If there was ever a story that the "donotwant" tag was designed for, it is this. If the idea of digitally resurrecting dead movie stars to star in new content wasn't creepy enough, there's the fact that this has George Lucas at the helm.
He's probably had this great idea about how much fun Star Wars had been if it had included a musical number from Charlie Chaplin wearing a rubber Gungan suit. Seriously, I hesitate to try to parody whatever Lucas might come up with using this technology, on the grounds that if he should ever read it, he'd probably think it was a great idea.
Ok, I should have been more specific. If you have a 4 or 5 star rating, then fine, give out the maximum score to a very, very good, but still flawed product (be it a movie, a game, a restaurant or whatever). The average consumer will know that a 5 point scale is a bit of a fudge. A lot of review sites, however, use 100 point scales. It may be a rating out of 10, but IGN, for example, are happy to give out decimal scores. And a score out of 100 implies a more nuanced rating. Under those circumstances, it's reasonable to expect a 10.0/10.0 to equal something very close to perfection. Great but with a few flaws? Use a 9.6 or whatever.
I'm not arguing for homogenisation. I am arguing for getting rid of design elements that have not stood the test of time. Japanaese gaming in general (not just Nintendo) are struggling hugely with this in the current gaming generation.
The lives system is a relic of the days when the best games were coin operated arcade machines and a substantial number of "home" games were arcade ports. In that context, it made sense. It's evolved its way out of most "major" games these days (leaving aside the likes of XBLA titles) because developers have realised that most gamers hate it.
It's not just Nintendo. Look at the addiction of Japanese RPG developers to the concept of "grind" in their games. A decade ago, both Japanese and Western RPGs were grind heavy. These days, the likes of Bioware and Obsidian have worked out that there are ways of delivering the 30+ hours that an RPG allegedly requires (I'm not convinced on that personally) without including anything that feels like a grind to the player (certainly no running around in circles doing random encounters).
I love Japanese games (not Nintendo, I admit). However, there's no denying that Japanese developers are, through clinging to old certainties, currently in danger of pushing themselves into the same kind of box of Korean developers (where overwhelmingly the games never make it beyond the domestic audience due to lack of wider appeal).
To use one of the ever-(un)popular slashdot car analogies, developers like Nintendo and Square are trying to sell cars that need to be hand-cranked to start, despite the fact that everybody else is using modern ignition systems. Variety of design choices is one thing; sticking with something that is outdated and noticably worse is quite another.
No, I think you can fairly easily say a 10/10 (or A+ or whatever a site's maximum-possible score is) if the game is not, in an objective sense, absolutely as good as it could possibly have been given the limitations as present hardware. If a game has even a single flaw within said limitations (and I don't think there has been a game during this hardware generation that hasn't) then it isn't a 10/10. 9.9/10 - sure. But when you give out a maximum possible score, you are saying "there is absolutely nothing about this game that could be improved without substantially better hardware than is currently available". It's not the case for Mario Galaxy 2 (the control system alone guarantees that). It's not the case for any other games currently released, either.
TFA strikes me as a bit of a missed opportunity. It makes some extremely valid points about the dependancy of gaming news sits on the good-will of developers and the impact that this has upon review scores (hello Kane & Lynch). Unfortunately, it drowns this in a morass of po-faced moralising about what "proper" journalism could be. Having a pop at Kotaku for mixing in silly or immature stories among the rest of the headlines is kind of missing the point; these are ultimately entertainment sites, talking about an entertainment medium while seeking to entertain their readers at the same time. A bit of sillyness is going to be par for the course.
For the most part, gaming news is not real news. That's not to say there isn't a place for it. But it isn't in the same category as the kind of news coverage we expect of politics, wars or crime and it doesn't need to be held to the same standards. Occasionally, the gaming world produces a genuine news story (anybody remember Infinium Labs?), but I've generally found that the gaming press isn't too bad at covering these when they do occur. For the rest of the time, think of it as belonging to the same category as sports or showbiz news.
The area where there is cause for concern is that surrounding developer/publisher pressure over review scores. Reviews, unlike gaming "news", fall more into the category of consumer advice than journalism and I think it's reasonable to expect appropriate standards. It really is quite obvious these days that games which come with a big name attached often seem to get review scores they don't deserve. Final Fantasy XIII is a dreadful game. You spend the first twenty five or so hours running down a straight path, fighting endless waves of identical enemies with an almost-uninteractive combat system. No matter how much the game may improve after that point (and the improvement is only mild), there's no way that 25 hours of boring on-rails gameplay shouldn't have a profound negative impact on review scores; and yet the game carried off a slew of 8/10 and 9/10 scores. Mario Galaxy 2 is not a bad game (it has some clever level design), but it has a good number of flaws, including a lack of innovation compared to its predecessor, an imprecise control system (in a game that requires a high degree of precision on many occasions) and outdated game-mechanics such as a lives-system. And yet it had ecstatic reviews, including a frankly incomprehensible 10/10 from IGN.
The thing is that it's by no means clear that publisher pressure was responsible for the scores in the two cases listed above. Square and Nintendo both tend to have a pool of rabid fans (albeit a shrinking pool in both cases) and it's quite possible that the games were just handed to fanboys for review, who were never going to hold the game to objective standards. But the fact is that there are enough incidences of genuine publisher pressure (yes, Kane and Lynch, I'm still talking about you) that gamers' suspicions are inevitably going to be aroused. I think review sites need to do more to enhance their credibility.
Some obvious steps might be:
- Removing advertising on the actual review pages (advertising elsewhere on the site - ok - but it sends the wrong message when you plaster advertising over the review itself and people will see corruption even where it doesn't necessarily exist).
- When a game review comes back with a score of 9/10 or higher (or whatever the equivalent in the site's scoring system), get a second opinion in there as part of the review.
- Greater acknowledgement of bugs and stability issues in reviews and scores. If you look at the reviews of Medal of Honour and Fallout: New Vegas, two recent games that launched in a highly buggy state (on consoles as well as PC), it's clear that some sites acknoweldge the bugs in their review while others don't, but that it's very rare to see bugs actually taken into account in scoring.
Where did I call for a ban? Or, for that matter, describe my MMO playing as an addiction? I certainly wouldn't support any kind of government intervention on MMOs (indeed, would oppose it strenuously) and I am quite clear that my playing was not an addiction (I've seen real addictions close-up and they're rather different).
All I was pointing out was that potential customers should consider the possible consequences of getting too "into" an MMO, and should ask themselves whether they have the willpower needed to get out of it again should they need to.
Personal experiences with the social side of MMOs
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The Ethics of Social Games
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· Score: 5, Interesting
There's something to this as far as MMOs go. People like to talk about how MMOs tickle the reward centres of the brain with their level-up/upgrade cycles and so on, but I suspect that this wears thin fairly quickly. Certainly, as somebody who has been heavily "into" and then got out of two MMOs (FFXI and WoW) over the last year, the social side of the game has been the biggest deterrent to leaving.
MMOs, of course, get to sting you twice in this respect. Not only do you get a social circle within the game, but if you're not careful, they also start pulling you away from your real-life social circle.
I remember I found it a bit disconcerting when I decided to stop playing WoW. I'd stopped enjoying the game about 4 or 5 months beforehand, and while I had friends within the game, I was finding the sheer tedium of playing the game itself increasingly unbearable. When I quit, I decided to go cold turkey, which was a pronounced contrast to the gradual drift-away I'd had with FFXI. For the first two weeks or so after quitting, I found it very difficult to fill the time I suddenly had. I'd gotten out of the habit of going out and doing things on weekday evenings and it took a while to get back into it.
