Excellent news about Mechwarrior 4. I wonder if the stand-alone Mercenaries spin-off (which I preferred) is also included (I note the expansions are)?
Also good news that if the screenshots/concept art are anything to go by, they plan on doing this properly. It doesn't look to me like some arcade-ified MechAssault type of game. I used to love the Mechwarrior games, partially because the complexity made it feel like you really were in command of a huge lump of metal. I don't expect they'll use half the keyboard on controls again, but if they can get something with even a vaguely sim-like feel, I'll be delighted.
I'm also very pleased that they're jumping back in the time-line. The Clans are great, and it would be neat if this game could feature the Clan invasion as its finale (like Battletech 2 and Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries), but I always felt that the narrative just meandered after that. Plus it's actually a lot of fun trying to survive in relatively primative mechs like the Jenner.
Graphics should be appropriate to the game experience you're trying to create. That's all there is to it, really.
In some cases, that means pushing for absolutely cutting edge technology. A big part of the Crysis experience is the "shock and awe" factor of the visuals, as well as the heavy use of foliage and other environmental factors that need to be done to a very high standard if they're not going to look silly. Personally, I think Crysis is a very, very good game - one of the best of recent years on any platform - and the graphics are a big part of that (though the fairly free-form gameplay is another big element). To be honest, if you're making a first or third person shooter these days that doesn't have a deliberately abstract setting, then you really should be pushing for the most technologically advanced graphics you can, because as gamers' expectations improve, games which fall behind the curve face a bigger and bigger challenge in not having their immersion broken through poor graphics. I remember playing Call of Cthulhu - Dark Corners of the Earth back when it was released and being generally very impressed by the atmosphere (despite the bugs). I tried replaying it recently, and the way that the graphics had aged so badly was quite a shocking bar to getting back into it.
However, not every game needs to be a technological powerhouse, and there are even cases where flash-whizz-bang 3d graphics can work against a game. My favorite example here (and yes, I know it's an old one) concerns the third and fourth Monkey Island games. Monkey Island 3 was for many years the closest thing I'd played to an interactive cartoon. The graphical quality certainly wasn't far short of the animation you were seeing in animated movies at the time, and was actually ahead of much of what you'd see in kids' TV cartoons and anime of the era. For a cartoony graphical adventure, it was perfect. Then for the fourth installment, everything went 3d and it looked rubbish. So we went stylistically from "interactive cartoon" to "badly designed Quake mod". You can see the same thing with the transition from Baldur's Gate 2 to Neverwinter Nights - beautifully drawn 2d backdrops changed to boring, bland 3d tilesets (though I guess this was necessary to make user created content easier).
Interestingly, the recent Sam & Max episodic games seem to have found a decent middle ground here. They balance 3d and 2 graphics in a way that works really quite well, and have finally pulled things back up to the "interactive cartoon" level (and a prettier cartoon that Monkey Island 3 was, though perhaps not by far).
Then occasionally you get one of my favorite experiences; something which uses really quite advanced graphical effects to produce a deliberately highly stylised effect. The best example I've seen of this recently is Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3, which uses some quite advanced 3d graphics and visual effects, but aims for a unique look, which is going neither for realism, nor for the typical anime look you see in a lot of Japanese games. I know cell-shading is nothing new (and has been much abused, particularly by Nintendo), but Valkyria Chronicles combines it with other techniques to pull off a unique and distinctive look that really fits the game well.
Most developers have given up on trying to do anything clever with the Wii-mote. Most games now use the pointer-function, and then basically map "waggle" onto a single action. If you're lucky, you might get "waggle from side to side" mapped to something different to "waggle up and down" (though the Wii-mote's now-legendary imprecision can make even this annoying). Personally, I felt that Force Unleashed was the moment it was clear that the Wii-mote's impact on gaming had been massively overhyped. People had demanded a lightsabre-fighting game on the Wii from day one and, when one finally appeared, it turned out that the secret to winning fights in it was just to waggle furiously.
The fact remains that at present, a mouse and keyboard remains the best option for precise control, while a decent, well-balanced 2-stick analogue controller is a respectable second.
Yes, I have to agree with this. I do hope Colonial Marines doesn't follow in the path of this, though.
The Aliens franchise hasn't been treated anything like as well as it deserves to be in recent years, in gaming terms. I mean, what have we had? A crap AvP RTS on the Playstation 2 and Xbox, a rubbish AvP shooter on the PSP, a few cellphone games and a decent-ish arcade machine. When you consider that the Aliens franchise has had such a huge impact on gaming culture (as the inspiration behind the look and feel of games like Doom), this looks a bit sad.
I think the whole AvP thing has been a bit of a depressing sideline. Personally, I find the Predator about as scary and cool as the average episode of Dora the Explorer. I remember when I was about 12 or so, my parents used to control what I watched at home pretty carefully. However, I had a friend whose parents were far more lax, so when I went over there, I often saw stuff I'd never be allowed to see at home. I remember watching Predator over there (it must have been newly out on VHS at the time) and not being bothered in the slightest. A few weeks later, I remember seeing Alien there. I didn't sleep for a month after that. Whichever way you look at it, the Alien is just a better baddie.
AvP2 for PC was 1/3rd of a very decent game. That 1/3rd was the Marine campaign, which was scary as hell. The less said about the "hunt for the breakable vent" and "stupid jump puzzles" flow of the Aliens and Predator campaigns, the better. Of course, the game hasn't aged fantastically well; the engine wasn't considered great at the time and looks and feels very nasty indeed now.
The technology to make a genuinely scary-as-hell Aliens fps has been around for a few years; basically since Doom 3 appeared. All it needs is some reasonably believable squad AI, a writer with a sense of pacing (ie. somebody who understands that having periodic lulls in the action is way scarier than pure run and gun) and a plot that DOESN'T revolve around some mad scientist experimenting on the aliens. It's disappointing that nobody has yet risen to the challenge. The release date for Colonial Marines keeps slipping - here's hoping it doesn't do a Duke Nukem Forever on us.
Fallout 3 is primarily an RPG, albeit one with heavy fps elements. However, the Operation Anchorage downloadable content is almost a pure action fps. It even makes a few typically wry nods to the conventions of the fps genre, such as the remarks you can find in there on the linearity on some of the levels (the content takes place within a simulator and hence is a video game within a video game), which stands in stark contrast to the generally open-ended nature of the rest of the game.
Yeah, I loved those as well, even though the multiplayer in Skynet never really "felt" right to me. We seemed to get a strange kind of spurt of well-made intelligent games based on dormant movie licences in the mid-90s, primarily around the Star Wars franchise (X-Wing, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, TIE Fighter and so on), but those two Terminator games are also good examples.
I remember finding Future Shock deeply frustrating for the first few hours and nearly taking it back to the shop because I just couldn't seem to work out what I was supposed to be doing. Then the "orienteering" nature of the game, which was completely different to the "corridor shooter" pattern established by Doom, finally hit me and I loved it from that point onwards. The degree of freedom it gave you in how to approach objectives was unprecedented at the time and we wouldn't really see proper parallels again (in a high quality game) until Farcry.
Of course, it was badly hamstrung by its technical limitations. The engine was unbelievably primative by today's standards, and the visuals didn't look anything like the "future" scenes in the Terminator movies.
Sadly, now that the technology is here to really do the concept justice, developers of licenced games have fallen into the pattern of just defaulting to brain-dead run-and-gun third person corridor shooters (cf. the Terminator Salvation) game. Of course, like Star Wars, the Terminator franchise has also been battered and bruised by inferior sequels pitched at the lowest common denominator as well. All in all, the chances of seeing a new Future Shock (as opposed to non-Terminator-licenced spiritual successors) must be assessed as being virtually nil.
I remember a great one of these in Ultima VII. Basically, there was a certain building in the first town, which had an invisible portal hidden behind its chimney. To access it, you had to either cheat (which is... well... cheating), or else build a staircase out of crates to get onto the roof. To do this, you needed to pretty much scour the entire town for crates, as you would need every last one to get up there.
