Tides of Darkness
[NOTE: To my blog readers, please tell me if the images on the side appear blurry or unfocused, the page no longer renders properly for me in Firefox but looks fine in IE7]
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A day after the terrible news from 1up, GAF looks like a post-crisis zone right now, trying to salvage what’s left after a terrible incident. It’s actually on GAF that a few of the 1up employees announced that they had been laid off and it’s there that there’s been tremendous support for these unfortunate people. There’s since been threads created that were dedicated to the preservation of the entire podcast archive from 1up (via plainly in the open torrent links) as well as links to the various twitters and blogs of now ex-1up staff.
What I’m getting at here is just how strongly some of these people have touched the gaming community and the invisible bonds that have been forged. Jeff Green wrote a fantastic article on what really has changed here, it’s not ownership but the entire substance of a website and its strong community following. In response to the previously mentioned Sam Kennedy post, the one trying to highlight the positives of the transaction, Jeff had a some words in response:
[This is from Sam Kennedy's post:]
“We’re still the same 1UP, and we’ll still be producing the same content…we always have”[Jeff Green in response:]
Well, no, you’re not, and no, you won’t. You’re not the same 1UP because you just lost a gigantic chunk of what made 1up 1up. It may go on, it may in fact produce great things, but it won’t be the same. All that a company ever is is a mix of specific personalities. That’s all it is. Period. When you remove people, it may go on, but it’s never “the same.” Saying it’s the same is a disservice to all the people who just got canned. And, no, you won’t be “producing the same content” because those responsible for some of the most popular and distinctive content–the 1up Show, the podcasts–no longer work there anymore.
Couldn’t have said it better. By the way, Jeff Green was former Editor-in-Chief of the late Ziff-Davis publication Computer Gaming World/Games for Windows magazine. He was also really popular in the community for hosting GfW Radio, but shortly after Ziff canned the magazine, he went to work with EA. Just a fantastic voice on the press side all around.
It might seem silly to be grieving for the uncertain future of a once great website, but as someone who plans on getting into this side of the industry, it affects me a little more personally. Like plenty of other gaffers, the guys at 1up have given me plenty of laughs over the years and their strong example has helped push me forward and given me something to strive to. Listening to those podcasts was like meeting up with some good buddies for a few hours a week, and they’ll surely be missed.
As for UGO, I briefly glanced at the main page and all I could think of was “Gamepro much?” Its motto is: “Lifestyle for gamers” and mixed in with gaming content are such highlights of a gamer’s lifestyle as “Best Bond Girls” and an article on extreme sledding. If it weren’t for the harsh economic times, I’d think the remainder of the 1up team would be worse off. If 1up.com is completely absorbed into UGO (as opposed to retaining its own editorial direction and content-focus), than the lights have gone out completely.
Thoughts: Does GTA deserve GotY?
When I look at the list of nominess from all the big sites-GTA has won GotY so far on GameTrailers, Spike, GiantBomb, and surely more to come-I realize that I missed out on a ton of the big hits from this year. It seems wrong to say that perhaps GTA doesn’t deserve the big award (considering I didn’t play a bunch of the competitors) but it wouldn’t feel right to say it deserves it either.
The game did have its share of amazing for sure: it was successful in all its flashiness, did a great job at capturing the various parts of New York City, had some well-done setpieces to give the action some flavor, and there was witty dialogue mixed in throughout. I remember those amazing setpieces well (like the assault on the construction site, or the abandoned building on governor’s) but what about all the hours of gameplay that surrounded these moments? Much of it was shallow, sometimes pointless, and other times boring. It was as if Rockstar North was so obsessed with placing the player in the shoes of a real life gangster’s day-to-day that they perhaps forgot that the gangster’s life is full of tedious, uneventful BS (which they captured). And as is probably the reality, the majority of time is spent performing those uneventful activities as opposed to all the “glamourous” stuff spread throughout.
