot only begins with her. She is deeply involved all the way through, but so are Locke, Edgar, Sabin, Celes, Cyan, Shadow, etc.

The game doesn't pull punches, either, for a mid-90s SNES game. Many of the characters have rather tragic pasts as shown in flashbacks. Others, like Cyan, suffer their tragedy in real-time, so to speak; his entire family is murdered by Kefka. His wife and son die in his arms the first time you meet him. Hell, halfway through the game the whole damn world gets destroyed.

So, what of the peripheral stuff? The graphics are better than FFIV and V, but still use dumpy little sprites for characters. I actually tend to like dumpy little sprites, but there's no denying that's what they are. The enemies are much more detailed. The spell effects are pretty nice, but who really notices shit like that unless is totally and completely sucks? The music, though, really stands out. It's some of the finest video game music around, from the dulcet tones of the opera to the super-long final battle theme Dancing Mad. I own the original, the orchestrated, and the piano versions of the soundtrack (yes, I'm a huge geek), and they are all totally, utterly, and completely awesome.

All that I've said holds true for the original SNES version and the PSX rerelease; the only major differences in the Anthology version were the addition of a bestiary and some monstrous load times. I have not played the GBA version, though I am disinclined to do so. I own the original and the rerelease, and what I've heard about FFVI Advance is not conducive to yet another purchase; apparently, the music blows on GBA or DS speakers, and the new, "improved" translation loses a lot of the punch of the original; they toned it down and made it more kid-friendly to get an "E" rating from the ESRB. Apparently the target demographic for a remake of Final Fantasy VI is not twenty-something geeks whose Super Nintendos no longer work. Apparently it is prepubescents and "tweens." Locke's classic lung-ripping line has been cut, and that alone is a jail-worthy offense. Overall, it seems that FFVIA is an inferior version of the game.

On a final note, though, the assholes at Gamespot actually gave FFVIA an 8.9 rating, saying that every aspect of the game still holds up wonderfully today, except the Active Time Battle system might annoy those who haven't played the game in the past. What this tells me is that all the "innovation" and change that Japanese RPGs have been going through in the last decade or so, from "new and improved" battle systems (FFVIII, maybe?) to convoluted stories that are heavier on shitty allegory than coherence (I'm looking at you, here, FFX), are completely unnecessary. When the "If it isn't different, it isn't good" assholes at Gamespot recognize that, you know it's got to be true. I really, really wish that Square would return to the simplicity that made so many of its older games so great. Until then, I'll be playing my cartridge labeled "Final Fantasy III" until either it falls apart or I do.

Apology of the Week

2007-03-11T02:25:00.000-05:00

I find myself overcome by some work here in meatspace, and as such will not be posting a GotW this week. I'll have something decent up eventually, but right now I'm pretty busy. Sorry.

Game of the Week #5: Final Fantasy V

2007-03-05T01:37:00.000-05:00

Final Fantasy V
Genre: Japanese RPG
Platform: SNES (Japan only), Playstation (in the FF Anthology collection), and GBA (FFV Advance)
Developer: Squaresoft (now Square-Enix)
Year Released: 1992, 1999, and 2006 respectively

I realized too late that I didn't do a GotW yesterday. I'm sure that you, my half-dozen readers will forgive me the oversight, as I was too busy playing today's GotW. I haven't been able to put it down since I bought the GBA version last week. It's the job system. It's incredibly addicting and it keeps you playing long after you should have quite to start a blog entry about it. Only Final Fantasy Tactics has made better use of a job system than Final Fantasy V.

I remember back in 1997 when I downloaded the translated ROM of FFV and started in. It was loads of fun, but I never ended up beating it; I suffer from a rare condition known as "ROM RPG syndrome," you see, but that's a topic for another post. Sparing you the details, I am basically incapable of finishing an RPG if I play it on an emulator.

In about 2000 I picked up the Final Fantasy Anthology version for my Playstation. It was interminable. The translation was worse than the fan-translation of the ROM, but that I could deal with. The major problem was load times. As with all the SNES re-releases on the PS, it took about two whole seconds to go from the game to the menu and vice-versa. It was disgusting, and maybe three hours into the game I just couldn't deal with it anymore and I quit playing. You'd think that loading times would be manageable on a low-resolution, 16-bit game on the Playstation, but you'd be wrong.

Jump forward to last week, when I finally broke down and bought the GBA version. The translation is better than the PS translation, the loading times are normalized, the story is a bit more robust, and overall it's the best version of the game that I've played yet. And I've played all of them.

The story is pretty standard, but the characters are interesting enough and the dialogue good enough that I can overlook it, which was not the case in either of the other translations (though it bears saying that the fan translation was better than the initial official version). The characters each have history and motivation, and while not as fleshed-out as those in FFVI, they are, in my opinion, far more interesting than those in FFIV. The graphics are essentially the same as FFIV: short, stubby sprites in battle and shorter, stubbier sprites on the map. I guess it took them one more game to realize that they didn't have to default to the little teeny guys on the map. The music isn't Nobuo Uematsu's finest, but it certainly isn't his worst, and the game has its share of tunes that you'll be humming after you turn off the GBA (or DS, in my case). Yes, a lot of the game is just happy, middle-of-the-road, take-no-risks fare, but the gameplay is what's important, and that's where the game really shines.

I love job systems. I didn't used to. I'm not sure why. But these days I love them. I love the idea of being able to decide what my player can do, and I love having a million options. So many Japanese RPGs put you through battle after battle, and you do little more than select Attack and Cure in about an 8/1 ratio. You could play FFV like this, it's true, but why would you? You can create a Beastmaster (Trainer in older versions) who can capture or control enemies, use him to teach your Blue mage new tricks, and then have your thief jack whatever loot the monster is carrying around. You can have a ninja dealing out massive damage from the back row while a monk holds down the fort from the front. You can have a Bard who can sing enemies to sleep before summoning Ifrit and burning them all to a cinder, or a Geomancer who uses the powers of the planet to cause massive, MP-free elemental damage. In addition to the many, many battle-specific abilities, there are a metric fuckload of out-of-battle powers that jazz the game up in a way other Final Fantasies just can't match, like the thief's ability to sprint superfast and see hidden passages, or the Geomancer's ability to detect and avoid hidden holes.

One of the best parts is not spoiling yourself. I purposely will not look up the ability lists for the classes because I want to be surprised when a character gains a new class level. It keeps you going just wondering what you'll get next.

The job system also feeds a need that I, and I imagine others, have: the need for perfection. It's like gathering all the heart pieces in a Zelda game. You don't have to, but you have to. It's not particularly useful for every character to master every class, but damned if I don't feel a need to make it happen.

The GBA version has a couple of things above other versions. First of all, its the best translation yet. Second, it has extensive post-game material, including a handful of new classes, some new items, and a new dungeon, all of which you can only get by beating the game once. All of the FF titles on the GBA have had post-game stuff, and it's an addition I'm glad they made. It's better than just buying the exact same game over again.

