…a new episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic!
In which Twilight puts on her robe and wizard hat.
What’s that? There’s something video game related going on, as well? You know what, YOU’RE RIGHT! All the Grand Theft Auto games are on a massive sale on Steam and Gamersgate!
…what? Blizzard? What about a blizzard? I mean I know we’ve got snow in the forecast here in Montana, but that’s because it’s, you know, Montana.
…OH! Right. BlizzCon. That thing. Well, we all know that there’s a new WoW expansion coming up, so expect some commentary on that next week. Neither myself nor Mister Adequate is a huge WoW junkie at this point, but we both have fond memories of the game and I’m sure we’ll come up with something to say. As for me, I’m going to continue playing Final Fantasy I. I think I’m over halfway done at this point. What are you guys doing this weekend?
When Saints Row came out, me and my vidya bro Barry Manilow weren’t tremendously interested. It looked like a fairly run-of-the-mill GTA clone with some juvenile humor. Eventually one of us picked it up used for cheap and… we were pretty much correct in that assessment.
So we weren’t jumping up and down in our seats over Saints Row 2. This proved to be a mistake, because when I did eventually get it at the behest of other friends, it turned out to be seriously awesome. I’m replaying it now to get in the mood for The Third and it’s just so absolutely mental, massive, and not-giving-any-shits about the whole thing. It’s not a perfect game by any means but it’s one of those all-too-rare ones which really puts stupid fun first and everything else second. My current Boss looks like Jesus dressed in a cheap 70’s plaid suit. I cannot begin to emphasize how hilarious this is, especially when something goes down and the camera is up in his face as he’s about to tell Maero hard or something.
They might be led by an Internet Tough Guy but the Deckers seem to be a gang straight out of Jet Set Radio. Which is nice.
And in a few weeks Saints Row The Third is out. This is a big deal, because it looks like Volition have finally just gone over the edge, said “Fuck it”, and decided that even the remotest semblance of realism has no place in their game. I’m pretty sure some of the art assets have been pulled from Red Faction: Armageddon and there is all kinds of crazy stuff like lasers and a hoverbike and I don’t even know. Annoying punk kids? Luchadores? Classy Belgians? An anime game show thing with a truck that sucks up pedestrians and fires them and a gun that fires squid that attach to people’s heads, turn them into allies, then explode? It’s got it all! The level of both customization and sheer insanity in this game looks to be pretty much peerless and I am okay with this. (I just hope there are Summoner references as well how cool would it be for Joseph of Ciran to burst into the middle of a gang fight and summon a Blood Elemental)
I’ve said things before about videogames being art and deep and meaningful and how they are things to be engaged with and all that. And sometimes that’s true. But sometimes you just need to jack a sweet ride, pimp it up, and be totally ballin’.
Not to turn this into Mr. Adequate’s Angry Blog Of Rage but…
You know how they’re destroying all our beloved old games with stupid remakes that have nothing to do with the original? FaceBook versions of complex strategy and simulation games? ‘XCOM’? Syndicate*? And so on?
We sit around whenever some such bastardized abomination is announced and wonder “Why”. Why are they doing this to our beloved SimCity? Well I think I’ve figured out one reason this happens. Now don’t get me wrong, a good chunk of it is still just because designers (And I’m looking at you Brian Reynolds) seem to not really grasp certain facts about their own game, such as the fact that nobody WANTS SMAC Effect, we want SMAC, the 4x. Otherwise it’s better left alone. Sometimes (And I’m looking at you Will Wright) they just go right off the deep end and decide that Spore needs to be an incredibly casual, cartoony disappointment instead of, you know, good. But these out-of-left-field revivals, the ones that come out of absolutely nowhere and do their best to destroy treasured memories? That I think I’ve got figured out.
I just spent 20 minutes looking for this picture so you better appreciate it
See, Pike (Because she actually takes pleasure in my suffering) linked me to this article. Now that’s a long and depressing read, but the gist of it is a guy who tells us all about why games aren’t about games anymore, but about reducing them to the most mechanistic profit possible. Now, we’re not opposed to profit here. I just think that it should be one among a number of considerations and that profit is best made through quality rather than microtransactions.
But anyway. That particular page I linked you to is what sparked my theory. See, the people making these games need monetary support. They have to go to investors, i.e. old dudes in suits, and explain to them why X is a good investment. And that’s not going to be easy because the old dudes will probably think gaming ended with Pac-Man and is still the exclusive preserve of 12 year old boys. So. What’s a prospective developer to do?