Once you went through the portal, you found yourself in a strange sci-fi type area, with the Kilrathi theme from Wing Commander 2 playing as BGM. There were chests containing multiple sets of the best equipment in the game, a huge variety of useful magical items, as well as most of the plot-related items. There were also teleporters that could take you to most of the key points of interest around Britannia.
This one was so cool because it didn't require the use of a cheat or clipping exploit to find it. Sure, nobody was ever going to find it on their own accord without having been told about it in advance, but you could get in there without typing in any special commands or cheat codes.
Oh yeah. This was pretty gobsmacking at the time. He told us what he'd done and we sat there with our jaws quite literally dropping.
Of course, back in 2000, while e-mail was already pretty much everywhere, there were still quite a few hold-outs, particularly in senior ranks, who personally used it as little as possible (actually, scratch the "were"... there still are). By all accounts, this guy's director was one of those. There was also, I think, much less in the way of checks and balances in place in many corporate IT systems, putside of the tech sector. My housemate had been telling us for months about his adventures in the company email system. His idea of a side-splittingly funny joke was to go into somebody's inbox and delete the unopened mail from their girlfriend asking to meet up that evening. After all, people were quite happy to believe that e-mail would just "vanish into the ether" sometimes. I lost count of the number of times myself and the other housemates had to sit through some tedious story about this kind of thing in the evenings.
He'd been getting away with this kind of thing for the better part of a year at least. Not long before he got fired, his stories had increasingly started to involve an element of "sending e-mails pretending to be other people". He didn't tell us in advance about the one that got him fired - perhaps with hindsight he realised as soon as he'd done this that he might have overstepped the mark. At any rate, his modus operandi was just to monitor the inbox of the person he'd sent a mail as (I presume he only targetted light users) and delete any replies before the recipient could see them. In this case, his director found out by word of mouth about what he'd apparently been saying about one of his staff. I don't know the details, but I can imagine it could have been something quite innocuous... "Hey, Chris, that guy in your team who you've been raving about in e-mails - could you get him to have a look at this problem for me?".
As to what eventually happened to him... I lost track for a long time. The rent on the place we were staying was pretty astronomical - with one of the four of us no longer able to pay his share, we had to find somewhere else (or take in a stranger, which none of us wanted). It was a good time for me to relocate to London for career purposes, so I did. However, I found out about a year ago, when I met up with one of the other housemates for a drink, that the guy in question spent 2 years unemployed after his sacking, went back to live with his parents, and now works as a taxi driver in their town.
However, this is part of the point I was making. In the world of the BOFH stories, the BOFH is almost always omnipotent and omniscient. If he's ever temporarily caught out, he always manages to twist it to his advantage. At the same time, the people he's surrounded by (except for the PFY) are so predictable and stupid that he's able to run rings around them. For short, humorous stories, this works perfectly - the archetype of the clever trickster who outwits his more powerful but less quick witted opponents, flirts with danger but always escapes with his hide and his spoils, goes back thousands of years. The BOFH is just Pan/Loki/Brer Rabbit with an IT degree. This is not, however, how reality tends to work a lot of the time.
Always remember, no matter how clever you think there are, there is almost certainly somebody smarter out there. And of course, the cleverer you think you are, the more likely you are to slip up and underestimate your opponents. In both of the examples I gave in my earlier post, this was the fatal mistake. The BOFHs in question thought that the other people in their organisation would be as gullible and stupid as those in the BOFH stories. They were wrong.
I've seen a couple of IT careers ruined by this attitude. In one case, getting fired was just the start of the guy's problems.
The BOFH stories are funny. Simon Travaglia writes well and manages to put out clever little satirical stories on a regular basis. He provides an ongoing wry commentary on the state of IT practices in business. He has also, albeit unintentionally, through his cultural influence in the IT world, been the driving force behind more sackings than I care to imagine.
The point that often gets lost is that his stories are fiction.
Yes, fiction.
The unpleasant fact is that in the real world, sysadmins are not generally omnipotent technical gods able to manipulate entire companies at will and escape the consequences of their actions. Nor are management always incompetent drones who will believe anything they're told provided you use big enough words to confuse them. The stereotypes may be comforting, but they're largely not true.
As I say, I've seen two cases of people getting sacked for directly BOFH-inspired behaviour. One was a guy I shared a house with for a while around 2000 or so, after graduating. He used to regale us with his own "BOFH" stories (though most of them were petty and unfunny). After just over a year, we got home one evening to find he'd been fired. He'd sent out e-mails from his boss's boss's account, designed to promote his own reputation in his company. This had, of course, gotten back to his management chain. My housemate was actually furious because he was convinced that the allegations against him couldn't be "proved". He freely admitted to us he'd done it. But it couldn't be proved, he cried. Honest. The world just wasn't supposed to work this way. He never actually went as far as trying to claim unfair dismissal. I think reality finally managed to penetrate his skull.
The second guy I saw fired I didn't know so well - rather I saw it at a distance across the organisation where I was working (in 2002). Again, he was a sysadmin (albeit one of several - this is a big organisation). He'd picked up a grudge against a non-technical member of staff and had done the classic BOFH trick of filling their file storage space with naughty pictures then reporting that he'd found them there. In BOFH land, the target would swiftly escorted off the premesis while the BOFH celebrates down at the pub. Of course, in the real world, of course, the victim protested his innocence. The employer follows proper channels and investigates. An external auditor works out exactly what's happened. The sysadmin in question is sacked. And reported to the police. And sued by his intended victim.
So yes, read the BOFH, enjoy the stories. But don't, for a moment, think they highlight an appropriate way to behave in the real world.
Final Fantasy XII is odd. I suspect most people who just play the game through normally, as you seem to have, will feel as you did. I know I felt that way after my first playthrough.
The big discovery for me with FFXII was playing it through again, with a power-gaming FAQ. With an hour or two of grinding for levels early on, you can pretty much slot yourself onto a parallel game track, where the real challenge isn't progressing through the plot (which can be done in a few minutes with your extra levels and better rewards), but rather beating the optional (and sometimes secret) challenges that are unlocked throughout the game.
If you do the more advanced hunts, simply setting up your gambits is nothing like enough to get through these harder fights. Certainly, from King Behemoth onwards, you will need to be micromanging one of your characters intensely and making frequent interventions on other characters whenever they need to do something that the gambit system just can't cover.
The gambits do feel a little odd if you just play through the game's main plot. The more you get into the optional challenges, the more you realise that they're a sensible solution for keeping the micromanagement required down to a sensible level during some pretty epic fights.
Oh, this takes me back to something that happened when I was still at school, around about 1996 or so.
At the time, despite being pretty much clueless by slashdot standards, I functioned (and still do function, when I can't avoid it) as the all purpose IT helpdesk for my family.
Now, I have an aunt who was working as a manager in a medium sized UK based IT firm (I can't remember the name and I don't even think they're still around). However, do not take this as any indication that she knew anything at all about computers. She didn't. Nor did she have any inclination to learn. She could just about manage to use Microsoft Office and the web/e-mail clients that were around at the time (I think this was around the time of Netscape 2). Literally anything beyond that would baffle her. She'd call her monitor "the computer" and so on. She was employed, I gather, for her "management skills".
Now, even at the time, I had a feeling that this was a crock. My aunt is a rather forceful personality. A less diplomatic person might use more bovine terminology and I always got the impression that she wouldn't be much fun to work for.
She's also very, very, very large (over 25 stone) and ugly as sin to boot. That's not me being deliberately rude. There's just no nicer way to put it without doing a genuine dis-service to the truth.