GTA occasionally feels like an art house game with how guided it is by a single vision, but like many art house productions, it gets ahead of itself. One of the biggest disappointments I had with the game is the in-game radio, which in previous titles was often fantastic. But with IV, the developers went so obscure and experimental that I would switch from station to station and find nothing that I liked. It may have given the game some “underground” value but what about the rest of the population who loved all the cheesy hits in Vice City? There’s not a single Top 40-ish station in the game and that is a major false step. And then there’s the driving model, which the player will eventually adjust to but then come back later and hate it all over again. Would it have been such a failure to go with more conventionally accessible controls such as the Burnouts, Need for Speeds, PGRs, etc. rather than the “baby the brake button” style that we see in IV? As to what they were thinking ending the game in New freakin’ Jersey when the game is inspired by New York City? I’d really love to know.
For all its finer points, the game was set out too much to impress on production values and experimentation with the III formula rather than impress with the sheer fun of the overall gameplay (which is what fans of the III-based games originally loved the games for). I imagine Rockstar has a lot of work to do in recapturing all the mindshare they’ve lost, but in reality, I don’t imagine they really care what the people who “didn’t get it” really think.
Reaction: Dead Space demo-”Good show” EA
I’ve kept the skate. demo on my 360 HDD for nearly a year now but I can’t say I’ll do the same for Dead Space. There were three immediate red flags about the demo that warned me it would be a sloppy job. 1. It was terribly small for such an important game (less than 400 megs) 2. Given a subtitle of “Dismemberment” and 3. It was released a few weeks after the game had already been out.
From what I can tell, EA was basically releasing a “proof of concept” stage in lieu of a more traditional demo approach but they still could’ve done a way better job than this. You’re immediately dropped into the game with a lazy controller layout screen to get you “familiar” and a brief comment from an audiolog telling the player character to dismember enemies if they want to survive. And that’s about it. Without being able to look at the layout again (it’s not in the options menu), I couldn’t figure out how to reload (Aim up+A, so simple!), and didn’t even realize I could switch guns till after I had died a few times. They also don’t tell you about the inventory aspect that allows you to refill your health partially. IT’S LIKE EA IS DOING A META-COMMENTARY ON HOW IT MUST FEEL TO BE DROPPED INTO AN UNKNOWN AND HOSTILE SPACE. A DEAD SPACE.
As to the dying? Well in addition to not telling you how to do anything, you’re also brought into a room and immediately swamped with multiple enemies-and from multiple sides-who will more than likely kill you. By the way I might as well tell you that your health is a bar parallel to the character’s spine, the demo left that little part out. The room is ridiculously tight so you can’t run away forever (and it seems you have to fight to progress anyway). After the 5th or 6th time, I got past all the bad guys, you’re told to go somewhere else. When you open that door, a humongous creature is waiting for you and instantly kills you. And then it ends.
A trained player could likely finish this sequence in 2 minutes to give you an idea of it’s lenght. With what this demo presents, I might be better off going to someone who’s played the game already and asking their opinion rather than judging it based on the demo. A good amount of people may be completely turned off by the immediately ridiculous difficulty that is presented to them, although I’m sure the full game is more appropriate about scaling it up. And it fails to convey any of the themes the greater game presents like isolation or terror. Instead, all I felt was frustration. The demo simply gives me no idea at all of what to expect from the entire game.
In a world of kiss-ass journalism, I’m going to say it straight. What the hell were you thinking EA?
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
I was checking out the recently released Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix at a friend’s house, and while the game seems “just fine” overall-you can only make a 15 year old game so fresh without actually changing the mechanics as other remakes do-I couldn’t help but be a little annoyed with the music they chose to use. In a nod to the community, the soundtrack is composed completely of Overclocked Remix material and is freely (and legally) available here, but anyone familiar with OCRemix knows that there is a wide variety of musical styles represented on the site, along with perhaps an even larger variety in actual quality of composition. I love that OCRemix exists, but many of these remixes do not fit in at all when played along side a game. They’re better for listening in your free time.