Well if you’re smart, you’d go in and say “We’ve got this videogame idea. The franchise already exists – in fact it’s 20 years old, has sold millions of copies, and is hugely critically acclaimed.” The suits won’t understand the nuances here – they’ll just see “Hey this is already a winner we just need to cash in”. It’s doing half the job for you. The players who actually played the old games don’t enter this equation at any time. It’s not a poor attempt to rouse interest through using a known name (Though they will tell the investors this will happen), that does not factor into this process until the thing is green lighted and the poor bastards in PR have to try and spin it.
Or am I just being a conspiratorial nutbird who should join the ranks of those who think we need to return to the gold standard and that the moon landing was faked?
*In this edit: I forget that I had intended to append something. Syndicate is being made by Starbreeze, so it’s likely to be a damned good game. Just not, you know… Syndicate. Maybe. Who knows.
I do, however, remember the first game I ever beat. It was “The Lion King” for SNES, and I was about 10 or 11 years old… in other words, I’d already been playing games for nearly a decade by that point. (It was actually a pretty terrible ending, but it did feel good at the time.)
Since then, I can count the number of games I’ve actually played all the way through on, well– probably just a couple of hands. Ocarina of Time. Super Mario World. A handful of other platformers, like Yoshi’s Story. A few different RPGs. Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64. Goldeneye 007. Probably a few other racing and FPS games that I can’t think of off the top of my head.
Then you get to all the games I played a very great deal of and never actually beat. Sometimes it was because the game got genuinely very difficult– Banjo-Kazooie, I’m looking at you. Other times, I don’t know why I quit playing. I got bored, I guess. I have an FFTA save parked outside the final mission and I just never got around to beating it. Actually, I’m sure there are more games I’ve played to 90% than there are games that I’ve actually beaten.
It's an endless cycle of starting new games before I beat a previous one! An ENDLESS. CYCLE.
If you’re like this, then you’re not alone. According to a recent article, of all the people who started playing last year’s Game of the Year, Red Dead Redemption, only about 10% of them beat it. In fact, the article also says that game developers are actually making games with the thought in their head that most of their game’s players won’t see all of their carefully crafted content. What a bit of a sobering thought. Imagine writing a story and knowing that 90% of your readers won’t read through to the end.
I think there are a few different reasons why games have such a low completion rate. The fact that we’ve grown up is a big one. And I don’t mean that in a stereotypical “We’re too old for video games now” way. This is what I mean: Remember when you were a kid? You only got a few games a year, one or two for Christmas, one or two for your birthday, and maybe a couple others at special occasions throughout the year. “Someday,” you resolved to yourself, “I’m going to grow up and I’m going to buy SO MANY GAMES.” So then you grew up, got yourself an income, and did exactly what you said you were going to do. Which is great. Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day. And you’re probably spending most of that time either sleeping or working.
And then you find yourself asking this.
Or perhaps your gaming tastes have changed a bit and now you mostly play stuff that doesn’t really “end” (MMOs, Minecraft) or you play games that can be played as a “match” in one relatively short session (Starcraft, Civilization, LoL, TF2, etc.)
For whatever reason or variety of reasons, though, people don’t beat a whole lot of games. I’ve acknowledged my own problem in this regard, and my current quest to either beat or re-beat as many Final Fantasy games as I can is part of a personal goal of mine to prove that I’ve still got what it takes to play a long game all the way through.
What about you guys? Do you have a backlog of games that you still need to beat?
Games are no stranger to controversy. We’ve had Carmageddon, we’ve had Mortal Kombat, we’ve had Postal, and these are just games the media gets worked up about. Of course a lot of this is just nonsense, it may be crude but it boils down to “old people don’t get hip new things”. Or they tell outright lies. Then there’s things which actually warrant comment, such as Custer’s Revenge or Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Well we can add another one to that latter list, a list of games which probably warrant genuine criticism.
It is called Lady Popular. Kotaku has a writeup, but I will relate the gist of it here for those of you who are understandably averse to anything Gawker-related (Though it’s written by one of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun chaps so it’s not their usual drivel).
Lady Popular, explicitly billed as “A game for girls”, is a game where you play the role of a female. Or, a female in the bizarro reality-TV world that someone clearly conflates with real reality. Your first task to becoming a “smart, talented, and successful woman” is to move out of your parent’s house. You do this by completing three tasks. One is to rent an apartment – all fine and dandy so far.