This isn't to say that MMOs are entirely bad. I mostly enjoyed my time with FFXI and WoW. And while only having an online circle of friends is hardly ideal, it's still a step up from having no social life at all. I don't think I'd go so far as to accuse MMO developers of being outright unethical. But I do think that the MMO market is one where the principle of "caveat emptor" is relevant in some fairly unusual ways. I didn't touch MMOs during my student days, because I knew I would find them engrossing and I didn't want to take this risk until I had steady employment. It's probably worth thinking about your ability to stop playing before you get too heavily into an MMO.
There have been decent rail-shooters in recent years which have, I think, proved that there's still some life in the genre.
Dead Space: Extraction, originally for the Wii but now with a PS3 (Move-compatible) port coming alongside Dead Space 2 is one of the real neglected gems of the last few years. It's a rail shooter that defies many of the conventions of the genre by requiring a dose of thought. You have to plan your weapons loadout and ammunition consumption quite carefully. It's also quite demanding of your observation skills; the ability to spot enemies while they're lurking in the background, before they make an obvious attack, is a great advantage. It's also a pretty scary game, and one which realises the importance of having "quiet" sections to building atmosphere. Sadly, the game was arguably released on the wrong platform and was a spectacular flop in terms of sales (to the extent that it has become the ultimate "mature games don't sell on the Wii" argument). Additional exposure on the PS3 should hopefully correct this.
While not quite as good, the Umbrella Chronicles spinoffs to the Resident Evil Franchise, also on the Wii, are by no means bad. They're a bit more manic than Extraction, and lack the tactical aspects, but you can have a lot of fun with them, particularly in co-op. There's a further passable (though not spectacular) PS3 Move rail shooter; The Shoot.
I think the rail shooter is a genre which suffered due to massive over-exposure at the time of the CD-ROM's entry into the gaming world. When CD drives became common in PCs, and Sega had the Mega-CD fresh on the market, there was an immediate dash to use the storage capabilities of the new medium to do very FMV-intensive games. The nature of FMV-based games means that only a few genres are suitable for adaptation; primarily point and click adventures and rail shooters. So we got a rush of dismally bad FMV-heavy rail shooters (think Sewer Shark and Mad Dog McRee) which damaged the reputation of both rail shooters and FMV cutscenes for years to come.
Happily, there's been a bit of a rehabilitation of both in recent years. Games like Command & Conquer 3 have shown that, when used in the right place, FMV can be a lot of fun. And with "lightgun" capable control devices being the trendy thing right now (though I suspect this particular bandwagon is almost bust) there's been a desire by developers to take a fresh look at the rail shooter concept.
To be honest, I have to wonder how different rail shooters are from many modern FPSes. The Call of Duty tendancy is towards games which are essentially rail shooters, but with the ability to control the speed at which you move forwards. Traditional fps gameplay, which combines exploration elements with the shooting, seems to be drifting towards the slightly more highbrow end of the market, in games like the Bioshock and Crysis series.
I've played through the campaigns in both MoH and Black Ops. I'm not quite sure why I did; I was pretty sure in advance that I wouldn't like them. I'm not a great fan of the "gated corridor" school of level design that the Call of Duty series has promoted and I feel like I've seen pretty much every possible variation on their big "set piece" scenes by now. Indeed, having completed both of them, it's hard to manage more than a "meh".
MoH is a strange game, at least partially, I suspect, because of how the developers were trying to skirt around the "taste" issue. It seems to alternate between the kind of po-faced faux-seriousness that made me wonder whether I was supposed to be saluting my monitor, and "yay, quad bike level". The weird thing is that this ended up creeping me out rather more than a straightforward treatment of the same material would have.
The game clearly has aspirations to be the kind of semi-serious treatment of contemporary conflicts that we see in some movies, but it falls short because of the fact that... well... it's an action game pitched at a fairly low common denominator in terms of its player base. It's hard to square serious reflections on war with mowing down vast waves of infinitely respawning Taliban with a big machinegun. In fact, while I generally regard MoH as too silly to be offensive, the one area in which it does skirt close to crossing a line, I felt, was in portraying the Taliban as braindead grunts who charge in their hundreds into a hail of machinegun fire. That's seriously underestimating and trivialising the task that our actual armed forces have to do in Afghanistan.
Black Ops is a different kettle of fish entirely, in that it accepts its own ridiculousness from the outset. It's basically just a pastiche of cold war conspiracy theories and Boy's Own adventure stories which, despite some graphic content that's not for the squeamish, is unlikely to ever cross the line into actually offensive (well, apart from the whole Cuba issue, but I confess to having just found that funny). It put me in mind of the Roger Moore era James Bond movies; The Spy Who Loved Me and so on, mixed with some of the more famous scenes from Vietnam movies like The Deer Hunter and Full Metal Jacket.
I don't think it even aims for historical accuracy. Guns show up in the campaign that shouldn't have existed until years later. In the context of some of the howlers that Black Ops throws into the mix with gleeful abandon, I don't think that a few errors in the poster are really worth noting.
As a final note, I enjoyed Black Ops more than MoH (in so far as I enjoyed either, given how constrained the gameplay is). A cheerfully unrealistic game is always going to be more fun than a game which would like to be realistic but fails spectacularly. I think MoH presents a pretty good case that videogames aren't likely to be able to do serious treatments of current wars. But then, maybe it's just the genre? Would a suvival-horror based game, or a small-squad RTS (a la Dawn of War 2) have more luck?
Lego is always going to be the obvious suggestion in cases like this. Not the pre-packaged Star Wars/Transformers/whatever licenced stuff, but a plain old box of bricks.
Alternatively, though this might seem a strange suggestion taken at face value, that old 1960s favorite Spirograph can be an interesting stepping stone into all kinds of clever thoughts about geometry/mathematics. Plus you get some pretty pictures out of it.
I don't think the advance of graphics and voice acting has been a problem at all. Yes, a few recent games, such as Final Fantasy 13, have had a serious problem with being "interactive movies", but there were plenty of shallow, linear games in the 80s and 90s as well. I can't honestly say that I got a lot out of "imagining" what my characters look like. As for missing hard-copy maps and stat-sheets... I can't say I miss that, either. I remember having to make my own maps for the Eye of the Beholder games. Yes, I did it, but I'd much rather have a decent automap. That said, I do miss the old cloth maps and trinkets that you used to get in game boxes (eg. for the Ultima series). They were pretty nice collector's items.
As for old RPGs being beatable in a couple of hours... maybe. It's certainly true that if you knew what you were doing, you could run through Eye of the Beholder in a few hours (I do remember doing it in a single 8 hour session once). But you can actually do the same with modern RPGs; if you know what you're doing, skip the cutscenes and dodge the sidequests you can blast through the original Mass Effect pretty damned quickly. Meanwhile, the old Japanese RPGs were frequently 40+ hour experiences. The first 6 Final Fantasy games (number 2 really sticks in my mind here) all required a fairly hefty amount of grinding and none of them were over quickly. I brought my first FF6 playthrough home in about 45 hours; roughly 5 hours more than my first FF7 playthrough. When more recent Final Fantasy experiences have worked (eg. FF12), I've found that they've generally provided a more interesting gameplay experience within the same playtime (which isn't to say that they aren't still padded). That said, 13 was, by any measure, a disaster.
As for puzzle games, go to Steam, Xbox Live Arcade or the Playstation Network. Puzzle games may not merit the full $60 release treatement any more, but the genre is alive and well on the PC and home consoles.
In Valkyria, I did no grinding of Skirmishes until I was a good way through the game. But I was finding that as I got further (to about chapter 12 or so), my squad were falling behind the enemies in terms of levels. So I was having to cope with enemies evading and so on far more regularly. This was limiting my ability to get the higher rank scores, which in turn limited the rewards I got from each mission (forming a vicious circle). I had to go and grind old skirmishes to keep up, and found that I needed to continue doing so for the rest of the game. Fortunately, the Bruhl Skirmish (the one where you have to fight along the street and capture the windmill) can be completed with the top rank in about 5 minutes with a sniper/scout combo, which takes a lot of the pain out of it.
