Dragon Age: Origins checked all those boxes handily. So I snapped it up.
The game is, by all accounts, huge. Fifty hours of gameplay, easy. More, no doubt, if you're an obsessive side-quester like me ("What's that little elf boy? You lost your bouncy ball? I will go into these haunted woods and find it!").
DA:O is supposed to be a lot darker and grittier than the D&D-licensed RPGs that have come out in the last decade or so. And it is that, although it's not the darkest or grittiest thing I've ever played by a long shot.
Still, the much-touted 'morally gray' choices are agonizing, especially for a player like me who wants to see every single part of the game. The game seems to delight in tossing the player into situations where there don't seem to be any right answers, and possibly there's not even a happy outcome.
Intellectually, I really appreciate that. So many games that offer 'moral choices' come down to "Would you like to save the orphanage? Or set it on fire?" In the world of DA:O, the orphanage is already on fire and the orphans will grow up to be evil necromancers. Frequently, doing the 'obvious good' thing will lead to unintended consequences. Also frequently, there's no 'good' way to do anything and you have to do the bad thing or stand aside and watch.
Again, it's intellectually more interesting that way. In an actual game, though, it's a bit frustrating in a way. As a player, you want a clear path to reward, and DA:O stubbornly refuses to give it to you. As a story, this makes it realistic. But as a game which you are actually trying to play, it's a bit random. One comes to the point where one wants to save before every conversation.
Debating the pros and cons of such a complex moral choices in the format of a video game is definitely a conversation to be had. There's wiggle room there. But here's an area where there's not wiggle-room: I think Dragon Age: Origins fell into a rut in terms of gameplay mechanics, and that there is a design failure here on the part of the developers.
If you've ever played any of the Baldur's Gate games, the Neverwinter Night games, or there close relatives (basically, any Bioware/Black Isle/Obsidian RPG from the past fifteen years) you're going to be very familiar with the way combat and character leveling works in this game. And you know what, I'm going to say that's not a good thing.
The basic formula involves pausing the real-time combat about once a second (not an exaggeration), moving every character who isn't a mage, and using the mage to drop big area-of-effect spells on the enemy hoardes to mop them up. In a nutshell: extreme micromanagement, and magic-users are king. And this is a system that DA:O takes to the next level, by ratcheting up the difficulty and forcing you to do this kind of thing or watch your party get wiped out by low-level grunts.
The problem is, this is a game that starts out by inviting you to build any character you like. It then has a combat system that emphasizes real-time, one-on-one combat. Yet if you create a wise-cracking rogue duelist, like I did, you'll quickly find that attempting to just 'play' him is an exercise in frustration. Without being heavily optimized and understanding all the ins-and-outs of the game, the character quickly becomes quite useless in combat. And the game does little to prod you in the right direction.
Ultimately, I think these 'semi-real-time' RPGs have bad interfaces. Oh sure, they're polished and easy to navigate. But they're also extremely misleading. They make it look like the game is meant to be played one way, when really it's meant to be played in an entirely different style.
In most of the older games, that didn't matter, but DA:O demands a lot more of players (presumably because many of them have been playing this same kind of game for fifteen years) and is extremely unforgiving if you don't play it the 'right' (but secret!) way.
But here's the problem: I should fall within the cohort of 'veteran' players, since I picked up the first Neverwinter Nights nearly a decade ago. But you know what happened during that decade? I got older! I'm almost thirty, I have two jobs, and I don't want to spend my evenings pouring over the manual, the character creator, and any FAQ I can find online in order to optimize my character and make the game playable. I want something I can come home to in the evening and unwind by spending a couple hours saving the world.
I really, really like DA:O's story and characters so far. But at this point I'm starting to get torn. I want to hear more of it, but advancing through it is like pulling teeth. So I almost don't want to play it. At this point, I'm half-way inclined to start over and build a better optimized character, but I've already sunk 10+ hours into the game.
Is this the kind of game you wanted to make, Bioware? An RPG for teenagers and experts? And do you really think that recycling decades old mechanics is the best approach here anyway?
