Read this Kieron Gillen piece on Gears of War right now, because it is excellent and well worth the five minutes it takes to get through it.
Good writing informs while it entertains, and this piece does that in spades: I had never really put together how the dichotomy between western and eastern juvenalia in the games industry shakes out, but Gillen lays it out very nicely in this piece.
Speaking of Gears of War, this new footage of the game doesn’t do a whole lot for me. I liked the first game because it innovated just enough to be interesting while still keeping a bear-like grip on its FPS legacy, but I’m not sure that increasing the amount of on-screen enemies, making the graphics nicer, or increasing the size of multiplayer games is going to grab me this time around.
Apparently, NBA Ballers: Chosen One is not very good.
Making a good basketball game is extremely difficult, but NBA: Homecourt, which was by no means a perfectly realized basketball simulation, had the right mix of disparate design elements to be fun and addicting, especially when played in short spurts. Part of Homecourt’s draw was that, after making your own personalized “baller,” the game gave you four or five pick-ups games to learn how to play and then immediately made your baller a super bad-ass at one thing, like dunking or outside shooting. Your character was instantly separated from the crowd.
But most of the good things about Homecourt have very little to do with the actual game of basketball that people around the world play everyday. Unlike Football, Soccer, or even Hockey, Basketball is very match a sport of individuals and match-ups. It’s a sport where one person can completely take over a game or a series of games due to their own personal talent, skill, and drive. In a lot of ways it may be an issue of the granularity of control - how much can you do on a controller to approximate the complexity of body control and positioning that mean so much on the court? These are the kinds of issues that need to be addressed when designing controls for any sports game, but they’re particularly pertinent in simulating the game of basketball.
Multiply the task by the giving the players three to five onscreen avatars to control and it’s not surprising that most basketball games just aren’t very good.
It doesn’t help that NBA Baller: Chosen One is ugly.
I don’t know what to think about all this bruhaha.
DRM for PC games is as inevitable as the sun coming up or water being wet. It’s hard for me to get worked up about it because I can’t imagine any probable future where it doesn’t happen, and ubiquitously.
Pandemic is making a Lord of the Rings game. It’s called The Lord of the Rings: Conquest. According to their PR, TLOTR:C will
allow players to jump into any battle seen in the films, as well as some extras, and let you play out the battle any way you see fit.
I guess that could be fun, if the combat mechanics are interesting. But no one has really done melee combat with weapons very well; Mount and Blade probably got the closest. I imagine TLOTR:C will be more like God of War than anything else, which makes sense. But, you know, it’s hard for me to get excited about another game like that.
I’m curious to see whether Pandemic brings in any of the open-world freedom they’re known for into the game. It doesn’t sound like it from the PR, but since they do that so well I’d be surprised if it doesn’t get there in some form. The idea of a free-roaming game where you’re constricted to a “battlefield”, with multiple points of interest, quests, and conflict in said zone, sounds like a ripe concept.
Also, what is it with videogame titles and colons? Are they really necessary in every game?
I forgot to mention that I’m super excited about Ken Levine remaking X-Com, which I happen to think is a fantastic idea.
I have no idea how you update X-Com and make it into a AAA title. But I’m not Ken Levine and I wasn’t the lead designer for the best game released last year, so that’s ok. I expect nothing but the best.
It may be quibbling, but do open-world games constitute an emerging genre? It doesn’t seem like they should, because all the term “open world” does is describe a lack of geographical linearity - it would make more sense for the genre to be “driving games” or “murder simulators.”
I joke.
I imagine this is an argument that was extensively hashed out years and years ago, probably around the time Mercenaries and Spiderman 2 came out, but I was too busy with college to pay attention at the time. And there is an explosion of GTA-esque games coming in the near-future (or further future) that use almost identical mechanics with vaguely altered settings (different cities, chucking in superpowers, etc.) Even that Viking game was essentially an open-world brawler!
So maybe it is a genre. If so, I suggest an addition. Take Mira or Canderous from the KOTOR games and give them their own action-adventure open-world game where they hijack droids and assassinate jedis. I don’t know. It sounds good to me.
