0xDECAFBAD - Tag: gaming

Mass Effect 2: A Review

2010-04-02T20:06:30+00:00

I just finished Bioware's Mass Effect 2 for Xbox 360, and I've got some thoughts about it. Haven't really written reviews here for games before, but I said I wanted to start posting things here that I'd want to read. So, here goes...

In a nutshell: I loved it, will play it again—but it could have been so much better.

Mass Effect 1: The Obsession

After having had a blast playing through Star Control 2 / The Ur-Quan Masters and loving the classic (albeit pulpy) sci-fi storyline, someone suggested Mass Effect 1 would feel like a modern remake. I forget who it was, but they were right. Galactic exploration, negotiation between alien races, even taking a moon patrol buggy (a.k.a. the Mako) down to planets for resource gathering—it all matched up pretty well and compared very favorably.

So, I was set up to be impressed. Mass Effect 1 was cinematic—even down to the film grain simulation in graphics options. It was also the first major next-gen console game I spent any time with on a nice, big HDTV.

The storyline gave me a nice sensawunda, like a season of a well-made sci-fi series like Farscape or Stargate SG-1. I actually cared about what happened in the dialog sequences, and I wanted to explore those bits equally alongside combat and planetary exploration. I actually said "Whoa," when I first saw the inside of the Citadel, with its massive cylindrical interior dotted with neighborhoods and landscaping. I read all the Codex entries and planet descriptions to soak in the worldbuilding.

And then there were the art and music direction of Mass Effect 1, both of which were note-perfect for me.

The art was like the future Atari computer designers had envisioned, all clean surfaces and angles.

The music was like a modern Vangelis soundtrack for an alternate reality Blade Runner. The transition from Eden Prime to Battle at Eden Prime was a great build-up of suspense in the opening mission. The Citadel was a big sensawunda moment—in fact, the whole soundtrack had a sensawunda thread throughout. You might be on a dangerous safari, but damn if it ain't an awesome universe to do it in.

At the end—spoiler alert—they surprised me by carrying through the total feel of an 80's movie with a real band playing out the closing credits. It was a total "the end" kind of song that you'd walk out of a theater listening to, all jazzed about the show you'd just seen. The first things I did after the game ended was to look up that song (M4 Part II by Faunts), buy that band's albums, and then buy the game soundtrack.

During a plane ride to California, I watched the making-of videos on my iPod Touch. I bought an SR1 hat when I got back home.

I have done these things before for favorite movies, but only rarely for games.

What I liked in ME2

So... that brings me to Mass Effect 2, and the large shoes it had to fill.

As a game, ME2 is much improved over ME1 in many ways. They've streamlined a lot of fiddly tedium in the gameplay; amped up the combat to compete with other cover-based shooters; backed away from the cookie-cutter procedural environments to hand-craft all missions.

That last part, hand-crafting every mission, is easily the biggest improvement. In ME1, nearly every mission was a Mad Libs mashup of some pre-fab warehouse / mine / space station; an assortment of cloned enemies; some loot lockers; and maybe a unique objective or two. I still liked it: dungeon-crawlers like Diablo and Torchlight and Nethack are fun, and I have an even softer spot for space opera than fantasy.

But, ME2 clearly shows more effort in mission design. It's obvious that a human being spent many, many hours building every environment rather than just filling out a few data structures with object IDs and sketching out simple maps. I'm sure ME1 was more involved than I make it out to be, but the fact that ME2 spans two discs alone is a testament to the extra effort.

Oh, and the new "circuit bypass" and "code hacking" mini-games? They're a huge improvement over the all-purpose "Simon" game from ME1. I miss having the cheating option to just throw some omnigel at a locked door, but I don't have the overstuffed inventory to constantly recycle into wonderstuff any more either.

In terms of the story, well, it has a very brief main arc accompanied by a Canterbury Tales parade of side-stories for everyone you need to recruit to go up against the Collectors. The Collectors are very definitely bad—but, all told, you rarely see them in the act of doing bad things. They're less of a constant nemesis, and more of a looming threat that will nonetheless wait until you're done puttering around with your sniper's family problems.

Really, the Collectors felt like a blatant MacGuffin for getting Shepard involved in the lives of some interesting characters. I did find most of those characters interesting, so I was able to go with it.

It's a small world

What I missed in the story, though, was a real sense of exploration and worldbuilding. I guess maybe they figured they got it all out of the way in the previous season and just wanted to plow through with action in the second.