The other two tasks are to get a haircut and to buy something at the mall. Getting haircuts and going shopping seems to be quite literally half of the stuff you can do in this alleged game.
But okay. Let’s stretch the definition of charitable beyond all reason and allow this. After all, people do give a lot of consideration to their appearance. It’s part of one’s identity. Being able to take care of such things and to make purchases is a part of being an adult, even if it’s not exactly up there with raising kids or paying off your mortgage. So we’ll allow it, because much worse is to follow.
An early objective sees you invited to a party. But oh no! You don’t have anyone to go with! Yes, a fundamental and early objective in this game is to seek a boyfriend. “But Mister Adequate!” you cry, “That may be poorly presented, but relationships are a part of growing up as well!” Yes, well. Put aside that acquiring a boyfriend is presented as a central objective to a young woman’s life – not as one part of it, not as an option among many options from abstinence to having many one-night-stands, not as something that tends to just happen when you meet someone you click with – a central objective without which her life literally cannot proceed – put that aside. Because do you know what happens when you do find a boyfriend?
Do you? Can you guess?
He gives you money.
Every day.Us too, Twilight, us too.
He gives you a daily stipend. Although there are jobs in the game this appears to be a major source of income, and as far as I can gather you keep getting your girlfriend allowance as long as you’re dating someone. A core part of this game is literally to find a sugar daddy. Now I don’t know about anyone else, maybe things changed whilst I slumbered wreathed in fire beneath the earth for a hundred thousand years, but last time I checked the concept of a “successful woman” did not tend to involve finding a boyfriend for the sole purposes of attending parties and paying for your hairdressing and shopping needs. If you wanted one at all (Dear God can you imagine if these people tried to allow for lesbian relationships? That would be such a clusterfuck I’m glad they just plain pretended it doesn’t exist.) it was more about companionship, having fun together, and being a best friend. You know, equal parts of a whole. Maybe I have become the old fogey who doesn’t understand the hip kid way of doing things? But I doubt it. Of course this also means that the monetary success of the guy is THE major factor in his worthiness. Truly a good message to send to our young ladies in this straitened economic times, with unemployment rising around the world.
Another important objective, and one which seems to persist throughout the game, is to watch your weight. Now I’m a lazy neckbeard, so I freely admit that messages about good health tend to pass over my head unheeded, but this isn’t even that – this is just straight out “Remember that excessive weight loss or gain is not healthy and will make your lady unhappy”. Getting too fat will MAKE YOU UNHAPPY; this is presented not as a societal construct but a simple fact of reality.
I honestly cannot begin to fathom just who on Earth would come up with something like this, who would greenlight it, and who would program it and put the art assets and everything together. This game seems to be designed to travel back in time and kick Emmeline Pankhurst and Susan B. Anthony in the ovaries so hard their great-grandkids feel it.
Now for a palate cleanser. Something that has strong female characters with realistic flaws, motivations, and personalities, which is neither patronizing nor insulting. Something like…
Girls, you've got an important mission. You must save our fillies from this horrid thing!
During that week, I messed around a bit, mostly on alts, and I had a little bit of fun, but not quite enough to warrant resubscribing. I let my free week run out, satisfied that I’d gotten my WoW fix for a little while.
Then I remembered that I’d just put a whole bunch of crap on the auction house right before my time expired.
…
So I resubbed for a month. For no other reason than to ensure that a bunch of virtual gold doesn’t have to rot in a virtual mailbox.
I don’t really have a proper topic today, because insomnia is a lot of fun and has left my brain quite mushy and useless today! So I’m just going keep moving from topic to topic though it won’t be one long incredibly unbroken sentence and hopefully something will stick!
Let’s see then.
I finished Dead Island yesterday. My verdict remains much the same: It’s a buggy game from a developer who clearly has no idea what they are doing (The most recent patch broke the game entirely and they had to roll it back before fixing it; I don’t really know how you miss the “Nobody can play your game because it doesn’t even start” bug but there you go.) and it is a ridiculous amount of fun. You go to three major places in the game; the Resort, the City of Moresby, and the Jungle. Weirdly it’s Morseby which is the most hectic, tense, and meaty part; the Jungle was a quick and pleasant jaunt in comparison. Also as someone on SA said, the presence of an honest-to-god sewer level in a game in 2011 is personally offensive to me.