Hopefully I'll figure out a way to keep playing and enjoying this game. But I also hope that the next game in the series takes a good hard look at some of the fundamentals here. I think one of the world's foremost RPG developers owes players something better than this.
Yarr. One episode of Tales of Monkey Island and no gold out of yer pocket. 'Tis a value of free ninety-nine!
In no time at all ye will find yerself treasure huntin', seeking the hand of comely wenches and crossin' swords with the Dread Pirate Le Chuck. So don't be a-feared, but prepare to click the link!
The final reckoning of the infamous Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas 'Hot Coffee' scandal:
With Take-Two's $20 million settlement with its investors late last week, the long-wrought 'Hot Coffee' episode finally comes to a close. The settlement comes after the $2.75 million the publisher had previously set aside for payments and costs to incensed consumers -- and that's not all.More here.
Once a user mod revealed a hidden sex minigame, the recall, re-rating and re-release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas the publisher had to undertake was surely expensive, concussing revenues -- where major GTA releases usually bring windfalls, the company's third quarter in 2005 showed a $28.8 million loss.
An estimate based on legal costs and lost sales is ultimately just a ball-park guess, of course -- that $20 million also compensates investors for Take-Two's stock option backdating scandal, and the company's insurance paid much of it. It's also impossible to create a precise lost-sales figure.
But the financial cost of "Hot Coffee" to Take-Two is clearly in the tens of millions, at least -- a huge price tag for a small share of game content consumers were never even supposed to see.
Alexander notes in her article that the cost to the video game industry was probably ultimately far greater than the cost to Rockstar, the game's developer, and Take Two, it's publisher. Video games are a medium still struggling for legitimacy, and continually saddled with the reputations of their most extreme representatives. A hidden sex game in one of their most high-profile releases does not help matters.
Video games, or at least their descendants, will most likely be the last great frontier of entertainment and storytelling. I really believe that virtual worlds and interactive works will be very important to us in the future. We're just beginning to understand how to tell great stories with these tools, but in time they will be every bit as powerful in this regard as film.
Let's not limit the kind of things that we can do in a virtual environment to stuff as silly and puerile as 'Hot Coffee' at this early stage.
Yes, I'm stuck. Which means that yes, I'm playing a classic adventure game. Sort of. Does anyone remember the hilarious Lucasarts classic, The Secret of Monkey Island? Well, it's back.
Way back in 1990 Lucasarts released this seminal hilarious pirate puzzle game. Players starred as Guybrush Threepwood, the dweebiest pirate wannabe ever, as he took on the Dread Pirate LeChuck and sought to win the love of the fair Governor Elaine. The game featured wall-to-wall sixteen bit sound and a scintillating 256 colors, every pixel of which was highly visible.
It was brilliant.
Flash forward nearly two decades, and my sister is telling me that the game is available... on Steam?!? And the art and music has been completely redone? And voice work added? Seriously?
Yes, she insisted, it's true. And to prove it, she and Steven bought me the game! I downloaded it and am now knee deep in scurvy scalawags and swashbuckling sea-dogs. Don't believe me? See for yourself:
The really cool thing about the 'remake' is that it's built on the exact same source code. At ANY point in game you can hit F10 and flip seamlessly to the pixel-intensive original. Which is worth checking out, by the way, just to see what passed for state of the art back then. To it's credit, the original Monkey Island made the best possible use out of the available technology. That's why it's still such a good game.
It's also very funny and the puzzles are clever but generally without being wall-bangingly maddening.
( I have a couple of niggling nitpicks with the update but they're hardly worth mentioning... )
So I'll just say instead that if you've got ten bucks to drop and you love either pirates, monkeys, or adventure games you need to get on Steam (or XBox Live if you're into that) and download it pronto. This is an adventure game in the classic style, faithfully ported into the twenty-first century. GET IT.
And then if someone could PLEASE kindly help me get the herring from that dang sea-gull?!
The games are a mix of a old-school point-and-click adventures and classic JRPGs. So one minute you're mousing around an empty sanitarium, clicking for buried treasure, and the next you're using your upgraded Super Punch on a band of hat-wearing spiders. Tactical combat trumps puzzle solving just slightly, although the balance is somewhat redressed in the second episode.
