Friday, April 13th, 2007
Today Paul and I are testing a the new game mode, code-named “slow duel arena”. It’s duel arena, but locked in two dimensions and the movement made much slower, thus emphasising sword play. I plan on making some changes until it feels a lot like playing a standard 3D fighter like Soul Calibur, but with our sword system rather than combos. I’ll let you know how it’s working out.
Paul’s also probably going to be doing some stuff with the new weapons. Woo!
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Friday, April 13th, 2007
After my second PC (an old 2.8 P4 with… Rambus RAM) blew up a couple of months ago, I finally yeserday built a new PC out of it’s corpse, with a Core 2 Duo, 8800 GTS, a new motherboard, and some, um, not Rambus RAM.
I was a virgin PC builder, but the process went ok. I have a dual monitor set-up now. Wow, this is the most boring blog post of all time. I’m going to hide it beneath a blog post about what Paul and I are working on today.
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Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
It’s time for that exuberant extravaganza of e-opinion, th’ncounter with drac’! This week in hip abbreviated title mode. Also, apologies for being extremely late with this one. I don’t want to blame 9/11, but it certainly didn’t help.
Picture this: I get into my house and get a phone call. Excited, right?! Well, that’s just what happened. Anyway it’s an old friend asking if I would like to partake in some NES games and beer for the afternoon. He says he’s struggled with the video game tie in of ‘Gremlins 2: The New Batch’ for a few hours and is getting irritated with the dying animation of the furry hero spinning around and falling over, seen as he’d died about 100 times. Now I’m a man who’d just taken multiplayer Gears of War down on the hardest setting, so introducing a few bad two dimensional animations to the expanded properties of deck chairs couldn’t be too difficult, I thought. Well, as usual I was completely wrong. The game is completely impossible. It is 6 levels long, according to the internets, and playing for a good 3 or 4 hours I could not complete it. I barely made a dent in level 4. It is just one mean game. This escapade triggered two thoughts: One was that ‘games nowadays are easier’. The second was ‘I wonder why games nowadays are easier, yet often just as repetitive and annoying.’
Immediately you might think that a game in those days would take about ten minutes to finish if it wasn’t gut wrenchingly difficult, but this can’t be the sole reason. For a start, the game is clearly identifiable as residing in the bracket of – what in more recent years has become a sordid group of ne’er-do-well titles – movie adaptations. Not too long ago I bought a movie tie in video game. Spiderman 2 for the PC, it was. Despite no alternative title and a multi-platform release of a different and reasonably fun game, this was not actually the one all the consoles got. I bought this one day and had it done within 2 hours (A day which, incidentally, began with me having £30 and ended with me thinking that if I had a blog then my ‘current mood’ setting would definitely be hearing all about it. That’s another story, though.)
Anyway my point is that, even with games recently like Fable, they can still be very short lived. The only thing that has changed in regards to short games is the terrible difficulty has been removed, for better or worse. But what has been added to keep this balanced? Is it lo salt? Nay, it’s worse.
On ye olde consoles, games were made longer by obstacles to overcome such as insurmountable amounts of angry faced enemies, jumps that would pose a challenge if the controls weren’t totally irresponsive, and never having enough health. Nowadays it seems that, to try and lengthen the playing experience, developers will do one or more of the following:
I feel compelled to warn you this list is full of things that can easily be considered NOT COOL.
- Make you retrace your steps. Seriously, this happens so much more since the advent of 3 dimensions. Always when I’m playing an unrewarding game I seem to be backtracking for that missed inventory item at one point or another.
- Give you guns with no bullets. Lots of games do this, particularly the ones trying to be really spooky, immersive or serious. Back in Gunstar Heroes day you had infinite ammo. The game was still a challenge, but the bad guys knew you were packing heat. In many volatile situations nowadays you’re likely going to have to club your enemies with a shotgun, but for all the technological advances, you don’t get that option. You just have to run past every enemy. Exciting. Spooky. That guy nearly brushed me.
- Make you accompany a useless female or child (sorry females and children, but it’s a stereotype you cannot deny exists in video games) with terrible AI that will meet any supposed peril extremely quickly. I’m not playing Kindergarten Cop, so just let me hide them in a cupboard until I can sort the situation out myself.
- Find a save point! There is literally no point in a save point. I read a decent analogy on the internets a while back on the subject of save points: What if Microsoft Word wouldn’t let you save until you’d finished a few more paragraphs? The correct answer is it would be lame. Fuck that shit.
- Pseudo-free roaming bits. Let’s get one thing straight, no video game of this generation is free roaming. Might seem a bold claim, and perhaps something that will change in the future, but all video games have one thing in common, and that is that the player is making the choice of what moves the character makes (as a fan of Phoenix Wright I know there are exceptions to this if you take it literally, but even in puzzle games you’re calling the shots). Basically games need user input. The difference with “free roaming” is, apparently, that you can choose what to do. This means you choose to make your character do something from a select bunch of things that the developers have chosen for them to do. But, you get to choose the order. Hurrah. In my earlier example, Spiderman 2, the game expanded its play time by in between bits of the linear story making you do a number of “free roaming missions” before you can proceed. Personally, “My girlfriends kidnapped! I’ll just see if I can’t finish a few scripted return-the-handbag-to-old-lady dot chasing missions before doing anything about the pressing situation” doesn’t seem like a very cool super hero sentiment to me.
These things are a plague on modern (particularly console) gaming IMO, and whatever point I was making and have forgotten, they should not be regurgitated. It seems rather than learning from mistakes they decide to put new ones in instead. These techniques all deprive a game of its ultimate focus – being fun to play. Padding it out with dross until it’s as big as the guy in the picture below won’t make it a better game, and it’s time some developers realised that.
Rant over…Back to making my Wiimote operate my drug paraphernalia…
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Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
Dan has informed me that Gibbage.co.uk has undergone a relaunch: it’s being turned into a portal of sorts; and (most importantly) you can buy Determinance from it! Head over there immediately and check out the games on offer. Do this right now. I said now.
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Friday, April 6th, 2007
Bloody hell it’s been quiet around here. Let’s hope it’s because I’ve been doing some programming. However, it’s now time for some opinion.
There’s a postmortem here on MLB2K7. Ben Brinkman, the producer of MLB2K7, talks to a few journalists about what went right and wrong with the title. He first talks about the “three year plan”
- that it won’t be until MLB2K9 that they have the title they really want, and that 2K7 and 2K8 are steps to that goal. He then says he thinks they did a good job with 2K7 “given the short amount of time they had to do it”.
That raises one big question – why did they only have a short amount of time to complete 2K7?
Obviously the answer is that they had to get it out for the start of the 2007 baseball season. But isn’t their responsibility to make a good game first? Why are players being asked to pay, effectively, $150 for the proper game (2K9) and be part of the beta testing effort until then?
I’m not clear on my opinion of this. I think a sports franchaise has to be yearly to contend – our sports have yearly seasons, we want our sports games to too. If you take a two year hiatus your user-base will shift franchaises, which is bad. And I guess you also have to release at the beginning of the season to get anything approaching maximum sales.
This is a great example of the business of video-games clashing with what we think is “right”.
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