I may have mentioned before that I enjoy Borderlands 2. I may have mentioned something along the lines of being a little addicted to Borderlands 2. You probably don't get the scale to which I threw myself into this game. It's so bad I'm embarrassed* to talk about it. Really, I shouldn't even be admitting to it. Am I creating strong enough picture? No?
Right. I got sooooo into this game that I spent three fucking weeks looking for the rarest weapon in the game. I found the bloody thing and then Gearbox did their Loot Hunt** month and for a glorious day one boss enemy dropped the weapon one hundred percent of the time, and now I have a bunch of them.
This doesn't even cover the HUNDREDS of hours looking for other slightly less rare, but still hard to obtain weapons. I give one word to people who might know: Norfleet. I'll now give you two words: fucking Norfleet.
Anyway. Now that I've given you some idea the extent to which I let this game take over my life, I'm going to go through a few things about the game since it's coming to the end of it's very long cycle†. Is it a review, is it an overview, is it me taking an opportunity to whine about things I don't like about the game? Who can say? I present this little essay and I'll let you, demented reader, make up your own confused, confused mind.
I'm pretty heavily into the game is what I'm trying to get across to you.
Let's start with what Gearbox got right with Borderlands 2, shall we? From the outset it's a pretty game. The overexposed opening reminds those of us who played the first game just how unforgiving the planet of Pandora is. Each of the playable characters is distinct and quirky, as you would expect from a game as quirky as this. Once you're knee-deep in the game you're presented with bleak environments and amusing new enemies in wonderful cel-shaded-fi. Lovely.
We also get to meet the two characters that eased us into the first game: Angel and Claptrap. There are too many spoilers when it comes to Angel, so let's not bother with her. Claptrap, I perversely find a lot more likeable than in the first game. I know he's supposed to be a really irritating character and he was much more annoying in the first game. In Borderlands 2 he's just kind of tragic and everyone hates him, even though he turns out to be incredibly useful. Maybe it's my sympathy for the underdog, dunno.
The story is coherent, which is always a plus in an FPS. I'm staring directly at you COD. It doesn't suffer being lost quite as much as in the first game, though there's so many side quests to do, there's still that drift and you can sense it on the periphery of you consciousness. But there are so many amusing asides and so much funny dialogue, you don't actually notice too much and by the time you might be in a position to notice, you're too busy killing baddies to really care. Which, mostly, is the point of a game like this.
That brings us to the extra content. So much of it. A good lot of it I haven't indulged in because it's in the form of skins and heads. I mean they're cheap and all, but I can't get terribly excited enough to fork over the money to buy them. It's a clever way to grab a few extra quid without people feeling like they're being squeezed, even though they are a little bit, not a full squeeze of the testicles‡ just a little pull of the sac.
What I have paid for are the DLC campaign add-ons , and largely I've been happy with what I've handed money over for. You get a few extra hours of gameplay for about eight quid. Can't complain even when they don't quite measure up to the main quest, though I was very pleased with the Tiny Tina DLC, which was huge for an add-on. And then there are the other bits, like the extra characters, level upgrades and the Head Hunter packs. That adds up to a lot of extra stuff. And we consumers do like our extra stuff, unless it's hot coffee in the crotch, we're not so keen on that.
The whole package is crammed full of references. Brimming over, dammit. I like me a good old reference, and this kept me amused, I'll tell you. There were so many references I didn't even know them all – not that I'm some kind of pop culture guru, it's just amazing the breadth of things they pulled in. There's even one I'm sure no one's copped to and that's from the Torgue DLC with one of the gangs called the Burners, looking very similar to a faction in the game Rage called the Scorchers, even having a thing about bikes. Am I seeing things? Hmmm.
There is a lot to like in this game. Perhaps not enough to take it to the insane extremes I've gone to in playing it, but a fun game all the same.
Of course, it isn't all good. I wouldn't have written this if it were a fannish look at what makes it work. You're not getting off that lightly, oh no. I have things I want to say and I want to suggest. As if anyone from Gearbox is going to read this. Just like Dean Koontz is never even going to be aware of my open letter. It's all just honking in the dark.
I'll not bother with bugs and glitches and things, because you could write a book about them. Borderlands 2 isn't quite as bug-ridden as, say, Fallout: New Vegas, but it has its fair share.
What I am going to say, is repeat what a guy who goes by the Youtube user name Morningafterkill observed about Gearbox's handling of the game: they don't seem to know how to handle it. The first Borderlands felt slight and experimental and it almost feels like they were throwing stuff at to see what worked. This extends into the DLCs for the first game which were kind of messy and, in the case of the Mad Moxxi DLC, was just badly put together. Yes they hit the right notes with some parts of campaign add-ons, but you could feel they were kind of winging it. For all that Gearbox addressed a lot things to improve the experience of Borderlands 2, there's the niggling feeling of not being sure what to do with it.
Sure their blogs make it seem like they have everything well in hand, but when you look at certain things, you start to see cracks. It was most illustrated for me when someone on their forum asked a question about one of the big mechanics of the game and the developer who answered essentially explained the point of the mechanic and then said it wasn't desirable§. Bit of an odd thing to do when you should be in control of the game. Their last couple of non-Borderlands games have been embarrassing failures and it makes you wonder how good they are at producing games.
Even the Loot Hunt event had shades of this. Actually, more than shades. Huge big signs, telling us, "WE DON'T HAVE A FUCKING CLUE!" The first part of giving players the opportunity to find some rare items, yeah I can get behind that. It was a fantastic idea. Gets the interest again. But the added stuff, like buffing the game's weapons went a little awry. There were a handful of weapons that got good upgrades and then the rest just got tweaks, like the weapons known for having huge magazines getting an extra one ammo. One, in weapons that carry hundreds. A lack of awareness there, Gearbox. Lots of people were disappointed by that, but what was most disappointing was the inability for international players to help out with the targets. It was made clear from the start we couldn't get the prizes and no one was surprised, but when we couldn't even help out in the US players reach the goals, it felt a bit like the company couldn't give a shit about their overseas players. This might not be the case, but you feel that twinge, like non-US players aren't important. WE'RE PEOPLE TOO! And if it wasn't apathy, it gives even more this impression of not knowing their market reach. A tad strange, don't ya feel?
For the record the Loot Hunt is a great idea and wouldn't go amiss being part of the ongoing promotion of a third Borderlands game, and not just for other corporate sponsorship. Something other than the golden keys. Keep interest and maintain a cool connection with the fanbase, doing these events one weekend a month or something. See, I'm still trying to be positive in this sea of criticism.
They added a third playthrough to the game. It was designed to be very tough. The main problem you see with it, is it kinda broke the game. It's actually incredibly difficult to progress in this playthrough without specific weaponry, even with multiple players. In a game of 'a bazillion guns' it's a little strange you find only about a dozen weapons make doing it feasible§§. How much thought did they put into this mode that wrecks the notion of customisable characters? Probably not quite as much as they should have, as they added in regeneration to enemies that negates another major mechanic. I can't say that was well-thought out. It's one of the things the first game got right. You could go through any mode with gear that wasn't the rarest and have a good time making it through, even when it was quite challenging.
