Category Archives: Games

MetaCritic

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BioShock Infinite is out, after what seems like 20 years of dev time.  It also seems to have universal acclaim.  The interesting part about that link is that it’s not a review but Metacritic’s assembly of reviews.  I have issues (still do) with Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes and a pile of aggregate sites.  Their definition of “Critic Reviews” can be, enlightening.  IGN might show up 3 times, one for the US, one UK and one for the Aussies.  I can’t fault the site for having reviews a week before a game launches, though in the recent SimCity debacle you have to wonder when there’s a 30 point spread between the average, top and bottom scores.

Yet here we are at BioShock Infinite, scoring a whopping 96 with 40 reviews already in.  I can say I have more faith in these reviews because the game experience is the same offline or on – you know, since there’s no online.  Still, when you look at the list of all-time best PC games, it comes 5th.  I have played nearly every game that’s scored a 90, so time will tell if it does merit the score.  Even more so if it beats out the first game, which was a masterful story with solid mechanics.

Another side comment – the game is available on Steam for 60$.  I can’t remember the last time I paid 60$ for a game on Steam but in this particular case, I couldn’t really come up with a good enough reason not to give them my money.  Years of work, apparently a kick ass game – why not?

These past month has probably been the best in recent memory for games. Scratch one though.

Riccitiello is Gone

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So the web is aflutter with news that John Riccitiello, the CEO of EA, has left the company after 6 years in the big chair.  Since that time, EA’s stock started at 52$, rose to a high of 62$ in 2007, took a massive nosedive at the end of 2008 to 17$(due in large part to the economy), and has fluctuated since then between 17-20$.

EA and I have had a falling out.  That isn’t to say that I don’t respect and appreciate what they’ve done in the past.  They were the first company where I could be sure all their games were quality (back in the 90s). EA has had ups and downs over the years.  They are responsible for Rock Band, Crysis, Mass Effect and Dragon Age.  They’ve produced innovative games from time to time (Mirror’s Edge) and bled franchises dry (the Sims).  They’ve treated their employees poorly and yet stood up for equal rights in the political sphere.  They’ve implemented some of the worst DRM on the planet (Ubisoft comes first) which has led to some of the most prolific pirating ever seen (Spore is the #1 pirated game apparently).  Dante’s Inferno marketing had fake protesters and one of the most insane ploys ever created (remember the naughty pictures they wanted?).

While this certainly isn’t the end of EA, make no mistake, this is a massive change in management.  Like the doctors before him, John was shown the door after a very disappointing release.  I have no worries that he’ll find somewhere else to work and at the same time, I’m really hoping the next CEO of EA manages to remember that in order to make a profit for shareholders, you need to make games people actually can and want to play.

More Grimrock

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If you haven’t already, you should pick up Legend of Grimrock.  It’s an amazing indie game that captures the dungeon crawl feeling.  My only issue with it was the level cap and that you were sort of forced down a single skill path because of it (especially for rogues).

In the fall the devs released a toolkit to allow players to build their own dungeon sets.  Well, an enterprising group managed to re-create the entire main quest line and add piles of tweaks to the journey.  Master Quest allow you to level up to 30+, gives items more worth, a slightly different layout and replayability.

Considering you can get the game for 10$, which is less than the price of most DLC today, you’d be doing yourself a favor giving it a shot.  I know I’m going for another few runs through!

The Wonders

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So we’re about into week 2 of SimCity, a game I haven’t played but feel like I have.  The stories coming out are pointing more and more towards Accident-Lawyer on the truthiness scale.

Recently we learned that “offline mode” is more than feasible from the same guy that was able to mod away regional boundaries (make the map bigger essentially).  The servers apparently are only used for resource relay from nearby regions and to save your game.  Given that resources in regions only update if there’s an ACTIVE player in those regions, when you’re playing  private region, it never updates.  This means that the “cloud” does one thing and one thing only for single-player online games, it saves.  And does a poor job at it too, since you can’t access your saves from a different server.  Not too cloud-like to me!

Today we find out that the game has a line of code to disconnect you after 20 minutes of no-interweb.  Code it out, and you can play offline as much as you want, you just can’t save.  Seems rather DRM-ish to me.

