2008 Retrospective

2008 is more or less over in the video game world. Anything new that gets released at this point can’t expect much attention. All the blockbusters have dropped in time for the holiday season; the final point of punctuation being the new Prince of Persia, which from what I read is great as a comfortable timewaster but if you enjoy any sort of a challenge you will hate it. Anyway, it feels like a good time to take a look back on what I played and of that group which I loved and which I didn’t.

As one quick note before we get going: I have an Xbox 360 I play every day and a Nintendo Wii that (like everyone else) I haven’t turned on in months.

Best 360 Retail Game: Gears of War 2

What’s the best part of this game? Cover system? Brutal weaponry? Chunks of flesh and splattered blood? I think all of those things are great little bonuses but what makes the game really incredible is the way it’s redefined the shooter. Gears somehow slows the pace of the game while making it feel more frantic. It’s not a run and gun like halo or most other shooters. It forces you to execute flawlessly while taking your time and constantly reevaluating your position. It eliminates the all too common cycle of spawn > get as many kills as you can before you die > die > repeat. If you die in gears you’re out until the end of the round with the rest of the other poosies, and who want’s to be there?

B3RG Runner-Up: Dead Space

It’s easy to define what made Dead Space the kick ass game it is. One thing: atmosphere. First of all, they set you in the scariest place possible, the middle of outer space on a busted ship with no communication. You are completely and utterly alone. Then they get rid of the HUD, add a bunch of ambient noise, do an over the shoulder view, automated computer system that sounds like people whispering from a distance, flickering lights and insane doctors and religions…it was all about atmosphere and it was 100% success.

Best XBLA Game: Geometry Wars 2
Seizure inducing firework-esque visuals, pulsing electronic music, over the top frantic gameplay, but most of all ridiculously addicting. The win in this game is short rounds that always leave you thinking “but this is so easy…why did I fly into that guy? I can do better”.

BXG Runner-Up: Braid
Geo Wars’ antipode. This game encourages you to relax, take your time and think. Soothing music and art design by Claude Monet (not really) made this game an intelligent escape from the norm. The puzzles forced you to think, leave, come back and finally have one of the most satisfying eureka moments of any game I’ve played to date.

Most Disappointing 360 Retail Game: Battlefield: Bad Company
What can I say? I was game starved. I knew this wasn’t going to be that good. I had friend who swore by the old Battlefields though…I bought into the whole, “completely destructible environments alone will make this game awesome” bullshit. Multiplayer was fun for about 3 hours. Campaign was terrible. This game sucked.

Most Disappointing XBLA Game: Castle Crashers
Castle Crashers was super hyped. The gaming community watched the Behemoth Dev Blog like hawks for what seemed like years. Every time a new weapon or animal orb was announced we all exploded into cheers, “Woo! Yay for a…mace/fish/cleaver!”. When it released I was on the fence about snagging the beat’em-up. I thought, “This game will be awesome if I have friends who play it with me”. I spoke with a few friends who felt the same. So we all got the game. Turned out connectivity bugs had rendered it impossible to play over live and therefore no fun. Single player beat’em-ups become a chore after like 5 minutes. Woot for hype. Stupid Behemoth is still correcting the issues today and should have the patch out soon. Oo yay!

Best Game for A Lesser Console: Little Big Planet
I have one friend with a PS3. From the day he got it I’ve made fun of him. Since that day I’ve told him to buy two games for it. First was the new Metal Gear Solid, not because I thought it was going to be good, because it was “the game that makes the PS3 worth owning” according to popular outcry. The other game was Little Big Planet. He bought it last weekend and brought his PS3 over to my apartment so we could give it a spin. I must say that it is a phenomenal game. It’s a silly, fun time that’s great for multiplayer locally and lends an unimaginable amount of creativity to the player. Oh, and I started to scratch the surface with the level editor last night (yes, he left it at my apartment, woo!) – unbelievable depth. Easily the best game I’ve played on PS3 or Wii in the past year.

BGFALC Runner-Up: Okami
Okami for Wii was a remake of the ps2 version. It’s the game they say the newest Legend of Zelda stole it’s gameplay elements from. Saddly, the best way I can describe it is by using Zelda as a reference. It’s like Legend of Zelda if Link was a Japaneese God embodied by a wolf instead of a little elvin boy. All your special abilities in the game are driven by god powers you control with the “celestial brush”. To control the brush you paint different sybols on the screen using the Wiimote and an onscreen stylus. This is how you solve puzzles; this is how you do combat. It’s an awesome mechanic perfect for Wii. The game has depth, story and is ridiculously long. Like any Zelda game as it progresses you learn new techniques that keep the puzzles and combat from getting old. It’s good…I guess it’s about as good as a Legend of Zelda game but amped up with god wolfs and 7-headed mountain-sized serpent beasts.