Then there's the tendency to aim to be annoying and frustrating with game mechanics. Yeah, they actually want to frustrate their player base with enemies. What the fuck? Going out of their way to make something so annoying it will make people rage-quit? Is that really a desirable goal for a game? I don't want to play a game to be frustrated and angered§§§. I want to have fun on a game for a few hours, not have the creators yank my fucking chain.
The rarities of equipment is all fucked up. It shouldn't take days or weeks to get certain weapons, no matter how good they are. Fighting a tough enemy for hours or one that has a fight time that's tediously strung out shouldn't yield rubbish and fucking consolation items. It's not rewarding. At the moment I'm trying to get weapons that only drop from enemies that only occasionally occur. Someone quoted these weapons have a drop rate of one-in-thirty. I started counting and as of writing this blog I've fought ninety of these enemies and not a one of these weapons has appeared, and some people have talked about fighting one or two hundred of these guys and only got one or two weapons. And remember these are rare enemies already! If you're going to have these things in the game give a fucking decent chance of a drop§§§§, because the enemy's rarity is going go on top of the item's rarity. I'm not some fancy mathematician, but even I can see that. It's clear most gamers aren't even going to encounter them, as they play through the game once and move on, such deeply buried items seem pointless, don't you think?
Players want to feel rewarded. It's something that Minecraft – a game Gearbox admire so much they have an entire section pay homage to it, including fighting enemies from Minecraft – understands all too well and though you can spend a long time doing something it never feels frustrating. Yes, Borderlands 2 is a very different game and that's my point, it's a fast-paced shooter that's repetitive enough with three playthroughs available, adding in sections that need to be done over and over and over and over and over and over§§§§§ for the item an enemy is supposed to drop takes away from that. S'not rewarding. Players want rewards not grinding chores. The slavish adherence to the RNG in the inevitable sequel§§§§§§ has to go and with it the mindless 'random is random' mantra.
And finally, probably more personal to me, but I've seen a few grumblings about it: ditch the fucking raid bosses. This convention of MMOs isn't required in a game like this and it feels like giving the single player or people playing splitscreen at a home a raw deal. I've told you my feelings on forcing people to play online – I'll give a hint: I don't think it's good. That's only part of it. Super powerful, can take a ridiculous amount of damage and, the cardinal sin, most possess unfair attacks you can't defend against marks all of these enemies. It doesn't fit in with the rhythm of the Borderlands games and, again, feel desperate, like Gearbox don't know what the hell's going on.
There you go, the good and the bad of a game I've spent far too long playing. There's more to love and more to get annoyed about, but I've rambled enough. Don't you people ever sleep!
* And mortifying. Don't forget mortifying.
** I think some people were pissed off that the super-rare weapon they'd spent ages looking for was now very easy to get a hold of. I thought it was only fair of Gearbox.
† By the time the final DLC comes out Gearbox will have been supporting the game for eighteen months. Quite amazing for an FPS when most other companies give up on a title after a year. Unless it's Insomniac games with Resistance 3 and they walked away after about months, the fucking wimps.
‡ Or ovaries. Whichever, it all adds up to the same.
§ I would link it, but I don't have time to dig through the forum to find the thread.
§§ Although the minority of really good players will claim this is nonsense. They're talking out of their arse.
§§§ It will likely happen anyway, but that's not the point. The creators of the game baiting the player that way is trollish to me.
§§§§ Yes, yes, they drop other rare items, but only at the top mode and the rare items aren't that good and, again feel like patronising consolation prizes. I don't want to be patronised any more than I want to be frustrated, man.
§§§§§ ...over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...
§§§§§§ Because it will happen. They made too much money on it and had too many high-profile fuck-ups to not support the Borderlands universe with a second sequel.
Will
Showing posts with label consoles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consoles. Show all posts
Wednesday, 12 March 2014
Wednesday, 12 February 2014
The Modding World
I’m no fancy coder. In fact I’m no kind of coder at all. I can fiddle about a bit with very basic HTML, but otherwise I’m completely clueless when it comes to making things happen with computer code. I tried to learn a bit as a kid, but it turned into a dizzying swirl of things that didn’t make a whole lot of sense and the can-can music started playing in my head. This is BASIC we’re talking about here, the same language we were forced to use in computer studies, so you can imagine the miserable, though musical, time I had of that particular class. As much as I tried, I couldn’t work out how to get the damn thing to work – and I so wanted to know how it worked. This was the first suspicion I got that I’m a bit on the dumb side.
Still, even now, as a sophisticated* – but still dumb-ish – adult, there’s something fascinating to me about the whole coding side of gaming. It fills me with wonder that they can put together strings of gibberish which coalesce in the characters and worlds floating around on your screen – often trying to kill you. It’s something I’ve always found sort of arcane. I just can’t get my brain around the whole business at all; to the point where I’m almost Rain Man-style punching myself in the head. Nyaaaaaaaa!
Even more fascinating to me are those folk who crack open games and fiddle about with their innards, like mad Roswell autopsy doctors, rearranging and replacing the quivering innards of the game to come up with something different. Not always better, mind you, just different. I’m fascinated by this world, mainly because I don’t have access to it. I just hear things about it on the internet wind, whispered by those in the know or all-capsed by crazies who insist it’s all just the Illuminati desperate for new thong underwear**.
Modding isn’t a new phenomenon (and neither are crazies blurting about why their underwear disappears into their rectums) the early days of home micros had plenty of modding. To be honest if it weren’t for modders, if what I’m led to believe is correct (I refer you to my statement about dumbness above), a lot of games on the Spectrum and the Commodore 64 wouldn’t exist. There were also those who came up with ‘pokes’, the quaint term (and, let’s not kid ourselves, hilariously dirty) for creating strings of code that by-passed the games’ functions to make them easier – you know, a cheat: infinite lives, infinite time, invulnerability or infinite ammo. They were great, when they worked. About ninety-five percent of the time you sat through the loading of your prospective game only to discover the pokes mangled a bit too much and it crashed or, even more infuriating, the game loaded fine, just as if it was running normally, which you soon realised it was. Someone, somewhere was cackling ‘Suckers’ to themselves. Oh, yes, I know their game. Bastards.
Whether the game worked or not, wasn’t the point, the fact was there were industrious folks out there breaking open the code of games, prodding around inside and making changes. Now you have guys prising up the hood of a game engine and tweaking it in different ways. They’re adding their own signature to the game, and going to great lengths to do so.
There are even those who improve games. Our old, buggy friends Bethesda have benefited greatly from those industrious little modders. These guys have swooped in and covered over the cracks in games like Fallout 3 and the Elder Scrolls games after the company has left the games alone.
How great would it be to have that kind of resource on the consoles? And by that I mean the PS3, of course. If I had an XBox 360† I’d talk a lot about that too, but I don’t, so I won’t. We’ve kinda been left with still-broken forms of the above-mentioned games. Imagine if Sony allowed players to get in and faf around with the code of certain games? What wonders we could behold! A game of Fallout: New Vegas that doesn’t have a fucking seizure when you go to too many settlements. How great would that be?
Of course there would be the other side of the equation: nasty little creeps messing with the code and creating malware. As it is we already occasionally get that with the PS3, like the evening I was playing Modern Warfare 2 online and suddenly the game seemed to decide that psilocybin mushrooms would be good in an omelette. No harm was done to the system, but it did kind of break my game when I was getting millions of XP for kills. I couldn’t really look at Modern Warfare 2 in the eye again after that, like I’d seen it get into a car for money.