Anyway, one Saturday afternoon, I get a call from her. Her voice implies that she's perched in that dangerous territory between bursting into tears and throwing a screaming, PC-destroying fit. Apparently, her computer is "insulting" her. I need to go over there instantly. I got a lot of this kind of stuff until, a couple of years later, I finally told her where she could stick it after I moved off to university and got a call asking me to travel 200 miles to fix something. Anyway, I'm not best pleased about losing a Saturday afternoon, especially with exams coming up, but for the sake of a quiet life, I head over.
Oh boy was it ever worth it.
Sure enough, every two minutes on the dot, her PC is insulting her. Whatever she's doing in Windows, a little dialogue box will pop up with a splendidly vicious insult. I mean, some these were absolute gems and were clearly aimed right at her personally. A few of the more repeatable examples (and I still remember these more than a decade later) were:
"Careful! Better fetch an extra chair. I think those two are about to give way." "Wow you must be constipated. Or does your face just look like that normally?" "Did you just fart, or do you always smell like that?" "Wipe your face. Half your lunch is stuck between your fifth and sixth chins." "Is that your face or your arse I can see? Your face? Hmm... the arse might be better." "I can access over 64,000,000 images via the Internet and none of them are as ugly as you." "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? No? How about a half-digested turnip?"
There was plenty of other stuff as well, including the old classics about ID10T and PEBCAK errors, but enough of it was specific enough to my aunt (making mention of particularly distinctive unflattering features) that this was clearly something bespoke.
Anyway, my aunt's in an absolute state at this point. She's convinced that the computer is insulting her. She tells me she tried covering up the monitor for half an hour (so it couldn't see her), but when she came back, it had been queuing up the insults.
Anyway, having confirmed that a virus scanner doesn't pick anything up, I ask to see any disks she's put in the PC lately, or any files she's downloaded. The downloaded files all look pretty safe, and it doesn't seem like anything dodgy's come in via e-mail either. However, she then shows me a couple of disks (3.5" floppies) she'd brought home with work on. These are a numbered series of progress reports. Most of the disks look absolutely fine - a few Word and Excel files. Nothing too scary (I don't think MS Office files were being used extensively for exploits at the time).
You can tell that the Achievements thing has worked out pretty well for MS, because of the number of other companies out there who have frantically tried to copy it. People talk about motion-sensing controls, but it may prove to be achievements that are the defining legacy of this console generation.
Unfortunately, I'm not 100% sure I like this. I don't much mind achievements on the 360. If I buy a full-sized game (as opposed to an XBLA game) I know that there are 1000 achievement points to be unlocked in there. However, I also know that I don't particularly need to bother about these if I don't want to and, because I've read reviews, I know that I am buying a full-sized game that there is a good chance I will like.
I'm far more worried by the direction taken by Blizzard with the achievements they've added to World of Warcraft. Achievements were added to WoW just before the latest expansion was released and there can be absolutely no denying that they have been used as a substitute for including proper content. It's clear that Blizzard wants to run down the amount of resource it devotes to keeping WoW updated and achievements are their quick fix of choice. Even with the recently released Ulduar, the amount of raid content we have in Wrath of the Lich King is vastly inferior to what was around in the Burning Crusade pretty much from launch. But then, why have a team of developers spend months creating new dungeons, when you can have the office temp sit down for an hour or two and think up some stupid and time-consuming ways of getting people to recycle the same old content.
So yeah... achievements as currently impelemented by MS are at worst harmless and at best quite a fun little distraction (and this often depends on how they're implemented in a particular game). However, I can see the little dollar signs flashing in eyes across the industry, as people wake up to the potential for using achievements as a means of increasing profit margins while screwing over all but the most guillible of customers.
Nintendo have ensured at a stroke that I will never pick up a DSi. They've region locked its software.
My morning commute isn't really handheld friendly (packed in like sardines on a short distance commuter train and then London Underground). The main use I get out of handhelds is when I travel, be it for business or personal reasons. And with the nature of my work, most of my business travel is to the States. I've always, therefore, kept a handheld (or several - I have a PSP and DS, which get around equal use) around for flights and for evenings stuck in crap hotels or conference centres in the middle of nowhere. The ability to buy games for my handhelds at either end of the journey is a sine qua non for me. In the past, it's not been much of an issue - handheld games were always region free. For Nintendo to now institute locking on the DSi just confirms my long standing suspicion that Nintendo's natural instinct is towards the kind of corporate ethics that would make even Sony and Microsoft blush (no mean feat), but that they've not previously been confident enough in their market position to give into this.
I've seen quite a few games over the last couple of years that have really impressed me through the way they tell their story. In particular:
Lost Odyssey - not the fairly standard Japanese RPG fare that makes up most of the game, but rather the text narrative used for the dreams. Very minimalist - just animated text on an almost static abstract background with a few ambient sounds, but they covered an impressive range of scenarios and even genres. A few were genuinely well-written, even by the standards of non-video-game writing.
Valkyria Chronicles - awesome game (a genuine PS3 killer-title), awesome visuals and a very well-told story. The whole "book" device used to tell the story works extremely well. It's also notable that, unusually for a Japanese game, Valkyria Chronicles manages to avoid most of the usual anime cliches when it comes to its characters. The recently-started anime is sadly a bit more "traditional", making Alicia into more of a typical tsundere type, but it's still good stuff for a game-to-anime adaptation.
Red Alert 3 - knows precisely what it is - pure B-movie schlock - and has a lot of fun with it. It's completely ridiculous in every respect, but it carries its storyline along with such energy that it's really difficult to care.
Super Smash Bros Brawl - interesting one, this. The story's wafer thin. But, unusually for Nintendo, they did put a bit of effort into it and the game is far better for it. The short, punchy and completely over-the-top nature of the CGI scenes fits the game perfectly.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 - integrates its storyline into the gameplay with consumate skill. Japanese RPGs are often criticised (not without truth, in some cases) for being essentially a series of cutscenes separated by fairly cookie-cutter battles. Not so with Persona 4. If you want to beat the game, not only do you need to fight through the dungeons and beat the bosses, but you also need to solve the murder mystery. At the risk of spoilers, the player is asked, around 90% of the way through the game, to identify the culprit behind the murders that have occurred throughout the game. If the player has paid attention, watched for background details and picked up on the right clues, he will be able to do so and procede on to the final dungeon. If he hasn't, then unless he gets a lucky guess (and there are a lot of options to guess from), it's BAD END.
Portal - the best example around of a game which tells a story with a minimum of actual narration, at which it far surpasses the horribly over-rated Half-Life 2. Within the specific confines of Portal, the traditional Half-Life storytelling technique works fantastically. It doesn't matter that you've got next to no background information - it's easy to assume that the protagonist has woken up without her memory. It's also easy to accept that she doesn't speak - there's nobody to speak to. In Half-Life 2 by contrast, the technique fell flat on its face. Not only were we expected to believe that Gordon never says a single word, but we're also expected to believe that none of the other characters ever go "Oh, Gordon, you might want a quick update on what's happened while you were away...". This was just too much for my suspension of disbelief to handle.
The irony, of course, is that in the wider battle for the online gaming marketspace, both Q3 and UT lost out very badly indeed to a free mod for an aging game based on a hacked around version of the original Quake's engine (ie. Counter-Strike).
I think looking back, Quake 3 was the point at which id went from being the undisputed industry leaders in the fps genre to "one among many". With the original Quake and Quake 2, if you played fpses online, you basically played one of those games, or one of their mods. There were a few other minor niche games, but none of them really had much of a wider community. Counter-Strike was the last game to really unite a majority of the online fps scene under a single banner and, as it starts to fade away, there doesn't seem to be any single successor (on the PC at least), but rather a broader fragmentation.
I wonder if the same will happen in the MMO market once WoW jumps the shark? If, rather than having one all-consuming leviathan in the market and a few minnows trying to snap up a few hundred thousand users around the edges, we'll end up with a situation with multiple MMOs well up in the millions, but no clear pack leader?