Finally, I want to point something out. The main character's name in both official Square translations is "Bartz." Anyone who has played the ROM knows this is not the case. The official Romanization in Japan is "Butz." Butz. They made a character whose name is "More than one ass." I can see why they changed it for official US releases, but seriously, Japan, what the fuck?

Our World is in Peril

2007-03-02T03:03:00.000-05:00

Today I'm going to ask for your help. I'm going to ask you to help not just me, but all gamers everywhere, and, indeed, the entire world. I need you to put aside your biases, stop grinding you axes, and open your eyes to a problem that has been plaguing mankind for almost a decade and a half. If you help me today, you will do a service to every last human being on the face of the Earth, and be a part of the solution rather than the problem. What's the problem, you might ask?

In 1994, Electronic Arts published the game "Shaq-Fu."

This game has been a plague on humanity ever since. Its mix of poor hit detection, shameless marketing, and sheer ridiculosity have boggled minds and ruined lives. To my great excitement, however, I found that there are people out there fighting back against the monstrosity.

The fine people at Shaqfu.com have dedicated their lives to LIBERATING each and every copy of Shaq-Fu left in the world so that we can all finally be at peace.

Reasons for LIBERATING:

1. You prevent other generations from feeling the corruption of this game and its evil.
2. You clear up the enormous copies of Shaq-Fu lying on the shelves in used console game stores. By doing so, you remove it from public display so that people will not be reminded of the game's existence.
3. Purchasing many copies of the game shifts the demand schedule, consequently raising the price. Even though it costs you more money, it reduces the incentive for a non-liberator to buy the game; a worthwhile sacrifice.
4. By getting it from another person, you remove the burden and embarrassment they feel.

They provide plans for LIBERATION, and even a few photodocumentaries of LIBERATION in action. This is truly a noble cause, and one that I support wholeheartedly. I will endeavor to LIBERATE as many copies of Shaq-Fu as I can find, and I will pass on the results to you, my valiant readers, who I am sure understand my committment to this war against merchandizing.

LIBERATE Shaq-Fu however you can. Fire, acid, a bigass hammer. Feed it to your neighbor's dog. You know, that fucking mutt that keeps you up all night with its yappy-ass barking? Fuck that little piece of shit. Copies only cost a couple of bucks, but the worth of the results is without measure. How does one measure happiness and peace in US dollars? How does one measure a world free of evil?

I submit that you cannot.

Game of the Week #4: Megaman X

2007-02-25T04:58:00.001-05:00

Megaman X
Genre: Side-Scrolling Action
Platform: SNES
Developer: Capcom
Year Released: 1993

There are few things more venerable in video gaming than the various subseries that make up what I am tempted to call "the Megaman genre." Between the original series, the X series, the Zero series, the Battle Network series, the ZX series, the Legends series, and the many random spin-offs, Megaman and his decendants are some of the more prolific players in the history of video games.

For my money, the X series is the best of them all.

Don't think I'm knocking the other series, though (well, except Battle Network; it was like Megaman fucked Pokemon and the offspring was a game of Magic: The Gathering). The classic series, especially, is and always will be great, but the X series has added depth of story, character, and gameplay that in my opinion make it superior.

Of course, it has its pitfalls, or rather, it's cliff edge. Walk past X4 into X5 and beyond territory and you'd better hope you can air-dash back to solid ground. For the purposes of simplicity, when I say "X series," what I mean is "Megaman X through Megaman X4."

Andyway, Megaman X is the game that got the whole thing started. Like many children, when the game came out I thought it was Megaman 10, and was confused because of this. Of course, I soon found out it was just a spin-off series, and the Roman numeral-based confusion was put to rest. The game takes place in "21xx," some 100 years after the "20xx" of the original series, and you play as Megaman X, a "reploid" created by Dr. Light, creator of the original Megaman. X, as a reploid, has more free will than his precursor, but reploids are still bound by their programming, and thus can go "Maverick" when infected with the Maverick Virus. That's where X comes in: he's a Maverick Hunter.

There's really little I need to say about the gameplay; everyone knows Megaman. You run, jump, shoot, and dash your way through your 2D world, collecting powerups in the form of upgrade capsules and heart containers and learning the powers of the Maverick bosses you defeat. It's a simple formula that carried the series for years, and only when the formula is trashed beyond recognition in the name of "progress" (I'm looking at you, X5 and X6) does it fail. It's fun as hell, and there's really no need to alter it unless it is being added to.

This game has a fairly high difficulty level, but Megaman games are generally known for that. It's not as hard as, say, Megaman 2 on the NES, but neither is it very forgiving. The capsule powerups help a great deal, especially the secret Hadoken fireball powerup in Armored Armadillo's stage. It also helps to defeat the bosses in the proper order so you can exploit their weaknesses, or, new to Megaman X, change the layout of their level. This is why you beat Storm Eagle second, even though you don't have his weakness yet: his plane crashes into Spark Mandrill's stage and makes it much easier.

I have always found the X series, and the first game in particular, to have amazing replay value. Maybe its because I long ago memorized every detail of this game and can breeze through it in one sitting, and that strokes my ego a bit, but I like to think it has something to do with the combination of great (for the SNES) graphics, fun gameplay, and memorable characters, like Zero, the King of Awesome.

There's one final factor that adds to this game's awesomeness: the music. The tunes in this game are catchy as hell. The music team did a fantastic job populating this game with really high-quality songs that stick in your head for hours after you're done playing. Among my favorites are Zero's theme and Storm Eagle's stage music.

I really can't say enough good about this game. There's a level of nostalgia for me, as I've loved this game for almost a decade and a half, and it's always been one of my favorites. If you have a used game store around you (and a working SNES, like me) you can find this game for peanuts, and it is worth every peanut and then some. Or you could always emulate it, or buy the Megaman X collection for your PS2 or Gamecube. This game will always have a special place in my gamer heart as one of the best side-scrolling action games ever made.

I Could Be A Surgeon!

2007-02-23T02:06:00.000-05:00

Science is a wonderful thing. The scientific method is probably the most important development in human civilization; it has allowed us unheard of progress in the last few centuries and is the most reliable generator of truth known to man. Thus it is always encouraging when I read an article like Surgeons Who Do Video Games More Skilled.

Strange phrasing notwithstanding (how do you "do" video games? That sounds like something your grandma would say after she hands you a PS2 game for Christmas and says "I hope you enjoy your Nintendo tape"), the article is quite interesting.

Bear in mind before we start that it is only one study and it has a very small sample size of only thirty-three surgeons. That said, it is encouraging, and it does confirm studies in other areas that video games improve fine motor skills and hand/eye coordination. We even get:

“Video games may be a practical teaching tool to help train surgeons,” senior author James Rosser of Beth Israel said.