We’re never going to see the wonder of modded games (outside of the very limited ways some games will allow) on the PS3, but a man can speculate on the world that could be.
* Okay, I can’t help but laugh at that either. Me, sophisticated, the very idea.
** Fine, it's hyperbole for comic effect, so sue me.
† Or them thar new-fangled PS4s and XBox Ones.
Will
Still, even now, as a sophisticated* – but still dumb-ish – adult, there’s something fascinating to me about the whole coding side of gaming. It fills me with wonder that they can put together strings of gibberish which coalesce in the characters and worlds floating around on your screen – often trying to kill you. It’s something I’ve always found sort of arcane. I just can’t get my brain around the whole business at all; to the point where I’m almost Rain Man-style punching myself in the head. Nyaaaaaaaa!
Even more fascinating to me are those folk who crack open games and fiddle about with their innards, like mad Roswell autopsy doctors, rearranging and replacing the quivering innards of the game to come up with something different. Not always better, mind you, just different. I’m fascinated by this world, mainly because I don’t have access to it. I just hear things about it on the internet wind, whispered by those in the know or all-capsed by crazies who insist it’s all just the Illuminati desperate for new thong underwear**.
Modding isn’t a new phenomenon (and neither are crazies blurting about why their underwear disappears into their rectums) the early days of home micros had plenty of modding. To be honest if it weren’t for modders, if what I’m led to believe is correct (I refer you to my statement about dumbness above), a lot of games on the Spectrum and the Commodore 64 wouldn’t exist. There were also those who came up with ‘pokes’, the quaint term (and, let’s not kid ourselves, hilariously dirty) for creating strings of code that by-passed the games’ functions to make them easier – you know, a cheat: infinite lives, infinite time, invulnerability or infinite ammo. They were great, when they worked. About ninety-five percent of the time you sat through the loading of your prospective game only to discover the pokes mangled a bit too much and it crashed or, even more infuriating, the game loaded fine, just as if it was running normally, which you soon realised it was. Someone, somewhere was cackling ‘Suckers’ to themselves. Oh, yes, I know their game. Bastards.
Whether the game worked or not, wasn’t the point, the fact was there were industrious folks out there breaking open the code of games, prodding around inside and making changes. Now you have guys prising up the hood of a game engine and tweaking it in different ways. They’re adding their own signature to the game, and going to great lengths to do so.
There are even those who improve games. Our old, buggy friends Bethesda have benefited greatly from those industrious little modders. These guys have swooped in and covered over the cracks in games like Fallout 3 and the Elder Scrolls games after the company has left the games alone.
How great would it be to have that kind of resource on the consoles? And by that I mean the PS3, of course. If I had an XBox 360† I’d talk a lot about that too, but I don’t, so I won’t. We’ve kinda been left with still-broken forms of the above-mentioned games. Imagine if Sony allowed players to get in and faf around with the code of certain games? What wonders we could behold! A game of Fallout: New Vegas that doesn’t have a fucking seizure when you go to too many settlements. How great would that be?
Of course there would be the other side of the equation: nasty little creeps messing with the code and creating malware. As it is we already occasionally get that with the PS3, like the evening I was playing Modern Warfare 2 online and suddenly the game seemed to decide that psilocybin mushrooms would be good in an omelette. No harm was done to the system, but it did kind of break my game when I was getting millions of XP for kills. I couldn’t really look at Modern Warfare 2 in the eye again after that, like I’d seen it get into a car for money.
We’re never going to see the wonder of modded games (outside of the very limited ways some games will allow) on the PS3, but a man can speculate on the world that could be.
* Okay, I can’t help but laugh at that either. Me, sophisticated, the very idea.
** Fine, it's hyperbole for comic effect, so sue me.
† Or them thar new-fangled PS4s and XBox Ones.
Will
Wednesday, 5 February 2014
Does the Future Count?
Note: This was written in and refers to 2012, so just fucking go along with it, eh?
Legacy. It’s a word, in this year of the Olympics, we here in the UK have been hit over the head with at almost every opportunity. Turn on the television and WHACK! we’re treated to a face full of legacy-mania. It really makes a guy long for the good old days of nostalgia. Where before it was, “Wasn’t it great when…” now it’s, “We need to preserve…” and, “What will this say about us…?” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, apart from the vague future fatigue it brings on.
Though not enough fatigue to stop me thinking about what the current crop of games will be leaving behind for future generations. I mean, I know lots of games have opened up innovative new ways of doing things, leaps forward in graphical capability, wonderful ways of pushing systems to new heights, storytelling that’s never been seen before and interesting, compelling game mechanics. All that stuff’s a given. We’ve gone through some of the biggest changes in computer gaming in the last ten years; that means the influence of games designers and programmers will be felt for several decades to come. That’s all just dandy, but not what I’m talking about – I’m talking about the games themselves.
You’ll have got it into your head by now that I’m some sort of retro gaming nut. I’m not really. I remember some games from my youth (and a little beyond) with great fondness and would love to play them again, but it’s not a carpet love of the past. I’m not one of those weird people who loved (and still love) Manic Miner. I’d heard this game hyped for years when I was a kid. When I finally played it I wondered if the whole world of Spectrum journalists were in on a big prank at my expense. It was terrible in the way that only Spectrum games of that era could be: bright, noisy, stupid and ridiculously hard. There was one of those shaking my fist in anger at the world moments. And, almost thirty years later, who plays Manic Miner? No one, that’s who. I’d bet even the people who claim to have an almost inappropriate love for the game don’t even play it. Or they’re simply crazy people*.
There are, of course older games that I still play, but not many of them are from those far off days of the eighties. Sure, I’ll fiddle about with Chaos if I find it, but so many of the games are so bad, fair poorly against games even a decade older or are simply broken. It’s interesting to discover that when a game won’t work almost instantaneously, it’s just as frustrating as the first time you tried it and, after five minutes of squeaking and wheezing from the tape, you find yourself horrified to be stuck on the loading screen. Sometimes we grow in the wrong ways, I suppose, but I like to at least have a chance of being disappointed by a game. Ah the disappointments: games that promised to be something other than what they were (Blade Warrior by Codemasters still infuriates me to this day, there were no damned blades!) or were missing important and advertised features (like the game in which you were one of two rival wizards looking for spell ingredients without the ability to use the ingredients! now there’s game design for you**). You might offer the excuse that it was a simpler time of experimentation. I think it’s because the eighties were inherently bonkers and a tiny bit slipshod.
Some console games have fared better; Super Mario Bros is a good example, Legend of Zelda and Metroid, but they’re rarefied. They still have life because they were created as franchises that still allow life to flow into characters that would have shrivelled away to nothing (and that’s not even mentioning the fact that they worked). It’s amazing SMB survived the awful Bob Hoskins film – that’s how hardcore the franchise is. You don’t have people picking up the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game or Fester’s Quest, do you?
Of course there are loads of games from the nineties that still have followings. The Final Fantasy games from then are still well-loved and often played. I have Resident Evil sitting on my PS3 hard drive, waiting to release the power of dreadful voice acting on me in a wave of nostalgia-repulsion. I’m fairly sure there are myriad N64s, SNESes and Megadrives, held together with duct tape and Blutack, weeping to be put out of their misery and playing one more game of Star Fox, Super Street Fighter 2 or Sonic the Hedgehog. From the nineties I can feel the love.