Mowen? More like BRO-en!
My efforts to give HoI3 another shot have failed because I keep playing Victoria 2 and EU3 all day. It’s not my fault, PDM keeps getting updated and I must also bring the Light of Islam to the world as a unified Arabia! I’ll try and play some HoI3 soon though.
I picked up MoO2 on GoG.com recently (I know, it’s shocking that it took me this long) and I can already tell it’s very much worthy of the praise it receives. That said I’ve more been messing around with GalCiv 2 lately, largely because MoO2 doesn’t seem to play nice in a window.
Oh, and if you’re playing any Gears 3 lately, make sure you give the mutators a try in Horde mode. Super Reload is amazingly fun.
Finally, I’ve come across a freeware RPG called Exit Fate, which apparently hews to the Suikoden school of game design. Will give it a try and report back on how true this is and so on.
I’m currently playing Final Fantasy. Just… Final Fantasy. The first one. The one with no numbers after it. It’s my kickoff for a goal to play (or replay, as the case may be) all of the FF games that I have access to, since I haven’t played most of them in ages.
It’s slow but steady going, for no other reason than the fact that I’m trying to squeeze my FF time in between things like writing, drawing, working, and playing other games. Still, I’ve reached a comfortable point where I’m playing for an hour or two a day, and having a whole lot of fun.
I actually named my white mage Rarity, but this picture will have to do.
And now for the Android’s Topic of the Day: Have you ever decided to “marathon” a game series, and how did that work out for you? Did you finish?
So, as you’ve no doubt gathered if you’ve been reading this blog for a length of time, I’m a fairly big fan of Paradox’s grand strategy games such as Europa Universalis. My favorite however is probably Hearts of Iron II: something about it just really, really appeals to me, and I’ve had weeks where I play nothing but that game or one of its innumerate mods.
All kinds of hilarity
So you’d have thought Hearts of Iron III would be a pretty big thing for me, right? So did I. Then I played it.
I really can’t put my finger on what it is. It’s not a bad game, though it had the usual panoply of Paradox bugs on release. It does a lot of interesting things and objectively looks like an improvement over its predecessor. I don’t want to be some kind of old stick-in-the-mud but at the base of it, it’s not enough like II for my tastes. It took a long time to get into II, and now that I’ve got it all figured out I’m somewhat reluctant to move on.
But I can see the appeal of III. So I’m giving it another try! This time I’ve said screw the base game though, I’m going to dive straight into a mod that does stuff I like, so I’m rolling with the Historical Plausibility Project, which seeks to allow plausible in-game outcomes based on what happens without being either too sandboxy or hewing too closely to reality. Exactly how I like my Paradox.
What I REALLY want is Silent Hunter with Admiral Rarity, though there is an Equestria mod for Vicky 2
So let’s see how this goes! Have you guys ever had a game which you know you should like, but don’t? Have there been games which you’ve had to try several times before you get into them? Are there some you’ve just given up on, and retreated to a preferred predecessor?
…okay, okay, you can get it whenever you want, but you have seven more days to get it for cheap as part of the Humble Bundle.
What is Frozen Synapse, you may be asking?
Well, let me put it this way:
Do you like tactical turn-based strategy games?
Do you like interesting game premises involving the player being an AI?
Do you like really good music?
If you said yes to the above questions then you should really be looking into getting this game. This is a solid TBS that gives you a considerable amount of control over your troops and provides a rather interesting twist of allowing you to run simulations of your moves before you actually move. You ARE an AI, after all. The actual outcome is always different from even your best looking simulations, though. In other words, the white-knuckle anticipation between turns might just be the death of you.
There is also a multiplayer mode which I’m assuming is intense as all heck but I’ve yet to try it. Mister Adequate and I have plans to butt heads in game at some point, though. As of now we’re both just working our way through the single player campaign between playing a million other things. And yes, Mister Adequate has given this game his Hardcore Strategy/Tactical Game Seal of Approval, which is basically our equivalent of the Good Housekeeping award, except even more elusive.
Anyways, if you think any of this sounds interesting and/or you’re still listening to the music (and you really should be), then go toss Humble Bundle a few bucks and enjoy. There are other games that come in the bundle, of course, and they seem to be adding more every few days, but honestly Frozen Synapse and its soundtrack alone is worth the (user-set) price of the package. Check it out!