If I recall correctly, the game does include alternate soundtrack versions in case the default is not to the player’s liking. While this is a great middle ground, fighters really need to start taking their own approach to how music is laid out in the game since the tracks will be heard again and again and again. Super Smash Bros. Brawl actually paved the way for this. It allowed the player to attach a percent to each song which would determine how often it would show up (based on random selection). So I could give the CPS1 Ken Theme say 90% since I like it more, CPSII 75% so it’ll come up occasionally, and maybe the HD Remix 0% in case I never want it to show up. It was used to great effect in Brawl as the game had a ton of music produced for it and while some of it was fantastic, a few songs I never was in the mood for (Porky’s Theme anyone?) HD Remix, as a downloadable game has to deal with hard drive space so players who could care less about the soundtrack would have a lot of extra megs to download for no reason. But when Soulcalibur IV was released as a retail game, there was no good reason why they couldn’t do something like this. They ended up making the original SC soundtrack downloadable, but instead of using a percent system, the player had to toggle what song would play for each stage without any on-the-fly choices! You could mix and match with 1 stage having an SCIV song and another one from SC, but why can’t I just have both accessible without fiddling around in the options menu?
I can’t imagine this taking a lot of programming work to do. If anything it may come down more to issues with licensing and not wanting to give away all this music “for free” to the player. I’d love to see more developers following Brawl’s example though. Hell it might not even be such a bad idea for a jRPG which has the battle theme repeating ad nauseum to try this out as well. By the end of any jRPG, most battle themes have lost all emotion and excitement that the player initially attached to them. Let’s try keeping players on their toes rather than beating them over the head with repetition.
Where have all the jRPGs gone?
[This is probably the closest thing I write to that "lost post" so at least it's not completely lost.]
Ask any gamer with a taste for Eastern style what the best time for jRPGs was and you’ll more than likely get a few answers. The 32-bit and 16-bit ages will be the majority answers, and there might be a few PS2 era answers for good measure (with FFX, an explosion of MegaTen for NA consumers, Nippon Ichi’s rise). I can say that there’ll be practically no chance anyone would say current gen (Wii/PS3/360) unless they’re absolutely dedicated to the DS. Unfortunately any big-name jRPG this generation has failed to create any sort of new standard of what is expected and nearly all have been considered disappointments (Blue Dragon, The Last Remnant, Infinite Undiscovery). There’s still upcoming Final Fantasy entries along with Versus XIII, Star Ocean 4, but has it come this far where no other titles aside from these massive franchises can sit comfortably on a consumer’s shelf without a bit of shame?
Ironically the only jRPG that I would say has come close to being a criticial success was going after a relatively niche crowd to begin with. That title is Valkyria Chronicles which has a unique (but beautiful) art style and is more tactical/strategy title than your straight-up RPG types. So what’s the problem then? I can look through a bunch of those RPGs from the 16-bit and 32-bit era and find numerous problems with all the best titles, many of which would have likely been seen as being problematic even when they were released. FF VII? An at times incomprehensible story, lack of unification in world, setting etc. FF VIII? Little character development aside from the mains, experimental gameplay systems occasionally felt forced. FF IX? A bit too by-the-books at a time when many RPG makers were taking greater risks, nothing stellar about its general aspects.
It’s worth noting that most genres are only getting more polished as time goes by. In the early 90′s a fighting game could easily get away with having only an Arcade Mode, Versus Mode, and nothing else. These days that’s barely passable. And RPGs have advanced over time as well, although the conventions of jRPGs may limit any sort of major changes taking place in the genre. And maybe that’s why nothing’s really blown the press away this generation. There’s only so many different ways you can have the player traverse a town or a world map, gameplay aspects that are strongly associated with jRPG experiences. Yet one area where jRPGs could use some focus in is scope and pacing. Final Fantasy XII was seen as a pretty modern RPG for its time, but within the first 10 hours, the player is fighting through some sewers, a grassy field, and a vast desert. That may have worked for a large-scale story like Lord of the Rings back when high fantasy was rather young, but a lot of the best sci-fi and fantasy I read these days is so much more engaging since it limits the scope (Ender’s Game anybody?) and as a result, the overall atmosphere feels much more developed. There are tons of Western RPGs that follow these old conventions of (1 desert, 1 ice area, 1 field, etc.) and manage to earn high marks, but as they’ve been much more polished recently, they manage to slide by. I imagine they too will run into this problem eventually. A friend of mine playing Mass Effect at the moment has been dragging himself through the Citadel (ME’s capital city basically), but you have to wonder is that point in the game absolutely necessary to the experience? I’d imagine there’s a lot of plot development in these hours, but what about something more on-the-fly like, Half-Life style? The pacing of town-field-dungeon-town has long needed to be rethought. And now that I think about it, I stopped playing the first KotoR right as I landed in Tatooine as I knew I was in for another “town” section.
