Planet Sillicon

Your inner child active enough?

By blog on May. 7, 2010.

Some games are just designed to awaken your inner child.

I just happened to take a look at the Toy Story 3 preview, not something I would usually do – licensed games since SNES being what they usually are and all – but I trust in Pixar so I thought I’d take a look at the preview.

I was mightily surprised to hear that the game actually sounded fun! Basically, there’s a very minor story-mode which apparently touches on parts of the upcoming film, but the real joy to be had is in Toy Box mode.

Basically, you get to be either Buzz, Woodie, or Jessie, and you get to run around in a big toy box like town, either doing missions for the locals, or decorating, or doing… stuff. You can miniaturise the locals with goop to be found around the place, you can get a rather large assortment of weapons or items, including a lightning rod to zap the locals with, and there’s all sorts of other unlockables and so on.

So, whilst I do hold some trepidation, I mean, this is a licensed game after all, and they are rather notorious, but when I read the preview I was pleasantly surprised by what was there. When I showed my SO the preview, she, and I hope I’m getting the term right here, squeed at the idea of unleashing her inner child and playing around in the Toy Box.

Among the unlockables it would be good to see the option to ‘Sheriff’ – because yes, that’s what you’re doing in the Toy Box – as different characters. I forgot to mention too that you can ride around on mounts to get to different places within the Toy Box, including a horse and a dragon. Also, you can play split screen with two players at once, but they don’t necessarily have to be playing together doing the same things, but they can help each other if they want to.

All in all I’m hoping it lives up to it’s potential. Probably not, but hey, why not have a little hope?

When sequels go bad

By blog on May. 7, 2010.

Some sequels should not exist, and it’s seeming like Lost Planet 2 is one of those sequels.

I played Lost Planet back when it came out. It’s actually a bit of a blur – a white, snowy blur – as much of the storyline has faded from my mind. Not a good sign. It wasn’t a very long game, but I suppose that’s not really a problem when the game isn’t really, really engaging, but I have a thing about games being less than 20 hours. That seems cheap to me.

So, when I saw that Lost Planet 2 had been reviewed on IGN, I thought I’d check it out. As I said, I wasn’t blown away by the first game, but there’s the rare occasion where a sequel will be a better game than the first. Rare, but it does happen occasionally. In this case, no. A game that wasn’t great to begin with lead to a sequel which doesn’t even qualify as good.

Reading through the review, which happens to come out four or five days before the game is actually released – watch this one do poorly in sales! – one has to wonder why anyone would want to play it. It sounds absolutely terrible, and when IGN rates a game 6.0 and they say passable, they really mean passable. I’ve got a standard of not usually playing any game that didn’t get an 8.5 or higher, so when a game gets a score this low I’d never play it.

Basically, it’s incoherent, poorly controlled, animations are overly elaborate and take too long, the game is very unclear in directing the player to what objectives need to be completed, and you can’t save during game play. Seriously. The game is set out as 6 episodes with a few chapters for each episode. Each of these chapters constitutes a playable level. They take about an hour a piece, and you can’t save during it, so if you die towards the very end, you go right back to the beginning of that level. Oh and nor can you have someone jump in for some co-op play.

The game’s difficulty level is also poorly balanced, and all in all it seems an exercise in frustration. Yep, I’ll give that one a miss!

Now for some really good gaming

By blog on May. 7, 2010.

Some really, really good gaming.

After playing Alan Wake, a game that I could have said so, so much more about – in a negative light – I needed to play something fun, something really good, something that was excellent the first time I played it and was going to be excellent this time as well. That game is, of course, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn with the Throne of Bhaal expansion pack.

This is one of my all time favourite games, one of those games that forever shall be a yard-stick against which all new games shall be judged. You can’t help doing that when you play a game like this. BGII is one of the longest, most well written, most engaging, most enjoyable games out there. Forever after playing it you’ll remember great lines from your party members. “Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes! ” and “I have lost myself in your words but Boo thinks you’re just ducky.” from Minsc – and Boo – as well as “I can’t! I’m allergic! Well, not that allergic.” from Jan Jansen are among my favourites. Pretty much anything Minsc says in reference to Boo is awesome, and Jan’s got a few other good one liners.

There’s certainly a lot of humour in the game, but it’s not all so light. There’s enough darkness to make you appreciate the light. You get to fight such a wide variety of foes, too, from Beholders to Mind Flayers, from Umber Haulks to Vampires, and you even get to fight – and kill if you’re awesome like I am – a black and a red dragon!

There’s so much to talk about with this game, and the storyline is so epic, that one little blog post really can’t begin to cover it’s total amount of awesomeness. All I can say is, if you’ve not played this game, go get yourself a copy now! If you have, and you have fond memories of it, then get it back out, play it windowed, and have a great time with it all over again!