This brings me to now, right this second†. Who will be playing the games of the moment in ten, twenty years time? Which games from now-times will people be playing?
Halo and Call of Duty will still be about, but will many people be playing Modern Warfare or Halo 3? Certainly the online play option, sitting as a sad remnant of a glorious time of shooting some stranger halfway around the world, will go unused. Or worse the mad purists who want the unfettered experience of an earlier time will haunt ancient levels murdering the final remnants of the original game’s fanbase like an online version of Highlander that will never end…‡
Games that try to force online and community play will suffer, no doubt. A prime example of this is Little Big Planet. Try playing an online cooperative game of the first one now, go on. All you’ll find are the mad and the terminally annoying. It’s a game that tells you everyone’s supposed to be working together and having fun, but that feels like someone forcing a laugh at a terrible joke made by the boss who’s one bourbon away from sacking a whole department. It’s a game that’s amusing as a platformer for while and it’s supposed to come alive when more people play. What it really makes you want to do is smash your console to bits with your own spleen because the twitchy loons who’ve hooked up with you can’t stop themselves from slapping you. Imagine what the online community’s going to be like in a few years time – a gulag in January would be more fun.
There are scores of games that will last and last thanks to the future iterations of XBox Live and Playstation Store. I’m sure as the years and generations of consoles pile up, so will the games of yesteryear, scrambling for the attention of the game-playing public, hoping beyond fevered hope they won’t get forgotten and lost in the mix. I’m sure publishers will be thinking the very same thing. Will we see a second remake of the Monkey Island games? Are they working on them right now to be encoded right into your brain in 2069? Could be, although I actually hope they’re not, it’s a creepy thought.
We’re in the middle of a golden era for computer games. It just remains to be seen which games from now will carry on into the future and whether they’ll be truly representative of the gaming times in which we live. Then again there’s always the chance tastes will take a huge leap into unexpected territory and everyone in the future will be into games all about sweeping driveways and everything from now will be abandoned, leaving future games columnists to lambast us people from the twenty-tens as a bunch of mental cases who wasted their time on games with action and story. I already hate those future people.
* Okay, I’ll admit I’ve heard of some people who play, but I can’t help thinking, “For fuck’s sake why?”
** I don’t remember the name of this game, and if someone could supply the name I’d be most appreciative.
† Or over a year ago. You know, whatever your level of pedantry.
‡ At least until the someone notices the lecky bill and pulls the plugs on the servers.
Will
Legacy. It’s a word, in this year of the Olympics, we here in the UK have been hit over the head with at almost every opportunity. Turn on the television and WHACK! we’re treated to a face full of legacy-mania. It really makes a guy long for the good old days of nostalgia. Where before it was, “Wasn’t it great when…” now it’s, “We need to preserve…” and, “What will this say about us…?” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, apart from the vague future fatigue it brings on.
Though not enough fatigue to stop me thinking about what the current crop of games will be leaving behind for future generations. I mean, I know lots of games have opened up innovative new ways of doing things, leaps forward in graphical capability, wonderful ways of pushing systems to new heights, storytelling that’s never been seen before and interesting, compelling game mechanics. All that stuff’s a given. We’ve gone through some of the biggest changes in computer gaming in the last ten years; that means the influence of games designers and programmers will be felt for several decades to come. That’s all just dandy, but not what I’m talking about – I’m talking about the games themselves.
You’ll have got it into your head by now that I’m some sort of retro gaming nut. I’m not really. I remember some games from my youth (and a little beyond) with great fondness and would love to play them again, but it’s not a carpet love of the past. I’m not one of those weird people who loved (and still love) Manic Miner. I’d heard this game hyped for years when I was a kid. When I finally played it I wondered if the whole world of Spectrum journalists were in on a big prank at my expense. It was terrible in the way that only Spectrum games of that era could be: bright, noisy, stupid and ridiculously hard. There was one of those shaking my fist in anger at the world moments. And, almost thirty years later, who plays Manic Miner? No one, that’s who. I’d bet even the people who claim to have an almost inappropriate love for the game don’t even play it. Or they’re simply crazy people*.
There are, of course older games that I still play, but not many of them are from those far off days of the eighties. Sure, I’ll fiddle about with Chaos if I find it, but so many of the games are so bad, fair poorly against games even a decade older or are simply broken. It’s interesting to discover that when a game won’t work almost instantaneously, it’s just as frustrating as the first time you tried it and, after five minutes of squeaking and wheezing from the tape, you find yourself horrified to be stuck on the loading screen. Sometimes we grow in the wrong ways, I suppose, but I like to at least have a chance of being disappointed by a game. Ah the disappointments: games that promised to be something other than what they were (Blade Warrior by Codemasters still infuriates me to this day, there were no damned blades!) or were missing important and advertised features (like the game in which you were one of two rival wizards looking for spell ingredients without the ability to use the ingredients! now there’s game design for you**). You might offer the excuse that it was a simpler time of experimentation. I think it’s because the eighties were inherently bonkers and a tiny bit slipshod.
Some console games have fared better; Super Mario Bros is a good example, Legend of Zelda and Metroid, but they’re rarefied. They still have life because they were created as franchises that still allow life to flow into characters that would have shrivelled away to nothing (and that’s not even mentioning the fact that they worked). It’s amazing SMB survived the awful Bob Hoskins film – that’s how hardcore the franchise is. You don’t have people picking up the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game or Fester’s Quest, do you?
Of course there are loads of games from the nineties that still have followings. The Final Fantasy games from then are still well-loved and often played. I have Resident Evil sitting on my PS3 hard drive, waiting to release the power of dreadful voice acting on me in a wave of nostalgia-repulsion. I’m fairly sure there are myriad N64s, SNESes and Megadrives, held together with duct tape and Blutack, weeping to be put out of their misery and playing one more game of Star Fox, Super Street Fighter 2 or Sonic the Hedgehog. From the nineties I can feel the love.
This brings me to now, right this second†. Who will be playing the games of the moment in ten, twenty years time? Which games from now-times will people be playing?
Halo and Call of Duty will still be about, but will many people be playing Modern Warfare or Halo 3? Certainly the online play option, sitting as a sad remnant of a glorious time of shooting some stranger halfway around the world, will go unused. Or worse the mad purists who want the unfettered experience of an earlier time will haunt ancient levels murdering the final remnants of the original game’s fanbase like an online version of Highlander that will never end…‡
Games that try to force online and community play will suffer, no doubt. A prime example of this is Little Big Planet. Try playing an online cooperative game of the first one now, go on. All you’ll find are the mad and the terminally annoying. It’s a game that tells you everyone’s supposed to be working together and having fun, but that feels like someone forcing a laugh at a terrible joke made by the boss who’s one bourbon away from sacking a whole department. It’s a game that’s amusing as a platformer for while and it’s supposed to come alive when more people play. What it really makes you want to do is smash your console to bits with your own spleen because the twitchy loons who’ve hooked up with you can’t stop themselves from slapping you. Imagine what the online community’s going to be like in a few years time – a gulag in January would be more fun.