All this while, the Maxis boss has been claiming the cloud off-loads computation.  Mind you, they’ve now opened the can of worms by alluding to the game as an MMO.  You know, an MMO where you actively play with other people and don’t have any single player options?

It just seems unfortunate that a series with as much history as SimCity would want to go down this path.  Are there still pirates?  Yes, and I would bet dollars to donuts there are more pirates that don’t want to play your game than do.  I also bet that online stores without DRM would have sold you more copies.  There are simply too many DRM alternatives out there to go down this ridiculous route.  It’s 2013, we can do better.

There Be Finger Pointing

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finger pointing

When SimCity first released, those people who did publish official reviews clearly had reviewed a demo copy.  Eurogamer Sweden published a 100% rating on the 4th, when the servers were taking a pretty large poop and a true play test of the multiplayer portions had not really begun.  A few days after launch, the metacritic score was around 85.  Now it’s 67.  Let’s not even discuss the user score.

I know that most publishers tie a revenue bonus or tier percentage on returns based on the metacritic score.  This can clearly be gamed if the review sample is small, such as what happened with Fallout: New Vegas, where a single % cut off all bonuses for what was arguably one of the best games that year.

Now let it be clear that I like Maxis.   They’ve made some pretty amazing games over the years, one of which I’m pretty sure is still the all-time best selling game (The Sims).  Darkspore, to me, was their first toe step into the multiplayer arena.  Again, the reception for that game was mediocre.  Given that, it’s hard to imagine that it was EA that was pushing the muliplayer aspect of SimCity and that a portion of the blame of what was delivered sits squarely in their lap.

So here we are, 1 week after launch and the game 10 years in the making is most definitely going to cost EA a few million in lost sales, Maxis any possible bonus and likely quite a few people their jobs.  It’s a business after all and one with next to no tolerance for failure.  I do feel bad when people lose their jobs, but at the same time, you can look at SimCity and see nearly everything wrong with games today:

… in one package, that’s Sim City 5. To wit:

– Overpromise
– Underdeliver (bordering on flat out fraud)
– We still buy a lacking product

Aging Gamers

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First, the gushiness, I have two adorable children.  If you’re a parent, you have the same problem I do.  Children make you feel old and out of touch, like you’re 2 steps behind the pack.  It’s an effort to be at the same pace they are since every generation moves at a quicker pace than the last.  Which brings me to this post which has been simmering in the back of my mind for some time now.

In general, the blogging generation is older.  Few people take the time to sit down and write something down that has more than 140 characters or isn’t a cut and paste from somewhere else.  I tell people I write a blog and most think that’s quaint, as if I was writing an op-ed piece in the newspaper (which is my reaction to those who do just that).  Being older brings with it a sense of nostalgia and entitlement.  Things were better back then and gosh darn it, I put in my time and I deserve something better.  You know why they don’t make cars with carburetors anymore?  EFI is better.  It’s the same reason that you need to be 40+ to own any car with a carb, today’s generation simply never knew it existed.

Gaming isn’t much different.  There are quite a few blogs out there that mourn the loss of gaming of old and put out such amazing pieces of hyperbole that you’d think Chicken Little was at the keyboard.  While I appreciate dissenting views, sometimes you just have to shake your head and wonder what planet these people are on.  Torchlight 2, Borderlands 2, Ni No Kuni and Tomb Raider are recent examples of near perfect gaming, each embodying a particular facet of their genre and shining it to golden luster.  The difference is that these games aren’t designed for us (the older folk), they are designed for the core gaming audience, the low to mid 20s.  They might have features we like but their targets are much different.

Ni No Kuni is a great example.  This is Pokémon meets JRPG/FF13 combat, with a sprinkle of Tales story telling.  The individual elements are all fairly recent, the cutesy characters aren’t meant for realism but the whole of the game, the final package, is just pure fun.

