To the chagrin of FFVII fans everywhere, Square-Enix yesterday announced that they are remaking Final Fantasy X for the PS3 and PSV. Me though, I’m overjoyed. I might even get a PS3 one day now that it has a game coming out for it.
I love FFX. I wrestle over whether I like VII or X more, but I really think I have to say the latter is the better game. I love everything about it (Except certain moments of voice acting). The aesthetic, the setting, the architecture, the battle system, the Sphere Grid, the music, the characters, everything. So I’m pretty excited to see what they will do with this.
Though all these FF rereleases and such make it kind of hard to mock Nintendo fans.
It’ll be a delicate balance. FFX isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot easier to mess it up than to improve it. Of course we want more than just graphical updates; FFX has aged fairly well for a 3D game anyway. I must presume the stuff from the European/International edition will be included, but hopefully there will be more besides this, more monsters, more areas, just MORE FFX, without changing the core game.
I also hope they redo Blitzball. I don’t care what anyone says, it was the best FF minigame ever (With the possible exception of Mog House). But there needs to be MORE of it. Two dozen teams, thousands of players (Make every single person IN THE WORLD a potential Blizter), and make it into underwater FIFA in terms of gameplay, where the stats are hidden and things are more dynamic.
Also add a whole bunch of endgame content and more summons and change absolutely NOTHING about Wakka because he is truly a god among men.
What do you hope to see come out of this? And what games do you want to see remade, for that matter?
So as you may recall I’ve written about Dead Island before, but now that it’s out and I’ve had the chance to spend some time with it, I thought I’d give some of my opinions on it.
The very abbreviated version is: Dead Island is one of the best bad games I’ve ever played.
Let me elaborate. It’s a shoddy piece of programming. It slows down at times for no discernible reason; sometimes you’ve got a bunch of zombies and it goes smoothly, sometimes there’s two and it stutters horrifically. There’s noticeable pop up. Textures can vary wildly in quality. The controls were very obviously designed for the console, to a degree that kind of makes me long for Oblivion, because this is far worse and it gets very tedious very quickly.
There are some poor design choices as well. Everything respawns being the main one. Everything – zombies, vehicles, weapons, items, little stacks of cash tucked away inside people’s backpacks and stuff (More on money later). It doesn’t make sense. You end up just learning the game, and once you’ve been through someplace once there are no more surprises. Hardly making the best use of an open world. It also harms the immersion, both in the obvious ways (“Didn’t I kill this guy the last four times I went this way?”) and the slightly less so (People desperate for food/water/booze in a world where everything respawns within minutes).
Remember the previous DI post, where I talked about losing quest hubs and stuff? Yeah, well, there are safe zones in this game. Some infected (Running zombies, just like L4D) managed to get in because there’s a very conveniently placed rock for you to use, and apparently they can do. For a moment I thought “Oh shit here we go!” but they just charged directly at me, got their heads smashed, and elicited no response from the surrounding NPC survivors.
Pretty much my face when that occurred.
In fact, so far at least, it seems that there is no interaction between the living and dead aside from yourself and some scripted encounters. There are other survivors around the island, but unless you get an escort quest or something, they’re not going to be getting themselves bitten or cracking any heads. Worse, if someone isn’t an escortee or the like, you can’t give them a slap/hug/whatever and say “Yeah I know you had to do some bad shit, but we gotta get to safety, come with me.” They just sit there lamenting whatever they had to do to survive over and over.
You also have to pay cash money for stuff. I mean, I can sort of understand why you’d still care about money to some extent – it suggests there will be a normal world tomorrow to spend it in. But yeah, really having a hard time buying that people would hold back on helping you out when their lives are so acutely on the line. Nevermind the workbenches – you pay to repair and upgrade items, but there’s nobody there to pay! Apparently some ethereal miser demands payment in exchange for sticking your weapons back together.
Oh but cracking heads. Forget everything I’ve just said about the game, because really, what it’s about is cracking heads. And this, at least, it does well. Smacking a zombie feels great, visceral. Knocking one aside with a metal pipe is satisfying as hell. Cracking or entirely removing limbs? Yep, you can do that, and they’ll flail the jelly-like appendage at you without much effect. And this is before you start playing silly buggers and modifying the game files.
The game is pretty atmospheric, it does a great job of juxtaposing a tropical paradise with living hell. When you’re walking around and you hear a zombie breathing or roaring or whatever, it’s unsettling, even if you’ve killed a hundred of them already and one more won’t be able sort of problem. The evidence of what’s going on is grim and pretty omnipresent; one minute it’s a picturesque tropical scene, the next you come across someone whose skin appears to have all been eaten.