I was expecting Omega to be the "anti-Citadel", though, so I was a bit disappointed to find that the area was so sparse and small. Instead of a load of nooks and crannies to wander through, I got a few bare floors of grunge leading straight to objectives. I really wanted to spend some time digging into the place in the talk-to-every-villager style of most RPGs. Instead, I got a seedy nightclub, some shops, and an apartment—that's it.

In fact, although the Citadel returned and the Asari world Ilium was introduced in ME2, I felt like they were mere shadows of what ME1 offered. I guess the flip side of having the hand-crafted environments throughout the rest of the game's missions means that the hub worlds suffer.

Another weird thing were the news reports on various terminals, mentioning things happening throughout the galaxy. In ME1, hearing about trouble and raids on colonies were the starting points for side missions. In ME2, they were just random fluff and color. I'm not sure why they bothered with the content, to be honest.

Mediocre art and music

Style-wise, ME2 stripped out a lot of what I adored about ME1, coming very close to making it just another game rather than a work of art. You can call me nuts—and probably already have, though strangely you're still reading—but yes: I thought ME1 was special.

The music in ME2 is largely forgettable. There's an orchestra with horns and strings, and occasionally a chorus chants. Sometimes, there are bells and triangles. There were no themes that stuck with me, other than maybe the end-of-mission report jingle. It's just like every other modern video game with a big budget.

At least they kept something like Uncharted Worlds from ME1 for the Galaxy Map.

The art direction in ME2 also strays toward mediocrity. ME1 was stylized, all clean surfaces and sleek angles. It was nostalgic and optimistic, something refreshing. (See also: The New Star Trek.)

ME2 introduces more grime & dirt—it's "grittier" and more "realistic". Just like every other modern video game with a big budget.

But, you know what? "Realism" and "grit" are so last-decade—I'm sick of it. If I'd wanted to play Gears of War, I'd play it. I didn't. I watched Battlestar Galactica—it was good; it's over now.

R.I.P. M35 Mako

They also killed the M35 Mako, replacing it with a tedious planet-scanning mini-game. No more endless alien skies over suited-up away teams, unless you're on a mission and don't have time to look up anyway.

Sure, there were pain-in-the-ass 89.999º inclines to navigate with the I-think-I-can moon patrol buggy and its annoying jump-jets that would throw you right off a mile-high mountain peak with a slipped button press. But, I'd take all of those flaws versus painstakingly dragging a pokey reticule across a textured sphere hoping for a spiky waveform and bit of vibration in my lap.

If there's an away team to be assembled for scouring a planetary surface in-person, I'm your man. But, screw this scanning grind. Half my recruited shipmates spent all their time meditating or staring at the walls. Couldn't I have delegated some reticule-dragging duty to them, rather than wasting my precious galaxy-saving time?

Oh, but I do get to fly the little model Normandy around on the galaxy map now. Whoosh, vroom, whoop-de-doo! Remember to keep the gas tank full. Wait, isn't that Joker's job? Christ, do I have to do everything around here? While I was really hoping they'd include some sort of space vehicles alongside the Mako, tooling around with a toy was not what I had in mind.

BioWare missed an opportunity: Of the several dozen missions in the game, there were only around four main arc missions involving the big-baddies—the digressions out-massed the central story.

I would have loved some random / procedurally-generated levels on planets—ala every mission in ME1, only more unapologetically dungeon-crawley—fighting constant waves of Collectors, saving forgettable-yet-grateful human colonies as I scooped up the resources I needed to get the next sniper rifle upgrade. No hand-crafting needed here, just give me some bug hunts and make the Collectors seem like a serious and constant threat. Hell, give me a scoreboard of Collector versus Colonist body count for extra fun.

Dragon Age got my hopes up

In another BioWare game, Dragon Age, I got sucked in despite my so-so attraction to fantasy stories. The main thing came down to dialog and character interactions, and a departure from the general Paragon / Renegade system of ME1.

In Dragon Age, you get per-character approval meters. This means that what endears one character may repulse another. So, if you want to try to please or at least gain respect from everyone you recruit, you need to be careful about who you bring on which quests and what you do in the course of accomplishing goals. The occasional deep conversation or gift helps, too. It makes the game surprisingly rich.

Assuming that BioWare has a set of technologies and notions they carry from game to game, I expected to see this sort of thing pop up in ME2.