I wholeheartedly agree, and offer for Mr. Rosser's consideration Trauma Center: Under the Knife for the Nintendo DS and its "Wiimake" Trauma Center: Second Opinion which is, quite obviously thanks to the bad pun, for the Wii. Those games fucking rock.

In addition, I think that all lawyers must beat the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games in order to pass the bar exam.

More seriously, though, the end of the article kind of takes away from its coolness. The author decided that they had to end with some typical anti-video game fear-mongering nonsense:

A 2004 survey by Gentile found 94 percent of U.S. adolescents play video games for an average of nine hours a week. Game-playing has been linked to aggressiveness, poor school grades and can become a substitute for exercise.

"Parents should not see this study as beneficial if their child is playing video games for over an hour a day," Gentile said. “"pending that much time playing video games is not going to help their child’s chances of getting into medical school."

Why does this always have to come up? The media can't ever present video games in a positive light without saying something parent-friendly and negative. "Yes, this may look good, but remember: gaming makes kids fat and violent!" These days I just look down and shake my head. I don't know what else to do.

I plan on someday reading the book Everything Bad is Good For You, by Steven Johnson. In it, he apparently argues that computer and video games, among other pop culture phenomena, have done good for people that is generally ignored by, well, most everyone. It promises to be a good read.

An Open Letter to Jack Tretton, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America

2007-02-22T01:36:00.000-05:00

Mr. Tretton:

Do you see that picture? That's a pair of Playstation 3s sitting on the shelf at the Wal-Mart on the south side of Lafayette, Indiana. I would like to respectfully request that you abide by the verbal agreement you made when you recently spoke to Electronic Gaming Monthly.

I would like you to send me $2400.

You said it, sir. You made the bold, balsy bluff that the PS3 was in such demand that it would be nearly impossible to find one on the shelf. You stated, sir, and I quote:

If you can find a PS3 anywhere in North America that’s been on shelves for more than five minutes, I’ll give you 1,200 bucks for it. I can get any retail buyer on the phone with you and get them to verify that there’s not a single retail location in America where there’s a PlayStation 3 on the shelf for sale. They’ve all been sold in a matter of minutes.

It is dishonest and disinginuous of you to ignore that bounty that you yourself set. Sir, with all due respect, if you had any true sense of honor, you would abide by your word instead of arguing semantics as your proxy did when I attempted to contact SCEA and receive my promised money:

We are able to confirm that the comment in question was directed at the editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) and was merely said to demonstrate that the PLAYSTATION(R)3 computer entertainment systems were selling out during the November launch time. It was not a challenge to the general consumer.

I appreciate the timely reply from Joseph from the customer service department, but it seems to me to be a cop-out of the highest order. The interview was made months after the November launch time, so that cannot be the case. Additionally, while I agree that the statement was made to demonstrate speedy sales of the PS3, that is unquestionably not all that was being said. If you intended the statement to merely illustrate a brisk speed of sales, you would have simply stated that one cannot find a PS3 on a store shelf. Instead, you went the extra mile and made a claim that might be called smug and overconfident: that you were so sure that stores cannot hold onto a PS3 for more than a few minutes that you would pay a $1200 bounty for any one console found. Need I quote again from your "demonstration?"

If you can find a PS3 anywhere in North America that’s been on shelves for more than five minutes, I’ll give you 1,200 bucks for it.

That, sir, is more than a "demonstration" of the sales potential of your console. It is a challenge set, a bounty offered, a committment made. The gauntlet was thrown and I and others have picked it up. You made the statement, sir, and now that you have been proven wrong, you are attempting to fast-talk your way out of the money you rightfully owe not only me, but others including Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade.

Sir, backing out of your committment merely because it did not work out in your favor is dishonest and, worse, dishonorable. You argue semantics using demonstrably wrong logic to save face and save money that is rightfully owed the consumer. You are backing out in the most cowardly fashion I can imagine. An honorable man would admit his mistake and pay what he owed. I urge you to be an honorable man, sir, and stand by your statement. Abide by the pact that you made and pay up.

Pay up, sir. But, perhaps more importantly, Mr. Tretton, man up.

Sincerely,
Akusai of Akusai's Video Game Musings

Inaugural Carnival of Video Game Bloggers

2007-02-19T04:22:00.000-05:00

Dear Readers Who Are In The Single Digits,

The very first Carnival of Video Game Bloggers has been posted at its parent blog, The Collected Writings of James Newton. Go read for this month's finest video game blogging.

Thank you.

Game of The Week #3: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

2007-02-18T01:59:00.000-05:00

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Genre: Adventure
Platform: PC
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Year Released: 2002

When I graduated high school in 2002, I took half of the gift money I received at my open house and put it int he bank. I took the other half and stocked up on games for my new top-of-the-line PC. If memory serves, I bought, in one trip, Dungeon Seige (sucked), Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast (rocked), and Neverwinter Nights (awesome). A couple of weeks later, I walked into my local EB and said to the manager "Mike, I still have more money to burn. Any recommendations?"

He took Morrowind off the shelf, and my life changed forever.

This may sound a little dramatic, and it probably is. But know this: from the day I bought Morrowind, I didn't really play anything else for months. Bear in mind this is early summer 2002. I had already decided I hated Dungeon Seige, I had gotten partway through the first chapter in NWN, and I had gotten through the Jedi Academy in Jedi Outcast. Then I installed Morrowind. I didn't play Neverwinter Nights again until finals week of my first semester at college, and I didn't play Jedi outcast again until the second semester. Barring short interludes for Warcraft III and Battlefield 1942 (both obtained by the guy across the hall in a completely legal and legitimate fashion), it was Morrowind pretty much all the way. The game totally changed the way I looked at gaming.

How do I love Morrowind? Let me count the ways...

1. Huge, sprawling world
2. Huge, sprawling, cohesive, and well-realized mythology
3. Hundreds of hours of quests, not to mention just exploring the huge, sprawling world
4. Graphics that kicked major ass at the time
5. CCC: Crazy Character Customization
6. Did I mention that it's huge and sprawing?

I've put many, many hours into Morrowind. So many hours that I've never even made it to the expansions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon, and I don't feel at all cheated. Though I did install Tribunal for the improved journal interface.

The real greatness of Morrowind is tied to its hugeness, and that is its open-endedness. The heavy level of character customization allows you to assign skills as you want and play exactly the character you'd prefer. The massive list of quests, from the main quest to the dozens of faction quests from more factions than I can remember, will keep you going for an eternity, and even if you finish them all, there's still random ruins to explore and tons of little secrets.

One of the major triumphs in Morrowind is that it feels more alive than most any game before it. Sure, compared to lots of games since it is less alive, but at the time, the sheer number of townspeople, the depth of the dialogue (that kind of depth is a lot easier when you're not wed to complete voice coverage of every line), the various archetectural styles that denoted different regions and peoples...It felt like a real world.