Eternal Sonata has a lot of version and region differences, so the amount you have to grind will depend on your version. The 360 version apparently needs little to no grinding. The PS3 version adds more content, but massively reduces the xp that each fight awards, meaning you really do need to grind to stay competitive vs the bosses. I believe the European PS3 version is even harsher than the US PS3 version.
Oh yes, sorry, I didn't want to imply that absolutely every game that involves repetition is rubbish. I've put far too many hours of my time into Geometry Wars and its sequel for that to be the case. But the games I tolerate repetition from tend to be those which you don't play through and complete. If a game is about firing up a session and aiming for a high score, then fine. What bothers me is when a game has a beginning, a middle and an end, but pads itself out needlessly by adding tedious repetition.
I've been looking at my game shelves and thinking about this myself recently. Like the author(s) of TFA, I find myself completing a far lower proportion of the games I buy than I used to. Looking at the games in question, I'm starting to sense a common factor; repetition.
I think that as I get older, find work taking up more of my life and find my genuinely free time getting more and more constrained, I don't have the tolerance for repetition that I once did. This has had a pretty large impact on how likely I am to finish various types of game.
TFA begins by talking about Mass Effect 2, but to be honest, I had no problem playing through that to completion (and will likely do a second playthrough at some point in preparation for Mass Effect 3). Aside from the planet scanning (which you can ignore past the game's mid-way point quite safely), there's precious little repetition. Bioware did a great job of making all the side-missions feel pretty unique. Combined with a strong plot, I never came even close to giving up on Mass Effect 2 (nor on any other Bioware game I can remember).
I find myself strugging a lot more with Japanese RPGs these days, because that genre as a whole (and there are rare, welcome exceptions) has not yet grown out of the idea that levelling up is about running in circles for a couple of hours fighting identical monsters. I have twice tried to play through Star Ocean: The Last Hope and have run out of steam both times because of the sheer quantity of the grinding needed (the game has weird difficulty spikes - the bosses are much, much harder than anything else in the game). I struggled through the grinding in the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata because I was so deeply in love with the game's concept, plot and style, but I would have enjoyed it far more without the grinding (and I did come close to dropping it several times). Even Valkyria Chronicles, which I would rate as arguably the best game of the last 5 years, frustrated me because of the need to do multiple replays of the skirmish engagements for experience points.
I wasn't always this way. I remember playthroughs of Final Fantasy VII where I spent many hours levelling up in and around Midgar so I could beat the Midgar Zolom the first time I met him (nabbing the Beta enemy-skill far earlier in the game than you were supposed to be able to get it). But these days, the thought of doing that just makes me despair. I constantly find myself wishing that Japanese developers (and it is primarily Japanese developers at fault here) were confident enough to make a game as long as it needed to be, rather than trying to deliver the 40-60 hour playtime that they think the fanbase expects.
It's not just RPGs where I find myself increasingly intolerant of repetition. Even in action and platforming games, I hate (really, really hate) being made to replay sections I've already completed. Action games which have no quicksave function and which think it is funny to be sparing on checkpoints are likely to get dropped (Halo: Reach came close several times and had the campaign been slightly longer it probably would have). While I generally liked Mario Galaxy 2, I hated the fact that the lives system meant I found myself repeating sections of levels that I could do with my eyes closed just to get back to the section I was stuck at.
This isn't to say that repetition always means I will drop a game. Where there's a compelling enough reason, I can tolerate it. I've played through Persona 3, its FES "director's cut" and Persona 4 despite their grindy nature, just because the game's social mechanics are so unusual and compelling that I wanted to see them through. But I don't think that enforced repetition ever adds much to a game. Developers: please, work out how long your game needs to be to tell its story, deliver the gameplay experiences you want to get across etc. And then make it that long (or if you only had a 3 hour game left, you may need to go back to the drawing board and rethink your concept). Don't think that we're all sat ou
I think the key question in the short term is going to be "what are court reporting restrictions like in Sweden". I have no idea whether Mr. Assange has committed the crimes he is accused of. If he has, then regardless of his notoriety, he should be punished appropriately. If he hasn't, then regardless of his notoriety, he should not be punished for them (and if there has been an attempt to pervert the course of justice, those responsible should be put on trial).
But with a case as charged as this, controversy will inevitably surround any court proceedings that may result. I would argue that it is of vital importance that the world outside the courtroom be able to see the evidence presented, so as to deter against any possible injustice towards either Mr. Assange or the reputation of the United States.
Here in the UK, we still have pretty heavy court reporting restrictions. In the US, of course, proceedings tend to be far more open (to the extent of televised trials). Does anybody know where Sweden falls on the spectrum?
Agreed, but a blanket policy of reporting all attempts at P2P filesharing (which may not be a crime) to the police as copyright infringement is going to result in a large number of false accusations. As I said in my OP, a large number of legal pieces of software, not least games, use P2P methods for their update systems. If I were running a police department, with limited resources, and suddenly began receiving a large number of false accusations from the local college, at the very least I would want to get the college's administration in for a polite but firm chat about the appropriate use of police resources.
I don't see the police department as being in the wrong here; at least not yet. The college has announced an intention to report all uses of P2P software to the police. I don't see that the police have yet given any indication of how they will respond, not least when presented with a case relating to legal P2P traffic. If the police take no further action with the information provided to them, then they are surely in the clear.
What does occur to me - and this is where I'd welcome input from somebody who does know the legal situation in the US better - is that here in the UK, and in many countries whose legal systems have historic links to ours, there is an offence of wasting police time. If there is any equivalent law in the jurisdiction that covers this college, then I suspect they'd find themselves in breach of it, which could open their administrators to criminal prosecution.
Ok, I'm no expert on the US legal situation, but what's to prevent a situation like this from happening:
1) Student installs 100% legal copy of World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2 or any other game which uses a P2P updater system on their PC in their dorm room.
2) Game does its P2P stuff to get its patches.
3) College spots P2P activity and calls police.
4) Police charge college administrators with wasting police time.
5) Student sues college.
Like it or not, P2P isn't just about illegal filesharing. Yes, I'd fully accept that most P2P traffic is illegal, but a blanket policy like this just seems doomed to (probably expensive) failure.
Being "a good car" is not necessarily a criterion for inclusion. There are lots of really bad Japanese cars that made the cut, as well as the decent ones.
I think what really shocked me is that despite all the fuss they made about having the Top Gear Test Track on the test list, they didn't even bother to include the "reasonably priced car" that the show famously gets celebrities to drive around the track (the Kia Cee'd), nor its predecessors (which are Suzukis). I just look at this car list and it shouts "lazy" and "couldn't be bothered to look around".
1. The Forza 3 devs are American. Based in America. But there's no shortage of Japanese (and European) cars in their game. 2. And they've had long enough. 3. Not really, it was clear by the time GT5 Prologue came out that the actual racing was dated next to all the competition. 4. Don't use it if you don't like it. Those of us who have jobs and lives don't like spending half an hour re-running a race after a stupid mistake on the last lap cost us the win on the previous run.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to this game. I've got the pre-order in for the expensive version and everything. However, I've got to admit that I have a few misgivings and questions:
- Sure, they're saying over 1000 cars, but now that the full list is out, it's clear that this basically means an incredible number of MX5 and RX7 variants, as well as a bunch of LanEvos and Skylines. At the same time, the car lists for some manufacturers, particularly US ones (Europe doesn't fare quite so badly) are extremely thin. Have they really spent their time as well as they could have?