No such luck.

Instead, you get the same Paragon / Renegade system that opens up special options in dialog as before, and a simple binary not-loyal / loyal state for each of your squaddies depending on whether you completed their respective special-attention missions. Makes for fun additional missions, but is relatively boring overall.

I'd play it again, and I'll play Mass Effect 3

I grouse, but it's out of love.

Mass Effect 1 hit all the right spots for me as a sci-fi adventure and a storytelling experience in general. There's no way I wouldn't play Mass Effect 2, and I'll be right in line for Mass Effect 3. I'll probably even start over again from the beginning and replay #1 & #2 before #3 comes out.

But, BioWare? I'd really love it if you pulled back from fully making Mass Effect 3 just another video game and recaptured a bit of what made the first one so great.

the auction house is the game

2007-01-03T00:53:12+00:00

Free game idea I'll probably never implement, and would hate to maintain if I ever did:

Yendor's Other World (or, YoW) - a cross between IdleRPG / ProgressQuest and the Auction Houses from World of Warcraft. The market is the game, the roleplaying is just the background. Characters quest while you're busy in the real world, and you end up with new items and money when you return to play. Buy, sell, and trade items with other characters. Collect sets of armor to pimp your avatar and show off. Buff your stats so your avatar can finish better quests to get better items and start the whole cycle anew.

But, alas, I don't know anything about auctions or markets, and I don't like people enough in the general case to put up with running an online game unless it made me piles of (actual) money and I never had to answer a support email. :)

Archived Comments

John Manoogian III (jm3)
2007-01-03T04:46:13

plus five mousepad of exalted jerking for coining the phase, "buff your stats"
Mad William Flint
2007-01-03T13:23:29

EvE, I'm tellin ya. The marketeering is awesome.
l.m.orchard
2007-01-03T20:21:14

Well, the thing is, I don't think I'd ever really want to play this game - but it's just been mentioned to me in passing as a "wouldn't it be cool if" by at least 4 people now :)

clubhouse games FTW on nintendo ds

2006-10-28T19:24:38+00:00

I'm really digging the Nintendo DS thing - especially this new game I got for my birthday last week called Clubhouse Games. It's a pretty cheap buy, but comes loaded with about 40 classic board, bar, and card games. It also seems like they've got all the bases covered with 1-cart local multiplayer; WiFi internet multiplayer; and in-game pictochat. There's also a decent amount of incentive to explore all the games to unlock even more games, as well as little gimmes like background music styles and game background graphics. I'd say this is a must have to keep with you at all times in your DS case. Just bust it out in any DS-equipped group and pwn n00bs in a game of Grid Battle (nee Battleship™), Last Card Plus (nee Uno™), Turncoat (nee Othello™), or even bowling or darts.

Oh, and for anyone who happens to want to play me, here's my WiFi friend code for Clubhouse Games:

5283 6308 0677

Let me know if you add me, drop your code here, and maybe hit me with an IM to play.

Archived Comments

Rod Begbie
2006-10-29T06:15:31

Spooky -- My birthday was also last week, and I also received Clubhouse Games for it! How Halloweeny.

My code is 3866-2922-6013, and I'm always up for a spot of Double-Six action.
Nicholas Wright
2006-10-29T08:07:21

Dude, I got the game today, and so far I love it. I added you, and here is my code: 2191-2585-1517 Hope to play you soon on 5 card draw or somethin! =^)
brian cors
2006-11-12T17:43:36

I have this as well!

Here's my code: 5111 8497 1306

Pop me an IM if you'd like to test it out. I've never played a WiFi game on this before...
danny
2006-12-28T06:21:51

1031 6668 8096

i'm in the nintendo ds homebrew club now

2006-09-19T16:16:12+00:00

Passscard is the perfect flash card boot-up solution for DS LITE & NDS . It is compatible with most types of flash cards including M3, Neo, SC & G6 etc.

Source: Divineo.com - Product Information

I've just received a Passcard 3 in the mail. Nintendo DS homebrew, here I come! I'm particularly excited about NitroTracker and ScummVM. Though I've only got a GBA Movie Player and a 128MB CF flash card from a camera, that seems enough to run most of this stuff so far. Unfortunately, it just sticks out from the Nintendo DS Lite by an inch or so - almost half the depth of the handheld itself! I think one of my next purchases may be a more compact and capable SuperCard MicroSD, which fits flush in the Nintendo DS Lite and accepts MicroSD expansion cards.