Brief summary: it takes place on the Vvardenfell, a "small" triangular island in the province of Morrowind. Now, compared to Arena and Daggerfall, it was small, but it was still huge, and it didn't rely on bland, random generation as a cludge to create size. You're a random, nameless (until you name yourself) prisoner with no memory who ended up in the Vvardenfell because Emperor Uriel Septim VII had a vision that you would be important. You start small but build big, characterwise, storywise, and worldwise.

At first, quests confine you to a small corner of the Vvardenfell, but before long, you're tromping all over, finding cities, ports, dungeons, native villages, caves, mines, and more random crap than you can shake a stick at. The faction quests are generally pretty good, and you can even join and rise through the ranks of one of the three Dunmer (dark elf) Great Houses, with all the perks one might expect from such membership. And, of course, you can steal from, talk to, bribe, attack, and kill anyone at any time. Even major, plot-necessary characters, though if you do (it isn't easy), the game gives you a warning that you can no longer complete the main quest.

There are bunches of different types of weapons and armor, tons of magic as well as a magic customization system and an enchantment system, tons of different side plots, some only discoverable if you go far out of your way, little snippets of history that tug at your curiosity...And it's frequently hilarious. For example, play a male character and rise through House Hlaalu until you meet Crassius Curio. That makes me laugh every single time. The skill system is one where skills build as you use them, like the Quest for Glory games, which I also fucking love, and will undoubtedly be featured in future GotW (that's my new and clever abbreviation for "Game of the Week") posts. This is to say that you get better at swinging a sword by hitting shit with it, you get better at running and jumping by running and jumping, etc. It's far more realistic than the old "gain a level, shit moves up" structure of most other RPGs, and for my money it's more fun, more intuitive, and far less restrictive.

Perhaps the most enduring positive feature of Morrowind was its sort of meta-open-endedness found through the free Elder Scrolls construction set that came with every game. It allows all users to create add-ons and alterations to the game, from bug fixes to new textures to new items to entirely new quest lines. The construction set created a large community of modders who made Morrowind essentially a neverending game.

I love Morrowind. I've only beat it (and by "it" I mean "the main quest") once, but I love replaying it nevertheless. Morrowind just isn't one of those games that you beat. It's one of those games that you just play, pure and simple. I don't care about the main quest half the time, I just play a different way and see where it takes me. I'd like to see more games in this vein, games in which it is the experience that counts and not the eventual end-game payoff. MMORPGs are that, supposedly, but I've never been able to enjoy any of them as I strongly prefer a single-player experience, and I don't like grinding.

All this gushing is not to say that Morrowind is without faults. It has many, though none significant enough to ruin it for me by any strech of the imagination. For one, its size is rather ridiculous when you have to travel pretty much everywhere but some major cities on foot. You can easily get lost and wander somewhere and die, and sometimes you just get bored. This problem is complicated by the fact that your character's movement speed is tied to the "speed" stat, which is a very, very poor idea. It makes movement interminable for some people and, well, somewhat less interminable for others. Of course, you can use the teleportation cheat with abandon, as I do. It really helps. Another problem is the character graphics and animation. The world is spectacular and epic; the architecture looks fantastic, nature is beautiful and the views from a high mountain are truly awe-inspiring. The dungeons and caves feel suitably oppressive and dark. The people, however, are hideous monstrosities that walk as if their center of balance was located somewhere outside and behind the center of their back. It's an odd, wobbly, straight-legged, backwards-leaning gait that I've only seen in a few rather unsavory, meatbaggish people, like the manager at my high-school job who would bring hentai to work. Luckily for part of that problem, the sin-ugly faces can be fixed with some really fantastic fan modules that make the females of the game positively radiant. Why Bethesda can't make realistic faces and character animations is a mystery to me; they did a lot better in Oblivion, but still not terribly well.

Other issues are small. The journal is, at first, structured like an an actual journal, which makes it hard to keep track of quest information, but that was fixed with the Tribunal expansion. There is a small amount of voice acting that kind of...well, sucks. Hearing the same salutations time and time again will start to grate on your psyche. Eventually you'll become numb to it, but that's not really a good thing for the game. The power to eventually max out every skill and ability and become an ubercharacter does not appeal to me; it's unrealistic and overpowered. However, that's a flaw that others might see as a virtue. There are a few bugs and glitches, and, even patched, it occasionally crashes to the desktop, but far less often than detractors might have you believe. Overall, Morrowind is a stellar game, paling only in comparison to its sequel Oblivion.

You can get this game cheap as hell these days, and if you don't have it, what are you waiting for?

A Mission Statement

2007-02-16T03:17:00.000-05:00

I've been writing this blog for a few weeks now, and a few things have dawned on me that I'd like to record for the 5 people who read regularly. As the title suggests, this is a bit of a summary of how I plan on running this blog. So, here goes...

The major goal of this blog is to celebrate video games and video gaming. This focus on video games is not necessarily exclusive; tabletop gaming or anime might sneak in there somewhere in the future. I will discuss games I love, talk about exciting-looking upcoming games, muse lightheartedly about the content and nature of things. I'll generally keep things happy.

Part of celebrating games is not getting mired in negativism. I dislike lots of games. Probably more than I like. That's not going to sneak in here, though. I'm going to spend time covering games that I enjoy for one reason or another, and anything negative I have to say about them will simply be constructive criticism. For the most part, I will not go off on games I dislike.

Take, for example, the Grand Theft Auto series. I do not like those games. I find them boring. But that is irrelevant to the blog. I will not create a post denigrating GTA simply because I can't get behind the franchise. This goes for any game or genre I just can't really enjoy.

That being said, there are major stinkers out there. These are games that are so poorly made, so badly constructed, so completely unfun, that only a masochist or a moron could like them. These games, these complete wastes of data, will be mocked mercilessly. You'll have to wait to see what's on my shit list.

There will also be criticism of things that I feel are bad for gamers or gaming in general, like my post about Microsoft Windows Vista and how it seems intended to completely screw over gamers (and, well, everyone else, too). Articles like that will be, by nature, extremely negative, but only in response to what I feel is a threat to one of my favorite pasttimes.

Well, that's out of the way. I don't know if it really matters to anyone but me, but that's my intention for the blog. If you ever think I'm subverting that intention, getting too negative for no real reason, just let me know.

Game of the Week #2: Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

2007-02-11T01:43:00.000-05:00

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
Genre: Adventure
Platform: PC
Developer: Sierra On-Line

This game represents, to me, lost hopes. This has nothing to do with the game itself, really, but more to do with my ability to play it. Allow me to explain.

I've been an adventure game junkie since I was a young, young child (probably 7) and my uncle kindly gifted me with his copy of "King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella," as he had already beaten it and thought I would like it.