I liked NWN2. The original NWN felt like a toolkit with a (rather shoddy) sample campaign bolted on. NWN2 actually felt like a proper game, with a plot and everything. Some of the dialogue, particularly that between party members, was very well written. If it didn't quite ascend to the quotable highs of the Baldur's Gate games, it didn't fall far short. I'll grant you that, on launch, NWN2 had some serious bugs that rendered it near-unplayable in places, but these have been fixed and if you haven't looked at the game since then, you really should give it another go.
The expansions are also very interesting. I still don't think anybody has really made an epic-levels AD&D CRPG that actually really works and is interesting, but Mask of the Betrayer is certainly as close as it comes. For what it's worth, while I don't play the tabletop game myself, I have friends who do who are really contemptuous of epic-level games (too fiddly, too much micromanagement needed, too hard to make proper scenarios that are actually testing for characters who are supposed to be of near-godly power), so it might be that the CRPGs that try to emulate this (the BG2 expansion, the second NWN expansion and Mask of the Betrayer) are just tilting at windmills anyway.
Storm of Zehir, the second expansion, is really quite unusual and ambitious. It's a lot less linear than is the norm for these things and feels, in a weird way, like some of the old Gold Box games.
So yeah, I think Obsidian did a pretty good job on NWN2.
Under other circumstances, I might have. But with the Elite now temptingly cheap (and the 20 gig HD size of the old one starting to feel painful) I honestly just decided that the cost of buying a new one was easily outweighed by the time and effort required to get a replacement. Back in my student days, when I had more free time and far less cash, I may have felt differently.
Meh, the original had seen a lot of use and, as I say, I'd been pretty close to deciding to go for an Elite anyway. The 3 years warrenty on the new one should comfortably carry me over into the next console generation.
Back in the last generation, I had 2 Gamecubes die on me (one just suddenly refused to go past the initial splash screen, the other had that little flippy-lid-thingy torn off by an overenthusiastic 8 year old who was visiting over Christmas). Having to replace dead consoles isn't actually a new or uncommon experience.
The console I live in dread of any failure on is my PS3. This is a US 60 gig model which I imported to the UK pretty soon after they launched. As an early model, this has full PS2 back compatibility, which I make extensive use of to play my imported US PS2 games. As far as I'm aware, these are now pretty much irreplacable.
The huge reduction in difficulty level in WotLK has indeed been pretty annoying. Now, I understand that these tier 7 instances are designed to be accessible to new players who've never touched the level 60 or 70 content, and that's fine. Their difficulty as an introductory tier would have been spot on, IF there had been harder tier 8 content in WotLK on the day it shipped. I was never expecting (nor wanting) the retuned Naxxramas to be pitched at Sunwell Plateau level difficulty.
I understand that back in Burning Crusade, they possibly pitched some of the early raid encounters a little bit too hard. Karazhan was quite a steep curve for new level 70s (to say nothing of the fact that it was the only introductory level instance and could only be done 10 man) and Gruul and Magtheridon, before they got nerfed, were completely out of the sights of most players for quite some time. But even had Burning Crusade's Tier 4 content been easier than it was at launch, there would still have been plenty for the more advanced players to do.
I really hate the philosophy which says that every raid player in the game should be able to blitz through any instance, with a few "hard modes" for the same fights thrown in for advanced players. Back when we were working through Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau, just getting to see the next boss was often the biggest reward from defeating the previous one. That's gone now. I'm not sure I want to be playing a game where, once Icecrown Citadel has been released, even the casual guilds have downed Arthas within a fortnight, meaning we then spend the next 9 months trying to kill him while standing on one leg and drinking only the purple fruit juice.
The reason why people are still buying 360s is because it has the games. Of the three consoles, the 360 has, for the moment, the best all round coverage of genres and styles to satisfy most people who consider themselves to be gamers. The PS3 is slowly making up lost ground here, with a few genuinely excellent exclusives like Valkyria Chronicles, but right now, it has no racing game to match Forza 2, no Western RPGs to match Mass Effect and no Japanese RPGs to match Lost Odyssey. Gran Turismo 5 and Final Fantasy XIII will probably go some way to closing those gaps, but neither is due for imminent release.
But yes, the hardware situation is pretty dire. My 360 red-ringed on me the other week, just outside of the 3 year warrenty. I didn't make a big fuss out of this, as I'd been considering buying an Elite anyway. But what really did frustrate me is how, for a console known for catastrophic rates of hardware failure, the process of transferring all of your content to a new console is still an absolute pain in the backside. You either send off... via *snail mail* to Microsoft for a transfer kit, or you transfer your Xbox Live account manually, redownload your XBLA games via the most hideous, user-unfriendly interface imaginable and then try to transfer your saves by swapping back and forward between hard disks and using a memory card. Except that some games have restrictions on their saves that don't let them be moved to a memory card (presumably to prevent people from cheating in *single player games* by downloading saves off the net).
A couple of changes are badly needed here - first, a simple, one-button "redownload all of my previously purchased content" option on the Xbox Live interface. Second, a complete lifting on any restrictions regarding the copying and transfer of save games. Oh, and while you're at it MS, add an online form for requesting the free transfer kits. Because they way you do it at the moment, one might almost get the impression that you were actively trying to discourage people from sending off for them.
I suspect there's quite a lot riding for Blizzard on the quality (and challenge level) of this new raid instance. A lot of people are starting to notice that Blizzard seems to have stripped WoW of development resource to focus on other projects. While the Wrath of the Lich King expansion got a lot of positive press for the "oooh, pretty" factor, the simple fact is that it is desperately short on level 80 content (and with WoW levelling being as fast as it is, most players are level 80).
When the previous expansion, The Burning Crusade, came out, it contained quite a few raid instances. These were, Karazhan (11 bosses), Gruul's Lair (2 bosses), Magtheridon's Lair (1 boss), Serpentshrine Cavern (6 bosses), The Eye (4 bosses) and Mount Hyjal (5 bosses). A few months after release, Black Temple (9 bosses) was added. All of these were brand new encounters. By contrast, with WotLK, we got a recylced instance from before the first expansion and just 3 new bosses in other mini instances. Only now, months after release, are we actually getting a sizeable new instance with a reasonable number of bosses. Instead of developing significant amounts of new content, Blizzard have just had the office temps think up some new Achievements - basically requirements to kill bosses in really silly ways - to act as timesinks.
If these new bosses in Ulduar are the kind of thing that can be breezed through in a week or two, even on easy mode, then I suspect that a lot of players, like me, will be leaving the game. The thought of spending the next 5 months farming Ulduar, as we've just spent 5 months farming the pitiful content that was in the game at release and redoing it in an attempt to get some dumb achievements is not pleasant.
This is the single best piece of advice that you can give to any teenager or young adult who's approaching a big decision point career-wise. The number of people I know who are stuck in IT jobs they loathe and despise because they enjoyed playing around with computers while they are at school is just insane.
Yes, basically. If a game is sold as new, then it should be new (as in, unplayed). I remember once on a business trip to the US, picking up a "new" copy of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories from a Gamestop, which had a saved-game with 20 or so hours of play on the cartridge's save slots. Wasn't happy about that at all, even though it didn't actually detract from my own play experience. It just made me feel like I'd been taken for a ride.
I found out too late to do anything about it (in the departure lounge at Miami International), so had to console myself with the thought that some Gamestop employee was probably kicking himself for giving away the cartridge with his save-game on it and having to start the game afresh (yeah, I know, he might just have gotten bored of it, but I can dream).
You might be interested to note that Silent Hill 4 wasn't actually even developed as a Silent Hill game, but rather as a stand-alone title just called "The Room". The decision to stick a Silent Hill label on it, while sticking in a few references to the other games in the series, was made very, very late in the development process. And oh boy does it show.
The end-result was a "lose-lose". The reputation of the Silent Hill brand was damaged quite seriously, while the fact that people came to the game itself with a specific set of expectations meant that its strengths (which were modest but real) ended up overlooked and it was probably judged more harshly than it would have been as an original IP.