Archived Comments

foosel
2006-09-24T22:43:08

Congratulations on the Passcard ;) I got one myself a couple of months ago, including a M3 CF, and playing Monkey Island on the DS rocks ;) I have to warn you though concerning SD based units, there were a couple of issues not so long ago with several homebrew apps (including Scumm), and write-support for SD is afaik still rather new in the standard fat-lib used by homebrew devs. So you might want to make sure that your most beloved or interesting apps will actually work like expected prior to spending loads of money.
Adam Mokan
2006-09-28T04:21:30

How does the Passcard 3 fit in the DS? I've heard that its a real tight fit and you really have to force it to "click".

I'm getting ready to break down and buy some homebrew stuff for mine.

When virtual banks fail, seek virtual laws

2006-08-29T16:16:25+00:00

Virtual acts increasingly have offline consequences--at least in those worlds with permeable borders. I would not like to be planning the next masive EVE Onine scam, or the one after it, or the one after that. For now the comforting strains of "it's just a game" are paying, but some day, some day soon, the weasel will pop.

Source: LawMeme - When Virtual Banks Fail

If the day comes when in-game offences are punishable by out-of-game laws, I quit the internet. Or, at least the MMORPG side of it - not that I've got that much an investment in it anyway.

I mean, sure, some people are making significant real money from play money. There's value in time spent and time saved running the treadmills. But no one should be delusioned to think that there's anything other than a service purchase involved, and the laws of the game world are part of the purchase. If the game world allows a scam, then you bought the fun of an in-game scam along with your rupees or ISK or gold or whatever. Ignorance of that fact is ignorance, but it ain't an excuse.

Someone has to have thought of this: What about forming governments, laws, police, and courts inside EVE? Get scammed once too many times? Don't escape to the meta level and cry for mommy in the outside world. Organize and fend for yourselves. Does the game specifically make this sort of thing impossible? If so, then the game's broken - stop playing it.

Archived Comments

Mad William Flint
2006-08-29T18:37:45

Being a 3-year EvEer I've gotta say, it's quite possible to do such things. Most of the Eve universe is controlled by massive coalitions of player-run corporations. They've got enough control over the local economy to sanction or locally ban people without much difficulty at all.

It's the PvE portion of the universe (probably 1/4 or less) that is pretty much entirely out of the hands of the players as far as market pressure, politics, etc.
l.m.orchard
2006-08-29T19:08:25

The funny part is that the news of the scams actually makes me want to play EvE :) Sounds like a pretty interesting world, at times.
Mad William Flint
2006-08-30T02:44:06

I've been MMOing since MUDs. It's really the only one I've had any inclination to stick with. Sure I miss spells and orcs. But it's just so damn RICH. EvE actually got me back into trading equities, with significant success. (Unfortunately I'm in the industry now, so my hands are kinda tied, SEC and all.) But it's got a whole lot of everything. I really can't recommend it quite highly enough.
Bob Aman
2006-08-30T20:42:35

Any game that makes it possible in any way to transfer anything between avatars makes ingame enforcement by anyone other than GMs impossible.
Bob Aman
2006-08-30T20:49:21

Also, EVE is amazing in a lot of ways. It's easily the toughest MMORPG ever made. You can lose 6 months of work in 30 seconds with no recourse if you don't take precautions. Conversely, you can ruin 10 people's day in about an hour or so if you're really good. Many roles in EVE require actual understanding of economics. And EVE's current fanbase is pretty solid in terms of legitimate community. The game actually red-shifts and blue-shifts stuff when you're travelling fast enough -- the level of detail on some things is mind-blowing. Highly recommended, but be aware that often this game is as much work as play. Definitely not for everyone.
l.m.orchard
2006-08-30T21:13:59

These two things seem at odds to me:

"Any game that makes it possible in any way to transfer anything between avatars makes ingame enforcement by anyone other than GMs impossible."

"You can lose 6 months of work in 30 seconds with no recourse if you don’t take precautions. Conversely, you can ruin 10 people’s day in about an hour or so if you’re really good."

Couldn't someone organize a police force that enforces ingame laws by ruining law-breakers' days? :) You might not be able to recover assets, but you can at least introduce consequences.
M. Brubeck
2006-08-31T03:02:03

"Couldn’t someone organize a police force that enforces ingame laws by ruining law-breakers’ days?"