And that’s it.
p>c.

VGA World Premiers '08: What you should think

The Spike Video Game Awards were last night. I didn’t watch them, but I did catch some of the “World Premier” trailers today across the interwebs. Some of it looked good, some of it looked like crap. Here are my thoughts in a bit more detail…

Oh, and FYI: the headers below should be links to the clips...enjoy!

Brutal Legend

It looks like Jack Black will bring the same level of failed hilarity to this game that he does to most of his movies. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not all crap. I loved his role in Tropic Thunder, he had the funniest line in the movie in my opinion (“Alpa, if you come over here and untie me I will literally suck your dick…”). I liked the songs in The Pick of Destiny. School of Rock wasn’t all bad, though a little too Disney for my tastes. But Nacho Libre was utter shit. I was expecting a hidden gem like what Napoleon Dynamite turned out to be but no. Just crap, unwatchable crap. I see this game turning into something between Nacho Libre and The Pick of Destiny. A whole hearted “…meh…” I have little to no interest but it seems like a lot of gamers out there do. Why? Who knows.

Dante’s Inferno
I know nothing about this game other than what I saw in the trailer 10 minutes ago but I am already pumped for it. Dante’s Inferno (the book) is awesome. Before you ask - nope, never read it, I just know it’s awesome. I love that sort of shit. Horror mixed with religion or pseudo religion…like that movie Constantine. I loved it, and it probably wasn’t that good but I was blinded by the awesome horror/demons/mystics/voodoo/religion stuff. Religion – Boring bullshit + fantastical demon monster creatures + dark oppressive atmosphere = win. It’s like you’re watching a Lord of the Rings movie that a bunch of people believe could be true. It rules. And this game will rule. They better not fuck it up because it has phenomenal potential.

Watchmen: The End is Nigh
Other than the use of the word nigh instead of near, this game will blow. I think I’m going to start using the word nigh instead of near. It will totally add a bunch of dramatic effect to my everyday conversation. “Hey Aesop, do you know where the nearest Dunkin Donuts is?” “It’s pretty nigh, about 4 blocks from here…” But seriously, I see this game turning into just another crappy superhero or movie game. Pick any example* of a movie or superhero game and you’ll find crap. Take crap, multiply it by crap and you get? I don’t know. More crap I suppose, but either way this game will suck.

*Any example except that incredible hulk game for the original Xbox. That game fucking owned. You were just massively destructive. If you’ve never played that game I recommend you go pick up a used copy for like $4 or whatever used copies of Xbox original games sell for.

Fight Night: Round 4
If you love the fight night series you will love this game otherwise you won’t be able to tell the difference between this and any of the originals or any of the future games. I think picking up the yearly updated editions of these sports games is equivalent to trying to lick your elbow after you’ve tripped and fallen and your elbow landed in dog shit. Dumb if you were to succeed, pointless because you won’t. Oh, and fuck madden.

GoW2: Combustible Map Pack
I fucking love gears. This iteration isn’t getting the credit it deserves. The first one was revolutionary, it came out of nowhere. All we knew about it before it came out was it had that cool promo with the sad “all around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out placesssssssss” song. Then boom, it ruled. When this one came out everyone was hoping for that same “Surprise! It’s fucking awesome!” feeling. But it was hyped to shit and the bar was so high that of course you’re not going to get that feeling. Between that and the internets usual response to an excellent shooter’s sequel of “Waahhhh, the banana is nerfed! I don’t like how you can make soup! The first one was better! Waaaahhhhh”. Substitute the correct terms in for “banana” and “make soup” for your shooter of choice, in GoW’s case banana=shotgun and make soup=tag walls with grenades. But that’s all garbage. This game fucking kicks ass.

That said, I think it’s complete and utter bullshit when a developer has DLC ready for release on the same day the game launches. That’s not quite the case here (it’s been 3 weeks) but it’s pretty fucking close. And $10 dollars? Bah! Fuck this. Multiplayer is still laggy and there are still issues with getting connected to a game. WFT? Fix that shit. I love the game, I love every blood splattering and flesh carving minute of it when it works. But it doesn’t work consistently yet. How bout that gets fixed then we talk about micro transactions…I just wish the maps didn’t look so fucking fun…dammit.