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Excellent news about Mechwarrior 4. I wonder if the stand-alone Mercenaries spin-off (which I preferred) is also included (I note the expansions are)?
Also good news that if the screenshots/concept art are anything to go by, they plan on doing this properly. It doesn't look to me like some arcade-ified MechAssault type of game. I used to love the Mechwarrior games, partially because the complexity made it feel like you really were in command of a huge lump of metal. I don't expect they'll use half the keyboard on controls again, but if they can get something with even a vaguely sim-like feel, I'll be delighted.
I'm also very pleased that they're jumping back in the time-line. The Clans are great, and it would be neat if this game could feature the Clan invasion as its finale (like Battletech 2 and Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries), but I always felt that the narrative just meandered after that. Plus it's actually a lot of fun trying to survive in relatively primative mechs like the Jenner.
Graphics should be appropriate to the game experience you're trying to create. That's all there is to it, really.
In some cases, that means pushing for absolutely cutting edge technology. A big part of the Crysis experience is the "shock and awe" factor of the visuals, as well as the heavy use of foliage and other environmental factors that need to be done to a very high standard if they're not going to look silly. Personally, I think Crysis is a very, very good game - one of the best of recent years on any platform - and the graphics are a big part of that (though the fairly free-form gameplay is another big element). To be honest, if you're making a first or third person shooter these days that doesn't have a deliberately abstract setting, then you really should be pushing for the most technologically advanced graphics you can, because as gamers' expectations improve, games which fall behind the curve face a bigger and bigger challenge in not having their immersion broken through poor graphics. I remember playing Call of Cthulhu - Dark Corners of the Earth back when it was released and being generally very impressed by the atmosphere (despite the bugs). I tried replaying it recently, and the way that the graphics had aged so badly was quite a shocking bar to getting back into it.
However, not every game needs to be a technological powerhouse, and there are even cases where flash-whizz-bang 3d graphics can work against a game. My favorite example here (and yes, I know it's an old one) concerns the third and fourth Monkey Island games. Monkey Island 3 was for many years the closest thing I'd played to an interactive cartoon. The graphical quality certainly wasn't far short of the animation you were seeing in animated movies at the time, and was actually ahead of much of what you'd see in kids' TV cartoons and anime of the era. For a cartoony graphical adventure, it was perfect. Then for the fourth installment, everything went 3d and it looked rubbish. So we went stylistically from "interactive cartoon" to "badly designed Quake mod". You can see the same thing with the transition from Baldur's Gate 2 to Neverwinter Nights - beautifully drawn 2d backdrops changed to boring, bland 3d tilesets (though I guess this was necessary to make user created content easier).
Interestingly, the recent Sam & Max episodic games seem to have found a decent middle ground here. They balance 3d and 2 graphics in a way that works really quite well, and have finally pulled things back up to the "interactive cartoon" level (and a prettier cartoon that Monkey Island 3 was, though perhaps not by far).
Then occasionally you get one of my favorite experiences; something which uses really quite advanced graphical effects to produce a deliberately highly stylised effect. The best example I've seen of this recently is Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3, which uses some quite advanced 3d graphics and visual effects, but aims for a unique look, which is going neither for realism, nor for the typical anime look you see in a lot of Japanese games. I know cell-shading is nothing new (and has been much abused, particularly by Nintendo), but Valkyria Chronicles combines it with other techniques to pull off a unique and distinctive look that really fits the game well.
Most developers have given up on trying to do anything clever with the Wii-mote. Most games now use the pointer-function, and then basically map "waggle" onto a single action. If you're lucky, you might get "waggle from side to side" mapped to something different to "waggle up and down" (though the Wii-mote's now-legendary imprecision can make even this annoying). Personally, I felt that Force Unleashed was the moment it was clear that the Wii-mote's impact on gaming had been massively overhyped. People had demanded a lightsabre-fighting game on the Wii from day one and, when one finally appeared, it turned out that the secret to winning fights in it was just to waggle furiously.
The fact remains that at present, a mouse and keyboard remains the best option for precise control, while a decent, well-balanced 2-stick analogue controller is a respectable second.
Yes, I have to agree with this. I do hope Colonial Marines doesn't follow in the path of this, though.
The Aliens franchise hasn't been treated anything like as well as it deserves to be in recent years, in gaming terms. I mean, what have we had? A crap AvP RTS on the Playstation 2 and Xbox, a rubbish AvP shooter on the PSP, a few cellphone games and a decent-ish arcade machine. When you consider that the Aliens franchise has had such a huge impact on gaming culture (as the inspiration behind the look and feel of games like Doom), this looks a bit sad.
I think the whole AvP thing has been a bit of a depressing sideline. Personally, I find the Predator about as scary and cool as the average episode of Dora the Explorer. I remember when I was about 12 or so, my parents used to control what I watched at home pretty carefully. However, I had a friend whose parents were far more lax, so when I went over there, I often saw stuff I'd never be allowed to see at home. I remember watching Predator over there (it must have been newly out on VHS at the time) and not being bothered in the slightest. A few weeks later, I remember seeing Alien there. I didn't sleep for a month after that. Whichever way you look at it, the Alien is just a better baddie.
AvP2 for PC was 1/3rd of a very decent game. That 1/3rd was the Marine campaign, which was scary as hell. The less said about the "hunt for the breakable vent" and "stupid jump puzzles" flow of the Aliens and Predator campaigns, the better. Of course, the game hasn't aged fantastically well; the engine wasn't considered great at the time and looks and feels very nasty indeed now.
The technology to make a genuinely scary-as-hell Aliens fps has been around for a few years; basically since Doom 3 appeared. All it needs is some reasonably believable squad AI, a writer with a sense of pacing (ie. somebody who understands that having periodic lulls in the action is way scarier than pure run and gun) and a plot that DOESN'T revolve around some mad scientist experimenting on the aliens. It's disappointing that nobody has yet risen to the challenge. The release date for Colonial Marines keeps slipping - here's hoping it doesn't do a Duke Nukem Forever on us.
Fallout 3 is primarily an RPG, albeit one with heavy fps elements. However, the Operation Anchorage downloadable content is almost a pure action fps. It even makes a few typically wry nods to the conventions of the fps genre, such as the remarks you can find in there on the linearity on some of the levels (the content takes place within a simulator and hence is a video game within a video game), which stands in stark contrast to the generally open-ended nature of the rest of the game.
Yeah, I loved those as well, even though the multiplayer in Skynet never really "felt" right to me. We seemed to get a strange kind of spurt of well-made intelligent games based on dormant movie licences in the mid-90s, primarily around the Star Wars franchise (X-Wing, Dark Forces, Jedi Knight, TIE Fighter and so on), but those two Terminator games are also good examples.
I remember finding Future Shock deeply frustrating for the first few hours and nearly taking it back to the shop because I just couldn't seem to work out what I was supposed to be doing. Then the "orienteering" nature of the game, which was completely different to the "corridor shooter" pattern established by Doom, finally hit me and I loved it from that point onwards. The degree of freedom it gave you in how to approach objectives was unprecedented at the time and we wouldn't really see proper parallels again (in a high quality game) until Farcry.
Of course, it was badly hamstrung by its technical limitations. The engine was unbelievably primative by today's standards, and the visuals didn't look anything like the "future" scenes in the Terminator movies.
Sadly, now that the technology is here to really do the concept justice, developers of licenced games have fallen into the pattern of just defaulting to brain-dead run-and-gun third person corridor shooters (cf. the Terminator Salvation) game. Of course, like Star Wars, the Terminator franchise has also been battered and bruised by inferior sequels pitched at the lowest common denominator as well. All in all, the chances of seeing a new Future Shock (as opposed to non-Terminator-licenced spiritual successors) must be assessed as being virtually nil.
I remember a great one of these in Ultima VII. Basically, there was a certain building in the first town, which had an invisible portal hidden behind its chimney. To access it, you had to either cheat (which is... well... cheating), or else build a staircase out of crates to get onto the roof. To do this, you needed to pretty much scour the entire town for crates, as you would need every last one to get up there.