Alan Wake – A game we waited so long for.

By blog on May. 7, 2010.

But was it worth the wait?

I, like many gamers, feel conflicted about the whole thing. It looked alright and played alright, but surely for five years of development it should have been more than alright, right?

I mean, the game mechanic was a very interesting and fun idea when I first heard about it, back in 2005, but now there are other games that have gone and done very similar things so this isn’t as ground breaking as it could have been if the developers hadn’t taken so long. Also, Remedy made out like the game would be quite a bit more expansive than it was, suggesting there would be a great deal of exploration. Most of the game actually takes place in an extremely linear fashion, and sure you can stop and have a peek here or there into a few places that you don’t strictly need to go to in order to complete the game, but this by no means makes it expansive. It lasts for about ten hours. Goodness me that’s a lame amount of time. That’s why I love RPGs!

I have to say, I’m also extremely irritated that a game that took five years from announcement to release already has tokens for bloody downloadable content. Are you freaking kidding me? And, spoiler alert here, when you finish the game you get the most boring cliffhanger ending, which supposedly Remedy is going to expand on in the DLC chapters soon to follow. I don’t know, but when I pay that much for a game, I want it to be bloody well finished, and I don’t want to have to guess randomly at an ending when I know that in a short time I’ll find out what’s going to happen anyway! Bah!

I think the thing that bothers me about the whole thing the most is the conceit. I felt like I was basically just walking through the inner monologue of an uninteresting and self-absorbed writer. It was like the worst of Steven King’s and Dan Brown’s novels put together. It’s so clichéd, and so… self indulgent. I really don’t like listening to internal monologues… I believe in the art of show don’t tell. I also felt the whole time that the monster in the dark was clearly a part of Alan, but I suppose we’ll have to wait for sequels and sequels before Remedy gives that gold up.

So, whilst there are some good things about the game, all in all it’s not really doing it for me.

Games as an art form

By blog on Apr. 21, 2010.

I know, I know, I have actually written about this, but there’s more to talk about now!

Okay so, if you read my previous post on this issue, you will have seen that I wrote of Roger Ebert’s comment about video games never being able to be considered an art form. I’ll sum it up here again, though. Ebert stated that due to the players choices necessary in a video game, it could never be considered art in the same way film or literature can. Oh and instillation art doesn’t count as art, either, by that understanding, but anyway.

This really irritated many gamers, and, quite rightly, Ebert has been inundated with requests to reconsider his opinion. He hadn’t written on the topic since he wrote his original comment, until now! A game designer and producer, Kellee Santiago, gave a TED talk at USC recently, and referenced Mr Ebert’s comments. She then spoke of amazing games like Braid, Waco Resurrection, and Flower and basically showed how each of these games could be considered art based upon their individual style and impact. I’ve not actually played Waco Resurrection or Flower, but the latter is one that my SO really wants to play.

Ebert wrote a short essay as a rebuttal to Santiago and as a confirmation of his previous statement in response. This then lead IGN writer, Mike Tomsen to write a rebuttal to Ebert, and that’s where I started reading. I agree with so much of what Tomsen had to say in his piece titled, Dad is Dead: Rebutting Roger Ebert – poorly named in my opinion as it doesn’t make sense and Ebert is currently fighting cancer, but anyway.

It was so heartening to see not one but two cogent and intelligent arguments put forth about this topic. Ebert asked in his essay why gamers care that video games be considered art, and to that I had my own response. Because it’s tiring seeing a medium which can be so evocative, emotive, inspiring, and far reaching be diminished by such ridiculous claims by ignorant people. Ebert pans Braid, and the other two games with it, when he’s never even played them. I felt insensed by that, because when I played Braid, I found it a touching and thoughtful game that deviated greatly from the norm. It was intriguing and, quite honestly, beautiful. Want to know what Ebert had to say about the storyline of Braid, which was told between the levels? He said that it “exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie”.

I’m astounded that an actual critic would be so callous and dismissive. I found that particular line in his essay to be both grubby and snot-nosedly imperious all at the same time. But anyway, back to my original premise here.

In my opinion, the gaming world needs to stop looking to critics who’ve no idea of video games for validation. There are video games that do deserve validation, praise, and to be considered works of art, but if a critic doesn’t even understand how to play a video game, how is he ever going to be able to comprehend the full package? I think it would be great to see critics cross the boundaries of film and gaming, and I hope to see it in the near future, but I think Ebert is not that critic, and I think he’s just proven once again how ignorant of gaming he truly is. He’s got films down, but games? He’s just not there at all.

