Hardcore Gaming 101 – hardcore plug

Illness on my part means it’s just a plug this week. (Complete with an update once again accidentally going up and confusing any subscribers!)

Hardcore Gaming 101

The site essentially does retrospectives of older games and series’. It’s pretty interesting to learn about some of the more obscure and older games, and there’s a good chunk of nostalgia in there too.

It’s great for discovering little nuggets of information about old adventure games, what games could get away with back then or a lot of those cult series’ you’ve probably heard of, but never played.

For example, it’s pretty interesting to see that Dragon Quest did, in 1992, what Peter Molyneux has been trying to do for the past six years.

It also features an edited version of the Rise and Fall of Final Fantasy.

They’ve compiled a hefty library of games that I still haven’t finished looking through, even writing an article on good ol’ Jeremy Blaustein, the noted translator of Shadow Hearts and the original Metal Gear Solid.

So go and read!

…

Oh, god. What kind of searches will find ‘hardcore plug‘?!

Pre-emptive game of the year awards 2010

Pre-emptive because the year technically isn’t over and also because this is before the Spike TV awards. Let’s get to the awards.

Best Story

Winner: Mass Effect 2
It’s gripping, it’s funny, it’s emotional, it’s incredibly detailed and it’s interactive. Complete with a complex and genuinely compelling lore. From the likable and memorable characters to the detail and humour of the in-universe advertisements. What else could win?

Honourable mention: Red Dead Redemption
It probably would’ve won any other year. You could even argue that the basic story of John Marston’s tale is better than the proxy war plot of Mass Effect 2. But the suicide mission was more emotionally charged than anything in Red Dead, and the middle third of the game doesn’t drag as much.

Ecosystems in gaming

Watching this video about Kangaroo Rats made me wonder about ecosystems in gaming. Have games ever constructed an environment where such different creatures display interesting behaviours?

This is the level of fleshed out detail that would be ideal for a fantasy game, anything with an original world or even a real world game.

I have heard many a good thing about Beyond Good & Evil along these lines, and I have no idea how well the Playstation 3 title Africa did it.

Naturally, the game that has the most potential for an ecosystem…System – is Pokémon. Imagine being able to see every single creature in the wild, whether in the grass or the water or the air.

All those useless details in the Pokédex could be programmed for part of a complex behaviour system, ecology and interaction.

For example, let’s take some Pokédex entries, from Bulbapedia, about everybody’s least favourite forest-dweller – Pikachu.

This intelligent Pokémon roasts hard berries with electricity to make them tender enough to eat.

It raises its tail to check its surroundings. The tail is sometimes struck by lightning in this pose.

When it is angered, it immediately discharges the energy stored in the pouches in its cheeks.

Whenever Pikachu comes across something new, it blasts it with a jolt of electricity. If you come across a blackened berry, it’s evidence that this Pokémon mistook the intensity of its charge.

This Pokémon has electricity-storing pouches on its cheeks. These appear to become electrically charged during the night while Pikachu sleeps. It occasionally discharges electricity when it is dozy after waking up.

It occasionally uses an electric shock to recharge a fellow Pikachu that is in a weakened state.

Now imagine if you could actually observe these complex reactionary behaviours in-game – with each of the 150 or so Pokémon. It would really make the whole world feel unique and alive. (Maybe if they do a console game with Bioware)

Have you encountered any games with interesting ecosystems?

For the record: Black Ops versus Modern Warfare 2

Get it? ‘For the record’? ’cause that’s the thing from Modern Warfare 2?

Anyway, I wanted to throw up an extra post this week to clear up some matters pertaining to last week’s post. It exploded in popularity and I thought it was worth explaining my thoughts on the game and its predecessor.

I’m in no rush to defend myself from angry multiplayer obsessives that believe in “Infinity Ward fanboys” (That’s a thing now? Really?) or think that complaints about the game are code for craving grenade launchers…That are still in the game.

But for the sake of anyone with reasonable questions or any regulars who actually give a crap about Call of Duty, here’s the lowdown:

25 reasons Call of Duty: Black Ops is awful

1. The surprising amount of low-resolution textures and jagged edges, whenever you slow down and look at the details.

2. It features the best fire effects you ever saw on the previous generation of consoles.

3. Frame rate – remember how impressed you were at the smoothness of the previous games? Despite running on the same engine, Black Ops seemingly boasts half as many frames per second as the Modern Warfare series!

4. The disjointed missions and uninteresting in medias res structure of the story.

5. Briefings are now packed with so much flashing imagery and noise, it’s surprising there’s been no seizure lawsuits.

6. Will the heroes save the world from the Russian sleeper cells with the deadly nerve gas known as Nova 6? Spoiler: The answer is in every clichéd film and episode of 24 that has done this bioweapon plot before.

7. Modern Warfare 2 had lines like “But the sands and rocks here, stained with thousands of years of warfare…They will remember us.” Black Ops has lines like “THE FUCKING NUMBERS!”

8. The plot twist stolen from a film that veers the game into some kind of science fiction or magic territory. It makes the action movie nonsense of Modern Warfare 2 look sensible.