Once you went through the portal, you found yourself in a strange sci-fi type area, with the Kilrathi theme from Wing Commander 2 playing as BGM. There were chests containing multiple sets of the best equipment in the game, a huge variety of useful magical items, as well as most of the plot-related items. There were also teleporters that could take you to most of the key points of interest around Britannia.
This one was so cool because it didn't require the use of a cheat or clipping exploit to find it. Sure, nobody was ever going to find it on their own accord without having been told about it in advance, but you could get in there without typing in any special commands or cheat codes.
Oh yeah. This was pretty gobsmacking at the time. He told us what he'd done and we sat there with our jaws quite literally dropping.
Of course, back in 2000, while e-mail was already pretty much everywhere, there were still quite a few hold-outs, particularly in senior ranks, who personally used it as little as possible (actually, scratch the "were"... there still are). By all accounts, this guy's director was one of those. There was also, I think, much less in the way of checks and balances in place in many corporate IT systems, putside of the tech sector. My housemate had been telling us for months about his adventures in the company email system. His idea of a side-splittingly funny joke was to go into somebody's inbox and delete the unopened mail from their girlfriend asking to meet up that evening. After all, people were quite happy to believe that e-mail would just "vanish into the ether" sometimes. I lost count of the number of times myself and the other housemates had to sit through some tedious story about this kind of thing in the evenings.
He'd been getting away with this kind of thing for the better part of a year at least. Not long before he got fired, his stories had increasingly started to involve an element of "sending e-mails pretending to be other people". He didn't tell us in advance about the one that got him fired - perhaps with hindsight he realised as soon as he'd done this that he might have overstepped the mark. At any rate, his modus operandi was just to monitor the inbox of the person he'd sent a mail as (I presume he only targetted light users) and delete any replies before the recipient could see them. In this case, his director found out by word of mouth about what he'd apparently been saying about one of his staff. I don't know the details, but I can imagine it could have been something quite innocuous... "Hey, Chris, that guy in your team who you've been raving about in e-mails - could you get him to have a look at this problem for me?".
As to what eventually happened to him... I lost track for a long time. The rent on the place we were staying was pretty astronomical - with one of the four of us no longer able to pay his share, we had to find somewhere else (or take in a stranger, which none of us wanted). It was a good time for me to relocate to London for career purposes, so I did. However, I found out about a year ago, when I met up with one of the other housemates for a drink, that the guy in question spent 2 years unemployed after his sacking, went back to live with his parents, and now works as a taxi driver in their town.
In theory, yes.
However, this is part of the point I was making. In the world of the BOFH stories, the BOFH is almost always omnipotent and omniscient. If he's ever temporarily caught out, he always manages to twist it to his advantage. At the same time, the people he's surrounded by (except for the PFY) are so predictable and stupid that he's able to run rings around them. For short, humorous stories, this works perfectly - the archetype of the clever trickster who outwits his more powerful but less quick witted opponents, flirts with danger but always escapes with his hide and his spoils, goes back thousands of years. The BOFH is just Pan/Loki/Brer Rabbit with an IT degree. This is not, however, how reality tends to work a lot of the time.
Always remember, no matter how clever you think there are, there is almost certainly somebody smarter out there. And of course, the cleverer you think you are, the more likely you are to slip up and underestimate your opponents. In both of the examples I gave in my earlier post, this was the fatal mistake. The BOFHs in question thought that the other people in their organisation would be as gullible and stupid as those in the BOFH stories. They were wrong.
I've seen a couple of IT careers ruined by this attitude. In one case, getting fired was just the start of the guy's problems.
The BOFH stories are funny. Simon Travaglia writes well and manages to put out clever little satirical stories on a regular basis. He provides an ongoing wry commentary on the state of IT practices in business. He has also, albeit unintentionally, through his cultural influence in the IT world, been the driving force behind more sackings than I care to imagine.
The point that often gets lost is that his stories are fiction.
Yes, fiction.
The unpleasant fact is that in the real world, sysadmins are not generally omnipotent technical gods able to manipulate entire companies at will and escape the consequences of their actions. Nor are management always incompetent drones who will believe anything they're told provided you use big enough words to confuse them. The stereotypes may be comforting, but they're largely not true.
As I say, I've seen two cases of people getting sacked for directly BOFH-inspired behaviour. One was a guy I shared a house with for a while around 2000 or so, after graduating. He used to regale us with his own "BOFH" stories (though most of them were petty and unfunny). After just over a year, we got home one evening to find he'd been fired. He'd sent out e-mails from his boss's boss's account, designed to promote his own reputation in his company. This had, of course, gotten back to his management chain. My housemate was actually furious because he was convinced that the allegations against him couldn't be "proved". He freely admitted to us he'd done it. But it couldn't be proved, he cried. Honest. The world just wasn't supposed to work this way. He never actually went as far as trying to claim unfair dismissal. I think reality finally managed to penetrate his skull.
The second guy I saw fired I didn't know so well - rather I saw it at a distance across the organisation where I was working (in 2002). Again, he was a sysadmin (albeit one of several - this is a big organisation). He'd picked up a grudge against a non-technical member of staff and had done the classic BOFH trick of filling their file storage space with naughty pictures then reporting that he'd found them there. In BOFH land, the target would swiftly escorted off the premesis while the BOFH celebrates down at the pub. Of course, in the real world, of course, the victim protested his innocence. The employer follows proper channels and investigates. An external auditor works out exactly what's happened. The sysadmin in question is sacked. And reported to the police. And sued by his intended victim.
So yes, read the BOFH, enjoy the stories. But don't, for a moment, think they highlight an appropriate way to behave in the real world.
Final Fantasy XII is odd. I suspect most people who just play the game through normally, as you seem to have, will feel as you did. I know I felt that way after my first playthrough.
The big discovery for me with FFXII was playing it through again, with a power-gaming FAQ. With an hour or two of grinding for levels early on, you can pretty much slot yourself onto a parallel game track, where the real challenge isn't progressing through the plot (which can be done in a few minutes with your extra levels and better rewards), but rather beating the optional (and sometimes secret) challenges that are unlocked throughout the game.
If you do the more advanced hunts, simply setting up your gambits is nothing like enough to get through these harder fights. Certainly, from King Behemoth onwards, you will need to be micromanging one of your characters intensely and making frequent interventions on other characters whenever they need to do something that the gambit system just can't cover.
The gambits do feel a little odd if you just play through the game's main plot. The more you get into the optional challenges, the more you realise that they're a sensible solution for keeping the micromanagement required down to a sensible level during some pretty epic fights.
Oh, this takes me back to something that happened when I was still at school, around about 1996 or so.
At the time, despite being pretty much clueless by slashdot standards, I functioned (and still do function, when I can't avoid it) as the all purpose IT helpdesk for my family.
Now, I have an aunt who was working as a manager in a medium sized UK based IT firm (I can't remember the name and I don't even think they're still around). However, do not take this as any indication that she knew anything at all about computers. She didn't. Nor did she have any inclination to learn. She could just about manage to use Microsoft Office and the web/e-mail clients that were around at the time (I think this was around the time of Netscape 2). Literally anything beyond that would baffle her. She'd call her monitor "the computer" and so on. She was employed, I gather, for her "management skills".
Now, even at the time, I had a feeling that this was a crock. My aunt is a rather forceful personality. A less diplomatic person might use more bovine terminology and I always got the impression that she wouldn't be much fun to work for.
She's also very, very, very large (over 25 stone) and ugly as sin to boot. That's not me being deliberately rude. There's just no nicer way to put it without doing a genuine dis-service to the truth.