All this is wrapped up in a really engaging format of comic-book style cut scenes. The animation really looks terrific - this is NOT amateur stuff. The actual game is in 3D, but has been cell-shaded to match. The soundtrack is also strong, and they got a pitch-perfect narrator who imparts just the right tone of dark foreboding.
The reason I'm pitching this to you is that it's only $15 a pop. You can click here, download it in five minutes and be playing in ten. So if you don't have time or inclination to get into a serious full-size upgrade-your-graphics-card kind of game right now, the Penny Arcade Adventures are a solid option. Episodes One and Two are already out and should keep you busy for the moment, with Three slated for release soon.
I think that you don't have to be a Penny Arcade fan to enjoy these. There are lots of references to both the comic strip, naturally, and the games often have sort of a meta-commentary on the classic video game tropes that the comic is so obsessed with, but none of it is vital to your understanding of the plot or characters. You can jump right in and start foiling evil mimes and running errands for hobo scientists with no prior knowledge of these things.
The one way in which a knowledge of the source material might benefit you is that it would prepare you for the kind of humor on full display here. The games can be profane and violent but they are also literate and very very funny. If you enjoy Tycho's loquacious word-play and the comic's style of writing you will be very much at home here.
Like in the old Lucasarts games, clicking on stuff is half the fun as you get to hear whatever ridiculous throw-away text the writer cooked up. My favorite bit so far, after selecting a ladder against a wall: "Young hooligans often use these devices to get high."
This is game design at it's finest. There are no instructions because none are needed. It's simple, elegant, and challenging. Props to whomever.
UPDATE: I've decided that this game is even more brilliant than it first appears, as the rather contrary nature of the cat somehow feels extremely true-to-life.
Video gaming's longest-running-joke has come to an end with no punch-line: Duke Nukem Forever is canceled as developer 3D Realms dissolves due to financial difficulties.
Damn you, credit crisis! Is nothing sacred?!?
I think we all assumed that the storyline would go something like this: DNF would eventually be released. If it was a flop, the derision would be universal but the joke would be satisfying. The other scenario was vindication. DNF would be such a triumph of video game virtue that it would silence all critics and justify it's many years of being the butt of all jokes.
I don't think this was on anyone's radar.
Didn't 3DR make a huge pile of money selling off the Max Payne franchise? What did they blow it all on, a cocaine habit?
Anyway.
The Duke Nukem series has a lot of history for me. When I was young and VGA was new, I saw a demo for the original side-scrolling platform game Duke Nukem running on a friend of my dad's top-end 386x PC. The advertisement said something to the effect of, "Better than Nintendo", an unheard of statement in those days, but it looked like it just might be.
In due time my dad and I scraped together a computer capable of playing the thing. We played the shareware version until we wore a groove in the disk drive, then eventually the rest of the game as well. When Duke Nukem II dropped, we were there (I think my dad is still playing that one).
Duke Nukem 3D, a joke of sorts at the end of the second installment, became reality circa 1995. It left my dad behind (he's never made the switch to 3D gaming) but my friends and I greatly enjoyed it. It's goofy action-hero sensibilities were great, and the multiplayer was violent and highly engaging. Plus, the game was kinda groundbreaking.
Duke, you'll live on Forever in our hearts. Hail to the king, baby.
UPDATE: some sources are claiming that since 3D Realms parent' company survives, development on DNF is not affected. Color me skeptical, to say the least.
I don't think Realms ever made much of a splash commercially, but it was a great game. A friend gave it to me, I think. I had no idea what it was, but one fateful evening
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unfjoel and I popped the first of the four CD-ROMs into the drive. We were immediately introduced, through the magic of Full Motion Video (still popular in the late nineties), to a man who has just buried his father, had a run in with a very dubious priest, and is now on his way to a strange house that he has seen frequently in his dreams. We also learn that his father left him a strange relic and that his dreams are grainy CGI renders. But whatevs.Then he steps into the haunted house, the doors slam shut behind him, and the game begins.
The game itself was a hybrid of an old-school first person shooter and an adventure game. You moved around with the arrow keys and shoot things, but you could click on objects with your mouse to investigate them. And there were also points in conversations and in the FMV sequences where you had choices to make. Basically, if they'd thrown in some real time strategy they would have covered every genre of nineties PC game.