Like it? I loved it. I couldn't get enough of it. Even though it took me forever and a lot of the puzzles didn't come easy to a first-grader, I played the shit out of it. That Christmas, he gave me a copy of Sierra's "Hero's Quest." That's right, before it was called "Quest for Glory." I had the 5 1/2 inch floppy disc fort edition. Eight goddamn discs. I was a junkie. King's Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, Monkey Island, whatever you had, I wanted it. But somehow my radar missed Gabriel Knight, perhaps because I was too engrossed in King's Quest VI at the time and GK was a new series and one that was intended for adults.

Years later, in college, I picked up a copy of it through completely legal, non P2P means, and began to play through. About then, the Sierra forums and I became very good friends, as my XP PC couldn't digest the ancient DOS-based game and I had to jury-rig that fucker from here to 3000 AD. Eventually, in the final chapter, I hit a fatal and unfixable error. My time with Gabriel had come to an end.

Last year, I came across this site, where an Italian gamer had created a script patch that made Sins of the Fathers completely playable on XP. I want to have this man's children. Incidentally, a collection of similar fan patches for other Sierra games can be found here. There's even one for Quest for Glory IV, where they fixed everything! Even the awful, evil, fatal error 52 crash when you fight the Chernovy in the swamp! Awesome!

I installed Sins of the Fathers with the patcher and we sat down to play through it for Wintereenmas. Then my computer went down. Then it came back up. Then it went down again. It's currently in the shop. Again. Great. It seems that everytime I try to sit down and play Sins of the Fathers, life conspires to thwart me. It is truly a shame, as Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is one of the finest adventure games ever made.

Throughout the game you control Gabriel Knight, failed author and owner of a failing rare books store in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Gabriel is one of my favorite game characters of all time. He's intelligent but lazy, he's a smartass and a ladies man, and he's always putting his nose where it doesn't belong and riding the ragged edge of disaster. Under it all, though, is a heart of gold. Other characters include Grace Nakamura, Gabriel's assistant at St. George's Rare Books, who would later come more into her own in the sequels, and Detective Mosely, Gabriel's balding and dimwitted childhood friend who is his contact in the police office. None of the characters are boring or flat, and each has a distinct personality and is likeable in his or her own way.

At first, Gabriel is just researching a spate of serial killings for a book he is working on. Eventually, however, you get drawn into a story of magic and murder, where Gabriel finds out his history and true heritage. The story is dark and truly frightening, even to a jaded veteran of horror games like myself. It's suspenseful and a far more psychological scare than, say, Resident Evil, which is far more frightening to me. The plot unfolds with practically perfect pacing, and secrets are unveiled in just the right places to constantly keep you entrenched in the mystery. The game isn't for the weak of mind, as it requires a lot of reading of history and mythology to get through the story and some of the puzzles, but it's all very rewarding. As far as I know. At least until the last chapter.

The puzzles are, with one notable exception, fantastic. They're all pretty intuitive without being head-smackingly obvious, a difficult road to walk sometimes. They're inventory- and plot-driven; a puzzle always feels like "Here's what I need to do; here's what I have. How do I get there?" Often in adventure games (especially in the past few years), puzzles feel like little more than arbitrary roadblocks, but fortunately, that is not the case in Sins of the Fathers. It's well crafted and that's no surprise, as it was written and designed by Jane Jensen, who's work on King's Quest VI helped make it a classic of the genre.

What's really awesome, especially considering the game's age, is the quality of the voice acting. They got professionals to do the work. Tim Curry is fantastic as Gabriel. His New Orleans accent is great and the sense of self-satisfaction and smugness he lends to the character really gives the game feeling. Mark Hammil plays Detective Mosely, and he's so good I hardly recognized him. Go Luke.

This game was crafted with both love and lots of thought. It's a testament to the quality that Sierra routinely put out before its unfortunate demise. It's dark and frightening and darkly hilarious, often at the same time. The characters are all amazingly endearing, the dialogue is snappy and well-written, and only one puzzle involving a crypt wall and a voodoo drum mars the majesty. It deserves to be played.

But get that patch I linked to above. Otherwise, you really won't be able to play at all. Not even with with DOSBox.

'Til next week...

Where Lavos and Marty McFly Meet in the Middle

2007-02-10T04:14:00.000-05:00

Writing time travel stories can be tricky. The whole concept is so fuzzy and rife with paradox potential that it's often wise for lesser writers to avoid it entirely. They don't seem to realize that, however. Most often, a story that uses time-travel fucks it up majorly and you get a messy narrative full of irritating plot holes and contrived plot devices. Good writers can craft a time travel narrative that is consistent and rewarding, and we've seen such a story in a few places. Back to the Future and the TV show Gargoyles are notable examples. A video game that used it to great effect, and in a similar vein as the Back to the Future movies is Chrono Trigger.

In middle school, when I first played through Chrono Trigger, questions of time travel consistency were not on my mind. I just knew I loved the game for its characters, its story, its battle system, etc. I loved it. As I grew older, I kept loving it, but I began to question the validity of its use of time travel.

In my mind, the most interesting way to deal with time travel is the fixed timeline. It takes tight, planned plotting to get your fixed timeline story to pay off and not contradict itself or leave and open causal loops. You have to pepper the story with mysterious events that leave questions but don't necessarily take the forefront of the story. This means the payoff in the end, when all the pieces fall into place and the reader realizes what is going on, is nothing short of spectacular. Good places to see fine use of fixed timelines are Simon R. Green's Deathstalker and Nightside novels and Terry Gilliams classic time travel thriller "12 Monkeys."

Chrono Trigger doesn't have a fixed timeline. The whole point of the game is to change the past to protect the future, and the story is rife with changes to the past made by Chrono and crew. As I began examining the story for possible paradoxes, I found quite a few. A very good example is the section of the game that takes place in Zeal, as it involves people from multiple different timelines converging on a massive, world-shaking event.

Before they end up in Zeal, the party combatted Magus inside his castle in 600 AD. At the conclusion of the battle, they were all warped to Zeal in 12,000 BC. Magus donned a disguise and went under the name of "The Prophet," using his knowledge of the future to ingratiate himself with Zeal's royal family. However, it is later revealed that the young prince of Zeal, Janus, is actually Magus as a child. During Queen Zeal's initial summoning of Lavos, Janus got warped to 600 AD and was raised by the Mystics. He summoned Lavos to get his revenge. This presents an apparent problem. When the party meets a grown Magus in 600 AD, he does not recognize them, though they were in his past in 12,000 AD. Of course, this is not a fixed timeline narrative, so that is resolved by taking the stance that the "first time" the events played themselves out, leading to Janus' transport to 600 AD, the party wasn't around. In the future, they travelled to the past, and in doing so changed things. When they fought Magus, he had memories of the "first time." Consequently, after their collective experience in Zeal, he might develop new memories of the time in question (but I suspect not; I'll get there later).