Anyway, one Saturday afternoon, I get a call from her. Her voice implies that she's perched in that dangerous territory between bursting into tears and throwing a screaming, PC-destroying fit. Apparently, her computer is "insulting" her. I need to go over there instantly. I got a lot of this kind of stuff until, a couple of years later, I finally told her where she could stick it after I moved off to university and got a call asking me to travel 200 miles to fix something. Anyway, I'm not best pleased about losing a Saturday afternoon, especially with exams coming up, but for the sake of a quiet life, I head over.
Oh boy was it ever worth it.
Sure enough, every two minutes on the dot, her PC is insulting her. Whatever she's doing in Windows, a little dialogue box will pop up with a splendidly vicious insult. I mean, some these were absolute gems and were clearly aimed right at her personally. A few of the more repeatable examples (and I still remember these more than a decade later) were:
"Careful! Better fetch an extra chair. I think those two are about to give way."
"Wow you must be constipated. Or does your face just look like that normally?"
"Did you just fart, or do you always smell like that?"
"Wipe your face. Half your lunch is stuck between your fifth and sixth chins."
"Is that your face or your arse I can see? Your face? Hmm... the arse might be better."
"I can access over 64,000,000 images via the Internet and none of them are as ugly as you."
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? No? How about a half-digested turnip?"
There was plenty of other stuff as well, including the old classics about ID10T and PEBCAK errors, but enough of it was specific enough to my aunt (making mention of particularly distinctive unflattering features) that this was clearly something bespoke.
Anyway, my aunt's in an absolute state at this point. She's convinced that the computer is insulting her. She tells me she tried covering up the monitor for half an hour (so it couldn't see her), but when she came back, it had been queuing up the insults.
Anyway, having confirmed that a virus scanner doesn't pick anything up, I ask to see any disks she's put in the PC lately, or any files she's downloaded. The downloaded files all look pretty safe, and it doesn't seem like anything dodgy's come in via e-mail either. However, she then shows me a couple of disks (3.5" floppies) she'd brought home with work on. These are a numbered series of progress reports. Most of the disks look absolutely fine - a few Word and Excel files. Nothing too scary (I don't think MS Office files were being used extensively for exploits at the time).
However, on the fi
You can tell that the Achievements thing has worked out pretty well for MS, because of the number of other companies out there who have frantically tried to copy it. People talk about motion-sensing controls, but it may prove to be achievements that are the defining legacy of this console generation.
Unfortunately, I'm not 100% sure I like this. I don't much mind achievements on the 360. If I buy a full-sized game (as opposed to an XBLA game) I know that there are 1000 achievement points to be unlocked in there. However, I also know that I don't particularly need to bother about these if I don't want to and, because I've read reviews, I know that I am buying a full-sized game that there is a good chance I will like.
I'm far more worried by the direction taken by Blizzard with the achievements they've added to World of Warcraft. Achievements were added to WoW just before the latest expansion was released and there can be absolutely no denying that they have been used as a substitute for including proper content. It's clear that Blizzard wants to run down the amount of resource it devotes to keeping WoW updated and achievements are their quick fix of choice. Even with the recently released Ulduar, the amount of raid content we have in Wrath of the Lich King is vastly inferior to what was around in the Burning Crusade pretty much from launch. But then, why have a team of developers spend months creating new dungeons, when you can have the office temp sit down for an hour or two and think up some stupid and time-consuming ways of getting people to recycle the same old content.
So yeah... achievements as currently impelemented by MS are at worst harmless and at best quite a fun little distraction (and this often depends on how they're implemented in a particular game). However, I can see the little dollar signs flashing in eyes across the industry, as people wake up to the potential for using achievements as a means of increasing profit margins while screwing over all but the most guillible of customers.
Nintendo have ensured at a stroke that I will never pick up a DSi. They've region locked its software.
My morning commute isn't really handheld friendly (packed in like sardines on a short distance commuter train and then London Underground). The main use I get out of handhelds is when I travel, be it for business or personal reasons. And with the nature of my work, most of my business travel is to the States. I've always, therefore, kept a handheld (or several - I have a PSP and DS, which get around equal use) around for flights and for evenings stuck in crap hotels or conference centres in the middle of nowhere. The ability to buy games for my handhelds at either end of the journey is a sine qua non for me. In the past, it's not been much of an issue - handheld games were always region free. For Nintendo to now institute locking on the DSi just confirms my long standing suspicion that Nintendo's natural instinct is towards the kind of corporate ethics that would make even Sony and Microsoft blush (no mean feat), but that they've not previously been confident enough in their market position to give into this.
I've seen quite a few games over the last couple of years that have really impressed me through the way they tell their story. In particular:
Lost Odyssey - not the fairly standard Japanese RPG fare that makes up most of the game, but rather the text narrative used for the dreams. Very minimalist - just animated text on an almost static abstract background with a few ambient sounds, but they covered an impressive range of scenarios and even genres. A few were genuinely well-written, even by the standards of non-video-game writing.
Valkyria Chronicles - awesome game (a genuine PS3 killer-title), awesome visuals and a very well-told story. The whole "book" device used to tell the story works extremely well. It's also notable that, unusually for a Japanese game, Valkyria Chronicles manages to avoid most of the usual anime cliches when it comes to its characters. The recently-started anime is sadly a bit more "traditional", making Alicia into more of a typical tsundere type, but it's still good stuff for a game-to-anime adaptation.
Red Alert 3 - knows precisely what it is - pure B-movie schlock - and has a lot of fun with it. It's completely ridiculous in every respect, but it carries its storyline along with such energy that it's really difficult to care.
Super Smash Bros Brawl - interesting one, this. The story's wafer thin. But, unusually for Nintendo, they did put a bit of effort into it and the game is far better for it. The short, punchy and completely over-the-top nature of the CGI scenes fits the game perfectly.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 - integrates its storyline into the gameplay with consumate skill. Japanese RPGs are often criticised (not without truth, in some cases) for being essentially a series of cutscenes separated by fairly cookie-cutter battles. Not so with Persona 4. If you want to beat the game, not only do you need to fight through the dungeons and beat the bosses, but you also need to solve the murder mystery. At the risk of spoilers, the player is asked, around 90% of the way through the game, to identify the culprit behind the murders that have occurred throughout the game. If the player has paid attention, watched for background details and picked up on the right clues, he will be able to do so and procede on to the final dungeon. If he hasn't, then unless he gets a lucky guess (and there are a lot of options to guess from), it's BAD END.
Portal - the best example around of a game which tells a story with a minimum of actual narration, at which it far surpasses the horribly over-rated Half-Life 2. Within the specific confines of Portal, the traditional Half-Life storytelling technique works fantastically. It doesn't matter that you've got next to no background information - it's easy to assume that the protagonist has woken up without her memory. It's also easy to accept that she doesn't speak - there's nobody to speak to. In Half-Life 2 by contrast, the technique fell flat on its face. Not only were we expected to believe that Gordon never says a single word, but we're also expected to believe that none of the other characters ever go "Oh, Gordon, you might want a quick update on what's happened while you were away...". This was just too much for my suspension of disbelief to handle.
The irony, of course, is that in the wider battle for the online gaming marketspace, both Q3 and UT lost out very badly indeed to a free mod for an aging game based on a hacked around version of the original Quake's engine (ie. Counter-Strike).
I think looking back, Quake 3 was the point at which id went from being the undisputed industry leaders in the fps genre to "one among many". With the original Quake and Quake 2, if you played fpses online, you basically played one of those games, or one of their mods. There were a few other minor niche games, but none of them really had much of a wider community. Counter-Strike was the last game to really unite a majority of the online fps scene under a single banner and, as it starts to fade away, there doesn't seem to be any single successor (on the PC at least), but rather a broader fragmentation.
I wonder if the same will happen in the MMO market once WoW jumps the shark? If, rather than having one all-consuming leviathan in the market and a few minnows trying to snap up a few hundred thousand users around the edges, we'll end up with a situation with multiple MMOs well up in the millions, but no clear pack leader?