A successor to the DS

By blog on Apr. 9, 2010.

A successor to the DS, titled the 3DS, has been announced and will be unveiled formally at E3 in June.

Details at this point are sketchy, but what Nintendo has confirmed is that the DS successor, the 3DS, will have 3D capability without the need for any sort of glasses to perceive the effect. Nintendo have also stated that the new handheld will be completely backwards compatible, so you’ll still be able to play the full library of DS and DSi titles.

At this point, confirmed details of the handheld run dry, and the rest comes from speculation from newspapers in Japan. Japan’s largest newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, says that the 3D technology being used by Nintendo comes from Sharp’s 3D LDC panel, which works by having a thin film suspended slightly above the actual screen, which each eye interprets slightly differently, causing the image to look three dimensional. Personally this sounds like a great way to feel nauseous after a short while of game play, but I’m sure Nintendo wouldn’t have gone down this road should that be the case.

The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper usually entrusted to break all Nintendo news, has reported that Nintendo is planning to use an analogue stick for controlling characters in 3D, and rumble technology is also expected for the new handheld. Both odd notions to me. To continue with a sleek design, the idea of an analogue stick seems somewhat of a sore thumb, and it makes me wonder if they’re planning on sticking with the same folded design. I certainly hope so.

Supposedly the new 3DS will also have much better battery life and wireless, but the screens aren’t set to go as large as the DSi XL – watch that chunky hardware sit on shelves for a long time to come! – but will have an accelerometer, which is the same technology that allows electronic devices to know when they are being tilted, so you’re already familiar with this if you’ve played a Wii, even if you didn’t know the fancy name for it.

That’s all the info that’s out there at the moment. No one eve knows what the thing is going to look like, but I do have to wonder why Nintendo announced it just days before the DSi XL hit shelves everywhere other than Japan. Just on IGN I saw many comments on the 3DS article from people saying that they’d just cancelled their pre-orders for the DSi XL. Seems a faux par, but still, the handheld is not set to ship until March next year, and that’s only for Japan.

The Legend of Molyneux

By blog on Apr. 8, 2010.

Written by Mr Molyneux, of course.

The latest bout of my laughing at Molyneux was brought about by happing upon an article on IGN where Molyneux is claiming Fable III has ‘the greatest cast of any video game’. Now, I know that they’ve got some great actors in their voice cast, including John Cleese and Steven Fry, both very funny, but the best cast ever is just a ridiculous claim. It’s so very childlike that you have to wonder if Molyneux is even aware of how easily and often he’ll find himself ridiculed for such a statement.

Now, if this was a game developer who’d come through on his huge game promises in the past, then perhaps there’d be less of the ridicule, but he isn’t. He’s made huge promises with the Fable franchise and has failed to deliver on many occasions. His ideas of what constitutes a good video game sometimes baffle me, and it’s a little sad to see great actors working on less than great games.

Sometimes it seems, when one is reading or watching an interview with Molyneux, that he genuinely believes that he’s the most amazing game developer out there, but you have to wonder if it’s more of a media ploy; that he’s playing up his bold claims and eccentricities to get more coverage for the upcoming Fable title.

Either way, it’s both mildly irritating and rather funny. Apparently they’ve gone about voice recording in a way never done before. From what Molyneux said it just sounds like they’ve gotten the actors to ad lib a lot of the dialogue, in which case it’s really their great work not his, but anyway.

I’ll still not buy or play the game, but these little boasts of Molyneaux’s are often good for a laugh.

Same story, terrible graphics

By blog on Apr. 8, 2010.

I was looking forward to Splinter Cell Conviction, but I do have some issues with how the game is shaping up at this stage.

I took a look at some of the trailers for the game on IGN the other day, and the first thing I couldn’t help noticing was the poor graphics. Okay they aren’t terrible, but when you put it up against other games being released at the moment, the graphics really are sub-par. Sam’s head looks to be oddly shaped many times through the trailers, and textures look a little big for what these seventh generation consoles. The other thing of note was the minimalistic approach to the environments: though many of the scenes in the trailers there was a decided emptiness that wasn’t as engaging as it could have been.

The first thing my SO said was that it the ’same old storyline’, and she’s pretty much right. It feels like a very cliché storyline that’s being trotted out as the reason behind Sam Fisher’s new found aggression towards the bad guys. The events of the game take place around two years after the previous Splinter Cell game, Double Agent, and in the intervening years Sam’s daughter, Sarah, has died. Sam finds out in the early stages of the game that her death was no accident, so now he’s rogue Sam Fisher, and he’s after the bad guys whilst Third Echelon – his former employer – is after him.