- Why so few tracks? They're advertising what looks like a large list, but many of them are just minor variants on the same circuits. In addition, only a few of these tracks are new to the series. If they want gamers to play for long enough to experience any kind of sensible proportion of the cars on offer, wouldn't spending some more time on tracks have been an obvious move? I don't really think the (very limited) course editor compensates...
- And what is the actual racing going to be like? There's been almost no focus on this, as opposed to the car and track lists. Will the AI actually be any improvement on previous titles? The AI in GT5: Prologue was basically the same as that in the original Gran Turismo, and it has not aged well at all, particularly well put against the likes of Forza 3. I want to feel as though my opponents are actually racing against me, rather than just driving on the same track through sheer coincidence.
- And finally, will the game include the single greatest humanitarian development in the entirety of recorded history - the rewind button? This was in Grid and Forza 3 and was an absolutely fantastic frustration-beater. I really don't fancy the idea of doing any races longer than 10 minutes without one of these in future.
On the one hand, high street game retailers have nobody but themselves to blame for their woes, particularly where PC games are concerned. Going out on a limb, I'd guess that the two UK retailers the story refers to are Game and Gamestation. Of course, both of those have the same owning company, so maybe there's actually another retailer out there who's thinking the same way, but I wouldn't bet on it. I think HMV (our major music/dvds high street retailer that also does games) is too diversified to be really worried about the PC gaming market.
The main difference between Game and Gamestation is that the latter is almost entirely used games sales, while the former generously gives over a good 25% or so of its shelf-space in the average store to new games. Occasionally, they'll even let you buy one without a pre-order.
Gamestation is, in my opinion, pretty much unspeakable. They have a business model that revolves around buying copies of Fifa Soccer off teenagers for £3 (or £5 if they accept payment in store credit) and selling them on at £30. I've nothing against used games sales, but really, people could be getting a far better deal either as vendor or buyer from ebay. And that's basically the entirety of Gamestation.
Game used to be somewhat better. Sure, they have the same used-games model, but they did at least used to be a reasonable place to buy new titles. These days, however, if you want anything other than the last couple of big releases for each platform; well, I hope you pre-ordered. They have a small number of flagship stores that are slightly better, but shopping in the average branch pretty much comes down to "Do you want Fifa new or used (oh, and the right answer is "used")?". I remember when Valkyria Chronicles 2 came out... I was told by the staff at the Game branch in London's Victoria Station that I had no chance of getting one without pre-order. So I walked a few yards to the (tiny, cupboard-like) branch of HMV and got one there.
And as for PC gaming, both chains have completely neglected it since the start of the current console cycle. If the store had a PC section (and not every store did) it was usually a single rack with a new release or two and a collection of 5-10 year old casual titles. No refunds on PC games (though they might reluctantly exchange a damaged disc) and, with no used market, the retailers weren't interested. And yet now, with the current gen consoles looking a little bit tired (with no successors in sight) and Valve having revived the PC market quite effectively, high-street retailers decide that they want a slice of it. And apparently they want it handed to them on a platter.
And at the same time, Steam is, in many ways, an extremely good service. As DRM goes, it's not offensive. It's tied to an account, not a PC, and you can redownload data as many times as you want. There's no need to put any kind of game disc in your drive. And Steam does generally seem to offer at least an alternative to the kinds of hideous DRM we've seen elsewhere. Plus it's a well-rounded platform that includes achievements, friends lists and most of the other features we expect from the (subscription based) Xbox Live service.
However... there are aspects of Valve's business practices that are starting to worry me. I have no sympathy for high-street retailers, but I do think that some of Valve's online competitors are being very hard done by. It must suck for direct2drive (who I have used and who are fine, if not as good as Steam) that every copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops they sell has to be installed within Steam, sending customers direct to their main competitor. Steam has, thus far, been a net positive for PC gamers. But should Steam become the only platform in town, then I don't think that's going to work so well for the customer. Ideally, we need some of their competition to get their act in gear and improve their own services to the point where they become a valid alternative.
The average first person shooter these days involves moving down a pretty corridor, alternating between cutscenes and battles where you hide behind a box and fire at people who stick their head up from behind their own box. I'm not necessarily saying that such games aren't fun in their place (I just finished Vanquish and loved it), but it's pretty easy to see that there's a big difference in scale.
New Vegas has flaws, but it is vast and sprawling. It develops a whole game world that you can spend days exploring, and is well designed enough (no random dungeon generation here, thanks) that it doesn't get dull. Sure, it would be nice if it wasn't buggy, but I'm prepared to tolerate a lot in exchange for the experience on offer.
What does make me laugh, however, is that the new Medal of Honor is just as buggy as New Vegas, despite being a "walk down the pretty corridor" shooter. I loved the bit where I died in the middle of a set-piece battle, only for it to decide when it loaded my checkpoint (no luxury of a quicksave system here) that I'd actually been 30 yards or so in front of where I had been. Took me half an hour and about 50 attempts to survive long enough to get back to cover.
While the article summary doesn't mention Fallout: New Vegas, it's clear from both the context and TFA itself that this is really a New Vegas issue.
I stuck some of my early (and mostly positive) thoughts on New Vegas's PC version in my journal a few days ago. Being in Europe, I only got the game after the first PC patch had been released, so I never got to see the PC version at its worst. Having now finished a 35 hour playthrough of the game, I can offer a slightly more comprehensive run-down of the bugs I did hit. Obviously, this is just my experience; your mileage may vary depending on your hardware and luck-stat.
The most common of the bugs is the Nvidia slowdown issue. This is annoying, particularly because my PC is massively ahead of the recommended specs, and because it often seems to occur at random, rather than just at "busy" times (though a few particular busy scenes will consistently cause slowdown). However, it's not going to stop you from completing the game and only had a minor impact on my enjoyment.
I had a few crashes to desktop - maybe a dozen over the course of the 35 hour playthrough. These almost always seem to happen in specific areas. The killer area for me was the "outer" section of Freeside, particularly near the door to the Old Mormon Fort. At least half of my crashes happened while walking towards the Fort. After a while, I just got used to tapping quicksave before walking through that area. It was an irritation, but not a massive one.
Quest bugs are potentially extremely serious. There are plenty of reports of quests being rendered uncompletable. In some cases, this can apply to main-plot quests, which is potentially game-breaking. I had three quests glitch on me over the course of the game. In two cases, it was a case of an NPC getting stuck in the middle of a scripted sequence and loading a quicksave fixed the problem without losing me more than 60 seconds or so of progress. The third case was more serious; several NPCs involved in a major sidequest refused to acknowledge my existence. This one cost me 45 minutes, as I had to go back to a proper save from before I started the quest (plus factor in additional time for trying to fix things before reverting to an old save).
I had a fourth quest incident that may have been a bug or may have been sloppy script work. I pushed a quest towards a very specific resolution, but when I handed it in, the quest-giver seemed to be assuming that I'd engineered a slightly different set of outcomes. As I say, this might not be a bug, it might just be a (rare) incidence of bad writing.
Beyond that, I didn't hit any of the other big bugs that have been reported. My followers worked as advertised (and are much improved from those in Fallout 3) and, most importantly, I had no problems with loading savegames. I think that the initial PC patch fixed those issues. There were a few small problems; monsters that sunk half way into the ground and stuff, but I don't tend to sweat that too much so long as it's only rare occurences.
In short, the bugs are an irritation, but the game is very, very good. If even small bugs irritate you, then the game is probably best avoided for now. Otherwise, I would say that the PC version is playable enough right now to be worth your money and time. One of the advantages of the PC as a platform is that patches can be pushed much faster; if I was still waiting for the PS3 or 360 version patch, I'd probably be rather irritated by now.