A major change, however, is that when Chrono and co. confront Queen Zeal in the Undersea Palace, Janus is no longer there when Lavos is summoned. This means that the second time around, Janus wasn't sent to 600 AD, therefore he never grew up to be Magus and therefore major historical events should have been changed. This isn't merely memory; it's a physical change to the timeline. There is ample evidence in Chrono Trigger that physical changes to the past have repurcussions that change the present and future. So what's the deal?

Moreover, how can you get a powered-up black chest item in the future, go back and get the lesser version in the past, and then still have the future version on your person?

I thought on it for a while, and then, while watching Back to the Future (the first one), I noticed an analagous situation. When Marty returns home at the end of the movie, he retains only his original memories of his childhood. He knows nothing of the new present, with Biff a lowly servant of George McFly and George a successful author. His non time-travelling siblings and girlfriend, however, remember the altered timeline. This gave me an idea.

Here's my hypothesis, and it works for both Chrono Trigger and Back to the Future. When one travels time, one becomes exempt from certain aspects of temporal causality. Why didn't Marty remember the changed timeline? Why was Magus still around? Because by being outside of time for a while, they were rendered immune to temporal change. They existed as they were regardless of how their past changed. They had acquired their own personal, subjective timeline, in a sense. They keep their black chest weapons because they already have them, and removing the weapon in the past doesn't change that fact. Their physical and mental states remain in their subjective timeline. This, potentially, is how the universes in question safeguard against paradox. The simple (if totally whacked and contrived) notion that time travelers are causaly exempt neatly solves the problems in both Back to the Future and Chrono Trigger. Of course, Back to the Future II introduced a branching timeline, but I'm absolutely not going there at all right now.

I'm not sure I articulated that as well as I could have, but I'm kind of short on time tonight. Thoughts?

That's a Big Twinkie

2007-02-08T03:22:00.000-05:00

I've recently come across some news that has excited me rather a lot. There's a long list of things I'd like to see made into a passable video game, and one of them seems to finally be coming to fruition.

A small dev company called ZootFly is developing a Ghostbusters video game.

This is good news for a couple of reasons. First of all, there hasn't ever been a decent Ghostbusters game except for an arcade top-down shooter based on "The Real Ghostbusters" that I only ever saw once at a rest stop on the way to New York when I was a kid. The NES game was unbearably awful. It was completely unclear what you were supposed to do at every step of the way. Move the Ghostbusters symbol around the streets? Okay. Oh, shit, now we're driving the Ecto-1. Okay, don't hit anything. Wait, I ran out of gas? Maybe I should hit something. Oh, damn, now we've got this trap and the ghost is up there. Time to randomly smack buttons and hope something helps. The NES Ghostbusters II wasn't much better. The control scheme was evil and reprehensible. The Genesis platformer was midly better. It was a below-average platform shooter, but at least you could control it. Plus it had awesome big-head 16-bit charicatures of Murray, Ramis, Hudson, and Aykroyd. It is good to see that somebody wants to make a decent game out of the property.

The other reason this is so wonderful is that, in my opinion, Ghostbusters really is one of the classic movies of all time. It's filled with great writing, spectacular acting and characterization, and special effects that killed in the mid-80s. The pacing and plotting are fantastic and the line deliveries are spot on by every member of the cast. It's about as quotable as you can get. It can also boast that it's one of the few movies ever with a halfway-decent sequel and a Saturday-morning cartoon series that was quite good, probably owing to the heavy creative input from J. Michael Strazynski (before he went all mystical and weird). Well, at least the show was awesome before its switch to the kiddified "Slimer and The Real Ghostbusters." This is a movie that is really a major part of an entire generation's pop culture makeup, but it's been sadly out of the public consciousness for a long time. Murray was the only holdout from a Ghostbusters III a few years ago, partially owing to the fallout with Harold Ramis that occured while they were working on "Groundhog Day." Subsequently, it's not something you hear enough of. Apart from a well-received indie comic book (that I still haven't been able to get my hands on) and a rumored CG sequel (that is so not the way to go, guys), you hear nothing, and those two things aren't exactly front page news. I love Ghostbusters. I want more Ghostbusters, and I want to share the love of Ghostbusters with others. I am an evangelical Ghostbusters fan.

Sadly, at the moment the game is stuck in some legal wranglings to officially acquire the license, and as such they took the videos off their website. You can probably still find them on YouTube. Apparently things are looking good, though, because Aykroyd has apparently already announced that he's going to be in it. Hopefully he can get the whole crew rounded up and we won't have to deal with Dave Coulier doing his Bill Murray impression. Bill Murray is Peter Venkman. End of story. It would be a shame if he refused to do this, too, for some dumb and probably pretentious reason.

Add this to the pile of reasons that are making me greatly desire a 360. The game looks like a Gears of War style over-the-shoulder shooter, and ZootFly has already confirmed that it would be travesty to not base it on the events of the movies. Good for them, and great for the 360.I never got an original XBox, for reasons that I'll probably go into at a later date, but the 360 is finally, after a year and a half, starting to look fucking sexy.

Microsoft Hates Gamers: Addendum

2007-02-07T21:41:00.000-05:00

I forgot a major point in my last post, so I just want to add it here really quick. This really is a significant issue for PC gamers, as we're big power-hounds and upgrade freaks, so here it is:

Under Vista's...unique...anti-piracy plan, you may not be able to upgrade your own system without getting permission from Microsoft.

The full details of this plan are not, as far as I know, fully set in stone yet, but here's the general idea: you want to upgrade. You buy a new graphics card or sound card or whatever. You take out the old one, put in the new one, and when Vista detects it, it refuses to run and instead gives you a phone number to call and okay the whole thing with a Microsoft customer service rep. He or she will then remotely reactivate your copy of Vista, if, of course, the upgrade was approved.

What this might be, apparently, is a "so-many-upgrades" plan where you only call after, say, 3 cards. You get a few freebies. But that's a flimsy rationalization. That I ever have to call Microsoft to get permission to do something with my own personal, private property that I purchased in full from a third party separate from Microsoft is anathema to me. It's mine, assholes. Mine. I should never have to ask you permission, not once ever, to switch in a new video card. It's not your fucking business what I do with my own computer, and your desperate drive to protect your worthless "Premium Content" does not give you the right to essentially invade my house and tell me what I can and cannot do.

I don't know how I forgot this the first time around. When I read that article, this struck me as the biggest insult of all, the worst intrusion of the 900-pound gorilla yet. I certainly hope this is no longer the case.

Microsoft Hates Gamers

2007-02-05T05:04:00.000-05:00

I read this article a couple of weeks ago, found at Stupid Evil Bastard The title of the article is "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection," and it is very enlightening. It deals specifically with Vista's Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the problems their DRM poses. The Executive Executive Summary of the article is:

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

This is true. But to modify it a bit, I think that the Vista Content Protection specification also constitutes a letter of homicidal intent against PC gamers everywhere, and they're doing it just to pander to major media corporations.