If the law-breakers are in it for real-money profits (rather than enjoyment), then that won't work. As soon as you can exchange game property for real money, a whole different set of motives comes into play. Imagine criminals using MMO enterprises to launder money, or to run 419 scams. Then real-life law enforcement is going to take an interest in what's happening in-game.
Mad William Flint
2006-09-01T14:03:28

You couldn't really enforce something like that in empire space. An act of vilonce against a player (or peaceful NPC) in a policed area to bring down the hellfires of CONCORD (the in-game actual cops.)

Out in low-sec space you could do it just fine, as it's "wild territory" and there's no police force (and no repercussions to popping someone who just "needed killin"). But someone could always retreat to safe space, which is in large supply.

Plus, such a coalition would be in direct competition with the player-run corporations that have laid claim to those otherwise lawless star systems.

It could not operate in "high-sec" where concord is waiting to put the smackdown on anyone who "shoots first" at another player. It would be really tough to do I think.

There may be other ways to get at someone besides popping their ships all the time and podkilling them (long story.) But with 20k+ concurrent players at all times, it'd be really tough to organize.

Still... I like the idea :)

No more Second Life

2005-11-01T16:02:10+00:00

Over the past few months or so, I've given Second Life about 6 hours of my primary life. At first, between all the rapidly aging machines I own personally, I didn't have a single one that did the place justice. Now though, I've got a work machine with enough horsepower to do it up right.

Anyway, although I wouldn't call mine a dedicated attempt at living an alternate life, I think I've seen enough. Between the awkward controls for navigating space which make me yearn for Quake 2, and the 90% crud which comes from all ecosystems of "Consumer Generated Media", I don't think I'm going to get it.

So, like the people who say mostly these same things about podcasting, I think this is a signal that Second Life is not meant for me. It might obsolete sliced bread for some people—but all it does for me is make me want to waste time with Everquest, wash my brain out with Zork, or script something in a MOO.

Of course, I've never really bought into the whole Cyberspace / Metaverse thing past recognizing it as a neat device in William Gibson novels. I mean, why would you ever want to limit info freako space to a shoddy simulation of meatspace's meager 3 dimensions?

Archived Comments

John Best
2005-11-01T17:12:18

Maybe people want to feel more pover that they can't have in reall life...
l.m.orchard
2005-11-01T17:21:03

I'm trying to find the post where I'd said this, but once upon a time I compared my spare-time programming projects to running the experience treadmill on Everquest.
Martin Atkins
2005-11-01T18:31:26

For a long time I've had a rather irrational interest in these online simulations of the world. I'm not sure why. I've tried a bunch of them, and it's interesting to note the differences and similarities between them and speculate about how they came about.

I've never really stuck to one, though. I don't know whether it's just that none of the implementations have done it for me yet or whether my interest in them is purely academic, but I can certainly see where you're coming from.
Jason R.
2005-11-21T07:35:19

Second Life seemed like an interested diversion, with some opportunities to run it in the background doing menial things like camping to "earn money". But there hasn't really been too much going on in there that really merits sticking around for the long haul or investing and "First Life" cash thus far.

Being a Mac user, with a cable hookup, I'd much rather get some serious performance out of the game, rather than big lags and serious rezzing issues.

Video Games Live^WDead

2005-10-27T02:56:15+00:00

Due to circumstances beyond our control, Video Games Live will not be playing any of the previously scheduled shows, with the exception of Seattle and Vancouver on October 29 and October 30. Furthermore, plans are being made for additional shows in specific markets across North America for 2006.

Source: Video Games Live | www.videogameslive.com

Bastards. I was looking forward to that concert, too. When the girl and I saw the commercial for it, we looked at each others' dropped jaws and I went off to get the scoop. What's worse is that although we got the price of tickets refunded, Ticketmaster kept my service fee. What wonderful service!

Archived Comments

Lee
2005-10-28T03:39:48

I'm immensely glad that I procrastinated on buying tickets for the Chicago show. Sorry to hear that your enthusiasm got you boned out of those fees.

West of House

2005-10-21T03:09:49+00:00

The next documentary I am working on is about Text Adventures, or Interactive Fiction. It is called "Get Lamp".