There are scores of games that will last and last thanks to the future iterations of XBox Live and Playstation Store. I’m sure as the years and generations of consoles pile up, so will the games of yesteryear, scrambling for the attention of the game-playing public, hoping beyond fevered hope they won’t get forgotten and lost in the mix. I’m sure publishers will be thinking the very same thing. Will we see a second remake of the Monkey Island games? Are they working on them right now to be encoded right into your brain in 2069? Could be, although I actually hope they’re not, it’s a creepy thought.
We’re in the middle of a golden era for computer games. It just remains to be seen which games from now will carry on into the future and whether they’ll be truly representative of the gaming times in which we live. Then again there’s always the chance tastes will take a huge leap into unexpected territory and everyone in the future will be into games all about sweeping driveways and everything from now will be abandoned, leaving future games columnists to lambast us people from the twenty-tens as a bunch of mental cases who wasted their time on games with action and story. I already hate those future people.
* Okay, I’ll admit I’ve heard of some people who play, but I can’t help thinking, “For fuck’s sake why?”
** I don’t remember the name of this game, and if someone could supply the name I’d be most appreciative.
† Or over a year ago. You know, whatever your level of pedantry.
‡ At least until the someone notices the lecky bill and pulls the plugs on the servers.
Will
Wednesday, 29 January 2014
The Wii U: A Step Too Far?
Note: This article was written over a year ago, just before the Wii U skulked into the marketplace. Y’know, just so you don’t think I’ve gone fucking doolally, but I think a lot of what I’m saying still stands.
Do you hear that distant rumble? Already the plates in the cupboard are starting to rattle under the constant vibration. Can you discern the sound like millions of coin slots working in unison, putting money into the hands of tame journalists? And I know you can hear the voice with the abysmal, borderline offensive Italian accent slowly repeating, “Buy-a me, buy-a me,” over and over again.
This lumbering behemoth, my friends, isn’t the product of screen induced dementia on my part – it’s the monstrous Nintendo PR machine for the Wii U stomping across the landscape with its dozens of compound eyes fixed on your wallet. Probably squishing a load of civilians in the process. A couple of bloody feet on the stomping hype beast don’t matter as long as the company can turn a profit.
Yes, that’s right. As you’re probably aware the people at Nintendo are well into the inexorable process of pushing their latest console into your consciousness. Some of you might even find the whole thing as uncomfortable as I’ve described it and some of you might be as excited as puppies who’ve managed to eat a bag of coffee. No one who has any interest at all in gaming is going to be unaware of this product. Ads and features will soon rain down on your poor beleaguered gamer’s head in the coming weeks. Here’s a fun quiz: who will be the most inappropriate person will Nintendo approach to endorse it? I’m going to say Stephen King or Richard Dawkins. Or a hologram of Steve Jobs*.
I’m not a Nintendo denigrator, in fact I’ve owned and enjoyed a few Nintendo consoles over the years, going back to the good old NES, but there’s something off about the Wii U. I’m not the only one to notice it, either. There are a few people looking askance at this new bit of hardware and wondering just what Nintendo are playing at.
Innovation is something that Nintendo have always been pretty good at. The NES gave us the small and easy to use game pads as standard to replace Atari’s bulky joysticks. The Gameboy opened up a whole new world in which to annoy people on the train or bus and the potential to crash a whole plane – how cool. The Wii broke through and really pulled in the whole family to play games and to get fit and wreck your television. What we got were fairly chunky bits of innovation, but delivered in an accessible way.
With the Wii U’s blocky tablet-like controller (called the GamePad, with a depressing level of mundanity and grandiosity) we have something that they’re telling us, fix-grinned and sweating, is a whole new way of playing games. You can look at inventories and stuff on the small screen, while you play on the big screen! Solve puzzles while in mortal danger! Do stuff that we hope developers will work out for us!
It all sounds a bit duff. The GamePad screen sounds to me like a distraction. Nintendo looked at the success of the DS and thought they could scale it up. A neat idea, but one that falls down if you think about it in any sensible way. With the DS you have your two screens one on top of the other, about a finger width apart and you can take in the information from both with a minimum of fuss. What the Wii U invites is whiplash. You could describe the distance between the GamePad and your TV as fingerwidth if you were talking about the finger of the god-like ‘It’s you!’ being from the early days of the UK’s National Lottery. Otherwise what you have is an annoying device that calls for your attention while you’re doing something on your eighty-four inch LCD TV.
Speaking of which, what if someone else has the audacity to watch something on your titanic screened television? Don’t worry, you can play your Wii U game just on the GamePad’s screen. That doesn’t defeat the purpose of having the huge screen with super HD at all, does it? All those pretty graphics squished down to coloured blobs on the screen that’s one hundred times smaller than the one they’re supposed to be viewed on, that won’t suck any of the fun out of games, no sir. What about those features that you need to look at your GamePad screen to use? Will you need an even smaller screen to get the full effect or will it – gasp! – do what every other game does and either have an HUD or get you to pause the game? Wouldn’t that kind of go against the effect they’re going for?
It’s not all bad, they’re keeping the system backwards compatible with the Wii controller. Which is a smart move. By all accounts the old Wii players will get to play with much prettier games since the Wii U makes the Wii look like one of those watch calculators by comparison. But will that be enough to give the Wii U an edge?
The last console I saw with anything like the screen on the controller was the ill-fated Dreamcast with its visual memory units. These VMUs had a tiny screen on them, something that would even make a Tamagotchi feel cramped, and the worst battery life imaginable. Six months was all you got out of them, then you have to scuttle off to get two (yes two) expensive new batteries for it. And you could count on one hand the number of developers who incorporated the tech into their games. The highest profile of the adopters was Sonic Adventure with the frustrating and weedy Chau subgames. There’s the feeling the GamePad screen will be left behind like the quiet kid on the school trip, lonely and forgotten and a bit dusty.
The problem is, of course, that gamers don’t really want extraneous stuff cluttering up their gaming experience. An extra little screen for widgets and whatnots will only annoy gamers. Some even see through the ruses the screen is there to create, like on quite high-profile game ZombiU. The oft-seen clip is of the player typing in a code for an in-game number pad on the GamePad while onscreen a zombie shuffles up wanting to gurgle sweet nothings in the player’s ear while chowing on their virtual brains. This doesn’t even look fun. It would be fun in a film or television programme, but all you risk with this is endless game-ending and players who throw their hands up and stop playing. Somehow I don’t think that’s what Nintendo is aiming for.
The GamePad is an interesting idea, I won’t argue that point at all. It’s just not a great idea. Nintendo’s best ideas are great and technically pretty out there, but they manage to make them accessible. The GamePad has every possibility of closing off that accessibility. Then again I could be proven wrong and it will go onto roaring success, I just hope I don’t get trampled by the roaring PR beast as passes through for questioning Nintendo’s wisdom**.
* Thus far, over a year later, they haven’t been going for celebrity endorsements. They’ve been pretty low-key generally about the Wii U.
** And it turns out people are starting to think Nintendo are fucking bonkers and self destructive. Feel that, it’s my sense of swelling vindication. Stay calm, don’t struggle.