What I mostly remember about the game (aside from it being SUPER long) was that it was absolutely sopping with spooky atmosphere. I mean, Joel and I were playing together throughout most of it and it was still scaring the pants off us. But the story was so devilishly intriguing that we didn't really have a choice, we had to keep playing. Hmm, sort of like our hapless protagonist. I wonder why that strange priest had a copy of this game lying around for me anyway? Well, nevermind...
I knew absolutely nothing about this game going in, and that was definitely the very best way to experience it. Because what starts as your typical hack-your-way-out-of-the-spooky-mansion game quickly becomes much more.
( Spoilers... for a game that's over a decade old )The other thing I remember about the game was that it was SUPER long (I mean, four CDs was a lot in those days) and that some of the maze-based puzzles were a bit... galling.
It was worth it though. It was inventive in its scares (I still get chills thinking of the long, dusty hallways where you have to crunch your way over thousands of dead rats). And the story was quite passable, especially for a video game. As the narrator in the above YouTube link points out, it's like the people who shot the movie sequences actually knew what they were doing... and cared.
Anyways, if you find yourself in the mood for a classic PC game, this might be worth digging up. There are some helps out there to get you running with it on your Computer Of The Future, which is what poor Realms will think you have. But if you come across it in a used game bin, you should scoop that puppy up and give it a whirl. It's a certifiable classic.
Audience Participation: what old games have you recently unearthed? And did they hold up against your memories of them?
Anyways, if you have the slightest interest in video games, hit up Count Gameula and say Hi. Tell her Tom sent ya.
For some reason I've always followed this franchise with interest. Not sure why, since I'm not usually that into 'shooters', but the stylistic approach of the series - a grimy, gritty modern noir - has always appealed to me.
This will be the first entry in the series developed ENTIRELY by Rock Star Games. Rock Star is the company responsible for the notorious Grand Theft Auto. The first game and most of the second were developed by 3D Realms and Remedy Entertainment, but the franchise was sold to Rock Star before the second game was released for 80 million dollars. Yes, you read that right, 80 million dollars. So I was surprised not to hear about a sequel sooner, since you can bet that Rock Star wants to make its money back.
Even though Max Payne is theoretically right in Rock Star's wheelhouse with loads of violence and mature content, I wonder if it might not be too mature for Rock Star. I mean, this is a series that tells serious stories, not a series about beating people up and taking their corvettes. Also, their press release raises some eyebrows:
Scheduled for release in "Winter 2009," Max Payne 3 seems to have a decidedly darker tone than its two predecessors, based on the small amount of information so far revealed.Uh, 'darker'? Darker than what? The first two games weren't exactly set in Happy Rainbow Land. Apart from the brooding noir atmosphere, you've got a backstory soaked in murder, a renegade anti-hero cop who pops pills to keep on his feet, weird death cults, high-level government corruption and a plot where virtually every character is guaranteed to wind up dead.
"We're starting a new chapter of Max's life with this game," said Rockstar founder Sam Houser via press release. "This is Max as we've never seen him before, a few years older, more world-weary and cynical than ever. We experience the downward spiral of his life after the events of Max Payne 2 and witness his last chance for salvation."
What exactly are they planning to do to make the next game 'darker'?
wistfulmaid has been valiantly picking up the linkage while I've been in absentia. Good on her! Hopefully she'll keep it up, since I'm still trying to catch up to the 1000+ posts in my Google Reader queue. Yeesh.Tropical Doldrum Fay is supposed to pass just south of us today. In theory that means that it should be dumping a ton of rain on us. So far there hasn't been anything out of the ordinary around here, though. I mean, I haven't seen the sun since I got back from Europe, but it hasn't been nearly as crazy as, say, the freak hail storm we had a couple of months ago.
Today is my second-to-the-last day working for The Man. Then: freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom! I'm working from home today like everybody else in anticipation of Fay's lethal incessant drizzle.
Did you know that you should not try executing power slides in Happy Fun Car when the pavement is wet? It's true!