MMOs aren’t much different.  For the vast majority of MMO players, their first game was World of Warcraft.  UO, EQ, DAOC, AC – it all means bunk to them.  Bygones of a forgotten era.  Heck, I played AD&D for years before version 3 came out.  By the time 4 came out, no one really remembered what THAC0 meant anymore.  MMOs today are simply not designed for the people who played those first games.  The originals were not built on gameplay, they were built on social structures for people who had 4-6 hours to invest in one session.  You’re kidding yourself if you think there is an infinite pool of those types of players.  They are all already playing some game and invested in it.  You think Blood Legion (a hardcore WoW raiding guild) has the time to play another MMO for 30 hours a week?  You think they are going to drop years of investment in a game for another one with 10% of the content?

Today’s gaming generation plays short sessions with quick rewards.  Their lives move at an incredible pace and they have other things to do.  They certainly won’t sit for 4 hours a night in front of a computer and wipe continuously on a boss for 2 weeks.  I daresay they aren’t the crazy ones.  I certainly don’t have the time to commit to that with kids in the house.  I barely have time to commit to one 2 hour session a week, especially if it’s in my own house.

As aging gamers, perhaps it’s just time to take a backseat to the sky-is-falling attitudes and simply enjoy the fun games that we do get to play.  There are plenty of them out there and I bet for most of us, we don’t even have time to play half of them.

Tomb Raider

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Hard to believe it’s been 17 years but I played the original Tomb Raider back in the day and aside from being impressed with the fact that Lara has amazing back muscles to keep her from falling forward with that weight up front, I was relatively pleased with her first few outings.  Then the franchise doldrums hit and hit hard.  Single player rehashes are hard sells.  Mutliplayer ones are simply exercises in peer pressure.  When the 2nd Lara Croft film hit the cinema, you could see the bottom of the pit the franchise was in.

Fast forward to today and the reboot of the franchise is a welcome sight.  This is one of those games where the Croft name is more important than Lara, as for all intents this could be Lara’s daughter running around instead of the original one.  Gone are the linear tombs with massive puzzles and repeated deaths.  Welcome are the relatively open zones with succinct puzzles whose solutions are within eyesight.  I remember some of the nasty puzzles in the past that had you moving for what seemed like 5 minutes, into some sort of Rube-Goldberg machine and then die at the end from a missed jump.  Today’s game has less instant death and more “think it out” and act.  A bit like the Assassin’s Creed 2 tombs I guess, but smaller in size.

I play on the PC, which apparently at the lowest setting still gives better performance and art than any console.  I can play moderately well at Ultra and it seems more like a movie than a game.  The sound is amazing, I find myself shouting in surprise at events where guys jump out of nowhere and the scenery is simply the best of this generation.  When you do play it, and you will, take the time to look around on the Radio Tower.  Jeebus.

Tomb Raider

Everyone and their kid is talking about how the bow is awesome.  I am here to tell you they are correct.  Sure, you will use it to shoot people in the head but you can shoot them in the arm, the belly or the leg for various effects.  You can shoot ropes to slide around.  You can shoot walls to make distractions and shoot lamps to start fires.  Shooting from a dark corner, sniping 2 or 3 enemies before they realize what’s going on is amazing.  Shooting a flaming arrow into a gas pocket and knocking 6 of them down in a single attack, amazing.  The bow is practically perfectly implemented.

While the story isn’t something amazing, the progress of Lara’s character is.  Small and timid, injured without end, she continuously, if reluctantly, surmounts every challenge in her path.  Often times I found myself at the edge of my seat, wondering what was going to happen next.  I think the one facet that makes her relate-able to the masses is that anyone can see themselves in her shoes and acting in the same way.  This isn’t some episode of Lost where you’re screaming at the TV “Don’t go in there stupid!”.  Each and every action and reaction is similar if not identical to the one you’re having while playing.  Quite an accomplishment.

Tomb Raider is a must buy.

SimCrappy

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To the surprise of no one, SimCity launched and then fell flat for many players.  Either failed downloads, failed connections, server queues or just plain old bugs, many people were unable to play the recent installment in the classic series.