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If there was ever a story that the "donotwant" tag was designed for, it is this. If the idea of digitally resurrecting dead movie stars to star in new content wasn't creepy enough, there's the fact that this has George Lucas at the helm.
He's probably had this great idea about how much fun Star Wars had been if it had included a musical number from Charlie Chaplin wearing a rubber Gungan suit. Seriously, I hesitate to try to parody whatever Lucas might come up with using this technology, on the grounds that if he should ever read it, he'd probably think it was a great idea.
Ok, I should have been more specific. If you have a 4 or 5 star rating, then fine, give out the maximum score to a very, very good, but still flawed product (be it a movie, a game, a restaurant or whatever). The average consumer will know that a 5 point scale is a bit of a fudge. A lot of review sites, however, use 100 point scales. It may be a rating out of 10, but IGN, for example, are happy to give out decimal scores. And a score out of 100 implies a more nuanced rating. Under those circumstances, it's reasonable to expect a 10.0/10.0 to equal something very close to perfection. Great but with a few flaws? Use a 9.6 or whatever.
I'm not arguing for homogenisation. I am arguing for getting rid of design elements that have not stood the test of time. Japanaese gaming in general (not just Nintendo) are struggling hugely with this in the current gaming generation.
The lives system is a relic of the days when the best games were coin operated arcade machines and a substantial number of "home" games were arcade ports. In that context, it made sense. It's evolved its way out of most "major" games these days (leaving aside the likes of XBLA titles) because developers have realised that most gamers hate it.
It's not just Nintendo. Look at the addiction of Japanese RPG developers to the concept of "grind" in their games. A decade ago, both Japanese and Western RPGs were grind heavy. These days, the likes of Bioware and Obsidian have worked out that there are ways of delivering the 30+ hours that an RPG allegedly requires (I'm not convinced on that personally) without including anything that feels like a grind to the player (certainly no running around in circles doing random encounters).
I love Japanese games (not Nintendo, I admit). However, there's no denying that Japanese developers are, through clinging to old certainties, currently in danger of pushing themselves into the same kind of box of Korean developers (where overwhelmingly the games never make it beyond the domestic audience due to lack of wider appeal).
To use one of the ever-(un)popular slashdot car analogies, developers like Nintendo and Square are trying to sell cars that need to be hand-cranked to start, despite the fact that everybody else is using modern ignition systems. Variety of design choices is one thing; sticking with something that is outdated and noticably worse is quite another.
No, I think you can fairly easily say a 10/10 (or A+ or whatever a site's maximum-possible score is) if the game is not, in an objective sense, absolutely as good as it could possibly have been given the limitations as present hardware. If a game has even a single flaw within said limitations (and I don't think there has been a game during this hardware generation that hasn't) then it isn't a 10/10. 9.9/10 - sure. But when you give out a maximum possible score, you are saying "there is absolutely nothing about this game that could be improved without substantially better hardware than is currently available". It's not the case for Mario Galaxy 2 (the control system alone guarantees that). It's not the case for any other games currently released, either.
TFA strikes me as a bit of a missed opportunity. It makes some extremely valid points about the dependancy of gaming news sits on the good-will of developers and the impact that this has upon review scores (hello Kane & Lynch). Unfortunately, it drowns this in a morass of po-faced moralising about what "proper" journalism could be. Having a pop at Kotaku for mixing in silly or immature stories among the rest of the headlines is kind of missing the point; these are ultimately entertainment sites, talking about an entertainment medium while seeking to entertain their readers at the same time. A bit of sillyness is going to be par for the course.
For the most part, gaming news is not real news. That's not to say there isn't a place for it. But it isn't in the same category as the kind of news coverage we expect of politics, wars or crime and it doesn't need to be held to the same standards. Occasionally, the gaming world produces a genuine news story (anybody remember Infinium Labs?), but I've generally found that the gaming press isn't too bad at covering these when they do occur. For the rest of the time, think of it as belonging to the same category as sports or showbiz news.
The area where there is cause for concern is that surrounding developer/publisher pressure over review scores. Reviews, unlike gaming "news", fall more into the category of consumer advice than journalism and I think it's reasonable to expect appropriate standards. It really is quite obvious these days that games which come with a big name attached often seem to get review scores they don't deserve. Final Fantasy XIII is a dreadful game. You spend the first twenty five or so hours running down a straight path, fighting endless waves of identical enemies with an almost-uninteractive combat system. No matter how much the game may improve after that point (and the improvement is only mild), there's no way that 25 hours of boring on-rails gameplay shouldn't have a profound negative impact on review scores; and yet the game carried off a slew of 8/10 and 9/10 scores. Mario Galaxy 2 is not a bad game (it has some clever level design), but it has a good number of flaws, including a lack of innovation compared to its predecessor, an imprecise control system (in a game that requires a high degree of precision on many occasions) and outdated game-mechanics such as a lives-system. And yet it had ecstatic reviews, including a frankly incomprehensible 10/10 from IGN.
The thing is that it's by no means clear that publisher pressure was responsible for the scores in the two cases listed above. Square and Nintendo both tend to have a pool of rabid fans (albeit a shrinking pool in both cases) and it's quite possible that the games were just handed to fanboys for review, who were never going to hold the game to objective standards. But the fact is that there are enough incidences of genuine publisher pressure (yes, Kane and Lynch, I'm still talking about you) that gamers' suspicions are inevitably going to be aroused. I think review sites need to do more to enhance their credibility.
Some obvious steps might be:
- Removing advertising on the actual review pages (advertising elsewhere on the site - ok - but it sends the wrong message when you plaster advertising over the review itself and people will see corruption even where it doesn't necessarily exist).
- When a game review comes back with a score of 9/10 or higher (or whatever the equivalent in the site's scoring system), get a second opinion in there as part of the review.
- Greater acknowledgement of bugs and stability issues in reviews and scores. If you look at the reviews of Medal of Honour and Fallout: New Vegas, two recent games that launched in a highly buggy state (on consoles as well as PC), it's clear that some sites acknoweldge the bugs in their review while others don't, but that it's very rare to see bugs actually taken into account in scoring.
Where did I call for a ban? Or, for that matter, describe my MMO playing as an addiction? I certainly wouldn't support any kind of government intervention on MMOs (indeed, would oppose it strenuously) and I am quite clear that my playing was not an addiction (I've seen real addictions close-up and they're rather different).
All I was pointing out was that potential customers should consider the possible consequences of getting too "into" an MMO, and should ask themselves whether they have the willpower needed to get out of it again should they need to.
There's something to this as far as MMOs go. People like to talk about how MMOs tickle the reward centres of the brain with their level-up/upgrade cycles and so on, but I suspect that this wears thin fairly quickly. Certainly, as somebody who has been heavily "into" and then got out of two MMOs (FFXI and WoW) over the last year, the social side of the game has been the biggest deterrent to leaving.
MMOs, of course, get to sting you twice in this respect. Not only do you get a social circle within the game, but if you're not careful, they also start pulling you away from your real-life social circle.
I remember I found it a bit disconcerting when I decided to stop playing WoW. I'd stopped enjoying the game about 4 or 5 months beforehand, and while I had friends within the game, I was finding the sheer tedium of playing the game itself increasingly unbearable. When I quit, I decided to go cold turkey, which was a pronounced contrast to the gradual drift-away I'd had with FFXI. For the first two weeks or so after quitting, I found it very difficult to fill the time I suddenly had. I'd gotten out of the habit of going out and doing things on weekday evenings and it took a while to get back into it.