Okay, so I'm being a little melodramatic, but that doesn't change the fact that Vista's DRM presents one thousand and one problems for the next generation of PC gaming. As an avid PC gamer lo these many years, I resent much of the Vista DRM, as it puts me and my ilk into a very objectionable position: the position of a body between a rock and a hard place.

The major problem is that we gamers are damned if we do and damned if we don't. If we don't upgrade to Vista, we will be unable to play the next generation of PC games, those that will run on DirectX 10. DX10 is only compatible with Vista, so staying with XP severely limits our options.

If, on the other hand, we upgrade to Vista, we'll be smacked with the problems mentioned in the linked article, which I strongly suggest you read, as it is a powerful indictment of Microsoft and Windows Vista. The first major problem is a financial one. The hoops that MS is currently making hardware manufacturers jump through to be Vista compatible will drive up prices across the market. The goal with these hoops is to make all hardware as secure as possible to protect what MS refers to as "Premium Content," presumably HD video files, MP3s, and other such media, but not necessarily limited to those. The hoops require, among other things, that the manufacturer of a piece of hardware get its hardware's security systems approved by no fewer than three Hollywood studios. Don't believe me? Here's a quote from an actual MS document.

The evidence [of security] must be presented to Hollywood and other content owners, and they must agree that it provides the required level of security. Written proof from at least three of the major Hollywood studios is required.

Hollywood studios know nothing about computer engineering or security, yet this is a mandate if your hardware is to be Vista compatible. Additionally, MS is only allowing certain board layouts to increase "robustness" and security, and they are not optimum layouts. They do not even allow for the removal of nonessential parts to create a lower-grade and cheaper product. Following these and other "robustness rules" makes each piece of hardware cost more, and the cost is then passed on to the consumer as a price hike. What you get, then, with Vista, is more expensive equipment that is actually crippled and sub-optimum because of the very rules that drove the cost up in the first place.

The worst part? Because all hardware manufacturers must go through these processes, you're paying this price even if you don't run a Windows computer.

The next travesty to gaming (and indeed all of computing) is Microsoft's "tilt bits" functionality. "Tilt bits" are set whenever any device detects something "unusual." I'll quote (rather extensively, sorry) from the article to better explain the process.

Vista's content protection requires that devices (hardware and software drivers) set so-called “tilt bits” if they detect anything unusual. For example if there are unusual voltage fluctuations, maybe some jitter on bus signals, a slightly funny return code from a function call, a device register that doesn't contain quite the value that was expected, or anything similar, a tilt bit gets set. Such occurrences aren't too uncommon in a typical computer. For example starting up or plugging in a bus-powered device may cause a small glitch in power supply voltages, or drivers may not quite manage device state as precisely as they think. Previously this was no problem — the system was designed with a bit of resilience, and things will function as normal. In other words small variances in performance are a normal part of system functioning...With the introduction of tilt bits, all of this designed-in resilience is gone. Every little (normally unnoticeable) glitch is suddenly surfaced because it could be a sign of a hack attack, with the required reaction being that (from the spec) "Windows Vista will initiate a full reset of the graphics subsystem, so everything will restart."

Sound good to you? This means that you plug in your USB drive, and shit breaks down. You experience a slight lightning storm, and shit breaks down. Imagine the ease of screwing over an entire network with the tiniest of effort. Since we're talking gamers here, imagine what happens if you're playing CS Source or Unreal Tournament and somebody, heaven forbid, turns on the lights in the same room as the computer. It won't restart your entire system, just your graphics subsystem, but the damage will be done. Continued minor fluctutations could render your computer, or a network, completely unusable for any length of time. How did this seem like a good idea to anybody? Oh, right, because it "protects from piracy.

The final major strike comes with Vista's policies on hardware drivers. First off, Vista kills the current wonderful trend of driver unification, the practice of making one standard driver for a variety of cards, like Nvidia's Forceware.

In order to prevent the creation of hardware emulators of protected output devices, Vista requires a Hardware Functionality Scan (HFS) that can be used to uniquely fingerprint a hardware device to ensure that it's (probably) genuine. In order to do this, the driver on the host PC performs an operation in the hardware (for example rendering 3D content in a graphics card) that produces a result that's unique to that device type.

What this means is that each separate piece of hardware has to have its own specific driver. Bye-bye, Forceware. Hello more wasted time and money by hardware developers.

This goes hand-in-hand with Microsoft's demand that, in order to prevent third parties from creating drivers that might emulate a regular driver's HFS signature and leak their precious Premium Content, hardware manufacturers call a moratorium on the great two-decade history of open development. All technical details of all hardware must be completely confidential. Anybody who was planning on keeping XP until a new, DX10-compatible version of OpenGL was developed, sorry. Not gonna happen. Because of all this, Linux developers have offered to make Linux hardware drivers free of charge, in essence doing the hardware makers' work for them, just so Linux can stay up to date.

The final part of the evil Microsoft driver triumvirate is their new practice of driver revocation. If, at any time, a hardware driver is found to be leaking even the tiniest amount of Premium Content, it will be immediately revoked by Microsoft, instantly making a brick out of important, expensive piece of hardware across the world until the manufacturers can create a more secure driver. Heaven forbid that five or six bytes of last week's episode of "Prison Break" be leaked out into cyberspace! We must take measures to render our users' computers useless! Great plan, Microsoft. What this means for older, legacy hardware is that they'll be permanent bricks, as they won't have new drivers created. This screws over your average user, too.

There are other problems out there. There's MS's disabling of certain functionality without the exactly proper HDMI setup. There's extra resource consumption by both the CPU and all devices necessary to run Vista's absurdly unnecessary encryption algorithms, further hamstringing already subpar equipment. And what if Microsoft determines that games are "Premium Content?" Then you can't even run them without perfect HDMI.

So what does all this mean for the gamer? It means you'll have more expensive hardware that runs at suboptimum levels for multiple reasons. It means that you'll have an unreliable system that's prone to graphical resets at any time for the tiniest of "problems." It means that your overly expensive and subpar hardware is prone to being bricked and rendering your shit unusable for something that you didn't even cause and probably isn't even hurting anybody. It means there aren't even any third-party alternatives to any of this. Your PC gaming experience is thrashed and ruined six ways from Sunday, and DirectX 10 be damned. And to what end will your computer's performance be so thoroughly fucked?

So Microsoft can get in good with the media companies as part of their plan to turn every home computer into a total media center. But why? Most people don't even use their computers this way. If they wany to watch a DVD, they buy a DVD player. Their computer is a separate entity, built for gaming or typing or surfing the net. Microsoft is pandering to the whims of the MPAA and the RIAA to ensure that they'll be able to sell their Premium Content digitally to a mostly oblivious public. As a software company, they're supposed to pander to the market and to the customers, not use their weight to completely reshape the market. As developers of an OS, they're supposed to create a system that allows people to easily and effortlessly interact with a computer. They're not supposed to make good with media conglomerates, and they're not supposed to design an OS based around "media security," all at the expense of their entire user base. That's not the purpose of an operating system. They're treating every last one of us like potential criminals. And will it stop pirates? Of course not! These are the most resourceful people on the planet, and they'll break it within a week. If it gets fixed, they'll break it within another week. These measures will stop nothing. The entire exercise is completely absurd.