GTA IV: Lost and Damned
This looks awesome. Well…let me rephrase, it looks awesome on paper (or video in this case). It looks poetic and artistic and all those things everyone says about GTA IV that got it crowned Time Magazine’s GotY 2008. But there’s a problem with Grand Theft Auto that’s hard to put into words…of course I’ll try. When I play the game it’s totally rad at first but it slowly becomes routine and by the end I’m not even enjoying myself…I just need to beat it because I’m so close and it’d be a shame to quit. Maybe Grand Theft Auto would make a good movie and then I wouldn’t have to devote so much energy to it...
I’ll probably get this DLC anyway and go through that same cycle of thinking it awesome until it becomes painful…because I have an addiction.

And that's all.

pie>cake. 1.

Gears Gets Old School...Kind Of

The world used to be a lot smaller. When I was young I got my start playing Tank Wars on the PC against a couple of computer controlled opponents. The family computer was next to the washing machine, adjacent to the living room; and there I sat, on a stool that was a challenge to climb as an eight year old, alone. Then when we got a Nintendo Entertainment System my brother and I would occupy our finished (and by finished I mean unfinished except for an area rug, a pool table and a TV) basement for hours at a time struggling through cooperative bubble bobble; dying to get through each level and pick up that next password code (before the days of saved games). When the Super Nintendo dropped we begged our parents for it saying “it’s like Mario in 3D!”. Nintendo 64 released a few years later and it actually had three dimensional games. I remember my friend Brian opening it at his birthday party and popping Super Mario 64 in…my mind was blown. I got into the shooter genre with the game that sucked almost everyone from my generation in, Goldeneye. It had four player deathmatches and as a 13 year old boy one of the coolest thing you could ever imagine doing was firing a rocket launcher at your friend. The next step in this progression’s tale was Xbox and it’s flagship game, Halo. Halo was phenomenal. It wasn’t cartoony, it was realistic and gritty. On top of that you could plug a couple Xboxes into each other and load up each one with four players. I can’t count the number of times I carried the TV from my bedroom two flights down to the basement so that we could system link two Xboxes together. We’d set the teams; put the four people on red in the main room and the four people on blue in the back room. At the time it was unbelievable, eight player video games?

These days it’s very different. There’s no lugging consoles over to your friends house so that you can play four vs. four team deathmatch. Today you connect through the internet. There’s no coordinating with your friends to find a time that everyone has free…a couple hours they like to waste killing each other. Today the pool of opponents is practically limitless. You could end up playing with anyone who owns the game and has an internet connection. Many games today have actually gone the way of making local play more difficult. Rarely do you see four player split screen anymore. Instead it’s most common to cap local play at two and online play at one person per console. Playing video games is a different social world now. Back then if you had an interest and a friend with an Xbox you were all set to play to your hearts delight. Chances are your friend was looking for the opportunity to get some multiplayer in. Today you need to buy your own console, pay for online service, get a copy of the game…

In many ways it used to be a much cleaner, purer experience.

Today when I get a game for my Xbox 360 I follow a pretty standard routine. First I play through the single player campaign on the hardest difficulty available (yes, I’m badass). This first step has never changed, it’s just like I used to do on any gaming console in the past. I enjoy that feeling of accomplishment I get when I beat a game. Next I do something I never did before the 360, page through the possible Achievements and see what’s required to unlock those points (play it on a new harder difficulty, kill 30 enemies with the flamethrower, find all the collectables, etc.). I generally crank through as many as those as I can next and that is the point the game sort of turns into work for me. I’m no longer playing it as I see fit. I’m not playing it to escape or relax. I’m playing it to complete arbitrary tasks set forth by the developer. But I can’t help it. I need to beat them…at least some of them.

Once I start to realize I’m not having fun (I’m doing work) I turn my attention to the multiplayer. Multiplayer follows a general cookie cutter format with most new games. The first time you play you are a rank zero. As you play more games and beat people supposedly better than you, your rank rises. In many games this ranking is a range from 1 to 50. Each game uses a different ratio of skill and experience to decide the speed at which you rank up. A lot of games are attempting to use the same TrueSkill system the Chess world uses, ELO. It does a calculation based on which side of the bout is predicted to win and by how much (similar to a spread in sports betting). If the favorite wins, they gain a modest amount skill points and the underdog loses a modest amount. If there is an upset, the underdog gains a large amount of skill points and the favorite loses a large amount. It’s a system put in place to keep public games fun and competitive by matching you against similarly skilled opponents. However, as I said above, in most games this is balanced with experience points. Everytime you win a game you get 1 additional experience point, if you lose, nothing happens.