There are also a nice wide variety of weapons, and what is more, the weapons degrade and break at a pretty believable speed for once! The human skull is one of the toughest structures nature has devised, so you’re not going to be able to break thousands of them before you need to exchange your paddle for something better. Similarly, this is one of the best implementations of stamina I’ve seen in a game. You’ve got a lot of it and it recharges fairly fast so you can sprint a long way, but if you go around swinging madly you’ll run out faster than you expect, and then you’ll be in trouble. It works excellently in doing what it is meant to do: Making you fight with an eye on your tactics.
It should be noted I’ve not played a terrific amount of the game yet, and I’ve also not played multiplayer. I’m confident that messing around with some friends would make the game much better. It’s not a ‘good’ game, so I can’t in good conscience say to everyone “go out and buy it now”, but it is a fun game and once the price comes down a bit, if you see it when there’s a bit of a slow spell of other releases, or if you just want to crack a whole lot of heads and collecting way too many weapons that you then have to sell ONE AT A TIME with a confirmation message for EACH AND EVERY ONE, then yeah, Dead Island is a sound purchasing decision.
In contrast to my post earlier this week, I’m now going to talk about the people out there who are making games “as they want to make them”, that is to say, indie developers.
To be clear on the definition, I’m just using Indie to mean a game which is made without the financial support of a publishing house or anything.
And if you don't like my definition, you can take it up with Fluttershy here.
This has created a pretty interesting model. Increasingly, Indie games are implementing a model whereby you can pay a small sum now, in the alpha or beta stage, and get all later updates for free even after the price increases. Minecraft is the foremost example of this, but we can also look at games like Project Zomboid or Overgrowth to see the same model. This has all kinds of benefits; it brings people in and generates an active base of players before the game is officially “out”, the players can fulfill the role of testers, can give feedback and advice (If the dev wants to listen, of course), and most importantly the early sales generate money that mean the game can actually continue to be developed.
The thing is, because these games are made by individuals or small teams, and thus have far lower overheads than triple-A titles like Gears of War or Modern Warfare, they can be far, far more experimental and unique. Sure, you get games like Katamari Damacy from the bigger houses but those are the exception rather than the rule. Indie devs have an easier time in this regard. I doubt you could sell the idea of Dwarf Fortress to EA or Sony and have it still resemble DF once it’s been minced by their focus groups and marketing and what have you. Hell, you can’t even get a decent version of long-running, successful franchises like SimCity anymore.
But indie developers can. They can make extremely complicated games, niche games, experimental games,
games that are banned in Germany,
games that look like spreadsheets, games like Mount and Blade or Kenshi or a zombie game where one bite infects you 100% of the time. Or that are Minecraft, but with a dimension removed.
Which isn’t to say that all indie games are classics and we should bow down and worship their creators. Just that I have an appreciation for them because of the freedom they are afforded, compared to big name publishers.
Something interesting has occurred to me. I was thinking about how other creative/entertainment sectors will very often have people who do things because they want to, rather than because it’s what the market demands. Now this may seem like a senseless statement but I can assure you, even if you’re trying to stick to your guns on every last syllable, when you’re writing a book you still have “Who will this appeal to?” “Will this drive people away from future books?” and the like in the back of your mind. Well, I do at least. Even with something I can completely control like that, there are such concerns. Even so there are always people out there who are happy to use their success to make something they really want to make, be it a movie or a TV show or whatever, even if it’s not going to be a major blockbuster. Similarly, we have all kinds of patrons for the more revered older arts, donations to save a statue or to support a poet or the like. But do we have the same for games?
Well I suppose the short answer is “Yes.” but that wouldn’t make for very satisfactory analysis, tempting as it is to leave it here and abscond to New Antioch where I am trying to craft a brutal urban wasteland from which the poors and minorities have no escape.
Okay, blog's over. Job well done! Time for donuts.
We do have, for instance, the indie game scene, where things like Dwarf Fortress and Aurora are superb examples – the former is funded by donations alone and the latter doesn’t even accept those because Walmsley’s independently wealthy. Toady has pretty explicitly said that while he takes player thoughts into consideration he’s making a game that he and Threetoe want to make, and if other people want to play it and support it that’s great, but if they don’t they’re not going to make radical changes to the game in order to appeal.
Similarly there are people of particular renown who have some leeway even in major companies. I imagine that if, say, Shiggy says “Making a game.”, Nintendo will pretty much let him do that. And we know there are people like Sid Meier, Will Wright, and Peter Molyneux who have had in the past a huge amount of discretion in what they make. But these times seem to be lost now.