This isn't to say that MMOs are entirely bad. I mostly enjoyed my time with FFXI and WoW. And while only having an online circle of friends is hardly ideal, it's still a step up from having no social life at all. I don't think I'd go so far as to accuse MMO developers of being outright unethical. But I do think that the MMO market is one where the principle of "caveat emptor" is relevant in some fairly unusual ways. I didn't touch MMOs during my student days, because I knew I would find them engrossing and I didn't want to take this risk until I had steady employment. It's probably worth thinking about your ability to stop playing before you get too heavily into an MMO.
There have been decent rail-shooters in recent years which have, I think, proved that there's still some life in the genre.
Dead Space: Extraction, originally for the Wii but now with a PS3 (Move-compatible) port coming alongside Dead Space 2 is one of the real neglected gems of the last few years. It's a rail shooter that defies many of the conventions of the genre by requiring a dose of thought. You have to plan your weapons loadout and ammunition consumption quite carefully. It's also quite demanding of your observation skills; the ability to spot enemies while they're lurking in the background, before they make an obvious attack, is a great advantage. It's also a pretty scary game, and one which realises the importance of having "quiet" sections to building atmosphere. Sadly, the game was arguably released on the wrong platform and was a spectacular flop in terms of sales (to the extent that it has become the ultimate "mature games don't sell on the Wii" argument). Additional exposure on the PS3 should hopefully correct this.
While not quite as good, the Umbrella Chronicles spinoffs to the Resident Evil Franchise, also on the Wii, are by no means bad. They're a bit more manic than Extraction, and lack the tactical aspects, but you can have a lot of fun with them, particularly in co-op. There's a further passable (though not spectacular) PS3 Move rail shooter; The Shoot.
I think the rail shooter is a genre which suffered due to massive over-exposure at the time of the CD-ROM's entry into the gaming world. When CD drives became common in PCs, and Sega had the Mega-CD fresh on the market, there was an immediate dash to use the storage capabilities of the new medium to do very FMV-intensive games. The nature of FMV-based games means that only a few genres are suitable for adaptation; primarily point and click adventures and rail shooters. So we got a rush of dismally bad FMV-heavy rail shooters (think Sewer Shark and Mad Dog McRee) which damaged the reputation of both rail shooters and FMV cutscenes for years to come.
Happily, there's been a bit of a rehabilitation of both in recent years. Games like Command & Conquer 3 have shown that, when used in the right place, FMV can be a lot of fun. And with "lightgun" capable control devices being the trendy thing right now (though I suspect this particular bandwagon is almost bust) there's been a desire by developers to take a fresh look at the rail shooter concept.
To be honest, I have to wonder how different rail shooters are from many modern FPSes. The Call of Duty tendancy is towards games which are essentially rail shooters, but with the ability to control the speed at which you move forwards. Traditional fps gameplay, which combines exploration elements with the shooting, seems to be drifting towards the slightly more highbrow end of the market, in games like the Bioshock and Crysis series.
It's both. If the opponent is that dumb, then why has it taken a decade?
I've played through the campaigns in both MoH and Black Ops. I'm not quite sure why I did; I was pretty sure in advance that I wouldn't like them. I'm not a great fan of the "gated corridor" school of level design that the Call of Duty series has promoted and I feel like I've seen pretty much every possible variation on their big "set piece" scenes by now. Indeed, having completed both of them, it's hard to manage more than a "meh".
MoH is a strange game, at least partially, I suspect, because of how the developers were trying to skirt around the "taste" issue. It seems to alternate between the kind of po-faced faux-seriousness that made me wonder whether I was supposed to be saluting my monitor, and "yay, quad bike level". The weird thing is that this ended up creeping me out rather more than a straightforward treatment of the same material would have.
The game clearly has aspirations to be the kind of semi-serious treatment of contemporary conflicts that we see in some movies, but it falls short because of the fact that... well... it's an action game pitched at a fairly low common denominator in terms of its player base. It's hard to square serious reflections on war with mowing down vast waves of infinitely respawning Taliban with a big machinegun. In fact, while I generally regard MoH as too silly to be offensive, the one area in which it does skirt close to crossing a line, I felt, was in portraying the Taliban as braindead grunts who charge in their hundreds into a hail of machinegun fire. That's seriously underestimating and trivialising the task that our actual armed forces have to do in Afghanistan.
Black Ops is a different kettle of fish entirely, in that it accepts its own ridiculousness from the outset. It's basically just a pastiche of cold war conspiracy theories and Boy's Own adventure stories which, despite some graphic content that's not for the squeamish, is unlikely to ever cross the line into actually offensive (well, apart from the whole Cuba issue, but I confess to having just found that funny). It put me in mind of the Roger Moore era James Bond movies; The Spy Who Loved Me and so on, mixed with some of the more famous scenes from Vietnam movies like The Deer Hunter and Full Metal Jacket.
I don't think it even aims for historical accuracy. Guns show up in the campaign that shouldn't have existed until years later. In the context of some of the howlers that Black Ops throws into the mix with gleeful abandon, I don't think that a few errors in the poster are really worth noting.
As a final note, I enjoyed Black Ops more than MoH (in so far as I enjoyed either, given how constrained the gameplay is). A cheerfully unrealistic game is always going to be more fun than a game which would like to be realistic but fails spectacularly. I think MoH presents a pretty good case that videogames aren't likely to be able to do serious treatments of current wars. But then, maybe it's just the genre? Would a suvival-horror based game, or a small-squad RTS (a la Dawn of War 2) have more luck?
Lego is always going to be the obvious suggestion in cases like this. Not the pre-packaged Star Wars/Transformers/whatever licenced stuff, but a plain old box of bricks.
Alternatively, though this might seem a strange suggestion taken at face value, that old 1960s favorite Spirograph can be an interesting stepping stone into all kinds of clever thoughts about geometry/mathematics. Plus you get some pretty pictures out of it.
I don't think the advance of graphics and voice acting has been a problem at all. Yes, a few recent games, such as Final Fantasy 13, have had a serious problem with being "interactive movies", but there were plenty of shallow, linear games in the 80s and 90s as well. I can't honestly say that I got a lot out of "imagining" what my characters look like. As for missing hard-copy maps and stat-sheets... I can't say I miss that, either. I remember having to make my own maps for the Eye of the Beholder games. Yes, I did it, but I'd much rather have a decent automap. That said, I do miss the old cloth maps and trinkets that you used to get in game boxes (eg. for the Ultima series). They were pretty nice collector's items.
As for old RPGs being beatable in a couple of hours... maybe. It's certainly true that if you knew what you were doing, you could run through Eye of the Beholder in a few hours (I do remember doing it in a single 8 hour session once). But you can actually do the same with modern RPGs; if you know what you're doing, skip the cutscenes and dodge the sidequests you can blast through the original Mass Effect pretty damned quickly. Meanwhile, the old Japanese RPGs were frequently 40+ hour experiences. The first 6 Final Fantasy games (number 2 really sticks in my mind here) all required a fairly hefty amount of grinding and none of them were over quickly. I brought my first FF6 playthrough home in about 45 hours; roughly 5 hours more than my first FF7 playthrough. When more recent Final Fantasy experiences have worked (eg. FF12), I've found that they've generally provided a more interesting gameplay experience within the same playtime (which isn't to say that they aren't still padded). That said, 13 was, by any measure, a disaster.
As for puzzle games, go to Steam, Xbox Live Arcade or the Playstation Network. Puzzle games may not merit the full $60 release treatement any more, but the genre is alive and well on the PC and home consoles.
In Valkyria, I did no grinding of Skirmishes until I was a good way through the game. But I was finding that as I got further (to about chapter 12 or so), my squad were falling behind the enemies in terms of levels. So I was having to cope with enemies evading and so on far more regularly. This was limiting my ability to get the higher rank scores, which in turn limited the rewards I got from each mission (forming a vicious circle). I had to go and grind old skirmishes to keep up, and found that I needed to continue doing so for the rest of the game. Fortunately, the Bruhl Skirmish (the one where you have to fight along the street and capture the windmill) can be completed with the top rank in about 5 minutes with a sniper/scout combo, which takes a lot of the pain out of it.