What I’ve found is this: in games such as halo 3, your rank is advertised next to your name with both a numeric value and a symbol. In the early stages of multiplayer your rank will jump sharply. The further you come along the more the slope of advancement stabilizes until you reach the skill level you are “supposed” to fall under. Under such conditions I quickly found myself playing for a purpose other than the fun of the game. I needed to get to that next rank. Every time I lost a match I was furious because I knew I faced the possibility of ranking down in the network; stepping further away from my goal.

Often I miss the days of sitting in my basement with 3 of my friends in the back room and my brother and 3 of his friends in the other room, screaming at each other through the wall, talking all sorts of shit, but laughing my ass off win or lose. After the match we’d step outside for a cigarette and either congratulate ourselves on our awesome win and talk some trash to my brothers team or laugh about how badly we were beat after the warthog we were all in got hit with a rocket and went flipping through the air…

This is why I applaud the Gears of War 2 ranking system. There are 5 ranks represented by pictures, not numbers; FIVE, not fifty. You have no way of telling how far or close you are to the next level. I feel liberated...freed. I’m not worrying about making it from 22 to 23. I’m not pissed at my teammates for not coordinating as well as we could have or not reviving me at some crucial moment. I’m not thinking about any of those many things that irked me while playing Halo 3. I’m simply too busy laughing.

Fallout Ruled.

I was originally planning on writing a complementary entry to my commentary below ("Fallout Sucked") weeks ago but I got busy at work and swept up in Gears of War, which is currently consuming all my gaming time. But today I am bored! Woo...so I will think way back to 2 weeks ago when I was finishing Fallout and recap why it was so awesome. Enjoy.

Fallout was a phenomenal game overall. I've already mentioned what I thought was terrible about it but in brief summary, it's not as satisfying an experience as some other games. When it ends you still feel like you haven't done anything or made it anywhere. However, that right there is what makes this game so great. The absolute freedom. The lack of direction. The go anywhere, do anything, be anyone mindset.

The free world Fallout is created around gives you the option to do main story quests...or not. You could just wander around the wastes and collect scrap metal for hours if you wanted, which happens to be the exact way I entered this game. I left the vault and there it was…a vast expanse of desolation as far as the eye could see (well, much further actually). So I started wandering around, stumbled across a few destroyed remains of houses and scavenged for whatever I could find. This early in the game I had an empty inventory and no idea what was useful. I found myself pocketing every tin can and empty whiskey bottle I came across. Soon enough though I found Megaton, the first rummaging of organization you encounter in the wastes. You start meeting people and everyone has something for you to do, or someone for you to find, or something for you to research. I came across a shiesty fuck named Moriarty who gave me some news about how to find my father, I knew it was a mission of story progression and avoided it like the plague. Instead I figured I'd run a few errands for the other folks around town. Before I knew it I had gained a few experience and leveled up a few times. My character was starting to get fleshed out. The original plan was "Aesop Doom, the smooth talking, charismatic thief who'd agree to help you out then pick your pocket and rob your house as soon as you turned your back." He would constantly be committing small crimes and loosing karma, but ultimately be good by completing the good karma missions and making the morally correct big decisions. He was going to have an emphasis on the sneaky, lockpicking, and speech skills. Well, it turns out it's hard to survive without some sort of combat focus. I gave up on sneaky-ness and started buffing up my explosive skills. I developed quite the collection of mines and grenades of all varieties. The more I grew my collection the more I desired. Every time I leveled up I struggled with where to place the development points, I just wanted more.