Finally, below the cut is a Very Important Video for those anticipating the way retro goodness of Mega Man 9:
( Read more... )
It's a simple concept, really. It's capture the flag, only the flag is a princess. To keep the other team from running off with her, you feed her cake to make her fat and difficult to move. Obviously.
What could possibly be controversial about that?
UPDATE: Oh my but the comments on that article are hilarious! I've included a few choice ones below the cut.
( How heteronormative are YOU? )
Wii Sports is getting a sequel. Set on a tropical island, it appears to include Frisbee throwing and fencing. The really interesting thing, though, is that the game will be packaged with a little peripheral that clips onto the Wii-mote, and gives it advanced motion control...
Portal: Still Alive is coming. 'Exclusively to XBox 360', supposedly, although 'exclusivity' nowadays usually just means you have to wait two more months to get it on your platform of choice. From the sound of it it will be more of an expansion with new test chambers than a full-fledged sequel, but I'm not shedding any tears over that. I'm just thrilled about the chance to return to the Enrichment Center one more time...
Mega Man 9 shocker: the new game will be eight-bit. That's right, they're going totally old skool. And they're promising that it will have defenestrate-your-TV levels of difficulty. Hmmmm... It certainly sounds like they're planning on recreating the authentic experience!
And finally, you're probably wondering if I ever downloaded the Spore Creature Creator. Oh yes I did.
No, but seriously. There is a game coming out on the DS. If you own a DS you should buy it, then play it, then play it again. I personally am off the hook, because I have already played it in its original form.
The game is ChronoTrigger, a PS1 game widely considered to be one of the best JRPGs evah. They're updating it for the DS. I don't know what all that entails; whether it involves a facelift or if it just revels in its pixellated glory; but let me just say that if you only buy one time-travelling nostalgic JRPG cash-in port this year, make sure that it's **CHRONO TRIGGER**(tm)!!!!
OK, I realize that most of you don't care. Most of you have a gaping Rockman-shaped hole in your cultural education. That's okay, we can't all be awesome.
However, after receiving these glad tidings I found myself pondering my own joy. Have I too bought into the nostalgia cult? Is my joy in the Wii and all it's well-worn franchises indiciative of a desire to be sold endless retreads of childhood favorites?
After much soul-searching, I concluded that the answer was: Maybe! But not entirely.
Self justification: you see, for all the glory of today's three dimensional, high-def, fully immersive non-linear interactive video game entertainment, there are some types of gameplay that have been left markedly underserved. Side-scrolling platmore games, the dominant genre of a bygone era, don't benefit much from graphical bells and whistles, and so they've fallen by the wayside. Fair enough.
But that style of gameplay is no less valid for a game, and no less appealing for someone who grew up playing those games. So when I hear that they're working on a new Kid Icarus for the Wii, the little thrill that runs through my soul is not entirely nostalgia. There's some well-founded excitement there as well. I enjoyed this style of game once, and assuming that a new edition won't completely jettison all the mechanics that I enjoyed in the original - and that I probably haven't experienced since.
The original Mega Man games combined very tight, challenging platform-play with a unique brand of puzzle solving. You ran, jumped and blasted your way across difficult terrain and and a variety of enemies with specific, patterned attacks. Certain levels and enemies were easier to deal with if you had the right tool for the job.
The tools came in the form of special weapons acquired by beating level bosses. Each level boss was also uniquely vulnerable to another bosses' weapon. That meant that figuring out the order of the levels (you could select which one to play next) was paramount.
I have to admit, the original games could also be difficult. The kind of difficult that makes you tear your hair out, bang your head against the wall and curse the twisted gods that would design such devious levels. So yeah, looking forward to that.
In case you are a microorganism which has been living under a damp rock, Wil Wright, the man who brought you Sim... everything, is developing Spore, which is essentially Sim Everything. You develop a life form, guide it through its formative years, help it to start a little life form family, and eventually build an interstellar civilization. Anyway, that's the long view. In the short run, you can download just the part where you actually start adding arms and eyeballs right here and get a head-start on using God-like power to completely make a mess of everything.
So yeah, if you've given it a whirl, let me know what you think!