Eternal Sonata has a lot of version and region differences, so the amount you have to grind will depend on your version. The 360 version apparently needs little to no grinding. The PS3 version adds more content, but massively reduces the xp that each fight awards, meaning you really do need to grind to stay competitive vs the bosses. I believe the European PS3 version is even harsher than the US PS3 version.
Oh yes, sorry, I didn't want to imply that absolutely every game that involves repetition is rubbish. I've put far too many hours of my time into Geometry Wars and its sequel for that to be the case. But the games I tolerate repetition from tend to be those which you don't play through and complete. If a game is about firing up a session and aiming for a high score, then fine. What bothers me is when a game has a beginning, a middle and an end, but pads itself out needlessly by adding tedious repetition.
I've been looking at my game shelves and thinking about this myself recently. Like the author(s) of TFA, I find myself completing a far lower proportion of the games I buy than I used to. Looking at the games in question, I'm starting to sense a common factor; repetition.
I think that as I get older, find work taking up more of my life and find my genuinely free time getting more and more constrained, I don't have the tolerance for repetition that I once did. This has had a pretty large impact on how likely I am to finish various types of game.
TFA begins by talking about Mass Effect 2, but to be honest, I had no problem playing through that to completion (and will likely do a second playthrough at some point in preparation for Mass Effect 3). Aside from the planet scanning (which you can ignore past the game's mid-way point quite safely), there's precious little repetition. Bioware did a great job of making all the side-missions feel pretty unique. Combined with a strong plot, I never came even close to giving up on Mass Effect 2 (nor on any other Bioware game I can remember).
I find myself strugging a lot more with Japanese RPGs these days, because that genre as a whole (and there are rare, welcome exceptions) has not yet grown out of the idea that levelling up is about running in circles for a couple of hours fighting identical monsters. I have twice tried to play through Star Ocean: The Last Hope and have run out of steam both times because of the sheer quantity of the grinding needed (the game has weird difficulty spikes - the bosses are much, much harder than anything else in the game). I struggled through the grinding in the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata because I was so deeply in love with the game's concept, plot and style, but I would have enjoyed it far more without the grinding (and I did come close to dropping it several times). Even Valkyria Chronicles, which I would rate as arguably the best game of the last 5 years, frustrated me because of the need to do multiple replays of the skirmish engagements for experience points.
I wasn't always this way. I remember playthroughs of Final Fantasy VII where I spent many hours levelling up in and around Midgar so I could beat the Midgar Zolom the first time I met him (nabbing the Beta enemy-skill far earlier in the game than you were supposed to be able to get it). But these days, the thought of doing that just makes me despair. I constantly find myself wishing that Japanese developers (and it is primarily Japanese developers at fault here) were confident enough to make a game as long as it needed to be, rather than trying to deliver the 40-60 hour playtime that they think the fanbase expects.
It's not just RPGs where I find myself increasingly intolerant of repetition. Even in action and platforming games, I hate (really, really hate) being made to replay sections I've already completed. Action games which have no quicksave function and which think it is funny to be sparing on checkpoints are likely to get dropped (Halo: Reach came close several times and had the campaign been slightly longer it probably would have). While I generally liked Mario Galaxy 2, I hated the fact that the lives system meant I found myself repeating sections of levels that I could do with my eyes closed just to get back to the section I was stuck at.
This isn't to say that repetition always means I will drop a game. Where there's a compelling enough reason, I can tolerate it. I've played through Persona 3, its FES "director's cut" and Persona 4 despite their grindy nature, just because the game's social mechanics are so unusual and compelling that I wanted to see them through. But I don't think that enforced repetition ever adds much to a game. Developers: please, work out how long your game needs to be to tell its story, deliver the gameplay experiences you want to get across etc. And then make it that long (or if you only had a 3 hour game left, you may need to go back to the drawing board and rethink your concept). Don't think that we're all sat ou
I think the key question in the short term is going to be "what are court reporting restrictions like in Sweden". I have no idea whether Mr. Assange has committed the crimes he is accused of. If he has, then regardless of his notoriety, he should be punished appropriately. If he hasn't, then regardless of his notoriety, he should not be punished for them (and if there has been an attempt to pervert the course of justice, those responsible should be put on trial).
But with a case as charged as this, controversy will inevitably surround any court proceedings that may result. I would argue that it is of vital importance that the world outside the courtroom be able to see the evidence presented, so as to deter against any possible injustice towards either Mr. Assange or the reputation of the United States.
Here in the UK, we still have pretty heavy court reporting restrictions. In the US, of course, proceedings tend to be far more open (to the extent of televised trials). Does anybody know where Sweden falls on the spectrum?
Agreed, but a blanket policy of reporting all attempts at P2P filesharing (which may not be a crime) to the police as copyright infringement is going to result in a large number of false accusations. As I said in my OP, a large number of legal pieces of software, not least games, use P2P methods for their update systems. If I were running a police department, with limited resources, and suddenly began receiving a large number of false accusations from the local college, at the very least I would want to get the college's administration in for a polite but firm chat about the appropriate use of police resources.
I don't see the police department as being in the wrong here; at least not yet. The college has announced an intention to report all uses of P2P software to the police. I don't see that the police have yet given any indication of how they will respond, not least when presented with a case relating to legal P2P traffic. If the police take no further action with the information provided to them, then they are surely in the clear.
What does occur to me - and this is where I'd welcome input from somebody who does know the legal situation in the US better - is that here in the UK, and in many countries whose legal systems have historic links to ours, there is an offence of wasting police time. If there is any equivalent law in the jurisdiction that covers this college, then I suspect they'd find themselves in breach of it, which could open their administrators to criminal prosecution.
Ok, I'm no expert on the US legal situation, but what's to prevent a situation like this from happening:
1) Student installs 100% legal copy of World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2 or any other game which uses a P2P updater system on their PC in their dorm room.
2) Game does its P2P stuff to get its patches.
3) College spots P2P activity and calls police.
4) Police charge college administrators with wasting police time.
5) Student sues college.
Like it or not, P2P isn't just about illegal filesharing. Yes, I'd fully accept that most P2P traffic is illegal, but a blanket policy like this just seems doomed to (probably expensive) failure.
Being "a good car" is not necessarily a criterion for inclusion. There are lots of really bad Japanese cars that made the cut, as well as the decent ones.
I think what really shocked me is that despite all the fuss they made about having the Top Gear Test Track on the test list, they didn't even bother to include the "reasonably priced car" that the show famously gets celebrities to drive around the track (the Kia Cee'd), nor its predecessors (which are Suzukis). I just look at this car list and it shouts "lazy" and "couldn't be bothered to look around".
1. The Forza 3 devs are American. Based in America. But there's no shortage of Japanese (and European) cars in their game.
2. And they've had long enough.
3. Not really, it was clear by the time GT5 Prologue came out that the actual racing was dated next to all the competition.
4. Don't use it if you don't like it. Those of us who have jobs and lives don't like spending half an hour re-running a race after a stupid mistake on the last lap cost us the win on the previous run.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to this game. I've got the pre-order in for the expensive version and everything. However, I've got to admit that I have a few misgivings and questions:
- Sure, they're saying over 1000 cars, but now that the full list is out, it's clear that this basically means an incredible number of MX5 and RX7 variants, as well as a bunch of LanEvos and Skylines. At the same time, the car lists for some manufacturers, particularly US ones (Europe doesn't fare quite so badly) are extremely thin. Have they really spent their time as well as they could have?