Will
Do you hear that distant rumble? Already the plates in the cupboard are starting to rattle under the constant vibration. Can you discern the sound like millions of coin slots working in unison, putting money into the hands of tame journalists? And I know you can hear the voice with the abysmal, borderline offensive Italian accent slowly repeating, “Buy-a me, buy-a me,” over and over again.
This lumbering behemoth, my friends, isn’t the product of screen induced dementia on my part – it’s the monstrous Nintendo PR machine for the Wii U stomping across the landscape with its dozens of compound eyes fixed on your wallet. Probably squishing a load of civilians in the process. A couple of bloody feet on the stomping hype beast don’t matter as long as the company can turn a profit.
Yes, that’s right. As you’re probably aware the people at Nintendo are well into the inexorable process of pushing their latest console into your consciousness. Some of you might even find the whole thing as uncomfortable as I’ve described it and some of you might be as excited as puppies who’ve managed to eat a bag of coffee. No one who has any interest at all in gaming is going to be unaware of this product. Ads and features will soon rain down on your poor beleaguered gamer’s head in the coming weeks. Here’s a fun quiz: who will be the most inappropriate person will Nintendo approach to endorse it? I’m going to say Stephen King or Richard Dawkins. Or a hologram of Steve Jobs*.
I’m not a Nintendo denigrator, in fact I’ve owned and enjoyed a few Nintendo consoles over the years, going back to the good old NES, but there’s something off about the Wii U. I’m not the only one to notice it, either. There are a few people looking askance at this new bit of hardware and wondering just what Nintendo are playing at.
Innovation is something that Nintendo have always been pretty good at. The NES gave us the small and easy to use game pads as standard to replace Atari’s bulky joysticks. The Gameboy opened up a whole new world in which to annoy people on the train or bus and the potential to crash a whole plane – how cool. The Wii broke through and really pulled in the whole family to play games and to get fit and wreck your television. What we got were fairly chunky bits of innovation, but delivered in an accessible way.
With the Wii U’s blocky tablet-like controller (called the GamePad, with a depressing level of mundanity and grandiosity) we have something that they’re telling us, fix-grinned and sweating, is a whole new way of playing games. You can look at inventories and stuff on the small screen, while you play on the big screen! Solve puzzles while in mortal danger! Do stuff that we hope developers will work out for us!
It all sounds a bit duff. The GamePad screen sounds to me like a distraction. Nintendo looked at the success of the DS and thought they could scale it up. A neat idea, but one that falls down if you think about it in any sensible way. With the DS you have your two screens one on top of the other, about a finger width apart and you can take in the information from both with a minimum of fuss. What the Wii U invites is whiplash. You could describe the distance between the GamePad and your TV as fingerwidth if you were talking about the finger of the god-like ‘It’s you!’ being from the early days of the UK’s National Lottery. Otherwise what you have is an annoying device that calls for your attention while you’re doing something on your eighty-four inch LCD TV.
Speaking of which, what if someone else has the audacity to watch something on your titanic screened television? Don’t worry, you can play your Wii U game just on the GamePad’s screen. That doesn’t defeat the purpose of having the huge screen with super HD at all, does it? All those pretty graphics squished down to coloured blobs on the screen that’s one hundred times smaller than the one they’re supposed to be viewed on, that won’t suck any of the fun out of games, no sir. What about those features that you need to look at your GamePad screen to use? Will you need an even smaller screen to get the full effect or will it – gasp! – do what every other game does and either have an HUD or get you to pause the game? Wouldn’t that kind of go against the effect they’re going for?
It’s not all bad, they’re keeping the system backwards compatible with the Wii controller. Which is a smart move. By all accounts the old Wii players will get to play with much prettier games since the Wii U makes the Wii look like one of those watch calculators by comparison. But will that be enough to give the Wii U an edge?
The last console I saw with anything like the screen on the controller was the ill-fated Dreamcast with its visual memory units. These VMUs had a tiny screen on them, something that would even make a Tamagotchi feel cramped, and the worst battery life imaginable. Six months was all you got out of them, then you have to scuttle off to get two (yes two) expensive new batteries for it. And you could count on one hand the number of developers who incorporated the tech into their games. The highest profile of the adopters was Sonic Adventure with the frustrating and weedy Chau subgames. There’s the feeling the GamePad screen will be left behind like the quiet kid on the school trip, lonely and forgotten and a bit dusty.
The problem is, of course, that gamers don’t really want extraneous stuff cluttering up their gaming experience. An extra little screen for widgets and whatnots will only annoy gamers. Some even see through the ruses the screen is there to create, like on quite high-profile game ZombiU. The oft-seen clip is of the player typing in a code for an in-game number pad on the GamePad while onscreen a zombie shuffles up wanting to gurgle sweet nothings in the player’s ear while chowing on their virtual brains. This doesn’t even look fun. It would be fun in a film or television programme, but all you risk with this is endless game-ending and players who throw their hands up and stop playing. Somehow I don’t think that’s what Nintendo is aiming for.
The GamePad is an interesting idea, I won’t argue that point at all. It’s just not a great idea. Nintendo’s best ideas are great and technically pretty out there, but they manage to make them accessible. The GamePad has every possibility of closing off that accessibility. Then again I could be proven wrong and it will go onto roaring success, I just hope I don’t get trampled by the roaring PR beast as passes through for questioning Nintendo’s wisdom**.
* Thus far, over a year later, they haven’t been going for celebrity endorsements. They’ve been pretty low-key generally about the Wii U.
** And it turns out people are starting to think Nintendo are fucking bonkers and self destructive. Feel that, it’s my sense of swelling vindication. Stay calm, don’t struggle.
Will
Wednesday, 15 January 2014
So, Your Favourite Feature's Gone...
There are some ways in which I envy developers: the money, the fame, the adulation. Mostly the money, though. However having the power to create worlds in which players can get lost for hours is a tempting prospect. Being a writer affords you a little of that, but there’s something mesmerising about how a good game can worm its way into your mind and you find yourself thinking about it at odd times*. A funeral somewhere has to have been inappropriately interrupted by some derp shouting, “Shit! That’s how you kill Crawmerax!”
Developers hold the keys to our gaming experience. You can see them as benevolent overlords, handing out nuggets of golden gameplay to while away your hours, with a beatific smile and generosity of heart. Or you can see them as cackling bastards, sitting atop their piles of shimmering experiences, demanding body parts for the privilege of just a few moments of rapturous joy and then peeing on our shoes and asking for a kidney when we want to extend the game**.
Whatever your view of developers, they are the ones who control the content of the games that we see on the shelves. If they so chose they could fill their game chock-full of whoopee cushions that every time you did anything in the game you made a fart noise. Actually, I think I’ve just created gaming perfection, go me! Just imagine it: the climactic fight between you and the Great Murder Soul Hellstomper and with every move the hilarious sound of a violent evacuation of gas from the backside. Thinking about it, it might be a bit crap.
We have to believe that the people who put together the games we buy have the best interests of enjoyment at heart (you know, outside of the fame and money) – though sometimes it’s hard to see it that way. When the developers look at a mechanic or option they have to make a decision about whether it’s right for the enjoyment and feel of the game. They are human and sometimes they make mistakes, after all there are lots of considerations to putting together a game, even with armies of people working on it, but they also quite often, through study and experience, get the decision right on the button, and we as gamers do a little happy dance – well I do anyway, don’t you judge me. Then there are the other times, the instances where you look at the choice that’s been made and you think, “Someone should have sobered up before they stuck that in.”