In essence I’m just wondering – what if some really rich dude comes along, gathers up a bunch of programmers, and says “We’re making the best space 4X game ever. It’s going to be compared positively to MOO2. We will do what we think is best for the gameplay, not for sales. Profits and sales are secondary to the main objective.” Not indie, but real big-budget, triple-A stuff. I tell you what, when I am mega rich and rule large tracts of the universe, I’m going to make sure some great vidya gets made. But in the meantime I wonder if we might not benefit from a greater spirit of philanthropy towards games in this manner, and help spur new innovations and experimentation.
Edit: Unrelated, but something everyone should read. I think this is one of the most important articles currently on the Internet regarding gaming, it touches a lot of points about a vital game and company.
Just noticed that we topped 20K page views a very short while ago, which is convenient because neither Pike nor I have the first freaking clue for a blog topic today so I’ll just take this opportunity to profusely thank all our readers and commenters! You guys are quite wonderful and it is altogether too satisfying to watch those little numbers of page views and subscribers rise, and to get emails notifying me of comments made on my posts etc.
So yes, thank you very much, from both of us! I didn't know what image to use so I used Pinkie Pie as a human not knowing what to do about my not knowing what to do and oh no I've gone cross-eyed
I suppose it is expected that I at least mention videogames on our My Little Pony image blog, yes? Well, I’ve been playing a ton of SimCity 4 the last few days and I had an interesting experience. Last night when I was finishing it up I looked around what I had wrought and thought “Yeah, that’s okay.” This morning when I went back to it, I thought “Oh wow, I am some sort of urban designing genius, this looks great!” I wonder what caused this discrepancy? Do you guys find you can feel differently about stuff like that if you give it some time, or are you more likely to feel it’s worse than you originally thought, as I generally am? Also if anyone’s interested I might provide a few screenshots as I go along! Not now though. Because I have none to hand and the game takes forever to load when your mod folder is three times the size of the game itself.
Also playing through Human Revolution, which is brilliant, and waiting for Dead Island, which sadly doesn’t look like it’s going to be the horrorfest I originally hoped for but does nevertheless have the potential, I think, to be an enjoyable zombie-slaying romp. And there’s always Project Zomboid for real zombie survival stuff!
Please note this post will contain spoilers for Breath of Fire III.
As you may recall, I’ve been playing through Breath of Fire III lately. Well, last night I got to the end of it, and I did something I never have in the other times I played it – I chose the ‘bad’ ending. What you’re intended to do is fight and overthrow the Goddess, who is keeping the world in a static place, in the belief that change can only make things even worse. There are hints of this throughout the latter part of the game, and she admits as much herself – but in my adulthood I’ve found her case rather more seriously presented, and compelling, than I did when I played through when I was much younger.
Now, to be clear, the game suffers from what I would suggest are poor writing decisions. One of the characters is implicated as being very much more important than you presume, but they only actually reveal this when you are talking with the final boss before deciding whether to acquiesce or to fight. Therefore I can as a player understand it all and deduce that this character is probably speaking sensibly – but it should be rather less convincing to my character. Indeed, some of the other reactions to what they learn in the very last room of the game are a bit weak as well, though it’s somewhat more forgivable because the characters really couldn’t have time to develop more complex opinions at that point.
Also because one of the characters is still a freaking onion
It got me thinking about it all though. The ‘bad’ ending isn’t really presented as being all that terrible, as long as you keep in mind what the characters know rather than what you know about tropes. And what the Goddess said about the possibilities of the alternative mean it’s quite believable that they would be happy enough with the outcome. Despite this it feels a bit lacking – it’s clearly the “bad” ending because if nothing else, there’s a good deal less to it than the “good”. A lot of games seem to suffer from this sort of thing; sometimes an alternative ending is acceptably given less time, or is quite clearly the worse option to take, and very often it’s not left up to the player to fully decide whether their course of action was right. Games try to do this sort of thing, and for many “player choice” and the like is very vaunted, but a JRPG nearly 15 years old seems to make a better stab at actual ambiguity and leaving it to the player to decide the worth of what they did than a lot of modern ones with their binary DOUBLE GANDHI/EVIL LINCOLN dichotomy.
These days I would normally load up a save towards the end of a game and see the other ending(s) just for completeness. I’ve decided not to with this playthrough. It feels satisfactory leaving it where it is.
The other day Pike and myself were looking back with fondness on a certain videogame company. It was quite stunning, once we actually sat and talked about it, just how many games they were responsible for, and not just games, but true classics, things that defined – even created – genres.
Which company am I talking about? Well, which one came to your mind when you read the above? In this case we were discussing MicroProse, but there are quite a few companies which could have been mentioned here and all would fit; Bullfrog, Rare (Of old), Codemasters (ditto), Psygnosis, etc. (And these ones are just examples from the UK!)