- Why so few tracks? They're advertising what looks like a large list, but many of them are just minor variants on the same circuits. In addition, only a few of these tracks are new to the series. If they want gamers to play for long enough to experience any kind of sensible proportion of the cars on offer, wouldn't spending some more time on tracks have been an obvious move? I don't really think the (very limited) course editor compensates...
- And what is the actual racing going to be like? There's been almost no focus on this, as opposed to the car and track lists. Will the AI actually be any improvement on previous titles? The AI in GT5: Prologue was basically the same as that in the original Gran Turismo, and it has not aged well at all, particularly well put against the likes of Forza 3. I want to feel as though my opponents are actually racing against me, rather than just driving on the same track through sheer coincidence.
- And finally, will the game include the single greatest humanitarian development in the entirety of recorded history - the rewind button? This was in Grid and Forza 3 and was an absolutely fantastic frustration-beater. I really don't fancy the idea of doing any races longer than 10 minutes without one of these in future.
I feel so conflicted over this one, to be honest.
On the one hand, high street game retailers have nobody but themselves to blame for their woes, particularly where PC games are concerned. Going out on a limb, I'd guess that the two UK retailers the story refers to are Game and Gamestation. Of course, both of those have the same owning company, so maybe there's actually another retailer out there who's thinking the same way, but I wouldn't bet on it. I think HMV (our major music/dvds high street retailer that also does games) is too diversified to be really worried about the PC gaming market.
The main difference between Game and Gamestation is that the latter is almost entirely used games sales, while the former generously gives over a good 25% or so of its shelf-space in the average store to new games. Occasionally, they'll even let you buy one without a pre-order.
Gamestation is, in my opinion, pretty much unspeakable. They have a business model that revolves around buying copies of Fifa Soccer off teenagers for £3 (or £5 if they accept payment in store credit) and selling them on at £30. I've nothing against used games sales, but really, people could be getting a far better deal either as vendor or buyer from ebay. And that's basically the entirety of Gamestation.
Game used to be somewhat better. Sure, they have the same used-games model, but they did at least used to be a reasonable place to buy new titles. These days, however, if you want anything other than the last couple of big releases for each platform; well, I hope you pre-ordered. They have a small number of flagship stores that are slightly better, but shopping in the average branch pretty much comes down to "Do you want Fifa new or used (oh, and the right answer is "used")?". I remember when Valkyria Chronicles 2 came out... I was told by the staff at the Game branch in London's Victoria Station that I had no chance of getting one without pre-order. So I walked a few yards to the (tiny, cupboard-like) branch of HMV and got one there.
And as for PC gaming, both chains have completely neglected it since the start of the current console cycle. If the store had a PC section (and not every store did) it was usually a single rack with a new release or two and a collection of 5-10 year old casual titles. No refunds on PC games (though they might reluctantly exchange a damaged disc) and, with no used market, the retailers weren't interested. And yet now, with the current gen consoles looking a little bit tired (with no successors in sight) and Valve having revived the PC market quite effectively, high-street retailers decide that they want a slice of it. And apparently they want it handed to them on a platter.
And at the same time, Steam is, in many ways, an extremely good service. As DRM goes, it's not offensive. It's tied to an account, not a PC, and you can redownload data as many times as you want. There's no need to put any kind of game disc in your drive. And Steam does generally seem to offer at least an alternative to the kinds of hideous DRM we've seen elsewhere. Plus it's a well-rounded platform that includes achievements, friends lists and most of the other features we expect from the (subscription based) Xbox Live service.
However... there are aspects of Valve's business practices that are starting to worry me. I have no sympathy for high-street retailers, but I do think that some of Valve's online competitors are being very hard done by. It must suck for direct2drive (who I have used and who are fine, if not as good as Steam) that every copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops they sell has to be installed within Steam, sending customers direct to their main competitor. Steam has, thus far, been a net positive for PC gamers. But should Steam become the only platform in town, then I don't think that's going to work so well for the customer. Ideally, we need some of their competition to get their act in gear and improve their own services to the point where they become a valid alternative.
Yes, this.
The average first person shooter these days involves moving down a pretty corridor, alternating between cutscenes and battles where you hide behind a box and fire at people who stick their head up from behind their own box. I'm not necessarily saying that such games aren't fun in their place (I just finished Vanquish and loved it), but it's pretty easy to see that there's a big difference in scale.
New Vegas has flaws, but it is vast and sprawling. It develops a whole game world that you can spend days exploring, and is well designed enough (no random dungeon generation here, thanks) that it doesn't get dull. Sure, it would be nice if it wasn't buggy, but I'm prepared to tolerate a lot in exchange for the experience on offer.
What does make me laugh, however, is that the new Medal of Honor is just as buggy as New Vegas, despite being a "walk down the pretty corridor" shooter. I loved the bit where I died in the middle of a set-piece battle, only for it to decide when it loaded my checkpoint (no luxury of a quicksave system here) that I'd actually been 30 yards or so in front of where I had been. Took me half an hour and about 50 attempts to survive long enough to get back to cover.
While the article summary doesn't mention Fallout: New Vegas, it's clear from both the context and TFA itself that this is really a New Vegas issue.
I stuck some of my early (and mostly positive) thoughts on New Vegas's PC version in my journal a few days ago. Being in Europe, I only got the game after the first PC patch had been released, so I never got to see the PC version at its worst. Having now finished a 35 hour playthrough of the game, I can offer a slightly more comprehensive run-down of the bugs I did hit. Obviously, this is just my experience; your mileage may vary depending on your hardware and luck-stat.
The most common of the bugs is the Nvidia slowdown issue. This is annoying, particularly because my PC is massively ahead of the recommended specs, and because it often seems to occur at random, rather than just at "busy" times (though a few particular busy scenes will consistently cause slowdown). However, it's not going to stop you from completing the game and only had a minor impact on my enjoyment.
I had a few crashes to desktop - maybe a dozen over the course of the 35 hour playthrough. These almost always seem to happen in specific areas. The killer area for me was the "outer" section of Freeside, particularly near the door to the Old Mormon Fort. At least half of my crashes happened while walking towards the Fort. After a while, I just got used to tapping quicksave before walking through that area. It was an irritation, but not a massive one.
Quest bugs are potentially extremely serious. There are plenty of reports of quests being rendered uncompletable. In some cases, this can apply to main-plot quests, which is potentially game-breaking. I had three quests glitch on me over the course of the game. In two cases, it was a case of an NPC getting stuck in the middle of a scripted sequence and loading a quicksave fixed the problem without losing me more than 60 seconds or so of progress. The third case was more serious; several NPCs involved in a major sidequest refused to acknowledge my existence. This one cost me 45 minutes, as I had to go back to a proper save from before I started the quest (plus factor in additional time for trying to fix things before reverting to an old save).
I had a fourth quest incident that may have been a bug or may have been sloppy script work. I pushed a quest towards a very specific resolution, but when I handed it in, the quest-giver seemed to be assuming that I'd engineered a slightly different set of outcomes. As I say, this might not be a bug, it might just be a (rare) incidence of bad writing.
Beyond that, I didn't hit any of the other big bugs that have been reported. My followers worked as advertised (and are much improved from those in Fallout 3) and, most importantly, I had no problems with loading savegames. I think that the initial PC patch fixed those issues. There were a few small problems; monsters that sunk half way into the ground and stuff, but I don't tend to sweat that too much so long as it's only rare occurences.
In short, the bugs are an irritation, but the game is very, very good. If even small bugs irritate you, then the game is probably best avoided for now. Otherwise, I would say that the PC version is playable enough right now to be worth your money and time. One of the advantages of the PC as a platform is that patches can be pushed much faster; if I was still waiting for the PS3 or 360 version patch, I'd probably be rather irritated by now.