This is more of a problem, I suspect in sport simulation games. I read about people muttering about the loss of a mechanic from FIFA 12 or the latest Need for Speed. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, since sports games aren’t really my bag. Football’s never been of much interest to me and driving just bores the hell out of me – except maybe Chase HQ, I was crap at it, but it was fun. Having said that these games aren’t the only ones to suffer or gain from feature shuffling.
Games franchises where the basic gameplay elements never really change can live or die on what’s added and what’s subtracted. Up to a point for a lot of games it’s mostly about what’s added that makes them better and better games. Take Assassin’s Creed as an example. The first game in that franchise was okay, for about half an hour, and then the boredom set in. And what boredom it was. The same pattern of climb, do viewpoint then go to a dull mission, repeat. In Assassin’s Creed II (along with Brotherhood and Revelations) the addition of more flavourful and enjoyable missions made for a more interesting game. Yes, they maintained the same basic gameplay, but it was made more fun with the variety of what you got to do with the character. For me they did go a step too far in a desperate attempt to cash-in on the multiplayer market, but I seem to be the only one in the world who thinks multiplayer Brotherhood and Revelations are both as much fun to play as cornering a rabid rat.
Features are, of course, a hotly contested element of the super-money-spinning industry of FPS, whose multiplayer elements bring out some of the best and worst of the feature shuffle. You can see that these guys watch each other very closely and, quite often, you can see that they’re gleefully lifting ideas from their contemporaries. It sort of looks like they’re walking up to each other in the street, saying hello and then taking that packet of M&Ms right from the other’s pocket and grabbing a handful. That kind of handsiness makes me worry about ever meeting them – it could get awkward.
Arguably the most controversial feature in the recent Call of Duty games has to be the ‘quick scoping’ ability. This, for anyone who doesn’t know, is something that apparently predates Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but these games have run with it. In a nutshell it’s the ability for snipers to run around and shoot people at close range with a minimum of aiming. Since most sniper rifles in the Modern Warfare games are one-hit kills, you can see that some people can get a bit frustrated with it. I have to admit, it frustrates me too, even more so when I experimented and discovered how easy it is – I got a lot of kills and I’m a middling player at best. As you can imagine there are a lot of people who detest this feature’s very existence. So, when Call of Duty: Black Ops came out Treyarch decided to ditch the ability. Can you guess what happened next? Yes, in a fit of ‘oh dear, human nature’ there was an outcry; a huge vocal group started angrily asking what happened to their favourite annoying feature. And, like that, in Modern Warfare 3 quick scoping was back to test just how far a game can increase my blood pressure.
And then there are the baffling omissions. As annoying and unfair as quick scoping can be you can understand why it was put back in place. Insomniac Games, going a little crazy, did something that almost beggars belief. In Resistance 2, a game that a lot of people were lukewarm about, there was included a multiplayer co-operative mode. This was a huge amount of fun, if a tiny bit repetitive, with groups of players working together to complete missions of varying difficulty. It included three classes that could, in fine RPG style, be boosted the more you played. I sure, correct me if I’m wrong, this game managed to boost the life of a game that otherwise would have disappeared into dim memory by perhaps a year. I waited in patient hope when Resistance 3 was announced to see if they would update and expand this mode. When I got my copy and discovered there wasn’t anything like it available on the disc, there was a tear in my eye. Yes, they vastly improved the single-player experience, but they gave us a clunky and buggy multiplayer that was like everything else out there – don’t even get me started on the disheartening swarm mode, blech. Discovering, the other week, that Insomniac Games were finished with the Resistance universe I fell to my knees and bellowed at the heavens. They’ve moved on to the Ratchet and Clank games leaving no possibility of replicating that wonderful gaming experience from Resistance 2†.
Developing games is clearly a juggling act, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, why don’t you take to the comments and give an airing to the game features that you love, lament, mourn the passing of or would happily dance the grave of?
* Fuck that was prophetic, considering what I did last year.
** Or they’re a bit trollish and like to take this piss and frustrate players. They still giggle like the nasty cunts they are.
† Turns out Insomniac yoinked it for Fuse and kinda screwed up the experience by making it a deeply mediocre game.
Will
Developers hold the keys to our gaming experience. You can see them as benevolent overlords, handing out nuggets of golden gameplay to while away your hours, with a beatific smile and generosity of heart. Or you can see them as cackling bastards, sitting atop their piles of shimmering experiences, demanding body parts for the privilege of just a few moments of rapturous joy and then peeing on our shoes and asking for a kidney when we want to extend the game**.
Whatever your view of developers, they are the ones who control the content of the games that we see on the shelves. If they so chose they could fill their game chock-full of whoopee cushions that every time you did anything in the game you made a fart noise. Actually, I think I’ve just created gaming perfection, go me! Just imagine it: the climactic fight between you and the Great Murder Soul Hellstomper and with every move the hilarious sound of a violent evacuation of gas from the backside. Thinking about it, it might be a bit crap.
We have to believe that the people who put together the games we buy have the best interests of enjoyment at heart (you know, outside of the fame and money) – though sometimes it’s hard to see it that way. When the developers look at a mechanic or option they have to make a decision about whether it’s right for the enjoyment and feel of the game. They are human and sometimes they make mistakes, after all there are lots of considerations to putting together a game, even with armies of people working on it, but they also quite often, through study and experience, get the decision right on the button, and we as gamers do a little happy dance – well I do anyway, don’t you judge me. Then there are the other times, the instances where you look at the choice that’s been made and you think, “Someone should have sobered up before they stuck that in.”
This is more of a problem, I suspect in sport simulation games. I read about people muttering about the loss of a mechanic from FIFA 12 or the latest Need for Speed. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, since sports games aren’t really my bag. Football’s never been of much interest to me and driving just bores the hell out of me – except maybe Chase HQ, I was crap at it, but it was fun. Having said that these games aren’t the only ones to suffer or gain from feature shuffling.
Games franchises where the basic gameplay elements never really change can live or die on what’s added and what’s subtracted. Up to a point for a lot of games it’s mostly about what’s added that makes them better and better games. Take Assassin’s Creed as an example. The first game in that franchise was okay, for about half an hour, and then the boredom set in. And what boredom it was. The same pattern of climb, do viewpoint then go to a dull mission, repeat. In Assassin’s Creed II (along with Brotherhood and Revelations) the addition of more flavourful and enjoyable missions made for a more interesting game. Yes, they maintained the same basic gameplay, but it was made more fun with the variety of what you got to do with the character. For me they did go a step too far in a desperate attempt to cash-in on the multiplayer market, but I seem to be the only one in the world who thinks multiplayer Brotherhood and Revelations are both as much fun to play as cornering a rabid rat.
Features are, of course, a hotly contested element of the super-money-spinning industry of FPS, whose multiplayer elements bring out some of the best and worst of the feature shuffle. You can see that these guys watch each other very closely and, quite often, you can see that they’re gleefully lifting ideas from their contemporaries. It sort of looks like they’re walking up to each other in the street, saying hello and then taking that packet of M&Ms right from the other’s pocket and grabbing a handful. That kind of handsiness makes me worry about ever meeting them – it could get awkward.