Sometimes I find myself confounded by mainstream gamer opinions. For instance, I had no idea that Medieval Two: Total War was considered to be a bit of a dissapointment after Rome: Total War. I’m by no means a strategy game maven, but I thought both products were immensely satisfying.
On a somewhat related but tangential note, I heard some commentators on a gaming podcast describing Grand Theft Auto IV as “a masterpiece” and “the game that is truly moving game narratives forward.”
Really? Granted, I haven’t finished the game. But I’ve put in some time with it(more than I should have, what with a review deadline looming), and while I really enjoy the game and think that many of the great reviews and superlatives it’s received are justified, I just can’t agree with the critical fellatio the game is getting, especially in the mainstream press. Sure, the animations in the cut scenes are great, but is that really moving the narrative design of gaming forward all that much? I don’t think they’re any better than the work in Half Life 2, and that game is four years old. And is the storyline really all that good? It’s much better than previous GTAs, to be sure. Is this really the game that critics will look to in the future and say “This is where games grew up.”? Perhaps when I finish the game I’ll think so. For now, it seems doubtful.
This scenario reminds me of the way Halo 3 was reviewed when it came out. I still haven’t finished the campaign in that game, because I thought it was pretty boring and a dissapointment compared to the fantastic first game. Sometimes I think that critics in the gaming media so desperately want games to be “up there with the big boys” that they lose sight of what some games are, as opposed to what they want them to be.
All that being said, GTA IV is great. Really great. Go out and buy it. But I think some perspective is in order.
There’s an excellent interview with Will Wright about game design and game design theory over at The Guardian.
Wright’s discussion of his “abdication of authorship” is particularly interesting:
“My focus started shifting more and more to players, and what they were doing,” he says, “Because I found that fundamentally as interesting, or more interesting, than the actual games [was] parallel play. Sitting and looking at what someone else has done with the same game as you is fundamentally interesting to me.” …
“When people tell me about playing a game and tell me what happened to them, then I hear how different their stories are,” he says. “To me, that’s an indicator of how good the game is.” …
“What I want to do is craft this landscape of experiences where the player has a huge degree of control over what they encounter,” he says. “I think that’s what games have as an advantage over any other form of media; that the player is half the author of the experience if the game is done well – or even more so. I think this is the first form of medium which has really achieved that and it allows us access to emotional regions that are inaccessible to linear narrative.”
Hey that’s funny, that’s exactly what I want you to do, Mr. Wright! How exciting.
I’ve always liked Iron Man, the weapons-dealer turned superhero who fights communism (or something). Why? I’m not exactly sure. Maybe it has something to do with the four-color expression of American Transcendentalism, or dealing with the zeitgeist of the Vietnam-era, or even some sort of genetic pre-disposition due to Tony Stark’s singular stature as the only mainstream Italian-American superhero. Or maybe I just like watching guys in robot suits blow shit up.
Either way, I’m seeing the movie tonight. Maybe I’ll review it. Maybe I won’t. I’m mercurial, what can I say?
1up has an interesting feature about what the roles we play in videogames have to say about ourselves and the conception of self. This is my favorite one, but they’re all worth reading.
My reaction to the question is that it’s a complicated one, and also one that tabletop gamers have been considering for decades. I’m not sure what games tell us about yourselves, and part of the reason I like Sean Molloy’s piece linked above is that the answer to that question, if there is one, is most likely to be an intensely personal one.
When I play a game like Oblivion, I’m very cognizant of creating a character: the power mad warrior king, the adventurer who yearns to discover the secrets of elven tombs, etc.
I am not often interested in playing someone like myself; rather, I want to play someone new, to have some experience that I haven’t experienced before, even if it’s in a setting that I have. This is why, I think, I’ve made so many different Oblivion characters, many of which have only received two hours or so of play. I just want to try different characters out. This, by the way, reminds me of Jim Rossignol’s excellent article about why he still plays STALKER. Go read that, too.