I liked NWN2. The original NWN felt like a toolkit with a (rather shoddy) sample campaign bolted on. NWN2 actually felt like a proper game, with a plot and everything. Some of the dialogue, particularly that between party members, was very well written. If it didn't quite ascend to the quotable highs of the Baldur's Gate games, it didn't fall far short. I'll grant you that, on launch, NWN2 had some serious bugs that rendered it near-unplayable in places, but these have been fixed and if you haven't looked at the game since then, you really should give it another go.
The expansions are also very interesting. I still don't think anybody has really made an epic-levels AD&D CRPG that actually really works and is interesting, but Mask of the Betrayer is certainly as close as it comes. For what it's worth, while I don't play the tabletop game myself, I have friends who do who are really contemptuous of epic-level games (too fiddly, too much micromanagement needed, too hard to make proper scenarios that are actually testing for characters who are supposed to be of near-godly power), so it might be that the CRPGs that try to emulate this (the BG2 expansion, the second NWN expansion and Mask of the Betrayer) are just tilting at windmills anyway.
Storm of Zehir, the second expansion, is really quite unusual and ambitious. It's a lot less linear than is the norm for these things and feels, in a weird way, like some of the old Gold Box games.
So yeah, I think Obsidian did a pretty good job on NWN2.
Under other circumstances, I might have. But with the Elite now temptingly cheap (and the 20 gig HD size of the old one starting to feel painful) I honestly just decided that the cost of buying a new one was easily outweighed by the time and effort required to get a replacement. Back in my student days, when I had more free time and far less cash, I may have felt differently.
Meh, the original had seen a lot of use and, as I say, I'd been pretty close to deciding to go for an Elite anyway. The 3 years warrenty on the new one should comfortably carry me over into the next console generation.
Back in the last generation, I had 2 Gamecubes die on me (one just suddenly refused to go past the initial splash screen, the other had that little flippy-lid-thingy torn off by an overenthusiastic 8 year old who was visiting over Christmas). Having to replace dead consoles isn't actually a new or uncommon experience.
The console I live in dread of any failure on is my PS3. This is a US 60 gig model which I imported to the UK pretty soon after they launched. As an early model, this has full PS2 back compatibility, which I make extensive use of to play my imported US PS2 games. As far as I'm aware, these are now pretty much irreplacable.
The huge reduction in difficulty level in WotLK has indeed been pretty annoying. Now, I understand that these tier 7 instances are designed to be accessible to new players who've never touched the level 60 or 70 content, and that's fine. Their difficulty as an introductory tier would have been spot on, IF there had been harder tier 8 content in WotLK on the day it shipped. I was never expecting (nor wanting) the retuned Naxxramas to be pitched at Sunwell Plateau level difficulty.
I understand that back in Burning Crusade, they possibly pitched some of the early raid encounters a little bit too hard. Karazhan was quite a steep curve for new level 70s (to say nothing of the fact that it was the only introductory level instance and could only be done 10 man) and Gruul and Magtheridon, before they got nerfed, were completely out of the sights of most players for quite some time. But even had Burning Crusade's Tier 4 content been easier than it was at launch, there would still have been plenty for the more advanced players to do.
I really hate the philosophy which says that every raid player in the game should be able to blitz through any instance, with a few "hard modes" for the same fights thrown in for advanced players. Back when we were working through Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau, just getting to see the next boss was often the biggest reward from defeating the previous one. That's gone now. I'm not sure I want to be playing a game where, once Icecrown Citadel has been released, even the casual guilds have downed Arthas within a fortnight, meaning we then spend the next 9 months trying to kill him while standing on one leg and drinking only the purple fruit juice.
The reason why people are still buying 360s is because it has the games. Of the three consoles, the 360 has, for the moment, the best all round coverage of genres and styles to satisfy most people who consider themselves to be gamers. The PS3 is slowly making up lost ground here, with a few genuinely excellent exclusives like Valkyria Chronicles, but right now, it has no racing game to match Forza 2, no Western RPGs to match Mass Effect and no Japanese RPGs to match Lost Odyssey. Gran Turismo 5 and Final Fantasy XIII will probably go some way to closing those gaps, but neither is due for imminent release.
But yes, the hardware situation is pretty dire. My 360 red-ringed on me the other week, just outside of the 3 year warrenty. I didn't make a big fuss out of this, as I'd been considering buying an Elite anyway. But what really did frustrate me is how, for a console known for catastrophic rates of hardware failure, the process of transferring all of your content to a new console is still an absolute pain in the backside. You either send off... via *snail mail* to Microsoft for a transfer kit, or you transfer your Xbox Live account manually, redownload your XBLA games via the most hideous, user-unfriendly interface imaginable and then try to transfer your saves by swapping back and forward between hard disks and using a memory card. Except that some games have restrictions on their saves that don't let them be moved to a memory card (presumably to prevent people from cheating in *single player games* by downloading saves off the net).
A couple of changes are badly needed here - first, a simple, one-button "redownload all of my previously purchased content" option on the Xbox Live interface. Second, a complete lifting on any restrictions regarding the copying and transfer of save games. Oh, and while you're at it MS, add an online form for requesting the free transfer kits. Because they way you do it at the moment, one might almost get the impression that you were actively trying to discourage people from sending off for them.
I suspect there's quite a lot riding for Blizzard on the quality (and challenge level) of this new raid instance. A lot of people are starting to notice that Blizzard seems to have stripped WoW of development resource to focus on other projects. While the Wrath of the Lich King expansion got a lot of positive press for the "oooh, pretty" factor, the simple fact is that it is desperately short on level 80 content (and with WoW levelling being as fast as it is, most players are level 80).
When the previous expansion, The Burning Crusade, came out, it contained quite a few raid instances. These were, Karazhan (11 bosses), Gruul's Lair (2 bosses), Magtheridon's Lair (1 boss), Serpentshrine Cavern (6 bosses), The Eye (4 bosses) and Mount Hyjal (5 bosses). A few months after release, Black Temple (9 bosses) was added. All of these were brand new encounters. By contrast, with WotLK, we got a recylced instance from before the first expansion and just 3 new bosses in other mini instances. Only now, months after release, are we actually getting a sizeable new instance with a reasonable number of bosses. Instead of developing significant amounts of new content, Blizzard have just had the office temps think up some new Achievements - basically requirements to kill bosses in really silly ways - to act as timesinks.
If these new bosses in Ulduar are the kind of thing that can be breezed through in a week or two, even on easy mode, then I suspect that a lot of players, like me, will be leaving the game. The thought of spending the next 5 months farming Ulduar, as we've just spent 5 months farming the pitiful content that was in the game at release and redoing it in an attempt to get some dumb achievements is not pleasant.
Oh if only I had mod points.
This is the single best piece of advice that you can give to any teenager or young adult who's approaching a big decision point career-wise. The number of people I know who are stuck in IT jobs they loathe and despise because they enjoyed playing around with computers while they are at school is just insane.
Yes, basically. If a game is sold as new, then it should be new (as in, unplayed). I remember once on a business trip to the US, picking up a "new" copy of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories from a Gamestop, which had a saved-game with 20 or so hours of play on the cartridge's save slots. Wasn't happy about that at all, even though it didn't actually detract from my own play experience. It just made me feel like I'd been taken for a ride.
I found out too late to do anything about it (in the departure lounge at Miami International), so had to console myself with the thought that some Gamestop employee was probably kicking himself for giving away the cartridge with his save-game on it and having to start the game afresh (yeah, I know, he might just have gotten bored of it, but I can dream).
You might be interested to note that Silent Hill 4 wasn't actually even developed as a Silent Hill game, but rather as a stand-alone title just called "The Room". The decision to stick a Silent Hill label on it, while sticking in a few references to the other games in the series, was made very, very late in the development process. And oh boy does it show.
The end-result was a "lose-lose". The reputation of the Silent Hill brand was damaged quite seriously, while the fact that people came to the game itself with a specific set of expectations meant that its strengths (which were modest but real) ended up overlooked and it was probably judged more harshly than it would have been as an original IP.