Arguably the most controversial feature in the recent Call of Duty games has to be the ‘quick scoping’ ability. This, for anyone who doesn’t know, is something that apparently predates Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but these games have run with it. In a nutshell it’s the ability for snipers to run around and shoot people at close range with a minimum of aiming. Since most sniper rifles in the Modern Warfare games are one-hit kills, you can see that some people can get a bit frustrated with it. I have to admit, it frustrates me too, even more so when I experimented and discovered how easy it is – I got a lot of kills and I’m a middling player at best. As you can imagine there are a lot of people who detest this feature’s very existence. So, when Call of Duty: Black Ops came out Treyarch decided to ditch the ability. Can you guess what happened next? Yes, in a fit of ‘oh dear, human nature’ there was an outcry; a huge vocal group started angrily asking what happened to their favourite annoying feature. And, like that, in Modern Warfare 3 quick scoping was back to test just how far a game can increase my blood pressure.
And then there are the baffling omissions. As annoying and unfair as quick scoping can be you can understand why it was put back in place. Insomniac Games, going a little crazy, did something that almost beggars belief. In Resistance 2, a game that a lot of people were lukewarm about, there was included a multiplayer co-operative mode. This was a huge amount of fun, if a tiny bit repetitive, with groups of players working together to complete missions of varying difficulty. It included three classes that could, in fine RPG style, be boosted the more you played. I sure, correct me if I’m wrong, this game managed to boost the life of a game that otherwise would have disappeared into dim memory by perhaps a year. I waited in patient hope when Resistance 3 was announced to see if they would update and expand this mode. When I got my copy and discovered there wasn’t anything like it available on the disc, there was a tear in my eye. Yes, they vastly improved the single-player experience, but they gave us a clunky and buggy multiplayer that was like everything else out there – don’t even get me started on the disheartening swarm mode, blech. Discovering, the other week, that Insomniac Games were finished with the Resistance universe I fell to my knees and bellowed at the heavens. They’ve moved on to the Ratchet and Clank games leaving no possibility of replicating that wonderful gaming experience from Resistance 2†.
Developing games is clearly a juggling act, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, why don’t you take to the comments and give an airing to the game features that you love, lament, mourn the passing of or would happily dance the grave of?
* Fuck that was prophetic, considering what I did last year.
** Or they’re a bit trollish and like to take this piss and frustrate players. They still giggle like the nasty cunts they are.
† Turns out Insomniac yoinked it for Fuse and kinda screwed up the experience by making it a deeply mediocre game.
Will
Friday, 10 January 2014
Retro Money's Still Money, Boys.
I own a
PS3. Nothing remarkable there – that’s
me and about sixty-four million other people, then. When I’m not being terrible on some online
game or another, I like to go browsing through the Playstation Store. Like most people I do a little rooting around
for new DLC and perhaps some new game that might be good to have a look
at. This can make my poor hard drive
unhappy and my struggling bank account look nervous. Seriously, my bank account is a worried
entity, constantly sweating and sending me pathetically worded letters pleading
for me to stop spending money.
Much of the
time I don’t buy anything, but come away with some ideas for games I might want
to buy in the future and be awful at.
Sometimes, though, I feel a tiny bit disappointed. I get the feeling that there are games that
should be in the Playstation Store, but don’t make an appearance for one reason
or another. Old games. Though, not that old – my first computer was
a ZX Spectrum +2 and just about any game I might want from that era is easy to
get through emulators and such. The old
games I’m talking about are ones that I played on the PS One and Saturn back in
the heady days when I wasn’t crippled by poverty.
They do
have some PS One (and PS2) games in the store and my wife was very pleased to
get a hold of Theme Hospital a while back.
She got hours of fun out of that; it was great. Something bugged me, though. I’ve got Resident Evil: The Director’s Cut,
though it seems that the Saturn version of the game has been expunged from the
history books. There were lots of titles
that maybe should have been present, but there was no sign of them. Like someone had been blindfolded, spun
around in a room full of game titles and those they stumbled on were the games
chosen for the store.
I remember
getting quite excited when I saw that Golden Axe was available for purchase and
then almost cry-vomited when I discovered it was the crummy Mega Drive
version. I wanted the arcade version I
remember sucking my ten pences up like some kind of ten pence devourer when I
was ten or eleven or twelve! What’s
wrong with that? Why can’t we get
similar stuff to what’s on XBox Live Arcade, I cried through the few, errant,
chunks of eye-corn. I haven’t bought Golden
Axe, but I still felt cheated. How dare
they stop me in the desperate and intricate attempt to recreate my
childhood? No, I’m not going to buy an
XBox for that one thing, didn’t you read the first paragraph – I’m poor; it’s a
fucking miracle I have a PS3.
There’s no
R-Type, either. A game I possessed on
the Spectrum and then, some years later, when I had a PS One for a short
time. I’m not very good at it, but it’s
a fun little shooter and can whittle a few minutes of boredom. And it’s not an unpopular game. There are screeds of fond gamer memories
about the little blue starfighter that could.
Yet it’s not there. Sure, there
could be rights problems, but given the money Sony could make by making the game
available that’s something that could be recouped.
Then
there’s the little game, Dark Cloud, that I spent too many hours playing in
even more recent times. I don’t think it
would kill them to give this an airing on Playstation Store. If only just to salve my hurting nostalgia
bone.
A game that
might be less likely to turn up is Exhumed, an FPS in which you’re pitted
against aliens that formed the basis of ancient Egyptian mythology. There was a PS One version of this and I’m
sure it would be seen as a retro treat.
Though, I have to admit, I had the Saturn version of the game that was
considered far superior. What do you
reckon the chances are of that one appearing on Sony’s shop front? A clue: non-existent. That’s one I imagine trying to overcome
licensing wrangles wouldn’t be worth the effort. It’s nice to dream though.
And, really
that’s all this is, in the end, dream upon dream. There is money to be made in dusting down
these retro gems and many more on top of that, but it’s whether Sony, or anyone
else thinks the reward is enough that will determine if they are unearthed
again.
Wednesday, 23 May 2012
Sore wrists, swollen thumbs.
Yep, I'm back for a ramble, deal with it.
I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry. Let's throw that one out there. I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot. As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.
What I do have is a long history with computer games. I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted*. I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer. Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play **.
Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time. Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other. It was a golden, very pale time.
The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC. All dependent on money and my interest. Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life. At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend. Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!
My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games. After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.
It happens. Although I've felt it more with modern games. Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in. These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off." These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game. And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).
I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three. It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure. This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years. And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game. Pretty cool.
And I want in on that, man.
Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game. A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game. One can always hope, though.
* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers. Screw that shit. The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.
** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was. Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded. And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too. I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised". Gaaaah!
Will
I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry. Let's throw that one out there. I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot. As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.
What I do have is a long history with computer games. I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted*. I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer. Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play **.
Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time. Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other. It was a golden, very pale time.
The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC. All dependent on money and my interest. Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life. At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend. Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!
My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games. After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.
It happens. Although I've felt it more with modern games. Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in. These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off." These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game. And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).
I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three. It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure. This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years. And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game. Pretty cool.
And I want in on that, man.
Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game. A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game. One can always hope, though.
* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers. Screw that shit. The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.
** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was. Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded. And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too. I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised". Gaaaah!
Will
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)