jRPGs have been suffering more since they are much more traditional, but it’s about time a developer really breathes some fresh air into this genre. Too many times have I read a review on a recent RPG where it seemed like all the general aspects were completely passable, there was just nothing about the experience that felt completely fresh (Tales of Vesperia anyone?). We’re at a point where a game no longer needs to promise 20+ hours of gameplay to be passable, and RPG makers need to take advantage of that. I’m not saying I’d want to see any 3 hour RPGs or anything but would a 20-30 hour romp really be so terrible (as opposed to 60-80). Cut the fat, make everything tighter, and you might just come out with some amazing results.
EDIT: I realized while writing this post that it is quite unfocused and more of a multi-prong “what’s wrong” than a single answer, but really it just helps establish how much work jRPGs on console need in order to maintain some semblance of a contemporary genre. All the framerate problems, bad textures, etc. which have docked many of these games a few point are barely even touching upon the central problem that is corroding all these titles.
Rant: Waiting on a Miracle
Right around this time last year I was busy saving up for and anticipating my new 360. It seemed like it’d be a match meant to be, I’d read up on how to find the more robust 175w Falcons, and at the time it was all about the “Pro”. The Elite at that time was more or less an overdone “tard pack.” Since then the 20 gig has been discontinued, MS has launched a bunch of new functionality to take advantage of the higher capacity hard drives, and my hopefully indestructible Falcon was sent back to the shop in less than a year after purchase over an e-74 (the error that comes up as a result of a loose connection with the scaling chip. Fantastic). I have no idea where my old one is now, I look to have gotten a refurb, and that refurb was not only louder, but began freezing up on me in less than a month, 2 days before the New Xbox Experience launched. It snidely never showed me an error message, almost like it wouldn’t admit to being broken in the true sense of the word. The guy at the UPS store asked me “another Xbox?” And I could only mutter a beaten and broken down “yeah” in response.
I give Microsoft a lot of credit for what they’ve accomplished with the 360. It’s not quite the shooter box that the original Xbox was and it seems more friendly to Eastern titles than it’s predecessor. In addition, it has a tremendous amount more style, Live has become a very capable online platform, it has the best modern controller around, and you can now buy one for an easier to swallow $200 (compared to $250 for the disappointing Wii) although you’re really better off buying one of the better models seeing as there’s plenty of deals around to get them for cheaper than MSRP. And Microsoft has shown a good deal of continued support with the newly launched NXE, 16:10 resolution support, and a good XBLA game is always around the corner.
Don’t let that all go to waste by being remembered as “the console you can’t trust.” With two 360s now being down for the count, I am absolutely expecting a third breakdown. I feel like I’m becoming part of that worrisome group who turns their console on with one-eye covered in case some red lights should show up. When I thought MS had just about wiped away all their bad press with their 3-year warranty for RRoD, a billion dollar response plan, and the stronger Falcons, they promptly destroyed all of that within a year for me. At this point, the only thing they can do to rekindle anything is a 360-slim akin to the PS2 Slimline (cooler, QUIETER, a change of pace). It’s the only way that I’d truly know MS had learned something from all of this and grown from it, but it’ll never happen as they’re simply not selling enough to warrant all that R&D. More than likely, they’ve long been preparing for the next console cycle and hopefully that one will not play out the same way (just as Sony recovered from the weak build record of the PS2 with the near-invincible PS3). I’ll stick with you MS, but for goodness sake, don’t screw us all over. Fool me once…
They're on the line and waiting!
*Image from xbox360leagues.net