He’s pretty much got a no-holds-barred approach to taking down anyone in his way to finding out the truth behind his daughter’s death, and this is a fairly new approach for these games. In previous titles Sam was often hamstrung by directives issued from Third Echelon, often making levels irritating because you couldn’t do kill or couldn’t be noticed or some other action. However, now that Sam’s rogue, that shouldn’t be an issue.

So I’m still hoping for a great Splinter Cell game, but I’m hoping for three things. One, that the writing is good if the storyline is going to even approach the cliché. Two, that the graphics are improved before release, and three, that Ubisoft has ditched their terrible DRM.

Ubisoft causes anger in gamers

By blog on Feb. 22, 2010.

Ubisoft unveiled their new security package for games, and gamers are quite angered by it.

Many fans of Assassin’s Creed will be excitedly waiting for the sequel to come out in a little over a fortnight, but some recent news from Ubisoft has fans somewhat up in arms. Ubisoft has announced a brand new Digital Rights Manager – DRM – for all their games that have online capabilities. This system is supposed to ensure that their games are no longer being pirated, but of course, there’s a price.

If you want to play Assassin’s Creed II on the PC, you’ve got to have a constant net connection. If your connection drops out, you’re kicked out of the game, and are faced with a screen telling you that you can either wait for the connection to re-establish itself, or quit. You’ll lose your progress since your last save point if that happens, too. Oh and if Ubisoft’s servers go down? Well, Ubisoft stated that “The idea is to avoid that point as much as possible, but we have been clear from the beginning that the game does need an internet connection for you to play. So if it goes down for real for a little while, then yeah, you can’t play.

”

Notice the way they said that? “…Avoid that point as much as possible…” You know, that sort of sounds like they’re trying to avoid saying it outright and owning this nasty flaw in their plan.

So, what to gamers get out of this irritating new anti-piracy tactic? Well, you’ll get to be able to install the game on as many PCs as you like, you’ll have cloud-based save data – fancy words for ‘on the internet’ – and you’ll not need a disc to play. So if you happen to play PC games at two different locations, you’ll be able to access the save file from both, which is the only real benefit that I see here. Most games allow for at least a couple of installs, and as for the disc not being necessary, that’s only an issue if you’re not careful with the disc and allow it to become scratched.

It feels a lot like Ubisoft is ransoming their games to us, and I really don’t think it’s a good idea. I think that hackers are going to find a way around the system, and the only one who’ll suffer for it are gamers who do the right thing and pay for the games. Bad show, Ubisoft, bad show.

Flamers for Final Fantasy XIII

By blog on Feb. 21, 2010.

Some people are already starting in on Final Fantasy XIII, but are their concerns warranted?

Fans of the series are eagerly snapping up any piece of info they can about the soon to be released Final Fantasy XIII, but not everything they’ve read has sat well with them. On the game’s official website, one of the creators has talked about the linearity of the first half of the game, saying that it’s largely story-driven and you don’t get to run around exploring until you’re in the second half. It’s an attempt to get players invested in the story and very familiar with the new game mechanics.

I’ll say right now that I’m no stranger to having a go at a game before I’ve played it. I panned the crap out of Fable 3 just the other day, but I’m a little less inclined to do that with the Final Fantasy series. One major difference is that the Final Fantasy series has really established itself, there have been no failures in the series so far, no games that just weren’t up to par, though sure, some people favour certain iterations over others, but none of the games have been bad or poor.

Okay so what am I thinking about this? Well, one of the major issues that fans are angry about – I’m speaking based on comments on sites like IGN – is that there aren’t any towns to explore, and whilst I understand that, those extra towns just wouldn’t fit in with this story line. The first half of the game takes place in Cocoon, a paradise city built for humans that floats in sky above the planet Pulse. Now, the people of Cocoon don’t visit the surface of the planet, ever. Heck, most of them have never even seen it! So how would it make sense to have extra towns for people to explore?

Well, you could argue that the story could have been structured differently so that there were towns to explore, but I think that if you’ve got a good story, go with it. Changing things like this could be the inspiration the creators needed to make an especially good Final Fantasy game.

Another issue many are having with this particular Final Fantasy is the linearity, the fact that players are driven by storyline for the first half of the game before they’re given free reign. Now, I can understand that that’s a long time, but on the other hand Japanese RPGs are usually like this to some extent, you’re guided for longer, but the story line is usually quite in depth, so it’s worth it. I do like that it will give players a long time to get used to the new Paradigm mechanic, but mostly I am just trusting in the franchise at this point on this particular point, and I’m fine with that, Square Enix has earned it.

Oh, and how funny is it that we are now up the thirteenth ‘Final Fantasy?