While I think the concepts behind the game are pretty cool, I do have reservations on a few items:

  • It requires Origin to play, no matter where you buy it.  I have a dislike for Origin for many reasons, the least of which is their EULA and shoddy customer service.
  • It’s from EA, a company who is charging players for a priority queue to play the game.  Now that’s brass balls folks.
  • The city size is 80-90% smaller than in previous versions.  Hitting 500K population is an achievement.
  • Due to the former, cities must work together in a region to support each other.  Cool concept until one of those cities decides to stop playing and you suddenly lose all your power.
  • You can “finish” your city relatively quickly, in a few hours.  Past Sim games took quite a while to reach a prosperous city.  To me, this is going to hurt the longevity of the game as once you’re at maximum capacity, every corner is filled and you know a change in direction (say from Power to Knowledge) would destroy your region, why bother?
  • Always on DRM.  If Diablo 3 taught me anything, it’s that always on DRM for a single player game is one of the stupidest things ever seen.  If it’s single player, I want to be able to play offline for when I don’t have the internet.  That’s why I have a laptop.

It just seems like a wasted effort on a game that had a lot of potential.  I am hoping that EA and other companies learn from this and find some middle ground between letting players actually play the game and securing their games (like a once every 2 week ping to the server).

March Madness

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March is going to be one heck of a month for gaming.  I can’t remember the last time there was so much coming at us the same time.  It will be interesting to see how this month profits for companies and perhaps we’ll see a 2 month year stem from it (the other being November).

Tomb Raider is out this week and is getting some very nice buzz.  I’ve been a fan of the series for many years and thought the puzzle element was always the best part.  Uncharted does the story/movie aspect a lot better.  Apparently this new one is meant to provide both and it looks like I’ll be getting it on Steam shortly.

Sim City is back, though the focus this time is on single cities rather than large metropolises.  Sadly, it’s an EA distributed game, and my wallet says I won’t be buying it.  Mind you, this is the first game where I thought of changing that principle, in over a year.  Says something about EA…

Bioshock: Infinite is out too and by George, that series has a stranglehold on philosophy in gaming.  While there are balance issues with the game, the story portion and pacing is the bar others try to replicate.  Fingers crossed it does a good job with the idea of freedom vs. religion.  All signs point to yes.

The next installation of the Starcraft 2 trilogy is out.  I played the crap out of the original Starcraft and Broodwar.  Starcraft 2 was essentially a new coat of paint and having it split in 3 never sat well with me.  Has a great following and will be interesting to see how Blizzard includes micro-transactions into it.  I do remember them saying they wanted to MOBA it a bit more.

Gears of War and God of War are out too.  Both have protagonists I can’t stand and acted more like tech demos than actual stories you cared about.  They are console exclusives too, and bets are on to say GoW sells better.

Now That’s a Game

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I was able to finish Ni No Kuni yesterday.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the game is a more modern take on the traditional JRPG.  I can honestly say I haven’t had that much fun playing one since Final Fantasy X in 2001.  I played FFX from start to finish at least 20 times since I bought it and I think Ni No Kuni is going to be in that list for a long time too.

There are 2 items that defined a JRPG – the leveling aspect (or need to grind I guess) and the crazy stories.  If you follow all the side quests in NNK, you’re still going to be under-leveled for the rest of the content.  If you actively hunt to find more familiars (of which there are over 400) to fill out your party, then ya, you would have a better chance.  Having  1-3 more levels makes a world of difference, where the stats of a character have a major impact.  Or, you can hunt Tokos, who give piles of experience, are rare and run away as soon as you see them.  The hardest of them all gave my team 2 levels per kill, even at level 70.

The story part of JRPGs is the stuff of legend.  Final Fantasy usually sets the bar on linear for 75%, then the last 25% is over the top.  FFX made sense until you fought Sin, for example.  Well NNK isn’t a whole lot different.  The boss you thought was the end was only 80% of the game.  You get to fight the “god” of the world and that’s a heck of a fight.  The final boss was a real challenge and when it was all over, you really feel like the book is complete.

For the other items that make the game, balance is great, tons of side quests, lots of charm, amazing music and a fairly open world after the first 20%.  The art though, that’s the kicker.  Amazing.  This is a must play.

Great Art

Ni No Kuni