The deeper you dig into the game, the deeper you want to dig. Two hours slip away like nothing, just scrounging around in some deserted subway station looking for a new lab coat and just waiting to bump your lockpick skill the final 15 points to a full 100…it’s easy to lose yourself in sculpting this alternate world and suddenly I realize my character is at level 15 (of 20) and I hadn't completed any main story. Somewhere along the way the original vision of being cosmically smiled upon had been lost. My karma was deep into the nether regions. Aesop was straight-up evil, he was still a smooth talker and could lockpick absolutely anything, but he was also well versed in the combat shotgun and explosives. He had become misanthropic with a taste for human flesh. He'd find himself clearing out a small villages and raider outposts then feasting on them and collecting their ears. I know, he was a sick fuck. Anyway…

He was a big bad mother fucker who was wiping out entire towns single handedly. I figured it was time to do some story missions, give this game a little heart. I had wandered for tens of hours, doing random tasks and exploring wherever impulse led. It was ridiculously fun and addicting to create this beast of a man. And that is the point. There exists so much freedom to create whatever you want and make that creation so powerful…it’s ridiculously awesome. Then I played the storyline...

What this game boiled down to (for me) was simply an addicting journey.

Fallout Sucked.

Here’s why:

The story. It's a first person RPG (yes, you can play it as 3rd person if you so choose but the character animation sucks so why would you?). You are born in an underground fallout shelter, called Vault 101, in post-apocalyptic Washington DC. You are raised there until you reach the age of 16, when you father mysteriously leaves the vault and you have the option of going after him or staying in the vault and being killed by the overseer (the angry vault dictator). You leave. And suddenly, voila, the game is open world; you are free to do whatever you want. There are tons of side quests, places to explore and people to kill but all of those things are fun and what makes the game great and I’m here to talk about what made it shit (psst…the answer is the story).

So you are wandering from place to place looking for your father. Along the way you learn that he was working on some water purification project that'll bring clean (non-radiated) water to anyone and everyone. You eventually find him trapped in another vault somewhere. This was the best mission in the game. It’s much like a tiny Matrix. You sit down in a relaxation recliner and you are suddenly in some twisted world of the vault overseer’s creation. No one else in the experiment has any idea what's going on, they are just living blissfully in a Pleasantville type town. In order to get yourself and your father released you need to complete the demonic requests of the overseer. They include such activities as make little bobby cry, break up the marriage of these two people, murder everyone in the town with a butchers knife, ya know...that sort of thing.

Anyway, after this mission it's all down hill. You get your father out of the simulation and join him in his mission to save the world...or at least clean some water. You go back to his project site, help him flip a few switches and plug a few fuses in. Come back to the control room and he's being harassed by the enclave, a group that is apparently evil...I guess.

And here I recognized a problem that I thought I could look past. No one in this game is developed…at all. When I rescue my dad in the game I feel like I’m meeting him for the first time. I’ve got no real history with him…when it boils down to it I don’t really give a shit if he gets rescued or dies…
In the case of the enclave, all you know about them is they are the self proclaimed post-apocalyptic government. Some people in the wasteland love and seem to trust them. Others seem to hate and distrust them. But you never see first hand or aftermath of terrible things that would make you hate them yourself. You never are given tangible examples of why they are this terrible organization you are all of a sudden supposed to believe they are.

Anyway, your father kills himself in order to avoid handing over the initialization codes for the purification system. At which point I realized what most likely leads me to the complete absence of any attachment to the characters. No cut scenes. During your father’s final moments, if you aren't close enough to the action, you can’t even overhear the conversation. You aren't forced to watch it happen; you could completely miss it if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is the most driving event in the story and it had no dramatic impact on me as a gamer who'd invested probably 15+ hours building my character into what he was. Why? Because it's portrayed in the same manner the rest of the game is. Nothing is different. I may as well have been walking past two random NPCs in a random city. The same dramatic techniques are employed for this crucial scene as they were at any given point. Now I understand that some games over do it, and by no means am I requesting two 90 minutes cut scenes (I shudder at the thought), but when the most critical scenes in the game are no more dramatic than random encounters...fuck it. So your dad dies, you run away. You need to finish the project for him. While I'm summarizing it like this it sounds a lot better than it was. It sounds succinct, like a story you could care about. While playing it though about 10 minutes after my dad had died, I had forgotten about it. None of the events left an impact. It’s a storyline full of, “oo, that’s neat” instead of “Holy Shit” or “Oh My God” moments. It is the direct opposite of epic. I was finishing the project because the game said "Now you have to finish the project". But anyway, there are like 2 more missions after your dad dies and then the game is over. And when it ends you feel the same way again, "this is lame…wait, that's it?", because there is no fucking emotion behind it because there are no dramatic techniques used anywhere…ever.

New Blog, it's teh win!

Man, this new blog sure is pimpin! Kinda like this picture, which is also pimp-tastic. See those pants there, those are Nantucket.