Tally ho, chaps!
Where are the equivalent companies today? Who are even candidates? You can point to people who have had huge impact – Bungie for instance – but one series of FPS games, however brilliant and however influential, does not put them in the same league as these giants who bestrode the 80s and 90s. Nobody that I can think of today has the ability to put out X-Com, Transport Tycoon, Master of Orion, Civilization, and Rollercoaster Tycoon. Now, okay, you look at any of these companies and they tend to have something of a narrow focus, at least in the games that really stand out, but still, nobody today seems to come close, regardless of focus. Maybe Blizzard and Valve, but the former seems to be determined to fall from grace, and the latter hasn’t released something that isn’t a hat since the Bally Astrocade was new. I’m not trying to say there are no good companies anymore or anything, but none seem to really have the scope and grandeur of some of these old-timers we so fondly remember.
Who is your favorite game company of yesteryear? Am I overlooking someone modern?
So recently, I’ve been playing through Breath of Fire III again. It’s not the best game ever made, it might not even be the best BoF (II is pretty damned great after all), but it really is simply, good old-fashioned fun that just emanates nostalgia from every orifice. I’m just going to copy-paste what Pike said in her SMRPG post:
a relic of a different time: a time when RPGs weren’t about who has the fanciest cutscenes or who has the most photorealistic hair or who has the most immersive fantasy world. Rather, they were about traveling from weird town to even weirder town, beating up random enemies for gear, and saving the world. No nonsense. Just beating the big bad guy at the end with all of the epic loot that you had to cross the universe to find.
It sums it up pretty well. One of my party members is an ambulatory onion mutant thing.
He's also the toughest sumbitch in the game
It’s all around just a solid, fun game that knows what it is, doesn’t try to hide it, but sometimes throws something subversive in that makes you stop and think “Wait a second…”. Like when you come across the disabled guy who has been placed in a chair by a window, the sun streaming in. He just mumbles, but if you talk to another person in the room you learn that he was injured in an attack by a dragon years earlier. That is to say, he was one of the first people in the game you fought, and he was just a guy doing his job, mining to make his living. Every so often it’ll hit you with something like that, something brutal or just a bit cruel, never hammering it into you too hard, just letting you think about it.
No, I really did. A couple of nights ago, I had a dream wherein I played a remake of X-Com. Let me tell you about it.
This was my reaction when I woke up.
It was in glorious 3-D, still intended to be played as an isometric game, but you could move the camera around freely and stuff, and when you took a shot it would sometimes go into an over-the-shoulder camera or something (Think Fallout’s VATS camera, used fairly sparingly). It was turn-based, but because the characters had little animations and stuff based on what was going on it felt extremely active and fast-moving (e.g. ducking at the sound of gunfire, kneeling behind nearby cover, etc. – kind of how Company of Heroes does things). Also, though the basic calculations seemed to remain very similar to the original, your guy and an alien would look like they were having a firefight, and others on the field would give supporting fire which I don’t think actually hit anyone, but which could give some bonuses and stuff? Also it seemed like you almost always had reaction fire when fired upon, and your chance of success in that was determined by your remaining TUs. A character with 0 would just spray’n’pray and have maybe a 1% chance of hitting, but the added effects of it all really contributed to a sense of combat.
I only dreamed one mission, in which I had downed an enemy UFO and was doing the usual cleanup. As it turned out it was on the edge of a medium-sized town; the UFO was crashed in the forest and we had to fight through that, but several aliens had retreated into the town itself and were holed up there, meaning I had to chase them into it. The map was huge, but you could get around by commandeering vehicles and stuff; one of my guys rode into combat on a freaking motorcycle which promptly got blown right up by an alien grenade or something.
I was only fighting Sectoids, but they were really really vicious and tough to kill. It was a gloriously difficult fight and one which resulted in my guys getting slaughtered horribly. We finally made it through to the city streets; the civilians were inside, but a few bodies suggested they and the aliens had had a fight (At least one alien was dead in the city when I arrived, far from the crashed ship.) These last couple were really hellish to fight though, they just kept blowing my guys to hell no matter what I tried, it was obscene. Then they ran out of grenades or whatever and I won. Then I woke up, and I thought “Wow I can’t wait for this to come out!” and looked like Rarity, then I realized the horrible truth. And cried.
I just want to make a very brief post to plug Troy Goodfellow’s National Characters series which he has recently completed over at Flash of Steel, a blog anyone interested in strategy games should keep up with. It’s essentially a look at how games implement different countries and civilizations, what this says about our perspectives, and what impact it has on games and gamers. It’s something to mull over on Sunday!