9. Said twist is so heavily foreshadowed that most players guessed it before the game tells you it twice, then shows it, and then makes you play for another ten minutes before the actual flashback-filled reveal.

10. There is genuinely a guitar riff as a character puts on his sunglasses. In a dark room. Without a hint of irony.

Top 4 plot flaws video games need to avoid

The plot device wife

Video games evolved beyond the fairytale ‘rescue the princess’, perhaps an attempt to tell more intelligent stories. The problem is that this evolution consists of using ‘loved ones’ as the new ubiquitous carrot on the stick for the protagonist. Usually in the form of wives.

We’re told they’re married. We don’t tend to know anything about this womacguffin or her relationship with the hero. We’re just told ‘wife’ and are expected to infer that as an instant explanation for why the hero loves her so much and is willing to stab Cthulu in the face to “get her back”.

Alan Wake was guilty of this too, despite actually giving Alice some traits and even showing her together with Alan in normality. She still just became another princess to rescue. While on the other hand Red Dead Redemption arguably sidestepped this problem.

Now, mainstream video games admittedly aren’t perfect for portraying complex romantic relationships. Unless you’re really into dating sims. But would it hurt to write a spouse as something other than motivation?

Cliffhangers

Halo 2 is the obvious and classic example of this, but I believe there are much worse offenders. Usually from the “We haven’t released the first game nor have we seen how its been received critically or commercially – but we’re doing a trilogy!” crowd.

That means you, Assassin’s Creed and Gears of War. Both with stories that leave more unexplained and unsatisfied than a season of Lost.

Fallout: New Vegas – the game that should not work

Let me begin by saying: I hate Fallout 3.

I found it to be an incredibly dull game that was even boring to look at. A game that consisted of tiny bits of bad dialogue and genuine questing, wedged between bland hours of killing raiders or mutants in sewers and subways and other boring copy/paste dungeons. Bethesda had even removed everything that made Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion enjoyable.

The weird part is that I seem to be the only one. Even a good chunk of the die-hard original Fallout fans (who decried how the Bethesda-made Fallout 3 wasn’t like the old games and didn’t mesh story-wise) praised the game as a standalone gaming experience.

Personally, I didn’t play the original Fallout games until after Fallout 3, and I still enjoyed them more their younger brother from another mother.

Then Obsidian comes along to make Fallout: New Vegas. My interest was sustained entirely by the connections (Marcus the super mutant is in it!) to Fallout 2. It certainly didn’t help that Obsidian were responsible for Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords – one of the worst games I have ever played.

Then, given the reputation of Obsidian for developing badly designed, downright broken games (Alpha Protocol, etc.) and only having a few good story ideas to their name…Combing this with Fallout 3 could only end badly, right?

My Mojave Wasteland journal (Fallout: New Vegas)

Day 1

Recovering from my injury, I went out hunting with the pornstarishly named Sunny Smiles. Suddenly she started jogging into the side of her dog. Just on the spot. Either she was simple, or there was something a little off about the people in this wasteland…

Day 2

People I have encountered have been talking to me as if we were already deep in conversation. I’d swear I was blacking out on parts of the conversation, but I’ve seen that text below their faces appear and disappear super fast, almost as if they were skipping entire sentences.

Maybe this explains why the town and the military had nothing to say to me when I single-handedly freed that town from dangerous escaped convicts.

Day 4

My instinctual grunts and screams when being hit/cut/shot/stung/bitten have changed octaves. It’s almost like my vocal chords have been swapped for those of a female!

Update: Male again. Then female again. Wait…Male again. And sometimes my gunshots are silent? If they even shoot at all…What is going on in the Mojave?

Day 8

Several people have been treating me like a woman, even when my manvoice is working. I’m pretty sure I’ve been called a ‘she’ by passers by. And one doctor has taken to calling me his ‘little buttercup’ or something.

I am afraid.

Photoshop dump

Just posting some stuff I made in Photoshop over the years – back when I used to do banners/tags/whatever the kids are calling them these days.

Sorry for all the .PNGs.

Dragon Age: Origins – Bioware gone bad

Given the controversial quality gap between the recent downloadable content of Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age  (the beloved Lair of the Shadow Broker and the maligned Witch Hunt, respectively), I thought this was as good a time as any to talk about the quality of Dragon Age as a whole.

(WARNING: THERE WILL BE NON-DLC SPOILERS)

The plot

The fact this gets its own entry is not a good sign.

Virtually all your obstacles, opposition and problems originate from the villain: Loghain. This great hero of a former war betrays the King and leaves him, his army and the Gray Wardens to die at the hands of the Orc Darkspawn hordes. He then grabs power and control of the country by declaring himself Regent.

Now he’s sanctioning Elven slavery and sending assassins after you – one of the few survivors of his betrayal and the person trying to stop the Orcs Darkspawn. You and your companions are marked as traitors, while Loghain does nothing about the Orcs Darkspawn that are spreading across his land killing whatever is in front of them.

What evil fiendish plans does this scheming military strategist have? What does all this have to do with the Orcs Darkspawn and the Archdemon? What grand ambition fuels his evil deeds?

He’s just a dick.