To everyone that reads this, do not buy Windows Vista. Send Microsoft a message. Tell them you'd rather use outdated software and hardware than deal with their nonsense. Tell them that they've overtepped their bounds. Tell them that yes, they are committing suicide, and we'll dance on their graves. They're screwing us over, no matter what choice we make. Microsoft hates gamers.

I know they're a huge, giant company, but they expect huge, giant things from Vista, and if it doesn't deliver, well, they may just realize that change is in order.

Game of the Week #1: Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana

2007-02-04T04:50:00.001-05:00

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana
Genre: Japanese RPG
Platform: PS2
Developer: Gust

I don't remember where I first heard of Atelier Iris. I only remember that I did, in fact, hear of it somewhere, somewhen, and looked it up on Gamespot, my default info source even though its reviews rarely reflect my own opinions. I remember seeing that it got a 7.2 review, which generally means to me "You will like this far more than the pretentious non-gamers at Gamespot." I remember reading about its bright and pretty 2D sprite graphics, its simple-yet-interesting battle system, its somewhat disjointed story, more silly than serious, and decided "I will buy this game and I will love this game."

Well, I was right. On both counts, interestingly enough.

After months of saying, I moved to doing and bought the game in early January so that Magus and I might play it during Wintereenmas. We put it into the PS2 a couple of weeks early and almost immediately became terribly addicted. The game's narrative begins (and stays, for a considerable length of time) a loosely joined series of quests that eventually find a common thread and complete a larger whole. The episodic nature hardly detracted, as this is a game that doesn't take itself too seriously.

The story doesn't stray too far from standard, light-hearted fantasy. It starts with a young alchemist, Klein Keisling, wandering into the town of Kavoc and meeting a feisty young girl named Lita Blanchemont. They decide to become Galgazits, freelance wanderers who hunt monsters, and shack up above the local bar. They soon meet the other main characters, including Norn, the annoying-but-powerful catgirl, and Delsus, the beer-swilling pervert with a heart of gold. They embark upon a quest that will lead them to Avenberry, an ancient fallen city of alchemy, and (of course) to save the world.

The dialogue is often funny, and sometimes utterly hilarious, and the voicework is generally spectacular. Stars of anime abound, including Wendee Lee (Fae in Cowboy Bebop), Stephen J. Blum (Bebop, Samurai Champloo, and my favorite of all time, GTO), and Crispin Freeman (Alucard in the sweetness that is Hellsing) as the totally-awesome Delsus. For you pretentious whining otaku-types, there's also the option to listen to the original Japanese dialogue.

What makes the game completely addicting is twofold. First is its lighthearted nature. The story itself is not really funny, but the characters and their interactions are. Their world is filled with strangeness and absurdities, from Beggur, the worthless commander of the nearly worthless Alcavana Knights, who constantly try to arrest Klein because he won't join them, to the Puni God, a giant blue slime-creature into which you must venture during a particular quest segment. Even serious situations are often turned on their heads by a quip from Delsus or a fight between Lita and Klein. This comes as a welcome respite from the all-too-serious plots of most modern Japanese RPGs. The story is also simple in nature, which is also a relief after years of plot-twisting, make-no-sense tripe that is supposed to be "deep."

The other reason it is immediately addicting is the gameplay. The battle system is deceptively simple. It's old-school turn based, and the numbers are low. As an example, our level 35-or-so characters have around 200HP at most. At first you think it's just tit-for-tat attacks back and forth, but the game's skill system soon puts an end to that. Each character gains three skill points a level which can be apportioned into any of ten skills that are unlocked as the character progresses. Later on, when you gain the ability to equip characters with mana, the game's resident elemental spirits, it gets even better. The mana also help in mana item synthesis, the crux of Klein's character, which allows you to destroy most any item in the game world for the raw Elements to build items with various powers.

There's also a deep and awesome item synthesis system at stores, wherein you find the ingredients for a given recipe and combine them to create new items that then get sold at the store. Different combinations change the quality and even the type of item, so experimentation is necessary and often hilarious, as it can lead to short story snippets. Create quality items, and the store's reputation will go up. Don't even get me started on the weapon synthesis system, the out-of-battle abilities gifted by certain mana, the hundreds of various types of items, and more. This is one game that doesn't fill your roster of shit to do quickly; new stuff is constantly cropping up as the gameplay grows and evolves. This is one game that keeps on giving.

The grapics are cartoony and 2D and beautiful, and they fit the game perfectly. Anything else would have felt wrong. The music is often reminiscent of Yasunori Mitsuda's work in Chrono Trigger. Some of the tracks feel so much like Zeal or the Millenial Fair that I'd be tempted to call them rip-offs if they weren't so good in their own right. There are a ton of sidequests that flesh out its small-but-sweet world and all the great, fairly rounded characters therein. The boss fights, always important to me, are almost uniformly challenging but not too difficult; they require a level of strategy above the average battle and may take a try or two, but only one so far has made us froth violently.

I can't go on enough about this game. In a few short weeks it's gone up into my top 5 games of all time list. It's fun and funny, simple but deep, challenging but not hard (in the sense of pointlessly, artificially hard), and a joy to play almost every minute. We found ourselves spending hours just making new items at the bar, seeing what would happen next. The story of the magic shop girl is especially interesting, and her rivalry with Lita for the affections of the oblivious Klein is hilarious but touching in a strange way.

Buy this game. Do it for the good of the world, so that good old-fashioned Japanese RPGs do not perish from this Earth. Stem the tide of half-crocked, pseudo-sci-fi, poorly constructed, unintelligible nonsense the genre has been so full of in the decade since Final Fantasy VII. Love this game. Cherish it. Play it.

End Transmission.

Welcome!

2007-02-02T05:01:00.000-05:00

Dear all,

I have started this blog as a repository for my many, many thoughts on video games. You will be privy to many, but not all of them, should you choose to read my drivel. For slightly more important blogging, you may opt to read my other blog, Action Skeptics, linked at right.

The impetus for this came last week during Wintereenmas, when Magus (my sometime blog-mate at Action Skeptics) and I were in the midst of our annual WEmas play-through of Chrono Trigger. I realized that we say many funny and interesting things about games, and I might do well to write them down.

Of course, what is funny and interesting to me is not guaranteed to be to you. I just hope it offers at least a short diversion from work or school. At most, I hope you enjoy my musings as much as I do.

That's it for today. Tomorrow I'll begin with the first of my weekly Sunday posts called "Game of the Week," where I go on about whatever game I'm digging on this week.

Cheers.