Source: ASCII by Jason Scott: There is a Shiny Brass Lamp nearby

Sweet merciful crap! Man, aren't I smack-dab in the middle of Jason Scott's target demographic? I snatched up his BBS Documentary with the quickness, but I got my initiation into Zork a very long time before I ever heard the dulcet tones of my first 300 baud modem.

Archived Comments

D'Arcy Norman
2005-10-21T04:47:02

Hehe. I was a Zork addict. Still have a copy on my Powerbook... My /. sig is:

It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
l.m.orchard
2005-10-21T10:56:04

I think I spent some short period as a little kid actually wondering whether or not there were grues in dark rooms. :)
Nick
2005-10-21T15:11:26

I'm going to have to pick that one up.. How is the BBS DVD? I might have to grab it, as I was known to visit a BBS or two in my past..
Jason Scott
2005-10-25T06:55:44

I need more than 1.5 films to have a target demographic, Les!
l.m.orchard
2005-10-25T14:54:22

@Jason: Pssh... Years from now, when you've released your 10th documentary, your master plan will be clear for all to plainly see!
l.m.orchard
2005-10-25T14:55:43

@Nick: Oh, and the BBS Documentary very much rocks. You should definitely pick it up. I've got it, of course, and could lend it should we ever get together for that beer. :)
Robert
2006-07-01T20:02:47

Zork! I grew up on the BBS, learned so much about ignoring my family there! I'll be picking up the BBS Documentary... I just wish I could fire up QModem and hit the boards still...

Yak shaving, book pimping, and feed spooling

2005-09-22T20:31:16+00:00

Well, of course I've lapsed pretty much right back into silence after having shaken this place up and having announced the arrival of the book.

The culprit, of course, is yak shaving. Again. True, life itself has been pretty busy lately. The days are booked, the weekends have been filling up--and in spare moments I've been obsessed with jumping from building to building. But, when it comes down to me and a pile of code on the screen, I find myself in ever further depths of recursion.

For instance, I keep meaning to get down to posting some lightweight "asides" in place of my old "quick bullets" posts I was doing. But, of course, before I do that, I want to do some Kottkesque template mungeing to more properly present these smaller bits.

And, though I'm actually most of the way done making another rev to the theme here, I also want to fold my linkblog back into the site. The absence of these has already been noticed, so I'd like to give those a proper treatment.

In addition, I still mean to start pimping my new book a bit; maybe even starting tonight. I've got a notion to post teasers highlighting a few of my favorite things. And then, of course, there's the neglected companion site on which I've yet to spend much time at all. But I've got grand plans, including some which go beyond the book itself and toward making hackingfeeds.com a regularly updated and relevant resource.

Speaking of that... I've also continued working a bit with some feed hacks since finishing the book.

FeedSpool is one of these: I've revived some of FeedReactor's old code--this time aiming for a much higher degree of simplicity, trying to stick with standard Python modules, and dumping the database altogether.

I've been meaning to make a more formal announcement about this thing, once it's a bit more in usable shape. In a nutshell: It polls feeds and downloads the data. New entries are split out into individual files, like an email or usenet spool. That's it. Other programs are expected to do the clever bits.

And, to go along with FeedSpool, I've been toying with building a Spotlight importer for OS X Tiger which indexes RSS and Atom feeds and entries. Not in Subversion yet, and not nearly ready for public consumption, but it's been pretty fun to play with. (And I totally forgot just how many feeds I have lying around on my hard drive!)

Anyway, that's enough for now. Time to post this and get to thinking about what I want to post next!

Archived Comments

Aristotle Pagaltzis
2005-09-23T02:03:28

Just a quick note that as of this writing, neither the feeds (ironic!) nor commenting works at hackingfeeds.com.
l.m.orchard
2005-09-23T02:18:02

Aristotle: Thanks for the note! That should be fixed now. (This is me, grumbling about mod_rewrite rules...)
slackorama
2005-09-23T16:40:58

Oh man...don't even talk to me about that blasted Hulk game. It's been sucking up my time and destroying my thumb for over a week now.
l.m.orchard
2005-09-23T18:25:45

slackorama: I've been playing that game with the large-size XBox controller, since I'm still in need of an S-type. Man... I've got a big oval bruise / permadent in my right thumb from charging up the jump button over and over again.
Darren Chamberlain
2005-09-23T18:42:15

Re: FeedSpool: I started writing something similar a few years back, that read RSS feeds and posted them to an nntp server, dynamically creating newsgroups (one for each feed) on demand. I intended to read my feeds with tin or slrn (I'd use thunderbird now) and call it a day. I didn't get very far with it, though, because I couldn't find an NNTP server package that I was happy with, and then something shinier came along. I think there is a lot of merit to this idea, though, and I'm going to be taking a look at FeedSpool.

Crappy video games to get more expensive to produce

2004-08-30T02:52:48+00:00

According to calculations, it may cost up to 200% more to develop games for the PS3 or Xbox 2 than it does for current systems.

Source: EA expresses ‘concern’ about next-gen technology

Here's some blogging for you. This article brings two thoughts to mind for me...

First is this: Of course, if you're striving for some semblance of realism in games, the costs will likely approach and exceed the cost to produce movies. It'll approach the cost because, eventually, you'll need either movie-grade animators or real actors. And then it'll exceed the cost, because who wants a game that's as linear as a 2-hour movie? If you want any replay value out of the thing, you're going to have to produce the equivalent of a 4-hour movie at least, if not a 20- to 40-hour movie. And then, you're going to have to be satisfied that many players will miss most of it. Once things reach this point, I think in some sense video games will have arrived as a "successor" to movies, as movies were a "successor" to radio plays.

This brings me to my second thought: Right now, I'm listening to a streaming radio station that's playing old sci-fi and drama radio plays, like X Minus One and The Shadow. These shows are great, and I'm thinking of buying a few box sets of them. These old radio shows get quite a bit of mileage out of their less technologically advanced medium. In contrast to this, my consumption of contemporary and popular television, movies, and music has been dropping off from year to year as I get more tired of supremely well-produced yet worthless content.

Music gets sold on anything but a good tune, movies sold on special effects over plot, and video games head toward technological supremacy over a fun hook or even an engaging story line. But, I don't want anything to do with any of these.

A few days ago, a friend of mine remarked that many "retro" video games were just as horrible as modern video games, but I have to disagree a bit. There were a lot of horrible games. But, for games to be successful back when the dazzle factor of the hardware was low, you needed the fun trick or clever twist that addicted players. The constraints called for ingenuity. Sometimes this meant pushing the hardware, and sometimes this meant coming up with a brilliant yet simple-to-implement idea. (Tetris, I'm looking at you.)

As the hardware platforms progress, we'll see more and more absolutely dazzling demos of the hardware sold as games that completely fail at being fun. But they'll have insane budgets and probably sell very well just because people want to see the pretty sparklies and foobar shaders. The increased capabilities will offer more expressive ability to interactive storytellers, but I bet it will just give even more excuse for game makers to be distracted from that and keep pumping out stories that suck carried by game play that reeks.

It all makes me almost wish for a kink in Moore's Law that stalls the progress of dazzling hardware and forces developers back to being clever with their resources and game ideas. Maybe we'll see more and more of an indie games community rise, producing genuinely fun and amusingly ingenious games. (Gish, I'm looking at you.)

Meanwhile, my girlfriend and I will be playing massive amounts of Magical Drop III.

shortname=crappyvideogames

Archived Comments

Val
2004-08-30T00:30:14

I generally agree, tho I love a lot of games for their eye-candy like I love (well, at least like, or wll pay to see) a lot of movies strictly for thier eye-candy (as opposed to a good story, acting, etc.) But, re your wish for a more constrained environment in which to draw out developers' creativity: it strikes me we're starting to see this with the mobile environments. The cellphones Russell Beattie describes are severely restricted compared to today's monster desktop/video-card setups that comprise even bargain-basement PCs (tho Russ DOES today talk about getting a 512MB memory card for his phone -- size of a thumbnail -- for about $100. The constraints won't be there for long -- enjoy while you can!)
byran connor
2005-03-09T12:20:22

Hey your right man. Tetris and Nintendo, Sonic and Sega, dude those games kicked a$$ andnow a days game makers do get side tracked by all the fancy stuff an what not.The only new game that i played and liked all the way through was halo 1. Then all the other games i got for my xbox blowed except the fact that soul calibur was alrighty, but game makers or whatever they're called need to do a better job with their plot and game play...peace out and keep on playin the old school games.

Nintendo DS returning to Game & Watch roots

2004-05-11T22:31:17+00:00

Hmm. Looks like some pictures of the new Nintendo DS are filtering out of E3 today. Notice any similarities?